Is love blind? Romantic love and maternal love can be exhilarating, but the scientific truth is that loving feelings can get in the way of seeing things clearly. Andreas Bartels, a neuroscientist in Tübingen, Germany has shown that maternal love—with young children—can, in fact, be blind. He has pinpointed how a mother’s connection to her young child deactivates the part of her brain that is responsible for negative emotions and critical assessment. In other words, a mother’s positive feelings that arise from her developing attachment to her child overrides the part of her brain that is responsible for more objective appraisals. Being hopeful and optimistic regarding your child’s future is a good thing. But wearing rose-colored glasses with your adult child can be dangerous over the long run. These filters, which mental health professionals call denial or minimalization, can block a parent’s ability to make realistic assessments of their adult children’s needs, as well as their own.
I discovered the critical importance of “seeing” or acknowledging the reality of an adult child’s problems when I conducted one of the few empirical research projects on mothering in later life. Very little is known about the stress that older women/mothers experience when their adult children’s lives are detoured by mental health or substance use challenges. Much more is known about the stress on adult children when their parents become frail, than is known about the impact on the emotional life of older mothers when their adult children are unable to “launch” or maintain their self-sufficiency. In this essay, I describe how the pathway to getting help for a troubled adult child (and for the mother, herself) can be impacted by the parents’ ability or inability to acknowledge the depth of their sons’ or daughters’ problems.
I interviewed 50 older mothers, all of whom self-identified as having an adult child whose problems were worrisome to them. There were many distinctions between these mothers. Some were widowed. Some were married. Some were rich, while others were poor. They came from different races and ethnic backgrounds. The type and severity of the children’s problems varied greatly, too. Some were providing housing for their dependent adult children, some were not. Yet, among these distinctions, they shared a view of mothering that had led them to become their child’s safety net, despite their advanced ages and their sons’ and daughters’ status as “adults.” Each explained their situation with this simple sentence: “I’m her (his) mother.” Yet, each of them reported difficulty in acknowledging the level of their adult children’s problems.
Closing My Eyes
Lucy, a dynamic 69-year-old woman, described how she discovered her blind spots. She laughed, telling me how frightened she got when she saw that her son Carlos had put a towel in front of his door. She shared with me what she was thinking when she saw the towel. His marriage had recently ended in divorce, he was separated from his children by three thousand miles…maybe he was depressed and trying to kill himself?
Lucy called her daughter for help. She didn’t know what to do about her son’s possible depression. “Ma, he's smoking pot in that room and that's why the towel is there—so you can't smell it.” Lucy smiled as she described how, at her daughter’s suggestion, she went into Carlos’ room and found little pieces of a joint on the window, as well as a spray can that he was using to cover the odor. “I couldn’t believe how long I had been blind to what was happening. I had smelled something sweet, but I had told myself ‘That’s nice—it must be incense.’”
After this revelation Lucy started to pay more attention to what her son was doing. Money had gone missing from her drawer. “You know, I'd have maybe $180 dollars, I'd look and there'd be $140. I had been questioning myself, ‘Where could I have spent that missing $40?’” Nevertheless, she kept asking Carlos to go to her bank for her so that she didn’t have to walk up and down the five flights in their apartment building. “I’d tell myself I can trust him. He always gave me the receipt that showed the $200 that I asked him to get.”
After realizing that he had been covering up the fact that he was smoking pot in her house and purposely trying to deceive her, she saw that on the very same day that there was a withdrawal for $200, there would also be another transaction for $40. Her first reaction was to assume that the bank had made an error. She called them to report the problem. “For some reason, I didn't want to believe what was going on.” She paused for a long minute and described how hard it was for her to really believe that her son would steal from her. She assumed that he respected her and appreciated all she had done for him, raising him as a divorced, single, working mother. She had done everything she could to make him a good man.
Many mothers are like Lucy and have a hard time admitting that their adult children are stealing from them. They’re reluctant to admit what the evidence is telling them.
I coined the name “difficult adult child” to describe the situation I learned about when interviewing older mothers who were being affected by their adult children’s problems – including serious mental illness and/or substance use disorder. I chose this name to acknowledge not just the challenges faced by the grown children, but the hardships passed along to the mothers who cared for them. If “difficult” seems a harsh label—one that blames, not just identifies—consider how the dictionary defines difficult: 1. when something is hard to do or carry out; 2. hard to deal with, manage or overcome, and 3. hard to understand. Mothering adult children is hard to do. Tolerating the tensions in a relationship with a struggling adult child is extremely hard to manage. And understanding the problems that might have caused your child’s situation are hard, and knowing how to intervene can feel impossible. Naming an adult child “difficult” is not meant to be pejorative.
There are no models for transforming mothering in later life with difficult grown children, but there is value in adapting the Stages of Change Model which has demonstrable results in helping people change many kinds of behaviors. Also known as the TransTheoretical Model, TTM was introduced in the late 1970s by researchers James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente, two psychologists who were studying ways to help people quit smoking. The first stage of change in this model is acknowledging that there is a problem. The authors name this moving from pre-contemplation to contemplation. Parents in pre-contemplation do not allow themselves to see that there is a real problem in their adult children’s behaviors.
Only Seeing the Good
Loretta’s story illustrates how it can take fifteen years for a mother to move from precontemplation to contemplation to action. Loretta was 82 years old. Tall and thin, she spoke with a musical lilt in her voice, still maintaining her Jamaican accent. She was physically mobile and relatively cognitively sharp, although it was hard for me to follow the timeline of the stories about all the years of legal battles she had had with her son, Jason. When we met, it had been three years since she had had contact with him or her grandchildren. She had no idea where or how they were living. Last she knew, they were homeless.
Years ago, Loretta and her husband Karl had been able to purchase a small home in Brooklyn, where she still lived. Karl had died when Jason was just ten years old. Loretta had been a widow for many years when Jason, aged thirty, asked if he, his girlfriend Zahra, and their one-year-old daughter could stay with her temporarily. She remembers thinking, “He’s not a bad kid. Why not?” I was left speechless when she described the way that he and his wife had behaved towards her during the many years that they lived with her. Her daughter-in-law treated Loretta with disrespect, made no effort to clean the kitchen that they shared, and Loretta’s son seemed to instruct his kids to lie to child protective services, accusing Loretta of having hurt them. Jason wanted to have Loretta evicted from her own home. Apparently, he believed that his father wanted him to have the house and that was why, according to Zahra, he felt justified in his attempts to use the law to challenge his mother’s ownership of her home. As I listened, I kept trying to understand the timeframe. When had the problems begun? How had she allowed this to go on for so long? What had kept her from protecting herself earlier on from her son’s continual aggressive behavior and disregard for her comfort?
Loretta told me stories about Jason as a young boy. She proudly recounted that at age 11, when he was in 6th grade, he refused to follow the Board of Education’s decision that he enter Special Education classes because of his behavior problems. He wrote a letter to the Chancellor of Education stating his case for why he believed he should be able to attend regular classes. His request was granted. Back then, Loretta and Jason’s siblings admired his fighting spirit and perseverance. They believed this meant that he would go far in life. Loretta’s maternal optimism was also evident when she also told me what a great athlete Jason had been, how he had gotten a basketball scholarship to college, and about her and Jason’s firm belief that he still might be recruited for a national team in South America, even though it had been ten years since he had left college where he played ball.
Side by side with describing his talents, Loretta suggested that Jason had a way of fudging the truth. He claimed that he had graduated from a private four-year college, something Loretta knew not to be true. He would always present his leaving a job as his choice—not that he was let go. As Loretta described Jason’s actions prior to her having him evicted, I heard her describe the same personal characteristics—pushy, perseverant, and determined—that she had valued in him at age eleven. Yet, now in his forties, living with his mother, his goal was not to avoid Special Education classes, but to gain ownership of his mother’s house which he believed he was entitled to.
Loretta finally got help from a Legal Center for Seniors. They offered her free legal help to respond to Jason’s constant use of the courts in his efforts to take her home away from her. It wasn’t simple to have him evicted. He was very savvy and had taught himself how to use the law to harass his mother. One judge got so annoyed at his endless trumped-up charges that he forbid Jason from ever coming into his court again. After what seemed like years of attempts to stop his abuse and legal attacks, Loretta secured an exclusionary order of protection forbidding Jason or his family to enter her home. But Jason was not to be stopped. He managed to go to another court, find a second judge, who issued a warrant for Loretta’s arrest unless she allowed him entry.
When the police arrived, Loretta did what the public attorney had instructed her to do. She told the police officers that she had obtained an exclusionary order of protection against her son and would not allow him back into the house. Instead of understanding the situation, the police arrested Loretta and took her away in handcuffs. She sobbed as she described to me what it was like for her to be in jail for two nights. The cell smelled of urine, there was no working toilet, and no one gave her anything to drink for hours on end. Telling me, three years later, about this experience, she reexperienced the humiliation and cried. However, it was the sting of her son having her arrested that became a turning point for Loretta. Sitting in the jail cell, she fully acknowledged that there was something wrong with him, “if he could be ok with his mother being put in jail.”
Loretta had been using what mental health professionals call the defense mechanism of “minimization” or filtering out the negatives in a situation and only letting herself focus on the positives. This generosity of spirit, or seeing only one side of a situation, was likely at play when she accepted her son’s request that he move into her small one-family home with his new baby and girlfriend. When she told herself “he’s a good kid,” she was discounting what she also knew about his difficulty with authority and his inability to get along with people, as well as his history of lying or distorting the truth for his own ends. Loretta’s capacity to tune out the problematic effects of Jason’s behavior can explain how she had allowed him and his expanding family (he had six children when they were finally evicted) to continue to live with her, all those years. Her wish that things would eventually go well for Jason took priority over acknowledging her own discomfort.
Not Wanting to See
Rosanne described herself as someone who could never talk about or address upsetting things. She had stayed in a very unhappy marriage for years. When her son, Derek, cut off all contact with her several years back, she never discussed the situation even with her daughter, who she saw every week. She lived her life squashing down all discomfort. Soon before she had chosen to be interviewed by me, Rosanne learned that Derek might be in serious trouble. Derek was living on his own, unemployed, and supported by a monthly allowance from a family trust that was administered by a lawyer and did not require his parents’ involvement. Derek had maintained some contact with his father, Michael, from whom Rosanne was divorced. It was Michael who told Rosanne that he had gotten a troubling call from Derek demanding that he give him $5,000 immediately. Michael and Rosanne feared that Derek might be involved in drugs or gambling debts and that explained why he needed the money. Perhaps someone was after him. Rosanne was scared. She considered hiring a detective to find out how serious the situation was. She was afraid for her son’s safety.
To have hired a detective sounded to me like a metaphor for changing her lifelong mode of not allowing herself to acknowledge the things that upset her. If she had followed this idea and had hired a detective to investigate what was happening with Derek, she would have been trying out a new way of being. Instead, she decided against getting involved. She told her ex-husband to give their son the money with no questions asked. Her rationale was that she did not feel strong enough or savvy enough to know what to do if she were to learn that her son was in serious trouble with mobsters or drug dealers. She did not believe that she had the capacity to help.
Seeing and Intervening
In contrast, Wendy allowed herself to act on her worries about her daughter’s safety despite her advanced age (66) and belief that her mothering tasks were done. But when her 40-year-old daughter Mindy started making changes in her life that seemed out of character, Wendy—with time—allowed herself to acknowledge her concerns.
The first surprise came when her daughter announced “out of the blue” that she was leaving her engineering job to become a yoga instructor. She explained her job change as part of a larger evolution into a more spiritual existence, and that she was also changing her name, legally, to Vishnu. The name change really bothered Wendy and she even refused a birthday present Mindy had sent because it was signed from “Vishnu.” Several months later, Mindy reported that she was getting a divorce from her husband. Wendy and her husband, Robert, were very surprised, and asked many questions to be sure that Mindy was making the right decision, but accepted that she knew what was best. They had always had full confidence in their daughter’s choices up until then. They figured that Mindy was going through a spiritual crisis which would lead to something new for her. Yet, as they noticed more and more odd changes in their daughter, they started to make more frequent calls and visits with Mindy in the hopes of monitoring more closely the changes that seemed confusing and surprising.
With time, their dis-ease with Mindy’s erratic behavior motivated them to seek out information about symptoms of mental illness and possible treatment options. Neither of them had ever had any contact with the mental health system. First, they relied on the internet for information, then they went to local doctors and started to network with everyone they knew to understand their daughter’s situation. They were able to face the situation, as well as their lack of knowledge. They got educated quickly enough so that they could intervene and protect their daughter when that became a necessity.
Seeing Leads to Action
Seeing an adult child’s difficulties, acknowledging the impact of their behavior on themselves, or on you, is the first step in a mother’s change process. There are two kinds of changes that mothers may make. One is to more clearly see how an adult child’s life may need a parent’s intervention, even though this will require getting involved as a helper when you believed that active parenting was already over. The second kind of change is related to removing or changing an adult child’s ability to hurt you, as in the case of Loretta. Loretta’s filtering out of the ways in which she felt pushed around and taken advantage of by her son were her way of holding on to her image of her son as a “good boy.” Wendy and Robert took a while to see that their daughter’s surprising and erratic behavior was, in fact, mental illness. But once they saw that she was in trouble, they acted and did something that was hard: committing their daughter against her will to a psychiatric hospital. But this saved her life. Seeing is the first step in the change model for dealing with a difficult adult child.
Practice: Taking off your Rose-Colored GlassesSit in a quiet place and imagine having an honest discussion with yourself. Explore examples of your adult child’s recent behavior that are making you feel uneasy. Push yourself to imagine the consequences if you allow yourself to fully face your currently buried worries about this behavior. Are you afraid that you will not know how to help if you acknowledge their vulnerable situation? Will you feel like a bad mother if you acknowledge how your adult child is suffering? Who are you protecting – yourself as the mother or your adult child?
Difficult Mothering is Challenging
Most of us became parents believing that when we are in our 60’s, 70’s or 80’s, our active parenting will be behind us. But when you have an adult child who is suffering with serious mental illness and/or substance use disorder, your support is often needed, once again. Despite being tired and wanting to avoid conflict in later life, your adult children who are vulnerable will benefit if you let yourself see their difficulties. Seeing may make you initially uncomfortable, because knowing that they are in trouble may push you to want to find an appropriate way to respond and you may feel unprepared. There are many sources of help for older parents. Learning how other parents are coping with this family situation is an excellent resource. National Association of Mental Illness (NAMI) and Al-anon both offer groups for parents with adult children with mental health (NAMI) or substance use (Al-anon) issues. You can also call your State Area Agency on Aging (AAA) and they will suggest who you might contact in your area. Finally, if you acknowledge that you or your adult child is in a very dangerous situation, call 988 - the nationwide three-digit number for anyone to be connected to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or visit 988Lifeline.org.
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