2 weeks Ago By Yahoo Life UK
Sally McIlhone, 39, from Hampshire, is married with two sons, aged seven and one. As part of Yahoo Life UK's accounts of motherhood to mark Mother's Day, Sally tells how attending therapy in her 30s saved her relationship with her mum. I wasn’t the easiest child.
I insisted on calling my first doll Beethoven and wouldn’t let my mum choose any of my outfits, ever. I was smart, headstrong and argumentative – the poor woman had no idea what to do with me. Despite there being an obvious resemblance between us, that unshakeable mother-daughter bond I had read about in books seemed non-existent.
I didn’t understand how a person who was my complete opposite could have made me. Weren’t mothers and daughters meant to have this deep-rooted understanding of who the other is? If that was true, then why was my mum constantly annoyed and exasperated by me? Why didn’t she 'get' me like my friends' mums seemed to get them? It probably didn’t help that I was a miniature version of my dad, who my mum had separated from when I was four. Dad had problems with alcohol (fortunately, he’s been sober ever since) and Mum.
.. met someone else.
As a child, I felt hurt and betrayed on my dad’s behalf. When my dad went on to find love and my mum became terminally single, I was very much Team Dad. I put him on a pedestal and dismissed my mum’s stay-at-home single parent lifestyle 'choices' as lazy.
She wasn't a role model for me. If anything, my goal in life was to avoid following in her footsteps. Distance between us It wasn’t until I became a mother, a single parent, and a wife (in that order) that I began to understand how she might have felt.
My eldest son’s dad left when he was just eight months old and two years later I was engaged to my separation lawyer’s brother – but that’s another story...
I can’t imagine that having a living reminder of your ex, who points out how rubbish you are on a regular basis, is particularly good for your self-esteem. I also don’t remember her ever exploding at me about it, which shows a level of self-control I can only marvel at. As I got older, our already shaky relationship became even more fragile.
Yes, ok, she frequently played the 'cool mum', having an open door policy with mine and my brother’s friends and staying up to make bacon sandwiches when I came home from clubbing with my mates, but she was rubbish when it came to talking about sex and relationships. It wasn’t her fault. My mum grew up in 1960s Northern Ireland, where she was taught by nuns in a convent school.
Our chats about sex were awkward and stunted at best. But I was part of the American Pie generation: I couldn’t wait to go to uni and embark on lots of sexy, hedonistic adventures. My mum was (rightly) petrified and kept telling me to 'value' myself.
Distressing incident So when I was 20 and an adult, male family friend abused my trust, I genuinely thought my mum would be on my side. I’m a gut instinct type of person and whenever the vibes were off with friends, at the pub or even once at Thorpe Park, I would call mum to come to the rescue. She was my safety net.
The night, I was physically abused by a man who felt like family, then forced to spend a petrifying 90-minute drive home in his company before bursting through the door of my mum’s house in a cold sweat. When I told her what had happened, it was like a knife to the heart to hear that she didn’t believe me. This man said he needed a shoulder to cry on and I was naive enough to believe him.
I thought we would be meeting mutual friends in a pub, not swinging by his house for a drink that suddenly made me feel very tired and unwell. I tried to explain in detail what had happened, desperate to understand why she thought I would lie..
. and my mum just couldn’t show any empathy. She was angry I had put myself in that situation and couldn’t face talking about it, let alone support me in speaking to the police.
I was floored. If my own mother didn’t believe me, what hope did I have of getting a police officer, a lawyer, a judge or a jury to believe me? So I buried it all deep inside me. Feeling so hurt and abandoned by my mother, things between us went from bad to worse.
We argued more frequently in my 20s as I increasingly kept her at arms length, often not speaking for months after an argument. Falling out After I gave birth to my eldest son at 32, the problems escalated even further. I suffered with perinatal OCD, and reasoned that if I couldn’t trust my mum to keep me safe, I certainly couldn’t trust her with my precious baby.
We clashed over parenting decisions and before long we weren’t speaking again – and this time it felt like the final nail in the coffin. I was exhausted by what felt like a constant cycle of anger and resentment and I decided that it was make or break. We needed to learn how to communicate better – and we needed to unpack her reaction to that awful situation once and for all.
I was willing to give it one more chance – if my mum was willing to go to family therapy. At first, mum was apoplectic. There was no way in hell she was going to therapy.
.. It was my dad who got her to see sense.
I don’t know exactly what was said between them, but soon afterwards my mum agreed to give therapy a try. In August 2019, when I was 34, we had our first joint session. We arrived separately and barely spoke to one another in the waiting room.
I remember reaching for the box of nearby tissues and leaving feeling like we would need years to rectify our problems. Processing the painful events of the past was our focus, but we also spoke to our counsellor separately so she could build up a picture of who we were individually and of our relationship timeline. Facing the past We spent one session talking about our family, what it was like for my mum growing up and her approaches to men and sex.
Back when I was about 12, my mum had begun telling me the story of when she was flashed at in the sweet shop where she worked when she was a similar age. At first, I thought it was funny, but as I got older, the deeper implications of the event became apparent and I began to see that my mum had never really recovered from that incident either. How was she meant to help me through my own trauma when she hadn’t fully processed hers? Over the course of six weeks, we worked up to the session where we both recalled our personal accounts of what happened that awful night.
It made me realise that I was so caught up in my experience that I had never even asked about my mum’s. She reminded me that I had called her from this man’s house before the drive home, clearly wanting to alert her that something was wrong but still being in earshot of him so having to feign relaxed indifference. So she had 90 excruciating minutes of worrying about what had happened before I burst through the door.
When I recounted my side and told mum how awful her reaction made me feel, she broke down and apologised, for the first time, for not believing me. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it, her voice trembling. I knew she meant it.
In that moment, something at the core of our relationship shifted and things have felt lighter ever since. Two months of therapy finally allowed me to understand my mum, and where her thoughts, opinions and reactions come from. It’s also made my mum respect me more as a grown-up.
A new closeness Things have only got better from there. Now, I speak to my mum every day. I trust her implicitly with my kids and I involve her more in our lives.
Don’t get me wrong, she can still wind me up – but we are both quick to address our issues now and not let them fester. When we went back to Ireland a few years ago, she pointed out the shop where her flasher lived and worked for many years. I held her hand and gave her a hug as she breathed deeply, staring at the shop, lost in thought.
How brave she was to share that with me, to come to therapy and to help us heal together. Now, finally, she’s the role model I always wanted. Read more on Mother's Day:.
