Ask Ellie: How can I be nice to my mother?

Dear Ellie —

I’d like your advice for how I can behave better to my mother, on the phone and on the rare occasions when we are together.

Some context: I don’t get along well with my mother, and I don’t like her as a person. We don’t agree on anything, from big picture issues like politics to pointless things like the aesthetics of tattoos, and we don’t share any interests. (Indeed, she has — or at least pursues — no interests apart from bridge and watching sporting events on the TV.) She has done lots of work for me — cleaning, cooking, driving me about, even smocking little dresses (that I mostly hated) for me as a kid — but she has never been loving. As an adult, this next detail strikes me as so weird I’m almost reluctant to say it, but we don’t hug — she decided at some point that pre-dates my childhood memory that we would say goodbye by me kissing her on the hand (!). At some point (again, my memory conveniently fails me), I stopped doing that, so now we just say goodbye without touching at all.

Anyway, all that’s to say, I recognize the debt I owe her but I don’t love her. I know I will never have the kind of relationship I would have liked to have with my mother, but it’s not like I want to cut her out of my life. She’s fine, I just don’t love her or particularly like her. What I want is for our interactions to be the kind of polite, limited interaction you have with a colleague you don’t especially get along with but work just fine with anyway.

As an adult, I’ve always lived a considerable distance away, which certainly helps our relationship by simply reducing the amount of time we spend together. But I call her every few weeks, and I fuck it up every time. I just want to get through the call (which usually drags on for an hour — I need to be prepared with excuses if I want to get off sooner) without being rude or mean, but I never manage it. She always starts saying something I disagree with, and I always take the bait. She’ll also ask me questions that are based on the (incorrect) assumption that she understands my work, and I always correct her, despite having tried to steel myself before the call to just let whatever she says slide.

Basically, I cannot get through the call without disagreeing with her verbally, and I’m not very pleasant about it, and then I get off the call angry — irritated by her, of course, but even more angry with myself for being a rude and disagreeable person. It’s not that there’s any point to arguing with or correcting her — she will not change and I will not feel better for having done it. So why can’t I just somehow float past and not engage? I can’t control what she says, but shouldn’t I be able to control how I handle it?

xx Least Favorite Child

Dear LFC,

I’m struck by the detail of you kissing your mother’s hand. I can well understand why you stopped doing that, and blocked out the details: there’s something so Victorian about it, in its odd formality — and we all know the Victorian era wasn’t exactly a riot for children.

The most notable thing about Victorian attitudes to children (which still define British and WASPy societies) is that they cast children not as inherently delightful, miraculous, full of untold mystery and potential, but rather as shamefully unformed adults, needing to be brought to heel as quickly as possible through stiff upper lips and being packed off to boarding school or sent to work in the factory at the age of six. I can’t be sure, but it sounds to me like this is the kind of culture you grew up in. I’m not saying you were forced to sweep chimneys, but I note that it’s the language and structures of work that you use to talk about your mother: she has “done lots of work” for you; you would like your relationship to be the kind of “polite, limited interaction you have with a colleague”; and her failure to understand your work is one of your biggest aggravations with her. Then there’s that hand-kissing gesture, which, sure, wouldn’t fly in an office, but is absolutely designed to establish rank and obedience.

In other words: your relationship with your mother was professionalized in ways you never wanted or understood, and now you’re angry with yourself for being unable to remain calmly professional when talking to her. But she’s not your boss, and she never was. She’s your mother. Why should you be professional?

I suspect that you’re so used to this mode of relationship with her that you don’t have much access, anymore, to the part of you that wanted more. There’s a lot of level-headed acceptance in your letter: “She’s fine,” you say, and, “I know I will never have the kind of relationship I would have liked to have” with her, and truly, this stance is an admirable adaptation to your circumstances. It enabled you to navigate your childhood and all that’s come since without getting trapped in resentment or suicidally trying to fulfill needs your mother couldn’t meet. So: an admirable adaptation — but at what cost?

You say that after speaking to her, you are angry with yourself not simply for being rude and disagreeable (which may not even be true, if we look at the big picture), but for being a rude and disagreeable person. In this relationship, your unmet needs and the ways you act them out make you a write-off as a human. I wonder if that is true in other spheres of your life, too? I wonder how often you tell yourself everything’s fine, it’s OK if nobody appreciates you or even cares about or understands what you’re doing, because you don’t really need anything anyway — and how often you then find yourself snapping at someone unexpectedly or telling yourself you’re just a bad person, through and through.

I know you asked me for tips on being nice to your mother, and it probably seems like I’m giving you the opposite: reasons to feel aggrieved with her. The truth is, I don’t have a handy pre-phone-call routine that will turn you into sweetness and light for an hour (just ask my mum). But I don’t know if forcing more professionalism on yourself is the answer here anyway. In fact, I sort of want to celebrate the part of you that snaps at her, that insists on explaining what it is you actually do for a living. That’s the part that hasn’t given up on wanting her to see you, to be your mum.

But I know the place you’re stuck right now — trying, snapping, shutting down, feeling guilty — is painful. I know because I’ve often been there myself, as have most adults I know whose parents are still alive. So, one definitive piece of information I can give you is that you’re not alone.

Stories have been trying to console us on the hardship of the mother–daughter relationship for years. Did you know that Snow White’s original nemesis was not her stepmother but her very own mum? In the earliest versions of the tale, the queen doesn’t die in childbirth; she’s the one who goes on to harbour the murderous rivalry that drives her daughter from the palace. It’s a similar story for Hansel and Gretel: in the oldest tellings, it’s not a stepmother but the mother herself who decides there simply isn’t enough to eat, and the only thing for it is to abandon the children in the woods. In both cases, the Grimms killed off the mother and subbed a wicked stepmother, because apparently a murderous mother is beyond the pale.

But there’s a reason these stories emerged the way they did, incited by the crimes of mothers rather than stepmothers. These tales of dark and murderous mums swelled from the earth and took root around the world and through time because on the deepest level, they’re true. There is an inherent darkness to the role of mother. How could there not be? After all, a foetus functions much like a parasite, and that’s only the start of the ego destruction the child will inflict on the mother over the course of its lifetime. Meanwhile, to the child, the mother is absolute, totalizing. The mother is the god of a child’s early years, which only really means one thing: she is set up to fail.

There’s a lot of advice these days about how to manage this most fraught of relationships. There are a lot of pastel-coloured Instagram feeds presenting only the sunny side of motherhood, leaving mums to push their darkest feelings ever farther into the shadows. And so, inevitably, at the other end of the scale, there are also lots of pastel-coloured Instagram feeds offering advice from celebrity therapists on how to heal the mother wound and the ubiquitous traumas of childhood.

For my money, this approach disempowers just about everybody. It casts mothers as failures simply for being human, and children as victims. The beautiful thing about folktales and fairy tales in their original, unsanitized forms is that they understand that darkness in family relations, especially the mother-child relationship, isn’t an aberration or a pathology. It’s the whole damn point. These stories tell us that the mother-child relationship is fraught and often monstrous by its nature, that the domestic sphere is the theatre of human darkness. Even the ideal mothers in fairy tales are just one side of the coin, since the very existence of absolute purity creates its own opposite, outright evil.

(And if you’re more of a rationalist, know that there’s a biological basis for this perspective, too. The evolutionary biologist/hero Lynn Margulis speculated that reproductive sex emerged from a failed cannibalistic impulse: one microbe tried to survive seasonal changes by eating another, but was only partially successful. “The result was a monster bearing the cells and genes of at least two individuals” — which is to say, a child. The whole human life cycle and the family structure it has birthed is a murderous monstrosity.)

So what are you supposed to do with all this? Well, first of all, know that there’s nothing wrong with you. Maybe it would have been nicer if you’d got one of the angelic mothers, but: alas. (And honestly, having an angel for a mum sounds pretty fucking annoying too. Nobody who had an angel for a mum ever grew up to make great art or have a wicked sense of humour or even, I suspect, become truly self-aware.)

Next, congratulate yourself on having already completed a big chunk of your role. Like a good fairy tale hero or heroine, you escaped home.

The rest is a little more prosaic: fairy tales don’t tell us how to maintain decades’ worth of polite phone conversations with our persecutors after we leave. In fact, in fairy tales, the evil mother is always vanquished: Snow White’s mother is made to wear a pair of red-hot shoes and dance in them until she falls down dead. Hansel and Gretel’s mother dies before they come home with the riches they took from the witch.

Obviously, murder isn’t an option. Not literally, anyway. But here’s the thing: your mother is a fairy tale now too. I know, I know, she’s a real person with a phone and a face and annoying sounds that come out of it. But that’s only a small part of her presence in your life. Mostly, she’s a story that lives inside you, about your own unworthiness, rudeness, and disagreeability, and beneath that, about how it’s not OK for you to have needs. We all carry some version of this. By the time we hit adulthood, our parents aren’t really people but internal constellations that we interact with constantly, even after they die.

So the key is to kill this story version of your mother. First, indulge some dreams about what could have been. You say that what you want is a polite sort of professional relationship, but I don’t think that’s what you really want. I think that’s the best version you’ve allowed yourself to hope for. What is the relationship with your mother you would have liked, but which you tell yourself you can never have? What would a truly nourishing, life-affirming relationship with her have looked like?

These thwarted hopes might be buried so deep they take some digging to uncover, but it’s worth doing, and worth spending some time with the grief and sadness that might bubble up when you let yourself consider what was lost. It won’t be easy, but then, life-changing things never are. If I’m right and you are a person who often minimizes your needs and feels bad about yourself without knowing why, here’s ground zero of that behaviour; here’s your chance to heal it by feeling the pain you buried a long time ago. As you do this, know that early wounds like this can take a while to work with, but that all feelings are ultimately temporary, so long as you actually feel them. There’s a new dawn on the other side.

Next comes the fun part. Once you’ve allowed yourself to feel what you lost, you’ll have a clearer sense of the true nature and scope of the damage. Now, you get to write and enact your own ending to this story. If this were a fairy tale, what would be the most fitting end for the mother you’ve had? From the sounds of your letter, it might revolve around the forced and false professionalism of your relationship. Since your mother denied your need for love and turned you into a professional acquaintance, or minion, the most fitting end for the story version of her might look like you finally and completely rejecting that role. You must devise this for yourself, in response to the specifics of your story, but I’m imagining a ritual in which you step out of and burn a business suit, or perhaps even a version of the dress-uniforms she smocked for you — the straitjacket she’s made you wear all these years. You might also smash a plaster cast of the hand she proffered (enjoy that one!), then spend the rest of the day indulging in things that make you feel happy and loved, whatever they might be. Indulging whims you don’t typically allow yourself to feel. Alternatively, you could simply write the fairy tale of this relationship, including the most fitting end you can imagine for this distant, professional mother. As you write, let yourself really feel what comes through: the grief of your early years and the glee of vengeance as you write your happy ending.

Because every story needs an ending. At the moment, you’re trying to engage with your mum as an adult, as if the past is in the past, but the confused and hurt kid in you has had no narrative justice. That kid is the one who’s lashing out on the phone, and he or she is not rude and disagreeable — they’re quite rightfully asking not to be ignored. Luckily, you’re a grown-up now, and you can take care of giving them what they need, without involving your mum at all.

Only when you’ve done that will it be possible (and even then, not always) to have a placid, professional sort of relationship with your real-life mother. Know that the problem here is not you. It’s the combination of an inherently bloody, murderous, boundary-destroying relationship with societal expectations of purity, cleanliness, and professionalism. Let’s normalize mothers being humans with dark and sinister sides just like every other human, and children having to metaphorically murder their parents as part of the work of growing up. Accepting the dark theatre of the domestic is the only way to stay sane — and it’s also a whole fucking lot more fun than pastel-toned Instagram feeds.

Love,

Xx Ellie