STACY: “She’s there all the time. We try to be polite because she’s helping out a lot, but now we’re the Three Musketeers. If we go to dinner and don’t invite her, she’ll give us the silent treatment for hours. We gave her a key to the house so she can get in while we’re at work, but she’ll walk in at almost any time, day or night. I cringe anytime I hear, ‘Hellooo, anybody home? There’s a great movie on TV tonight and I really want to share it with the two of you… .’ She won’t go back to her own place until late almost every evening. By that time, we’re so exhausted we just fall into bed. Here we are married less than two years and our sex life has gone to hell.”
Stacy was finally starting to realize that low rent and help with meals and child care were actually costing her a great deal. Beverly had practically moved in with her, and Brent and Stacy’s marriage was on the line.
Beverly, like all overly enmeshed mothers, was behaving as though Stacy had no emotional needs of her own. By making herself all-important to Stacy, as she had always done, she managed to move into her daughter’s living room, and her marriage. She could tell herself, and her daughter, that she was just doing the motherly thing and helping out during a stressful time. That help was undeniably real, but for both mother and daughter, it served as a rationale for Beverly’s demand for constant contact with Stacy. The more Stacy “owed” her mother, the more guilt she felt about claiming her basic adult right to an existence of her own. And for her part, Beverly felt more entitled than ever to claim the dominant place in her daughter’s life.
The Trap of “Let Me Do It for You”
The pattern wasn’t new. Beverly and Stacy had long been wrapped in a tightly woven net of dependency.
STACY: “I was the problem child in my family. I struggled through school until sixth grade, when we finally found out I had a mild learning disability. Mom thought I was lazy, and she was always trying to motivate me or find some new program to help. I was her project, I guess you could say. She did a lot for me—sometimes she’d even do my homework. She was a huge help, but she always treated me like I couldn’t do anything for myself, even though I was good at sports. She was really focused on what I couldn’t do and on fixing me. I know I needed it, and I’m glad she was there, but I felt like I couldn’t make it without her. She would always say things like, ‘Are you sure you should take that drama class? You’re going to have to read the script.’ I felt really stupid. Finally one of my teachers suggested I get tested, and we found out I had dyslexia. It was a big relief for me. I got tutors and they put me in special ed, and it really helped. But since reading was hard for me, Mom kept treating me like I couldn’t do anything for myself. She was so overprotective, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she wanted to go out with my friends and me so she could read the menu for me when we ordered pizza.”
It’s not easy for a mother to see a child struggle, and it’s natural to step in and do whatever she can to help. But in healthy relationships, independence is always the goal. For all the help her mother gave her, Stacy grew up feeling inadequate, always focused on her weaknesses rather than finding ways to develop her strengths.
Instilling in a daughter the feeling that “I can’t make it on my own” holds her back and creates a large confidence void that an enmeshing mother can rush in to fill. Almost without realizing it, a mother may come to take such satisfaction in the feeling of pride and competency that comes from “rescuing” a daughter that she loses sight of her child as a three-dimensional person. As Stacy noticed, she became her mother’s project, a bird with a broken wing who would always need to be carried. And the more both of them saw the relationship that way, the less Stacy could build a full, self-defined life of her own.
For Stacy, very little changed when she graduated from high school. Her mother persuaded her to live at home while taking classes at a community college, and swooped in to give her a job at her real estate office when Stacy had trouble her first semester and decided to drop out. She kept her daughter in a bubble, never letting her fail. And Stacy never had to learn to persevere, work through difficulties, and get up after a setback.
STACY: “I finally got a little momentum of my own when I got bored working for Mom. I had no interest in real estate, and driving around to open houses was not my idea of a good time. I got a job at a gym and started doing some work as a personal trainer, which I had always wanted to do. Then I met a guy, one of my clients, and long story short, we got married pretty fast. I thought I’d finally be on my own, and I was pretty happy about it. We had a lot in common, and it was great for a while. But after Tyler was born, we started having problems. It started when I told him he wasn’t doing enough around the house. He was taking me for granted, and he started to lose his temper a lot. Stupidly, I talked to Mom about it. Of course she took my side, and the more I talked to her, the less I could see Mark’s point of view. Mom kept saying, ‘Just come home. You don’t have to take that.’ The whole thing blew up, and I wound up taking the kids and moving back to Mom’s a couple of times. She said we could stay there as long as we wanted, and she’d help me out with money. Mark was so furious the second time, he said he was done with her and me. We couldn’t put things back together after that.”
The marriage broke up, and Beverly had her daughter back under her roof. That was a low point for Stacy, but recently, she told me, she’d thought she’d turned a corner in her life. Her mother seemed to like Brent, her second husband, and Stacy breathed a sigh of relief when her mother came to their rescue with the offer of the house.
But nothing had worked out as she’d hoped. For one thing, Brent was understandably feeling like a wallflower in the dependency-driven mother-daughter tango. And Stacy, confronted with the reality of wanting to please the two adults in her life who meant the most to her, was paralyzed, as so many daughters of overly enmeshed mothers are. Who could she risk alienating, her mother or her husband? She felt that she was being pulled apart in a life-and-death tug-of-war.
STACY: “I realize that as an adult, most of my major decisions have been based on what would please my mother—what would make her happy. I also realize that sometimes I’ve put my mother before my husband—how sick is that? That’s what I did in my first marriage, and now I’m right at the edge of the cliff with my second.”
I told Stacy I could help her move away from the precipice, but first she’d have to want to be an evolved, assertive woman. Like so many daughters who are enmeshed with their mothers, she’d been stuck in a half-child, half-woman identity.
Lauren: Learning to Accept the Unacceptable
Lauren, a recently divorced forty-six-year-old stockbroker with two teenaged daughters, came to see me because she was having a tough time handling the divorce, the new burdens of being a single mom, and the stresses of her professional life. But she soon revealed that a lot of her stress was coming from another source: her mother’s long-standing ritual of ignoring her plans and privacy.
LAUREN: “I have some anxiety during the week, but it really flares up on the weekends. Saturdays I do stuff with the kids and usually go out to dinner either with a date or girlfriends. It’s Sunday that’s the problem… . My mother and I have this tradition that we’ve had for a long time—even when I was still married. She comes over for lunch and often stays through dinner. My father died of cancer about eight months ago, and she really hasn’t done much to get on with her life. She says she’s just living for me and the girls. Mother comes over right on the dot of noon. I dread the weekends. I start feeling anxious Saturday morning, so her visit ruins the whole weekend for me. She sucks the air out of the room with her neediness.”
I asked Lauren to give me an example.
LAUREN: “It was last Sunday, Mom was over, of course. I’m in a group that raises money for the L.A. Philharmonic, so I got an invitation to a lovely event that the Phil was putting on. I was fixing lunch and my mom as usual was snooping around, and of course she sees the invitation on my desk. I was planning to go by myself because I thought t
here might be some interesting men there—I knew I was in trouble as soon as she came in the kitchen waving the invitation.”
SUSAN: “Wait. What’s she doing snooping in your things?”
LAUREN: “Oh—she’s done that since I was a kid—I guess I’m just used to it.”
Lauren told me that her mother had always insisted that there be “no secrets” between them, by which she generally meant very little privacy.
LAUREN: “I don’t know why she was that way, but I heard the ‘no secrets’ stuff a lot. I didn’t think twice about it when I was little. But it became kind of a big deal when I was in fourth grade and I had my first really close best friend, Anna. We practically lived at each other’s houses, and there was one afternoon when we were being silly and giggly—I think she had gotten a note from some boy she liked—and I closed the door to my room. A few minutes later, Mom pushes it open and in a loud and affected voice like a kindergarten teacher she says, ‘No closed doors, thank you very much!’ She comes in and starts going through the records we were playing, the games we were fooling around with. Then she sits on my bed and acts as if she wants to join our conversation… . Finally I said we were going to ride our bikes, just so we could get out of there. Anna and I laughed about it, but she stopped coming over as much. I felt like such a baby with that ‘no closed door’ thing. That’s my mom… . When I was a kid, she hated it if I was in the bathroom and the door wasn’t open a crack so she could ‘talk to me.’ ”
The boundaries between Lauren and her mother had been fuzzy, at best, for years, and I told Lauren that one of our first goals would be to help her get “un-used to” allowing her life to be an open book for her mother, who was still reaching uninvited—and undeterred—into her daughter’s life. Lauren told me that when her mother discovered the Philharmonic invitation in her kitchen, she pushed her way right into the evening.
LAUREN: “She goes, ‘This sounds like such a nice party. Since your father died I never get invited to anything this interesting. You know how I love being around cultured people… . Please don’t shut me out.’ Then she says, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to go together? … You know, sweetheart, it’ll be just us girls.’ She puts her arm around me and says, ‘I’m so lucky to have you.’
“She caught me off guard, and like an idiot I told her the truth and said I was planning to go alone—I should have said I had a date, but I have a hard time lying to her… . And by that time, I felt so guilty I couldn’t say no to her—but then I never could… . So I took her with me and had a rotten time. She wouldn’t let me out of her sight. She might as well have put a leash on me. I feel so smothered and manipulated by her. I can’t live my own life. Every part of me is aching to be free, but I just can’t do it. What’s wrong with me, Susan?”
I told Lauren that there was nothing wrong with her, but that there was a lot wrong with her relationship with her mother. She had given her mother license to engulf her life and she would have to learn how to cancel the permit.
The Enmeshed Mother’s Rules of Love
With “closeness” as her all-access pass, the enmeshed mother commandeers your space and time. She may give lip service to your right to privacy, but she still ignores it. Because she sees herself as your “best friend,” she feels entitled to read what’s on your desk, go through your drawers, join your parties, invite herself along for drinks, and even slip into your house without asking.
She may ratchet up the invasion by subtle degrees if she’s widowed or divorced and understandably feeling sad, bitter, angry, humiliated or rejected. She expects you to be the one who eases her loneliness and takes up the slack in her social schedule, essentially replacing her partner.
She co-opts and distorts the language of love as she fuses her life with yours. This isn’t just a matter of semantics. If you look at the behavior behind the words—the fine print that goes with her “I love you,” “We’re so close,” and “You’re my best friend”—you’ll find a long list of conditions, restrictions, and rules that have little to do with love and more to do with erasing your separate identity.
To an engulfing mother, love means:
• You are my everything, and that makes you responsible for my happiness.
• You can’t live without me, and I can’t live without you.
• You are not allowed to have a life that doesn’t involve me.
• You are not allowed to keep any secrets from me.
• You must never love anyone more than you love me.
• If you don’t want what I want, it means you don’t love me.
• “No” means you don’t love me.
Much of the love she feels for you is desperate, clinging, and restrictive. And this is the love you know and expect. Instead of understanding that love is a free exchange of support, encouragement, acceptance, and affection, with lots of space to breathe, you’ve learned that you must earn love by giving other people what they want, like it or not, and taking your own needs and wants out of the equation.
An overly enmeshed mother rarely allows her relationship with you to evolve beyond one in which she dictates the terms. It’s tremendously important to her that roles not shift, and that you do not outgrow your willingness to accept being swallowed up by her. “Keeping things the way they’ve always been” makes her feel safe, comfortable, and in charge, and she clings to rituals that reinforce her identity as your mother and her powerful place in your life.
Rituals are not, by themselves, inherently unhealthy. Some repetitive behavior can provide a warmth and familiarity that is nourishing. Traditions like having turkey on Thanksgiving, attending a house of worship on a regular basis, or planning family get-togethers on important occasions can provide a great deal of pleasure when they’re done out of choice. But when they’re done by rote and driven by guilt, they feel like the bars of a cage.
LAUREN: “I have to check in with Mom every night and tell her about my day. She’s so disappointed and upset if I happen to miss a night because I’m busy—it’s easier just to make sure I do it than go through a long explanation. It’s like an obligation I can’t get away from… . I promise myself I’m going to confront her about this and start to set some limits, but somehow my fingers dial the phone every night and I’m right back in the same rut.”
It’s almost impossible to say no to someone you are bonded to with this kind of ritual when the bonds are secured not only with the natural love you have for her but also with fear, obligation, and guilt. This unholy trinity is essential to the enmeshed mother, and you’ll frequently hear daughters using words like “I feel so guilty if I don’t do what she wants” or, as Lauren did, “It’s like an obligation I can’t get away from.”
When you believe that love means making the other person happy at all costs, then to love means giving up the right to your own desires. And if you veer from that version of the relationship, then fear, obligation, and guilt click into action. Fear that you’ll lose your mother’s love and affection. A sense that you’re obligated to do what it takes to make her happy—because that’s your role as a daughter. Guilt about doing anything that will hurt her feelings or upset her, guilt about expressing your true feelings, guilt about any complaints you’ve had, any smothering you’ve resisted.
That potent mix is the Krazy Glue that keeps daughters stuck to engulfing mothers.
Enmeshment Is a Two-Way Street
Each daughter we’ve met in this chapter says she’s angry and frustrated and yearns to escape her mother’s smothering, so what holds her back? Why doesn’t she say “Enough!” What is she so afraid of?
A woman may be twenty-five or thirty-five or fifty-five years old chronologically, but emotionally the daughters of enmeshers are much younger. In fact, there can be a dramatic disconnect between the competent, effective woman on the surface and the scared little girl inside, who is still paralyzed by the primal fear that all small children have: If I pull away from my mother, she’ll stop loving me and I can’t survive if
that happens. Daughters who have repeatedly been rescued face the additional challenge of feeling insecure about their ability to keep their lives on track without their mothers’ help.
Years of living with this dependency make it feel normal, and unknowingly, daughters sign a lifetime contract with their mothers that hands over much of their autonomy and big pieces of their adulthood. When the healthy part of you chafes or complains, you may even go as far as believing “I can’t survive without Mom.” If you encounter her disapproval or disappointment, giving in to your mother seems like the only reasonable choice.
Enmeshed mothers are masters at using guilt. They often collect injustices, lining up instances that have displeased them and citing them as reasons why you need to do more for them. And they’ll do it in the nicest possible way. They’ll say: “I was really counting on having lunch with you. I’m so disappointed… . You didn’t tell me you were going to that movie, and you know I wanted to see it.” They needn’t raise their voices, and sometimes they don’t even need to say a word—from the time they’re young, daughters are well practiced at reading volumes of meaning into a mother’s look or glance. Their mothers hardly need to use fear and obligation to get what they want, because most daughters would do anything to avoid the guilt that says: “Letting your mother down is the worst thing you can feel.”
You may feel criminal if you try to cancel a casual date with your mother so you can get a massage at the end of a grueling week. She has programmed you to believe that putting yourself first is a crime—and trying to skip brunch, spending time with your boyfriend, or being alone with your thoughts are major felonies.
It can be hard to see enmeshment clearly when you’re caught in it because it’s been with you so long it’s the reality you know, but with even a little distance, your adult eyes can recognize these patterns for what they are: an extremely unhealthy exchange of neediness.
The truth is that there’s no growth, no safety in this stifling symbiosis. And there are no psychological adults here, just clinging, frightened children.
Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters Page 6
