I'm Glad My Mother Died

[SnoopyDelilah]

Hi everybody!

It's been a while since I've posted but I wanted to share an essay I put out publicly. I was vomitously terrified to do it but it's been ok. It's amazing (and so sad) how many people have said they've felt the same way.

Not everybody loves Mother’s Day. In fact, not everybody loves their mother. In the Madison Avenue, social-media version of Mother’s Day, everyone is full of love and gratitude for the woman who brought them into this world. But for some of us, it’s far more complicated than that.

The truth is, I hated my mother, and her death eight years ago freed me from a lifelong burden of desperately trying to love someone society insisted I was supposed to love. And often, when I’ve shared my guilty secret, I’ve been answered with conspiratorial whispers of, “Oh, me too,” or, “What a relief it will be.”

Since my mother died it has been a huge relief. I no longer seize with terror when the phone rings. My heart no longer races with throat-closing panic that the — always temporary — peace is about to come crashing down.

Growing up in a small Brooklyn apartment with cats, roaches, drugs, porn, bulimia lessons, and frequent trips to the nude beach was bizarre enough. Adulthood, even from across the country, proved even harder. With borderline personality disorder steering my mother’s every move I truly felt that one of us had to die to put an end to this tortured love story. I’d raged with suicidal thoughts but had a loving son and husband to keep me here; she succumbed to cancer at 68.

My mother’s mental illness robbed us both of the fun, smart, easy-to-laugh woman she was meant to be. She desperately wanted help for the pain she was always feeling, but BPD is notoriously hard to treat. She’d always quit when therapy got too close to the truth about her condition. After her death one of her therapists told me she had despaired over our troubled relationship and wanted nothing more than to be the good mother she herself hadn’t had, but she was truly too debilitated by her BPD to let anyone in.

In reality, it was BPD, more than my mother, who would disown me, change her phone number or even move to another state, leaving no way for me to contact her, each time another daughter surrogate or new boyfriend consumed her affections. This revolving door of “golden children” or “favorite people” destroyed me every time. Eventually, she’d take me back, and I’d skip about with wide-eyed delight, naively confident that this time it was for keeps.

But it never was. Even the time she said, “I love you, SD. Do you know how happy I was to have a little girl?” led to an abrupt hang-up and three years of exile. That loving admission, which I’d waited so long to hear, simply made her feel too vulnerable, so she had to destroy it.

None of this was her fault. She had been set up for BPD by childhood trauma and a foster mother who most likely imprinted her own BPD on an orphaned, empty-feeling teenage girl. My mother was sure that having her own baby would cure her desperate need for love, and when I didn’t, a part of her despised me for failing her. She treated her dogs and cats the same way. She loved them madly, until she didn’t… and then gave them away, over and over.

When she was diagnosed with a second round of cancer I decided to leave my family in Colorado for as long as it took, to be her caregiver in South Carolina. I had to. I had learned that the moment I stepped out of her frame of reference, her BPD-tortured mind lied to her, saying I betrayed her, and she would instantly replace me with almost anyone.

So now I was alone with the mother I tried to love, hoping to end this maddening, lifelong dance on a good note. In her last lucid moment she informed one of her other “golden children” that she could not come for a visit, that this was her time with me. For the first time ever, I cried in my mother’s arms and thanked her for finally choosing me.

She died a few days later. I’d always wondered how I’d feel at that moment. When it came, I shed no tears; I’d shed enough over the past 44 years. Instead, I felt relief. Relief that it had ended well. Relief that it had ended.

She’s gone, but I have to pay attention to my own borderline tendencies, since daughters of borderline mothers are at greater risk of having the disorder. I feel terrible episodes of darkness, still, but I try to remember every day to be everything my mother could not be. A house full of rescued pets, sharing hula hoops and my love of dancing with anyone who will join me is my way of coping. I’m sad I never had the mother who should have been out there dancing with me, but I don’t miss the BPD that destroyed us. The truth is, I’m just grateful the madness ended.

[Harri]

Hi SnoopyD and welcome back!

What a powerful post.  I am glad you shared it here.  I can relate to much of what you talked about here.  My mom died 12 years ago and I too felt relief when it happened.   I don't talk about it much except here. 

While you say you hate her, you also obviously have a lot of empathy and compassion for her past and even her life and the choices she made.   One of the hardest things I have had to reconcile regarding my relationship with my mom is the conflicting feelings I have had about her and the things she did.  Hate, love, understanding her behavior in the context of her disorder, sympathy, rage, and now, finally, occasions of peace with myself.

When your mom hugged you in her last days and finally chose you... well, that got my tears going.  Happy and sad tears I think.  Bittersweet might be the word.  Given the time that has passed how do you classify that moment now? 

[GaGrl]

My mother, as well, felt freed by the death of her stepmother, who was uNPD/BPD. She became my mom's stepmother when she was only 18 years old, and my mom was 6 years old -- and in addition to the mental illness was woefully unprepared to be a mothet.

Like your mother, my stepgrandmother would fixate on a Golden Child or special friend and shower them with attention, at the expense of what my mother needed. While providing beautiful clothes, healthy meals, etc. she neglected any emotional needs and, in fact, actively interfered in the relationship between father and daughter.

Her death was a relief. Even the second generation (my sister and me) felt relief at no longer having to protect ourselves from near-constant attempts to triangulate us.

[zachira]

Thank you for sharing. You have said things that few people admit. There are family members that are toxic to our mental health and sometimes we have to stay away from them, and in some cases it is only their death that leaves us free of the ongoing nightmare of dealing with a relative with BPD.

[LonelyButTrying]

I've thought the same thing. There have been so many times throughout my life that my mother says she wishes she could leave (in addition to our present circumstances) that I thought to myself that even with my father's gross financial irresponsibility, I would have been ok if she actually left. With my father, even though he's emotionally standoffish, there would have been peace. If she had died in one of those years? Relief, too.

Excuse me while I switch out the eggshells to walk on in my household. These ones are getting old.

[SnoopyDelilah]

Hi Harri, (and everyone!),

Thank you for the nice welcome back! I still feel the same way now as I did when she finally chose me... Massive relief that it it ended well. I was very afraid for my mental health if she hadn't. And it is awful to think that I placed that much value on it but I was as enmeshed in the madness as anyone could be.

It's just amazing to me that only on her deathbed, without the energy to keep IT up could who I believe was her "real" self be shown to me. It was delightful. Truly.

But I'm still grateful every day that she's dead.