By: Sabrina Pardo
Every now and then, when I am comfortable enough to open up, I find myself surrounded by the discomfort of other people. A story I often tell is about the way I grew up in Bolivia, raised by my uncle, while my mom was in the states for school. I think it paints the picture of how close we are, taking in the fact that we never really got a chance to build a tight knit relationship.
People don’t know what to say when I tell them. Distance in a relationship with a parent is somewhat common, even as mothers are deified. There’s a mix of understanding and sympathy as well as an inkling of – but she’s your mom, and she sacrificed everything for you.
My mother had a tough time. She was a single mother, and she worked a lot. For a long time, I’ve been trying to reckon with that fact, and that she did so much for me, even with our difficult relationship. And slowly, I’ve begun to make peace with it.
The struggle to make ends meet as a young, single parent of 2 must have been nearly impossible for my mother, especially in wealthy Northern Virginia. Still, my mother insisted that we live in Fairfax because it had the best secondary school and many opportunities. It was pretty much impossible to live there by ourselves, so we had eventually decided to move with our grandparents to afford a small townhouse.
Throughout school, all my friends about family movie nights or family dinners. But it wasn’t. Not me. My norm was a busy, working mother who was away while I shared dinners with my grandparents and sister. There were factors that played into our own situations that made it hard for us to have movie nights, to have a girl’s night in, and I couldn’t blame anyone for that. The best attempt we ever had at a sense of normalcy were the office visits at my mom’s job where we put on a show for her coworkers and played pretend.
I eventually developed a closeness with my grandparents that I did not have with my mother. Not only was she always away working, but when she was back, she was difficult to be around. I always assumed it was stress. And at the time, because I was young, I didn’t recognize the stresses of her life, though now I do. She faced many of the issues, including the need to be the primary breadwinner, as many single parents. As common as it is, with nearly 24 million children who live in single-parent households, it is a struggle to make ends meet.
And though there as many things, I can understand now that I may not have before. There are enough resources about the topic of single parenting that I began to absorb. I noticed I had many of the stressors of being the child of a single parent. The Annie E. Casey Foundation recognizes the lack of an intact parent unit as an adverse childhood experience, also known as ACEs. The more a child is exposed to ACEs, the more potential there is for harmful effects that could cause a child to then deal with later in life. And those effects could be physical, mental, and even go as far as affect their education.
Because my mother was often low on fumes, I felt the pressure to behave and tend to her expectations of me. Besides the lack of parents’ consistency and money issues, this is another issue that child of single parents’ face; we often take on roles with higher responsibility and maturing faster to pitch in and help.
But if I’m honest about it, that was also, in part because my mother demanded it. For a long time, I assumed that much of our struggle was because she did not have a partner to help her. But eventually, I started to shift my perspective.
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What I started to process, for instance, is that after my visits to my mother’s office, back at home, the nurturing was gone, and the pressure was back on to be hardworking, perfect grades, no trouble, and no disobedience. To make matters worse, there was competition between me and my sister.
It was a pile of expectations that distanced our relationship, the constant not good enough reaction or arguing over the small “disobedient” actions. And yet, I always hoped that I could finally please these expectations, but I always found myself in trouble. I continued to hope that we would eventually move past this “phase” and maybe become a normal family.
There were so many ups and downs in our relationship. I always found it hard to talk about with other people, maybe because it felt wrong but also because I recognized that some of the distance was not her fault. But it was also the case that there were aspects of it that were her fault. She was my first critic. I still sometimes hear her judgement in the back of my head.
Recently, I read the book “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” about the Nickelodeon star, Jeannette McCurdy’s narcissistic mother. It was like a breath of fresh air. The stories she talked about – high the high expectations, the pressure she felt – were all familiar to me. I had finally found a sense of relation to my own experiences, that kind of gave me a sense of normality. I started to consider the mental health issues that uniquely could’ve applied to my situation.
After all I can understand, the mental toll it is to be a single parent. Single mothers are more prone to have mental health struggles such as postpartum depression and other psychologically challenging disorders. It was a matter of understanding the level of stress being a single parent could be and that’s when I started pulling away from the residing anger and unrealistic expectations for my family to be “normal”.
In her book, Jeannette writes: “Why can’t we be honest about them? Especially moms. They’re the most romanticized of anyone.”
It is one of my favorite lines. We have such high expectations for mothers. And it’s also what led to my final shift in mindset. I stopped searching for the fairy tales.
When I look back, I recall many of our fights. Some of them were because I was a rebellious teenager. Others were excessive, the screaming, the honest dislike for each other. This was not something I could ever understand or wanted to. I would always what exactly was wrong with me that I was so disliked by my own mother.
I could not help it, resorting to blaming myself because I could not talk about it. If I did, I’d hear the “You should be grateful, “or “She has done so much for you, you have no idea.”
And maybe I don’t have any idea, but I do have an idea of what I experienced. What others with single mothers could experience just by the looks of statistics. A few studies confirmed the controlling behaviors that come from single mothers especially deflecting onto their kids, and the damaging effects it could have such as anxiety and depression. I remembered the feeling during our fights, and the silent car rides. It was tense, it felt like anything I did was wrong, like I was under a microscope. I would find myself crying after a fight, and thinking “She hates me,” and wonder “Why? What is wrong with me?” That was more painful, I learned later, than it needed to be.
Now, I realize that my mother probably had a picture of what her child would be – someone obedient and cheerful, someone who looked up to her. I wasn’t always those things, and she got angry because I couldn’t fulfill that same unrealistic standard.
I was doing the same to her. Because I compared it to everyone else around me, I set myself up for disappointment, and as bad as it sounds, the relationship I wanted with my mom, was not realistic. As I recognize the limitations of our relationship more clearly, I’ve come to peace with it, and I’m less angry. I don’t have the ideal mother-daughter relationship, and I’m okay with that.