Hating your mother is taboo. “But she’s your mother!”, is the all too familiar response. It is hard for those who were nurtured and loved to imagine hating their mother. They see the child’s hatred as the product of a petty outburst, dismissing the very real underlying pain that leads a child to reject their caregiver. It’s not easy to truly hate one’s mother. Even then the hatred stems from the desire to be loved by her, seen by her, and the ultimate failure of performing for her love. For a child who has been rejected by their mother, the only way out of her shadow is to kill her metaphorically.
Reading Jennette McCurdy’s memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, was like reliving my childhood. An emotionally volatile and suffocating mother, a distant father, and a house that never felt like home. Not only is Jennette physically overwhelmed by her mother’s hoarding tendencies, she is mentally exhausted by the demands of being a child star and living up to her mother’s vision. It is a parent’s duty to set the foundational standard that a child has with living, but when emotional neglect comes into play, it creates walls that limit a child’s ability to accept not only others but themselves. They are taught to settle with the expectation to act the way the parents want them to. Unable to accept that her mother is the villain in her story, Jennette copes with unhealthy behaviors like eating disorders and alcohol addiction. It is not until her mother passes away from cancer that she is able to begin the process of healing.
While her mother’s cancer diagnosis was the literal nail in the coffin of their mother-daughter relationship, Jennette’s mother was dead long before she was born. As a young girl, Jennette was often the mediator in her mother’s screaming matches with her father. Her mother, whose dreams of being an actress were squashed by her own parents, used Jennette to vicariously live her TV starlet aspirations. She contorted her body, her mind, and her true feelings to please her mother. As a 20-something woman, Jeanette struggled with body image issues, alcohol addiction, and a loss of purpose in life because she was never allowed to be who she wanted to be.
For a child who has been so deeply traumatized by their mother, perhaps the only way to heal is her death. It is hard to accept that one’s mother does not unselfishly care for them. It is in the child’s nature to desire protection, love, and acceptance from its parents, and when those needs are unmet, it can lead to an identity crisis, much like the one Jennette experiences as she attempts to cut the proverbial umbilical cord. Her mother’s death brings her story to an end, for there are no further avenues to heal the relationship. It is not until her mother physically dies that Jennette is truly able to recover from her influence.
Much like Jennette, I also lived under the oppressive shadow of my mother. Whether she lacked a mother’s love or whether my father had killed her before I was born is unknown to me, for her general lack of mothering created a rift so large I have forgotten what it is like to have a mother. Her childhood dreams of being a singer and dancer were crushed by her repressive parents, so she lived out her dreams by “encouraging” me to be a child performer. My desire to stray from her ideas of what my future should be like would send her into violent rages where she would berate me, akin to Jennette’s mother, and tell me how much of a burden I was. In her best moments she was cold and robotic, and her worst, a screaming monster.
In the end, forgiving her was not possible. Forgiveness does not have to be directed towards the abuser, but rather towards the abused themselves. We are not obligated to accept the neglect and pain that our parents have caused us, and in some cases, we will always have a deep sense of responsibility to wallow in their apologies as a form of guilt because they essentially gave us life. To forgive her would mean ignoring years of abuse and neglect. It would mean pretending that the pain that I went through as a child could be washed away, even though the scars from it endure to this day.
Like Jennette, I find that forgiving my mother would be an outward gesture of healing, something expected from a society that does not understand how deep the wounds go. Far too often we exalt the mother to sainthood, forgetting that mothers too are human and capable of cruelty like everyone else. As Jennette puts it, “Moms are saints, angels by merely existing. NO ONE could possibly understand what it’s like to be a mom. Men will never understand. Women with no children will never understand. No one but moms know the hardship of motherhood, and we non-moms must heap nothing but praise upon moms because we lowly, pitiful non-moms are mere peasants compared to the goddesses we call mothers.”
