Dear Neha:

I would like to give you more of my input regarding your original post. I will quote from it and respond.

“… how she owns all the money I earn and save”- she doesn’t unless the two of you as adults made a legal contract that you have a financial debt to her. A child does not owe money to a parent for food, shelter, clothes and whatever else the parent chooses to buy for the child. For one, a parent has the legal duty to provide for the child food, shelter and such. If the parent chooses to provide more expensive items than it is her choice.

A child is not qualified to enter a legal contract anyway. Let’s say that as a child you told your mother: “when I grow up I will buy you a house!”- you are not required, legally or morally, to buy her a house because you were a child when you made that statement.

“Sometimes she thinks of me as her competitor…’I have done so many things for you’ but frankly I was never a demanding daughter.. I just accepted things the way they came to me”- it is unfair, unjust, immoral and .. otherwise wrong to give a child things and bargain later, state: I gave you those things, now give me!

Because as you wrote, a child accepts, what else is a child to do? A mother gives a child an expensive toy, is the child to say: you shouldn’t have! The child doesn’t know it will be part of bargain later on!

“I give her everything she puts her finger on”- she bargained well, not that it is difficult for a mother to do, to bargain with her child. Hence, the misuse of power (“I would agree on the misuse of power”, you wrote to me).

You experience resentment because you are being used and misused.

What to do? Stop buying her things, stop being used and misused by your mother. Better way to spend your money is in quality psychotherapy, so that you can heal from having been used and misused by your mother.

In therapy, you can be helped, to be able to say no to your mother, to stop allowing her to use you without the (unjustified) guilty feelings.

anita