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Dear Abby: I don't like my mom
DEAR ABBY: I'm 16 and lead a pretty good life. I attend a fantastic school, do well, have lots of friends and am overall happy. I have siblings and a mom who love me. The thing is -- I don't love her. It's not because of "teenage angst"; I just don't like her as a person. I'm polite to her and she doesn't know how I feel. How should I handle this? -- CONCERNED DAUGHTER IN SAN FRANCISCO
DEAR CONCERNED DAUGHTER: I think you should "handle it" by keeping your trap shut. Not every mother likes/loves her daughter all the time either, but the feeling usually passes. Consider this: Because you have so many positive things going on in your life, your mother may have had something to do with it, so try to be a little less judgmental.
DEAR CONCERNED DAUGHTER: I think you should "handle it" by keeping your trap shut. Not every mother likes/loves her daughter all the time either, but the feeling usually passes. Consider this: Because you have so many positive things going on in your life, your mother may have had something to do with it, so try to be a little less judgmental.
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I will say that unless there is a specific something with which to address her mother ("Mom, it makes it really hard for me to be around you when you say mean things about others to me"), I agree with DA. Telling mom you don't love her just because would be an asshole move. You may not love her, but she loves you (you say), so take a minute to think how much this would devastate her, and whether you're prepared to do that. You can't control your feelings, but you can control your actions. Think hard before you act.
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I feel much less certain about that. It's not always that easy to identify that something is abuse or neglect, from the inside. Sometimes that process starts out with a vague feeling of "everything's fine, my life is fine, my parents are fine, why do I feel like this? what's wrong with me?" and the clarity comes later and they start to learn that maybe things they thought were just How Things Are are in fact not how things are for most families.
I have heard more than one person whose parents physically and emotionally abused them in very unambiguous ways say "I don't know why I'm so depressed. Nothing BAD happened to me."
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On the other hand I basically agree with the *advice* if not the sentiment behind it. Telling Mum about the lack of familial feeling will not cause such feelings to appear and will likely cause resentment, and perhaps withdrawal of such pleasant things that parents might reasonably choose to provide or not provide. Besides, being nice to people you feel neutrally towards is a good skill for humans to have.
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(However, I also agree with the commenter below who said that the girl was probably not asking if she should tell her mom, but more what she should do about the situation. And regardless, I think Abby's answer was snotty. Maybe this girl is just an ungrateful teenager, but plenty of adults don't love their family and it is a genuine thing, not just due to being an ungrateful kid.)
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Also, I'd be willing to bet a candy bar that the LW would cringe to reread this letter in a decade.
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In terms of deeper stuff: very first thing, okay, how are we defining "love"? How is this kid at IDing her emotions in general? Because lbr, a lot of teenagers are absolutely horrible at it, and "love" is one of the worst, since nobody can agree on what EXACTLY it means ANYWAY.
I mean, I'm pretty sure I wrote something like this when I was sixteen in my diary at the time. (And then burned.) I was also wrong: like most of the kids around me (because stuff like this often came up, because we were very into analysing ourselves) I had a very narrow and sheltered idea of what "love" is, and confused being frustrated by my mother and wanting space with not loving her.
Particularly when a kid is intelligent enough to see the flaws in the simplest of the cultural ideas of "love" (you want to hang out with your mom all the time! You get warm fuzzy feelings every time you see her! Mother's Day is a day of sparkles and sunshine!) but lacks further guidance or exploration of love/attachment/etc and what it means, it is really, really easy to think some fairly untrue things.
But that's the level of "therapist discussion in private" or "really emotionally intimate adult friend", not "lady in advice column", because it's also easy to pile all of that on a kid who IS being neglected/emotionally abused and doesn't recognize it as what it is, and that's not great.
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LW did not ask "what should I tell my mother?" She asked "how should I handle this." It sounds to me like she's asking how she should handle these feelings, or lack thereof.
"Don't tell your mother that you don't love her" is good advice.
"People's feelings of love and liking in long-term, family-type relationships can ebb and wane over the years" is also good advice.
Some additional advice I'd give LW is:
- you can't help what you feel or don't feel, but you can help how you act. not feeling warmly about people doesn't make you a bad person, just like liking everyone doesn't necessarily make someone a good person. a good person treats people with respect and fairness as best they can, even if they don't like them. so keep doing that, but don't force yourself to like or love her. Being polite to her and not telling her you don't love her is a smart decision on your part.
- are you safe? do you feel unsafe, even if you think intellectually that that's unreasonable? if you're feeling unsafe, honour those feelings and try to work out something that without harming other people would make you safer. even if this is 100% all in your head, and you don't know where it's coming from, having a place to go or a contingency plan for if things go Really Bad or a long-range plan for how to move out without messing up your life will still give you more control, and that might be what you need.
- this is a stressful time in a parent-child relationship, and a time when it's natural for you to want to separate yourself from her and be your own person. That might be bringing up stuff for you where you question what she's been teaching you or telling you, or how she treats your or other people. That doesn't make you bad or wrong. It doesn't make her bad or wrong either, necessarily. But it doesn't make her right either. Sometimes it can seem like a betrayal, when you start discovering that the person who first taught you right from wrong is definitely wrong about something. It's okay to feel that way, and you can get past it, but it'll take time to adjust.
- do you want to like her more? did you like her before, and now you miss that? or do you feel like you're supposed to like her even if you don't want to? If it's the second one, please be gentle with yourself and give yourself some space. Maybe ask your friends about their relationship with their parents, and listen to what they say. If it's the first one, you could try spending regular time with her, and asking her about her life -- especially when she was your age. Listen hard. Ask her about the hard times and the good times.
- does she want you to be more demonstrative or affectionate with her than you feel like being? is the problem that you feel uncomfortable either giving her what she wants or lying? Weigh this one for yourself, in terms of safety, ethics, and integrity. By safety, I mean that if you feel like she might hurt you, including emotionally, if you don't give her what she wants, then that's a valid thing to take into account. By ethics, I mean that you're already taking into account that you don't want to hurt her, and that is also a valid thing. And by integrity, I mean that there are things she might want you to say or do that would hurt your sense of who you are, and that is also a valid thing to take into account. That's a hard problem to weigh, and it will probably take you practice to get a balance that you can live with. That is all right: you are allowed to make mistakes, and unless you're incredibly lucky, you're not going to get this one right without making some mistakes along the way.
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