Shelley is about to admit to one of the great taboos of motherhood. No matter how hard she has tried, she says she can’t bring herself to love her elder daughter, Catherine. ‘I know what people will think. Everyone will hate me. I’m the woman who doesn’t like her own child. But I’m speaking out because I’m convinced I’m not alone,’ says the 33-year-old.
This experience of Shelley’s (or try here or here if the article is down) is worthy of discussion and I’m sure she’s right and other mothers feel this way too, and I could say a lot about fathers who don’t seem to have any particular attachment to their children (ie. the whole ‘deadbeat dad’ phenomenon) but who don’t seem to trigger nearly the outrage.. but instead what I will say is fu-uck, how masochistic do you have to be to tell a story like this to a conservative sensationalist newspaper like the UK’s Daily Mail? That act alone tells me that you are in desperate need of counselling.
And, reading this article reminded me just how cathartic confessing something terrible can be for you, but not necessarily for the recipient of your burdensome secret – not sure how this whole newspaper article bizzo will help the daughter, Catherine any.
Post Script: This piece remains in my blog statistics as one of the most searched for topics bringing people to my blog, a fact that has surprised me greatly. At least according to the comments, it seems the bulk of people searching the Internet for this topic are adult children of mothers who didn’t love them. There is consequently a world of sadness in the comments below and I want to express my deepest sympathy to those of you who find yourself here because you are coping with the experience of not being loved by your parent. This is not a topic I have particularly explored on my blog and I have little to offer you here, except for the growing number of comments below indicating that you are not alone.
Goodness.
Just as well 11 year olds aren’t sensitive to every single little thing their mothers do. The poor kid must be mortified.
Link to the article isn’t working… : (
It’s been removed, but I read it here:
http://www.wekidyounot.org/wkyn/printthread.php?tid=1391
What an irresponsible piece of schlock journalism. Yeah, it probably pays in some way to acknowledge publicly that parental love isn’t necessarily a biological absolute, but this? It’s harmful to Catherine, and honestly reads more like a psychotic split between internal and external than a simple matter of some kind of random absence of love.
What aggravates the hell out of me is this nonsense about emotions being somehow outside of one’s own control.
“But I know I can’t help the way I feel. I can’t turn on my feelings like a tap. ”
Horsesh*t. If you aren’t controlling your own emotions, who is?
If the bond doesn’t come magically from on high, you bond with your child the same way you bond with anyone else–by spending time with them, getting to know them, finding common ground, cuddling and so on.
I think I’d have less of a problem with the confession if she changed her name or something. What if her daughter ends up reading it?
She should have just sent a postcard to PostSecret.
The Terrible Mother is a classical Jungian archetype — one that occupies the role opposite the (male) Hero. She is the secret face behind the dragon that all heroes must face down in order to come to adulthood. The Terrible Mothers in contemporary news stories are real people, but they’re also great “stories” because of the way that journalists can choose to make them read like like fairytales come to life. (As opposed to, for instance, “Ms. X, alternately abused and neglected in childhood, is unable to form strong emotional attachments with anyone. Unsurprisingly, parenthood has not turned out to be an easy experience for her.)
For me, there’s something so magnetic about the Terrible Mother archetype — it’s my experience of my own mother when I’m feeling down, it’s what I see when I look in the mirror sometimes out of the corner of my eye. In real life I’m not a terrible mother, but her mysterious, Kali-like figure still has some powerful psychic pull.
She’s certainly not alone, nor is it impossible to find stories of other people in a similar situation. Both mothers and fathers. There are quite a few examples of it on Tanya Byron’s House of Tiny Tearaways.
I agree with Christina, we aren’t entirely at the mercy of our emotions, but sometimes people need some help to understand where theirs come from and how to modify them and make them more positive.
It doesn’t take a genius to suspect that she has a whole lot of negative feelings she’s attached to that poor kid which she needs to recognise and separate from the child. But she’s hardly going to achieve that talking to a newspaper.
I also agree that you need to work on bonding with your child, but there is a tendency for wonderful birth experiences with instantaneous, everlasting love to be over-represented to the casual observer. A 22 year old might be forgiven for thinking there is just something wrong because she didn’t spontaneously bond with the slimy, ugly creature she was presented with.
I felt such sadness for this woman’s daughter. Not sure what motivated the woman to make her lack of feelings for her child public, other than to try in some way relieve herself of the burden she felt she was carrying, but I agree with some of the other comments in that it is irresponsible and in terribly poor judgement on the part of the publication to print this.
As to why she feels no “love” for her daughter? My guess is that something went awry in their early attachment, for whatever combination of reasons. My advice to the mother would be, especially at this stage of proceedings, to keep her worries out of her daughter’s hearing, and to do the responsible grown up thing by doing the very best she can to look after her daughter’s emotional needs as well as she is able.
It’s all good to acknowledge our deepest fears, and it might very well be comforting for other parents to hear them, but I think the 11-year old’s needs here should come first.
This thing is best left to hash out with your therapist, not a public newspaper. I can not imagine reading an article about how my mother didn’t love me in print.
There are many people who can not attach. There are psychological reasons behind it best left to professionals. But it is a discussion worth having without fear of being attacked for being honest (though I agree it is not something your kids should read about in the paper).
You know when your mother doesn’t love you. If you aren’t allowed to know that your mother can’t love, you can grow up thinking that you (the child) are unloveable. Believe me, it is easier to know the issue is your mother’s and not yours.
Jake,
That’s a very interesting perspective. I never thought of it that way. I don’t know if I agree with you or not. It’s something I’d have to think about.
I think it would be horrible to have your parent not love you. I’m not sure if it would be worse if you suspected it and it was denied. Or worse if it was out in the open.
Even if it’s better in the open, wouldn’t it be still better not to put it out there in the public eye. Maybe it’s something they need to work on as a family. I also think 11 is a bit young to handle that information. I think your idea would make more sense to me if the child was older….maybe 15+
I also think there’s the issue of her being able to love the other child. This is not a woman who is incapable of love. It’s a woman who’s incapable of loving this one daughter. How can you not take that personally?
This article was so compelling and made me so very sad and had me going through so many different emotions. I don’t think it’s terrible she did the article. It pulls attention to an issue that another parent might read and realize they are not alone. And she’s honest even though I can’t identify with her in a million years.
My heart just aches for this child. I can’t imagine. I think she will have some real issues to find that love that her mother hasn’t given her, even if she is trying to do better now. It kills me to think of that toddler coming to her for cuddles and being turned away. Uh. The crush of that.
I do think there is a point when we cannot control our emotions. So much of our person is the chemicals that run through our body.
I can admit a confession that my own (only) child, who I love eons over, is a very trying toddler who drives me out of my mind many days. I have wondered if I had another baby who was very calm in disposition, if I would love them more. It’s scary to have those thoughts. And mothers do have favorites no matter what many say. I just hope my children would never know the better as these two siblings must obviously know.
I read it, and was a) amazed at her chutzpah for making the confession public, and b) appalled at the impact such a confession would have on her child. Sure, we all have days – longer? – when we might not like our children. Maybe we have moments when we don’t love them, although I’m not quite sure what that would even mean. But to state it as an absolute? ‘I can’t help it, I don’t love my child’? Even if it is true – and who is anyone to say that it isn’t? – who gains from the saying? Because the cost to the child… gah.
no some mothers hate their children, or at the very least have no bonding or attachment at all. They see the child as a problem they wish they did not have. Some go so far as to act on getting rid of the problem, but for most kids, they are left to bear the brunt of an angry unloving mother.
I am my mother’s eldest. A lady at my church said, oh you have such a wonderful daughter. She pretended not to hear so I prodded her and I said, didn’t hear what she said Mom, she turned to the woman and said, yes, but my son is my pride and joy. I am not 11, but 56 and it still hurts. My mother is 86. Sometimes I think when she dies I will be free of always trying to win her love, and other times, I just think I will really be a motherless child then.
Don’t try to win her love, recognize her problems have nothing to do with you, You are not the problem, she is. You are a child of the universe and you have a right to be here.
We often think we need love from a person, sometimes we have to find love elsewhere. And we must learn to love ourselves.
Nancy
Oh Deborah that is one very painful memory.
Deborah Chall-Hutchison I understand you completely. I had a mother who didn’t love me as much as my brother. I am not sure if she loved me at all. I grew up frightened, dysfunctional and angry for many years as an adult. I felt like unwanted goods and was tired of hearing how I was “JUST LIKE MY FATHER that BASTARD” It affected my life, many times I wanted to just die. I have never had family support.
My mother tried to kill me as a toddler and I learned not to trust her. She was mentally unstable and unable to attach to me somehow. She said she loved me but there was always that condition for loving me. I love you but..you are not this or that.
My brother on the other hand didn’t live the first seven years of his life in fear of his mother doing him in or wondering why you can’t make her happy at all. He is younger than I by 5 years.
My mother died and that day a weight lifted from my soul. My father died the same year. I knew I would never ever find the mother love I wanted then. It was over.
I have had to be my own mother and hold myself in. After many years of counseling I am learning to be my own mother. I have to protect my heart from my brother and his wife. He is fine with me but his wife cannot believe me when I speak of the abuse I endured and the sexual abuse from my father cannot even be mentioned. I am the one at fault, I lost my mothers love and I caused my father to abuse me.
I am done with my family and moving on. My first marriage was to a dysfunctional man and I one day decided I wanted love and began to care for myself. I found a good man who is patient and loving and cares for me. He has the stability to let me grow. I have been to a lot of counseling and I am now working on the deep inner rage I have held in for years over the lack of love and care and any stability in my life. I never had any thing stable. I am amazed I am even functionally normal. I just became a loner in my own family.
I am still working on loving myself and letting go of my parents neglect. I have had to do so much to overcome their failures and I now realize how strong I must be to deal with it without suicide. I do not have children and in a way I am glad I didn’t. I didn’t want to continue the problems of our family and after my mother told me I would be a lousy mother don’t have kids I realized she would just never support me or love them.
If Shelley doesn’t like her daughter then give her to someone who would love her. I wish that had happened for me. That child will know it and be a problem till she loves herself and doesn’t feel unworthy.
While I do feel sad for Catherine as I had a mother who made it plain she never wanted me, I can also fell for Shelly, too. Sometimes people can’t help how they feel. I’ve also been in Shelly’s shoes, too. In my case, I had a 1st child I love dearly and was I happy with being the mother of an only child, so I got a tubal ligation…only to have it fail. No matter how I felt I could not be happy with that unintended, unwanted pregnancy. I felt depressed and nearly suicidal. My marriage began to unravel and we actually separated. It was counselors at our church that suggested adoption, and we did. I have no regrets about it, yet there are those who do judge and make rude comments about how I “gave my baby away.” I still say adoption is better than either abortion or keeping the child and resenting him or her. It’s too bad no one talked to Shelly about the adoption option. The both she and Catherine would’ve had a better chance at happiness.
There is nothing here that I do not know personally, My mother did not love me, was very abusive but when I divorced the family for 10 yrs she was super worried about what others thought about it.
And yet until she died she could not even pretend to like me. It is strange, I was a good kid, took care of my brothers, worked hard on the family farm, never in any trouble. Went on to a stellar career which she had to lie about to her friends and family because it was not good enough. Go figure
I too, have a mother who didn’t want me. Actually, she didn’t want any kids at all and certainly not the five she had. She made the right choice not to have kids, but back then in the late 40’s and 50’s, unlike today, there were no options for women who didn’t want to be a mom. She tried to kill me and my sister on several occasions and was a violent out of control rage-aholic. There was no love. We grew up with constant fear, rage, and unpredictability and a lot of cruelty, abuse, physical beatings and mental abuse. No support, no love. She is a narcissistic sociopath.
I heard over and over how she wanted to have a career. But back in the late 1940’s, after she married my dad and when I was born in 1952, there were no options, no birth control. She tried to bribe the Dr with money (and who knows maybe what else) to have her tubes tied so she didn’t have to have more kids. She was told it was not possible as he would lose his license to practice and he had a family. There was no birth control, no choices to be made.
Fast forwarding to a few years ago, my younger brother died. I knew she wished it was me lying there but she didn’t say anything. All of a sudden as I was at my dying brothers bedside, she came up behind me and as I turned toward her she came right within an inch of my face and screamed out … “Why … why .. why… Why does God have to take my David”? She meant, why couldn’t it have been ME lying there dying instead of her youngest child, her son. She resented me more than him, for some unknown reason.
So, to this day, I feel like crying when people are angry towards their birth moms or complain that their birth moms gave them up for adoption or they were abandoned. I wish my mom left me at the Hospital and ran off. Had my mom given each of us up for adoption, 5 children would have had much better lives (nothing could be worse than what we all 5 suffered) and she would have made 5×2 = 10 adoptive parents happy, plus 5 kids = 15 … not too mention their extended families as well. But, oh, what would others think? So, she kept us for selfish reasons.
I have a lot of respect for and admire women who recognize that they can’t raise a child and instead give the baby a good home, instead of torturing the children and hating them. Giving up a child is so hard to do but it is so UNselfish. I wish my mom had. Now, all of this has contributed to my relationship with my own (grown) daughter. Out of all this comes the fact that I loved my daughter with all my heart and soul (and it showed) from the minute she was born until she became a teenager.
She’s now in her early 30’s, 15 years older now and I still can’t stand her. At least we had the first 16 very good years together. Now, I wouldn’t care if I never saw my own daughter again. I gave her what I never had and for the past 20 years all she does is whine and complain and brood … her childhood wasn’t good enough. Jana
http://www.alice-miller.com/flyers_en.php
excellent website for understanding our life without loving mothers. It is not our fault, and I too look back and wonder why i did not go to childrens services and look for help. I had been in foster care once already, but perhapbs i was too young to know exactly what was going on.
nancy
I’ve just stumbled upon this and am speechless. So many of you share such painful mother daughter experiences, it’s frightening. I also respect this woman for revealing one of the darkest secrets of all time, although this ‘perfect mother’ image only began in the 1940’s and 50’s and has now become plain ridiculous. Before that, other people raised our children, even breast feeding them, so there weren’t even thoughts of attachment issues between mothers and their children. Men of course, have always been allowed to be detached by society, and involved fathers are something to be revered. Children and neglected, beaten, abused and murdered every single day, so I really can’t understand why a mother explaining that she doesn’t connect with one of her children, is so abhorrent. ~30 year old mother from South Africa.
It is so abhorrent because the child is left without love, without care and with no way to even learn to love themselves or grow into reasonably normal human beings.
Their souls are deeply wounded, they ache for someone to care enough about their safety, love needs, teaching them, mentoring them. They grow up on a vacuum and live lives of desperation, often raising kids for which they really do not have the parenting skills.
It is one of the reasons we have so many drug addicts, prostitutes, thiefs, murderers, no one is raising the kids, teaching them right from wrong in dysfunctional families. Then you have multigenerational dysfunctions, We do not become more competent as people if we do not raise good, well loved, well mentored kids.
It is also a reason there is so much hate and fear in the world, both grow in the absence of love. Again I refer anyone interested to Alice Miller PhD’s work on child abuse.
Nancy
Yes, of course its going to cause her some emotional damage, but no more than a child being brought up by a step-mother, most of whom do not love their step-children. What I was trying to express, is that a mother not showing affection to her children cannot alone cause these children to become drug addicted miscreants. There are far worse things. I grew up with exactly the same mother and realised very early, with a little therapy, that I needed to move on. In my experience of living in the country that I live in, children become extremely damaged human beings when they are EXPOSED to gangs, violence, drugs and alcoholism, regardless of how much or how little they are loved. Thats why this middle class child growing up in a middle class life is not going to turn out so badly, unless she is allowed to.
Well, you have two things going for you, middle class and therapy. So many of the kids who do not succeed have neither of those going for them.
I was not in a middle class family, we barely made ends meet, and there was a great deal of abuse but my real mother. I succeeded by divorcing the past and because I had a grandmother who was an “enlightened witness”, who loved me very much, who taught me right from wrong, and who served as a stablizing force until she became ill about the time I was 13.
By then I had a goal in mind, to become a nurse and had earned and saved the money for tuition by picking berries and other subsistence commodities (ferns, salal, bark). Without my grandmother, I would have ended up like my brother (half brother, no relation to my grandmother), growing pot for a living, and living off the books so long he will not get any retirement benefits.
Success despite one’s circumstances, almost always comes from someone outside the circumstances recognizing your worth, capacity, potential and facilitating your suppressed voice. It begings to give you new messages; messages you do not get in your home. Without that you begin to believe and live the environment to which you are exposed as a young impressionable child. I don’;t think you and I are very far apart on this issue, just seeing it through different eyes, I am a 68 yr old retired nurse in the USA.
http://www.alice-miller.com/index_en.php?page=2
I hate to make this comparison but the comparison is not meant to be taken in a way that makes mother’s look bad. It is said by experts in the field that serial killers can kill and simply lack the emotion that a “normal” person would have. It isn’t like they are having all this sadness but doing it anyway. My point is this: There are mothers who give birth to children and don’t have maternal feelings for their babies. When the babies are infants or even as they get older. They simply lack those emotions. Like it or leave it, it’s the truth.
Truth or not, it destroys the soul of the child. To come back from such a basic rejection takes strengths many children do not even have the opportunity to develop because they are so hated.
It is abuse of the child’s core beliefs of love and caring. it destroys the child unless the child has someone who can reflect back to him or her that they arenot the problem, the unloving mother is
I believe they lack emotions in most cases because they have not been properly socialized or loved. You have to have love and compassion expressed to you in order to learn it. You cannot teach yourself in a vaccum what is acceptable and what is not. In fact you isolate yourself to avoid the fact you are unloved, unwanted, you get what you need by acting out regardless of the social norms.
Mothers who give birth to kids they do not love, should quit after one, ideally should not give birth at all.
This mother is so insensitive to her daughters feelings. As you can see she only cares about her own or she wouldn’t have done this. My mother has hated me since day 1 and has never tried to hide that fact. I have many siblings who were shown love and were manipulated into showing hatred towards me as well. We are adults now for many years and this has never changed and never will I guess. As for this mother, wasn’t it enough that you showed this to daughter all her life? Did you really have to keep going just to mess with her some more???? I know you so very well!!! You are just looking for support in your abuse towards your daughter so you can feel justified in you’re behavior. Too bad because I know God must be trying to set you straight in you’re thoughts but instead you are looking to support you’re evil ways with others like you. One thing I know is that abusive parents look to others to be their allies and help support abuse toward that one. YOU DO NOT DESERVE YOU’RE DAUGHTER!!!!! What you give is what you’re going to receive in the end.
For some on here you will never really comprehend the totality that physical and mental abuse plays on a child and adult. The fact is, is that as an adult the anger goes so deep and it pisses you off that a mother can say she hates that child. I know for a fact that to not be shown love does not take away a person’s ability to love. I have loved my son with my whole heart and have never abused him in anyway. So as much as a violent, alcoholic, twisted and sadistic so called mother wanted to destroy me, she didn’t win!
I agree, my sadistic abusive mother did not win either. However with out the assistance of a grandmother who adored me, I wonder where I would have ended up. She taught me right from wrong in a loving way, (in contrast to my mother who raged even when i did things right, just to have a reason to beat me), taught me that I was worthy and that what was going on in my life was not my fault.
Without that learning, I believe i would have felt very unworthy and perhaps ended up on drugs or alcohol to medicate the pain and unworthiness. She was the enlightened witness that showed me a different life was possible. Without that, perhaps i would have grown up with rage and a loveless personality.
I believe kids who are asocial, without emotion or feelings are not properly socialized and loved. They come to believe they are unlovable, not all but those who do not make it in life. They have no reference point as to the way life can be lived (without rage, hate, drugs, booze, etc).
Feelings of inferiority in women also lead to a lack of self “care for them” with drugs and alcohol in exchange for sex with strangers for money.
A downward spiral that is very hard to stop alone.
Nancy
While trying to conclude the basis for my binge eating, I stumbled across this article. Wow. So disgusting. My “mother” is a horrible, nasty, narcissistic sociopath, who did everything in her power to intimidate, abuse, and frighten us to the point that I still try to train myself to wake up in the morning without fear and anxiety. I have abused drugs, alcohol, food, and just about anything else that I thought might fill the gaping void in my soul because of her hurtful and hateful behaviour. It’s so embarrassing at this time of year, especially, when others are talking about spending the holidays with their families–or even when people begin to reminisce about memories of their mother’s cooking or beauty routine or …anything, really. I have no memory of anything except physical, verbal, and emotional abuse. Additionally, I’m an overachiever, but I suffer from so much nervousness, anxiety, and fear of failure that everything just seems twice as hard. I’ve achieved a lot, and I’m glad that I followed through on my dreams, but it doesn’t matter to anyone because success and learning are not valued by my “family.”
You need to do the things you do for yourself. You are to be commended that you got beyond your family. Non-nurturing mothers are really not mothers, but have such devastating impact on our lives.
On the other hand perhaps we would not have been such ac hievers if we were not driven? I don’t know for sure, but suspect I was pursuing a better life than I had.
Nancy
Oh as to embarassment about not having families during the holidays, I seek out friends who are also alone and ask if they would like to get together over the holidays, which works out well