the myth of the grateful child
As I fought with my mother for the hundredth time over a reason that was silly yet too hard for her to understand, I concluded that this post was long overdue. While I had ninety-nine other chances to complain about my difficult relationship with parents, I kept postponing it, fearing that I would alienate all my readers, who seemingly belong to one of two groups: those with toxic parents and those who fail to admit it. Above all is an unspoken rule to not talk ill about family, for only a wicked person with a mind and a tongue of a devil himself has wits to appear ungrateful to his kin. And being ungrateful to one's parents is of the same level of madness as being ungrateful to one's entire existence.
But arguing with my mother for the hundredth time felt like a drop in the ocean—if the ocean could fit in a teacup and the drop were the size of a meteorite. What makes it unbearable is both the fact that I am fighting with the closest and the dearest person, and that the fight itself consists of no solid argumentation whatsoever and is for the same reason as all previous fights—my mother's own insecurity. Neither this nor previous conflicts had any resolution, apart from staying silent for a week and then pretending we had never argued in the first place. But this time the teacup overflowed, and risking alienating one or the other or even both groups I've decided to cut all communication with my parents and, since nothing can be worse, write about it, too.
Speaking about my parents, I'll mostly be talking about my mother as the relationship with my dad has been close to nonexistent after I'd moved to my university's dorm at nineteen. Like me, my father is a lone wolf. Most of the time he keeps to himself, and when forcefully pulled out of his bubble of comfort, he gets irritated and practically impossible to deal with. Growing up with a father who rarely showed any emotion beyond irritation left me with a sense of detachment and struggling to connect with others. The weight of his silence—his emotional absence—became too much. There seemed no way to make him happy and so I stopped trying.
Nothing can describe better his relationship with my mother than the fact that they have no common interests, and the only thing the two of them don't mind sharing, it seems, is the seat of the toilet. For some unimaginable reason they found it the most practical thing to keep living in the same one-bedroom apartment that my grandma bought with her own money some fifty years ago; the very same place that my older brother and I grew up in, sharing the only bedroom while our parents slept in the living room; the place that has seen every repair possible, from floor to ceiling, and therefore every repair but one—the repair of our parents' marriage.
"Children of emotionally immature parents have to learn the hard way that they are not responsible for their parents' happiness, security, or well-being." — Lindsay C. Gibson, “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents”
This sense of solitude—perhaps a cover-up for my father's loneliness—is the only thing that unites him and me. Despite my mother bringing up my and his similarities every chance she has, I can't imagine a person more different. Unlike me, he had decided to have children, and so he reaped what he sowed. Unlike me, he kept torturing my mother with his presence out of convenience of staying under the same roof. And unlike me, he kept cheating on his partner, her being my mother, and repeatedly coming up with lies that even a seven-year-old could see through. But even the ugliest of characters have as much good in them as they have the ugly, and so my father somehow kept the appearance of a kind and thoughtful and caring person. And that is as much as I can say about him, for I am lucky to hear his voice once every March when I call to wish him a happy birthday.
Before I talk about my mother—and the complexity of her character deserves more than a couple of paragraphs—I will question the relationships with parents in general. Why do we give our family their own category as if they were a cast above all others? Like the socialite in a country with a corrupt government, we are willing to forgive our parents all crimes and harassment and humiliation simply because they appear to have authority over our lives. And who am I to live through the consequences of their choices? In his “Book of Secrets” Osho argued that there are two types of people, the logical and the emotional. But when did we decide to treat parents above all reasoning? Why do our relationships with family, unlike those with friends or partners, fall through the cracks of our mind and straight to the emotions? Instead of treating our parents based on logic and according to their actions, we treat them how we feel parents should be treated. But I am a logical person and thus reason must prevail. Barely distinguishing any status and hierarchy whatsoever, I put family into the same box as friends and colleagues and business partners. I do so because a parent must be a friend first and foremost, or what is that relationship without trust and acting in each other’s best interests?
A well-working relationship benefits both parties. If one pulls the blanket, leaving the other in the cold, what is there for the other to catch besides a sore throat and sniffles? It's natural for humans to strive to be better, and so we must surround ourselves with people who help us grow. Nobody wants to wake up in the morning a worse person than they were yesterday. To the best of our abilities and the capacity of our knowledge, we look forward to starting a new day better off than the one before, as little as the difference could be, and aspire to do good. Out of five closest people, besides a husband or a wife and maybe two best friends, why do we make space for the only two, the dearest, who constantly talk us down? Forty percent of energy spent in blame and guilt-tripping is a heavy price to pay for being born. So why do we keep paying it?
On the contrary, the right friend is not the one who supports every endeavor, though I wish everyone had supportive friends. No, this is enablement. In this case, you might as well surround yourself with five AI chatbots as LLMs excel at that. The right friend is one who knows when to encourage, when to be silent, and when to be a voice of reason, should you ever do something outrageously stupid. But take my mother, for example, for she is a fair parent but a terrible friend. First, I don't remember the last time she sided with me. When I was leaving Russia, she acted as though I betrayed the whole country. When I had quit my job, she reminded me with every occasion that I'd better find a new one soon. Now, that I am contemplating a ten-day meditation retreat, I suddenly appear to be joining a cult and will soon be out of home—not that I've had a permanent place in the last eight months—and enslaved and sent to a labor camp.
As I discovered recently, my mother has an intricate ability to find the weakest spot in my thinking and exploit it viciously. She may as well have Spider-Sense because she always knows what doubts I have about myself even if I don't disclose it to her for exactly the reason of that exploitation. Take the meditation retreat, for example. As it is my first time going away to some distant temple in the middle of Thai woods, I, who is just a monkey with a worried mind, hesitated every part of that decision: being far from the city, being in the woods, being in a Buddhist temple, surrendering all possessions and technology to god knows whom, and spending the majority of the ten days sitting in silence. And as a normal human being excited about his adventure, I shared everything and in great detail with my mother, though withheld the questionability of the activity. To my surprise, it took long enough to trigger her anxiety, as she only came back to me after four weeks. Ah, did she come prepared! Suddenly I was watching interviews about a disappearance of a young Russian man—how convenient it is to be just like him!—in a Buddhist meditation retreat. The interviewer was a handsome journalist from a Russian government-owned TV channel which spread all day long no valuable content but propaganda. The interviewees, on the other side, were the disappeared person's village mates with thin white faces and under-eye bags so big and blue that a poor makeup artist couldn't hide with a centimeter-thick layer of a concealer. Because nothing can conceal twenty years of drinking vodka.
"Trauma robs people of their sense of agency. Healing comes from reclaiming a sense of control over their own life." — Bessel van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score”
The main flaw in my reasoning as I can so far see is that of being disturbed by my mother's poorly handled projections of anxiety. Truly, isn't that what makes one a greater person if he can be above all verbal abuse and manipulation? It is my choice to be offended, or is it not? But logic aside, the abuse is most hurting not because of the words themselves but because they come from the mouth of the closest person.
Another might argue that we must ignore our parents' mistreatment and take care of them as one takes care of an older person because of age. But tell me then, if I am given a choice to save one person from a devastating fire, first being my mother, her life as mediocre as it is, and the other a noble biologist or, say, a pediatric surgeon whose work saves ten children each year, who should I urge saving? As I've recently come to making an extra dollar and realizing that not all is needed for my humble living, I considered donating a chunk of it, for that is the easiest I can do, not knowing what other use is there for the money. With these thoughts I came to my friend and asked him whether I should send it to a charity like The Red Cross or back home to my parents. Family always comes first, said the friend with the parents by no means nobler than mine. But to make him think a second longer perhaps I should have asked a different question: should I donate to a charity that provides humanitarian aid to those affected by war or to the two people that enable the very same war by bringing food and clothes to the young boys in the Russian military? Wnen I last wondered if my mother finally gave away my guitar that hasn't been played for a decade, she said that they've got many instruments in the army and that she sees no other way to dispose of it. Not all donations are alike.
The reason my mother has such a complex personality is that I never know what next she'll throw at me. At the age of eighteen, I was thus presumed by her to be dating a hooker, since only a hooker could take interest in me. Little did I know that prostitutes have better things to do than flirting around with broke teenagers. Today, I seem to be dealing with drug addicts and alcoholics, in other words a questionable company, considering my mother's loud concern with me steadily slipping into crime. As someone who doesn't smoke, drinks sparingly, and is highly cautious about drug use, the only crime I am guilty of is not leaving my parents' house sooner.
"If your parents have unresolved trauma and emotional immaturity, it’s not your fault. You’re not responsible for their healing." — Shannon Thomas, “Healing from Hidden Abuse”
But to paint a picture this dark is not to give my mother justice. Having raised two children in a household so tiny that even a mouse would feel restless, and with a cheating husband as a cherry on top, she made sure we were warm and fed and somewhat happy. My brother and I had clothes and not rags, our toys were simple yet they were toys still, and both of us were educated by the best institutions that a family of our class could afford. I thank my mother for gifting me a guitar on my thirteen's birthday. I was let alone to play it, and I played it for hours straight, until the music has become the essence of my living. It was also my mother who transferred me to a better school after the 7th grade—though it meant steep monthly payments—after noticing that I was bored where I was, among the ordinary unmotivated students. The new school boosted my confidence and gave me amazing friends with whom I'd shared many precious moments, be it on the school's premises or besides a campfire some five thousand kilometers away from Moscow.
It was, however, my very same mother who'd later tried to pull me out of that school—as I was spending too much time there—and send me to the outskirts of the city to a beaten-up college that produced no other alumni than cooks and plumbers. Another sharp memory of mine is waking up in the middle of the night at the age of eight to sharp gasps for breath. Someone was being chocked, I thought. The bed was shaking, rhythmically, methodically, and I was shaken with it. Shocked and scared, I slowly discerned my mother’s face in the dark, and then, above her, the face of a stranger.
My parents never traveled together—although I don't remember them ever trying—and that night left me pitying my mother. An eight-year-old must not be asked to bear a secret of an affair of his parent, but I bore it anyway as I bore my mother's other, bigger pain of not being given the life she wanted. Nonetheless, I now had two cheating parents, and that didn't make my childhood easier.
I don't know if there's a protocol of talking to abusive people other than ignoring them. I doubt it. It does, however, become more intricate when parents are the abusers. My journey into understanding parents' psychology began with reading Lindsay C. Gibson's book, named exactly as it should be, “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents”. I had first gotten curious by the title, thinking that perhaps I would better understand my distant and self-indulgent father. I was wrong. I learned little new about him. Yet in this book I discovered a whole Pandora’s box that was my mother. I have since recommended this book to many friends and all of them came back saying that they in turn recommended it to theirs.
This time my patience is over. I make no space for toxic people and my mother won't be an exception. I banned her on Telegram, and she is the first person I've ever banned. I have no intent on keeping it permanent—but neither do I plan to communicate with her soon.
If, like me, you’re fighting the internal battle of dealing with difficult parents, don’t you deserve a break too?