Back then, they didn’t have a name for it. They just called her overprotective. Yes, that’s what my mother was. Overprotective, overzealous, over-everything.
My mother was just 19 when she had me, and, although she had been given the option of going back to college to finish her degree, she decided not to. She had no plans of getting a job. Her career, she declared many times over the years, was motherhood.
That’s exactly what she focused on. While my father devoted all his time to working, my mother spent all of hers on mothering.
My mother took pride in her parenting style, raising her eyebrows at other mothers who juggled careers and taking care of their babies, and shaking her head at women who chose to work abroad than stay at home with their kids.
When I started school, my mother was heavily involved. In grade school, she didn’t just help me with my homework. My projects became our projects. My exams were our exams. She would create reviewers and make me spend hours studying them before quizzing me until I knew them forwards and backwards.
I had good grades, yes, but I also became the kid who would cry when she got four mistakes in an exam because she was afraid of disappointing her mother.
Weekends were spent practicing penmanship and going to lessons, all kinds of lessons.
Intensity
My mother’s attention was divided by the birth of my sisters. Soon, their homework and their exams were also hers. She applied the same intensity to their schoolwork.
My sister still remembers being hit with a ruler because she couldn’t get the answers to her math problems correctly. If any of us got a bad grade, my mom would go to the school and confront the teacher.
When we got a little older, she stopped helping us with our homework. But while she relaxed in terms of schoolwork, she stayed as intense in other aspects of our lives. And, being the eldest child, I experienced the brunt of it.
In high school, friends liked grabbing merienda at McDonald’s after classes ended, while some would stop by at nearby malls. I wasn’t allowed, not even with a chaperone.
Sleepovers were a no-no. “The world is a dangerous place. I cannot trust the people around you,” she would say.
Even in college, the “helicopter parenting” continued. She insisted on coming with me to enrollment, even when I told her I could do it on my own and that everyone else did it on their own.
She still tried to enforce a bedtime during my years in the university. She wanted me to sleep by 10 p.m., I think, and it was laughable, considering the amount of studying I had to do every single night.
Smothering
She would go through our rooms, dig through our bags, look through our wallets, read our phones and call it mothering. I called it smothering.
When I started to have relationships, she would get so involved I’d regret having introduced my boyfriend in the first place. She would hover while I was on the phone, trying to figure out if we were fighting. She would talk to my boyfriend on the phone without me knowing. It was the same scenario with my sisters.
I stopped confiding to her about my problems because she always threatened to confront the people involved.
I thought things would stop the minute I started working, that she’d finally realize I was an adult. I was wrong.
She continued to treat me like a child, requiring me to report where I’d be at exactly what time, who I’d be with, what I’d be doing there. During times I needed to go out of town or out of the country for work, we’d get into huge fights. She didn’t want to let me go.
That was the recurring theme of our life: she did not want to let go.
If I were lazy, if I wanted the easy way out, if I didn’t want to work hard, I could have chosen to stay under my mother’s wing and let her take care of everything for me. I knew she would have loved that. But it was extra-difficult for me because I’ve always been independent.
I was in my mid-20s when I finally put my foot down. It was not an easy process—it involved a lot of fights and a lot of tears—but it was something I had to do. I knew that if I let her, my mother would continue to overparent me well into my 50s.
Don’t get me wrong—I am grateful for everything my mother has done for me. I understood that everything my mother did was borne out of her deep love and concern for me and I appreciate that. But it’s a shame because if she had been less stifling, our relationship could have turned out to be so much better. I couldn’t help but think that if she had been less focused on her children, maybe she could have become a happier person.
When I finally have my own kids, I know one thing for sure: I will love them and take care of them but I will give them space to breathe. I will parent but not overparent. I will be involved but I refuse to be a helicopter parent.