My Mom Died, and I Didn’t Cry…
…because she was no longer a part of my family.
My mom and I didn’t talk for the last 8 years of her life. It was a mutual decision to break contact, based on years of emotional and psychological insults, substance abuse, and mental health issues on both sides.
I take my responsibility for our separation and spent years in therapy, working out the truth of our relationship, her expectations of me, and the reality of her own lived experience.
Before we stopped talking, we were just hurting each other. I wanted the hurting to stop, and I think she did too. I hope she died in less pain without me than she had with me living in her life. Her final absence has made me reflect on our relationship, and the hope I have for my relationship with my own children.
I started BabyMoon Family to research and write about the experience of IVF and surrogacy for queer men, and it has broadened to include learning and sharing what I can about the latest science, regulations, and societal changes around assisted reproductive technology (ART) for queer people.
I really enjoy researching and writing about these topics, but if I am honest, part of me started this venture to prepare or understand myself better, in order to not become the same parent as my mother.
However, estrangement from family is not uncommon. Some research data shows that as many as 25% of people are estranged from at least one family member (1), and the NPR podcast, All Things Considered, did a show in December 2023 titled, ‘Family estrangement is on the rise. A psychologist offers ways to cope’ (2).
While I’m not going to discuss the trend of family estrangement, I do want to share how it prepared me for the death of my mother, and how we should all celebrate our ‘logical’ or chosen families just as much as we applaud successful ‘biological’ families.
Gabi Hayes, a children’s therapist who is estranged from her father and paternal grandparents, compared estrangement to death,
‘This grief affects us very similarly physiologically as if we were experiencing the death of a loved one. Understanding this kind of grief has really helped me mourn the loss of the life I thought I would have and to give myself the space to process and grieve.’ (3)
I feel like my mom died 8 years ago, because for me, she did.
I have grieved the loss of her already, and like Gabi, I have worked very hard to let go of the life I should be living, and focus on the life I am actually living: A life without my mom.
I’m a self-proclaimed Disney nerd, and I often recall a quote from the Marvel movie Avengers: Endgame that supports this notion of ‘should’ in life. In the film, Thor’s mother, Frigga, says:
‘Everyone fails at who they are supposed to be, Thor. The measure of a person, of a hero, is how well they succeed at being who they are.’ (4)
I don’t think my mother ever wanted to be a mother. She talked about how having children and family obligations made finishing her PhD impossible, about the inconvenience of having to drive us everywhere, of all the sacrifices she had to make to support our lives and activities.
She never got to be who she really wanted to be, and I think that made her an unhappy person and an unhappy mother.
So, I stopped looking to her for support, for encouragement, for love, and I started finding that in my close friends. For years, I looked for it unsuccessfully in romantic relationships, but I finally found it in my husband.
However, I had to search for it, and when I found it, I had to nurture it. It didn’t come to me because I was born into the right relationships. I had to want it and build it.
In this way, ‘logical’ or chosen families are even stronger than ‘biological’ ones. We have to make them happen. Nothing is given to us. We have to make our own way in the world.
Don’t get me wrong. I would love to have been born into a family who loved me just as I am and vice versa. I have friends who have amazingly healthy and loving biological families. I love this for them, but I have accepted it is not my reality.
My mom’s death has also made me realize that having my own children and building my nuclear family with my husband through IVF and surrogacy is similar to me building a ‘logical’ family from my friends.
IVF and surrogacy are not easy, and this also demonstrates how much I want to be a father. I wrote a previous BabyMoon Family article on how children born to queer parents may even change the world because they are so incredibly loved and wanted given everything queer parents go through to have them (https://www.babymoonfamily.com/original-articles/rainbow-families-impact).
This is the main difference between my mother and me. This is why I don’t think I will become her as a parent. This is who I am meant to be. I want to be a father, and I have done everything I can to make this happen. She didn’t want to be a parent, but she felt forced to conform to societal norms for women of her generation, putting her career second and her family first. Sadly, now her life is over, and both her professional and personal lives were not what she ever wanted them to be.
As the world famous drag queen RuPaul says, ‘If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love anybody else? Can I get an amen?’
I will love myself so I can love my children, and that will be my ultimate lesson and the legacy from my mother.
References:
