Dear Therapist: I Feel Tremendously Guilty for Not Taking Care of My Aging, Alcoholic Mother

Dear Therapist,

Dear Therapist,

I am the adult child of an alcoholic mother, and now I am a mother myself. I love my mom, and we have a very close (albeit tumultuous at times) relationship. My upbringing wasn’t by any means all bad. My family was incredibly dysfunctional and maybe a little toxic, but also loving and supportive in our own weird way.

Still, my life has been defined, influenced, and certainly scarred by my mother’s drinking, behavior, and mental-health issues—denial being chief among them. In my late 20s, I gave up trying to help her and went about the business of breaking out of the chains and cycles of my family. Distancing myself from my mother and family was heart-wrenching, but I am living a healthy, positive, and deeply fulfilling life because of what I did.

I am now 43 years old with a 3-year-old daughter, and we live a few thousand miles away from my family. I own my home and work full-time, and I’m a single mom by choice. Life is wonderful, except for the fact that my mother, now 72, is deteriorating both mentally and physically. Her living situation is awful. She’s something of a hoarder, her house is dilapidated and dirty, and her drinking has begun to take a toll on her health in myriad ways. Recently, while highly intoxicated, she fell down the stairs in her home.

She has been asking me for years to move home, and I’ve always been very clear that I would not. But now I am so conflicted. I feel this tremendous guilt for no longer taking care of my mother. I know she needs me. But when I had my daughter, I made a promise to her, and to myself, that she would never grow up in the chaos that I did. I want to protect her from that. I don’t want her to see her grandmother like this either. But am I just sentencing her to a different type of damage? The damage of teaching her to walk away from family in their time of need, and of denying her a relationship with a grandma who, despite being deeply flawed, loves her? I don’t want that for her either.

I just don’t know what to do. For me, when it comes to my mom, the damage is long done. But my daughter has a clean slate. How can I protect her without also harming her in the process?

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

Dear Anonymous,

Growing up with a parent who struggles with addiction can affect a child in many ways, and the repercussions can persist into adulthood. In addition to the sense of chaos you say you experienced, there is often also confusion, especially around knowing what responsibilities belong to the parent and not the child. Many children of alcoholic parents become what’s called “parentified,” which means that the child takes on a caregiving role, whether that’s attempting to keep the parent safe or fending for oneself when the parent isn’t able to function as one. Clarifying appropriate roles and boundaries can be an ongoing struggle.

Then there’s the question of how to love this parent who might at times be attentive and caring, and at other times frightening, unpredictable, unavailable, or out of control. A child can experience an array of feelings toward this parent, ranging from anger to compassion, along with a sense of guilt that leads to a tendency to put others’ needs above one’s own. This is another pattern that can be hard to let go of later on.

Given the ripple effects from a parent’s addiction, many people consider substance-use disorders to be family disorders, because they affect the entire family system. You seem to have come to this realization in your late 20s, and I can imagine how challenging it must have been for you to leave that environment and carve out a full, healthy life of your own. Making that choice took tremendous courage, and it sounds like you accomplished your goal of ending the family cycle you hoped to break out of.

A strong sign of your healing is that rather than seeing your family as all good or all bad, you’re able to hold its contradictions. You view your family as both “supportive” and “dysfunctional.” You understand that having a “close” relationship with your mom doesn’t erase how “tumultuous” it is, or vice versa. Getting to a place of “both/and” requires hard work, especially when a person grew up with some trauma.

What’s interesting, though, is that instead of looking at your current options with that same expansiveness, you present your choices as binary. In your mind, they look like this: