Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters. Karen C.L. Anderson

       Chapter 5 Awakening

      The image is vivid in my memory. My mother is standing in the front yard and she’s holding a letter in her hand—a letter she’s about to put in the mailbox.

      She holds it up, and declares, “I’m divorcing my mother!”

      I was in my early twenties and she was in her mid-forties. I certainly wasn’t surprised; it was no secret that she and my grandmother didn’t get along. My mother often said that she would never treat me the way her mother had treated her. I’d heard the stories and they made me hurt for my mother.

      Like the time my grandmother said to my mother, who had been voted the “Prettiest Girl” in her high-school class, “If I’d had more money, I’d have gotten you plastic surgery to fix your face.” She told me that story several times and I know she was hurt by it.

      My grandmother was a stunner. As was my mother. And like many, many women of their generation, their looks were everything. Their appearance and sex appeal (but not too much) was their currency. And deep down in the primal part of their brains, it was how they believed women survived.

      I remember the first time I felt that there must be something wrong with my body. I was about eight or nine years old and had been to a pediatrician visit with my mother. When we got home, she said to my stepfather, “The doctor said she’s chunky.” I heard amusement, fear, and disgust all at the same time.

      My mother put me on a diet when I was twelve. And when I reread the diary I kept during my high school years, it’s filled with pages where I write about feeling like a pig, about hating myself because I ate too much.

      Both my mother and my grandmother were concerned about my weight, and when I look back at photos of myself then, all I can do is shake my head. I didn’t have a “weight problem.” What I believe now is that she was worried about two things, one consciously and one unconsciously. First, she was worried about what others would think about her if she had a fat daughter; secondly, she worried that if I had a fat body, then a man wouldn’t love me and take care of me.

      * * *

      As a young adult I believed my mother and I had “typical” mother-daughter conflict, but I also thought our relationship was different—better than the relationship she had with her mother. My mother often said that we were close—good friends, even. I know she wanted it to be different between us than it had been for her with her own mother.

      What I didn’t know at the time was that my mother and I were not “close”—we were codependent and emotionally enmeshed. We were both single and we’d go out to nightclubs together and drink, flirt, and dance with men who would cleverly suggest we were sisters. She was involved in almost all aspects of my life and when I wanted to keep some things separate, she would be hurt and/or angry. And because I craved her attention and approval (unconsciously), I did as she wanted.

      I didn’t understand how unhealthy our relationship was.

      Fast-forward twenty-five years, at the end of 2010, and there I was, divorcing my mother, too. Instead of a letter in the mail, I sent her an email. Despite her (our?) desire for a different, healthier mother-daughter relationship, it appeared we couldn’t escape those etched-in-stone patterns. My mother had unconsciously passed down attitudes and behaviors, I unconsciously took them, and when I wanted to strike out on my own and have a life separate from my mother, our relationship suffered.

      I will tell you about some of the things that led up to that moment—the things that I believed justified “divorcing” my mother—but what’s important is to know for now is that in that moment I felt like I had no other option. I believed that divorcing my mother—choosing to have no contact with her—would solve all my problems.

      Instead, I found myself obsessing about our relationship. To anyone who would listen, I’d pour out my hurt and anger, sharing the details of how my mother had done me wrong. I was operating from an unhealthy, unconscious belief that I was my mother’s victim.

      When I discovered the concept of victim consciousness, it all made sense. Up until that point, I resisted the idea that I might be a victim because in my family, “being a victim” was something to be ashamed of and to avoid at all costs. I highly recommend the work of Lynne Forrest and her book Beyond Victim Consciousness for fully understanding this concept, but let me lay out the basics here.

      Imagine an inverted triangle. At the bottom of the triangle is the Victim, in the top-left corner is the Persecutor, and in the top-right corner is the Rescuer (note that both these roles are in the “one up” position from the Victim).

      When we’re in victim consciousness, we’re playing one of those three roles, and it’s important to recognize that none of these roles is considered better than other (especially when everyone in the dynamic is an adult). The Rescuer is not the “good guy.” In fact, the Rescuer and the Persecutor are basically exaggerated versions of the Victim.

      This dynamic plays out on a micro level in families, and we can also see it playing out in the world, on a macro level.

      According to Forrest: “Victims think of themselves as weak and unable to take care of themselves, so they are constantly on the lookout for someone to rescue them. Rescuers tend to believe that their own needs are irrelevant. They believe that they matter only when they are taking care of others, and that means they constantly need someone to take care of. Persecutors believe the world is a generally unsafe and fearful place. They think of themselves as being in constant need of protection from a world that is out to get them, and so they get angry at others or at situations believing that they are only defending themselves.”

      No matter where you start out on the triangle, you will eventually play the other two roles. If you’re the Victim, you start to feel resentment, and may even move into the Persecutor role in order to change the pattern, believing you are protecting yourself. Or, you may move into the Rescuer role in order to feel important because you’re taking care of the Victim.

      In hindsight, I see that my mother and I constantly revolved around the triangle, each of us playing all three roles.

      Shortly after I “divorced” my mother, I became my maternal grandmother’s legal guardian. Given that her children lived in other states (and in one case, in another country), it made sense that I, who lived about ninety minutes away, take on this role. Not to mention, as I said earlier, the relationship between my mother and her mother was strained.

      When it became obvious that she’d no longer be able to live alone in her home, I moved her into a skilled nursing facility, cleaned out her house, and sold it. It was while readying her house for sale that I found a series of letters she and my mother had written to each other, from the time my mother was eighteen and in college.

      I treasured those letters because they gave me so much insight. They mirror, almost exactly, some of the correspondence my mother and I have exchanged over the years. In some cases, the letters conveyed basic day-to-day observations and news, but other letters were filled with rage, hurt, accusations, and confusion.

      I even found the famous “I’m divorcing you” letter my mother sent my grandmother.

      My point in sharing this is to illustrate that despite what we say, despite what we might intend, what we model is what makes the