Turning Into My Mother

After realizing I was repeating some of my mom’s most painful patterns with my own daughter, I finally found a way to break the cycle.

My mom is banging the steering wheel in traffic, screaming, “God damn it! God damn it!” And I am slinking into the passenger seat trying to disappear. If I could only roll out of the moving car like the scene from the film Lady Bird I would have.

When she was in a rage, my mother would go up to her bathroom and hit the side of her bathtub with a wet towel. Apparently, a therapist told her that would be a good way for her to deal with her anger. I was in middle school at the time and I thought each thud was a hit she wanted to deliver to me.

I think of another scene from Lady Bird, where she and her mom are bickering while shopping at Thrift Town. Then her mom shows Lady Bird a dress she discovers and they immediately shift registers into cute, fawning voices. “Oh it’s perfect!” Lady Bird croons.

My mom and I were close. She was loving and generous but she was also very critical and, like Lady Bird and her mom, we bickered a lot. I learned to brace myself for her fits of rage, hyper-attune to her moods, and pick up on the signals when she was about to erupt—her hands gripping the steering wheel, a seething energy that I could feel in my own chest. Like a seismograph, I knew when the tectonic plates were shifting.

There were times when she lost patience with sales clerks, yelled at people in traffic, or broke dishes while screaming at the top of her lungs. Often, I’d try to talk her off that ledge, saying in my calmest voice, “It’s OK, mom.” And other times, I’d get irritated with her and tell her to calm down before she was even consciously aware a storm was brewing. My interventions would only annoy her and add fuel to the fire.

Like so many daughters, I promised myself I would never, ever behave like her. I learned to suppress my rage, which only ensured it would burst out, uncontrolled, just like hers.

Nothing will bring out the trauma of a mother-daughter wound more than having your own daughter. Like me and my mother, my daughter is fierce and strong-willed—I love that about her. But from the time she was four or five, she became something I couldn’t control. I found her intense emotions—anxiety, sobbing, tantrums—unnerving. They set off every alarm I’d built as a child to survive my mother’s volatility.

My son has always been much more compliant. My daughter argues back and doesn’t do what I ask. She is demanding and often criticizes me for overreacting and trying to control her. I would take it so personally, marching into her room to tell her in firm tones why her behavior was not OK. And she would say, “Why are you yelling at me?”

“Yelling at you? Honey, you don’t know yelling. This isn’t yelling. I am remaining calm!”

I used to hate it when my mom would say, “You really push my buttons.” I thought it was an awful thing to tell a child. Then, I found myself telling my daughter that she triggers me. I didn’t mean to make it her fault—at least not consciously.

What I have been most reactive to in her has been her sensitivity—easily hurt feelings, strong reactions to a comment, a lot of crying and overwhelm—all things that my mother couldn’t tolerate in me either. Sometimes in the dynamic, I am my mom and my daughter is me. Sometimes, I am the little girl again, and she is my mother criticizing me. It breaks my heart for her, for me, and for my mother.

For many years, I remained in denial about the harm my anger and my own critical nature have caused my children. I would say to myself, “I’m not as bad as my mother was.” I would complain about what they did wrong. I would focus on how loving and supportive I am. And I really am. But that was all just a way of not being truly accountable.

After reading Rebuilding Relationships in Recovery, initially just to prepare for interviewing the author for my podcast, that denial was cracked open. Janice V. Johnson Dowd describes the qualities children of alcoholics often carry into adulthood, like hypervigilance, perfectionism, and the need for control. I knew my mom grew up with alcoholic parents and that my father had stopped drinking when I was in the fourth grade, but until reading it, I had never thought of myself as a child of alcoholics.

Dowd also talks about the importance of what people in AA call a living amends—an ongoing honest accounting for how we have hurt people and how we plan to make it right. While I am not an alcoholic, once I got brutally honest with myself about how my patterns have impacted my children, I decided to make a living amends with them. My intentions were good. But it didn’t last.

About a year later, when my daughter was 16, we were driving home from the mall after a lovely outing. She said something to me that may have been bratty and most likely wasn’t very considerate. I can’t remember her exact words, but I remember feeling angry that she would speak to me that way after I had spent the day taking her shopping, doting on her, and buying her clothes. Honestly, I think she was just hungry. I know that my reaction was so much bigger than whatever she said. I went off in the car, just like my mom so many years earlier, maybe even screaming, “God damn it! God damn it!” She probably wished she could open the door and roll right out of the car, like Lady Bird.

For several days after, despite my apologies, she did not want to speak to me. And weeks later she was still angry and said she didn’t feel safe with me. I had to figure out how I could rebuild her trust. So, I talked with a therapist and went on Lexapro.

It has transformed my life.

I have done so much growth work over the years. I am genuinely not triggered by many things in my life anymore; I have learned to reset so many of my painful patterns. But when my mother wound gets activated, it has so much force. It’s like a volcano erupting.

I’ve come to feel that some patterns are just so strong that, even with all the tools at our disposal, we need help interrupting them. For me, finding the right medication was that help.

I used to have this gripping feeling in my body from my throat down to my gut when my daughter and I got into conflict. It was like no time had passed between those years with my mom and the present. I would be filled with an urgent need to make it stop and flooded with anger. But since being on Lexapro, it’s as though that feeling is several inches out in front of me now. I can see it more objectively, I don’t feel swept up by it, and there’s room for different choices. I wish I had taken it years ago.

Lexapro didn’t do the healing. It just made space for the work I already knew how to do.

What has changed most is our relationship. My daughter feels safer with me now. She is more affectionate and asks me for help more often—and she seems more relaxed in other aspects of her life, like she can finally let her guard down. But what I didn’t expect is how differently I see her. I have always respected her creativity and fire, but, since she was a little girl, I have seen her through a very narrow lens. That made it difficult for me to see and enjoy her in her fullness, including her sensitivity, which I now recognize as one of the real strengths we share. Lately I delight in her in new ways, finding her big feelings passionate and endearing, and appreciating how loving and funny she is.

She is a senior in high school now. Recently, we were lying in bed snuggling and I said to her, wiping away tears, “I feel like I finally learned to mother you and now you’re going to be leaving soon.” We both laughed, then lay there quietly holding hands.

I think, looking back, that my mom, who passed away six years ago, must have felt my same shame and confusion, caught in a painful pattern she didn’t choose. In moments like this with my daughter, I feel she’s there with us, and that we’re healing the pattern for her too—and for whomever comes next.

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