Dear Dandan,

First, I am glad that both you and your family all recovered from covid!! I’ve been following the news and am hoping that things will get better soon in your country…

Thanks for explaining some more about your mother and your situation at home and while growing up. It appears you were and still are your mother’s favorite:

She likes me more than my siblings. She always takes extra care of me. Even now. Treats me special, prepares juice , extra snack food for me. If I am not normal , she will be disturbed too.

My mom still loves me a lot. My sister says that my mom is liked obsessed with me. My mom wants me to be happy every single second. But i don’t know I couldn’t handle too much love.

One reason you could be her favorite is that you’re a boy, which is in many families in India more appreciated than having a girl. I don’t know if it’s true for your family. But beyond that, I think there’s another reason why your mom likes you the best:

She likes talking. She has complained a lot that dad doesn’t talk at all. she hasn’t had anyone to talk and share at all. But I have listened to her a lot.

Two days back when tehre was some fight, my mom was dull, she seeks me all the time. She wants me to be around her. She tells that my presence gives her some strength.

Your mother had two major problems, I believe. One is that she’s sad and depressed by nature, so she‘s a person with low energy and quite needy. She needs others to lift her up, and she also needs movies and other events to lift her from her lethargy.

Emotionally, she’s a needy person, with a propensity to easily slip into depression. Even if she took good care of you and your sisters physically, and walked twice per day to your school to give you lunch and snacks, it doesn’t mean she was able to give you the same amount of emotional care and nurturance. In fact, it appears she needed you, her son, to provide that emotional care for her.

She felt lonely in her marriage and didn’t have an emotional companion in your father, which means she didn’t have emotional support from him. He worked a lot, trying to ensure the best future for you, and he also wasn’t someone who talks a lot. I assume he wasn’t really emotionally responsive, didn’t understand her emotional needs. As someone needy and fragile as her, your mother needed someone to nurture her emotionally, and that someone was you. She talked a lot with you. Perhaps she sometimes complained that your father was so silent and unresponsive?

In any case, it appears the roles were reversed: instead of her taking care of you emotionally, you took care of her. You tried to make her happy but it was difficult because her unhappiness was much deeper and you could never make her happy. But of course, a child wouldn’t know that.

In the 11th grade, when you transferred to that strict, Spartan like boarding school, you did pretty well in the first couple of months, you even consoled your school mates when they felt homesick. But when you went home for holidays, I guess you saw how your mother was sad and depressed, and how bad she felt without your emotional support – and you couldn’t bear that. You faked stomach problems so you could come home never to return to that school again. I believe you didn’t do it because you were weak and needy (or at least that wasn’t the main reason), but because your mother was weak and needy. She needed you, and you couldn’t bear that she’d be without you.

This goes on to this day – she seeks you to console her when she has a fight with your sister. She seeks you to put cream on her legs, even though she could do it on her own. But she likes your caring and your proximity too – as she says, you give her strength. More precisely, you give her emotional support, like you always did.

She was so fragile amd needy of that emotion I felt. I did apply and massage. I do that many times. But that day as she was needy of that emotion, I felt so heavy inside, it was too much to me. Felt like crying, I don’t know how to explain that. When someone shows too much of emotions , emotional need are is so fragile around me, it makes me very weak and I feel like crying.

Yes, you feel heavy, because it’s a heavy burden for a small, needy child to take care of his needy mother. You could never give her what she needed, and at the same time you never received what you needed from her. It makes you feel desperate. You are dependent on each other, you’re still attached to her like with an umbilical cord. And that’s why you couldn’t accept that job in Germany – because your mother needs you. You can’t leave her, because she’s needy. She’s even more needy than you are. It feels hopeless for you.

So you’d need to learn to emotionally detach herself from her, and find happiness and fulfillment regardless of her inability to be happy and fulfilled. You’d need to detach that umbilical cord…

After you detach the umbilical cord, you’d need to focus on fulfilling your own unmet emotional needs. Only then could you have a chance of having a healthy romantic relationship. So there are steps, it’s a journey, but it’s doable and it’s worth it! Because as you start untangling those knots, things will be become clearer and you won’t feel at such an impasse like now.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Tee.