Stand up to malevolent mother with drinking problem

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/06/2020 (2293 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts: My mother is a lonely person because she’s so crabby and negative. She’s not old — just an alcoholic who is left alone because every visit is a litany of complaints against one of my siblings or me.

She writes down the date on the calendar when any of us visit her, and then, when we next see her, she lets us know the last date we were there, as if you were an employee who skipped a shift.

Last visit, when she was running down my younger sister and everybody else, and complaining they never visit, I told her off and said I wasn’t coming back until she got off her bitter pills!

As I was stomping out the door I heard her yelling, “After all I’ve done for you!” I marched right back in and said “You did NOTHING for me except scare our father off, and give me and my brothers and sister inferiority complexes. I will never be back here. Because of your own mean mouth, you have lost this daughter forever!”

Now here’s the bigger problem: I don’t want her calling when she’s dead drunk and looking for forgiveness, as she has done before. I’m through with her. She has three other ruined kids she can call.

I don’t want to move out of the city to get away because I love Winnipeg and my friends are here, but she is terrible for me. How do I get her off my back for good? She is not a real mother. She’s a drunken witch.

— Daughter No More, Winnipeg Outskirts

Dear Daughter No More: Answer her next phone call, and do all the talking. Tell her you will have nothing more to do with her unless she quits drinking with a real program, and has had a course of therapy. Tell her you will only meet her again if her therapist is in the room to witness and referee the meeting.

As for your siblings, tell them what you have done and that you’ve reached your limit. Then get help for yourself and work through the trauma and pain you’ve suffered at the hands of your mother to make sure you pass as little as possible on to your own children.

In the meantime, there are many good books for adult children of alcoholics, but don’t go on a binge reading them. One or two will do. You don’t want to be thinking about your mother every day.

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts: I’m 18. My older sister, by a year, just broke up with her boyfriend — a guy I wanted back, and she knew it. She said he’d done something so disgusting she couldn’t forgive it, and now “anyone can have the creep.”

When he moved into our area last fall, she dated him first, and then she dumped him. Then he asked me out and I went, and she was so jealous she made a big play for him, and took him back, until now.

I don’t know what she found out that was so terrible, but it’s weird — she isn’t even crying over the breakup. And she isn’t talking to me, just to our mother.

—  Curious About Mystery, West End

Dear Curious: Stay away from this guy! Usually, after a breakup when there are no tears and a girl says she’s shocked by a boyfriend’s behaviour (and she’s only talking to an adult about it) it isn’t likely about another girl.

It may be about something violent, illegal, disgusting and/or cruel. So back way off this guy, and don’t try to get into a discussion about it with your sis. Stay away from the guy if he tries to call you. If you’re a smart young woman, the competition with your sister is over right now.

Please send your questions and comments to lovecoach@hotmail.com or Miss Lonelyhearts c/o the Winnipeg Free Press, 1355 Mountain Ave., Winnipeg, MB, R2X 3B6.

Miss Lonelyhearts
Advice Columnist

   Read full biography