how to grow up and make my relationship with my mom better

[PomPom]

so. my mom loves me very much (my dad too, but it isn’t about him). but sometimes i feel like our relationship is more like relationship sue and elizabeth from the movie the substance, than normal mom and daughter. i mean it, not all the time, but this feeling definitely there. i look at my mom with disgust and pity and my mom is jealous of me. because our family spends all money on my education in college, and i have pretty clothes, i go out a lot, i’m skinny and have a body that my mom always dreamed about but never got. she’s jealous of me because she can’t buy herself clothes (mostly because she hates her body, i don’t think we are THAT POOR) and because she spends a lot of time driving me to college and all this stuff. my carelessness annoys her. my room is a mess, all my clothes are scattered on the floor, i skip classes and always late, sometimes i don’t do my homework, but it’s MY problems, it’s MY life, and if my actions have consequences, I will be held accountable for them, i’m young and i want to make mistakes. she doesn’t let me, we always have fights because of it, and i honestly really exhausted so i stopped restraining myself a long time ago, i say hurtful things because i hope it will make her change or at least fuck off. i look at her with pity and compassion as a girl to a woman, but as a daughter to mother i have no regret. i know she’s doing a lot to me, and i should be thankful, but i can’t. i look at her with disgust because she looks at herself with disgust, i feel it, i feel her jealousy, and i’m tired of it. yesterday we went to a clinic because i needed to get an Esophagogastroduodenoscopy and i was really nervous and scared, while she was annoyed that she doesn’t have anything to wear and that she’s afraid of driving me to that clinic because it far from our home, honestly i didn’t care. and i was really annoyed when she was complaining to me about it and asking what shoes looked better because she didn’t like both of them, while i was hungry, weak and nervous. i can’t find any compassion in myself when i look at her as a daughter, i know this is fucked up and i am a spoiled brat but i can’t. to find these feelings i need to look at her as a girl looks at a girl, as a woman looks at woman. i’m tired and i don’t know what to do. we’ve been on family therapy two times, it didn’t went well, and none of us wanted it. and i want to make our relationship better because i feel guilt and fear that she’ll die in hate for her life and herself. what can i do.

[KierC]

Hey there PomPom,

I’m so glad you feel comfortable opening up about this here. You’re not wrong or messed up for having these very real and multifaceted feelings about your mom. Noticing this dynamic with your mother, seeing that she suffers with her own feeling towards her body, that she is a person just as you are, all while growing into your own person, can bring up some complicated emotions. It sounds, though, like you’re feeling some guilt and fear. Do you want to talk a little more about how you’re experiencing those feelings?

I hear you about the difference between your relationship with your mom as “mother-daughter” versus “woman-woman,” and that you feel you need to see your mom as a woman to feel compassion for her. It sounds like you do feel compassion for her; you talk about how she looks at herself, how she tries to decide which shoes to wear, how she frets about appearance. It’s okay to sit with these feelings, noticing and reassuring yourself that you can and do look at her as a mother and feel empathy for her. Something helpful to remember, too, is that your mom’s actions are a reflection of her internal world, and may be more about her own feelings about herself that are getting reflected onto you, than about you specifically. What you can do, though, is offer compassion when you know someone is feeling badly about themselves. It’s also okay to sit with your own feelings about this. It’s okay to be annoyed, to want space, and it is *certainly* okay (and encouraged) to set boundaries in your relationships that are helpful for you. It doesn’t make you a bad person, it makes you a normal, real person with complex feelings about the suffering of others and how it shows up in your relationships.