Dear Samantha:

March of 2016 you shared that your father was aggressive when you were a child, that when you were 5-11, “I thought my dad was going to kill me because of his rage”, and that until the age of 11 you slept in your mother’s room, “otherwise I would have anxiety attacks”. At 13, during your parents’ nasty divorce, your mother’s health declined and you “had to pick up a lot of the responsibilities” while she was ill.

You wrote back in March 2016: “My mother and I have a great relationship… she’s my best friend and we pretty much are a team as we have been my whole life. She is working on building up her life again (still) so we have a major partnership in trying to do so”.

Later your wrote about your partnership, or teamwork with your mother: “the older I have grown and the more clarity I have of the past, I realize our relationship was more of teamwork/ survival oriented relationship” while your father and grandfather were in your lives, “it kept us sane at times”. Yet, “Our relationship now has changed slightly. We still are pretty much a team, however… I see us being less of a single working unit”.

Dec 2016 you referred to your mother as “basically my best friend”.

More than two years later, today, there is no semblance of a partnership or a team: “My mom is always annoyed with me. She’s pretty critical of me… I’d probably say I hate her. I always question if it’s me.. I just feel like she’s lonely and I am a place filler for her… Maybe my kindness will help her?”

My thoughts: your mother should have protected you from your father, being the adult protecting her child. Instead she formed a partnership with her child, as if you were an adult, a partnership aimed at helping and protecting each other against a common enemy, the father.

If I understand correctly, once the common enemy was gone, there was a new goal to keep you and her in partnership: the two  of you individually building up your lives. Am I understanding correctly?

Maybe she told you that this is her goal but then abandoned it, and as your partnership deteriorated for lack of a common enemy and lack of a common goal, she has been angry at you for… aiming at making a life for yourself instead of being content being “a place filler for her”?

anita