My mother was not invited to my wedding
I am finally admitting to myself how much my mother has hurt me
Like a lot of people my relationship with my mother is complex. When it was good it was great. We went on a girls holiday to Spain to celebrate the end of my exams and we would often sit together in the evenings and watch criminal minds. When it was bad it was suffocating and toxic. While I lived at home I felt stunted. Living in a remote part of the countryside meant that I had to rely on my mother for everything, even if I wanted to get a job I would still have to ask for lifts. I felt trapped when I was home. I was hardly ever allowed to hang out with my friends outside of school unless I could find my own way to and from their house, and my friends rarely wanted to come over because they could sense the tension that was in my home.
Making mistakes around the house was not acceptable. It is understandable to get frustrated when tasks are not completed properly but at the same time I was a child learning a new skill, was there a need for insults? There was rarely overt shouting but I remember having my intelligence questioned, a finger tapping against my forehead to see if it was hollow, a gesture that I cannot imagine doing to my own children.
“All of my pain and all your excuses
I was a kid but I wasn’t clueless,
someone who loves you wouldn’t do this’
Family line - Conan Gray
The control that was exerted over me was like a Chinese handcuffs, the harder I tried to pull away the stronger it became. At the first sign of independence she tightened the reins.
At 8 years old I had mistaken how far you could see from the kitchen window. The rule for playing outside when I was younger was to stay in eyesight of the kitchen or go to the playground, with permission of course. There was a flat area that my friends and I used to play but just a bit further there was a dip with the perfect climbing tree and at 8 years old it seemed like the most fun thing to do ever.
Big mistake.
I had forgotten that the specific tree we were climbing was not visible from the kitchen. The minute that I was not visible from the kitchen window all hell broke loose. Despite the fact that I was probably only three to five meters further than I was meant to be, just the down a slight hill where I would play often, it was far enough for my mother to panic. Once my mother found me she yelled at me in front of all my friends saying that she had been searching for me for so long and had almost gone down to the police station to report me missing. The rest of the summer I spent indoors, partially because I was grounded and partially because I could not face my friends after that.
At 16 years old I was at a friends after prom party, a party that took so much convincing for me go to. My mother had to contact multiple parents to make sure that it was legit and make me promise that I would contact her frequently throughout the night. At first I had kept my promise and I had messaged several times however as any 16 year old would have done I got distracted by how much fun I was having.
Big mistake.
The next time I remembered to check my phone I had 32 missed calls. I can still remember how my heart dropped to my stomach, the dread I felt knowing what was awaiting for me when I picked up the next call. I felt like I was 8 years old all over again, getting yelled at in front of my friends, and in a way I was. The same words were told to me just in a different manner and I had to ask the friend that I had went with if we could go home after only being there for two hours.
A few weeks after I turned 18 I managed to move out and by 19 I was financially independent. Both of those things did not stop my mother from trying to stay in my life. Despite our relationship being strained at best, my mother still expected frequent contact with me, to be kept up to date with every minute detail. When I did not deliver all hell broke loose.
It started with phone calls again. This time I purposefully did not answer, I would just let my phone ring. However my stubbornness came from my mothers side, the less I answered the more she called. There were times where I had to put my phone on airplane mode as my phone was over-heating due to the sheer volume of calls it was receiving. I was busy with my life, working during the day and hanging out with friends in the evening. When I explained that I did not want to call when I was in the middle of these things it was met with insults in attempts to wear me down and do what was expected of me. Instead I became more rooted in my place, having the physical distance made it easier to follow through with my boundaries.
Yet they still managed to be broken.
The phone calls continued but it was not just to my personal phone anymore, she had managed to find out the work phone number. Doing shift work at a restaurant meant that I had to explain to everyone why they should not tell my mother any details about me in case we had been rota-ed to work together. Most were understanding but there were a few who could not wrap their head around why I was avoiding talking to her. This meant that they would tell her I was around and attempt to get me to talk to her, believing that whatever was going on could be fixed. Seeing that I had a shift with these people started to fill me with anxiety, I was having to mentally prepare myself to have to deal with my family issues at work, something most people are able to avoid.
The first major incident after becoming independent was having my mother travel a few hours to visit me unsolicited at my place of work. I was 16 and 8 years old again, being told off for not following the rules. During this embarrassing scolding at work I had discovered that after breaking up with my ex they had briefly spied on me. Unknown to me, my ex had walked past the restaurant enough times to notice my work pattern, letting my mother know when I would be working and that is how she managed to call while I was on shift. My mother had been fully aware of the break up and still kept in contact with my ex as a way to try to get to me.
Once she had left I went into the stock room and sobbed. What could I do to end the control? I was living by myself, paying my own bills but it was not enough.
Did you know that you can request phone logs from your phone provider? I had never thought about it too much but I guess I assumed that only the police or lawyers could do that because the thought that my mother would do that had never crossed my mind.
Have you ever had your manager call you on the weekend to let you know your mother called them? Have you ever had your friends text you in a panic because your mother made them think that something had happened to you? Walking into a work the following Monday was horrible, bearing your rocky relationship to your manager at a job you have had less than two months is not a pleasant experience. Despite being financially independent and having the means, I had not bothered to change my phone provider as I liked my number and saved some extra money every month had been a bonus. The money I had saved was not worth the trouble however. This was the last boundary that I let my mother cross as this action had not just affected me but it had also affected the privacy of many people.
For the majority of 2023 I went no contact with my parents. This was the toughest decision I had ever made, I had just cut off my small support system while living in a city I was still getting to grips with. While I was no contact I became pregnant with my eldest daughter. During this time I wished that I had a kind supportive mother to guide me through this new and daunting experience. Going through pregnancy without a parent who could be around is painful and difficult. It felt lonely not having my mum there to reassure me that everything was going to be okay. At times I was tempted to reach out in hopes that we could bond over motherhood. However I knew that if I were to let her back in so quickly things would never change.
A month before I was due we got back in contact. The way we got back in contact was not how I had planned but throughout the pregnancy I was constantly debating what to do with the relationship. Should I limit my contact indefinitely? The peace was beneficial but mentally I was still not in a great headspace, the fact that nothing had been properly discussed and no genuine apologies had been said made it hard for me to move on. What about my child, should she be deprived of a relationship with a grandparent? Eventually we got back in contact and slowly started talking again.
The first time that we had met up since going no contact was about two months after my daughters birth and it was as though no time had passed. Granted everyone was distracted with the fact that there was a new member of the family and there were a few questions about what I had been up to in the last few months but there were no direct comments or questions regarding the lack of contact. Even until today we have not spoken in person about what happened. The closest that we came was there was a time not long after we regained contact that I was asked if we could talk about it but with the hormones and post-natal depression it was not a conversation that I could have handled at the time.
We are still not in frequent contact, we can go weeks without messages and months without seeing each other. Although this is better for me mentally and has given me the space to process events in my childhood, it has not done anything to help mend the relationship. As a result when my husband and I started to plan our wedding we did not tell my mother about it. We chose to do a micro wedding, partially due to the budget but also so that it would be easier to explain why she never got an invite to the ceremony. After the wedding and the honeymoon, we made plans to meet up with my mother, the plan was that we were going to go to a nice restaurant, tell her there that we got married and celebrate over lunch.
Except she never came.
A few days prior I checked in with her to make sure that everything was still going ahead when I had found out that she had got the date wrong. In attempts to salvage the situation, I told her the importance of the meal to give her a chance to try to rearrange things, a chance to prove to me that I matter and that she is trying. Instead I got a message saying that she would have to cancel and celebrate another time. My mother had now managed to control when we would celebrate my wedding. It has now been a month since I have gotten married and there is still no new date in the calendar and I have been debating with myself if it is even worth putting one in.
“You can throw a party full of everyone you know,
And not invite your family because they never showed you love,
You don’t have to be sorry for leaving and growing up”
Matilda - Harry styles
Now that I am a parent myself I struggle to understand my mother’s actions even more. I can no longer justify the harsh words and the excessive control that was shown to me throughout my childhood. The direction that our relationship will be going in is not fully decided yet, but after the lack of effort shown to celebrate my wedding I am considering putting even more distance between us.
Everything you wrote was really thought out. You’re definitely gonna be a great mother going off that fact alone.
If you haven't read it, I'd recommend "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents." There are way too many people in the world that can relate to what you're going through, myself and my wife included. It's a huge problem.