Teens

My mother has always been avoidant. She learned it as a child herself. As a kid, her mother and sister would mock her - calling her a "Betty Sue" any time she expressed her emotions. So she learned to keep them to herself. She internalized the belief that invalidation is normal. That she's the broken one for being too sensitive. That if she were to express herself, no one would even care. She'd just be ridiculed.

When she was 20, her father died, and her own mother was likely overwhelmed - suddenly without the income of her now-deceased husband - no doubt prompting financial concerns that weighed on my mother at her age. She always recounts stories of crying as a waitress. I am certain her own mother had all but forced her to get that job.

By the time I was 15, my mother had made it clear to me how much of a financial burden I had been since my father left (after which we had to move into her mother's - my grandmother's). Later, she gave me the medical bills for my broken arm as a kid.

She invaded every bit of my privacy as a teen, refusing to honor any personal boundaries. Later, she socially engineered her way into my apartments when I wasn't home - to "drop off a package," or "make sure everything's okay."

I was well aware of our differing values and my fundamental incompatibility with her worldview by the time I was 17 - a year after starting to date my first girlfriend, Beth, and finally, mostly, having thrown off the shackles of my hyper-conservative upbringing.

The only way my mom and I communicated was when Beth was over and my mother would yell down the stairs: "No sex in my house!" Our birds and bees talk was "You know not to be having sex, right?" Who knows; maybe some girl would fool me into getting pregnant.

I didn't get a job by choice. My getting a [professional] job was a bit of a "fuck you" to her - after she suggested McDonald's, or else I start paying rent. Before that, she had forced me to stuff newspaper inserts and trudge through a foot of [hometown] snow, delivering free newspapers to literally every house in my neighborhood - something she couldn't even endure herself on the one time she tried to help by driving the route alongside me as I walked, letting me get into the warm car when I was desperate, while she watched from said toasty warm car, sipping a coffee.

It was also the start of my acute awareness that I had to strategize to GTFO around 18. Not because she was threatening to force me out at that age, per se (rent aside), but because I was already very aware by then that it was her (strict) way or the highway (literally) - which was a fundamentally unsafe situation for me.

Nearing 18, my mother made it clear, as she had in the past, that it was then either college, or rent. Her income made it impossible for me to get student aid, but she neither offered any financial support nor was she willing to cosign for loans. This left me to work a full-time job to pay for state school as I went, which ultimately meant I never finished school, working for my own survival instead. At 20, I was close to not being able to accomplish even that, weighing 130 lbs and living on my own in [a different state]. She would repeatedly bring up a joke she told her friends about how I had "taken a machete to the apron strings" like it was a choice, or something to laugh about.

We never had any meaningful discussions that I can remember - at least none that weren't about religion or general hurt feelings (all of which could be cured by enough faith in "God's Plan").

She would never tell me why Dad left, despite my repeated questioning in therapy. She would instead tell me that I didn't know how to express myself properly or that I lacked the vocabulary - perhaps like she had. That I didn't need to know about adult things, but that it was still okay to be sad and express it. Except I didn't even know what to be sad about.

She never said that my father not being at birthdays or holidays was weird, or something to be upset about, or that my father didn't have a good survival-based reason for not being there.

Expressing myself to my mother had always been fundamentally unsafe and never resulted in acknowledgment, validation, or clarity. There was only denial, deflection, and compounded avoidance. It reinforced what I already knew; my feelings didn't really matter.