how to appropriately distance myself?

July 25, 2015 7:11 PM

hi there, since my sister & brother repatriated themselves for education and work purposes, my mother has suddenly begun calling several times per week and asking me to spend time with her frequently- essentially trying to become my mother and confidante after years of completely neglecting our relationship.

while my siblings were around and living with our parents, my mother would call every 2-3 weeks or so, and i’d see her once per month for lunch or grocery shopping. the thing is, while i work professionally and support myself my mom still pays my $50 phone bill and $80 car insurance bill, and has me under her dental insurance, and will buy me groceries once per month. clearly, not entirely absent from my life financially, but entirely gone and the link broken emotionally.

i need to know how to turn down her advances and set boundaries with her increasingly guilt-tripping attempts at having a relationship, while still respecting the fact that she helps me out financially. i feel like she’s begun using her financial help as a way to make me feel obligted to have a reltionship that i can’t allow to form because she will abandon me emotionally the moment my siblings return.

i’m very grateful for all of her help, but the thing is, she’s been emotionally absent and uncaring in our relationship for many, many years. the emotional absense has and still does cause me a lot of pain and general emotional turbulence, though, i never let her see it. i know my mother, and i know that the moment one of my siblings comes back home i’ll cease to exist for her again, and i’m not going to let that happen.

posted by nephilim. to Human Relations (20 answers total)

This thread may help you figure out what to do.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 7:14 PM on July 25, 2015

You need to pay all your bills, I think. If your Mom has control over your finances, she is going to be able to have reasons to contact and stay in touch with you. Extracting yourself in a way that allows you to keep taking her money is going to be very difficult.
posted by xingcat at 7:14 PM on July 25, 2015 [42 favorites]

If your mother is so abusive that you don't want to have a relationship with her, then don't have a relationship. Having her pay your bills is having a relationship. You don't get to dictate that Mom pays your bills but only calls when it suits you.
posted by girl flaneur at 7:25 PM on July 25, 2015 [26 favorites]

Start by paying your own bills. Then you can navigate the rest of the relationship on a more equal basis.
posted by koahiatamadl at 7:26 PM on July 25, 2015 [8 favorites]

There are probably a dozen adages along the lines of, 'yee who holds the purse strings makes the rules,' and this situation applies. I don't know how old you are, but if you're over 25 you should be financially independent of your parents. I know broke young professionals who make it work. Living within your means is something you need to learn how to do as an adult. If that means having a roommate or eating rice and beans or taking a second job, so be it. I went without any extras for years in my early 20's. It wasn't until now in my late 20's that I began to incorporate the frills and extras, because I can afford to now. Whatever luxuries and extras you're relying on her to support, they need to go. If she's an emotionally unfair mother, and you are only comfortable with an established distance between the two of you, then it's time to wean yourself. Suckling from your mother but not wanting to give her any of the attention she craves is kind of shady on your behalf, even if she's inept.
posted by Avosunspin at 7:27 PM on July 25, 2015

Response by poster: i'm 22, just graduated.
posted by nephilim. at 7:31 PM on July 25, 2015

Have you ever expressed to her that her behavior hurts? "When X and X are around, you're nowhere to be seen. When they are gone, you cling to me. I wish you were more consistent with me and I felt valued as your child all of the time, not just when you're lonely. It hurts when I feel like I'm the last one picked."

You may need extensive joint therapy to heal old wounds and resentments, but if you still really need your mother's financial support, then you're just going to have to work on your relationship.
posted by Avosunspin at 7:35 PM on July 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

I should say that nothing in your description actually suggests that your mother is abusive, but if you think she is, then you need to cut the money strings. 22 years old is old enough to pay your own bills.

To me, it sounds as if you do want to have a closer relationship with your mother, but you are afraid of getting hurt. Why not talk with your Mom about this rather than distancing yourself? There are many good (or at least understandable) reasons why your mom might be focusing more attention on your siblings.

It is popular on this site to stress the importance of boundaries, and many people applaud those who go "no contact" with their family. While one should always respect oneself, very often the costs of these strategies are ignored. Imperfect relationships are often better than no relationship at all. Maybe it would be good to open yourself up to your Mother rather than distancing yourself even though in doing so, you risk hurt.
posted by girl flaneur at 7:47 PM on July 25, 2015 [8 favorites]

Response by poster: i never used the word abusive, my mother is not and has never been abusive, i think you're misreading my use of the word 'absence' as the word 'abusive'. the dynamic is really complicated, but i'm not considering cutting all ties, only setting boundaries based on what i know of my family.
posted by nephilim. at 7:52 PM on July 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

You want to separate emotionally from your mother. That's natural and good and normal, actually.

The thing is, you can't take the financial help you're taking from your mother and dictate the terms of your relationship with her. Not because this isn't cosmically right or because you're a bad person or because you owe your mother, it's because you know that your mother expects some active control over you because you're accepting her money. This is who she is.

Don't take her money anymore if you don't want her to have any say over you, or any excuse to lecture you or be overly involved in your life. If you have to take her money in order to survive, then you have to accept how she is, refuse to engage with her guilt trips by being relentlessly pleasant and emotionally opaque, and all the while plan how you're going to work it so that you can start making more money as quickly as possible or scale down your lifestyle.

I'd also like you to consider that the kind of break you want from your mother could be temporary. You might need to push her away now in order to stand on your own two feet completely. That's okay. But bear in mind that you're not carved in stone at 22 and you may grow to view your mother differently over time.

Good luck.
posted by TryTheTilapia at 8:15 PM on July 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

Pay your own bills. Problem solved.
posted by WalkerWestridge at 8:16 PM on July 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

Obviously, I don't know the dynamics, but just as an outside opinion, calling every 2-3 weeks or so and visiting once a month is well within the range of normal contact for a parent and grown child who isn't living at home. I would be careful not to compare how much time/attention she was paying to siblings living with her versus you not living with her. My brother currently lives 20 minutes from my parents--I'm much farther away. He gets probably 100x more parental attention, but that's a reflection of proximity, not emotional closeness.

Again, you 100 percent know your own family's dynamic, and I don't want to question it. If you sense a emotional disconnect between you and your mother than you don't think your siblings have, that's significant.
posted by whitewall at 9:40 PM on July 25, 2015 [9 favorites]

The question is how to enforce boundaries with the mother, not cut the mother out of the OP's life completely while still having her pay the bills. If the level of relationship they had before the escalation of calling, etc. was acceptable and bearable -- it makes ZERO sense that because the mother pays for some things, she gets to dictate exactly how their relationship works, that she can call all the time and guilt trip when the OP finds it, at a guess, emotionally exhausting? And painful? And difficult? to be there and talk like everything has always been fine, when clearly, it has not been. The investment of money does not magically grant the money investor special authority over how the relationship works. The OP is allowed to be exhausted and overburdened by this amount of attention. Boundaries are not an unreasonable thing to want.

Many of Captain Awkward's family-related advice posts contain some element of boundary-pushing parents, sometimes to extremes (more extreme than your situation, or so it sounds like). The big element is making active offers of calls/meetings on your own terms, and keeping them. So picking a schedule that more closely resembles the one you had before, setting a specific time when you will call your mom and trying to stick it out for a set duration -- that kind of thing. Of course it would be ideal to have her not pay those things for you at all, but somehow, I have the narrowest suspicion you may have thought about that and dismissed it for reasons you didn't know you would have to explain for this post. Things like it might be seen by her as even more ungracious to reject her help, and would in fact be essentially cutting all excuses to have a relationship off, which you don't seem to necessarily want.
posted by automatic cabinet at 9:44 PM on July 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

So is the problem that she's going to distance herself from you when her favorite children return or whatever?

Seems to me that you might be able to hang out with her more frequently and still avoid this. If you tell yourself it's going to happen, and you don't, like, emotionally bond with her, it might not hurt when she eventually distances herself from you again.

I don't think that's necessarily what's best for you. But it might accomplish what you're asking.

BTW, if you give more insight with specifically the issues with her are and what boundaries you need, we may be able to offer you better advice. Not all boundaries are the same! So how you create and maintain them can also vary.
posted by J. Wilson at 10:30 PM on July 25, 2015

Response by poster: well, i'm the youngest and was always the trouble child growing up. Understandably, as a result, my mother never really understood how to bond with me, so she didn't really try... mainly because around the time i became a teenager, my parents went through a divorce, and my dad couldn't cope and took off for just one year, came back a year later and resumed supporting my mother and i from afar . understandably, my mom had trouble coping with a crumbling marriage, all but one of her kids leaving the nest, her abusive childhood, etc., and fell into a depression and really kind of just ignored me emotionally throughout my pre-teen and teenage years.
my siblings were already adults and had left home by the time i was a teenager and all of this had happened, hence, their tighter bond. when i turned 18 and was accepted into a local college my mom gave me the boot, and told me in these exact words: "you are a guest in this house", made it very clear i had three weeks to get my things and find myself a room to rent somewhere other than her home. yes, i was very troubled back then, but i had always been a good kid, never drank or did drugs, never violent, didn't sleep around or hang out with the wrong crowd, etc. i was very emotionally troubled back then and my mom, for her own troubled reasons, could not handle it. so, i have worked, struggled tooth and nail to support myself through college while my older sibs got the full ride from my mother. room & board, free food, etc., come and go as they please, new cars whenever they crash the old one, whatever. i just bought myself my first car.
through all of this time, living 15 minutes away from my mother, she never involved herself emotionally with me and kept our relationship one of cold distance. through breakups, new relationships, deression, anxiety, she has never once bothered to ask or support me emotionally. i am grateful for all of her financial support, and for being a great mother when i was a child, but the bond is broken and i still long for my mother. just going to see her is usually enough to set me in tears for the re9st of the evening, causes me a lot of emotional distress and it's not healthy for me to see her any more than what the previous schedule was, before all of my siblings left the country at once.
posted by nephilim. at 1:21 AM on July 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: she doesn't get to just waltz back into my life emotionally after all of these years, she's really trying to. i know her, she will let me go again the moment my sister returns home. and i don't think i'm strong enough to see her too often. TL;DR
posted by nephilim. at 1:46 AM on July 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

Can you set a schedule that gives your mom slightly more contact while blanking her the rest of the time? The schedule you have so far sounds good. It might work better if you state it explicitly.

"Mom, looking forward to our twice monthly Saturday lunch". "Mom, looking forward to our catch up Sunday phone call". No phone calls or contact during the week, except responses to texts if urgent. You're really busy with work, volunteering, etc.

Also your mother is going to adjust to the empty nest but she will be anxious and needy in the meantime. Her extra attention will fade if you give her something to regulate her schedule while she finds other activities to fill her days.

As for the emotional aspect, I'm so sorry. Maybe regular contact will give you a safe space to rely on her too?
posted by charlielxxv at 2:08 AM on July 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

If you are looking for permission to keep your distance, you have it. You are entitled to your feelings, and you are entitled to protect yourself emotionally from someone who has hurt you in the past and whom you fear may hurt you again. Your mom may not be happy about it, but you have every right to draw that boundary, and people above have given you excellent advice about how to do it.

However, if you are looking for ways to increase contact without necessarily ending up with a lot of long visits that end up with awkwardness or tension with a parent with whom your relationship is not 100% problem-free, I highly recommend what I've taken to referring to as "activity dates." I think that conversation-focused contact (such as just going over to one of your homes without anything specific planned, or a meal without a set end time) is the worst thing in a tense relationship (and especially if the tension is partly over why you don't spend more time together because you really don't want to get drawn into an argument about why that is), so having a shared activity, something you're doing other than just making conversation, is a great thing. It means that you can satisfy her desire to spend time together while also allowing you to avoid being drawn into being more emotionally vulnerable with her than you want to be, because you'll have something to focus on other than talking.

Planning a night of going to a concert or theater or the movies together is perfect, because you have a quick dinner first and can catch up on what's been going on, but there's a set time by which you have to be done, then a shared activity that you both like but that doesn't involve needing to make small talk, and then an optional nightcap at the end of the evening that can be cancelled if you're not feeling up for it, on grounds that it's late. I've also had good luck for similar reasons with sporting events (a lot of sitting next to each other, and something to talk about that isn't personal, so it's physically close without being high-expectations, and there is both alcohol and snacks if you're into that).

Or projects. If your mom has a useful skill (sewing, cooking, working on cars, etc.) ask her to teach it to you. It's a great bonding experience, but again, there's something to talk about that makes for really easy conversation. I've asked my dad to teach me carpentry, both because I want to learn how to build stuff and he knows how, and because it's a good low-stress activity that we can do together. I've been seeing him a lot more lately since I came up with the activity date visitation plan, but it's also a lot less stressful for me than when I was expected to come up with three hours of conversation about my personal life every time I saw my family and suffer guilt trips about why I didn't want to do it more often.
posted by decathecting at 2:35 AM on July 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

I think you need to decide what your boundaries are, and as much as possible, pay your own bills.

Decide how much time spent with your mother is acceptable to you. It sounds like you already have a schedule that works, but your mother is trying to change it. Do whatever you need to to keep the status quo. If she invites you out midweek when you only normally do weekends, say you're busy (doing stuff, if she asks - never give specifics) but you're looking forward to seeing her Sunday night. Don't answer the phone any more than you normally would. Don't respond to text messages. Decide on what you're comfortable with, perhaps even writing it down so it's clear in your mind, and then stick to that.

I kind of look at the situation like this: The value of $50 + $80 + groceries purchased X amount of time with you. She's now trying to get a better deal based on that amount. However, you're in an invitation to treat scenario, rather than a binding contract scenario. You don't have to accept an increased level of contact. Your mother can continue to expect more from you (increased contact) but you can just as well decide that you're not going to provide it (don't answer the phone, don't respond to emotional blackmail, etc). Consider directing her contact towards text messages, or email, so you don't have to respond right in the moment and can craft a suitable reply. Be sure to include the fact that you'll see her on [whatever day it is that you'll normally see her], so she knows where she stands. Also beware the extinction burst. If your mother engages in one, it means that what you're doing is working. If she's ramping up her behaviour, then she knows that she's losing.

What, from my own experience, will likely happen is that your mother will dangle the carrot of an increased amount of money in front of you, thinking that she needs to up her side of the bargain for you to increase yours. OR, she'll threaten to withhold her side of the bargain and no longer pay for your car insurance. I'd lay money on the fact she won't threaten to cut off your phone because then she won't be able to guilt trip you as easily. Neither situation is good for you, because it leaves the level of control with her. For your own sake and benefit, pay those bills yourself. Do whatever you have to to cut those purse strings, or they can and most likely will be used against you.

When you're completely free of emotional or financial ties, then you can properly consider a relationship with her. The job of a parent is to raise a child that is capable of becoming an adult. Not all parents are qualified or able to do that, so sometimes you have to do it for yourself. It sounds like you've already taken a lot of the necessary steps yourself, which is a really good thing. This is just another step towards becoming self actualised. For what it's worth, I think that only a given individual knows what is best for that individual in a given situation. If keeping the current level of contact is what is best for you, then do it. When you're in a position of having no ties, then you can decide to reconnect or not without outside pressure.

tl;dr, don't give in to her increased attempts at contact but do direct her towards contacting you in ways that you can ignore. Remove any financial ties she has to you.
posted by Solomon at 3:19 AM on July 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm not a therapist.

It's possible your mother, in a last gasp effort to regain some of her lost autonomy, directed a lot of the focus for doing so on you rather than on your father. It sounds from your description like she felt she could not be anyone's emotional support system, and she drove home that point to you and herself and anyone else by shoveling on the tough love.

I disagree with her having done that to you at a time when you obviously needed help, and it does sound like she's now trying to effectively buy her way back into your life. She might experience this as an attempt to make amends.

Regardless, for your own sake, you have to separate emotionally from your mother. This means having the ego strength to accept yourself, accept your anger, and act with integrity toward your mother. This means being angry with her and creating distance you need to process those feelings. It's the conflict you feel from taking her money while being royally pissed at her that's eating at you.

Is therapy an option? If not, start with physical distance from her. Then, start setting limits - set your timer for five minutes for a phone call, for example. Dinner once a month for an hour, no more. Or stop taking the money. It's going to be hard for you if you can't be financially independent while attempting to break free emotionally.
posted by TryTheTilapia at 8:10 AM on July 26, 2015 [2 favorites]