When my marriage ended, there was one person whose love, reassurance and safe arms I longed for: my mum. I was 39 at the time but it felt natural to want the comfort of my mother in such a dark time. Even though we had never had a warm, affectionate relationship, I hoped this would bring us closer – that she’d finally show me the support I’d always wanted.
But her response was as cold as ever: ‘I don’t understand why you can’t work it through; your dad would be so disappointed.’
This was particularly devastating because Dad had died three years before and I’d spent my whole childhood seeking – and not securing – his approval.
She went on to accuse me of emasculating my husband Michael* by earning more than him, as with a successful career in global finance, I’d out-earned his job in manufacturing by tens of thousands. And of letting myself go since having children – given my lifelong struggles with body image, that really stung.
Worse, she claimed ending the marriage would ‘damage’ my sons.
I left in tears, feeling utterly heartbroken.
After that, Mum went one step further. Even though I had left our 15-year marriage on account of Michael’s gaslighting and mounting debts, which cumulatively ran into six figures over the years, she took his side. She insisted on taking him out for secret meals with our seven-year-old twin boys – long after I asked her not to.
Parental rejection at my lowest ebb was devastating. It meant that within the space of three years, I’d lost my father, my husband and then my mother.
We haven’t had any contact for three years now, something that is agonising but also liberating.
This ‘mother wound’ required more therapy than the divorce itself. After all, a husband can be replaced, but a mother cannot.
Growing up near Liverpool, my parents were never affectionate with my younger brother and me, giving us the silent treatment if we displeased them.
When I said I didn’t want to progress to Girl Guides after finishing Brownies, Mum didn’t speak to me for days. I wrote cards to say sorry, and made her cups of coffee in the hope of winning her over. But she ignored it all and her rejection made me feel unlovable and invisible.
Food was another battleground. My parents employed an ‘eat it or wear it’ rule. If we didn’t finish our plates the food would be rubbed in our faces – literally. I remember Dad rubbing the remainder of a jelly dessert in my face. I was then made to wash it off in a cold shower while fully clothed.
I felt humiliated, powerless and completely overwhelmed by shame and fear.
There were also ongoing comments from my mother that my boobs were too big, that I’d never lose my puppy fat, that I should do double chin exercises, and ought to join WeightWatchers. She was maybe one dress size smaller than me at the time. Friends and family could never understand why I always thought I was fat.
During my teens, I developed bulimia, rooted in shame, fear and a desperate attempt to be good enough for my mother.
Even supposed acts of generosity were simply other ways to control and diminish me. When I learned to drive, my parents – Mum was a midwife and Dad was a team leader in a factory – bought me a car, but it was used almost as a blackmail tool. If I came home later than expected or questioned something Mum said, my car keys would be confiscated for weeks.
As for Dad, he would either shout or follow Mum’s lead and give us the silent treatment too. Until I had my own children, I didn’t know this wasn’t normal.
Perhaps this lack of paternal support is why I fell in love with Michael so quickly when we met aged 19. I was studying Law at Liverpool University, while he was already working in manufacturing. There was instant attraction, and a deep friendship between us. He told me he loved me and for the first time, I felt chosen and loved.
Within six months, we were engaged. The biggest surprise was that my parents actually approved of our relationship. Michael had always felt distant from his own parents and, ironically, would say my mum was like the mother he never had.
Looking back, I think they liked him because our steady relationship represented stability and respectability, and they also enjoyed his adoration of them.
In June 2004, we married in a church with 150 guests. Left to me, we’d have married on a beach somewhere with just closest friends and family, but my parents paid for the wedding – another seemingly generous act that was all about control. I didn’t even know half the people they invited.
Even when they gave us a deposit for a house in our 20s, there was an ulterior motive. They insisted we buy a house belonging to a friend of theirs, even though the location wasn’t where we wanted to live. Of course, they got their way.
I was about to start my postgraduate legal training so we agreed Michael would pay the mortgage from his manufacturing job until I was earning too. Within months, letters arrived from the lender warning our mortgage payments were in arrears.
It was the first sign that Michael was irresponsible with money, and forced me to swap my aspirations to be a lawyer for a place on a graduate finance programme, earning around £10,000 more than him, even in those early days.
This was the start of a pattern that would define our marriage. Over the years, his debts ran into tens of thousands of pounds across overdrafts and credit cards. Often, I only found out when creditors contacted us directly.
He dealt largely in cash transactions on credit cards, and explanations ranged from ‘they are not my debts’ as if he knew nothing about them, to ‘I let my friend use my name to get a credit card’ – and even that the debts had been cleared when they hadn’t.
To this day, I have no idea what he spent his money on. I wondered if he was gambling or having an affair. When I asked, he would shout, insisting he was completely faithful – he denied gambling too.
As I climbed further up the career ladder in global corporate financial services, I was soon earning double what Michael did. In public, Mum would congratulate me on promotions but in private would ask: ‘How do you think Michael will feel? Will this make him happy?’
At that point, Mum and I were seeing each other every other week – although she continually undermined me, it didn’t cross my mind there was any alternative. Even when I felt she blamed me for Michael’s financial ineptitude.
I could only do so much to help pay off his debts as I was already funding the mortgage, bills and living costs. My parents stepped in to bail him out more than once, but it didn’t seem to put them off him.
On the contrary, they told me that given my career I should have taught him how to manage his finances. They wouldn’t accept that no matter what I said I couldn’t get him to change.
Even after I gave birth to our twin boys in 2012, he wiped out our savings for my maternity cover, meaning I had no choice but to return to work when the boys were only nine months old.
The day I discovered Michael had taken money from our toddler sons’ piggy banks, replacing the banknotes they’d received as birthday and Christmas gifts with folded-up pieces of paper, was the turning point.
It wasn’t about the money – I’m sure people dig into their kids’ piggy banks if they need milk and nobody’s got change in the house. It was the level of deceit and the fact he didn’t say ‘I’ve just borrowed £20…’
In the months that followed, Michael and I had couples therapy, organised and paid for by me in a last-ditch attempt to salvage our marriage – but it made no difference. In November 2018, I told him it was over and we agreed to separate after Christmas. He cried and promised he’d change, but after 15 years of the same promises I knew he wouldn’t.
When he moved out in February 2019, I went to my mum’s house and explained I could no longer live with deceit. A little part of me hoped maybe she would finally give me the love I desperately wanted.
Not only did she say Dad would’ve been disappointed in me but she implied that if I’d had a less successful career things might have been different. So too if I hadn’t let myself go after having kids.
My first inkling that she’d taken Michael’s side was when she secretly took him out for dinner with the boys a couple of weeks later. My sons told me there’d been an extra chair at the table which they’d thought was for me, but my mother had told them I wouldn’t be coming.
When I later confronted her, she said: ‘Oh that’s right, I’m such a bad mum.’ I told her, ‘Right now, it feels like you’re not being supportive.’
I later took her to lunch and calmly asked her to support me like she was supporting Michael. She said I was overreacting and that she was just helping someone she saw as a son. She continued meeting up with him.
The final straw came over Easter 2024 when she turned up at my house with chocolate for the boys. I asked her why my boys had told me she was still seeing Michael – five years after our split. Furious, she shouted at my eldest son that he was ‘a liar’ and ‘confused’.
He was so upset, he was visibly shaking. His brother ran and hid because he thought she might hit him.
It was like looking at me as a child, doubting myself because of my mother. That’s when I realised protecting my children’s emotional safety had to come first. I asked her to leave.
Since then, neither of us has attempted to make contact. There are no birthday cards, no Christmas presents from her and I stopped sending them too.
I was still questioning whether Mum taking his side is what all mothers would do when one of my colleagues said to me: ‘Emily, my mum loves my husband, but if we divorced I’d be her priority even if she was supportive of both of us.’
Now life feels freer without Mum in it. There is sadness about what might have been, but stepping away is the only way for the boys and me to live in peace.
Eighteen months ago, we moved from the North West to Buckinghamshire to be closer to my brother, who also no longer speaks to her. Our new house is full of laughter and the warm hugs and love I never had from my parents. Nobody walks on eggshells and the boys tell me that it feels like home.
I have learned that shame, silence and conditional love can shape a child’s nervous system for life – influencing who you marry, what you tolerate and for how long.
The hardest part of divorce wasn’t losing my husband. It was the painful acceptance that my mother could not give me the unconditional love I’d spent a lifetime trying to earn.
Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is admit the truth and walk away. I’m proof there is peace on the other side of a divorce from a husband… or a mother.
- Emily Robinson is a pseudonym. Names and identifying details have been changed.
