A Mother's Grip

“A mother is only as happy as her unhappiest child.”
― Nicole Helget, Stillwater

My mother is disappearing.

I don’t often write about this publicly. She has Alzheimer’s. She is bed-bound now, spending more time asleep than awake. Still, she can swallow. And each day, my brother and stepfather go to her care facility to feed her lunch and dinner. Hospice visits in the mornings. Her speech is gone, replaced by babble, the words lost in a tangle of neurons. She doesn’t know who we are. But she smiles. She laughs, though it’s a different kind of laugh now—deep, guttural, a ha-ha-ha that feels unfamiliar. It is not the laugh of the anxious, joyful woman I once knew.

My mother has always been beautiful, and she has always suffered. A life shaped by profound anxiety, left untreated for nearly eight decades. She is 78 now. Her diagnosis came nine years ago, though the symptoms began well before that. She refused medication until four years ago. By then, Aricept and Memantine—the standard drugs—offered little, at least from what I observed. The disease progressed slowly. Agonizingly. I have been living without a mother for years now. Her mind—her recognition of me—long gone. Each visit is a quiet heartbreak—a new fracture in the soul.

And yet, I love her.

We had a tumultuous relationship. She wasn’t just a helicopter parent—she was a gravitational force. Smothering. Overprotective. Her own fears and past traumas wrapped tightly around my life. She married at 17. Had me at 18. She often said she grew up with me, and that was true. But as I tried to find my way, to chart a course beyond her fears, her grip only tightened. When she could no longer hold on, she turned angry, brittle, and reactive. Everything I did seemed to wound her. And still, she showed up. She listened. She tried to fix things. She let me rant and rage. We screamed at each other. We moved forward. Or so I thought.

Maybe we never did.

She was angry with me when she wrote her will. I don’t know what I’d done. I can’t point to it. But I feel it, lodged between the lines like a splinter. That’s the thing about mother-daughter relationships: they’re as fragile as they are foundational. You carry the love and the wounds in the same breath.

I hadn’t heard that quote before—the one about a mother being no happier than her unhappiest child—but when I read it, it was a gut punch. When I was sad as a child—bullied, mocked for my weight, overwhelmed by emotion—she felt it deeply. But she didn’t know what to do with it. She had no resilience of her own to model for me.

A Psychology Today article outlines how a parent can support a child through emotional distress:

• Validate, validate, validate

• Don’t talk them out of their feelings

• Don’t rescue them from their feelings

• Let them consider their own solutions

• Don’t imply that sadness or anxiety is weakness

• Identify and label your own emotions

• Share your struggles

My mother did the opposite.

When I was eight and someone teased me about my weight, she put me on a diet. We went shopping to ease the sting. She tried to fix my feelings rather than let me feel them. She believed her own anxiety was weakness, so she treated mine as something to overcome, to avoid, to hide. Naming feelings was never an option. We didn’t have that kind of vocabulary.

It’s taken me a lifetime to learn what she couldn’t teach me.

I won’t write about my brother’s pain here, it is not my place to do so, but it shaped her as well, long into his adulthood, long after he left home. Her happiness, always tethered to ours, followed us like a shadow.

And now, at the end of her life, something strange and almost sacred has happened. She seems… lighter. Less anxious. Smiling, laughing. Her mind has gone, but so has the torment that followed her for so long. Perhaps, finally, she has let go of tying her happiness to ours. Possibly her world is quieter now.

I pray it is.

I pray that her final days are filled with gentleness, peace, and love. She gave what she could, the only way she knew how. And though there is hurt between us, there is also grace in remembering the effort. Even in her undoing, she has something to teach me.