Every week, Mallory Ortberg answers additional questions from readers, just for Slate Plus members.
Q. Estrangement by mother: I am the mother of an adult daughter who I don’t want to see. I am too stressed by dealing with her extremely difficult personality, which is the result of neurological and mental illnesses. She lives at a fair distance, more than a 10-hour drive, and she does not get to my home state, where she grew up, often.
I don’t want to tell her that I don’t wish to see her again in the near future, due to how much this stresses me, despite her trying not to—she cannot really help it. I could live my whole life and not see her again.
She recently married (a woman—I support marriage equality and am not even slightly homophobic), and I did not go to the wedding—I had a good excuse. Many people have abandoned her, and I don’t want to do this too, but I don’t want to see her again, and I think telling her outright is cruel, as is outright lying.
What to do?
A: I think it’s very difficult to ghost on a daughter.
I’ll take you at your word and trust that homophobia had nothing to do with your decision not to attend your daughter’s wedding, which was a fairly drastic statement as a parent, regardless of how “good” the excuse. It’s unclear how long you think you’ll need to take a break from seeing your daughter, since in one breath you say you’d like to take a break for “the near future,” then in the next say you could go the rest of your life without seeing her and be quite content about it. Those are two very different prospects.
Since you live so far away from each other, I think you could probably buy yourself a few months’ worth of a break without inviting a conversation, but if a part of you thinks you might want to go the rest of your life without meeting in person, you’ll have to think very carefully about how you want to proceed. If you think it’s possible to see her a few times a year, under controlled circumstances, then I would encourage you to at least attempt maintaining a friendly yet distant relationship. If even with therapy and enforcing strict boundaries you think yourself incapable of seeing your daughter ever again, then I think you will have to be honest. Nothing is worse than repeatedly reaching out to someone and not knowing why he or she refuses to respond. It’s particularly painful when the nonresponder is one’s own mother.
If it’s possible for you, choose the least cruel option. I don’t pretend to understand how difficult seeing your daughter is; it may be that every interaction with her is wildly painful and challenging for you, and I don’t want to lightly encourage you to sacrifice your own well-being on a regular basis, if it’s come to that. But you say that she’s difficult, not mean, and that she suffers from mental illness, which should surely be at least one reason to pursue empathy rather than censure.
I’d encourage you to figure out what’s the bare minimum of interaction you can possibly live with and find ways to make occasional contact bearable for you. If it’s absolutely impossible, you owe your daughter at least honesty, but I think you should try to offer her more than that, if you can. I wish you good luck.
