The Relationship Nobody Wants

Nobody wants to hear that you are relieved when one of your parents passes away, except for those who have experiences in common with you.

Two years ago, I was starting the process of mourning my mother. She had passed on April 24, however my youngest daughter was graduating high school on May 24th and, as a teacher, I had a school year to finish. My mind had a lot of things to keep it busy.

Photo by Brittani Burns on Unsplash

I returned to teach less than a week after my mom passed. There wasn’t a funeral and we had dealt with everything we could in person, so my brother and I came back home.

What we brought back with us were a lot of questions.

I had a very tumultuous relationship with my mother. We fought a lot over the course of twenty plus years. Most of our fights were verbal but there were times when she put her hands on me. There were also times when she egged me on to put hands on her too. I’m not proud of it but I was a child. She tried kicking me out of the house a few times as a teenager, but my dad always came to my rescue. She would refuse to buy me personal products if I refused to buy her cigarettes.

The worst came when I was in junior high. There were two different situations that shaped who I was for years after.

I had built up a friend group that had a lot of strange rules. Looking back, I know that maybe one of those girls was actually my friend. I was not doing well trying to be friends with these girls and I would physically shake myself to sleep most nights. One night I called my mom into my room because the shaking was so bad that it scared me. I told her what was going on and very matter of factly she stated, “Maybe you just need to try harder.”

I do not remember what created this situation, but I suppose that doesn’t matter. I was upset at my parents for something and they weren’t being incredibly helpful. At one point in our argument I said, “Fine, I’ll just kill myself then!” and stormed off. My father came up to me and said, “Well, if that's what you want to do grab your coat. I’ll take you to the police station.” This was back when they used to say that committing suicide was illegal. I think he thought he could have me arrested. What’s alarming about this is that the subject was dropped after that night. My parents never offered to help me. They never asked me how I was doing. The thoughts of suicide never left me and it was something I lived with forever. I think of them like an addict thinks of being sober. I have gone six years without thinking about suicide.

Sitting here writing this now, I realize that I could write an entire book on the ways my relationship with my mother failed. I’m not ready for that yet.

My relationship with my mom took a dramatic turn after my middle daughter was born in 2001. We both decided to agree to disagree and for nearly 20 years we did alright.

In 2017, my dad passed from cancer. In the years before his death, my brother and I realized that our parents were keeping a lot of secrets from us. We were told very little information and it seemed like they would tell my brother things they wouldn’t tell me and vice versa.

Once my dad passed, my mom had a bunch of money and went on a spending spree. She didn’t want any input from my brother and I. This resulted in her being scammed out of thousands of dollars and ultimately, losing her home to foreclosure.

I had promised my dad, just a few days before his passing, that I would take care of mom. Despite everything that she and I had been through, she was the only mom I was getting and I loved her. She made this impossible.

After my divorce in 2020, not one but two job losses, and a horrifying event, my youngest daughter and I moved to Las Vegas. My brother and I tried to find a way to get our mom to come to Las Vegas to live with one of us. We didn’t want her to live on her own because she was she wasn’t without her own health issues and she was way too trusting for a big city. She refused. Her excuse was always the fact that she lived with her sister and couldn’t leave her behind. So she stayed behind in Wyoming.

This put a strain on all of our relationships. I began to see that my brother had an equally bad relationship with my mom. I had thought for decades that they had a great relationship. I thought that he could do no wrong in her eyes. I was wrong. I didn’t know if this made me happy or sad.

While we were back in Wyoming attending to my mom’s things we found that she had death benefits but had put them in the name of her cleaning lady and not one of her children or grandchildren. I had known about this cleaning lady for years and always wondered why she never reached out to my brother and I. After her death we found out that it was because my mom told her awful and untrue facts about us.

We didn’t have a lot of family left after our parents passed. By the time our mom passed away, both of her sisters had passed away. Our dad still had two living brothers, one that hadn't spoken to any of us in decades and one who sat with my dad until he took his last breath. That brother had kept in contact with my mom until her passing. He did not reach out to my brother and I after her passing. I can only assume that she was telling him the same things she was telling the cleaning woman.

As a grown woman who has struggled with her own mental health issues, it is easy for me to confess that my mother had mental health issues of her own. She lost her mother in a violent car accident when she was 6 and had to go and live with other family members. Three years later, her father remarried a woman who didn’t have children of her own. All of this was done without any sort of counseling. They just went on about life as if there were no issues. I suppose that’s what life was like in the 1950's. My mother had significant issues with depression and anxiety, just like I do. I also believe she may have had some narcissistic tendencies.

In the months after her death, I found myself incredibly confused. When you mom passes away everyone thinks it is this great loss, so that comfort you in that way. I spent a lot of time grieving her in the way that I thought I should and paid very little attention to how I was really feeling. It wasn’t until my brother expressed his thoughts that my own started to surface. He asked, “How are you feeling?” and to him I responded, “Relieved.” It was the lightest I had felt in my entire life.

I felt relieved that I no longer had to feel shame about being a single mother, about buying things that I wanted, about choosing myself, about accepting help, about getting my college degrees, about being divorced, or anything else that she questioned. I felt relieved that I was out of the shadow of who she believed me to be and the secrets she kept from me because of it. I feel relieved that she can no longer speak negatively about me to my own children or belittle my parenting skills.

I just feel relieved to be out from under all of it. I wish I had the kind of mother that I could be sad about. The kind of mother that I could honor on each and every Mother’s Day, but I don’t…didn’t.

This story is Published in **The Ink Home**.

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