I Resent Caring For My Aging Mom When She Did Such A Crappy Job Raising Me

I started to babysit when I was eight years old. Just cousins and friends’ babies at first. There were my own siblings to watch too but that wasn’t babysitting, that was just being part of a family. By the time I was 12 years old I was babysitting four nights a week on an easy week when there weren’t any weddings in town. I was never paid, never thanked, never knew there was anything strange about leaving a preteen alone with as many as nine or 10 kids at night.

I made my own breakfast every day, and made my school lunches. Made my siblings’ lunches as well. I forged my mom’s signature on school permission slips when she slept late — which was every day — perfecting her big, loopy style of writing and scrounging for spare change for Hot Dog Day on Fridays.

I never resented a minute of it. I never questioned the fact that I was left to run feral. That I was expected to parent my siblings and myself from a very young age. That I was the only real adult in a house full of adults who did not take care of us. It was just my schedule, it was just my life. I came home from school every day to an empty house to watch Three’s Company and make myself Ritz crackers and peanut butter until someone came home. I never knew our family’s working hours because it was never any of my business. Every adult in our lives told us about their days, their adventures, their friends and co-workers who always, always felt more important than us. I never wondered about any of it.

Until, of course, I became a mom myself. Until I imagined my kids being left to run wild, left to put themselves to bed every night like I did for years. Only then did it hit me: I was raised without tenderness. I was not really raised at all. Like so many of my fellow Gen X friends, I just sort of grew up month-by-month, year-by-year, without any sort of form or plan or expectation or audience. No one was watching me.

I thought I made my peace with it all. I spoke to friends who grew up much the same way and we laughed about it. We wore our wild childhoods like badges of honor. We praised ourselves for being resilient, cool, tougher than the average bear. We were raised by the Me Generation, we said. We can handle anything.

But now. Now my mother is old. Now she needs us to take care of her. Now the people in my life are watching to make sure I take care of her.

And now I’m so goddamn resentful I can barely breathe.

I get phone calls from neighbors admonishing me, reminding me that my mother needs me. “She could really use your help, sweetheart,” one tells me, while another wonders if it might not be best if I move back home for a while to take care of my mother. “She’s your mother,” they remind me. The implication is always that I owe her. That this is the natural way of things, for daughters to take care of their mothers. It doesn’t seem to matter that she lives many hours away, a full plane ride. I am expected to show up without complaint.

I wonder where these friends and neighbors were when I was left to raise myself. I wonder what they think I actually owe my mother. I can say here that she was not a good mother, whatever that means. She wasn’t unkind, she was just gone. Even when we were in the room, she was missing from our lives. I wonder if she sees the irony in this at all. I wonder if she thinks she has to earn my care, or if she, like everyone else, just assumes this is her due. She brought me into the world, and now it will be my job to shepherd her out of it.

I think about saying no. No, I do not owe you this stage of my life that has suddenly gotten easier and looser and freer than it’s ever been. No, you don’t get to be the main event again.

I won’t say no, of course I won’t. I know I’ll take care of her the way I took care of her other children and her friends’ children. I know it was bred into my DNA. It is my training. I am going to be a good, diligent daughter. It is who I was raised to be.

It is who I raised myself to be.