Dear Prudence: My girlfriend thinks I should "appreciate" my abusive mother more.

[fairestcat]

Dear Prudence,

When she was 24, my girlfriend, “Lisa,” lost her mother to a sudden illness. By all accounts, Lisa’s mother was incredible—intelligent, accomplished, a pillar of the community. Five years later, Lisa still struggles with the loss. I know I will never truly understand what this feels like, as my own mother is alive and well, but I’ve tried to be supportive nevertheless.

Lisa has been pretty clear that she has “little patience” for people who have bad relationships with their (living) mothers. My own mother was borderline abusive. She kicked me out for my sexual orientation, turned my siblings against one another, and cheated on my father for years. We do not have a good relationship. Lisa knows to not push me to make amends. However, she is impatient and displeased that I don’t “appreciate” my mother while she’s still alive.

This is the only fight Lisa and I keep coming back to. In all other ways, we are compatible, and she’s the love of my life. But I will never be close with my mother, and Lisa’s will never come back. Does this mean we will never get over this dynamic? Or should we just agree to put a moratorium on all mother-related discussions? What if this keeps coming up?

—Maternal Woes

Since Lisa’s your girlfriend and not just a buddy you grab drinks with after work, it’ll be difficult to never discuss your mother with her again. To whatever extent it’s possible, however, limiting the amount of time you spend discussing your mother with her will go a long way toward keeping the peace.

That’s best as a short-term strategy. If Lisa’s really the love of your life and you can see yourself staying together for years, you two are going to have to find a way to at least occasionally talk about your problems with your mother that don’t all come back to “Your mother’s still alive, so I don’t really want to hear about your issues with her.”

The important distinction between Lisa’s situation and yours, though, is that she had a mother who was capable of intimacy without causing harm. You say Lisa knows not to push you to make amends, but I’m not sure what amends you could offer your mother, given that the problems in your relationship stem from her rejection of your sexual orientation—you can’t, and shouldn’t, apologize for that. Any repair would have to come from your mother’s own admission of how she harmed you, and as long as she’s unable or unwilling to do that, there’s a limit to how close you could ever be with her without hurting yourself.

The maternal relationship is not a transferable one. Whether or not you speak to your mother can neither enhance nor discredit Lisa’s relationship with hers. You can give her space to grieve, let her tell you what her mother was like, try to honor her memory together. And for her part, Lisa should not pressure you to get closer with your mother for the mere sake of maternal proximity, without regard for your own history or well-being.

Comments

[fairestcat]

I'm really curious what people think of this one. I admit that my sympathies lie pretty strongly with the LW, and I definitely came out of this letter thinking she should dump Lisa, but I'm lucky enough to have two living parents, so I don't really have any experience from Lisa's pov.

[rosefox]

I think Lisa should get a lot of therapy to deal with her grief so she stops trying to project it onto the LW. And if she's not willing to admit that there's something wrong with her pushiness and "little patience", then that's a big red flag.

[xenacryst]

This one's tricky, and all too possible for there to be no good outcome. I wish Prudie would have emphasized more that both of them have suffered some really big traumas related to their mothers. Really big, and really incompatible. LW can try to see their girlfriend's love and warm relationship with her mother, and then the trauma of the loss, and not try to be jealous, envious, etc. And the girlfriend can try to see LW's fraught relationship with their mother, and the fact that it's not LW's fault and healing may have to come from the mother. But it's also entirely possible that both of these are insurmountable mountains from the valleys of the traumas they're both in. I feel for both of them. It may be that they can stay together, not really prodding the mother angle, but if they do, I'd really encourage both of them to get therapy or find another close friend/partner/etc. that they can talk to about their mothers, without the minefield that each has for the other. This is not something that is ever going to go away.

[jadelennox]

Yeah, I'm with you on this one.

Also, since the LW doesn't give details, I do wonder about exactly what Lisa has said. In my experience, people who haven't lost someone are often so uncomfortable around death that if a loved one talks about their dead, that can often be perceived in all kinds of surreal ways. I've talked about my dead loved ones in completely innocuous ways and had some people, even very dear friends, react with such discomfort that they left the room. Other times people have perceived me to be saying something about my dead relatives as if I were making a value judgment about their relationship with their own. Death makes the living act weird.

Lisa has absolutely no right to make the LW rebuild a relationship with her mother, but I wonder if the push the LW is feeling from Lisa might be at least partially a projection. I second the advice to go to a third party on this one.

[minoanmiss]

but I wonder if the push the LW is feeling from Lisa might be at least partially a projection.

You have solid logic and experience backing this up and I'd never bet against you, but on the other paw I've had more than one person tell me that I should be more appreciative of my parents, even after hearing what my childhood was like. I honestly don't know which I hope for, in terms of possibility of a good resolution for LW and Lisa, that LW is hearing Lisa incorrectly and needs to realize that or that Lisa needs to learn to be more sympathetic to abuse survivors..

[jadelennox]

Ugh, I hate that people have done this to you. That's loathsome.

One thing I found very thought-provoking was when, after my dad died, a friend lost his dad, with whom he had a deeply fraught relationship. My relationship with my dad was overwhelmingly loving and positive (though I know I've sainted him a little more in every year since his death, as can happen), and at the time I remember simultaneously being deeply resentful that my friend was losing a dad he wasn't going to miss like burning every day, and incredibly grateful that my own grief and memories of my dad were so much less complicated than my friends. Does that make sense? Grief is awful and confusing.

But I'm pretty sure I never, not once, took that out on my friend. That would be monstrous. (In fact, my own dad had a complex relationship with his own mother which made his own reaction to her death complicated.)

I guess what comes of both our shared experiences is that (1) people get very weird around grief, and (2) people are assholes about other people's parents.

[minoanmiss]

Of course you would never be within parsecs of that awful. hugs you Among other things you actually understand that life has nuance. ANd I know people are really squirrelly about death. As agnostic as I am, I do think religion gives people frameworks around death that they sometimes flounder without.

I talked to Cereta a bit about this in a reply downthread, and like her, I'm just glad you had your dad. beams at you

[cereta]

I lost an awesome dad when I was 11, and I would never suggest to someone that their relationship with their father should in any way, shape, or form be affected by the fact that I don't have one anymore. That's a stunning level of self-involvement.

At the very, very least, they need some counseling, and I think Lisa needs individual therapy. Grief is personal, and has no timetable, but if it's affecting how she treats her girlfriend, she needs to work on it.

[conuly]

Lisa needs to know more people with abusive parents, and read more about them and so on. Her "impatience" with other people is her problem, and it's only going to be solved by learning that when people are estranged from their folks, sometimes there's a really good reason for it.

That said, omg therapy all around!

[minoanmiss]

Anyone who knows me knows what my reaction to this is, but/and the discussion here has been really intriguing and edifying.

When I was in college I participated in a discussion with a bunch of friends who either had lost one or both parents or who had abusive parents, and it was a really helpful thing for all of us

[cereta]

Yeah, I got to know some people in college who had bad relationships with parents, and it really helped me get that perspective. I still resent it when someone tells me that I should be grateful that my father (a) was a good dad for 13 years, and (b) died instead of willingly walking out (and yes, people have told me that), but I try to accept that they're still struggling with their situation.

[minoanmiss]

I kind of want to put the people who told you that in a locked room with the people who told me I should be grateful I have living parents, spend time with them, etc. Underneath the particular stupid opinion they choose, there are some people who seem to need to inflict their stupid opinions in the most flipping hurtful manner possible..

hugs you

I am glad you had your dad, whose memory is clearly a blessing.

[lavendertook]

it doesn't sound like it's just grief from losing her mother motivating Lisa's need to withhold any empathy from the writer's problems with her mother, but big pre-existing narcissism and need to control issues, probably with a good heaping of abusiveness, and she's using her loss to make her needs prime, and shut down the writer's ability to express her pain. That she could give little patience to a girlfriend who was thrown out of the house, and this early in the relationship--big red flag. If that didn't cut through her grief to recognize other people exist who have been abused by living mothers, nothing will. Frankly, I would be surprised if Lisa were willing to go to therapy and recognize she's got a big problem. Lisa isn't going to change if the writer hasn't gotten through to her already, and her methods to silence the writer will escalate. The writer needs to walk full speed away. Lisa is bad news.

[tielan]

I have some very harsh words for Lisa.

But the nice version is that Lisa's relationship with her mother is not LW's relationship with LW's mother, and Lisa needs to understand that the value of a familial relationship is in the intimacy and support that underpin it (or don't), not in the mere existence of that relationship.

[torachan]

ngl, Lisa sounds like an asshole.