Dear Abby: I don't like my mom

[cereta]

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.

Comments

[recessional]

In terms of advice-columnist advice, yeah, basically don't say shite, there is NO good ending (if there IS abuse/other stuff going on that the LW doesn't know how to ID yet, it's likely to be dangerous, and if there ISN'T, it's cruel).

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.

[sathari]

I have nothing to add to this. SPOT ON. Figuring out what you feel for your parents, really actually, as people in their own right and not only as your (supposed/hopefully-were) caregivers is one of the independence/identity jobs of a teenager, and it's a mess and it's hard to do alone, and I wish Abby had recommended counseling so LW can talk about these feelings and where they're coming from with a (hopefully!) trustworthy adult who can help them with it. (As other commenters have pointed out, putting a label on abuse or other dysfunction is HARD SHIT, and if that's in there talking it out with a therp can help.)