“I depend on you to take care of everything.”
A mother can’t teach her daughter to navigate life if she takes to bed with a bag of M&M’s every afternoon and shuts the door, or if she’s passed out on the couch when it’s time to get the kids up and ready for school. She may not be available to cook dinner, take care of younger children, or look after herself. Whether she is depressed, alcoholic or addicted, or infantile, when she needs much more mothering than she can give, her daughter finds herself taking on the role of parent, protector, and confidante.
For a young girl, few things are more distressing than detecting that “something’s wrong with Mom.” And with these mothers, there’s definitely something wrong.
Mothers who need mothering frequently withdraw into their own world, abandoning their role as caretaker. They may be at home, but they’re rarely present enough to notice your accomplishments or wipe away your tears after a disappointment. Instead, they spend their days sleeping, complaining, watching TV, drinking; and daughters who’ve known nothing else rarely recognize a poignant truth—that they are essentially unmothered.
The mothers you’ll see in this chapter are MIA—missing in action—they’ve simply checked out, putting whatever energy they have into their own survival, with very little left for tending to their daughters’ well-being.
Most of their daughters grow up feeling tremendous pity for them and believing that it’s their job to “make everything all better”—whatever that takes. Girls who are forced into this kind of role reversal often take pride in being called “so grown-up,” “responsible,” and “wise beyond your years.” But they’ve essentially been robbed of the chance to have a healthy childhood.
As adults, many of them pride themselves on being cool, capable, and able to take charge. They have a lifetime of practice shouldering burdens and taking on responsibilities that belong to others. It’s second nature for them to become the person others turn to for support and encouragement, and they know exactly how to be a vehicle for other people’s survival, success, and happiness. But when it comes to their own needs, they come up empty. They’ve rarely learned to put themselves, their dreams, and their own joy at the center of their lives. What they’ve mastered instead is the all-consuming art of being a caretaker.
Telltale Signs That You Grew Up
as a “Little Adult”
It’s often so difficult for adult daughters to step back and see how they were put into the adult helper role. To help you recognize if this dynamic echoes your experience, I’ve created a pair of checklists to help you identify how mothering your mother shaped and influenced a significant part of your life.
When you were a child did you:
• Believe that your most important job in life was to solve your mother’s problems or ease her pain—no matter what the cost to you?
• Ignore your own feelings and pay attention only to what she wanted and how she felt?
• Protect her from the consequences of her behavior?
• Lie or cover up for her?
• Defend her when anyone said anything bad about her?
• Think that your good feelings about yourself depended on her approval?
• Have to keep her behavior secret from your friends?
As an adult, do these statements ring true for you:
• I will do anything to avoid upsetting my mother, and the other adults in my life.
• I can’t stand it if I feel I’ve let anyone down.
• I am a perfectionist, and I blame myself for everything that goes wrong.
• I’m the only person I can really count on. I have to do things myself.
• People like me not for myself but for what I can do for them.
• I have to be strong all the time. If I need anything or ask for help, it means I’m weak.
• I should be able to solve every problem.
• When everyone else is taken care of, I can finally have what I want.
• I feel angry, unappreciated, and used much of the time, but I push these feelings deep inside myself.
The cost of growing up as a “little adult” who never had the freedom to be a child is high. If your entire value as a child came from being a caretaker, you never were able to develop your individual self, enjoy the freedom of imaginative play, or learn to let down your guard and be spontaneous. There was little time or support for asking “What can I be?” or trying on different identities on your way to finding a satisfying path of your own. Instead, you trained your focus on your mother, becoming an expert in her needs rather than your own, and vigilantly trying to anticipate difficulties and step in to resolve them.
But there is a cruel twist built into the role-reversal dynamic: It’s always a setup for failure. A young child doesn’t have the power to solve her mother’s problems—only her mother can do that. Even the biggest smile or sacrifice a child can offer can’t change Mom. But the daughter feels compelled to try. And when her efforts fall short, she can’t help feeling inadequate and ashamed. Young daughters deal with those feelings by resolving that when they’re grown, they’ll “get it right,” and as adults, they work tirelessly to do just that. They do too much for other people, give too much, help too much. It’s what psychologists call a repetition compulsion: the need to repeat old behavioral patterns with the hope of getting different results in the present than you got in the past.
When that compulsion drives you, your life can look like an endless series of burdens to be lifted from others, a treadmill of problems to be solved. Joy, lightheartedness, and fun go missing. And it becomes difficult to distinguish love from pity, or to believe that love relationships can be reciprocal—free of the need to rescue.
Allison: Falling for “Fixer-Uppers”
Allison, a willowy forty-four-year-old yoga instructor with her own studio, told me she had long suffered from depression, and she wondered if she’d ever be able to have a satisfying, loving relationship with a partner. She had a history of getting involved with men she had to take care of, and she made her first appointment with me fresh from a fight with her most recent partner, Tom, the man she’d been living with for eight months. I asked her to tell me about what happened.
ALLISON: “You know how they say opposites attract? I guess that’s what happened to me. I’ve always been so careful, figuring out the grand plan, doing things by the book, being the good girl. So when I met Tom, it was like, ‘Wow. Life can be way more fun than this.’ He was working part-time as a waiter, doing photography the rest of the time, and the tiny place he was living in was covered with these photos he’d blown up and painted. He didn’t have any money, and he didn’t care. He was so creative. I’d never met anyone like him—kind of a bad boy on a motorcycle. I really fell for him, and I was in awe of his talent and all that freedom he had. His friends were arty and wild—it was a whole different world for me.
“We started living together, at my place, since there was no room for anything in his, and it was great at first. He filled up the house with his photos, and sometimes there would be a party going on when I got home from the studio. I admired the way he just worked a few days a week so he could stay true to his art, and I knew he could do so much better if he had fancier equipment. So I got it for him. I’ve never seen him so happy, and I got really excited for him. I really thought that his work could take off and he could be a top-flight photographer.”
SUSAN: “Okay, let’s see. You move him into your house, he’s throwing parties there, he only works a few days a week, and you’re buying him all this fancy equipment. I can imagine how that worked out.”
ALLISON: “Yeah, not so great. . . . All the stuff I bought was like new toys for him, and after a few months he lost interest. He didn’t even pretend to look for photography work. I came home early the other day and he was smoking pot with all the windows open and watching TV, like he does when he knows I’m going to be out. His camera was right next to a full ashtray, sitting on a sticky table. He just can’t get motivated to take the next step. That’s what the fight was about. He yelled at me and said, ‘Okay, fine! I’ll just go wait tables again.’ I feel so ripped off and disappointed! Tom is so damn dependent.
“I feel like I married my mother. We’re not married, but you know what I mean. He’s just like her. I always get involved with men I want to nurture and save. Not the together guys, but the ones who have, you know, ‘potential’ ”—she made quote marks around the word with her fingers—“and just ‘need to be loved.’
“That’s just the way I am. I’ve always been the together one. My mother said I was an old soul, but it wasn’t true. I guess I had to grow up fast because of my family. My mother leaned on me a lot when I was a kid.”
I asked Allison to tell me more about the way she’d grown up, and as she did, it became clear how early she had learned the caretaking behavior that was shaping her life with Tom.
ALLISON: “My mother was a stay-at-home mom. My dad had a terrible temper, and they fought whenever they were together. It saved us that he was always away on business. I was raised to lie to my dad—there was always lying and deceit to keep his temper at bay, and walking on eggshells to keep him from exploding. My mom thought he was sleeping around, and he probably was. She hated him for that. But she was so helpless. She wanted to leave him, but she was afraid she couldn’t make it on her own with me and my little brother and sister. So she stayed. And I heard all about it. I realize now I was exposed to too much information at a very early age.”
SUSAN: “It sure sounds that way. You were supposed to be out with your friends having fun. What were you supposed to do with all that information?”
ALLISON: “I don’t know. And even today, she asks me if she should get a divorce. Then she told me she was only staying with him because of us, so it was our fault. I don’t know how many times I’ve said, ‘Just leave him!’ But I’ve given up. Nothing’s ever going to change. Her kids are grown up now, but she’s still paralyzed. She just can’t bring herself to do anything but complain. I’m so frustrated I want to scream, but it hurts so much to see her suffer. I still feel like I have to cheer her up and somehow patch things together. When I was a kid, if anything was going to happen to keep us going and feeling even a little bit like a family, I had to do it myself. Cook. Clean. Buy the Christmas tree and remember the kids’ birthday presents. I did everything. Just like with Tom. God, Susan, I’m so tired of doing everything. . . . When is somebody going to take care of me?”
At that point, Allison broke into tears and cried for a few moments, and as she wiped her eyes, she softly said, “I’m sorry.” Like so many women, Allison found it necessary to apologize for crying, as if she’d done something wrong.
I told Allison that she had every right to cry and be upset. The guy she fell for turned out to be needy and irresponsible. And there was a lot of grieving to do for the girl she’d been, who was asked to take on the role of a mini adult and take care of not only her mother, but sometimes a whole household. That’s a pretty staggering load to place on the very narrow shoulders of an eight- or ten-year-old who lives with the knowledge that if she wants to complain or exult or just be eight, there’s no one at home to turn to.
Allison didn’t linger in her sadness, though. She quickly composed herself and, as she had done all her life, did her best to absolve her mother of responsibility.
ALLISON: “To be fair, Susan, it wasn’t her fault. She really did have a terrible marriage and a terrible life. She was so sad so much of the time. I hated to see her like that.”
It was only natural for Allison to turn once more to her deep well of sympathy and lavish it on her mother one more time.
Depression Doesn’t Erase Her Responsibility to You
Though I didn’t see Allison’s mother, Joanna, I think it’s reasonable to believe that she was beset by the demon of depression. In fact, I don’t think it’s going too far to say that most mothers who need mothering are beset by the same demon. Depression exhausts and paralyzes them, decimating their ability to nurture, or guide, or comfort. There may be moments—even short, good periods in their lives—when they appear to be available and caring, but their need to be taken care of overwhelms everything else.
These mothers are caught in a dark spiral, their sense of possibility dimmed by their illness. Allison, like so many daughters, grew up with her mother’s hopelessness, steady as a heartbeat, creating a heavy atmosphere of pity and sadness with words like:
• Life is terrible.
• I wish I’d never been born.
• What have I done with my life?
• Why did I marry your father?
• I don’t know what to do. I’ve screwed up my life.
Depression robs these mothers of themselves and distorts their decision making. Their condition is the result of some combination of genetic factors, physiological factors, and unhappy life circumstances. A depressed mother is ill, and she’s suffering.
However, she is an adult, and she’s responsible for taking steps to change her situation and improve her life. That’s true for all adults. It’s not a suggestion, it’s a mandate for a mother to help herself so she can adequately care for her children. Even if, like Joanna, she is consumed by her own fears.
The resources for treating depression have improved enormously over the past several decades. Antidepressants have been effective for vast numbers of people, and there are many alternatives for addressing this debilitating condition. But so many mothers like Joanna, who had all the marks of being severely depressed, often back away from getting help and surrender to the victim role.
At the end of our first session, Allison told me that her mother resisted every suggestion that she seek treatment.
ALLISON: “I’ve tried, Susan. I just tell her, ‘You know, Mom, there are people out there who can help you. Your doctor, a counselor.’ But she won’t even consider it. She fights me! ‘How can you say that? I’m not the one with the problem. I haven’t done anything wrong—it’s your father. Why should I get help? I’m not crazy. Your father needs to stop yelling, that’s all. I’m not the one who needs counseling.’ ”
In cogent moments, a depressed mother may find enough energy to notice her daughter and offer a feeble “You’re so cute” or “You’re so sweet.” But that doesn’t make up for the lack of basic, core validation and bonding that all daughters need so much. Instead what the daughter hears most often is: “You’re so wonderful for helping me.” Not for being who she is, with all her uniqueness and value.
I have great compassion for mothers living with the heavy darkness of depression. But they are still accountable for the care of their young daughters. And I believe they also need to acknowledge the responsibility they bear for the pain they cause when abdicating their role causes patterns of caretaking to take hold in their daughters’ lives.
There was a clear line from the way Allison rescued her mother and Allison’s impulse to “adopt” Tom. The pleasure she got from seeing him light up at her gifts led her to believe that now she was at least partially making up for her childhood inability to save her mother. It was the repetition compulsion at work, but as I told Allison, together we would break the cycle so she could finally focus on what she needed and wanted.
A LEGACY OF DEPRESSION ISN’T DOOM
I want to assure you that if you struggle with depression, as so many daughters of depressed mothers do, you’re not doomed to handle it the way your mother did. That was one of Allison’s great concerns. “I have to admit that sometimes I feel like I caught the depression bug,” she told me. “I look at my life and my relationships and sometimes I feel like giving up. I’ve really had trouble with depression. I don’t want to become like my mother.”
Daughters who’ve grown up with depressed mothers not only often have a propensity toward the condition in their genes and brain chemistry, but also often battle the blows to self-worth and self-esteem that come with growing up unmothered.
But as I told Allison, there’s a huge difference between you and your mother. You’re not slipping into the victim role and saying, “Poor me.” You are trying to change.
Jody: Living with a Mother’s Drinking,
Drug Abuse, and Depression
Role reversal and its damaging effects are pronounced when mothers are addicted to alcohol or drugs. Chaos and crisis are part of an addicted mother’s everyday life, and for a daughter, that means even the quietest day has the potential for explosive drama. Jody contacted me by e-mail after a family gathering spun out of control.
FROM JODY’S NOTE: “Dr. Forward, I need to see you. I need to separate from my alcoholic mother, who’s always been controlling and critical. I’ve had it with her. . . . I have lived to please her for thirty-two years and I can’t do it anymore. . . . Having her in my life is hurting my marriage and it’s making me miserable. HELP!”
At our first session, Jody filled me in on what prompted her to contact me. An athletic-looking blonde, she grew up an only child, was thirty-eight and married, and taught special needs children at an elementary school.
JODY: “It was just a week ago, Thanksgiving in fact, that finally did it. Mom ruined everything. I have lots to be thankful for, a great husband and a beautiful new baby, and things should be wonderful. But they never are with Mom around, and this was the final straw. We were watching the Macy’s parade and then football, eating and playing with the baby. But out of the corner of my eye I was watching Mom reach for the wine, counting the glasses she had. I would walk by and move the bottle—it’s an old habit—but my brother-in-law would refill her glass. I could’ve killed him.
“Mom was starting to get loud and a little slurry. She sat down next to my aunt and knocked over her glass of red wine. They mopped up everything, and my aunt grabbed Mom’s glass and said, ‘Margaret, I think you’ve had enough.’
“Mom was furious. ‘You want to know why I drink so much?’ she yelled. ‘I’ll tell you why I drink. This is why I drink.’ She pointed at me. As if it was my fault! Then she said, ‘Selfish, know-it-all girl with that counseling degree. That’s a joke. She’s sick, sick in the head.’
“It was just unbelievable. I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me. That was it for me. Something has to change. I hate her drinking, her pill popping. She takes pills to go to sleep, pills to wake up. And she’s so selfish and depressed. . . .”
Jody was overflowing with anger, and I knew she needed to vent and have me hear her.
JODY: “You’d think I’d be used to it by now. I don’t remember when she was anything but a drunk. So many times when I needed her she was too drunk to be there for me. She moved me from home to home and dated so many men, then brought them into my life and acted like they would be a dad to me and we would be a real family. She left me alone a lot to work, date, or just do her own thing. And if she was home, she was drinking or drunk or passed out.”
Jody’s mother, Margaret, was almost never available for her daughter, and over several sessions, Jody gave many examples of how she’d been neglected, and what a remarkable amount of responsibility and stress she’d assumed so young.
JODY: “I remember how I’d wait for her to come home from work when I was in fourth grade or so. I’d have dinner ready for her, and she’d tell me about work. She didn’t get along with her boss. I was so afraid she’d lose her job, and then what would we do? But she didn’t seem to worry about anything. As soon as we were done eating, she’d go to her room with the newspaper and prop herself up on the bed with the TV on. She had a bottle of Scotch on the nightstand, and her glass, and she’d ‘read’ and sip her drink. Usually she wouldn’t even take her shoes off. She’d fall asleep with the TV blaring, and a lit cigarette in her hand. I’d go in and take the cigarette before it burned anything. Then I’d cover her up and dump out the rest of the bottle, for all the good that ever did.
“I’d go wash the dishes and turn on the TV in the living room so I could have some company doing my homework. It was so lonely, Susan. If it wasn’t for my friends at school, I would’ve been the loneliest kid in the world. I guess I was just supposed to raise myself. But I prayed a lot, and it helped me feel closer to God.”
Daughters of addicted mothers can’t tell friends and teachers what’s going on at home. When they go to friends’ houses and see that everyone doesn’t live the way they do, they realize there’s one more secret to keep, and they live with a sense of shame, a sense of being alien or different, even as they become masters of putting on a good front.
Lured by Drugs, Alcohol—and Helping
All the way through junior high, Jody took care not to call attention to herself except with decent grades and neat outfits that she carefully washed and pressed. But in high school, as her friends were negotiating curfews and dating restrictions, she realized that there was an “advantage” to being unsupervised. She could do anything she wanted, and her mother was generally too out of it to say a thing. There was little in the way of meaningful rules, discipline, or boundaries. Her mother didn’t raise an eyebrow when young men in their twenties showed up at the door to pick up teenaged Jody. Often Margaret wasn’t even home.
Jody began experimenting with drugs and alcohol on her own when she was in her early teens, pouring drinks and occasionally taking pills from her mother’s purse. There is a huge danger of children of alcoholics becoming alcoholics themselves—studies say the odds can be as high as 50 percent. But fortunately Jody was able to pull herself back from danger.
JODY: “Yeah, I turned to alcohol to cope. I didn’t become an alcoholic by the grace of God and my own realization that I was in trouble. I haven’t had more than an occasional glass of wine for more than fifteen years.”
Jody credits a teacher in her junior year of high school with helping her begin to turn her life around.
JODY: “I loved my psychology class and the way we got to talk about real stuff in people’s lives. It was the only class I did well in, and sometimes I’d go by at lunch and talk to the teacher. She thought I was smart, and she told me I should study psychology in college. It was the first time I could even imagine going to college. She said she and the school counselor would even help me apply for scholarships and financial aid. You don’t know what it meant to have someone who believed in me. She got me into volunteering with special needs kids, and it opened a whole new world for me. I loved the kids, and I could just calm down and have something to do besides party. It made me feel so good about myself.”
I wasn’t surprised that Jody had been so drawn to that field. Adult daughters of alcoholics and addicts are quite likely to become caretakers by profession. They often gravitate to careers in medicine, especially nursing, as well as social work and counseling—it’s a very adaptive way to use their drive to take care of other people.
I could hear the sense of failure that fuels the repetition compulsion when Jody told me: “I had no one else but my mom growing up, so I had to fix her to make her happier. And she never really was. I felt sad in my heart, like it was always hurting.” I’m certain that Jody’s gift for teaching, and the satisfaction she gets from her students, helped assuage that sadness, and I’m sure it was helping quiet the unconscious sense that she’d let her mother down. She’d built a workable life for herself.
But her mother was still acting up, still drinking. And now, helped by her outrage at Margaret’s recent behavior and her concern for her new baby, she was finally coming to terms with the fact that it wasn’t her responsibility at all to fix her mother.
Finding the Courage to Fix Your Life, Not Hers
In all those years of caretaking and neglect, Jody had felt a lot of anger, she told me, “but I was never allowed to be angry for long. We always had to make up quickly, no matter what she pulled. Because our family was just the two of us. And I had to do whatever it took to keep us from sinking.”
But Jody had a family of her own to think of now, and as Margaret became progressively irresponsible, Jody was beginning to let her long-simmering anger out, and to see her mother in a more objective light.
JODY: “There’s a drawer full of unpaid bills in the kitchen, and I think I saw a warning that the electricity was going to be turned off. When she calls, she makes her voice sound all depressed, expecting me to run right over. One of the first things she said when I told her I was getting my master’s in counseling was, ‘Oh good! Now you can fix me!’
“Well, guess what? I’ve finally had enough. I’ve tried everything I can think of to live my life and still remain in contact with her and it doesn’t work. She can’t stop saying hurtful things. She won’t stop drinking. What I want now more than anything is to live my own life, for her to leave me alone. She can do whatever she wants—stay in her room, drink, get depressed. I don’t care! I just want her out of my life. . . . But . . . how can I just abandon her? She’ll die, and then how can I handle the guilt?”
Jody stared into her lap, looking almost physically deflated.
SUSAN: “You have a big responsibility, Jody—to yourself. You’ve done everything you can for your mother, and from what I can see, she will not do anything for herself.”
I asked Jody if she’d talked to her mother about getting help—AA or working with an addiction specialist.
JODY: “Oh, according to her she’s ‘not an alcoholic.’ She somehow still has her job, she’s not out on the street yet, and I guess that means she doesn’t have a drinking problem. It’s always everybody else’s fault. She drinks because of me. Right.”
Alcoholics like Margaret typically project the blame for their drinking onto whatever seems convenient, I told Jody—the people who are closest to them, world events, the weather. They need just the slightest excuse.
JODY: “I keep telling myself all that, Susan, and they tell me that in Al-Anon. But even when I’m the most furious with her, I feel like she’s my . . . my child. And how do I abandon my child?”
Even with all the clarity that they may get from their adult perspective, many daughters have tremendous ambivalence about breaking off from a mother who has essentially morphed into a helpless and needy child. Their feeling of obligation to her is so ancient and unquestioned that it can pierce their anger and their healthy self-protective urges in an instant. Breaking away from all that requires unlearning layers of old responses and setting priorities that have nothing to do with getting sucked into your mother’s disasters and depression.
For Jody, the obvious priority was her baby, a real child who needed her and who was actually helpless and dependent. I knew how committed she was to being a strong and healthy mother, and how much she wanted to be there for her daughter in a way that her mother couldn’t be there for her. But it takes a lot of physical and emotional energy to be a good mother, and emotional energy supplies aren’t infinite. If you have children, you can’t keep dissipating your emotional resources by going back to rescue your mother. You have a responsibility to yourself, your partner if you have one, and to the children. Your mother has to take responsibility for herself.
When addiction is in the picture, the one certainty is that the addict’s substance of choice will take increasing amounts of her attention and resources, whether the “substance” is alcohol, prescription or illegal drugs, food, gambling, or sex. Pulling away from her is the only way to transform the effects her condition has had on you—and that requires disengaging from the behaviors you’ve been taught: the secret-keeping, the rescuing, the hypervigilance. You’ll have to stop doing the kinds of things you take for granted, as Jody did, counting how many glasses of wine your mother has been drinking, for instance, instead of playing with your baby. It’s hard work, but it’s the only way to keep from passing all the pain of your childhood on to a new generation—or continuing to carry it inside.
You Lost Your Childhood—and It Still Hurts
A daughter like Jody or Allison does her best to make her life seem and feel “normal” when she’s young, covering up the evidence of her mother’s depression, drinking, drug abuse, or neglect. She cares for her siblings. She cooks, she cleans. If her mother’s husband or boyfriend turns violent, she’s the one who puts the antibacterial cream on her mother’s wounds or calls the police. She carries a horrendously heavy emotional load.
If you are a woman who grew up with a mother who abdicated her maternal role, you may have taken a great deal of satisfaction from being needed. Some of that behavior looks noble on the surface, but you’ve paid dearly for it. You got cheated out of a childhood. You have a right to be both sad and angry about that.