I stopped asking my kids to come see me two years ago because I noticed that I was the one initiating everything. Every visit, every call that went longer than ten minutes, every plan that actually came together. And one day I decided to stop, partly because it felt undignified to keep reaching toward people who weren’t reaching back, and partly—though I didn’t fully admit this at the time—because I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I stopped. I found out anyway. The visits didn’t stop completely. They just became what they apparently always were when I wasn’t engineering them into existence.
That’s been the hardest thing to sit with. Not the quiet—I’ve made a kind of peace with the quiet. It’s what the quiet revealed. About them, about me, about what I actually built over forty years of raising them and loving them and being, I thought, close to them. The realizations came slowly, the way hard things usually do. I’m still in the middle of some of them.
I told myself it was for them—it was also for me
The story I told myself was generous. I was releasing them from obligation. I was letting them live their lives without a mother hovering at the edges waiting to be included. I’d read enough about adult children and aging parents to know that pressure produces resentment, and I didn’t want that. I wanted them to come because they wanted to, not because they felt they had to. That was the version I gave myself, and it was real—I did believe it.
What I’ve had to acknowledge, sitting with it longer, is that there was another layer underneath the generous one. I stopped asking because asking had started to feel like exposure. Every invitation extended and not returned, every plan that fell through, every visit that got shorter each time—each one was information I was receiving about how central I was to their lives, and the information was uncomfortable. Stopping the asking meant stopping the data collection. I could tell myself they’d come if they could, that they were just busy, that the relationship was fine, and the distance was circumstantial. As long as I wasn’t asking, I didn’t have to know. The stopping was about dignity. It was also about self-protection. Both of those things were true at the same time, and it took me a while to admit the second one.
I gave them a lot and didn’t give them me
This is the realization that sits heaviest. I was a present parent—there for everything, attentive, reliable in all the ways that mattered practically. I showed up. I remembered things. I made the occasions feel like occasions. What I’m less sure about, looking back, is how much of myself I actually gave them access to. Not the mother version, not the capable, organized version, but the interior version—what I actually thought about things, what I was afraid of, what I wanted for my own life separate from theirs.
I kept that version fairly private. Partly because mothers of my generation weren’t encouraged to burden their children with their own inner lives. Partly because I was better at giving than receiving, and giving didn’t require me to be known. Partly, I think, because being known felt risky in ways I never fully examined. Whatever the reason, what I gave them was a great deal of practical love and not very much of who I actually was.
What I’ve been sitting with lately is how that choice—and it was a choice, even if I didn’t experience it as one at the time—may have determined the shape of everything that followed. You can’t be genuinely close to someone you don’t really know. And if I never gave them much of myself to know, then the closeness we had was built on something thinner than I understood. The warmth was real. The foundation underneath it may have been more about function than intimacy—I was their mother, I did what mothers do, and the role provided enough structure that neither of us had to look too closely at what was or wasn’t underneath it. Now the role has receded and the underneath is what’s left, and there’s less there than I’d like.
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I wonder what they tell people about me
Not in a paranoid way—I’m not imagining them saying terrible things. I just find myself curious, in a way I never was when I assumed I knew where I stood, about the version of me that exists in their conversations. What they say when someone asks about their mother. Whether they describe me warmly, practically, or briefly. Whether I come up at all in the ordinary flow of their days, the way they come up in mine.
I’ve realized I have no idea. I know the version of them I carry around—detailed, specific, assembled over decades of paying close attention. I know their tells and their patterns and the specific way each of them sounds when something is wrong. What I don’t know is whether they’ve been paying the same kind of attention back, or what they’ve concluded from it. Whether the mother they’d describe to someone who didn’t know me matches the person I think I am. Whether, in the story they tell about where they came from, I’m a central character or more of a backdrop.
That question probably shouldn’t matter as much as it does. I know that. But it surfaces anyway, usually at night, in the particular way of things you can’t unknow once you’ve started wondering. I spent forty years being certain I knew exactly what I meant to them. The last two years have made me less certain about almost everything, and this is one of the things I’m most uncertain about.
It’s not that I’m hurt—it’s that I’m not sure what we are
Hurt would be simpler. Hurt has a shape—something was done, something was felt, there’s a wound, and eventually there’s some version of healing. What I’m in is murkier than that. I love them. I’m not estranged from them. We’re in contact, we’re cordial, the warmth between us is real. What I can’t quite locate is the substance underneath the warmth. What we actually are to each other beyond the biological and the historical. Whether the relationship would exist in the form it exists if I stopped being their mother and just became a person they knew.
That question probably sounds more dramatic than I mean it to. I don’t doubt they love me. I just find myself wondering, in the evenings, what that love is built on and whether it could hold weight if it needed to. Whether I’d be the person they’d call in a genuine crisis or whether they’d call someone who actually knows them. Whether, if I’m honest, I’ve earned the closeness I assumed I had.
What I keep coming back to is that I don’t have an answer, and I’m not sure how to get one without having a conversation I haven’t been willing to have. So I sit with the not-knowing, which has become its own kind of company—uncomfortable but familiar, present in a way that at least feels honest. I’d rather be uncertain about something real than confident about something I’ve been constructing. The not-knowing is at least mine. The certainty I had before may not have been.
The silence is easier than the answer I might get
I could ask. I could call one of them and say: I’ve been thinking about us and I want to understand what’s happened. I could try to have the conversation I’ve been avoiding. I could find out what they actually think, what they actually feel, whether there’s something I did or didn’t do that accounts for any of this. That option is available to me.
I haven’t taken it. Not because I’m afraid of conflict—at seventy-three, I’ve run out of patience for being afraid of difficult conversations. But asking would require me to be ready for whatever comes back. And I’m not sure I am. Not yet. It might be fine—they might say something that reassures me, that explains the distance in ways that don’t require me to revise my understanding of what we are. Or it might not be fine. They might say something honest that changes things in ways that can’t be unchanged. The silence keeps both possibilities open. The conversation would close one of them, and I’m not yet sure which one I’d rather lose.
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.
