Don’t Ask!

Tips for Mothers #497: Never ask your grown daughter what she talked about at therapy.

We were curled up on the sofa with cold glasses of Chardonnay binge-watching our current favorite series, Younger. Chloe, 30-years-old and living a few minutes away in Silverlake, came to Burbank weekly to visit. After catching up with her Dad and little brother, I would pour us a glass of wine and we’d pick up where we left off. During breaks between episodes, we would chat and catch up. She was at an age where we could finally be friends and I reveled in that.

“So I had an exciting week,” Chloe said. “I found a therapist.”

“Did you? I didn’t know you were thinking about getting therapy.” I said.

I was surprised. After all, she was the sane person in the family, more mature than either of her parents. She was brilliant, balanced, responsible from birth. She was emotionally open and stable, she had survived with grace the moves back and forth across the country to accommodate her Dad’s career, the changing of homes and schools, the adoption of her little brother and all the disruption that generated. She had breezed through Yale, she and her boyfriend had moved in together and were thriving in their television writing careers. 

Because she was so grounded and successful, I fantasized that she had somehow survived childhood relatively unscathed. Her Dad and I both grew up in dysfunctional homes and had struggled to build healthy adult lives and mature relationships. Chloe was the beneficiary of all the tools we sought out — church, couples’ therapy, 12-step meetings and the Grief Recovery Program. We poured all our new knowledge into being good parents and better role models than the ones we experienced. Still, we were prone to fall back into old habits — melancholy, anger, drama, chaos and noisy fighting. Every time things got rocky in our family, I told Chloe we’d add to her Therapy Fund, but I thought that joke protected her from the reality of actually needing it.

“Well, I really felt like I needed some help navigating the moving in with Josh situation. We’re driving each other crazy,” Chloe said.

After I said that was understandable, she told me all about her hour with her new therapist, Angela. I felt honored and a little smug about the intimacy we shared and felt comforted that she was seeking some counselling to improve her relationship skills.

I got complacent.

The following week, when the credits were rolling on our third episode of Younger, I handed Chloe a fresh glass of wine, sat next to her and asked, “So…what did you talk about in therapy this week?”

“Well…I was telling her about that problem getting our writing deal negotiated with the network and how our lawyer was making everybody mad and the producer was telling us we needed to call our lawyer off.”

“Oh yeah, did that ever get settled?” I asked.

“Yes, it’s all going to work out. Our lawyer is just trying to get as much as she can for us. But I was telling Angela that it really upset me and made me so anxious I couldn’t sleep for days. I told her I felt like I was in trouble. So Angela asked me if that was a familiar feeling.”

Chloe hated being in trouble. Driving her to school on the last day of second grade, I suggested she take the opportunity to be really BAD that day, to ignore the teacher’s instructions, to disrupt others, to not place her chair upside down on the desk at the end of the day or volunteer to help others do that. “I mean, it’s the last day of school, what can they do to you?” I asked. She looked at me as if I’d lost my mind and said with horror, “No!” She was a good girl, always followed the rules.

“Oh wow, what was your answer?” I said.

“I told her it reminded me of my mom,” Chloe said.

“Me? Why?” I said. I immediately started to feel a tiny bit defensive. Alarm bells started up.

“Well, just your over-reacting when I made any small mistake,” she said.

I felt a little nauseous. Yes, I was a little stressed out when she was young. Yes, I had a hair-trigger temper in those days. By nature, I was headstrong and stubborn, decisive, impulsive to some degree, words flying out of my mouth without forethought. Chloe, on the other hand, had always been a dreamer, a rule-follower and a planner, thinking through steps thoroughly before acting and keeping her opinions to herself unless asked. This seemed like a clash of temperaments, the problem being the differences in our personalities. Could I have changed my basic personality? I felt bad for being myself.

“Well, I’m really glad you took the Grief Recovery Workshop in high school. They taught you how to forgive, so I hope you’ll forgive me,” I said.

“Of course I do,” Chloe said, laughing as she took a sip of her wine.

“Ugh,” I said, looking away from her and taking a swig of my own wine. 

A picture popped into my head, Chloe at the dinner table, spilling a glass of milk and then lifting her hands in surrender, quivering with fear, preparing herself for the wrath of Mom. When I was raising her, my people-pleasing, hyper-responsibility and perfectionism were in overdrive. I filled my days with shuttling Chloe around, teaching fitness classes, volunteering for every PTA position, auditioning for acting roles, crossing chores off my never-ending to-do list, never sitting down, never finishing my duties. Even though I was making big strides in those days, by the time I put dinner on the table, I was an exhausted mess.

Then I remembered what the Grief Recovery program taught me. Don’t ask for forgiveness. Apologize. I could see how my behavior might have molded her personality. My intensity and hair-trigger temper certainly shaped her, her fear of others’ disapproval instilled by her mother’s inability to deal with her own lack of self-worth. If she were the good girl, she was safe.

“What I mean, Chloe is… you’re right. I was way too hard on you and I’m so sorry. I wish I could go back and change the way I was then.”

The fact that Chloe and I have a wonderful adult friendship is a testimony not to the brilliant mother I imagined myself to be, but to Chloe’s powers of reasoning, patience and forgiveness.

“Okay,” I said, reaching over to put my hand on her knee. “I think the only solution here is to tell your therapist to bill me.”

“Cheers to that!” said Chloe, raising her glass. “Ready for another episode?”