I Became My Mother and Had No Idea

My relationship with my mother was, for most of my twenties, a mixture of love and friction that I experienced largely from a position of judgment. She was anxious in ways that spilled out into controlling behaviour - about what I ate, how I dressed, whether I called often enough, whether the choices I was making were safe.

I found this suffocating and had a clear internal narrative about the ways I would be different: more relaxed, more trusting, less needy, less prone to the specific patterns that had driven me quietly mad growing up. I left Mexico City for graduate school in Monterrey at 23 and the physical distance helped.

I returned at 25 to a city job and my own apartment, with the feeling that I had grown into a sufficiently separate person that the old patterns would not catch me. It took about three years of a serious relationship and a close friendship for me to start catching myself.

My partner mentioned, carefully, that when he did not text me back quickly I became withdrawn in a way that he found difficult to read and respond to.

A friend said that I had a habit of asking how people were and then, if the answer indicated struggle, trying to solve it immediately rather than just listening.

A colleague told me, after I had reorganised a team project without fully consulting the others, that I sometimes made people feel like their input was a formality rather than a genuine contribution. Each of these things, independently, I found ways to explain. Together, they formed a picture I could not fully look away from.

I was anxious and controlling in exactly the ways I had spent years ascribing to my mother. Not identically - the specific expressions were different. But the underlying pattern, the deep discomfort with uncertainty and the instinct to manage it by managing the people and situations around me, was the same.

The reckoning with this was uncomfortable and also, eventually, compassionate. Because once I understood that these patterns were not character flaws but responses to an anxious attachment that had formed in childhood, I stopped being able to sustain the judgment I had directed at my mother for the same thing.

She had not chosen her anxiety. She had done her best with what she had. At 30 I had a conversation with her that I could not have had at 23 - one where I told her I understood more of her now, that I had found the same things in myself, and that I loved her in a way that was more whole because it was less superior.

That conversation changed us. I still work on the patterns. I expect I always will. But I do so now with the knowledge that understanding them in myself made me more able to forgive them in her.