I Love my Mother, But I Won't Become Her
the seemingly never ending cycle of difficult mother/daughter relationships
There’s an episode of Gilmore Girls where Lorelei is sitting at her kitchen table trying to figure out if she actually likes Pop-Tarts. She tells Rory the story of being offered one at a friend's house when she was young and eating it because she knew her mother wouldn’t approve. Rory’s response is to take them from her.
Now that I’m an adult, I’ve been like Lorelei so often. I’m not sure if I actually like what I think I do, or if the choices I’ve made have been mine - or if they are a product of rebellion against my own mother. Or against who I’ve always thought I should be.
I suppose the irony here is that my mom always described our relationship like Lorelei’s and Rory’s. We were always meant to be close. For a time, I guess this was true. We would occasionally disagree when I was a teenager, but we never fought. I wanted to believe that this was because we were more like friends than mother and daughter.
She and my father were married young - 18 and 19, respectively. They had met in high school through mutual friends and were already planning to get married by the time my mother graduated. Initially, she was going to start college and he would transfer to join her. This never happened. Instead, my dad dropped out and went to work at a factory and she started community college in her/my hometown.
By the time I was born, she was 19 and he was 21. I can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that I’m now older than she was when I was born. I barely feel like I understand what I’m doing with my own life - I know I couldn't be responsible for somebody else’s. I do wonder, though, if I could have ever taken the same path.
I grew up in one of those churches where the pastor still preached that it was a woman’s purpose to get married and have children. So did my mom. It was ingrained in both of us from when we were young that we were to follow this path - even if we had other ambitions. I rejected it pretty quickly. I remember the anger creeping up into my body anytime I heard these sermons.
I never dated in high school. The thought of having somebody keeping me tied to this town scared me more than being alone ever did.
As I watch girls my own age getting married or having babies, though, I wonder what it is they know that I don’t. I wonder if their lives are easier - even if I would have been miserable with that life instead of mine. Was my own mother ever miserable with the life she chose? She says she wasn’t. She says that wouldn’t trade the choices that allowed her to have me. Still, I’ve never been able to relieve my own guilt for taking her life away from her.
She left college when I was born. She wanted to stay home with me. She spent years teaching me everything she thought I would need to know before I started school, came to every class event, and - when I was older - encouraged me to do as much as possible so I could get into a good college. Even if she eventually finished her degree online, she never got the opportunity to leave like I did.
Back during Christmas, she and I were fighting pretty much all the time. During a particularly bad argument, she confessed that maybe she “should have just gotten a job and worked.” I guess hearing this felt like confirmation. That the fear I’d always had, the guilt I’d always felt, was justified. Hearing her say that cut through to the girl who always thought that her parents would be better off without her.
I have a hard time reconciling the idea of the type of relationship we had, with the one we actually do have - or, at least, the one we have now. I guess there were signs, but I could never allow myself to be angry with her.
The first break in the illusion of our perfect relationship came after I came out. It was the second semester of my freshman year of college. I had just moved on campus a month before and I finally felt comfortable enough telling her and my dad. I didn’t think either of them would care - but I needed to put distance between myself and my hometown before I told them. I was worried about people finding out - and about the people in our church blaming them.
I was wrong for this to be my only concern. I guess I was also wrong to think that I owed it to them to tell them. My mom’s response was to tell me that she “couldn’t accept” that I was bi. She thought that I had gone to college and become a different person. She asked if I still believed in god (I didn’t, but she didn’t need to know that). She then proceeded to not speak to me for a few weeks.
The first night after she told me she couldn’t accept me, I cried myself to sleep. It was the closest thing I had felt to heartbreak at the time. It was the kind of heartbreak where you can’t stop crying long enough to breathe - so your voice only occasionally comes out in wails. I mourned our relationship that night.
I got up the next day and put on the music she had always complained about when I was younger. Notably, I listened to a lot of Joan Jett over the course of the weeks we weren’t speaking. I blackened my eyes with eyeliner. I couldn’t look at my own face for too long. It’s hard when your own reflection looks like the person who has hurt you the most.
We’ve fought more in the past few years than we ever have. She doesn’t like the way I dress, how I do my makeup now, or my hair. She thinks the music I love is weird - and isn’t fond of the Bowie lyrics tattooed on my hip. (She didn’t speak to me for a few days after I got it). She doesn’t like that I drink, or that I go to bars and parties. She doesn’t like my politics, or that I’m educated enough now to challenge her.
And I don’t like that I’ve found myself in all the things she disapproves of - or that every time I smoke a cigarette, I wonder if I do it because I know she’d hate it.
I know she treats me the way she does because of her own mother. I know that it was her own religious trauma that kept me in the churches that caused mine. I know she’s always been afraid of what people would think of her (even if she won’t admit it), and I know she’s afraid of how I make her look. In all of this, though, I’m trying to find space for my own pain.
I’m not sure if I want my own kids - I never have. If I do - and if I have a daughter - I don’t want her to grow up wondering if I resent her. I’ve thought before that if love feels like how my mother can make me feel, I’m better off without it. But love shouldn’t - doesn’t - feel like that. I would want her (and I guess, by extension, my younger self) to know that. I would want my mom to know that, too.