She Is Your Mother. You HAVE TO Respect Her.
I have heard this sentence more times than I can count.
From people who knew my side of the story. Who had heard what happened. Who nodded along when I described years of manipulation, of being made to feel like the problem, of learning very early that love in my family came with conditions and the conditions kept changing and I kept failing them anyway.
They heard all of that. And then they said it.
She is your mother. You have to respect her.
And I used to crumble. Because part of me believed them.
What I Actually Learned About Respect
Respect, as I was taught it, had nothing to do with how someone treated you.
It was something you owed by virtue of the relationship. Parent. Elder. Authority. You respected them because of the title, regardless of whether the person inside the title had ever given you a single reason to.
This is a very convenient system if you are the one receiving the respect. Considerably less convenient if you are the one being asked to give it while being hurt.
What I know now is this: respect is not a debt you are born into. It is something that develops between two people over time, through how they treat each other, through whether they show up, through whether they tell the truth and keep their word and see you as a full human being rather than a prop in their own story.
You can love someone and not respect them. You can be related to someone and not owe them access to your life. You can acknowledge that someone brought you into the world and still conclude that the way they treated you after that was not okay.
Biology is not a character reference.
What Setting Boundaries Actually Cost Me
When I started setting limits with my mother, I was told I had changed.
Not in a good way. In the way people say it when they mean you have become difficult. Inconvenient. Suddenly the problem instead of the solution.
I lost my entire extended family. Not dramatically. Quietly, the way these things go. The calls that got less frequent. The invitations that stopped coming. The relatives who made their choice and it was not me.
Because she is your mother, you have to respect her. And if you do not, that says something about you.
What it actually said about me was this: I had finally decided that I was worth protecting. That what had happened to me was real and not a figment of my oversensitive imagination. That the version of love I had been offered was not the only version available and I deserved better.
That was inconvenient for people who had been comfortable with the old arrangement. The one where I absorbed everything quietly and nobody had to acknowledge anything uncomfortable.
The Therapist Suggestion
Since setting limits with my mother I have been regularly advised to see a therapist.
Because I have changed so much.
I find this genuinely funny. The suggestion that the healthy response to years of dysfunction is to remain unchanged. That my growth is the problem. That the correct approach would have been to continue tolerating what I was tolerating, remain in the relationships that were harming me, and call that stability.
I did see a therapist. She was excellent. She confirmed what I already knew and helped me stop apologising for it.
That is not what people meant when they suggested I see one.
What Choosing Yourself Actually Means
Choosing yourself in a family situation is not dramatic. It does not feel like empowerment at first.
It feels like grief. It feels like being the one who broke something. It feels like sitting with the weight of all those people's disappointment and deciding, slowly, that their disappointment is not your responsibility to manage.
It feels like being very alone for a while.
And then, slowly, it feels like something else. Like the particular quiet of a life that has stopped making you smaller. Like noticing you are not bracing for impact every time your phone rings. Like being able to have a Sunday without dread in it.
You are not required to maintain relationships that damage you because of biology. You are not required to earn access to your own peace by being acceptable to people who were never going to find you acceptable no matter what you did.
Respect is not owed because of biology. Love is not unconditional when the conditions were impossible from the start. And choosing yourself is not a personality disorder, no matter what anyone tells you.
Not even if the person telling you is your mother.
Has someone ever told you that you owe respect or loyalty you did not feel? What did you do with that?
rise · believe · fly 🪶
From the Ashes She is for the woman in the middle of it. Not after. If this found you today, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.