I recently told my daughter, who is 4 years old, that my mom died (in 1992) and the cause was a car accident. I was seven at the time. I was only trying to just be honest and now I’m not sure it was wise.
The reason I talked about it was I think she asked me about my mom. And I also don’t get along with my step mom but I pretend to nowdays for the sake of my aging dad and also so my daughter can visit them and I don’t see any reason to make it about me. So I just be polite and pretend.
Anyway, so my daughter now knows this and being only 4, naturally, she makes a statement like, repeating this fact back to me. We were watching the Lion King for like the twentieth time and she told me, “your mom got dead, right?” I say, “yes honey”. “But she died in a um, car accident right?” “Right”. Then she says to me, “but when is she coming back?” And I said, “oh honey” and I hugged her and said “when someone dies, they don’t come back.” It was very sad for me even though my daughter didn’t seem sad or fully understanding.
It hurts more than ever, it’s almost like I never even knew my mom it was so long ago, nearly 30 years ago. I don’t know what she was really like, I don’t remember. I wish she was here still, I wish she’d never left me, especially now that I’m a mom. When my baby was born I missed her so much, I wished I could pick up the phone and call her but of course she’s gone.
I don’t have a good relationship with my step mom, she screwed up my teen years and strained my relationship with my dad (they married when I was age 12), and I’ll never be able to get what I had with my dad back. Of course my stepmom is perfectly fine with pretending she wasn’t abusive and I feel like my experience just doesn’t matter. The last time we went out to lunch she didn’t even remember my age since I’m the youngest. She’s content to forget all the soul shattering, mind altering things she did and said to me because it just wasn’t that important to her. I was a nuisance to her, and she just wanted me out of her house. Now she wants to act like nothing ever happened.
I just don’t think it’s fair on my daughter to know all that stuff, at least not right now, but at the same time I wanted her to know that’s not my mom. So I was just trying to be honest, so she knows who my mom is in the pictures that I have.
Now I’m a mom I just want to be the best mom I could possibly be.
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