The Difficult Reality Of Mother’s Day If You Don’t Get On With Your Mum

Mother’s Day. It’s a day to spend with your mum, doing something lovely and super Instagrammable. It’s an opportunity to reflect on how much she’s done for you, to extoll her virtues in a Facebook post and tell the world that you wouldn’t ‘be the woman you are today if it wasn’t for your mum’. I’d imagine this is what people do on Mother’s Day but I wouldn’t know.

That’s not because my mum is no longer around. And don’t get me wrong, I am grateful that she’s still here. My heart goes out to everyone who is forced to reflect on the gaping void left my losing a mother too soon on Mother’s Day. It’s because my relationship with my mum is and has always been an emotional tug of war.

Three years ago, I stopped talking to my mum. I’d tried to cut her out of my life before, but this, I promised myself, would be the final time. This wasn’t a decision I took lightly, it was the result of years and years of pain.

I love her. I love her to the end of the earth and, no matter how old I get, I will always be her child. But, there have been times when our relationship has been a burden to bear for us both. If you have a toxic parent Mother’s Day, like Christmases and birthdays is never cause for celebration. Instead, it’s just another day that you know will present the best conditions for a perfect emotional storm.

This is because Mother’s Day is like society rubbing salt into your wound and reminding you that you really should get on but you know you don’t get on, you can’t get on. Before I stopped speaking to my mum, we’d spent many an unhappy Mother’s Day together. I do genuinely think we both entered into it with the best of intentions every time but it would always end in screaming matches, physical fights or feuds that lasted for months afterwards.

One incident that particularly sticks in my mind is the Mother’s Day that she told me she wished she had ‘aborted me’ because her life would have turned out differently.

All of this is a guilty, horrible, dirty secret that I carry around with me. For years I dared not tell anyone just how bad my relationship with my mum was because I feared it would only serve as confirmation that I was all the things she had told me I was: ungrateful, cruel, soulless, evil, entitled.

The relationship between a mother and daughter is always complicated, it’s bound up in the pressures we put on women, the expectations we have of ourselves and of others. But when a mother/daughter relationship is really bad, sour and painful it can be the most isolating feeling in the world. When all is said and done, if we can’t turn to our mothers who can we turn to?

Throughout my twenties, on Mother’s Day I have done everything I can to avoid social media, because I envy other people’s relationships with their family too much. What had I done so wrong? Where did I mess up? If only I’d been a better child, I’d have a mum like that too.

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I would wince when I saw Mother’s Day cards in the super market. My mum wasn’t my ‘best friend’, my ‘biggest inspiration’ or the person I ‘owed everything too’. Every single sheet of saccharine, shiny pink card would only reinforce my own feeling that our bad relationship was, somehow, all my fault.

As I’ve got older (and done a hell of a lot of therapy) I’ve realised that so much of my mother’s inexplicable anger towards me isn’t really about me at all. She had me when she was 25 and I think, in the same way that the world expected her to be a certain way, so much of her resentment towards me is bound up in our ideas about what a daughter should be and about what femininity is supposed to be. In her eyes, I am at once lacking in everything and have too much, I am everything she hoped I would be and still never enough. The goal posts are always moving and as she gets older, I’m a reminder of what she thinks she lacks and what she thinks she gave up to have me. I am also, in some ways, a reminder of the unhappy years that followed my arrival, a product of the failing marriage that followed.

I’m now in my late 20s and a few friends have had children. This has been a turning point in terms of how I relate to my mum because, for the first time, I have seen up close just what it takes not only to have a child but to keep it alive once you give birth to it. Of course, no baby asks to be born but there can be no doubt that all mothers make huge sacrifices. I see them in a state of constant exhaustion, with one eye on their already-cold food and another on their child. I think about how my mother would have done all of this for me and, despite the issues we have, it has helped me to understand that she does and has always loved me.

If you have a difficult relationship with your mum, Mother’s Day can be emotional and isolating. If you don’t want to speak to your mum on Mother’s Day that’s your choice, you have every right to put up boundaries. Time and space can be great healers, you can also return to a relationship after putting distance between yourself and that person to find nothing has changed. If you decide to send an olive branch, as I did last year, that’s your right too. It might work out, it also might not.

Whatever happens, know that you are enough on your own and learn to love her from a distance if you have to.

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.