What kind of an asshole doesn’t talk to their own mother? Let me try to answer that. This past July, soon after my 31st birthday, I received a letter from the IRS. It instructed me to immediately pay back-taxes I owed on a large cash withdrawal I had made in 2011, or suffer dire, IRS-y penalties. Since I hadn’t made any large cash withdrawals in 2011—or, like, in any year, ever—I was briefly confused.
Briefly. But after a few weeks of poking around, and talking to some very startled bank employees, the picture began to come into focus: I had had a trust fund, set up in my name when I was a minor, which had at one point contained more than $30,000. I had known about it vaguely when I was a kid—it was where birthday checks and bat mitzvah bonds were ferried away to, to be held on to “for the future”–but I had never been exactly sure what the account was or where to find it. My mother had cleaned out every last cent before I ever had the chance to find out for sure.
What kind of asshole steals $30,000 out of their child’s bank account? Let me try to answer that. When I was 15 years old, on a trip to the mall, my mother got into an argument with some women at the food court and told me to go wait for her in the Contempo Casuals across the way. This, on its own, was nothing unusual. Both of my parents were prone to fights and arguments with strangers, as well as fights with each other, as well as fights with me. The fights burned brightly, but typically finished quickly with little collateral damage, and as long as I wasn’t recruited to be a part of them, I was an expert at ducking away and going off to look at some chokers until things cooled down.
But that day, my mother was gone for four hours. In those pre-cell phone days, I eventually made my way to mall security, where I called her at home. Half an hour later, she appeared to pick me up, wearing sunglasses and a scarf wrapped around her head, like Jackie O out for a trip to Orange Julius. She told me in the car that after she had sent me away, she had gone to where those women she had fought with sat down, then sprayed her pepper spray at their table—not at them, mind you, just at the table, just to scare them, no one actually got hurt—and then ran off. She yelled at me a little for leaving Contempo, but mostly she was buzzed on having pulled off another great prank, one of her trademark feats of vengeance, and forgot to get too mad at me for disobeying her. A lot of my childhood is filled with faint memories of stuff like this—eggings and car keyings and constantly having to get a new dentist because my mom picked a fight with the old one—and none of it really stands out that sharply; it was all I knew at the time, besides brief interactions with friends’ parents and stuff I saw on TV. But sitting in the passenger seat as my mom drove out of the mall parking lot, I thought to myself, for maybe the first time, “This family is kind of fucked up.”
My mother—like, perhaps, early train-wreck period Courtney Love—sounded thrilling on paper, but was exhausting to be around. As her only child and only real companion (my dad, with whom she also had a story relationship, popped in and out of the picture) I could do anything I felt like—eat chocolate cake for breakfast, stay up late enough to watch Cheers reruns every night, shoplift Wet ‘N Wild lipstick whenever I wanted–as long as I agreed to fight with her, be yelled at by her, play Nancy to her Sid, Catherine to her Heathcliff, and pledge to drown together in our mutual gloom and sorrow.
Not to say that I, an angry teenager, never yelled back or picked fights of my own, and not to say that I didn’t love her. I loved my mother because she was smart and funny even when she was scary, and because I was afraid not to.
Whenever I recounted something my mother had done that I hadn’t liked, that had made me hurt or sad or embarrassed, she would deny it, bounce it back around to me. I wasn’t the one having a bad childhood; I was the bad child, the one hurting a hard-working single mother who had given up everything for her lousy ingrate of a child. With my mother and I the only two witnesses to most of the events in my childhood—every single problem a “she said, she said” situation—I grew up never quite sure which parts of my memory were real, and which were simply, as my mother liked to call them, fantasies. My mother told me, in words and in acts, that I didn’t really exist without her, that I was a mere extension of her, and I loved her because I was afraid that she was right.
After I left for college, our interactions became shorter, sharper, meaner. My mother quit her job, got on workman’s comp, and slowly withdrew from the world. She cancelled her phone line, internet connection, cable TV and garbage pick-up, in the name of maximizing her dwindling savings. I could tell that she was spending a lot of time at the casinos upstate—sometimes she’d tell me outright, sometimes I’d just hear the jingling of slot machines in the background of the voicemails that she left me. When I confronted her about it, she told me she wouldn’t have to gamble so much if I came to visit her more often, which had the appreciable effect of making me visit less.
As my mother’s life became more isolated, I threw myself into collegiate normalcy. I wanted to have a boyfriend and throw crappy dinner parties and ruminate about going to graduate school, not spend weekends visiting her at our increasingly spooky family home, where all the clocks and blinds were broken, and drop-clothes were randomly thrown over half the furniture like a crime scene someone had forgotten to clean up. I didn’t want to spend all day watching my mom watch old DVDs with the lights off. I wanted to be regular.
My mother had always done my taxes—I had never had much of a head for math—but in the early 2000s, in my first few years out of college, I decided to take a crack at them. The only thing that I need was the information about my trust, the one that had been filled up with all that money saved for me to use when I grew up. It had finally happened–I had finally grown up, and I was ready to buy a house or start a family or whatever other adult dreams bloomed inside that bank account.
“Oh, that money’s all gone,” my mother told me, as matter-of-factly as if she was telling me she had eaten the last piece of bread. She had spent it during her long bout of unemployment, she told me, because she’d needed it. Certainly, she’d spent more than that on me growing up—and, she added, whatever amount of money my good-for-nothing father had told me the account contained, the reality was something much smaller, something not worth getting worked up about. She told me to stop being a brat.
I stopped talking to my mother for the first time soon after that. In 2011, during a brief period of reconciliation, she assured me that my whole account had only ever contained “three or four thousand dollars at the most” and that is still had two thousand dollars in it–but that I still couldn’t have access to it, because I might waste it, and she needed to save it for me, for when I wanted to buy a house. I couldn’t be trusted, she said, with such a large sum of money. We stopped speaking again soon after that, and this time, I truly believed that I’d never speak to my mother again.
Even after I pieced together what had happened with my trust over the summer of 2013, plenty of people were more than willing to be in denial on my behalf—people like the accountant that I hired to square away the financial end of things.
“She may have placed the money there when you were a minor and then forgotten about it,” he said. “That does happen.”
“No, I know what happened here,” I said.
“It happens more often than you’d think,” he said.
“No, I’m pretty sure she stole my money,” I said.
“Anyway,” he said, and never mentioned it again.
My absolute confidence that my mother had purposely stolen my identity and my money made me feel like a bit of an outsider while navigating the online financial security industry. When you look up your credit score, or practically any other kind of financial record on the internet, the security questions—what street did you grow up on, who was your childhood best friend, what was your mother’s maiden name—suggest an idyllic childhood, that no one who knew all that stuff would ever try to hurt you. There’s not much to protect you from when the call is coming from inside the house, as it were.
Even in the articles that I found online about kids who had also had their parents steal their identity, there was an unspoken but prevalent idea that calling your parents out for what they did was worse than anything they possibly could have done to you. Most of the children I read about chose to quietly pay back the debts their parents had run up in their names, never pursued any legal action, and –most of the time—claimed to have never mentioned it again.
When you say you had a shitty childhood, everyone wants proof. Well, actually, no one wants proof. Everyone wants your memories of your shitty childhood–your troubled memory of your troubled parent–to be one big misunderstanding. In the past several years, there have been at least three articles in the New York Times about the parents of estranged adult children—how confused and wounded and hopeless they are—accompanied by zero articles about, say, why someone would become estranged from their parents to begin with. The articles treat each child’s decision to cut off contact as a choice they’ve come to with zero forethought, as if they impulsively decided to never talk to their parents again after getting upset because Starbucks ran out of their favorite latte flavor or something.
The implication, of course, is that estrangement doesn’t hurt the child at all, because the child has no feelings.—after all, only someone with no feelings could cut off their parents, in the absence of beatings or incest or untreated alcoholism, or the few other problems that we all agree are “valid” reasons to not talk to your parents. To cut them off for anything less is monstrous. What kind of an asshole are you?
When I realized what had happened and what my mother had done, I felt relief. I felt shame at that feeling of relief, and pain at losing that kind of money, too, but more than anything, relief. I finally had proof. Everything that I thought had happened in my life with my mother, had actually happened. I no longer had to spend so much time wondering which memories and feelings were real, which parts of me were real. This was real. It was all real.
There’s a unique toxic mold that can only grow on the connective tissue between mothers and daughters, and it can be intoxicating to watch it bloom. I mean, that’s why we’re still watching Grey Gardens! It’s a thrill to watch the high highs and low lows of two people so utterly dependent on each other that they can no longer tell if they love each other, or even what love is any more. It was tempting to me, after college, even as much as I wanted to leave, to stay close to my mother, to let her stay in charge, let her keep dictating reality to me. My love with my mother was built on our inter-dependence, and without it, I wasn’t sure that our relationship could survive. It didn’t, and she survived only barely, it seemed. Without our contact, my mother withdrew into our increasingly ramshackle house, leaving only to use the internet at the town library or dump her trash out in the dumpster behind the Stop N Shop in the middle of the night—a ghost who happened to still be alive. She sent me cards on my birthday, but I couldn’t bear to open them.
In the final months of 2013, I received a very nonchalant voicemail from a social worker informing me that my mom, at age sixty-something, had decided to begin intensive outpatient mental health treatment. I held out a lot of hope for a reconciliation now that my mother was seeking treatment. But it never turned up.
My mother scheduled and then cancelled six or seven phone calls since November, all of them arranged through her psychologist. The last one cancelled was days before I wrote this, about half an hour or so before we were due to talk. I’m not sure what my mother, who had never been one to hold her tongue in the past, is avoiding. Maybe she’s changed. But I’m too heart-broken, too terrified by the idea that maybe she hasn’t. Maybe she’s too terrified by the idea that I haven’t, either.
A friend who’s been helping me sort out of the legal aspects of all this made me a goofy little flow chart in Excel the other day, the kind of thing you’d give to your boss if he wanted to look at the pluses and minuses of switching over to a new paper supply company. It outlined three paths I could take, now that the immediate IRS threat had been quelled: pursue legal action against the bank that held my trust; pursue legal action directly against my mother; and–the shortest path—a line with one bubble which simply read “Do nothing” and the ended in a bright red sign marked “The End.”
The flow chart hangs in my bedroom over my desk, alongside a continually growing stack of legal papers that lay out the whole case in deeper and deeper detail. What kind of asshole would do anything besides nothing? Do regular, real-world rules ever apply to the confused hot-house of the family? What kind of daughter treats their mother with the kind of penalties you’d apply to someone else who committed a crime against you, someone else who didn’t give up their life for you, someone else whose body didn’t make you? What kind of an asshole are you?
Tags: moms, money, the long grift, theft
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Shit, this hit home. My dad spent ~$20k of money given to me by my grandparents my throughout my childhood/youth for college expenses – then refused to pay for my college. This eventually culminated in him no longer even filling out the FAFSA documentation because he “couldn’t find his tax information to file his taxes”. We didn’t reconcile. He died a few years later.
Wish I could say that I did something great – or made the most of an awful situation – but I didn’t.
I dunno about that–My father disappeared (metaphorically) into mental illness well before I was born, disappeared somewhat literally after his divorce from my mother and me hitting 18 (so the state couldn’t deduct child support payments from his paychecks anymore). After that he stole money from my sister. I made sure I checked the box on my college’s paperwork that prevented any media reference to me so he’d never find out where I was. He died about a year ago from auto-immune disease complications, and died more alone that I can imagine. I feel genuinely sad about his life and death, but I don’t regret making that call. I can’t speak to your situation but sometimes cutting off toxic relationships is the most you can make of an awful situation. There’s no great life lesson, just a hard-won decision on how you want to live your life and who you want to live with in your life.
Hey, you survived it. Don’t discount survival itself as making the most of an awful situation.
Damn. Thank you for writing this.
Oh man. I’ve been there. I feel you. My sum was smaller (like $8,000? plus like $11k in student loans taken out in my name) and it was never in a trust, but yeah I’m right there alongside you on the “never speaking to parents again” train. It’s a great train to be on. There’s a club car!
Btw if you do decide to pursue legal action, people tend to take you more seriously if you refer to her as “my biological mother,” not “my mother.” They fill in a ton of blanks on their own. These days I don’t even refer to my mother as my mother. She’s just Blaggatha (not her real name). Blaggatha used to do this and one time Blaggatha said that. Just a crazy person in another state.
Anyway, keep on keepin’. I have opinions about resuming contact with shitty relatives (Do Not) but I’m sure you heard plenty over the course of your adventure with this trust fund. Stay grounded and good luck.
-raises mixed drink in salute from club car-
You are amazing. And this is very well written. Bravo.
are you familiar with the sub-reddit Raised by Narcissists? Your story, though more eloquently told, reminded me of a lot of the stories on there. Perhaps the community there would be helpful in supporting you through this decision…
http://www.reddit.com/r/RaisedByNarcissists
I came here to reiterate this sub-reddit. It’s a great, supportive community and I am sure people there would be able to support you.
Thank you SO much for this. I sent this along to my wife, an ACoN, and she’s been reading this sub for like 12 straight hours. Pure gold.
This is SO much like my mother I almost passed out from identifying. I haven’t spoken to her since I was 18, an astonishing 19 years ago, and I regret nothing about cutting her out of my life. I also have a low, baseline constant worry that she’s still capable of messing up my financial life.
Borderline personality disorder is a hell of a thing. A hell of a thing.
Good luck to you!
YESSSS! People can be shitty therefore parents can be shitty. Procreation is not THAT much of a miracle. Anyways, my parents…yeah this article hit home and I totally believe you without needing proof.
I can relate so much to this! Especially to feeling relief that it’s not all in your head.
I talked to a school nurse as a teenager about my parents behavior and my situation at home and being told by an adult that this was not normal or in any way OK was such a relief to me at the time. You grow up not knowing anything else, and your biggest fear is telling someone and then having them tell you that it’s no big deal.
This is so, so important. I think kids can survive a lot from their parents if there is *someone* in their lives to show them what a functional adult looks like.
This is SO much like my mother I almost passed out from identifying. I haven’t spoken to her since I was 18, an astonishing 19 years ago, and I regret nothing about cutting her out of my life. I also have a low, baseline constant worry that she’s still capable of messing up my financial life.
Double post. 🙁
Sorry.
Dooo itttt. Do it.
Look, if anyone, ever, would like to receive vocal-to-the-point-of-stridency support for cutting crappy people, including parents, out of their lives just say my name three times and I am SO there.
Seconded! I get the weirdest reactions when people learn that I don’t speak to my mom—they’re usually really bummed for me or try to get me to reconcile (which … noooooo)—I have to explain that it’s one of the nicest parts of my life! Every day I’m above ground and not dealing with that woman is a good one.
I think it’s just very, very hard for people to realize that MY mom is not YOUR mom and that you just can’t imagine life without YOUR mom.
You are so right about what that person cannot imagine. It’s always formulated in those words, from the carrion feeders who want to help you be healed, isn’t it?
My wife once explained to someone who was being that exact kind of vulture that in fact, what the busybody could apparently not imagine was a childhood with a father so toxic and abusive that severing ties was a way station en route to a time when he will be dead and she will not be dead, and that’s when things will be better between them.
This. My in-laws don’t understand why I don’t talk to my father. “He can’t possibly have been That Bad. Look at how well you’ve turned out!”
I HATE THAT I always want to reply I TURNED OUT OK BY MY OWN FORCE OF WILL
My wife, who just read this thread: The years in which I was trying to kill myself with exciting violence were my way of replying to that inanity with, ‘Wanna bet?’ Those years are lost, now.
RIGHT. But the thing is, not cutting my mother off doesn’t get me a mother like that person’s, that they can’t live without. I don’t get that kind of mother EITHER WAY. How about that person expends some of that sympathy to me, who does not have a nice mother? HUH?
Actually I am blessed with a lot of friends and peers who understand and support my decision to speak to my mother very rarely, and under controlled circumstances, and don’t say things like ‘she loves you REALLY’ (so what? She is behaving unacceptably, what she feels in her heart doesn’t change that) or ‘but she’s FAMILY’ (no, she is blood family. I have a far, far better family of the heart and people who give me more love, support and guidance than she EVER has.)
I don’t get that kind of mother EITHER WAY
This is really, really hard for a whole lot of people to understand. I think because they have no similar experience of their own to draw from. They hear about your experience and can’t relate, think that years of betrayal and disappointment is equal to burning the brussel sprouts or showing up five minutes late that one time or not buying you candy or something. People treat me, at 43 years old, like dreading contact with my parents is a form of extended teenaged rebellion and not symptomatic of decades of experience with their brand of fuckedupedness.
Yes, there’s this pervasive idea that “a bad [parent] is better than no [parent] at all” and this is, in my experience, categorically untrue.
Oh man! I never speak to my parents (let me tell y’all ,they’re fucked and no mistake) and yet people I know often seem to imagine themselves in the “I’m such a great, reasonable human being! I’ll convince t_fer to reconcile with the parents whom she probably resents because she’s immature.” And the situation is really, “I’m emotionally invalidating and ignorant and I refuse to hear/understand that my friend’s parents threatened to kill her, stole tons of money from her, and are super unpleasant even when not committing felonies.”
Err…I guess I have a lot of feels around this subject.
I found that some people didn’t trust me for this reason? Especially when I was living overseas – like: you’ve cut ties with your family, and your country, and god – the three things that should inspire the most loyalty. If you’re not loyal to those things, you must not be loyal to ANYthing.
But of course I am super-loyal to lots of things.
I haven’t spoken to my father in more than 20 years. He’s not a nice man, he had no part in my upbringing and apparently it is my fault that his life hasn’t worked out as he’d planned. So I am perfectly content without him in my life and all the “you’ll miss him when he’s gone” from people who love their daddies will not make that my reality.
I feel like I would trip over it at the second recitation tbqh
I will keep this in mind! I am not to the point of cutting off contact with parents, but I’m cutting way back on contact with one of them, and even that is giving me guilt spasms, so.
Boundaries are so hard when your parents treat them like punishments you’re inflicting on them, and the worst part is how much of the work they get you to do for them, in terms of guilting yourself for it.
This isn’t an easy thing to do, and regardless of what the NYT thinks, no one does it lightly.
I promise that it gets easier though; no matter whether they get used to it, you will.
I also want to throw in a plug here for Captain Awkward (though I daresay most toasties have heard of her), who writes an advice column that has really great things to say about boundaries and getting rid of people who treat you like crap, and has a great and supportive commenter community as well (these are the two sites on the internet where the comments don’t regularly horrify me).
So great. I agree with the whole poor old people thing. There was an episode of the Closer once where a poor old man in a nursing home had no contact with his son. Brenda viewed this as a crime and pledged to her mother that, no matter what, she would never abandon her to a nursing home. Two sides to every story, Bren-da. (Mixing up Juno and the Closer there.) Anyway, I’ve been dealing with estrangement issues myself and I was nodding my head this whole article. Good luck with everything and I’m sorry your mom sucks so much.
Absolutely. Sometimes old folks without visitors at the nursing home *earned* their solitude. I always jump in with examples when anyone assumes some octogenarian’s kids are monsters for never visiting. “Remember what an asshole Susie’s mom was when we were in high school? What if this old woman is someone like Susie’s mom?”
I don’t know where people get the idea that every lonely old person is an underappreciated saint. I never mention my maternal grandparents to people for exactly that reason, as there’s no way to talk about a grandparent as an unwelcome burden, or even to talk about them without positive “I miss them so much!” statements without people being horrified. The world is better with them gone, and the fact that they were cared for so diligently has far more to do with my mother’s sense of generousity and duty than anything they did.
A while ago there was a news story about an old woman found dead in her house. She’d been dead for something like eight years and no one noticed. We had to talk about this ALL WEEK at work, and about how sad it was, and how could people abandon family like that, etc etc. I tried to provide some very mild alternative views but was essentially shouted down, and ended up sitting there going hot and cold and feeling like shit because sometimes when I get a phone call from a number I don’t know I secretly hope it’s going to be someone telling me that my mother is dead, so I don’t have to worry about dealing with her any more.
In other news, I need a new job.
come work at my work, fellow Australian-resident(seemingly?), and we can cackle over coffees about how one day our mothers shall be gone, gonnnnnnnne
You’re not an asshole. That’s so much that belonged to you–both your emotional integrity and your money. YOU’RE NOT AN ASSHOLE. Do it. You’re not wrong.
“There’s a unique toxic mold that can only grow on the connective tissue between mothers and daughters, and it can be intoxicating to watch it bloom.”
Damn.
Sweet baby Buddha, I think I identified with this on an atomic level. My deepest sympathies from someone still in the trenches.
If you can pursue action against the bank without leaving your mother homeless (deserved or not, that’s a heavy burden for any soul), I would do so.
This really hit home in super specific ways. This: “as long as I agreed to fight with her, be yelled at by her, play Nancy to her Sid, Catherine to her Heathcliff, and pledge to drown together in our mutual gloom and sorrow.” This just takes my breath, because it’s what’s going on, what I’m trying to get out from under but wanting so much to be able to write the ludicrous bright bits in.
Mine still fights all comers. It’s taken a lot, but I don’t want to, any more. It’s such a weird, elliptical orbit, and such a scale. I want to leave and never come back and then I want so badly to be home again.
Thanks for writing.
Good luck. I wish I had something more useful or specific to say, but I don’t, so just good luck, and I hope you make it out whole and happy.
As someone who was raised in a similar folie a deux, I wish you all the luck in the world!
Thank you for this. The marks our parents can leave on us without any repercussions are absurdly crippling, and everyone who wants you to just get over it and pretend you’re fine can eat it.
There’s always the presumption that “your mother put you first for your whole life, now it’s time for you to put her first.” Except that presumes she actually DID the first bit. When your mother always puts herself first and always expected you to do the same, that fucking equation doesn’t exist anymore.
I love the part about how the only reasons permissable for cutting a parent out of your life are physical or sexual abuse. It’s so true. Not that those aren’t REALLY good reasons, because they are, but crippling emotional abuse should really be on the damn list.
Mental health scientists now say psychological child abuse is longer-lasting than physical abuse. It’s all horrific and all of creates permanent scars, IMO, but do trot out that first sentence when anyone tries to downplay verbal or emotional abuse.
Yeah, I’ve read that research and it’s really interesting. It’s always a little difficult, because I would never want to downplay the horrificness of undergoing physical abuse, but the study I read says that the effect of emotional abuse on the brain is basically identical to physical abuse. The difference being, of course, that physical abuse can be permanently and visibly damaging to your body – but as far as your brain is concerned, they’re one and the same.
I endured both physical and emotional abuse. Let’s just say my nightmares never reference physical pain.
I’m so sorry to hear that. I hope you’re taking good care of yourself.
And with emotional abuse, there’s the extra layer of gaslighting, because there’s no evidence.
” in the absence of beatings or incest or untreated alcoholism…”
Sadly, even in the aftermath of all 3 of those forms of abuse, the adult child is left with the following shitty choices:
-Reveal that these, or any 2, are the reasons behind the estrangement, thus making herself ‘the victim’
-Stand up for emotional abuse as ‘real abuse’.
So I’d like to propose that we Toasters lead the revolution and stop auditing whether someone else’s reasons for cutting off her parent are valid.
I think, in the case of both adult women I’m intimate with who have done this, the survivor of the childhood I don’t want to imagine is totally capable of deciding how much is too much.
Uhg. Totally. I haven’t talked to my folks in years, not because of horrific abuse, but because they’re sarcastic jackasses, who don’t really care that much about me. They’re valid human beings, but I’m not a priority in their lives, and it’s just easier and healthier for me to not waste energy on them.
And I feel terrible every now and then, because I feel like maybe that’s not a good enough reason. But I’m getting closer to my 30’s now, and I find myself with fewer fucks to give, so I worry less and less about this.
If people don’t wanna do something, that’s their choice. We should all stick together, and support each other through life. <3
Well I mean why would you spend time with people who aren’t nice to you? I don’t see my mother much because she’s abusive, but I also don’t see her family, my grandparents and aunts. Because they are just not very nice, and they don’t seem to give a shit about me, so why should I bother?
I really resent all social pressure to spend time with people you don’t enjoy spending time with. It’s very corrosive of boundaries.
Vive la Revolution!
And especially in the case of alcoholism, people will parse and parse to argue over whether it was bad enough.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2013/02…
Made me think of this article I read today! As someone who had a childhood troubled by alcoholism and psychological/verbal/financial abuse by various parents, I have a lot of “fuck youuuuuus” for anyone who will tell an abuse (of ANY kind) victim to “forgive” and “move one” and “make peace”. My mother actually tells me that I need to stop being distant from her and my stepfather, because my experiences with abuse did not involve being beaten or molested and therefore are Not That Bad. HAHAHAHAHAHA.
Fuck herrrrrrrrr. Whateverrrrr. Jeez. Internet hugs!
the few other problems that we all agree are “valid” reasons to not talk to your parents.
Can we as a society please agree that the only person competent to decide the sufficiency of reasons to cut off contact with a family member is the person cutting off the contact? Actually, we can even take the word “family” out of there; if you decide to discontinue contact with someone, you have your reasons and that’s all you need. Anyone who tries to guilt or reason or cajole you out of it doesn’t respect your judgment, whether they know that or not.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to get to this point, but I assume that if cut off contact with someone who was once a large figure in your life, you know what you’re doing, you didn’t come to that decision frivolously, and is it possibly painful or difficult or taxing to discuss, so I’ll respect both your decision and, if you don’t volunteer information, your privacy.
I had a friend who I cut off contact with a few years ago. There were lots of reasons but the main one was that any time I disagreed with her or said no to her, I had to know exactly why because she would try to talk me out of it. This led to me doing a bunch of stuff that I wish I hadn’t done, because sometimes I just didn’t have the strength in the moment to keep arguing about why I didn’t want to do something.
I feel like society does that same thing. Just the constant hassling until you either stop talking about something (which can lead to it being a festering secret wound) or go along with what society thinks it wants you to do, often to your own detriment.
Boundaries, man. They’re important! I wish more people could learn that, that if someone has done something as drastic as cut someone out – or even just dial back and not see them that often – it’s for a reason that is a good reason to them. That should be all that matters.
Oh, this story is so familiar. My mother stole my money, and my mail. She closed my bank account. She ended my lease. I wanted to press charges, but no one would even write up a report. “Oh, it’s your mom. That’s a family thing. You just need to resolve that.” It has been 20 years since our last contact and I am still so angry.
There are days that I just need to let a piece wash over me, because engaging in it too deeply might make me break down in tears. This is one of those pieces, and I’m glad it’s here, and so glad I read it, and I’m going to reread it on a day when my defenses aren’t so spiky.
There was never any money for me in any account anywhere, but when I was in college, my mother (who was never financially solvent) decided to put my name on her bank account, “in case she ever needed to get me money easily,” as though she ever had any. I told her no and refused to sign the paperwork, but she’d known the lady at the bank since I was 2, and the bank did it anyway. Of course it all showed up on my credit report when she started kiting checks and running up hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees. (It went away pretty quick when I pointed out to the bank that they didn’t have my signature on file.)
More importantly, though, she’s hopelessly toxic on all fronts, and it took me ages to cut her out of my life. After years of people saying, “But she’s your mooooother,” as though that means something, I’ve stopped even talking about her to anybody but my therapist.
All this to say: this piece was great. And people who tell us we should put up with our mothers’ endless shit can take a flying leap.
(It went away pretty quick when I pointed out to the bank that they didn’t have my signature on file.)
APPLAUSE. Seriously, good for you to cut through all of that with one simple paperwork question.
I was stunned at my ability to solve the problem. Now I’m great at this shit, but back then I was incapacitated by my mom’s sneakiness and manipulation.
This is so beautifully written and, as someone who spent last night self-soothing in the Toast archives, were I in your position I’d be likely to hit up my local storefront psychic for a reality check, too. Loved that piece and this one as well.
Oh, honey. I am so sad that this happened to you. So sad that I’m going to tell you a little story:
3 years ago, my wife (then 47) got the call from the community social worker at the inpatient facility. Her father’s siblings, none of whom would help him fledge from this first of his life mental health treatment (at age 71), had given the locked ward her name as ‘possible community contact’. Bwahahahahaha! Yes, well, he’s always been crazy but we all get one childhood so no thank you.
It was a laff riot when she explained that they would be served with a lawsuit if they gave him her contact data, as she had been accurately described as ‘lost to him’ for 30 years and that she’d worked hard to keep it that way.
If what you’re doing is working for you, you do not have to reconcile. The mental health system, and elder care systems, such as they are, will pressure you in all ways great and small over the rest of your mother’s life to ‘step up’, ‘take responsibility’, and ‘seek healing’–by dealing with a sick, old, vulnerable person so that the rest of society can ignore her. Use your own judgment, knowing what you know now, about whose interests that serves.
Thank you, thank you, for finally showing me what it was all those years ago that kept my ex-husband going back to patch up his relationship with his mother.
She’s dead now; it was horrible and prolonged and well-deserved, and I’m glad she suffered. She had it coming. I hope he’s okay; it’s been ten years since I talked to him. I fear he might’ve failed to overcome all the smart, funny, abusive, crazy-town, money-stealing weirdness that she brought to the table.
Anyway, thanks.
oh man, THIS.
SO THIS.
“Whenever I recounted something my mother had done that I hadn’t liked, that had made me hurt or sad or embarrassed, she would deny it, bounce it back around to me. I wasn’t the one having a bad childhood; I was the bad child.” … because my own mother is brilliant and clever and emotionally needy and a product of her own awful parents and locked in a cycle of revisionist history and constant validation and it is EXHAUSTING.
it’s like walking on eggshells, waiting for the other shoe to drop. except this shoe has highly developed verbal skills and calls you selfish and callous and other mean things designed to make you feel small.
because this: To cut them off for anything less is monstrous. What kind of an asshole are you? is heartbreaking and too real and more than anything, i just kinda wanna reach through my tiny 13inch laptop screen and VIOLENTLY HUG GABRIELLE.
thank you for this.
My mother is not that brilliant and clever, but she IS deep into the revisionist history. Someone once suggested that the next time she try to contact me, I explain to her all the reasons I don’t wish to speak to her. There’s no point. She won’t remember them or if she does she’s spent years forgetting them and twisting them to her favour. I don’t even think she knows she does it, anymore.
Every now and then I have a dream that I am my adult self, but somehow back in time and living at home. And then I remember how horrible it was to be in that twisty, gaslit nightmare land where logic goes to die. Honestly I’m surprised I turned out as sane as I did, and it’s no wonder that I basically ahve a zero tolerance policy towards any kind of questioning of my reality. My grip on my own perception is hard won.
it’s a unique form of torture, that whole ‘nightmarish banging of your head against a brick wall’-thing that comes from attempting to rationalize with someone that knows no other way but their own version of history.
i found that knowing trusting your own sense of self, and surrounding yourself with people that remind you of that, are the best light for that very particular kind of darkness.
I cannot tell you how much this thread means to me, to know that there are other people who have experienced this particular, specific bizarre irrationality of trying to address a revised life. My mother has a psychology degree, and was all the more able to engage in that kind of gaslighting because she was supposedly a scientific expert on how people’s brains work and therefore she could never be doing something wrong or have anything wrong with her. Thank you.
Oh, my God. NO. You do not ever, EVER have to explain to an abusive person why you are no longer interested in maintaining a relationship.
Hell NO.
My parents also pull this revisionist bullshit on me, and then top it off with the cherry of, “We only did what we thought was best! Because of the Bible! And we love you!” Which, hey, thanks for completely denying the fact that my feelings, opinions, life, and experiences must ALSO BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT IN THIS EQUATION.
AUGH.
Twisty, gaslit nightmare land. This describes part of my childhood so perfectly that I don’t even want to post a comment under my own name.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
This post, and these comments, all mean a lot to me. My dad is a severe narcissist, gambling addict, and compulsive liar (the trifecta!), which led, among other things, to him spending the money my grandfather left me for college while I was still a minor. I don’t actually know the amount, nor do I need to, because for me the mere fact of the theft was the important thing: it meant that I wasn’t the volatile force, the thing that ended our relationship, that drove him away. You’d think that would be easier to realize, but then, I had been an angry teen, so maybe I had caused the divorce, obviously, etc. Nope! TURNS OUT HE’S JUST AN UNTRUSTWORTHY KIND OF GUY.
I’m trying to figure out the contact thing right now myself. I’m being asked for another chance and it’s the latest in a long line. Not sure what I will do this time, but it’s heartening to see others who have been in the same situation.
Oh, god, and does anyone else have that feeling of panic when you’re watching a movie about a middle-aged sad sack who has deadbeated around as a parent, and the movie is achingly sympathetic to them as they try to make contact with their mean estranged child who can’t forgive? “ABORT, ABORT,” I yell at the TV, scrambling for the remote.
If he makes you question your sanity, doubt your memory, hurt, feel small, feel guilty, or feel responsible for his feelings, BE SO CAREFUL. You can totally take that request for a second chance, send it up a mountain, and let it die of exposure.
I hate loser-fathers asking for second chances. Mine always did, after beating me as a child, trying to sexually abuse me, taking away my only asset: some jewelry I had received as a kid, and the name calling, oh God, always being your fault for not living up to their expectations, and always being your fault for cutting of the relationship. Being seen as the “black sheep of the family”…
I also have experience with a troublesome mother who steals and constantly lies for her own benefit. Whenever I confront her, she says she doesn’t remember lying or doing bad things against me, that maybe she has memory loss, which she doesn’t, her medical tests are fine. Now we’re in the stage where she married the wrong man again, sold her only apartment to build a house, spent the money with the guy and is living in a rental,which she can’t afford since both of them don’t have jobs. By the way, we live in a poor country. Anyway, needless to say she keeps asking me and my husband for money, cause she knows we do good financially, but my husband and I think it’s better for them to find a way to get jobs.
Anyway, my point is, I don’t know what you’re going to decide about renewing the contact with your dad, all I can say is what happened to me. Everytime I forgot and tried to give him another chance and the result was always the same: history repeat. With my mom, the conclusion applies also. At least, if you decide to give him another chance, only do it if he honestly apologizes and demonstrates it by actions. Best of luck to you, dear friend.
Oh, man. My grandfather did this, if I have the story right, to all three of his children. Then borrowed money from my dad that he never repaid. Then got my dad sued by a lawyer my grandfather never paid. My dad never cut off contact (which isn’t a better or worse choice! Just a different one), but he did find himself in the wrenching position of having to say no when his father asked for it.
This sounds horrible, but I’m sort of glad my grandfather died when I was eleven. I didn’t have time to get to know the terrible aspects of him (and there were others); I remember my fun grandpa who always bought my favorite apples and inadvertently taught me to swear, and know the emotionally abusive, other-stuff-I’d-rather-not-mention man only from family lore.
… did i write this? My mother also used my entire trust fund of exactly $30,000. It is an on-going source of contention (“I’ll pay you back soon!”). I am also an only child. I have also created a flow chart. Are you ME???
Internet hugs to all the other posters…I remember when this article first came out, I went back for days to read the comments. And it looks like people continued to comment, five years on.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/divorcin…
Hey, thank you so much for writing this. I had to cut off my mom as well–for “valid” reasons of abuse, but that’s never something you can explain to people when you say “actually I don’t speak to my birth mother anymore.” In fact, my stepmom (who raised me) is the biggest proponent of me getting over it and just talking to her again.
So anyway, I don’t have a cause of action against her like you do, but I don’t recommend pursuing one against her. For one, it’s moot. At best she’ll go to jail. At worst you’ll get a judgment against her that can never be resolved (because she has no money). But also, in my mind, I can’t imagine ever opening that door with my mother again, even if I was to gain monetarily. Just not worth the stress/drama/heartache/etc.
Another note … my best friend (who also has a father she doesn’t talk to) has a horrible coworker called Mean Darlene. My best friend hated her for a long time and found out that her two children had cut off contact with her and stopped speaking to her … so she still hates her, and feels bad for her kids, and knows she’s as nasty in all aspects as she is in the workplace. And I think that’s the general perception around the workplace, thankfully.
But truly, thank you for this great piece.
Not talking to my mom is always the best decision I make. Always. Thanks for writing this.
Ugh, yes. Thank you, this is me.
“I loved my mother because she was smart and funny even when she was scary, and because I was afraid not to.”
I love my mother, and this is why. She just lost her job after years of screaming obscenities at her bosses and has no plans (except me) to make rent and shaved her head into a mohawk and calls me three times a day and is coming to visit for my birthday this weekend.
I love my mother. I’m too terrified not to.
I hope there is and will be safety and support for you.
I would say, about what to do. Don’t hold off on doing something because you think it will make you ‘mean’ or whatever else. BUT. Think about what it is that you really want, and which of those flow chart options will get you that.
My story is that when my dad commited suicide five years ago, there was insurance money. The insurance company had to decide whether to pay it all to my mother, or jointly to her, my sister and I. My mother suggested they pay it all to her, so as not to mess up my sister’s youth allowance payments, and anyway she would share it out! My sister and I signed forms saying we wouldn’t contest the decision, I’m pretty sure. I say ‘pretty sure’ because it’s all a bit of a blur, tbh. My dad had just died and my mother was being clingy and manipulative and we were fighting with her about the funeral and I would probably have signed anything that reduced the decisions I had to make.
I have no idea how much money she got. Tens of thousands, at least. I am 100% positive she still thinks she did it ‘for us’. To be fair, she did give me some of it for a deposit on my house (and then she asked for it back, to which I said ‘uh… no’) and has paid for various things over the years for both my sister and I. But it also means we have to continue seeing her if we want it.
Personally, I have said that she can take the money. If it’s that important to her. It is one of the things that makes me feel less guilty about not seeing her often – and when I do it’s on my terms. It also means I feel less dread about what might happen if she becomes ill and needs support. I may or may not decide to pay for her care, if she comes to need that. But that will be a decision I make FOR MYSELF and not for her, because she’s already had 25 years of emotional care from me, when she should have been the one caring, and she’s had thousands of dollars as well. So I’m calling it even.
Sometimes it is worth doing something even when you know you won’t get anything from it – taking steps for legal proceedings or reaching out for reconciliation. Because then you can use that as evidence for yourself that you tried things, and now you don’t have to try again. I have had conversations that I know my mother won’t hear, because I needed to know I had them. I have done things I knew would backfire because I needed to proove that I tried. But just know, going in, that it’s for you, because nothing else is in your control to change.
Just leaving this here! It’s been very helpful to me!
http://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/?coun…
I love this thread because it is a place where everyone would understand why I try to avoid talking to my mother. She never stole money from me, but she did steal my pain pills, and come to think of it she used to cash my paychecks for me back in high school (“it’s easier than setting up your own bank account”) and then never get around to actually giving me the cash, so I guess she took some money, too.
And yeah, most people don’t understand. Some friends and I have formed the “Sucky Parents Club,” which basically just exists so that when we have to deal with things like this, there will be someone who won’t go, “but faaaaamily!” and will instead go, “yup, your dad sucks.”
Thanks for sharing this, and you are NOT an asshole. I cut off all contact with my parents for about five years when I turned 18 because I knew it was necessary for my ability to survive. The most common reactions I got (and still get) from people when I told them I was estranged from my family was “Oh, your poor mother!” or “Oh my god, I could never do that to my family.” People almost never assumed that it was for a valid reason beyond ~~teen angst~~, as if I just woke up one day and decided to run away in the middle of the night for lafffs. I’m sorry you had to go through what you did, and you have every right to set the boundaries that are best for you (I was also talked out of legal action for the same ‘what kind of a monster would do this to their family??’ reasons.) I hope whatever course of action you take it is the one that is best for your own situation, not what other people think you should do in light of any responsibility to your family they think you should have.
Girl.
Like everyone else here, I just want to hug you.
You are not an asshole, and you have every right to fight for your property.
Your mother betrayed your trust, and that is deeply uncool.
Don’t feel badly for fighting for this.
And on the other side, if you choose not to fight, that is also perfectly okay.
Make a decision that is wise and kind, and learn to be content with it.
Hugs from everyone on the internet, lady.
“Make a decision that is wise and kind, and learn to be content with it.”
Thank you for this.
…This is going to be a bit tl;dr…bear with me:
It is so hard to explain my strained relationship with the parents.
They seem like such nice people.
When my sister and I were kids, they were fine, really. A little strict and overly preachy, but fine. Lots of good memories.
Things only started to get weird when we hit high school–I was grounded for six months because my mother read my diary and found out that I stayed after school to talk with a boy. Six. Months. No allowance. No friends over. They almost pulled me out of the play I was in, too. We weren’t allowed to date. Our activities were tightly monitored by them–no cars, no licenses, not allowed to go to dances or prom, not allowed to hang out with anyone they didn’t directly know or trust.
College was when shit really, really hit the fan: When my grandfather died and left me with a decent inheritance, I was not allowed to determine what I could use it for–it went to my college loans and my first car (at 22, for fuck’s sake). These aren’t bad things–but again, I was not allowed to have ANY say in the situation. Just before I graduated (with honors!), I was informed that I wasn’t allowed to move out of their home unless I was married, because submission goes from the father to the husband. My mother told me she regretted ever sending me to college; that I should have been at home, learning how to be a godly woman from her instead. My father forced me into teaching, because it would be a good discipline to learn so I could homeschool my children someday. My mother read my mail, and cut me off from all of my friends, because they were “losers” and “rebellious”.
I tried to get my parents to see my point of view for almost three years. Then I packed my shit and left one day when they were both out of the house.
I had a bad car accident about a year later, and I asked if I could borrow one of their cars while mine was being repaired. My father told me that was a privilege I lost when I moved out without his blessing.
I stopped speaking to them for…a while…after that.
Even now, ten years on, people question why I’m not closer to my parents; why I have such a hard time with them.
“They love you, you know!”
“You should be kind to them, because they were trying really hard.”
I shouldn’t have to justify my decision to hold them at a distance. They are treacherous, unkind, and utterly unwilling to see their daughter for who she is rather than who they wanted her to be. Our relationship is worlds better than it used to be, but my mom STILL behaves in deliberately manipulative ways–last year, she asked my husband for our address instead of me, because she knew she could get it from him, and then she came over, even though I expressly told her that I would meet her somewhere else.
Shitty behavior is shitty behavior, WHETHER OR NOT A FAMILY MEMBER PERPETRATES IT. Abuse is still abuse, physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual. You get to determine who is allowed to know your reasons for cutting anyone out of your life–no one else gets to make this choice for you.
I wish I could hug everyone on this thread–it is okay to determine who gets to be a part of your life.
This sounds utterly awful and I support your decision to distance yourself from them 100% (and would even if it weren’t as awful as it is!).
When people say “You should be kind to them, because they were trying really hard” feel free to complete their sentences for them (aloud or in your own head, either way). “You should be kind to them, because they were trying really hard to imprison you.”
You should be kind to them, say others. Respond that your parents should have been kind to you. You were a *child*. They were unkind to a defenseless child. What was that others say you should do? To people who were cruel to a child?
Your responses to your parents are yours to decide. It makes no difference what I think, but I do think you have very good coping skills.
Your stating: I shouldn’t have to justify my decision to hold them at a distance, just spoke to me. Why do others just “know they know” what is best for everyone else? Instead they inflict their small-minded opinions of what traditions and society thinks is best on us who have been through a very different childhood then get all huffy if we disagree with them. Now I just let it fly and am open about it. I firmly tell the “do gooder” that they have no idea how my childhood was and aren’t they lucky to have had a great one but their advice is misguided. It sounds better than “go suck it.”
we need a whole other thread on how to respond to these people.
What drives me nuts is it is not about you, it is about their own guilt issues with their own parents. I think simply saying, ‘that is my decision and I am not requesting input about it’ is fine. Anyone who makes such a painful decision should never have to justify it to someone who hasn’t been through the pain.
Oh, man. Yes. My mother cut contact with her sister a couple of years ago for reasons very similar to yours, and all I can say is that anyone who believes that only a heartless, emotionless person could do such a thing can go suck a rock. The first few months she cried so much that my heart was broken for her, but ultimately we both had to agree she had made the right choice. The ONLY choice.
All my hugs. I think you’re incredibly brave.
I have a super shitty brother who I wish my mom would cut off contact with. He is an endless well of selfishness and is driving both my parents to the poorhouse. Well, has already driven my dad and is working on my mom. I think the old tradition of tearing your shirt and saying “Dead to me” is a good one. It should come back!
When I was growing up, my grandmother on my mother’s side was called The Bat.
To this day I don’t actually know her maiden name; I couldn’t even tell you her maiden surname with any reliability. But I could recount the innumerable horrors and terrible things she subjected my mother to.
I haven’t spoken to my mother in… -checks Stardate- 15 years? something like that. She took after her mother in the worst of ways, and refused to see it. Three husbands and four kids later, I think she gets the odd Christmas card from one of my brothers. The rest of us are unlikely to pick up the phone if she rings. There’s a likelihood of undiagnosed issues, plus a 100% surety of alcohol and gambling problems.
The greatest, -greatest- thing my dear father has ever told me, is that /she is not my responsibility/. In that second, all and every shred of guilt I still felt fled and I have not looked back since.
Then again, it helps when she’s physically restricted and can’t follow me as I dash to a safe minimum distance of One Large Body Of Water Away.
also: how much fun is it telling people your mother isn’t invited to your wedding and does not, in fact, know you even have a boyfriend? amazing. (she was not missed on the day. her spirit lived on through my drunk brother.)
I cut off contact with my father about a year ago…
And though I love the peace it has given me, the no longer dreading my phone and inbox, I still feel guilty.
I so wish for someone to tell me that my reasons for breaking contact are ‘valid’ , I am desparate for some sort of stamp of approval. “thwunk” DECISION OK’D BY PEOPLE IN CHARGE…
And though excellent points have made about how you are the only one who can and should decide when enough is enough, and others should respect that, I’m still going to present ‘my case’ here.
My father is and was a very authoritarian, old-fashioned man.
Children (and ideally the world) should always obey him without question.
Whichever idea of the world he has, or whichever new plan (a LOT) should be agreed upon and enthusiastically embraced by all around him, or he gets angry and resentful.
And then he started jumping on the conspiracy theory bandwagon, and started getting really paranoid.
He bought into the full hog, I’m pretty sure up to lizard-people level, and was always on the lookout for a) ‘them’ spying on him, being on to his startling insights into their true ways of suppression b) some kind of armageddon/collapse of society.
In practice this came down to him refusing EVERYTHING, and making EVERYTHING a taboo subject. Since he already lived abroad, most contact was via email, because over the phone we couldn’t talk about anything, for fear of ‘them’ listening in etc etc. And in email messages he would be superduper cryptic (though coded could easily be broken by your average 12 year old), but the message was alwasy: “the end is coming, buy more beans, build a shelter, don’t get vaccinated, false flag, omg chemtrail.”
Though we had been drilled from such a young age to always be polite, and never openly say WTF, we (sis & I) tried to gently tell him that we were not of the same mindset. This would be met with waves of rage, about ingratitude, being brainwashed, biblical references to how children should respect and listen to their parents, instead of biting the hand that feeds them etc.etc.
I have been disowned 8 times in 10 years.
BUT then when the ‘crazy’ lifted, he expected us to act like all was normal again.
But then he started telling you all about how you did your life wrong, and should do x and y and z instead.
And again, you ‘disobedience’ to do these things would lead to long prophetic shouty emails of disappointment and disowning.
Now, if he had been a super-duper succesful type you might look into his suggestions. But as you may have guessed, NOTHING was further from the truth.
And EVEN if you would have experimented with living-how-he-wants-you-to for say a year, it would have made no sense, because every 6 months A would have become B, minus would have become plus, and the enemy of April would be the saint of August…
Oh yeah and then he started reading Stormfront….
So I said, enough is enough, tatty-bye.
Well, thanks for making it this far. This was nice and cathartic.
*THWUNK*
Decision OK’D by pretty much every single person on this thread.
yeah right um that sounds like mental illness to me. I will be glad for the day when it is seen as okay for children to detach and separate from crazy people even IF those crazy people gave them their biological material. Because the hardline basic truth is they need HELP. And for us, to do so is simply practicing a trade without license and illegal. Those are just the hard facts. At its very best, attempts at help by a non-professional when the subject is mentally ill or addicted are enabling. I imagine it feels very similar to the parent of a drug addicted child who gives until the child simply overdoses. Professional advice would be to end all help and insist the child get treatment.
Wow. Sorry I don’t have anything more insightful to add.
I’m so glad you wrote this. It’s always surprising to me how close-minded people can be about setting boundaries with family members. “But they’re faaaamily!” Yes, and that means they have the potential to hurt you even more than non-relatives. Anyone who can’t understand why you wouldn’t want to speak to someone who stole $30,000 from you is not someone you need in your life.
And oh man, does it make me ragey when parents feel like their children “owe” them for raising them. Taking care of a child you brought into your life is really the baseline level for “decent human.”
For what it’s worth: Taking legal action against your mother is probably a waste of time — any judgment you might win is probably uncollectible. Taking legal action against the bank may get you a quick lowball settlement offer from the bank’s insurer, which might be better than nothing. “Do nothing and move on” is also a very reasonable choice.
I had that moment, reading this, when I stopped in shock at how familiar your story is to me, and then I started reading the comments and saw how many other people had that same reaction. It’s stunning, really.
I once participated in a study for a communication studies PhD candidate about children who have cut off ties to one or both parents. According to the interviewer, she received over 100 replies to her email in just a few hours, and we live in a small-ish town. But it’s like, I’d never know, because it’s not like any of us just bring it up in conversation or anything.
Thank you for writing this. The biggest part that hits home for me is the constant & surprisingly under-interrogated narrative of the poor, hapless parent who can’t quite fathom why a child would be so cruel as to not speak to them/cut off all contact. Those articles fill me with rage. It’s quite isolating, and I think holds true *even for* families with histories of abuse/incest/cruelty/etc — it’s just another way to help cover up just how common this type of abuse in families really is.
Hahaha oh god. This was a great…read? I mean it was, but it stung a little bit. The sting of familiarity! I especially relate to the part about people always wanting proof that your childhood was “bad enough’ to warrant the way you feel about the horrible parent/parents. Ok sure, let me relive the most painful and excruciating moments of my early life so you can decide whether or not it is ok for me to say that my mother is a bitch and that I won’t take care of her when she’s old and infirm. “But she’s your FAMILY!” they wail, wringing their tiny hands in anguish. Yeah well, YOU go live with her then. See how that works out for you.
well, YOU go live with her then. See how that works out for you.
That is perfect.
Oh man. I’m coming out of lurkitude for this one. What a beautiful, beautiful telling of a terrible story. I identify to a certain extent, although there was never any money involved in my emotionally abusive mom-world. Whatever you end up doing will be The Right Thing, but I’m giving a little nudge towards doing nothing. Isn’t that flashing red The End sign tempting? And not for her. For you. FOR YOU.
Oh god this is so rough. Thank you for sharing.
I don’t know how much was in my college fund; in fact, I didn’t even know it existed until I was a few months away from graduating high school and my mom mentioned that my dad had cashed and spent all of it. She was angry enough that I can assume it was at least several thousand. I didn’t speak to him for about a year, and if I think about it for too long I start to wonder how I was ever able to forgive him.
(The worst part — the part I wish she hadn’t told me — is that when they divorced, he had insisted that he get control of that account because he didn’t trust my mom with it.)
My brother in law no longer speaks to his mother for very similar reasons: she opened up multiple credit cards in his name when he was away at college, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debt plus interest, which he did not discover until shortly after he married my sister and they tried to buy a house. Luckily for my BIL, he married a sweet, smart, kickass lady…whose father happened to be an attorney. BIL’s credit is fixed, and as far as I know, he hasn’t seen her since. I know she’s never met my nephews. Her fault. No one else’s.
As an attorney myself, my inclination is to tell you to sue both your mother and the bank as well as pressing criminal charges. Not just because the bank will have assets to satisfy the judgment but because being able to point to criminal and civil litigation may spare you the asshattery of well meaning people telling you to reconcile until the day your genetic donor passes from the earth. Not that you have to press charges or sue to be entitled to tell those people to go to hell, but “my mom did time for defrauding me” or “I’ll speak to my mother when she has paid this $30k judgment for defrauding me” tends to discourage repetition in a very concrete way.
I hope there is and will be safety and support for you.
I was stunned at my ability to solve the problem. Now I'm great at this shit, but back then I was incapacitated by my mom's sneakiness and manipulation.
I finally made time to read this & I am so glad I did. It brings up… stuff. Not as much or the same kind of stuff as you’re dealing with, but stuff. And this whole comment thread has been empowering & enlightening & I’m glad people are finding the strength to make the families that they ought to have, instead of families they were stuck with in childhood.
This whole article… so much of this is exactly my mother. In November of 2012 I came to the hard realization that my mother doesn’t love me, and that it’s not anyone’s fault – and it’s not personal. My mother just can’t form lasting attachments to other human beings. I haven’t talked to her since shortly before Thanksgiving in 2012. I don’t anticipate, or want, a reconciliation. She’s broken, and that’s not her fault, and it’s not my fault… but it doesn’t make it hurt less. Having any kind of relationship with my mother was, is, and always will be harmful. I wouldn’t allow a friend or stranger to talk to me, or behave the way she does toward me – and while blood does complicate things – it doesn’t mean you should allow someone to hurt you. Ever.
I think I was more cynical as a teen than you were, certainly angrier and more prone to believe myself than my mother, because as soon as I realized that my mother had access to MY money… money I earned at my first job… I did everything humanly possible to remove her access to MY MONEY.
She stole my first paycheck from my first job. Just… all of it. And while it was some sad little thing, less than 200 dollars… it was mine, and I had earned it. When I confronted her about it she didn’t even bother to deny it. She said her name was on the account, she needed it more, and she had every right to it. The truth is: she didn’t have *any* right to it.
I went into my credit union the next day and talked to a personal banker. Because I was under 18 I needed my mother to co-sign to remove her from the account. I knew that was never going to happen, I explained as much to the banker. I cried. They said there was nothing they could do.
I went to BofA. I set up a new account. There were stupid fees, and I hated it. But my money was safe from my mother. The bank was stealing my money, but, at least they were honest about it. Apologetic even.
I went back to my credit union, to close out the account. To transfer all of the money to my new account. They balked. I could do that, but, that would by default close my account. Did I really want to do that?
Yes. Yes I did. Because I couldn’t take my mother off the account, and I needed the money to be safe from her. The teller sent me to a second personal banker, a more experienced one. She listened to what I had to say and suggested a password. In the days before internet banking there was still a mechanism for adding a password to an account – and no one, no one at all, could access the account without it. Even if their name was ON the account. They had to give the password to withdraw from it, to transfer funds.
Two years later, when I was 18, I removed my mother from the account. I never did get the money back she stole from me. To this day, I still have that password on the account.
This whole article… so much of this is exactly my mother. In November of 2012 I came to the hard realization that my mother doesn't love me, and that it's not anyone's fault – and it's not personal. My mother just can't form lasting attachments to other human beings. I haven't talked to her since shortly before Thanksgiving in 2012. I don't anticipate, or want, a reconciliation. She's broken, and that's not her fault, and it's not my fault… but it doesn't make it hurt less. Having any kind of relationship with my mother was, is, and always will be harmful. I wouldn't allow a friend or stranger to talk to me, or behave the way she does toward me – and while blood does complicate things – it doesn't mean you should allow someone to hurt you. Ever.
I think I was more cynical as a teen than you were, certainly angrier and more prone to believe myself than my mother, because as soon as I realized that my mother had access to MY money… money I earned at my first job… I did everything humanly possible to remove her access to MY MONEY.
She stole my first paycheck from my first job. Just… all of it. And while it was some sad little thing, less than 200 dollars… it was mine, and I had earned it. When I confronted her about it she didn't even bother to deny it. She said her name was on the account, she needed it more, and she had every right to it. The truth is: she didn't have *any* right to it.
I went into my credit union the next day and talked to a personal banker. Because I was under 18 I needed my mother to co-sign to remove her from the account. I knew that was never going to happen, I explained as much to the banker. I cried. They said there was nothing they could do.
I went to BofA. I set up a new account. There were stupid fees, and I hated it. But my money was safe from my mother. The bank was stealing my money, but, at least they were honest about it. Apologetic even.
I went back to my credit union, to close out the account. To transfer all of the money to my new account. They balked. I could do that, but, that would by default close my account. Did I really want to do that?
Yes. Yes I did. Because I couldn't take my mother off the account, and I needed the money to be safe from her. The teller sent me to a second personal banker, a more experienced one. She listened to what I had to say and suggested a password. In the days before internet banking there was still a mechanism for adding a password to an account – and no one, no one at all, could access the account without it. Even if their name was ON the account. They had to give the password to withdraw from it, to transfer funds.
Two years later, when I was 18, I removed my mother from the account. I never did get the money back she stole from me. To this day, I still have that password on the account.
This hit such a nerve, even though the circumstances have little in common with my own situation. I think the worst thing about cutting a parent out of your life is the constant and never ending guilt – the feeling that the fault lies with you, that you are ungrateful, unbending, intolerant, selfish.
I've spent the last 17 years attempting to grapple the relationship with my father into submission. Some days go better than others. We were never close – he's an old man who had 'a bad war', never wanted daughters, didn't understand children, couldn't look beyond his own limitations. Our relationship always fell into that no-where land between healthy and fucked up – he was never really physically of even verbally abusive, yet my childhood was overshadowed by this sense of bone deep terror of him.
It took me years to figure out that rampant and explicit disinterest can be just as damaging when it comes from a parent. I mostly stopped speaking to him when I turned 18, made easier by my parents' divorce and our relocation to another country. My siblings similarly cut off contact, and my father responded by spamming me with emotionally manipulative emails and phonecalls – not because he wanted to re-establish a positive relationship with me or my sister, but because he was puzzled my brother wouldn't speak to him. He would call again and again to tell me he was dying, no seriously, he was really dying this time, and it was all due to us. Think Gene Hackman in The Royal Tennenbaums.
I will never forget the one conversation we had that finally made me realise the fault didn't lie with us, but that he was the villain in the piece. He called to once again ask me to make my brother answer his emails and uttered the following: "I just don't understand it. I've always loved him so much more than you. Make him talk to me, you owe me that much."
That's the day I decided to just not give a fuck anymore.
He still calls, still tells me he's dying, still tells me we're being selfish.
I've decided being selfish is okay.
I found that some people didn't trust me for this reason? Especially when I was living overseas – like: you've cut ties with your family, and your country, and god – the three things that should inspire the most loyalty. If you're not loyal to those things, you must not be loyal to ANYthing.
But of course I am super-loyal to lots of things.
my dad embezzled/stole between 50-100k from my business. He doesn’t know I know. He’ll deny it if I tell him-I don’t have much hard evidence but i am 200% sure he has. And he will tell anyone who listens how much money I owe him for his help with the business (he hardly helped) … I don’t know what to do we used to be so close :,-I …even though he has always been a horribly passive aggressive parent 🙁
First of all, let me say I did read the full article and did get a sense of what your mother is like and how the relationship has been.
At the risk of downvotes, I am going to say this. Try embracing with love. Embracing her, the relationship, and everything. I’m going to quote the age old saying — you can’t fight darkness with darkness, you can only fight it with light. Don’t hate her because she hates you and don’t take revenge.
I myself have a father who is also abusive and in a way stole a sum of money from me as well, but in both ways less severe than your case. Growing up he would have plenty of fights with my mother and yelled at me and my sibling regularly. I have pretty much the same story as you with me and my sibling having saved a sum of money from gifts and such — that was taken away by my father in the name of helping his business in emergencies, in the name of putting bread on the table for us. (this sum of money is smaller than your amount, but not trivial either) Numerous years ago after a serious fight with my mother and my sibling, he left and didn’t come back.
It took me a while and I went through periods of time feeling like having lost a purpose in life, after my family having broken down. In the end, I decided to forgive and embrace everyone with love. I embrace my father with love, as well as my mother and my sibling, who after all these years still would not forgive and talk to my father. They are carrying hate with them in return for the way my father had treated them; and there was not any way for me to convince them to view the matter, the relationship, and the world as I do, and embrace everything with love. They are not living better than I am. They always have a negativity in the back of their minds, it is a burden for themselves.
For myself, I did go through months of denial and countless sleepless nights simply thinking, thinking about everything, all the incidents, everything I could’ve done or said to change anything. I believe I dissolved all my hatred. Here’s the way I think about it. Yes, he treated us poorly and he stole an amount of money from us. But ever since I grew up to be an adult (I am the same age as you, 31), I’ve made way more money than that amount. I just look at the monetary loss as inconsequential. As for all the mistreatment, I simply choose to forgive.
After those months of uncertainty, I began talking to my father again and attempt to make the interaction as normal as possible. At first it wasn’t easy. For a few years after that there was still some abusiveness here and there. But it has gotten better over time. As far as I remember, in the past year or two, there has been no incident of abusiveness from him to me. Here’s what it comes down to. I believe he knows that he owes us for all the mistreatment he gave us over the years; and the fact that I am embracing him now makes him feel that he’s definitely not in any position to exert any more wrongness over me or even any of us. In this way, love does conquer and eliminate hate.
Again, as a summary, I know this is unpopular opinion (judging from your original post and the rest of the commenters). Still, I would like to ask you to please try to embrace her and everything about everything with love.
We actually do not have downvotes, as evidenced by the fact that there is no downvote option anywhere on the entire site.
As far as the dilemma goes I think pursuing any action against her would be futile and not worth the drama however doing so against the bank is perfectly understandable and makes sense in light of their duty to protect the trust which they failed to do. As far as the parenting issues go there are parents and then there are personality disordered parents. Clearly mom is NPD, BPD, or histrionic or some swirl of the cluster B ice cream cone. I spent years on an online support group as a child of two personality disordered parents before I even felt sure I wasn’t the one with the problem. I was recently diagnosed with PTSD in part from the fallout of growing up around so many sexual predators that my mother could have so easily protected me from had she even bothered. Where you find sexual predation you find these kinds of personality disorders in the victims, and of course they do not ‘grow up, get over it, and forgive’ like my mother claims to have. In my humble opinion the old saw about ‘giving one’s life up’ for a child does not apply in the case of personality disordered mothers since so many, including probably my own, intentionally got pregnant to trap a man into marriage and escape a bad situation or acquire a standard of living. My whole childhood was sacrificed to abuse so that my mother could keep her standard of living and my PTSD symptoms are so bad that I am non=functional and applying for disability. It is far more likely that she didn’t ‘give up’ much but instead used and exploited the status of motherhood in every conceivable way and it just took her utilizing your trust fund for you to notice it. It has taken me over forty years to realize my mother is somewhere on the spectrum from extreme narcissist to bordering on being a sociopath. 40 wasted years, I hasten to add, of her draining the life out of me and destroying most of my relationships with family members (with help from my father as well) because I refused to lie about the effects of the sexual abuse and sought therapy and recovery (for which she accused me of “bragging about” being sexually abused.) She is a sly operator like my father was and can charm the pants off of strangers but the truth behind the curtain is pretty dismal. Don’t blame yourself, these people LIVE to fool other people and get away with murder (sometimes literally). And don’t take any crap off of judgmental types, most of the time they are in their own denial about their own issues with parents anyway.
Guys, I can relate. My mom had a rough childhood and chose to carry it with her throughout adulthood; instead of simply letting it go, she merely forced it upon me. Plus, she’s always jealous of me because I had, in most people’s words, “gracefully blossomed into a beautiful young woman” that she knows she’ll never be again. Plus, she has disowned me many times. Oh, and if she would audition for the Snow White play, then I’m pretty sure that she would only land the role as the Evil Queen. Oh, and she’s a fucking rageaholic too, so she always yells and screams at me while favoring my older brother over me. Everytime she gets her period, she’s so evil that she’ll always get mad at everything…and she often beat the shit out of me whenever I do things that she doesn’t like. She even tore me down before she even built me up. Plus, one day, when I was 14, she and my dad started talking shit about my friends, so I stood up to my parents for talking shit about my friends…and got punched in the face and head for standing up for my friends.
Yes, my parents may be my family by blood, but my chosen family, who happen to be my friends, have been there for me when my parents haven’t, so I would honestly be damned if I just sit there in the sidelines while my parents talk shit about people that I love and care about…especially when they haven’t even met them.
Once I would leave this bitch-ass house, I’ll consider cutting contact with both of my parents forever!
Amazing story and what a hard way to achieve “closure!”
With regard to filing against the bank, I ask that you go ahead with that, filing with the state banking regulators and Federal banking regulators. While you may or may get all or some of your money back, you may well “save” someone else from the same fate. Banks face criminal sanctions and fines for breaking trust instructions and the fallout will include some spankings and mandatory re-training. If even one person is helped by this, you will have done something even more amazing than you have already accomplished.
My father and mother stole roughly 80k from my trust fund that was given to my by my grandparents. They lied about this for years. They also stole my sister’s and blamed me for it (saying the money was needed for my college). They didn’t give me any money for college, minus a few hundred for books. I heard, through my sister, that they finally told her the truth a few months ago. My father is apparently dying and looking for absolution.
I was a cosigner on a loan for my father. He defaulted, lied and told me he was paying, then disappeared. The type of career I have requires good credit; I almost did not get my license (I had to have a hearing). I had to pay back 40k. I didn’t pursue him legally cause I couldn’t find him. Then by the time I did locate him I decided to let sleeping dogs lie. I don’t want to see him again. The money was hardly his only failing – he was a terrible dad. My mother was very physically abusive and a skilled liar. He allowed her to abuse us cause he wanted to carry on his affairs. He’s admitted as much.
I cut them both off. My mother and I ended our relationship when I was 20, my father and I ended ours when he disappeared when I was 23. I had good grandparents and I think they’re the reason I felt entitled to be treated decently by my parents. I am now in my mid 30’s – I have a family, a white collar job, friends, good credit, etc. I’ve been to Europe, I have a baby, and most people in my life know nothing of my background. I have a ton of college loans and am from a very different background than most people in my profession, but otherwise I lead a pretty typical existence.
I don’t know what the right decision for the OP is. Sometimes I still regret letting them get away with what they did. Whether you sue her or not, it’s never really “the end”, although there are certainly benefits to just moving on and leaving her behind. My sister re-engages our parents constantly and she’s a huge mess. She never sued – she instead spends most of her time talking to them, about them, or blaming them. My father contacted me when he found out he had cancer and, for my sake as well as my child’s, I have no intention of see him again. Ever.
Good luck.
I want to thank you for writing this article! It’s been 10 years I’ve been told a lie and 28 years of living with a liar.I’m sspeaking about who I use to call mother.
You don’t want it believe it because just like everyone says”it’s your mother”. All the brain washing, manipulation and disappointment is so palpable it physically hurts. As a child I was to be brainwashed that I was the black sheep in the family because I didn’t do exactly as I was told. I bounced from house to house from school to school and finally was manipulated to believe I was worthless like my father. When I was born I was given a trust fund by good friends of my”mother”. Right when I turned 18 my mother ran me to the bank place to sign paper work saying that I was sharing my +20,000 trust fund with my sister and that we would be putting towards school or somewhat.. hesitant and resistant to this transaction, papers were signed through hours of manipulation, deception and lying.
I finished school and to my knowledge no student loans were paid off nor a cent to alleviate those burdens. Never the less I ask her where this money is for more I need it, the usual diversion “that money? What money? There is no money, that money isn’t there”. Ive finally left it alone until my sister recently asked me the same thing ” hey whatever happened to that money we supposedly split”?! I gave her the same story mother` did and couldn’t believe it, so she did her own inquisition. Finally she got the answers from her, and she admitted to having, taking and spending my money like it was her right. My blood boils.
Do you now how much student loans are to be paid off?? 50,000 And even though she co signed for both of us she hasn’t even paid her part!!! It sickens me to think it was me this while time! That I’m the bad one for asking questions for wanting to know. I’m done with this wishy washy relationship. I’m going to try and forgive and forget because suing her isn’t gonna do anything for me.
It all gets diverted back to me and that I still have these Damn debt collectors on my back. I’m going to try a previous commenters suggestion and just cut her off and move forward with my life, I’ve always said and felt like the further I am from her the better off I am.
Thank you again for this amazing read!
Wow, didn’t know that this happened to other people besides me! My mother was an executor of my grandmothers will. When my grandmother passed back in the early 80’s I was told that her Sears stock was to go to her grandchildren. There were age stipulations for each grandchild. Mine was age 30. My mother was so upset about not being in the will. My parents both had let my grandmother live with them. So, I told my Mom at the time it was okay with me if she continued to get the dividends each month. With the stipulation that it be divided when she passed. Well she passed, and my brother was her executor. When I asked him about the Sears stock he said “oh, that’s all gone” I was so shocked that my mother could do that to me! Hurt, yes, but no matter what I have felt about her that money was from my grandmother. She had no right! But, I am sure she is being held accountable at a higher realm. It is so sad that this happens in families, but from what I have read in these postings, it does happen. From one dysfunctional family to another, I feel for all of you. Best regards.
I have a substantial trust fund (almost 200k), which is protected from my crazy, narcissistic mother by a trustee appointed by a lawyer until I turn 18 (which is very soon). My mother told me that I owe her money for her raising me and me using too much electricity (using a space heater when it is 16 degrees Celsius in my room and I’m freezing). I currently have part of the money to pay for school but she also has access to my account and threatened to steal 3200$ from my account if I used the heater. Like WTF? I am freezing cold. And it’s not like we are even close to poor. She just spends all her money on herself. I have basically no clothing (2 pairs of pants) and she sometimes goes weeks without buying food. People don’t get why I hate her because she seems so nice, but in reality, she is abusive and neglectful.
Oh my god I am so glad you posted this! I thought I was the only one with a crazy parent who took me for everything. My father drained my account and spent it immediately always lying and saying id get it. Im 30 years old and he has never supported me once in my life. He doesnt stop at stealing my interference, I have dealt with years of constant and violent emotional abuse. Now he is trying to get me to pay the back taxes on the house he bought with my money 20 years ago, even though he has been renting it out all that time and pocketing the income. I dont consider him my father in any means and if I can take him for everything I can Ill do it in a heart beat/
So does anyone know exactly how to prove you had a trust fund, at some point? When it was always just hear say? I was told by older siblings I had a pretty good trust fund. I asked my father he knew nothing, mom said yes, but when I turned 18 just before she upped and left the state I signed for it and it was only 1800.00, 30 years later my wife goes to public record and finds out my mother sued on my behalf for 150,000.00 and then settled out of court, so there is no record of what the actual settlement was, on record of her application and approval to be my guardian adliam. I am 55 years old now and my mother still goes to the casino every day. I wonder…..
Thank you very much for writing this. It has made me calm down and know that others have horrible parents as well. I went through a childhood similar to this. My parents stole 75k from me and more from my siblings. I never took legal action but live in financial fear of her stealing more. My mother always told me i was dumb and would never be anything. Made up stories about other relatives saying rude and cruel things about me. It's been an abusive childhood and adulthood even. I'm hoping to be able to one day share my story like you. Also, I'm really sorry you have to deal with all this. Goodluck and best of luck
I had the same thing happen to me. My mom stole 18,000 from me. I called the state police on her. They went to her house and she lied to them and said I gave it to her. she was vp at the bank my account was at and could access it. Stole it all but They believed her. Told me it was a civil case. I couldn't because she stole everything I had and couldn't afford it. I know she's a criminal. It a felony what she did. She deserves to be in federal prison. I don't talk to her anymore. She had the nerve to contact me with a birthday card. Not once did she apologize. I hate her.
Going through this right now. My mother opened a credit card up in my name and charged up to the full amount. Then she tried to cover it up but didn’t make any payments so she ruined my credit score. When I confronted her she said she wanted nothing more to do with me and I don’t love her if I think she would steal from me.
I’ve recently cut off my mother. I’ve been ill for 10 years. Sometimes so ill I could barely get out of bed. My mother insisted when I was 19 that I continue working, even when some days I would pass out from pain at work.
The doctors could find nothing, so she reasoned I was just “being lazy”. She’d sit there and blame me for being sick with a rare disease. I called her several times terrified I was dying and she hung up on me. Just hung up.
I’ve finally started to be diagnosed, Pots, cfs and Ehler danlos, and I got well enough to start looking around me. My mother had been stealing money from me, I was too busy trying to survive to notice.
300-500 dollars every month. Compound that over 10-12 years. She’s stolen about 30,000 dollars or more.
I’ve had to live in clothes I’ve had since highschool and 5 dollar shoes, as sick as anything. While my mother was collecting disability and using my money to go on Caribbean cruises with her friends. She has perfect credit, 900,000 in savings and 3 closets full of nice new clothes, a new pool and barn on a disability paycheck. (granted she got 500,000 dollars from a settlement, but that leaves 400,000 and all the swag unaccounted for)
I suspect she’s been stealing from my father and brothers as well, but what can I do? They don’t believe me. All I can do is cut her off and clean up her mess.
"Make a decision that is wise and kind, and learn to be content with it."
Thank you for this.