My Mom No Longer Recognizes Me—And I Don’t Know What To Feel

My mom was a good mother when I was little. But as time passed, the mental illness she had skillfully hidden for years became more apparent, more unwilling to be ignored. It made her depressed, manic, anxious and often irrationally angry with me. It put such a strain on our relationship that I refused to live with her as a teen.

Her illness seemed to follow me, even after I'd moved 200 km from my small hometown in British Columbia and started college in the big city. There, another student recognized my name. She told me she was a legal secretary who previously worked for a lawyer my mother had hired years before, and had once transcribed bits of my diary provided by my mom. She'd been determined to use some details to punish my dad in divorce court.

Related: My Mother Was A Difficult Woman, And I Worried I Would Become One, Too

Several times in my twenties and thirties, my mother had the police check on me after convincing them I had been kidnapped. She wrote to relatives overseas and told them I was working for unsavoury people, connected to her landlords who had installed pinhole cameras in her room.

I learned it was best to avoid her because then I wasn’t top of mind; the more she thought about me, the more she’d create stressful scenarios about me in her head. I became an expert at dodging her sometimes incessant phone calls, hiding everything about her from my friends, convincing those she’d had check on me that I was fine and navigating all the curveballs that kept coming for me as I tried to live a normal life. Despite her attempts, we had minimal contact for decades.

Eventually, due to her growing inability to care for herself, a social worker helped her find a place in residential care with 24-hour staff. By that time, she had pushed away almost everyone in her life. At this point, I was seeing her about once a year and dreaded it every time. I felt crushing guilt that she didn’t have anyone to care for her other than strangers in a nursing home. My only sibling had moved even farther away than I had—so though I didn’t want the responsibility, I became her family representative, the person they call for permission to administer a flu shot or to ask whether they should resuscitate her if needed. In other words, the person they call for everything.

Nowadays, I live about an hour away. When I show up, she asks who I am.

“Are you a nurse?” She’s confused. I’m not wearing scrubs.

“No, Mom, it’s me.” She doesn’t remember she has a daughter, or maybe she’s confused because I’m much older than her last memories of me.

She seems to accept my answer, possibly out of embarrassment. A few minutes go by.

“Who are you?”

There's often cognitive decline associated with aging. It’s bound to happen that memories fade as people get older. But this is much more than just forgetfulness. The doctors and nurses have told me it is dementia. I feel a wave of conflicting emotions.

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There is unresolved anger and frustration that I’m the only family she has nearby, as she flounders between mad-at-me bipolar to doesn’t-recognize-me dementia. 

There is the grief that comes from losing someone, no matter the state of our relationship.

There is also relief—she is no longer the same person who relentlessly complicated my life. 

And then there is guilt that there is some relief in there too.

Tanya Lee Howe, the author of  Supporting Parents with Alzheimer’s, knows what I'm going through. Her mom has dementia too, and she agrees that what people feel when their elderly parents no longer recognize them isn’t always straightforward or expected. 

"I'm angry at the disease for stealing Mom's dignity,” she says, “and for the time I've lost dwelling on the guilt for not resolving the issues in our complex relationship.” 

As my mom forgets who I am, I know there will be fewer surprises, like the 3 a.m. phone calls where she insists that someone is spying on her. I am filled with relief—but I struggle with whether it’s OK to be happy about anything in this situation. "It's a personal journey," says Howe. "No one else can tell you how to feel about it."

My mom has been in the nursing home for more than a decade now, and I visit when I can. There are many reasons why: a sense of responsibility, guilt and the fear of regretting it if I don’t; compassion, because I know she didn’t choose to be ill; and maybe even some long-ago tucked-away genuine love. I am learning to reconcile my mixed feelings—mostly grief that I didn’t have a “normal” relationship with her and never will, and relief that she’ll never be able to make me feel the way she used to again.

We may not be close. She might not be the good mom from my early years, or even know who I am anymore. But I can still find it in me to do some good for her.