Mothering your Mother

My mum wasn't "maternal" in a way that some friends' mums were. Not a lot of spontaneous kisses & hugs, & not much praise. But she loved me fiercely & I knew it & she always put my brother's & my needs before her own.
When we were growing up, she was helping my dad get a small family farm up & running, & she just saw this as more of a priority than being the perfect mum.
She's just been diagnosed with dementia but she & her partner live very independently. I do feel I need to look after her outside her home, & humour her a bit in conversations, but it's been gradual & tbh it's a relief that she accepts some "mothering" & help.

Yes, your story does resonate with mine. My mum lives in sheltered accommodation so has 3 or 4 friends around her. However she is still needy and relies on me to fulfill her expectations for social outings, shopping, taking great grandchildren to see her, finance and health apps, etc. This mothering Sunday I will call round to see her instead of hosting the larger family lunch - at 68 I am finding these roles more and more emotional exhausting, yet at 90 I know she may not have much time left. I have realised that I can't be her friend (a lot of past history) but I have told her I will always try my best to be her daughter.

Oreo Thank you

Thanks for your responses everyone. Some perceptive insightsso thanks. A few more details. Mum is 80 and she (and dad) always worked hard at their careers as me and my brothers were growing up. So we were provided for and honestly had a stable childhood. I think I just yearned for a mum who I felt was really emotionally present and nurturing, and cared about the little things that other mums did, like knowing what they child's favourite colour/ food/books/ teacher etc was. My mum wouldn't have had a clue! Since my dad died 5 years ago (after a happy marriage) and now seeing how close her friends' daughters are to their mums, I she wants that too with me. That is where i just don't want to go. That ship has sailed. She is well loved and we are there for her in every practical sense. She has an active social life. It's her growing need for me (not my brothers) to call more often (other daughters call daily) have long chats, tell her my news, secrets, all about the GC lives etc that I can't bring myself to do. I love her in my own way and she loves me in her own way. I just want that to be enough, and not to be something i regret later on. Thanks everyone xx

My late mother was an awful woman.
I hated having to send her gifts and cards on Mothering Sunday but the price I would have to pay if I didn’t was too great.

My mother found it very difficult to show love and affection. She was always angry and sometimes, when I was a child, never spoke to me for days.
I have mixed emotions about Mother's Day, because it brings back unhappy memories of flowers ( bought from my meagre pocket money) going into the bin and gifts being thrown back at me. Every year, I hoped would be different, but it wasn't. She was such a troubled woman.

Despite her behaviour, she was very demanding and I spent my adult years at her constant back and call.

I promised myself that I would never be that kind of mother.

I always felt that I was such a disappointment to her.

Marydoll how sad to continue to be present but not enough.
...but what a strong woman you must be to have survived and gone on to love.
I'm sure you would never make family feel like a "disappointment".

Franksi. I absolutely relate to what you say. I looked after my mother for nearly 3 years at the end of her life but I couldn’t bear being her mother.

My mum died 7 years ago (last week). I miss her so very much. I do pick up her photo every time we go to the Christie Hospital for a scan for Himself and ask her to look after us. Daft? Probably. But I know how much she loved him too so it helps. She once said of him and his great sense of humour “he could make a cat laugh!”. That’s always stayed with me. We were very close, always. Lucky me eh?

I miss my Mum. She told me when I was quite small that she wasn’t a cuddly Mum. Well, I told her she was. She spent lots of time with me at the weekends although she worked full time. As a teenager, my parents relationship went from bad to worse and she ended up on a huge number of pills. Eventually when I was 28 she committed suicide nine months after my father died of cancer. I’m an only lonely child.

My children are everything to me and I do everything I am able to support them in their lives. They all tell me how loved and appreciated I am.

I wish all mothers everywhere love. Xxx

NotSpaghetti

Marydoll how sad to continue to be present but not enough.
...but what a strong woman you must be to have survived and gone on to love.
I'm sure you would never make family feel like a "disappointment".

I agree NotSpaghetti
Some people may have carried this behaviour through the generations but Marydoll must be a very strong person to want to be a better person, mother and grandmother.

Marydoll 💐

Dear ayse.

So sorry about your mum. It sounds like she did the best she could to love you. It also sounds like you have turned that sorrow and loss into more love. "The heart that gives gathers" x

I think if we have had bad experiences in childhood most of us try our very best to give our children a different and better life, and in the trying, we succeed.

My son has sent his usual Mother's Day text - "Why don't you die Mother. The sooner you're dead the better as nobody will miss you ".

Marydoll

Our mums were kind, caring nurturing women. I can only hope I've been as loving. Caring for them in their last years was an honour.

I'm saddened to read to heartaches of some.

Happy Mothering Sunday.

Franski

Dear ayse.

So sorry about your mum. It sounds like she did the best she could to love you. It also sounds like you have turned that sorrow and loss into more love. "The heart that gives gathers" x

Thank you x

The saddest thing of all is when clearing out my mother's house, I found a blank card, which said: To a wonderful daughter on Mother's Day. She just couldn't articulate it.😪
She never told me she loved me.

Many years later, I found out from cousins that she had a breakdown at the age of eighteen, when her best friend died of a brain haemorrhage. From a poor mining family, she had been accepted for university, unheard of. However, she shut down and retreated from life.

Years later, it happened again, when her best friend fellow nursing sister died.
It explained her anger and coldness.
When I was in hospital with a suspected miscarriage, she told me she had lost a baby, before I was born.

I think she was afraid to love anyone, for fear of losing them..

Littke Annie [ flowers]

Thank you silverlining. I have had it for 40 years so I should be used to it, but it still hurts.

Oh, Littleannie, how dreadful. Can you not block his number for the mother's day weekend?

Marydoll, as you say, so sad, but I think it was that generation, I sometimes think it was the price our parents generation paid as the children of parents who lived through WW1 and had coped with the loss of so many near and dear to them.

As a child, I knew rather than felt I was loved, because nothing was ever said and my parents were not tactile. The only break came when they were in their seventies when my younger sister was killed in a road accident, then for a few months we cried and we hugged, but then things moved back to normal.

I only ever received one compliment from parents, my father, specifically, - and that came second hand. He said something to my praise to a friend, who told me, quite lightly, in conversation.

After his funeral, my mother died first, all his friends told me and my youngest sister, how proud our parents had been of their 3 'girls' and how they talked of our achievements and talked about their grandchildren and how well they were doing- but never to us.

MOnica it's the only way I have of knowing my grandchildren are OK.

Littleannie

My mum is much more clingy now. She insists I text her when I get home after a visit even though she lives nearby otherwise she ‘can’t settle’. I’ve noticed she often puts on an act that she can’t do things too, so I have to help her. I love her dearly but I do need to grit my teeth sometimes. It’s like she’s a toddler in lots of ways who needs watching.

I have a good friend who rarely if ever complimented or said well done to her children, her explanation was that s he was she didn’t want them to get spoiled or ‘big headed’ and she was brought up that way. (50 s/60s).
She shows her love in different ways and I hope they realise that she does love them. Those were the days when this sort of parenting was fairly normal. Children were not the centre of the family, as perhaps they are now. Different days different ways.