This couldn’t come at a better time, when I’m made to feel guilty for not calling my divorced parents on their respective Parent Days or birthdays or having anything to do with them in general.

That article was why I signed up for Kinja. Didn’t comment just starred until I could no longer see through my tears.

Thanks for your support

Thank you. I needed this.

I'll avoid rambling on about the various reasons that this article speaks to me, and just say "Thanks"

Can I just add that I hate how everyone views abuse as some sort of Cinderella story? You HAVE to forgive; you need to get over it because you found a good man; you must function like someone who was not horribly abused for decades. Doesn’t work like that.

I highly recommend Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel “Are you my Mother?” for anyone struggling with rejecting/accepting a disappointing mother.

My mom is mentally ill, and did a lot of damage to me because she wasn’t treated until she was almost sixty (I’m still not sure she ever got the correct treatment, but whatever). But I find that I’m angrier at the members of my family who knew the things that went on and did absolutely nothing to help me when I was…

This is a breath of fresh air, and a relief. I have a kind of hostage relationship with my mother, where she doesn’t support me, and considers me out of the family for not adhering to her religion. She doesn’t consider me married, and won’t visit my home or let my siblings because of ‘principal’. I still go over there…

Thank you so much for this. I carry a lot of tough feelings from distancing myself from my toxic, alcoholic mother, but I also feel gratitude. This really resonated with me as Mother’s Day is always a mixed bag of emotions for me.

Thank you for this. I have been distancing myself from my mother lately for various reasons and sometimes I feel like the worst person in the world because of it. My mother loves me and has been a good mother, but cannot accept that she does not come first in my life, firmly believes that I am still a child under her…

My friend Iris took this photo and captioned it “When you hate Mother’s Day and this is the grocery store.”

Thank you so much for this. I’m one of those “middle ground” people you wrote about in the third paragraph, and I still go around in circles with my brother and father about my mom. (“Oh, surely she wasn’t THAT bad!” Oh, no, Mom railroading me into coming out to her at age fourteen, then publicly humiliating me a few…

My boyfriend had to break up with his awful, toxic parents a couple years ago, and my excellent mother died almost four years ago. We mostly just, like, drink mimosas on Mother’s Day. I will probably ask my cats to get me some flowers.

Whether it’s a mother, father, sibling, grandparent, or other relative, always this: prioritize your own self-care. There is nothing wrong with protecting yourself and distancing yourself from an abusive/toxic person. It’s hard and can be hard throughout your life, but you are your top priority.

This is the first year in maybe 10 years that I’ve had a decent relationship with my mother. After my horrible breakup and some analysis, I realized that I would never be a peace with anyone that gets close to me unless I either cut her off completely or said every-fucking-thing I needed to in order to let her know…

I feel like I'm being dragged back into my mothets crazy cycle right noe. But she is so damn helpless I feel like I can't just abandon her to the mess she's made. Anyway this feels on point.

I am in fact one of those daughters that had to write off a toxic mother. For 18 years she shamed me, emotional and mentally abused me. She was a horrible excuse for a mother. I went 800 miles away to college to get away from her. She sent me off to college on an airplane with two suitcases. She tried to get me to…

Thank you for this post.

Thank you.