Why My Relationship With My Mom Feels Sour

My relationship with my mom feels very sour. Our relationship is similar to that of a business transaction. My mom cooks for me and I study. When we try to talk about my dream of doing something I love, go traveling, having fun, and hanging out with friends, she doesn’t seem very supportive and seems rather unsympathetic towards my dream. The only thing she seems to care about is how much I’m studying and how well I’m doing on tests. We rarely talk about anything not related to grades, tests, or going to graduate school and getting a nurse practitioner degree. I have told her of my ambitions in life and yet she does not seem interested in my ambitions. My ambitions, goals, and dreams in life of having deep connections with people and living life feeling excitement through the pursuit of adventure is incredibly important to me. These two things are at the heart of what I desire so badly, and when I ask for more freedom to go skiing with my good friend this winter, she plagues me with questions implying that I am too naïve and foolish for thinking I could go skiing with my friend.

She doesn’t trust me. She doesn’t support what I truly want in life. She doesn’t know how much pain I’ve been through in my life. She’s never asked in depth of how I feel about school and what troubles I’ve been going through at school. The only thing school related that she asks me every week is how my grades are and how well I did on quizzes or exams and when she doesn’t see me studying enough on weekends, she complains about how I have really bothered her because she feels like she has to constantly remind me to study, study, and study. It hurts to know that I couldn’t go to my mom or dad to talk about things that were bothering me at school. We never had that relationship and we still don’t. I’ve told my mom that I feel that studying so hard in my life for so long doesn’t seem worth it at times, but she doesn't seem to hear what I am saying. She would reply to something to the effect of, “That’s true, but the thing is…”. And at times, I’ll explain how I feel about things and she will reply by rejecting what I said and reply, “no, no, why do you think like that?”. She seems to be judging me for not studying as hard as my brother does, although my grades from this semester have been up than last two semesters. When I do well on a test, she doesn’t give me a pat on the back or say, “great job” or “I think it’s great that you did so well”. Instead she will just act as if I was supposed to get that A and anything lower, she would complain how I didn’t try hard enough. It’s hard for me to admit this, but besides from doing an excellent job cooking and being physically present, I felt that she wasn’t there emotionally for me all throughout elementary, middle, high school, and college so far. I’ve kind of just realized this.

How I really feel about my mom is that I’m a project of hers. I feel like she thinks, “get him to study hard and get good grades so he can earn lots of money in the future”, and almost everything else that comes with growing up, she wasn’t interested in asking me. In the end, I know she pushes me so hard academically because she wants me to have a good job that pays well so I won’t have to worry financially when I am older. But she has put that on the agenda so far ahead as priority number one that everything else that’s part of growing up like relationships and having fun was shoved to the bottom and rarely ever discussed. This is why my relationship with my mom feels sour. It’s not like a relationship you would see in a Disney movie between a parent and a child. It’s a relationship where our feelings about things were rarely talked about. I do feel like I have trouble expressing my feelings. My relationship with my mom has got me thinking if most teenagers have a sour relationship with their parents. I guess that’s a question I’ll have to ask some of my friends to find out.