The mother crush [long read]
If you felt unappreciated by your kids over the holidays, read this
This one goes out to all the empty-nesters whose young adult offspring came home for the holidays and have now flown the coop again, perhaps leaving you feeling hollowed out by unappreciated sacrifice, disconnection, and longing.
A friend left me a long, poignant voice message yesterday morning. She’s had a tough holiday season. Her daughter came home from university with a new boyfriend and a gaggle of friends in tow. In that easy way young people have of taking up space, they filled the kitchen with their laughter, their clutter, and their boisterous bodies while treating The Mother like an indentured servant and freezing her out of their fun. For three weeks her daughter had little time or affection for her, wrapped up as she was in her peers. So common, so understandable… and so painful.
If you had a holiday season like this, maybe the words they made me feel so left out, disrespected, and lonely are sticking in your throat. Maybe you’re rationalizing away your feelings: nobody can ‘make you feel’ anything; they’re young; I could have left them to it, read a book in my room, or gone for more walks.
I want to tell you what I also told my friend: Sweetheart, I know what you’re going through and I want to validate the shit out of your experience.
I know you don’t want to be blamey. We want to be generous in our interpretations and take responsibility for our own feelings. And yet, it’s agonizing when our kids take our generosity for granted and exclude us from their company, especially at the holidays, especially under our own roof, especially when we are putting ourselves out to create a festive, convivial atmosphere, especially when we’ve had a hard year and are craving celebration, joy, and connection.
To be treated as an unwelcome interloper in your own home is disorienting and alienating. It effectively makes you kind of homeless while that little gang of young adults has taken over your space and edged you out of it. Fill the glasses, put out the snacks, and do not speak, is what they want. Hosting a houseful of discourteous young people is draining, humiliating, and isolating, and you are allowed to feel upset by it.
Compounding the pain of being socially excluded, it hurts very much to be handled unkindly by someone we love. If your child was cold, dismissive, ignoring you, making jokes at your expense, steering the conversation so that you were left out… All of those things are just crushing to the heart.
So that is the first thing I want to say to you: of course, you were in misery throughout the holidays. I see you. I had this experience with my daughter, too. Things are so much better now between us now, (take heart, have hope!) but throughout her adolescence and early twenties, holidays and celebrations — especially Mother’s Day or my birthday — were so, so hard.
But we don’t have to leave it there, lose ourselves to bitterness.
I think there is an underlying natural force at play here, one that makes this dynamic all the more intense, and also holds the seeds of transformation if only we can come to understand it: The unrequited love of the mother.
We all feel a measure of unrequited love for our children. I think it’s not inaccurate to say we have a crush on our kids.
To have a crush on someone means to love them more than they love us. To pine for them, long for them, desire them. As mothers, our desire to feel close to our children is always going to be stronger than their desire for us, and I think it’s supposed to be that way. Otherwise, how could we be counted on to stand by them through the tumultuous child-rearing years, pour ourselves into them, make all the sacrifices, pay all that attention to them, and meet their gargantuan needs as they grow up?
And on the other side of the coin, if our kids loved us more than we loved them, well, that would be tragic for their sense of emotional safety. (If you had a narcissistic parent, you know this too well.) Plus, they would never leave our side and venture out into the world, would they?
So, these are the twin goals of the mothering project: we must meet their needs, and they must leave us. The success of this venture is predicated on the mother crushing on the child.
And maybe this is especially so with mothers and their daughters? Maybe — I don't know, I’m not a father and I don't have a son — but maybe we mothers love our daughters in a different, more personal way. And maybe that more personal way of loving is a little more invasive to our daughters’ autonomy. Maybe daughters’ rejection of their mothers is also a little more personal, and more forceful. A daughter must push off from her mother's embrace and disclaim her version of reality in order to find herself as a separate sovereign person, otherwise she would always exist in relation to you and not in the center of her own being. I know I needed to do this when I was a young woman, and I expect you likely did, too.
So, this is the agonizing state of things: We adore our daughters, and, for a time, they can’t bear to be around us because we personify everything they do not want to be, and their contempt is excruciating. But my dear one, I believe it has to be this way.
There’s an even deeper layer to this. When you and your partner decided to have children, you set about creating a world defined by the people inside of your home: The parents, the children, all together in one little society. And the thing is, you and your partner chose to make that world and implicate these little humans into it. But the kids have not chosen that world as the world they want to live in. It’s the world they were born into, and the correct order of things is that they must leave that world, go and create their own little societies within their own worlds. When your daughter was rejecting you, she wasn’t only rejecting you as a person. She was rejecting your world, even breaking it apart, which is why you can’t possibly feel indifferent to her cold shoulder. The meaning, for you, is so great, the stakes so high.
So now, my dear, you live in a somewhat broken world. She’s gone. Not gone from your life and not even gone entirely from your house. But she has left behind her childhood, has left the little society of that old family unit, and she’s never coming back.
To enter into this next phase, where you are the parent of an adult who is at the center of her own life, I’m afraid I think you kind of have to fall out of love with her a little bit. Just for now, sweetheart, not forever. And of course, you won’t — and mustn’t — stop loving her. But to protect your heart and her blossoming personhood, you must break the fever of that mother-crush. You must care a little less that she doesn’t want you. For now.
I’m not saying you no longer have a family. You do, and you always will. But it has to be remade with a looser weave, and new roles for everyone to play. The kids will step back into this family container eventually. In fact, they will co-create it with you when they come home to stay, or later when they’ve got their own families, when they bring their children for dinner or meet you for an afternoon walk round a museum, or whatever. And the perimeters of that new family world will have very different contours.
I think that this might be at the root of what my friend expressed in her message when she said, I don't even dare dream about my “ideal day” or what it might look like.
Darling, you are not alone in your hesitation to point your imagination in a new direction. It's hard for everyone, especially the mother, to accept that they no longer live in that world and will never live in that world again. You walked away from some of your own dreams and ambitions to throw yourself into the family project with utter abandon and, it should be noted, plenty of delight. You are holding the vision of the family unit more firmly in your own heart than any other members of that little society. Because of this, you hold responsibility and power to help everyone move forward into this new configuration.
Unfortunately, that also means that you have some power to disturb that process and hold yourself and others back by clinging to it once it has run its course.
My sweet friend, I am curious, so curious, about what you are afraid of if you “dare to dream about that ideal day”.
Are you afraid that there's nothing there at all, that you're a hollow, empty shell, a void? I can understand why you might feel that way because so many of us feel that way when we contemplate stepping out of the all-consuming mother role or letting it change shape a bit. But it just isn't true, this fear of emptiness, that you can’t exist outside of the world you made and maybe thought you'd live in forever. There is vivid color inside of you. You have a soul that wants to expand and knows what it needs in order to do it.
Or are you afraid that your emerging ideal day might take you into uncharted waters? It might show you a life with a different partner. It might show you in peaceful solitude, or spending your days very differently, perhaps living in a different country. I don’t know specifically what you’re afraid you’ll find in your heart but, please, let’s discover it.
So the good news, and the exciting thing, my love, is that you get to go on this journey of self-discovery now. In fact, you must do this not only for the sake of your sanity but for the sake of your relationship with your partner, for the sake of your individual relationships with your kids. You have to do it, most of all, for your own evolution.
I really do believe that there’s a place on the other side where you're anchored in sovereignty again. And reaching that shore is a prerequisite for your family dynamics to fall into their right arrangement for the next act in this play.
Paradoxically, once you find your footing, you and your children will find the place where your worlds overlap harmoniously. There will be a place where the entire family comes together in a new, more fluid society.
Also, a crucial footnote: None of this happens quickly, nor does it move in a straight line. You're all going to go through a period of adjustment and everyone’s going to regress from time to time. The children are going to have moments where they demand to occupy their former roles, maybe resent you for making new moves for yourself. This is a process, right? You’re all going to slip in and out of the old formations as you gradually establish yourselves in your new centers.
That’s all par for the course and when it happens, you will feel expansive enough to wrap your arms around all these changes — in them and in you — because you will no longer be crushed.
Thematically related: Last week I had the thrilling experience of having an essay slip out of me in response to a simple prompt: Write something about hands. Things we reach for, grasp at, and let go of. Prompts don’t always work for me, but this was a good ‘un.
Here’s where it took me.
Don’t Drop the Baby
Don’t drop the baby.
This is all that’s going through my mind as my arms go numb and my eyes are dazzled by the bright lights bouncing off the hard white floor of this Tesco Metro supermarket on the Portobello Road. I can hear my thin breath coming in little gasps, can feel my pulse in my neck. But I can barely feel the warm bundle in my arms. So small, so light, I can hardly hold onto her.
I sink to my knees so that, just in case I really do drop the baby, she will not have so far to fall.
I’m ok, my eyes say to the shoppers who tilt a concerned head toward me. The feeling of cotton in my throat, the taste of pennies in my mouth, I gingerly return to my feet and swiftly exit the store, abandoning my cart in the bread aisle.
Note to self: I mustn’t leave the house without her sling or stroller again. It’s not safe. Next time I really might drop her, and my world will shatter.
Why is it that I never worry about dropping her at home? All day long she is securely clamped to my hip, a reassuringly solid ballast as I charge around our flat from kitchen to bedroom to bathroom to garden. But out here in the world, my arms can’t be trusted. I am almost certain that one of these days I will drop the baby.
The year that I was seventeen, I dreamed incessantly about babies. Pregnancy dreams. Breastfeeding dreams. A pink plastic bassinet full of plush toys that I had birthed. Babies that walked and talked. Babies that grew into adults before my eyes. Every night that year came a new baby dream. And the one that still chills me: I held my new baby in my arms, cradled her head in my hands, and as she fretted and squirmed, she shrank. Shrank so small I could hold her entire soft body in my palm. And then, shrinking more, to the size of a prawn. Eventually, she was just a filament and slipped between the cracks of my fingers, lost.
My twenties were a shit show, a feast of crises. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I started strong with the early adoption of adult responsibilities. I was making good money at a young age. I put myself in therapy. I bought a house with my boyfriend and planted a circular herb garden in the backyard with a sundial in its center.
But things started to tilt toward the chaotic when, at twenty-five, I gave birth to my daughter. The word responsible took on new meaning, not a character trait but an unshakable role. I was not just a responsible person, but a person responsible for. For this small human, for her very existence, and also for her wellbeing. I must not drop her.
When she was only about twenty minutes old, or more accurately nine months and twenty minutes old, her plump skin still tacky with vernix, having just exited my body less than half an hour ago, I examined her limbs and tested their functionality. I lightly gripped her tiny thumb with my fingers and gently moved it back and forth in its socket. Just as my thumb does, the little digit slipped backward on its hinge, smooth as jelly. I drew in a breath of astonished delight—she is double-jointed, like me. This truly is my baby, her body patterned on my own. I want to drink her up, snuffle her all over, her velvety scalp, the pink creases in her legs, her smooth little belly, all milky perfection.
A delicious certitude settled over me, grounded by the anchor of this new inescapable obligation. I am the mother into whose arms every nervous visitor or bored friend will return her. This young charge is mine to care for, and I take up this sacred duty with reverence and delight.
As for the emergence of chaos that this new chapter brought, it was not due to my baby but to the other half of her making, and to my failed efforts to protect us both from him. I don’t want to tell a plaintive story or point a sharp finger to the things that happened. Let me just tell it this way: He hurt me. Harmed me, even, in a string of ways too long for this page.
By the time my daughter was eight and I was thirty-three, we had left, not only his house but also the country. One day she and I sat in our bright new kitchen on the other side of the world, eating sandwiches at a red Formica table handed down from a friend. She regarded me and said, “I think your early thirties is when people’s lives start to work out.”
I looked at her young face wearing the softly satisfied smile of one who has acquired a new piece of wisdom, and thought, how remarkable to witness this phenomenon in real-time, the way we humans universalize our particular experiences. How our parents imprint themselves on our worldview without us even realizing it. And I thought I hope she’s right. As the inevitable template for her own future and her proxy for all of humanity, thank god I have given her a reason to form this preserving thought. Correct or not, it was true for her in that moment. And I felt glad that she saw me as finally safe, and by extension perhaps felt a bit safer herself.
I hope that my daughter’s youthful proclamation planted a seed of destiny in her that will germinate in her and blossom into resilience and stability as she now approaches her thirties, deep in the project of putting chaos into order in her own life.
An ocean separates us now, her in England and me in California, so I can’t rush to her side in times of distress to lift the heavy end of whatever she is carrying, or even hold her hand. But I can take her urgent calls even in the middle of the work day. I can, and do, send her money. I can tell her what I know about life and her right to live it: That as hard as things can be at times, she is stronger than she feels, more capable than she knows, and innately deserving of all the good things she is still learning how to create for herself.
After twenty-seven years, I still have not dropped the baby, and now I know I never will.
xo
Oh my goodness- I feel like I could write an essay back to ALL the things that touched me about this piece! So instead a couple of things. :) The first part of this essay I think is such an important discussion--having adult relationships with adult children! Parenting and being parented, really doesn't just end when the kids "leave for college"! There is still so much important relationship-ing that can happen. And I think there's a lack of awareness and lack of safe places to talk about those, yep- once again complicated aspects of parenting. So thank you for writing about it- in such a gentle, accessible way, here. And as for the second part of your essay--yes the beginning years of parenting! And how our desires for our children's "safety" and well-being feel so inextricably tied to our own journeys in life- however "old" they become and however "young" you remain....