I Still Resent My Mom Sometimes. Here’s How I Manage It as a Parent.
I was folding laundry when my mom called. She asked if we had gotten the birthday card she sent for my daughter. I said yes, thank you. Then she said, “I just want to make sure. You know how the mail is.” And I felt it—that familiar tightness in my chest, the heat behind my eyes. I said, “We got it,” and changed the subject as fast as I could. I hung up feeling exhausted, like I had just run a small race. The resentment was still there, as strong as it had been when I was fifteen.
It’s hard to admit that. I’m a parent now, and I’m supposed to have some perspective. But the resentment didn’t disappear when I had my own kids. If anything, it got sharper. Because now I look at my daughter and I think, I would never say that to her. And then I feel the anger all over again, hot and familiar, for the things my mom said to me.
The weird part is, my mom wasn’t a bad mom. She wasn’t abusive or cruel. She just had this way of making everything about her anxiety. If I was late coming home, it wasn’t “I was worried” but “You don’t care about me.” If I didn’t call every Sunday, it was “I guess I’m not important to you.” I spent my teenage years walking on eggshells, trying to manage her feelings so she wouldn’t spiral into guilt-tripping. I learned to say the right things, to never share too much, to keep my life small enough that she wouldn’t have anything to worry about.
When I became a mom myself, I thought I would finally understand her. But instead, I understood something worse: I understood that it was possible to love your child and still not know how to see them as separate from yourself. And that made me angrier, not because I wanted to be angry, but because I couldn’t fix it. She would never change. And I couldn’t make her.
The breaking point for me was a Saturday morning. My daughter was five, and she was crying because her cereal bowl was the wrong color. I heard myself say, “You can’t cry about this. There are children who don’t have food at all.” It came out of my mouth, and I froze. That was my mom’s voice, word for word. My daughter looked at me, hurt and confused, and I felt sick. I didn’t say anything else. I just put the box of cereal in the cabinet and walked into the bathroom and locked the door.
I sat on the edge of the bathtub and realized: the resentment I carried wasn’t just about my mom. It was about the fact that I had become her without noticing. And that terrified me more than any of the original hurt ever had.
That was the moment I started actually trying to let go. Not for my mom, but for my daughter, and honestly, for myself. Resentment is a strange thing—it feels like it’s protecting you from the person who hurt you, but it’s really just keeping you attached to them. Every time I thought about my mom, I was letting her take up space in my head. She didn’t even know she was there.
I knew I needed practical help, not just abstract advice like “forgive” or “move on.” So I started small. I made a list of the specific moments that still stung. Not the generalizations like “she never listened,” but real situations. The time she read my diary and then cried because I wrote that I felt like a burden. The time she told me my friend was “stealing” me away from her. The time she said, “You don’t know what real stress is” when I was crying about finals. I wrote them all down, and I read them back. I realized that each one was about the same theme: my mom couldn’t tolerate my independence, and she made that my problem.
Once I could see the pattern, I could start separating her behavior from my worth. That might sound like therapy language, but I’m just saying that I finally understood: her guilt-tripping was about her fear, not about me being a bad daughter. That didn’t excuse it, but it made it less heavy.
I also started doing something I never used to do: I told myself a different story in real time. When my mom would call and say something like the birthday card comment, I would catch my automatic reaction—the tight chest, the urge to snap—and I’d say to myself, She’s anxious. She’s trying to hold on. And then I’d take a breath and answer her politely. I didn’t confront her, because I know she’d take it as an attack. But I stopped letting her needle get under my skin in the same way.
The bigger change came with how I talk to my own kids. I practice pausing before I speak. If my daughter is crying about something small, I try to name her feeling instead of shutting it down. I say, “You’re really upset that it’s the wrong color.” That’s it. I don’t fix it. I don’t explain why she shouldn’t be upset. I just say what I see. That’s something I never got as a child, and it feels like I’m giving her something real.
Does that mean I’ve forgiven my mom? Not entirely. I’m still working on it. Some days I feel okay, and other days she says something like “I guess you’re too busy for me” and I feel the old anger flare up. I don’t think that’ll ever fully go away. But it’s less loud now. It doesn’t control my morning. It doesn’t make me snap at my kids.
I think the goal isn’t to let go completely. It’s to stop letting the resentment run the show. For me, that happened when I stopped trying to change my mom and started changing how I respond to her. I can’t rewrite the past. But I can decide that my kids will grow up with a mom who tries to see them for who they are, not who she needs them to be.
The other day, my daughter asked me if I liked my mom. I told her the truth: “Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t. It’s complicated.” She looked at me for a second and said, “That’s okay.” And in that moment, I felt a little lighter. Not because I had it all figured out, but because I was okay with not having it all figured out. That’s probably the closest I’ll get to letting go. It’s enough for now.
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