Cutting off my cruel mother finally set me free

It sounds so shocking. But in this haunting account HARRIET BROWN says it was the toughest – and best – decision she ever made

MY MOTHER’S dyed blonde hair slid across the pillow — her beautiful straight nose was bent to one side by the adhesive tape holding the breathing tube in her mouth.

She had always been an attractive woman. People warmed to her vivacious, fun-loving personality and found her enthusiasm contagious.

Aged 76, she was in a hospital bed, deep in septic shock, unconscious and with her organs failing. Liquid pearled along her arms and the back of her hands, forced out through her skin as her kidneys stopped working.

The shape of her hands, their curving thumbs slack against the hospital sheet, was deeply familiar. I could picture those hands scrubbing a kitchen counter, bringing a cigarette to her red-slicked lips, slapping my face . . .

It was the first time I had seen my mother in four years. At the time of her death we hadn’t communicated at all, not by phone or email, for three years: we were estranged.

When the time came to say that last goodbye, no-one was more surprised than me when I burst into tears and sobbed: ‘Now I’ll never have a chance to have a relationship with her.’ But do I regret cutting off contact? No. It was the best thing I ever did. I would make the same choice in a heartbeat.

She might have charmed strangers but my mother’s relationship with me was very different. I grew up convinced there was something wrong with me because she repeatedly told me so, a constant drip, drip, drip of criticism.

When I brought home straight As she scolded me for thinking I was better than other people. When she found me reading in bed after lights out she punished me for being sneaky and deceitful.

When I woke with nightmares she advised me to think about someone other than myself and I’d have better dreams. And I believed her.

Our relationship turned me into a person who never felt good enough, kind enough, or pretty enough. Who would lie awake at 2am feeling ugly and worthless.

My mother, needless to say, would have told a different story. In her eyes I was the Fractured family: Harriet (back) with her mother, sister and father on her wedding day cold and ungrateful daughter who rebuffed her love and her repeated attempts to heal our rift.

And mostly, my wider family agreed with her. My problems — and they were always

MY problems, never OUR problems — were the subject of countless conversations among disapproving aunts and uncles, many of which happened in front of me.

To them I was ‘selfish’, ‘ungrateful’ and ‘stubborn’. In our Jewish family culture it was unthinkable that a daughter might reject her mother — it was my role to get along with her.

Family dysfunction is the stuff of myth and literature. Consider Cain and Abel, or basically every family in Shakespeare. Dysfunction means conflict, and conflict makes for a compelling narrative.

The most recent studies suggest somewhere between 5% and 10% of parents are estranged from at least one adult child. Some experts think family estrangement is on the rise, a ‘silent epidemic’. They point to trends like blended families and divorce that cause or exacerbate family tensions.

And we tend to think of estrangement as

a bad thing — after all, the bond between parent and child has roots in our very cells, and cutting ties, especially with a mother, is one of our most primal taboos. But that’s not my experience of it.

Yes, it was a last resort, but being estranged from my mother probably saved my sanity. While researching my book on the subject I was struck by the number of people who felt liberated by cutting themselves off from a family member.

Lucy Blake, a psychologist, surveyed about 800 people who said they were estranged from family and published the findings in conjunction with Stand Alone, a charity that supports estranged adults.

Eighty per cent said estrangement had led to positive changes for them. ‘It saved my life,’ wrote one. Another responded, ‘I feel like it has made me a stronger, more independent person.’ As Sarah, a 50-year-old publishing executive who is estranged from her mother, explains: ‘It’s not like I bailed at the first drama, and it’s not like I didn’t leave the door open. But there comes a time when your health and wellbeing is more important, and my family today is better off without my mother in our lives.’

BECCA Bland, who founded Stand Alone, cut off contact with her parents at 25 because of her difficult relationship with her mother. ‘For a lot of people estrangement is not a problem,’ she acknowledges. ‘It’s actually a healthier way.’

Increasingly, it’s accepted that some family relationships are so toxic they cannot be resolved.

Dr Kristina Scharp, of the University of Washington, has extensively researched family estrangement. Participants in her studies list parental abuse, neglect, and toxic behaviour —both past and continuing into the present — as the driving forces behind their decisions.

Comments suggest they don’t simply walk away after one or two incidents, but because the relationship as a whole causes great pain. One child explained: ‘I needed to cut off my mother. I need to protect myself and allow myself to one day have a healthy family of my own.’ I could have written those words myself.

Yes, there’s likely to be shame and guilt and grief. But for those of us who have chosen estrangement, it’s a solution to a problem that can’t be solved in any other way. For us, the physical and emotional costs of staying connected are far, far higher than the social costs of estrangement.

My own family looked good on paper: two parents and two daughters, a house in the suburbs, food and clothes and books, dinner out once a week. My father worked as an accountant and my mother was 23 when I was born. In her sleeveless blouses and pedal pushers, her hair curled and her lipstick dark against her pale skin, she looks like a teenager in photos from that time.

They show her holding me as an infant, smiling at me. I wish I could remember feeling safe in her arms.

One of the few stories she ever told about me as a young child took place in hospital when I was four. I’d had my tonsils removed and the way my mother told it, I was the only child on the ward who wouldn’t let her mother sleep next to her in the bed. ‘I had to sleep in a chair by your bed,’ she said. I still don’t know if it was true.

MUCH later I wondered why a mother would tell a story that painted her four-year-old as selfish and cold. What had to happen for a tiny child not to want her mother in the hospital?

My sister, three years younger, was the affectionate one who brought out my mother’s maternal instincts. I was the aloof, self-contained child, who was always reading, who worried silently, who wrote poetry and could not sleep.

Neither my mother nor I had the capacity to understand the other, and it wasn’t until I had my own daughters that I realised it’s not a child’s job to turn herself into what her parents want her to be. It’s a parent’s role to accept children for who they are. My mother was never able — or willing — to do this.

She often brought out a photograph that showed me aged six and my sister aged three. In it my sister sits on a tricycle, smiling tentatively up at me. I have one hand on her shoulder, scowling into the camera.

To my mother this was evidence of my meanness. ‘All she wanted was your attention, and you were too selfish to give it to her,’ she’d tell me.

I often preferred my own company, irritated by having a little sister trailing me. It was only years later that another interpretation occurred to me — that I might have been squinting into the sun rather than scowling.

While my sister had her own fiery relationship with my mother, she never felt unloved as I did. Yet I always loved my sister. We worked hard over the years not to let the issues between my mother and me get in the way of our own relationship.

Other people might tell me I was smart or funny or kind, but according to my mother I was conceited, selfish, incapable of affection — and lucky she put up with me at all.

She said I was a monster incapable of loving anyone but myself, and I accepted that as fact. Then there were her almost nightly rages. She’d storm from the dinner table, for reasons I never understood, and while her explosions might start as nothing to do with me, she would always end up in my bedroom, with mascara streaked down her face, wailing, ‘Why don’t you love me? What have I ever done to you that’s so terrible?’ I’d be left wondering why I felt nothing, not impatience or sadness and certainly not love.

At 16, I endured her fury when I applied to go to college early, in large part to escape her.

Four years later at my graduation my parents, sister, paternal grandparents and I, drove to a fancy French restaurant, supposedly to celebrate. Suddenly I heard my mother loudly tell the table, including my appalled grandparents, how ashamed she’d been when she’d found birth control pills in my bag when I was just 14.

It was bad enough she divulged this story on ‘my’ night, but worse still that she had twisted the facts. Because I could have sworn I’d been 16 when this happened. In fact, because I recalled in great detail which house we’d lived in at the time, I was sure of it.

If I’d been sitting with the queen herself I could have corrected the mistake, but because it was my mother who’d got it wrong, intentionally or not, I stayed mute and redfaced. Disputing her story would just have caused a scene and made things worse.

SHE was an expert at this kind of gaslighting (making someone question their own reality) and it still haunts me. My first instinct has always been to discount my own observations, to assume I’m misremembering. To gaslight myself, in a way. I can’t think of a more potent example of emotional abuse than this: to teach a child not to trust herself.

And what of my father? Where was he throughout all this?

I got along better with him; we were both introverts with a tendency toward the philosophical. But he chose the path of appeasement, telling me frankly in my 20s that my mother would leave him if he didn’t take her side.

While I never stopped loving him, it was only years after her death that I could forgive him for not intervening.

As for my sister, our deep affection for each other managed to bridge the family schism. I know she often felt

unfairly caught between my mother and me. After university, my mother and I saw each other every few months for family gettogethers and the occasional weekend visit, which often ended in arguments that led to frosty silences.

When I moved further away, contact grew more sporadic, and only at large family events. But we still fought by phone and, later, by email and text. At different times we both took breaks from the relationship, always assuming it was temporary.

I married when I was 28. My husband unswervingly took my side and his mother became like a surrogate mother to me. For years I never planned to have children, terrified I would inadvertently do to them what my mother had done to me. Then my grandmother died, my father’s mother who I had always been close to, and the need to have a child bloomed in me suddenly. I was pregnant two weeks later. Still, night after night over the next nine months my husband listened to me fret with anxiety, sure I would be a terrible mother because of everything my own mother had told me. Over and over he reassured me: ‘I know you. You are a good person and you will love this child.’

The last time I stayed at my parents’ house was when my elder daughter was three months old. My mother offered to look after her while I had a nap. Maybe, I thought, she would be the loving grandmother I wanted for my child. I put my daughter into her arms and climbed the stairs.

Yet almost immediately my daughter began to howl. I waited for her cries to slow, but all I heard was my baby sobbing.When I could take it no longer I went downstairs to find her lying alone in the middle of the living room floor.

Even though I’d explained that my daughter needed to be held constantly because she was colicky, my mother was in the kitchen, humming to herself.

When I confronted her she turned to me, a wooden spoon in one hand, and laughed. ‘This little girl’s got to learn she can’t get everything she wants,’ she said.

What had been ‘just the way it was’ or ‘my fault’ in our family suddenly felt like abuse when it was directed at my child. From then on, I tried to keep a distance from my mother, but I could never completely break off contact. I still held out a hope we’d somehow magically develop the relationship I craved.

The last straw didn’t break until my elder daughter was 18 and had a major relapse of the anorexia she had first developed four years earlier. Needless to say, my husband and I were out of our minds with worry.

In the midst of this my mother started emailing, offering support. ‘You can turn to your parents, you know,’ she wrote, and I felt the old tug of longing.

Maybe, just maybe, something would be different this time. So I wrote and asked for suggestions for high-calorie, low-volume meals we could cook for our daughter. Perhaps my mother would enjoy giving practical help, I thought.

Less than an hour later I received a reply, a diatribe about how my career as a writer who covered food and body image was to blame for my daughter’s illness, that my daughter was rebelling against me as I had rebelled against my mother.

I felt suddenly dizzy, as if the room had tilted. I thought I heard the crack of something breaking and wondered if I was having a stroke. Blood rushed to my head and then away. And then it was over, and I was done with my mother. I felt no regret or confusion, no rage or longing or resentment or anything, really.

AGREAT clarity settled over me. I knew our connection was broken in a way that couldn’t be healed because I no longer wanted it to be healed. And it never was.

I didn’t go to her funeral. I was 5,000 miles away on the island of Maui, on a long-planned holiday with my husband and daughters.

After nearly 50 years of conflict, I thought I had no feelings left for my mother. Yet as we hiked a beautiful mountain trail that day all of a sudden I started to choke, and my lips and tongue went numb. I had to sit down. A sentence popped into my head: my mother was buried today.

My mother was dead and I would never hear her say: ‘You’re a good person’. My mother was dead and I would never, now, get her blessing. I’d spent so much of my adult life walling off my feelings for her and finally the walls were coming down. I felt a pain in my chest.

This was not hearts and flowers love, not happy family love. This was brutal love, the kind that brings on a cold sweat.

I sat in the dirt for a long time, until the sweat cooled on my neck and my heartbeat slowed. Only when my mother was dead had I finally allowed myself to feel love and sorrow for her. It was an irony she would not have appreciated.

ADAPTED by Clare Goldwin from Shadow Daughter by Harriet Brown, published by Da Capo Lifelong on December 6 at €23. © Harriet Brown 2018.