I feel like I’m losing my mom over something that seems so small, and I don’t know if I’m the problem anymore.
I (26F) asked my mom for one simple boundary: I don’t want to text exactly when she wants to and exactly how she wants me to reply (she starts conversations through text that never end, comments on how I reply if she doesn’t think is enough etc.) and I’d prefer to call once a week instead. That’s what feels manageable for me. For her, that’s completely unacceptable.
For the past 6 months, I’ve tried to explain this calmly over and over again, and every time it turns into the same thing. She tells me I’m a bad daughter, that I don’t care about her, that I’m “punishing” her. She says she’s alone and suffering every day because of me. The worst part is that she constantly compares me to my father, who left when I was a teenager and basically disappeared from my life. She knows how much that hurt me, and she still uses it against me, saying I’m doing the same thing to her.
I’m not. I never disappeared. I tried for months to communicate, to explain, to find a middle ground. I just can’t give her constant access to me anymore. Now every single message from her is about this. There’s no normal conversation left. It’s just guilt, pressure, and pain every time I open my phone. So I stopped replying about a month ago, because I genuinely don’t know what else I can say that won’t just restart the same argument again.
Now she’s saying she’ll stop contacting me and will cut contact with me and that she has to accept that I don’t need her anymore, that she’s “losing her child.”
And I feel like I’m being forced into this impossible position; either I give up my boundary and lose myself, or I keep it and lose my mom. Idon’t want to lose her. I really don’t. But I also can’t keep going like this. I really can’t.
Am I actually doing something wrong here? What do I do?