You Should Have Left the Light On

a journey through estrangement, with an assist from Sinead O'Connor

Photo by Jarrod Reed on Unsplash

CW: suicide, abuse, parental estrangement, drug and alcohol use.

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And I wondered where you went to
Tell me, when did the light die?*

(*All lyrics in this post are the words of the brave and brilliant Sinead O’Connor, from her song “Troy”)

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Good daughters take care of their mothers. I was told that was my job. To make sure that she was taken care of. She gave birth to me. I heard the same story every September 16th: I was seventeen days late, 24 hours of mostly back labor, my head was too big so I got stuck on her pubic bone, they had to do a C-section, and I pooped on my father. She went to the trouble of raising me. I was difficult, a “lot”, “not an easy kid”. It was the least I could do. A modest amends for being born.

I still tried to be a good daughter, even from a distance. I have opened and closed this draft more times than I can count. I keep going back to it. I try to draft other posts and I can’t. I know that this is a necessary step for my continued healing, but I also I do not want to cause my mother any more harm.

After all of this, I realize that I’m still trying to protect her. Worse, part of me is still afraid of her, even though I know intellectually that she can’t hurt me anymore. I don’t want to be afraid anymore - of her or the ghosts of the past that might emerge. They can only hurt me if I let them.

I don’t owe anyone an explanation. I don’t owe anyone this story.

But I do owe it to myself to tell it.

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And I never meant to hurt you
I swear I didn't mean those things I said
I never meant to do that to you
Next time I'll keep my hands to myself instead

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There are many wonderful things about my mother. She is funny, gregarious, smart, industrious, outgoing, and tenacious. I learned from her how to be strong, how to work hard, how to tell a good story, and how to stick to your guns when necessary. I learned to demand more than just what I was given, and to aspire to greater than what the world told me I could be. She was not stingy with her affection, and I was told that I was loved. She drove me to rehearsals and extracurricular activities. I was bathed, clothed, and fed. I did well in school and stayed mostly out of trouble. To the outside world, she was a great mom. My success was her success.

We had a lot of fun together. We made each other laugh and had a thousand inside jokes. When the priest at my grandfather’s funeral was clearly intoxicated, slurring his words, my mother and I were laughing so hard that we had to pretend we were crying. She taught me how to laugh when everything was falling apart. There are so many memories that make me smile.

Then, there was the other side of her, the one she didn’t let a lot of people see. She was clingy and smothering. She could be vicious, entitled, manipulative, and demanding. She was “casually cruel in the name of being honest” (look, when Taylor gets it right, she gets it RIGHT). She reveled in humiliating me in front of other people. She made cruel jokes at my expense. She did not respect my privacy. She knew exactly what to say that would hurt me the most, that could turn me into a trapped, caged animal, a person I no longer recognize as myself. She would fly into rages, and sometimes would get physically violent.

The emotional abuse was the most insidious. I would have taken a thousand slaps to the face over the things that ate away at me like rust corroding a pipe.

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I wanted to be a good daughter. When I moved to New York, I was convinced that being an independent adult meant I could have a better relationship with her. We’re too much alike, that’s why we fight so much, I told myself. I was only a 90 minute train ride away. Far enough away that I could be independent, close enough to go home when I wanted to. By the end of my sophomore year, I had an apartment and a job. I was off on my own.

To make amends for leaving, I endured. I endured the suicidal threats, the mental hospitals, the overdoses, the drunken voicemails telling me I was a piece of shit. Every visit or conversation with her inevitably went to rehashing the past and airing her grievances. Her drinking problem got steadily worse. The drinking was on top of multiple medications, including painkillers, and her behavior became increasingly erratic. It took me a long time to accept that she was an addict. My father is an alcoholic, and having two addicts as parents was more than I could bear.

We rarely, if ever, had fun together anymore. I started avoiding visiting her, and then would feel guilty about it. When I would finally get up the gumption to see her, I would have to take a Xanax just to get myself in the car. I never knew what I was going to get. Holidays were especially awful.

She struggled with finances after she and my father split up. By the time I was in my 20s, I was making a decent living, and helped her as much as I could. She needed a cleaning person. She needed new clothes. She needed to have fun. She was in pain, and this would help. I gave her expensive gifts and took her to nice dinners. I paid for her health insurance for over a year. Eventually she went on disability, and her demands grew for support, both emotional and financial. At a certain point, I had started lying to my husband about how much money I was sending her. I justified it in my head, but knew deep down it was not sustainable.

She was always jealous of me, to a pathological degree. At one point, my husband and I bought a new car, as our old used Mitsubishi Galant was more than ready for retirement. Naturally, my mother couldn’t bear it, and decided she needed a new car, too. When I asked how she afforded it, she told me that she had cashed in a life insurance policy that she had taken out for my father. It was fifteen thousand dollars. I had no idea she had that available to her.

I was mad as hell, but I gently asked what she planned to do with the rest of it. I was hoping she’d use it towards living expenses, or taking classes like she said she would. Instead, she told me that she bought herself a mink coat and was going to the casino with her friends. There were times she would ask for money with the tell-tale jingle of slot machines in the background. I kept sending money anyway, because I was a good daughter, and what kind of daughter refuses to help her own mother?

I swallowed my rage, not realizing that every day it was expanding, pressing on my organs, slowly suffocating me.

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At the urging of a dear friend, I started working with a therapist. I had been laid off from my job, and it had unmoored me. My anxiety was untenable. I had steadfastly avoided therapy for years, partially because I’d had negative experiences when I was younger. I was told by my mother’s revolving door of therapists more than once that I was the problem, even when I tried to stage an intervention to get her into treatment for her substance abuse.

A few months after I started therapy, she overdosed again. This time, she called nearly everyone in her address book to leave “goodbye” voicemails, including me. Someone called 911. She survived, and despite the advice of doctors, checked herself out of the hospital after a few days. My therapist was a godsend as I sobbed in her office, and helped me to identify what I was really feeling, which was furious. I’d been through this too many times. Her suicide threats had become a form of psychological warfare, and I was also still terrified I was going to lose her.

I had begun a deep dive on problematic mother-daughter relationships, in an attempt to cope better. One day, I came across a list of traits of daughters with narcissistic mothers, and I remember printing it out and reading it to my best friend in her kitchen, my hands shaking. I could not un-know it. I wound up reading a book called Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers by Dr. Karyl McBride. I felt like someone had just explained my entire life to me. It was how I felt when I first read about ADHD, many years later. I just knew that this was a missing piece of the puzzle, a clue in the mystery of my life.

Not long after starting therapy, I got a new job I really liked, and it was less demanding than the one I’d been laid off from. I was now in my early 30s, and my playwriting career was getting some traction, but not as much as I wanted. I decided to apply to the MFA Playwriting program at Hunter College. Much to my surprise, I was accepted on the first try.

When I started school, I was overwhelmed and insanely busy, as the classes were at night and I kept my full time job. My mother called me on the phone incessantly, and I spoke to her every day, sometimes multiple times a day. It had become suffocating, and I was encouraged by my therapist to set boundaries with her over the incessant phone calls. I asked if we could schedule our calls for the weekends when I wasn’t in class. She reluctantly agreed. Of course, my mother hated that I was in therapy. She constantly asked me what I was telling my therapist about her.

The very next day, she called me no less than six times before 2 pm. This led to a terrible argument, the last argument we’d ever have. She accused me of being unclear about my schedule. She was angry I didn’t visit her more often. She accused me of not caring about how much pain she was in, which of course was ridiculous, since I’d been caring about her pain for close to twenty years. When I was fifteen, she had surgery to correct severe scoliosis. I was her primary caretaker during her long, painful recovery. She eventually healed, but developed spinal stenosis and suffered from chronic pain, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

In this argument, she once again brought up how much money she had given me when I started college, which she loved to lord over me whenever she could. It was gaslighting, plain and simple. I had the student loan bills to show for it, and at that point had given her far more money than she had ever given me. I was done. I told her I would happily write her a check for the total of what she felt I owed her, with the condition that it never be discussed again. She, of course, refused.

Not long after this exchange, I was in class and felt the buzzing of my phone. I stepped out during break into a chilly October night and saw eight missed calls from my mother, and one voicemail. I listened to the voicemail, and it was clear from the first few words that she had been drinking heavily. It was the same old song and dance: I was cruel, I was causing her anxiety attacks, I was ungrateful, I didn’t treat anyone as badly as I treated her. She said she needed a “break” from me and my “abuse” and asked me not to call her for a while. I stood outside, shaking, consumed with panic and guilt. Somehow, I made it back to class.

I decided to save the voicemail and played it for my therapist at our next session. I wanted someone else to hear it. Usually, when I got a nasty voicemail, I’d immediately delete it. They made me feel so ashamed that I just wanted them to go away. This time, I wanted to know if I was crazy, or just being mean. If I really was a bad daughter.

My therapist listened to it, took a beat, and then calmly asked me a simple question:

“How much longer do you think can you keep doing this?”

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I decided to call her bluff and give her the “break” from me she had asked for. My therapist wanted me to see how it felt to detach from her a bit, to set a firmer boundary. I wanted a break, too. I did not have time to be having constant anxiety attacks. The workload was intense, and I was barely sleeping. It had been more than a decade since I had been in school, and it took a long time to get my feet under me.

I stopped taking or returning her calls. The initial plan was to do that for a couple of weeks, maybe a month. I had hoped it would make her realize she had to make changes. Within a month, she wound up in the hospital again. Once I knew she was safe and had been treated, I stood my ground. I literally didn’t have time to manage my mother, a full-time job, and school.

After some time, I felt myself making progress. I focused on school and writing. I had so much more time and brain space without constantly managing her. I was diagnosed with C-PTSD and started really unraveling my trauma in therapy, strand by strand. I started to heal. Months went by. Then a year. Then another year.

I never meant for the break to be permanent. If someone had told me everything that was about to happen, step by agonizing step, I never would have done it. My husband supported me through all of it, and I can’t imagine how hard it was for him to watch me go through it. He told me more than once that he would have cut her off long before I did. I’d lay in bed while he held me, and I would cry myself to sleep, consumed by crushing guilt. What kind of person does this to their own mother?

There were attempts at contact, from a dwindling pool of friends, doctors, and social workers, since I had blocked my mother’s phone number. I said I would help however I could, but I could not have direct contact with her. I called for wellness checks. I kept waiting to hear she had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette and burned the house down. I lived in the fear that she would be found dead in her apartment after weeks, neighbors only calling the cops when it started to smell.

I had a lot of practice in being afraid, since I had been afraid she was going to die since the first time she overdosed. I had lived with that ice in my stomach for almost twenty years. I felt responsible for keeping her alive. The fear of losing her motivated everything I did.

I wasn’t afraid enough about what this was doing to me.

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I know you're always telling me that you love me
But just sometimes I wonder if I should believe
Oh, I love you
God, I love you
I'd kill a dragon for you, I'll die

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Estrangement is unique in that you are grieving for a person who is still alive. You are grieving for a relationship you will never have, for the mother you needed and did not get. You are grieving the words you will never hear, the things left unsaid, and the shared history you have lost.

I also had to grieve the version of myself I left behind in order to move forward. There was a time in my life where I really thought I could fix my family. That was my role – the Fixer, Miss Can-Do, No Problem too Big For Me to Handle. But no matter what, no matter how old I was, I was the child in this situation. I could not shelter my parents from the consequences of their decisions. I was only going to survive if I got free from that toxicity.

Healing from my trauma has not been easy. It took years to even say the word “abuse” in therapy, to admit that I am a product of abuse. My mother made me feel like I was a bad person. My failure to save her reinforced that belief. Realizing I was powerless – truly, profoundly so -  was the hardest thing I have ever experienced. It’s like watching a hurricane take someone out to sea. You desperately want to throw yourself into the foaming, roiling ocean and try to save them, but you know the most likely result is that you’ll drown with them.

The only thing left to do is choose survival. So I did.

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When Sinead O’Connor died last year, I decided to revisit her music. I had always loved her song, Troy. It’s one of those songs that demands your full attention. It’s sung from the bottom of her god damn soul, a powerhouse vocal performance, an act of generosity. I also read her autobiography, which was honest, heartbreaking, and surprisingly funny.

In the documentary Nothing Compares, which was released after her death, the origins of “Troy” were discussed:

The 1987 hit 'Troy' opens with her memory of being forced to sleep outside: 'I remember it / In Dublin in a rainstorm / Sitting in the long grass in summer / Keeping warm.'

As she recalled it: 'One of the very traumatic things that happened to me when I was growing up was that my mother had me living in the garden, when I was eight and a half, 24-7, for a week or two.

'I'm out in the garden in the dark – I still hate dusk to this day – and I'll be looking up at the only window on the side of the house where she'd have a light on and I'd be screaming, begging her to let me in, and she wouldn't, the light would go off, and the house would go dark.'

When I learned that “Troy” was a response to the death of her abusive mother, I listened to the song with fresh ears. The sheer power of it - the rage, the defiance, and the love - made me feel like I’d been kicked with a steel toed boot, right in the chest. It took my breath. I listened to it over and over. The tears came, but they were not frightening, and I wasn’t crying for my mother. I was crying for myself.

There was a time I would have used the abuse Sinead endured as an example of how what I went through “wasn’t that bad”. After more than a decade of therapy, I know that abuse is abuse. Trauma is trauma. It’s not a competition. In every woman who has an abusive or absent mother, there is a primal ache, and still, impossible hope. Inside of all of us is a little girl, sitting outside of a dark house, hoping that the light will come on.

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But I will rise
And I will return
The Phoenix from the flame

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My mother survived. God bless her, that woman is tenacious as fuck. She wound up being placed in a long-term care facility, a much nicer one than I ever could have afforded. In a way, it was a relief. She needed more help than I could have possibly given her. She is safe, she is cared for, and she is not alone.

I was encouraged to get in touch with her when I was informed of her whereabouts. From what I was told, my mother has regrets, but has not taken responsibility for her actions. After several therapy sessions and talks with friends, I decided against it. I know all too well from talking to other estranged children that re-establishing contact with an abusive parent can unravel years of progress.

When you are estranged, people assume that you haven’t thought it through. They assume you’ve never considered how you will feel when they die. I can assure you; I’ve thought about it no less than a million times. I’ve thought she was going to die so many times in the past twenty-five years that it was impossible not to consider it. The truth is that I don’t know how I will feel, but in many ways, I feel like I have already grieved.

For a long time, I held onto my rage with both hands. Strangely, I think it was my way of staying connected to her. I have compassion for her, but I have to release myself from the responsibility I carried for so long. I don’t want it anymore. I have to let her go.

A part of me will always love my mother. I know that my mother believes that she loved me, but the version of love that I grew up with was obsessive, smothering, transactional, and conditional. I know that love – the love that sustains us – cannot be that. Love is not a weapon. You cannot say you love someone and then continue to hurt them. I had to learn how to love without hurting people. I used to try to control the people I loved, to possess them, to make them the center of everything, because that was the way I learned how. Unlearning that has been the work I am the proudest of.

I decided a long time ago that I did not want to have a child of my own. I was a parentified child, and I have done the hard work of re-parenting myself. My best friends both have daughters, and I love being an Auntie. I want to be a positive, supportive presence in their lives. I feel like there is more than one way to be a part of a child’s life.

My mother wanted to do everything differently with her children, in the hopes that she could heal what was done to her. She had a difficult childhood, and an abusive grandparent. She tried to break the cycle. The only way to guarantee I break this cycle is to end it entirely.

I will always wish that things could have been better for her, for me, for us both. There was a time I would have traded it all to save her, but now, I know that it is enough. I have built a good life, better than what I thought I could ever have. I am safe. I am loved. I am grateful to be here.

My mother is a survivor, and she made me a survivor. This inheritance ends with me.

There is no other Troy for me to burn.