Surviving Mothering Sunday when the bond with your mother is broken

Just how hard is it to get through Mothering Sunday when you don’t feel unconditional love and gratitude towards your own mother? Every year I am reminded of a friend who finds it one of the most difficult days of the year. My friend, let’s call her B, breaks out in a cold sweat when the Mother’s Day cards start filling the display stands in the shops.

‘I hate it’, she told me, ‘the hypocrisy, the guilt trip, all of it. I literally feel huge anxiety when I have to choose a card to send.’

B’s difficult relationship with her mother started when she had children of her own. Until then she’d spent a lifetime being a parent to her own mother, a complex woman who’d endured a terrible childhood and an abusive marriage.

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David Butterfield

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B, the eldest of four children, had unwittingly fallen into the trap of becoming ‘mummy’s little helper’ in that her mother, in the absence of having a kind husband or concerned parent herself, relied on B to be a companion, listener, empathiser, friend – but crucially, never a daughter in the true sense of the word.