Bleeding Wounds: Insight from a Mother/Daughter Relationship

 Try and imagine for a second that feeling of constantly missing love – parental love, the kind of love only a mom can give to a daughter. It’s tough to imagine, right? In a perfect world moms love their daughters, they are their best friends and they support and encourage their daughters in the best ways they can.

 Sadly, this doesn’t always translate into reality, and the relationship I have had with my mom over the years is real life proof.  We had a rough mother/daughter connection ever since I can remember. We still do, even though many things have changed.

I desperately needed my mother at every step of the way growing up, but she was blind.  I hardly remember getting any hugs or kisses from her or hearing “I love you,” or any other encouraging words. I wanted to be a good daughter and to make her happy, yet anything I would do wasn’t good enough for her, so I started rebelling.

I became a troubled kid and ran away from home so I could attract her attention. This was a desperate cry for her love, but she didn’t hear it. Instead, my mom chose to play the victim card, and played out an entire drama in front of me after she had brought me home. I was 16 at the time.

At that point I understood: it was never about her loving me, it was always about me loving her. She didn’t care that her daughter needed her love and attention. All she cared about was getting love and attention from her kids because she gave us life, and it was our duty to love her.

I wanted to love my mother because I loved her and not because I had to. I realized how hurtful it was that I couldn’t have back the same thing I was giving out. Since then, I have started respecting my mom for the simple fact that she is a mom and that she gave me life, but my love for her has also started to fade little by little.

This doesn’t make my mom a bad person. My mom always was and still is an extremely strong kind of woman with fixed standards in her mind. She has great managing skills and is an outstanding leader in her career. She is determined and confident. Nothing seems unachievable to her; she fights for what she believes in and she always succeeds.

This makes me very proud of her, yet there is still one problem: my mom never learned to make a difference between her career and her family. Her need to be in control over everything that is happening in her work life extends to her home life. I feel like the need to be strong made my mom cold-hearted and impaired her ability to love not only her kids and husband, but also just about anyone else.

She raised her kids with the same kind of cold in her heart that she has when leading a team of hundreds of people. Having to show a cold-hearted and strong personality in her career is absolutely understandable yet having to show a loving and caring attitude towards her family was never part of her.  It seems like my mom refuses to accept this idea.

On top of all this, my mom is a close-minded person, over controlling, conservative and old-fashioned. These qualities hold her from opening up to me, and from letting me open up to her. I could never share any secrets with her because her conservative mindset would immediately see something wrong in whatever was going on instead of trying to understand and support me.

All this doesn’t make my mom the worst mom in the world. As a matter of fact, my mom was always over-protective, and so she was really good at making sure her kids were fed and clean, had done their homework, and she taught us the difference between good and bad. I can’t blame my mom for the way she is; she was raised with conservative beliefs and nothing could change that.

She didn’t know what it meant to receive appreciation and support growing up because that was how she was raised. I get why she is the way she is, but if she had opened up her mind, and given up on some of her limited beliefs, my mom would’ve seen how wrong it was to only give her daughter the little amount of love that she herself had received growing up. This doesn’t mean that my mom never loved me. She did, but she loved me in her own unique way that turned out to be the wrong way for me.

Time went by and I moved to live across the world hoping that distance would improve things. Things did improve, although not by much.  Coming clean in the relationship I have with my mom is not an easy task.

As a matter of fact, there is no relationship — one because we live in different parts of the world, and two because we never had a relationship in the first place. I mean, I stay in touch with my mom and we talk very often, but this doesn’t help our connection as much as I want it to. We talk like we are acquaintances and not blood related.

I once asked my mom to re-evaluate her beliefs and to ask herself if she had loved us the way a mom is supposed to love her kids, but she didn’t answer me. In my desperation, I made a Christmas wish that she would open her mind before it is too late. I hoped that she could understand how much I still need to hear an “I love you” from her, but it didn’t’ work.

I am an adult now, and I want to have my own family. However, when I reflect on my years growing up, and my mother/daughter connection, I realize that I never want to have kids. I consider myself an open-minded person yet I fear the inability to give my kids the one most important thing: love.

I fear that I will love my kids in all the wrong ways — just like my mom did. I fear I will be too over-protective. I fear I will impose my limiting beliefs on them.

I fear I will stick to the standards and norms I grew up with like my mom did. I fear I will make my kids suffer because of my inability to love them the way they need to be loved. Even more, I fear having a daughter and losing her because I don’t know if I will know how to show up for her as a good mom.

Alex G. is an exceptional risk taker. Her life is ruled by passion and positivity and she believes that everything she does needs to be fun and fulfilling. She lives and plays in Carbondale, CO, and is continuously looking for opportunities to improve.