My Non-Existent Relationship with My 18 Year Old Daughter

Reader’s Question

My daughter is now 18 years old and living away from home. Our relationship is non-existent. I have tried to find terminology to describe what’s going on within our relationship but can’t seem to and hope you can help me. As a small child she bonded with my mother — calling her mother before me — and the dynamic of our relationship seemed more like sisters than parent and child. As a 2-year-old she ran across the room and hit me hard because I was hugging my mother. When she was 10, I caught her putting matches in a pot of corn beef and cabbage to make it inedible.

She has a great deal of anger about being homeless repeatedly during her childhood and about my mother dying. As a teenager she dug her nails into me so deeply that I bled and on one occassion she called the police after I went to work and accused me of beating her. When I retrieved her from a homeless shelter she shook her hands at me in a challenge and said “come on mom, what are you going to do?” After this her behavior died down.

But by 16 she got a boyfriend who was 26, started going to hotels with him, and became sexually active with him and a 33-year-old woman that she moved in with. She began a campaign of slander against me, and she had me arrested for trespassing when I tried to ge a copy of an insurance card that I had given her — in case of an asthma attack. Every act of kindness that I have shown her she has rejected, and she is really violent toward me. Before moving out she would shove me and bully me around the house. What’s going on with my daughter? Why does she act this way?

Our Clinical Psychologist’s Reply

Part of the answer is in your question. You rather casually mention “being homeless repeatedly” and even “when I retrieved her from a homeless shelter”. Your daughter obviously had a very unstable and unstructured childhood. She may have identified her grandmother as more stable and predictable, thus making a better relationship with her. She may view you as a mother who came in and out of her life at various times.

Being homeless, living in shelters, frequent moves, death of her grandmother, and an unstable parenting relationship produces a child who operates on survival level with few boundaries. Your casual mention of homelessness, picking her up at a shelter, etc. suggest that your lifestyle has probably been similar to the way she lives at this time. When we live “on the street” we quickly develop a high tolerance for substandard situations of all types — substandard living arrangements, odd and/or abusive relationships, tolerance for abnormal behavior in others, etc.

Your daughter may harbor intense resentment and anger toward you. She may feel you, as the mother, are responsible for her multiple problems and unstable childhood. Her hostility has continued as an adult.

If you have lived most of your life in “survival mode” — spending most of your efforts to find shelter, food, and support on a daily basis — you may have difficulty understanding why your daughter is resentful and bitter toward you and her upbringing. I would recommend counseling to help you not only understand your daughter’s reactions toward you, but to repair the relationship if possible. In these situations, it may be impossible to return to a healthy mother-daughter relationship. However, with understanding between both parties, you may eventually have a stable adult-to-adult relationship.