Dear lostcatlady:

A child needs comfort from the parent, that “everything will be ok” feeling. It can be given by an embrace, a smile, a few words articulated with affection and confidence. When your father reacted by walking away and your mother’s reaction lacked the affection and confidence a child needs, your burden didn’t decrease, it increased and future burdens added to it, all experienced as too heavy to carry alone.

“I shouldn’t feel guilty for not being able to provide a better life for my mother, because she didn’t provide me with the ‘nutrients’ to do so”- true.

“I did sometimes feel bad for my mum because I know she is very unhappy”- a daughter has her empathy with her mother, the daughter experiences the unhappiness she sees in her mother, often feeing responsible for it, and follows with trying to fix the assumed responsibility by making her mother happy.

I wrote the above paragraph before I read the part of your post indicating this is what happened in your case: your mother chose to not go to not to  go to the funeral and you “regretted not offering to go with her” even though she didn’t ask you to go with her, assuming you did something wrong, and next, you tried to correct the assumed wrongdoing by offering to help her reconnect with her younger sister.

But it wasn’t your wrong doing that your mother didn’t attend the funeral of her mother. (And it probably not have made any positive change for your mother if she did attend it). And so, there was no wrongdoing to correct.

You wrote that your mother blamed your father for not encouraging her to go to that funeral and she sometimes blamed you for not mediating the quarrels between her and her husband, your father that is. Like you wrote yourself, it was “extremely unfair to be blames”, and it was unfair to expect one’s daughter to involve herself with her parents’ quarrels.

“I guess I really need to  learn to stop taking her unhappiness upon myself”- it is a difficult objective because daughters naturally take the mother’s unhappiness personally, as if it is our fault and something to fix and when the mother clearly communicates to the daughter (in your case and mine) that it is the daughter’s fault and her job to fix, this objective becomes even more difficult.

It is like a heavy weight to carry, for a daughter. It makes any additional weight related to the daughter’s own life, her”career, friends, SO, hobbies” … too heavy.

Add the heavy burden of your mother’s unhappiness, that guilt, to receiving little to no comfort from your father and mother, and you get a lost cat lady.

Here is an image that will explain my point: the false responsibility for your mother’s unhappiness is like a heavy rock that is in your backpack, and lack of comfort from your parents is like you are not allowed to put your backpack down during a hike and rest. This combination makes hiking very uncomfortable, difficult and undesirable, something to avoid. Who wants to hike  (no matter how promising the views may be) when your backpack is too heavy, so heavy you can’t add things you need to it, such as a tent and whatnot, and you don’t get to rest.

anita