When I tell the story of my childhood, my adoptive father, John — a gem of a man, who wanted a family as much as we needed a father — is often the hero. My mother gets credit for marrying him when I was 10. She did many other things right, I’m sure, but I don’t remember them, because as I’ve since learned firsthand, mothers do not always get credit for things like keeping small people alive and safe and delivering them to school on time with their teeth brushed and their book reports proofread.
When my father left my mom with three young daughters and loan sharks banging on the door, my mother kept us afloat. She sold our house on a cul-de-sac, moved us to an apartment and began working in the city to pay the bills.
As a first grader, I couldn’t see the ways she was suffering, the uncertain future she faced, or the responsibility she mustered. To me, she seemed out of control, with angry outbursts I couldn’t predict. One morning when I was 8, spacey and bookworm-ish, she tugge me by the hair to the mirror.
“You can’t wear that shirt to school,” she screamed.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Look at it. What do you see?”
“It’s plaid,” I pleaded. “Red, black. That’s all! Is it too fancy for school? Too small on me?”
“It’s wrinkled,” she screamed, smacking me. “Hurry and change. And don’t make us late.”
When she read this essay, my mom remembered lashing out at me in her closet. She’d lost her engagement ring the night before and she was distraught, retracing her steps to find it. The ring was the last tangible link she had to my father — and at that point, she thought he still might return.
But I didn’t know that then. Alone, in tears, I went back to my room with the pastel rainbow carpeting. Recently, Mom told me she paid extra to have the wall-to-wall carpeting moved from our house to the apartment, hoping it would feel more like the bedroom I’d always known.
Now, I understand how hard she tried. But back then, the familiar carpet was no consolation. We’d moved a state away from my friends and school, from our leafy cul-de-sac and our hammock. I no longer had a dad. And I had to walk on eggshells around my remaining parent, never knowing what might set her off.
Were there other times I was berated for missteps as innocuous as wearing a shirt that needed ironing? The details have thankfully faded, but yes — there was yelling on occasions when I’d been caught sneaking candy, or on library days when I’d lost my books, or when I made us late because I’d been absorbed in a book or a daydream.
When I saw a psychologist a few years ago, she guided me through eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy to release some of the childhood trauma that still had a grip on me. Being smacked by my mother didn’t come up. Instead, it was a foggy recollection of sitting, silently, in the back seat of the car, with Mom driving and my extroverted sister in the front seat, entertaining us with a dramatic retelling of her day. I stayed stubbornly quiet, though my mom and sister pressed me, over and over, to talk.
They must have been trying to help me from my introverted shell, but I only felt judged — too quiet, too sensitive, too oblivious. I didn’t have words to express myself. I turned inward, to the stories of other people in books and the stories in my head.
As I grew, I knew that my family loved me, but I wanted them to like me. Their love likely allowed me to find my voice and footing outside our family unit. When I was student council president in high school, my senior-year adviser was the school’s brilliant bearded headmaster. I remember recapping our first meeting to my mom: He’d asked about my favorite summer reading book, and I’d come up with “The Bridges of Madison County,” a romantic novel that seemed very mature to me. When Mom laughed, I burned with humiliation. I felt naive, never knowing the answer to her questions and anxiously trying to avoid her criticism.
I survived it all. But so, it seemed, did my resentment.
Thirty years later, all Mom had to say was “In other words…” at the start of a sentence, and I could feel my impatience bubbling up.
“Just say the words,” I’d snap, exasperated. “Whatever comes next will be the ‘other words.’ Just say them. No preface needed.”
Her other words bothered me too. She used “nevertheless” with alarming frequency. She often started a story in the middle, throwing in the names of people I didn’t know without any background. She commented on people’s appearances more than I liked.
And then there was her phone etiquette. Whoever invented the iPhone never imagined their mother shouting “Hey Siri” to make a dinner reservation from the post office, or loudly FaceTiming at Starbucks.
By my 30s, Mom had dubbed me her “worst adult kid,” jokingly, I think. I was the middle daughter perpetually stuck in a teenage phase of eye-rolling and snickering. She often ignored my scorn, but occasionally she’d push back. If her phone manners were rude, weren’t my outbursts, in front of my kids and in-laws, even ruder?
I was grateful for the many hours my mom and John spent with my three kids, teaching them to swim, cheering at games and recitals and playing Rummikub. I relied on the adoring attention they gave my kids, and how they praised my mothering.
I knew I had reasons to be angry, but I couldn’t see that our bickering was about more than Mom’s cellphone manners. I seemed to be continually punishing her for that long-ago scene in the mirror, and my desire for her to stop yelling at me somehow morphed into an unrelenting intolerance for her. Behaving badly didn’t make me feel better. I just couldn’t put my finger on where her responsibility ended and mine began.
And then, in my 40s, I met Emma.
Emma was the daughter of a couple we met on my husband’s business trip. On a snorkel boat, from behind her mirrored sunglasses, Emma told me about interning at a women’s shelter and the nannying job she took to pay for grad school. She colored with my toddler and coaxed my tween through choppy waves.
Just before I left for the airport the next day, I waited in line for coffee with Emma’s mom, Amy.
“You must be so proud of Emma,” I gushed. “She’s so poised and mature — it’s hard to believe she’s still in college.”
“Emma, Emma, Emma,” Amy said, but her smile receded. “It’s quite the Emma fan club around here.”
“You know why we didn’t go on that boat?” she continued. “Because Emma was on the boat. We took our grown daughter on vacation, and she’s criticized us nonstop. My pants are too short, my stories are too long, my husband walks too fast and said the wrong thing when he called housekeeping for towels. Trust me, we wanted to go snorkeling, but we needed a break from Emma.”
I don’t know if she actually gripped my shoulders when she crashed through my naiveté, but that’s how I remember receiving the memo. Amy could have meekly accepted my compliments about her daughter. Instead, she showed me my mirror image.
I was Emma.
I seemed lovely to most people I encountered — even those I found very, very annoying — but I was mean, impatient and unforgiving to my mom. I was rotten to the very person who gave me a good life when my other parent walked out. At too many turns, I disrespected the Nana who potty-trained my children and surprised them with “pillow presents” on sleepovers.
When I told my mom about my revelation, she confirmed my hunch. I was just like Emma.
Mom shared a mantra she’d devised to deal with conflicts with her own mother: My mother’s bad behavior does not reflect badly on me. It finally clicked. She was responsible for her phone manners; I was responsible for managing my petulance and sensitivities. I needed to forgive her imperfections, as she’d long overlooked mine.
Recognizing that we are each perfectly imperfect allowed me to finally see my mother for who she was — to like her, and not just to love her for getting us through hard times. She has a vitality that belies her age and stage as our family matriarch: mother of three daughters, three sons-in-law and a goldendoodle, and grandmother to nine grandchildren, ages 4 to 24. She competes in golf tournaments, and often wins. She jumps off the floating dock into the briny pond in front of the house she built ― the house we flock to all summer, partly because it’s beautiful but mostly because we want to be with her and John. She makes and keeps oodles of friends everywhere she goes because she is free-hearted and fabulous, and she’s not afraid to stand up for herself or for those she loves. Most admirably, she’s modeled to me how we each can continue to learn and evolve.
Mom can still irritate me (when she tells me who’s taking Ozempic, I’m pretty sure she’s suggesting I try it), but I’ve let go of that ugly anger that once separated us. My Emma–ness has become a shorthand that slows me down enough to identify the trigger.
We joked about it one Sunday as we both worked through the same crossword puzzle.
“Emma can’t wait until you solve 77 Down,” I texted her. The answer was four letters, with the clue “Like loud conversations in public.”
When she realized the answer was R-U-D-E, Mom texted back: “LOL. Like some children!”
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My biological father never reconciled with our family. I’ve come to understand how his abandonment left my mother and me with a stress that lingered even as our lives stabilized. I know now that her rage was never really meant for me, and my resentment wasn’t meant for her. Emma helped me see the best and worst parts of my daughter-self and find my way back to my mother, who thankfully was there waiting, steady and safe.
It’s ironic to have survived a shared trauma and thrived precisely because of one another’s support, only to get stuck in the minutiae of peevish habits. But it’s easy to miss the big picture and fixate on the imperfections of those who love us most, especially when a family history includes heartache and grief. For me, letting go of the past meant forgiving the small stuff to reveal how much goodness was there all along.
Some family relationships are too intolerable to sustain. Others, like mine, can be repaired through self-examination, persistence and counseling, according to sociologist Karl Pillemer, Ph.D., who researched family rifts for five years through the Cornell Family Reconciliation Project. The pioneering study concluded that most people eventually feel better after reconciling a family rift, even when the relationship remains imperfect. In his 2020 book “Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them,” Pillemer writes that when family members were able to reconcile a rift, “a weight dropped from their shoulders, and they were free from guilt and obsessive thinking” about the relationship.
If you recognize parts of yourself in my Emma era, or see glimpses of Emma in your own children, know that you aren’t alone. Parent-child relationships are lifelong works in progress, provided you are willing to evolve and accept each other’s shortcomings or make changes while you still have the chance. Focusing on the present and future of your family, and your role in it, may empower you to preserve one of the most authentic and precious connections and legacies of your life.
Jodie Sadowsky is a Connecticut writer focused on her life’s most defining roles: daughter, sister, friend, wife, mother, reader, writer. Her essays center on relationships, wellness and creativity, and her stories for children celebrate family, tradition and wordplay. Jodie is co-writing a memoir about her family’s resilience following her father’s disappearance. You can read more at www.jodiesadowsky.com, and connect with Jodie on Twitter and Instagram @LoveThemMadly.
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