“Sometimes, letting things go is a much greater act of force than defending or hanging out.” ~Eckhart Tolle
In July 2023, my father died in a tragic accident. We were devastated. My sisters, my mother, and I thought so.
Following months after his death, I was forced to confront the truth of my mother’s emotional mutilation. Losing my father left me with the illusion of my mother.
Sudden exit
By September, just two months after her father’s death, my mother had packed her bags and left the house to help her settle down. She moved from Florida to Alabama and was with her high school crash, a man she secretly loved for many years. The man she has long referred to as her “co-author.” I call him Roy.
He was the fixture of every night in her life for a while. Even while my dad was sleeping in the next room, she got a call with him late in the evening. She always insisted that it didn’t bother my dad. But looking back, I think he just engulfed the discomfort, like so many others.
Let’s take a step back. In 2022 my sister and I bought a house to help our parents retire comfortably. We thought we were giving them a safe and loving space to age together. But before my father passed away, my mother had already planned to escape for her. The house we bought was not her sanctuary. It was a stopover.
She moved and asked us for help. She did not warn us. She bought new packages, made quiet arrangements, and disappeared. We were suddenly struck by an exciting text message. A story of her “new life”, her “adventures”, and her rediscovered love. She was free and shining, but the rest of us were still breathing from the air.
New life, new names
By January, six months after her father passed away, she married Roy. She changed her last name. She abandoned her decades of shared identity with her father, as if she had stripped off her old coat. She left his ashes. She left a framed photo we prepared for his memorial. It was as if he had never existed.
But he wasn’t the only one she left behind. She also abandoned her daughter. Her grandson. Her great grandson. Many people cherished it and were dumped like messy.
Her new story was one of patient redemptions. She endured a difficult marriage to a man and eventually recreated herself as a woman who found joy decades later. truth? She had been slowly detached from the rest of us for years. I was investing more time in writing projects and Facebook groups to match Roy’s profits.
Her new husband also lost his spouse. It’s been a few days since my father passed away. The story actually wrote itself: the sad souls of two who found each other through destiny. However, we, looking from the outside, knew that the foundation had been laid long before the funeral.
The pain of rewriting the past
In the end, my sister and I had to leave. We wanted a space to grieve our father. However, all boundaries were filled with negativity, deflection, or emotional manipulation. We had no realization of our pain, only excitement about her “next chapter.”
Sometimes I struggle with the urge to fix her version of the event. She is, in her story, an eternal victim. The woman was eventually released and judged by her ungrateful daughter who refused to be happy for her. However, I have learned that discussion with someone’s internal myth is rarely healed. It only deepens the division.
So I let it go. It’s not the truth, it’s the need for her to see it.
I was deeply saddened – I thought I had it for my mother, not just my father. I began to wonder: Has she ever wanted a child? Was she really emotionally available? Was it all about performance?
Those are difficult questions to ask. But if I let her see clearly – I began to feel something amazing, not as the mother she wanted, but as she was in fact a woman – I began to feel something amazing: ah relief. And finally, acceptance. Accepting that parents cannot give you the love they need is one of the most difficult emotional tasks we face. But it is also one of the most liberating things.
Breaking the cycle
When I was a child, there was a red flag. My mother wasn’t raising her. She often complained of pain, left locked up on the couch, irritated and detached from the rest of her family. I walked over the eggshells around her. I can’t remember any warm and playful memories. That emotional blank quietly shaped me in ways I hadn’t fully understood until recently.
I developed an attachment style that repetitively drew me into avoidant relationships. I had never learned to recognize my needs in the first place, so I didn’t know how to ask them what I needed.
Through treatment, reflection and support, I began to break the cycle. But it had to give up fantasy. It was necessary to grieve not only the loss of my parents, but also the loss of childhood that I had hoped for. This is not a story of denouncement of my parents, but one of the things that gains a deeper understanding of my mother in order to better understand myself.
I want to be clear: I am considerate of my mother. She grew up at home with mental illness. She was not raised either. She didn’t learn how to attune, connect, or show up. She might have done her best with what she had.
But compassion does not mean ignoring harm. I can hold both truths: her pain was real, and so was the pain she inflicted.
Freedom to let go
I stopped hoping for an apology. I stopped trying to explain myself. And I stopped trying to gain her love.
Instead, I’m investing in relationships that nourish me. I give myself emotional safety that I didn’t have. You can feel sadness, clarity, compassion, peace, everything. Giving up your parents won’t keep you calm. It means you have decided to stop betraying yourself.
Because here is the truth that I have come to accept. We love our parents and can still recognize that our relationship is not healthy. We can bless their pain without sacrificing our healing. And in some cases we can and must be walking.
They have the freedom to actually see their parents, not as idealized people, but as complex and flawed people. When we hold onto the illusion, we gaslight ourselves. In reality, we call it too sensitive or troubled.
For me, that doesn’t mean you’re sitting resenting about what you didn’t get from your parents. That means coming up with ways to provide it to yourself as an adult. If you don’t look into these early wounds, you’ll carry them forward. We have a hard time trusting. It withstands toxic dynamics. We confuse love with emotional labor.
Understanding where it started can lead to healthy changes. There are many different relationships to choose from. We can choose ourselves.
And what I learned is where healing begins.
About Anissa
Anissa Bell is a licensed marriage and family therapist and sleep expert to help an uneasy mind find rest even when life is at peace. She works with her clients to unlock worries that remain at night, including work stressors, relationship issues, complex family dynamics, and overall life clutter that promote anxiety and insomnia. Find out more about her therapy practices at Sleep-Anxiety.com or ClarityTherpyAssociates.com. Or get to know her on a more personal level here.
