Matriarch.

I never knew that cutting ties with my mother could be anything more than a painful dream, or wishful waking.

For a long time, I toiled over the thought. My indecisiveness cut back and forth like a saw. I knew I was unhappy. I knew our relationship was hurting me. I knew something had to change. But knowing that and actually severing a relationship with your mother are two very different things.

When I originally wrote this in 2022, I was still very close to the decision itself. I was writing from inside the aftermath, still trying to understand what I had done and whether I had made the right choice.

Since then, I've had years to sit with it.

From Millennials to Gen Z, newer generations have increasingly been forced to confront the realities of generational trauma within their families. We didn't ask for any of this—the trauma itself, or the enormous weight of deciding whether to sever ties with the people who are supposed to be our greatest bonds.

A mother's unconditional love is supposed to be one of the safest things in the world.

Sometimes it isn't.

There still aren't enough resources for the strange, complicated grief that comes with accepting that you may never have the relationship with your parent that you spent your entire life hoping for. I knew then, and I know even more clearly now, that it hurts.

You don't simply stop wanting a mother.

You don't magically fill the maternal wound by walking away. But sometimes removing yourself from a relationship that continues to hurt you creates a bizarre kind of relief. It is difficult to describe the coexistence of grief and freedom unless you've experienced it yourself.

The people who raised you probably made mistakes. Chances are, they were doing the best they knew how to do. Or maybe they weren't.

Either way, you may never have the relationship you wanted with your caregivers. Eventually, you may have to let the fantasy of that relationship die.

That doesn't mean you stop loving them.

It means you stop asking reality to become something it has repeatedly shown you it cannot be.

Holding onto an unreciprocated expectation only fuels the heartache. Sometimes the fire inside you has to be allowed to burn itself out rather than being fed by the hope that someone else will finally become the person you needed them to be.

I am grateful that I eventually became the writer of my own history. I still believe in mercy and forgiveness—not necessarily because someone has earned them, but because I want to be the kind of person capable of extending them.

But forgiveness and access are not the same thing.

The Decision

On May 19, 2021, I made one of the hardest decisions of my life: I decided it was best to cut ties with my mother.

At the time, the feeling of dread had infiltrated everything. It felt like it was in my bones, every synapse of my brain, the bile in my stomach, the lump in my throat. I had spent so long contemplating the decision that actually making it felt almost surreal.

I started by writing her a letter.

I'd been working on that letter for roughly a year. In therapy, we talked about it extensively. What did I want to say? What did I actually want to change? What were realistic expectations? Was there any possibility of repairing the relationship?

My therapist encouraged me to use "I" statements.

I felt.

I thought.

I am.

That sounds simple, but it required an enormous amount of honesty and vulnerability. I was terrified of being rejected again.

I also didn't want to soften the message so much that there was room for it to be misunderstood. In the past, attempts at gentler conversations had often resulted in me feeling attacked, dismissed, or shut out. I didn't know whether being completely blunt would change anything, but I knew I couldn't keep communicating in ways that left me feeling unheard.

For much of my life, I had also been waiting for my grandmother to die.

Not because I wanted her dead, but because I believed her death might somehow reveal the blueprint for what I was supposed to do next.

My mother's relationship with her mother was, in many ways, painfully familiar to me. Their relationship was poor at best, and my mother had largely stopped interacting with her family in the years leading up to my grandmother's death.

There would be occasional attempts at reconnection, but I could see the hurt and disappointment when those attempts didn't produce what my mother wanted.

I recognized that hurt because I felt it too.

I'm still not sure whether it's harder to be the black sheep in a herd or the lone wolf.

Grandma's Funeral — April 11, 2021

So it finally happened.

My grandma died.

At the time, this felt like one of those "your actions will have consequences" moments from Life is Strange. It was a pivotal moment I'd spent years imagining, even though I hadn't fully understood what I expected it to change.

When I was born, my grandma was already 67. She died at 93.

I used to joke that she and Prince Philip must have been utilizing the same life source. They were the kind of people you assumed would simply never die.

Even stars die eventually. It just takes a while.

I was sad.

I think the last time I saw my grandma was Thanksgiving, three years earlier. My dad had mostly maintained contact with her, and the last few times we'd spoken, he told me that she was proud of the work I'd done so far.

I felt guilty that I hadn't done more to stay connected to that side of the family.

But I had needed time to unfuck myself.

The boundaries I'd created were necessary for my protection, but eventually those boundaries became walls. No one maintained much of a connection or put enough effort into keeping me included in family life. Or perhaps they did, to some degree, and the chasm had simply become too large for me to cross on my own.

There was always an estimated risk with that side of the family, and historically, it hadn't felt worth the cost.

I knew that eventually there would be a funeral, and that funeral would force me to decide whether I wanted to break down some of those walls.

There was so much contention, so many triggers, so much uncertainty, and so much disappointment wrapped up in my mother's family. There were decades of untreated issues and generational dysfunction layered between the oldest sibling and the youngest.

It was a minefield.

And, perhaps unfairly, I had hoped my grandmother's death might somehow be the final horcrux keeping my mother trapped in her pain.

I hoped that when Grandma died, my mom might finally be at peace.

Maybe she would want to reconcile.

Instead, I felt like I was slowly ticking up a roller coaster, waiting for the drop and having absolutely no idea what would happen once it came.

I had anticipated this being one of the most uncomfortable funerals of my life, second only to my mother's eventual death.

How do you grieve someone you don't feel like you really knew?

How do you reconcile the wildly different accounts of the same woman coming from seven children?

I was angry that I would never have all the answers.

I was angry that I might never have closure.

And, perhaps most painfully, I was angry that I couldn't get justice for my mother so that I could finally have it for myself.

What I didn't expect was how open and inviting most of my family would be.

I re-added them on Facebook and received messages of condolence and unity. I offered whatever empathy I could.

I was surprised by how little I felt.

But they didn't need to know that.

I wasn't hopeful that this event would magically reunify our broken family. But maybe I could see these people again after all those years and make some kind of peace with it in my own mind.

Sometimes seeing something—or someone—you loved one last time makes it easier to let go.

I hadn't been to a funeral since I was about seven. It was for my dad's brother. I'd been fortunate enough that death had mostly avoided my immediate circle for years.

My disadvantage was that I had no idea what to expect sitting in a pew surrounded by mourning strangers who were supposed to be family.

The grief was complicated.

Guilt, confusion, regret, grief, anxiety—all of these ingredients made one very flaky grief baklava.

When I think about my grandmother now, I remember both the ugliness and the strange little pieces of childhood that survived alongside it.

I remember what I knew about her abuse toward my mom.

I remember picking up sticks in her yard with my cousin for a penny apiece.

I remember her red living room and her hoarding. Her hundreds of newspapers. Her stale bathroom. Her love of soap operas.

I remember borrowing a Kleenex Puffs advertisement with those weird Tim Burton-esque characters on it, and her making me a little library pass so I'd return it.

I never did.

I remember letting go of a balloon at my preschool graduation and her being unable to catch it for me.

I remember her telling me to get my legs insured because they were a nice shape.

I remember her asking whether her hair looked green because she'd dye it herself and fluorescent lighting made it look that way.

She loved Kmart.

She loved lawn ornaments.

She loved collecting things to sell at garage sales.

She would get my cousin and me Kmart pajamas for Christmas.

I remember playing Pokémon Yellow on her couch, which was somehow the most uncomfortable couch in the entire world.

I remember playing Barbies at her house and being fascinated by her old toy castle and vintage dolls.

I remember that she was a matriarch.

She came from Poland.

She had IBS and eventually died from colon cancer.

Her eyesight was poor enough that driving became difficult. Her memory deteriorated to the point where she'd cycle through several names before arriving at yours.

She was often sick.

She was often bruised.

She had bed sores.

She was frequently asleep or undressed well into the afternoon.

She was complicated.

So was her legacy.

As I wrote all of this in 2022, I had no idea what to anticipate from the funeral.

As it turned out, we were late.

We arrived as she was being lowered into the ground.

I went to the gathering at her house afterward, and something unexpected happened: I was accepted as my own person, separate from my parents.

My dad stayed for maybe five minutes. My mom didn't attend because she'd had surgery the day before.

I stayed for about three hours.

I watched.

I listened.

I took it all in.

And when I left, I felt something I hadn't expected.

Closure.

Contentment.

For a few hours, it felt like everything that had happened when I was in tenth grade had somehow ceased to exist.

The funeral was healing.

And ultimately, it helped me understand what I wanted from my relationship with my mother.

My grandmother was essentially Hank Hill's dad Cotton Hill. My family drama was the love child of The Haunting of Hill House and Hereditary.

If you don't understand those references, get some taste.

The Letter

The letter I sent my mother was long.

Very long.

I'm not going to reproduce all of it here. She already knows what it said, and there are some things that don't need to be preserved word-for-word for strangers on the internet.

But the heart of it was this:

I knew we might never have the relationship either of us wanted.

I told her that I had hoped something would change after Grandma died. I told her I was sorry for the pain she'd experienced with her own mother.

I told her that she hadn't really known me for a very long time.

I wrote about growing up feeling ignored, criticized, watched, and misunderstood.

I wrote about having my journals read, my belongings searched, and my privacy invaded.

I wrote about being made to feel ashamed of my body, my sexuality, my femininity, and my emotions.

I wrote about the things I'd carried from childhood into adulthood.

I wrote about how desperately I'd tried to make her love me.

And I wrote something that, at the time, felt revolutionary:

I am an intelligent, hilarious, creative, empathetic, and above all things, kind human being.

I am worthy.

I am loved.

With or without you.

Looking back, I think that was the most important part of the entire letter.

Not the accusations.

Not the explanations.

Not the catalog of everything that had gone wrong.

It was the declaration that my worth was no longer dependent on whether my mother could recognize it.

There are things in that letter I would phrase differently today. There are conclusions I made in the intensity of that moment that I understand with more nuance now.

But I don't regret sending it.

I regret that I ever had to write it.

The Immediate Aftermath

After I sent the letter, there was silence.

Eventually, my dad called to tell me that my mother had received it.

I didn't hear her in the background.

He asked whether my ex-husband and I were okay. I said yes and told him I loved him.

My dad stumbled over his words and eventually told me he didn't have anything else to say.

I apologized.

I told him I didn't want him to be disappointed or angry about the choice I'd made.

Then we said goodbye.

I didn't know whether he'd called me secretly.

I didn't know if we'd speak again.

At the time, I was also grieving the version of my mother who had existed in my earliest memories.

I wondered if the woman reading that letter was, in some way, the last remaining piece of the mother I'd had when I was six—the mother who, without a doubt, had loved me.

I was grieving everything that had been.

Everything that hadn't been.

And everything that would never be.

My ex-husband asked me, "Isn't this what you wanted?"

I remember thinking that no, it wasn't.

I never wanted any of this.

I wanted a mother.

I wanted to feel loved by her.

I wanted to be understood.

I wanted to grow up and have an adult relationship with her that didn't require me to continually reopen old wounds.

I wanted the happy ending.

What I eventually learned was that sometimes choosing yourself doesn't feel like winning.

Sometimes it feels like mourning.

Sometimes it feels like failure.

Sometimes it feels like standing in the wreckage of the life you thought you were supposed to have and realizing that the only thing you can save is yourself.

In 2022, I was still trying to understand that.

Now, with more distance, I can see that cutting ties wasn't a single moment. It wasn't the letter. It wasn't the funeral. It wasn't May 19, 2021.

It was the culmination of years of realizing that I could not build a healthy relationship by myself.

I couldn't make someone meet me halfway.

I couldn't love someone into changing.

And I couldn't keep sacrificing pieces of myself just to preserve the appearance of a relationship.

I still don't think I would describe the decision as something I wanted.

I think it was something I eventually accepted I needed.

There is a difference.

And perhaps that is the part I couldn't understand when I first wrote this:

Sometimes choosing yourself doesn't mean you stop grieving the person you lost.

Sometimes choosing yourself means finally accepting that the person you were grieving had been gone for a very long time.