I moved away from my hometown when I was 19 years old. I’m now 31 years old and live 13 hours from family. I didn’t initially do it purposefully, but after getting away… I realized how terrible my mom is. Of course, already knew it was bad, but didn’t quite realize exactly how bad. There’s no way I’d ever live close by again.  

My mom abuses pain meds and some kind of stimulant (either Ritalin or Adderall; can’t remember), so that makes it even more unbearable to talk to her.  

When she’s not picking fights with people, she’s completely messed up on meds and can’t even hold a conversation over the phone.  

When she calls me and I can tell she can’t focus or is high, I get off the phone with her. That’s if I answer. I’ve gotten to where I just don’t answer a lot of the time. I try to make it a point to briefly talk to her once or twice a month. Mainly because she begins severely guilt tripping, acting suicidal, and sending family group texts if she even gets the feeling she’s being ignored. I keep the conversations pretty superficial and brief. My husband is a therapist (not my therapist) and says I seem to have good boundaries with her. It took me a long time to get that way. I still don’t feel happy with how things are, but I can’t think of any ways to change it without extreme negative feelings.  

I feel guilty if I completely cut her off. I feel my skin crawling when I talk to her too. I had cut her off for about 3 months at the beginning of my pregnancy. She had told my sister in the family group chat that she lied about being raped; when all of us KNOW she was molested as a child. It actually was brought up out of nowhere. It made me feel sick, so I went NC with her.  

Not sure how we ended up talking again, but we did. It’s still nowhere near the same and EXTREMELY brief conversation.  

Anyway, I’m 31 years old and finally pregnant with my first baby. I’m due in less than 2 weeks. What’s maddening is that I just feel completely disgusted and my skin crawls whenever she mentions my baby AT ALL. She says weird stuff to me and constantly has started to beg for pictures of my bump, which I do not send. She even said to me one day “I wish you would talk to me. I wish I were there to rub your baby bump.” and that made me feel physically ill. Even thinking about it again now has my skin crawling.  

I know it’s going to be even worse after my baby is here. My sister has kids and I remember the emotional turmoil she went through with her first kid. She said that having kids made her even more angry at my mom because she couldn’t imagine treating her kids the way my mom treated us.  

Luckily, I live nowhere close and my mom would never fly or drive here. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to avoid her being around my son, though. I don’t know if I have the heart to tell her no to meeting him indefinitely. I do want to go into town to see my aunt and sister. Of course, I will protect him and never let my mom be alone with him. They’d only be around each other for a short period of time, in a public setting.  

Expecting a baby has added a whole new layer of anxiety to this already complicated relationship. I don’t really know how to fix this feeling of dread and anxiety when I talk to her. I also don’t know how to go completely NC without guilt physically effecting me.  

I can’t seem to win in this situation.

Pregnancy makes it worse