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Mar 29, 2014, 11:56 AM
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Member Since: Jun 2012
Location: USA
Posts: 3,517
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PrairieCat,
I don’t have any tips but I do have sympathy for your situation. My adult daughter hasn’t spoken to me in 3 years.
I definitely did have mental health issues and finally lucked into finding someone who could help me 4 years ago. But it got worse before it got better and because I had had issues throughout my daughter’s life, which I recognized and intellectually (though not always behaviorally) took “total” responsibility for (I was the parent), perhaps that’s how she still looks at our relationship issues. The current rash of internet rejection of imperfect or “not good enough” mothers feeds people’s entitled attitude IMHO. Yes, I got her started on the attitude that she was entitled to a better mother – I thought I was “protecting” her from my imperfections. Made sense to me at the time.  My mother wasn’t perfect either, I had had my share of mental health issues but the mental health therapy I got 20-40 years ago seemed to encourage accepting our parents anyway. Of course, it was a different culture then, too. And maybe/probably “accepting” my parents anyway meant continuing to cover up or avoid the deep sense of abandonment, betrayal, loss, etc. which I’ve only recently been able to get in touch with, with the help of a trauma specialist.
I’m much stronger now, too – but my daughter doesn’t know that. She may be still dealing with her troubles with the “old” me. Doesn’t want any relationship. Maybe she’s not ready – and may never be – to get in touch with the kind of deep losses that get handed down through the generations sometimes. Now that I HAVE dealt mostly with mine, I can have some sympathy about where she may be coming from. Previously, even when she was a child, when I saw her looking lost I would “retreat”/withdraw rather than reaching out to her. My own feeling of guilt for engendering in her feelings which I couldn’t tolerate in myself led me to try to “protect” her from a harmful person (me) and also protect myself from guilt and the resulting shame. So “protection” was the dominant motivation, not nurturance – a family pattern, maybe. Sucks. I tried my best, my mother and grandmother probably did, too. We just haven’t known how to do and be any better than we know.
Maybe your daughter is overwhelmed right now with her own feelings of guilt, her own imperfections, her concern about her son. And when that's unbearable it spills over into ". . . if I'd had a better mother. . ."
Hope this helps and isn’t too much of just my own soapbox. I try to stay strong, grow, and if and when my daughter wants some of what I have to offer, then I'll have it. If not, at least I've done what I could. Maybe it will help somebody else somewhere and that will help the world our grandchildren and their grandchildren, or human beings in general, live in. That's all that I can see that I have any partial control, or influence, on.
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