I want to thank Cary Tennis, but also everyone who posted letters on this topic. You have helped me a great deal. My relationship with my own mother is an emotional minefield that has negatively affected every other aspect of my life for more than forty years. I now realize that even though she has written me off as "unsalvageable," she has loved me the best she knows how. I will never have her acceptance. It's time to face it and move on. Thank you for helping me understand that.

I think the key to your whole situation comes in your first paragraph: "when I was growing up my father was verbally and (sometimes) physically abusive."

First of all, you have to understand your mother in this context. A fully healthy woman would not have subjected herself and her child to that environment.

You must understand your mother as a battered wife. These women have a host of pychological issues not only stemming from the abuse itself but that set the stage for them to accept being in the abusive relationship in the first place. I suspect that her father is no peach either.

"It always seemed to be my duty to protect her from anything that seemed threatening and upsetting..." This is another type of psychological abuse. Children who are placed in this situation are asked to grow up too fast and themselves have a distinct set of common psychological effects. One of them is a hightened sense of responsibilty that follows their entire lives.

I am not sure that this is especially signficant to your immediate problem, but most bisexual women (in contrast to lesbian women) are the product of abusive childhoods. I am not suggesting that you have any choice about your orientation now, but your abusive past is the key to your present.

Here are my suggestions:

1) You need therapy yourself, not necessarily for anything in your letter other than your continuing feeling of over responsibilty for your mother, but because no one can have your childhood and not need therapy.

2) Your mother needs therapy. However, she will not get it and you are going to have to accept that she will just always have her own psychological issues. Just recognize that she is damaged as well and that her reactions are not going to be fully healthy.

3) Your own bisexual desires may wax and wane with time. My wife is bisexual. She was raped at 14 and then had a series of abusive relationships. Her relationship with me is only the second healthy relationship she has had. During our ten years together her interest in women has substantially waned. I am not suggesting that this is something you do or should desire, but it is something that might happpen if you are able to get into a long term supportive relationship.

4) I think in dealing with your mother you need to have a mix of honesty and an understanding of when not to talk about certain issues. The first thing is honesty and a willingness to abandon your role as protector. You have to tell her why you feel as you do. Tell her why you are angry, why you have excluded her from your home, why you are angry with the Catholic church. After that discussion or three, you can just decide that you will not talk about certain of these issues with her again. However, you can only get to that point after a real and honest talk with her. Continuing to protect and sheild her will only result in the same situation dragging on forever.

I just am continually grateful for Cary Tennis. Although the issue at hand is not my issue, the devestation of parental attack was. A very poignent response. He is a treasure.

And that additional issue is that as a child, the letter writer lived in a home where the roles were reversed. Instead of her mother protecting her, she protected her mother.

Personal experience and observations of friends' experiences lead me to bellieve that if that role reversal has never been acknowledged, it's a slim chance that healing will occur in old age. I suspect that responsible moms (or sometimes dads) never quite get over the guilt of having to depend on their minor child, instead of being the supporter and protector.

I think that the guilt pretty much overwhelms them and makes it difficult for them to accept differences. Mom might even feel, deep down, that the writer's bisexuality is "her fault" because she had to rely on the child.

We don't know what kind of burdens mom is carrying around, but I'm willing to bet there's a whole lot of guilt there. I suspect that has a lot more to do with her inability to accept the her own flaws than the writer's own behaviors.

Sometimes we just have to let go and love our parents as they are. We wind up, once again, modeling what we should have learned from them.

JM $0.02

I know this might sound naive, but so much of the talk here (and elsewhere) is predicated on the notion that old people can't grasp new concepts and are essentially automatons after 50 or so, lacking free will and sometimes even seem like the couldn't pass a Turing test anymore.

From what I've seen, this notion's basically true, except for a few professor-type folks I've met, and maybe a hippie or three.

HOW CAN I KEEP THIS FROM HAPPENING TO 29-YEAR-OLD ME?

Hi,

OK let me get this straight: Mom was abused by her man

and thought daughter should only be with a man.

I feel bad for moms' motherless daughter and moms' HUSBAND.

Mom hated sexual contact with a man and drove her family ga ga .

Cary's response and all of the other letters are so true. I was especially touched by the observations about how the things parents do and provide for their children can actually separate them from each other in profound ways.

It occurred to me while reading the letters that the LW's mother and Anonymous' mother might have had something else in common: not wanting to admit to a profound personal failure. One about her daughter's sexual preference, and the other about her daughter's mental health. In both cases, these are things for which mothers were, in the not-so-distant past, often "blamed." If your child (especially an only child, into whom you have poured everything, and who, unlike most of your peers, you waited to have until you were a fully-fledged adult, 28-30 yrs old), doesn't turn out the way that everything you were taught said she would, then you must have done something wrong.

Conversely, if you are convinced that you were the very best mother you could possibly be, then it is unimaginable that your beloved (only) daughter could become something so unacceptable in Society's eyes.

Cary, what does one call the emotional version of "cognitive dissonance?"

[FYI... I don't really think that parents with more than one child have any to "spare," but they're more likely to appreciate that there are inherent differences in each child, even though they all grew up in the same family.]

Another thought I had was about something I only wish I had learned earlier myself... that a parent's primary responsibility to a child is to help him or her understand and learn how to deal with their feelings, and that lots of parents need their own help in this area.