I've finally set boundaries with my mother, and if you're struggling with setting boundaries with a family member, I hope this experience will be helpful for you, because this has been a big challenge for me. I've even been hesitant to add this chapter to my autobiography. But it's Mother's Day today, and I'm not seeing my mother, so this seems like the time to talk about it in detail.
To begin: I love my mother. And the easiest way I've found to love my mother is to love her from a distance. Currently that distance is across the street. My mother lives 100 yards away from me, because a year and a half ago I dropped everything for a week and helped her move next door to me, along with the moving company. Then, for over a year, I saw her almost every day, and I did everything I could to help her move and to be a great son, to help her out, to fill the space that was left when my dad died.
And now I'm in a place where I don't see my mother and I don't talk to my mother. If I run into her on the street, I'll say hi, give her a hug, tell her I love her, but I'm not going to voluntarily see her, even on Mother's Day. Why? Because it's easier to love my mother from a distance.
Why I love my mother from a distance
When I'm up close to my mother, this is my experience of her. My mother is a drug addict who lives alone in her house, and who is, I guess the word is, a narcissist, so she pretty much just thinks about herself and her past and her issues all the time. She is very qualified for Al-Anon, because she has alcoholism in her parents, in my father, and in me. She very much lived a life surrounded by alcohol, by alcoholics. My father got sober when I was six years old, so for the first seven or eight years of their relationship he was an active alcoholic. When they met, he was also a drug addict, a sex addict, and a gambler, and he cleaned up a lot. But it was challenging growing up in our house at times, as it is for many people.
My mom got into a position where she was having a really rough time psychologically. All of us felt it. My dad nearly left about 25 years ago; he nearly took us and left. My mother went into the military when I was a baby, because my father had been kicked out of his own house in Michigan in the winter because of his addiction, and my mother went into the Army because she saw that as the best way she could find to guarantee that I would be taken care of. For that, I will forever be grateful.
The challenge is that being in the Army put my mother in a position where the institution has always just pushed forward. Take some drugs, get some surgery, whatever you can do, but you've got to do your PT test, you've got to be there and show up all the time. You do your job, you do what you're ordered to do, and if you're struggling with that, get some drugs, get some surgery, and get back into action. My mother had lots of surgeries and all kinds of different drug treatments, and she finally got on opiates a little less than 25 years ago. She's been on them ever since. She takes, according to the doctors, cancer-patient levels of morphine, among many, many other drugs.
The years I called her almost every day
My wife said that since she's known me, which is since 2011, I've had trouble setting boundaries with my mother. And my mother was a big help to me when I first got sober. After my dad died, I was in acute pain, and drinking was pushing me to the point where my wife finally couldn't stand it anymore and was getting ready to leave me. She made that clear. That's what motivated me to get sober, because I realized I'm not going to do very well, to say the least, if my wife leaves. I've got to do better in my life.
So when I got sober 10 years ago, I got all fired up that I could help my mom, share what I learned with her, and help her get clean and change her life too. About two years into my sobriety, she and I really had it out. She tried for a couple of days to get off all the drugs she's on, and she couldn't do it. It was ugly. She was nasty to me on every phone call because I was telling her she was a drug addict and that she needed to go to rehab and get off this stuff. We took a month where we didn't speak. Then she apologized and said she wanted to have a relationship with me again, and she made it clear: don't tell me to get off these drugs, my doctor gives me these, and that's not okay with me.
So from 2016 to the beginning of 2024, I called my mother almost every day. I did whatever I could do and gave whatever I could give as a son. I talked to her on average probably 20 or 30 minutes a day, every day. Some days I talked to her for hours; other days, no call, or a quick five-minute call. I even got my wife to drive to Mississippi with our two young children, because my mother said she was too sick to visit, and we had been years without seeing her. My wife really did not want to drive 11 hours with our one-year-old son and four-year-old daughter to go to Starkville, Mississippi, but I demanded it after realizing that if we didn't go visit my mother in 2019, I was never going to see her again. She was just going to die there.
So I did everything I could to try to help my mother, and I respected her choices about her health. That culminated, after several visits to see her, in her moving next door to me. For a bit over a year, I showed up almost every day. We had lots of nice adventures. We went to the commissary and the base exchange on MacDill. I took her to movies. I took her to some Al-Anon meetings and included her in things with my wife's family. We had lots of good days. But there would always come this point where she would be having a rough day, and she wouldn't want any help with it. She would just want to feel bad and wallow in it.
The negative feedback loop I wasn't allowed to mention
I wasn't allowed to say things like, hey mom, why don't you get off some of these drugs? These drugs are putting you in a negative feedback cycle where you're stuck. You take the drugs because you feel bad, but then you keep feeling bad because you're taking all these drugs.
And I'm a person who, in my experience, has become very healthy. My body has been incredibly healthy. I've not had one day in the last year where I've been sick. To be clear, I've had symptoms here and there. I have a little sensation in my throat right now, and my voice is a little different than usual. But not one day in the last year have I been sick in the sense of having to lie in bed with a whole collection of symptoms and a story to go with it. I have individual symptoms here and there, but my body has been able to function wonderfully every day, to do everything needed, to show up, to go to yoga, to go to my meetings, to take care of things around the house. I generally don't have any symptoms at all. In my experience, I'm the healthiest I've ever been right now.
So my mother being chronically ill and always talking about how sick she is, and then, from my point of view, doing nothing to change that, wore on me. No matter what we would do on a day-to-day basis, there would always be this time where we'd have to talk about her mental and physical health, all these medications she's taking, the way she's treating her body. It got to be unbearable to me to see her choose to suffer, day after day after day, to never take any of my advice, and then to completely discount everything I've done in my own life.
The breaking point, and the broken hip
The last time I went over to see her and spend time with her, it was 10 years since my dad had died. She laid into me that I don't have any medical experience, I don't know anything, I don't understand her problems. And I thought, I'm done. I'm done with this relationship. I didn't talk to her for five days, which was the longest I hadn't talked to her in years.
At which point she broke her hip, which to me looked very intentional, perhaps on a subconscious level. Like, oh, you're not going to talk to me? I'm going to show you. I'm going to break my hip, and now you'll have to take care of me, you'll have to do all this stuff. My wife got involved and went over to drive her to the hospital, and my wife asked if I would carry my mother into the car for her. I said, because it's you and you've asked, and because you've gotten yourself into this, I will assist you, although my opinion is that you have a broken hip and you should call an ambulance. They are perfectly equipped to help you, and you have health care for that. But my wife and my mother disagreed and asked for my help, and I said yes. I gave my mother a hug and I said, I love you and good luck. I said almost nothing else.
After that, I didn't see her. I maybe responded to one text message she sent. I refused to see her or to do anything else. Everybody called and asked, and I said, no, I'm done with this relationship with my mother until she becomes the person I know she's capable of being. I at first did this purely in anger. I can't believe she's living her life this way. All I've done, and it's never enough. All that stuff. But then I managed to transform it back into love, and to remember that some of the best help I got in my life was when people gave me tough love.
The tough love that saved my own life
If my wife had kept putting up with my drinking, I don't know if I'd be sober or alive today. As long as she kept staying with me when I drank, and she saw how I drank, I saw no big motivation to change. I tried to get sober a few times, but I just did not have the fire in me to do the necessary steps, to go through the necessary discomfort, and to face my life. I got that fire when my wife was ready to leave. Her finally setting that boundary with me, telling me, I'm not going to be with you if you drink, that motivated me to do anything, which included Alcoholics Anonymous and a lot of other steps I've detailed in many of my stories. That tough love motivated me to take action.
What I see today is that if I have a relationship with my mother while she's still in her drug addiction, and she has lots of other addictions, like a shopping addiction where she buys all these things and her house turned into a hoarder situation, then I'm doing the same thing my wife wisely refused to do for me. That hoarding has been addressed a little bit, but she just sits inside all day and doesn't do anything to help anyone else, at least last I saw.
Why I can picture her thriving
Now, what I'm able to do, since I don't see my mother, is picture that she's thriving. Because I don't see her, and I don't see any other evidence of her life, I'm able to think of her as doing fantastic, changing, and being different than I remember. As long as I don't see her, there's no evidence to contradict that.
My wife is over at her house right now with the kids, because my wife is a woman of moderation who can move between people with drastically different viewpoints, who can have healthy boundaries, and who can say, hey, I'll bring the kids over to see you, but no, I'm not going to drive you to the hospital again. With me, I'm afraid to go over and see my mother today, because I know where it leads.
I've noticed that since I set firm boundaries with my mother, things have shifted. I made it clear in a text message. I said, I will not have a relationship with you until you are sober and clean. She doesn't drink, but I mean no drugs, the mind-altering ones most especially, because she's never clean. She's always on the drugs. I said, I will not see you unless you're off these drugs and you're working some kind of program of recovery, not just sitting in your house all day alone watching what she calls justified-violence movies. I'm willing to change this perspective if I can see there's a way to have a relationship with my mother where we can communicate, because right now I'm not able to communicate with her. Her life, last I observed it, is completely unacceptable to me.
No one in active addiction can be in my inner circle
No one in my life that I keep close is allowed to be an active alcoholic, a drug addict, or a self-obsessed, narcissistic, sick person. If that describes you, you can't be in my inner circle. I can't be seeing you, because that rubs off on me, and it shows that I, as a person with 10 years sober who is as emotionally stable as I've ever been, am okay with that. And I'm not okay with that. If you want to be in my life, you need to be a grounded, balanced, healthy, sane, sober person. There's no flexibility on that.
Now, I can call people on the phone once a week and have friends who drink, and family members and so on, but I'm not going to come visit you, I'm not going to spend meaningful amounts of time with you, and I'm not going to put myself in a situation where I have to have any meaningful interaction beyond a little phone conversation with you. If you want to share your own story about this with me, the place I actually read and respond is inside my Jerry Banfield Family community, where these conversations happen every week.
The massage therapist who opened the door
I even had a massage therapist at the same time who was in the middle of her active alcoholism, and I cut her off too. Ironically, this was the gateway to setting boundaries with my mother. This massage therapist, who I was close friends with and had known for years, I was seeing once a week for a massage, so I'd be at her place about two hours total, since a massage is 90 minutes. Even though she wasn't drinking when I was over there, she was in the middle of that active-alcoholic thinking: drama-filled, emotionally unstable, and then it's everybody else's fault. All the drama in her life, it's her sister, it's her husband, it's her boyfriend. It's always somebody else, and it's sick.
She messaged me asking, why aren't you scheduling massages with me anymore? And I said, when you get sober and work a program of recovery, I would love to see you again. She didn't respond to that, understandably, because I'd talked to her one day and told her, you're an alcoholic, and there's only one solution for an alcoholic that's going to give you a good life, and that's to stop drinking. She didn't want to hear that, of course.
What my mother told me to do, and what I asked her back
I told my mother about that situation before I sent the message. I said, what should I do about my massage therapist friend? I go over there and she's just a disaster, and I feel worse after I leave. And she said, you should tell her how much she's hurting you. So I said, then what should I do with you, Mom? Should I tell you how much you're hurting me, watching you be sick all the time but do nothing about it? And she said, I'm going to the doctor. I said, going to the doctor is not doing anything to get yourself healthy.
I was very sick once, and I've worked to become the healthiest person I know. It takes work. It takes yoga classes. It takes thousands of AA meetings. It takes reading hundreds of books. It takes teaching yourself how to be your own advocate for your health, which I outlined in something I called Hope for Your Health Challenges. I've put a lot of work into being healthy, which my mother easily dismissed, all of it, because, well, you don't have any medical experience. She didn't want to listen to anything I had to say across the whole area of health.
I've had a life for a family that, the way my dad was living, we could have been on the streets easily. My mother helped my dad sober up and was a rock for him. She didn't drink herself, and she was a huge help to my dad having a second, third, fourth, fifth chance at life. And I've tried everything I could do to be loving, to save her, to teach her, to lead by example. The most loving thing I can see to do now is to give her space, so that if she wants to live how she's been living, she can do it away from me, out of my sight, and if she wants to live how I'm living, I'd be right there to assist her with it.
The hardest part is not moving the boundary
The challenge for me has been to not change the boundaries. Today, while my wife and kids were visiting my mother, I chose to clean the car, because they went to the beach and there's sand everywhere. As I was cleaning, I was thinking, you know, you could just go over there, give her a hug, say hi, I love you. You could do that. And yeah, I could do that, but what happens if I do? What happens is I'll be over there every day again. It'll just be a matter of time before I'm over there every day, trying to be everything for her, trying to fill in for my dad again, like I was doing for most of the last year and a half up until February. I'm not going to fill that space my dad held in her life. That's clear.
I think one of the most loving things you can do, if you have a relationship that's not working, is to back off and create space for a relationship to fill that void that will work. By me saying, look, I love my mother, and I can love her from a distance, that leaves a hole in her life that someone else could fill. As long as I'm there, it takes the edge off the need to fill it. My mind says, well, Jerry, your mother could have a nicer Mother's Day if she could see you. Yeah, she might be able to have a nicer Mother's Day. But sometimes the path of growth is not having someone else enable you by taking the edge off, by making it a little easier.
As long as my wife was willing to make my drinking a little easier by showing up and loving me the next day, after I had my binge the night before, and being there to help me feel better, I wasn't motivated. I didn't have enough pain to inspire the growth I needed. It was facing the prospect of my entire life ending at my own hands, if my wife left me and I was all alone, that did it. Picturing what would happen, the last time I drank, I woke up the next day realizing that if my wife leaves, that's it for me. The pain was so great that I was motivated to go to any lengths to get sober, which I had never been before. Other times when the pain was great, I'd call my father and he would help. I moved home with my parents after I blew my life up from drinking. Sometimes people not co-signing your BS anymore is one of the best ways you can be loved.
Picturing the relationship I actually want
So I love my mother with all my heart, and I'm picturing having a great relationship with her where she's healthier than she's ever been, where she's happy, where she's clean, where she has a meaningful life. Some of you might think that's unrealistic. What I've seen is that the fact that I'm here now was not realistic 10 years ago. I know that my mother 10 years from now could be unrecognizable from where she's been this year. To me, the best way I can see to help that happen is to give her space, to honor the boundaries I set with her. If I go over there and say hi and that I love her, it dishonors the boundaries I already set, because she's given me no indication that she's clean or that she's working a program of recovery.
I've made it very clear that anyone who wants a relationship with me has to be living a sober lifestyle. Either a normal person like my wife, who chooses to be sober but easily could have a drink, for most of our relationship she had a drink here or there and was sober 99-plus percent of the time, of sound mind and body almost all the time, or someone genuinely in recovery. Anyone in my life has to meet that criteria.
Why I have to get this right for my kids
I'm glad I've connected with so many people who've shared their stories. I really need to get this right with my mother, because I'm an alcoholic, and there's a decent chance that one of my children is an alcoholic or a drug addict also. I certainly hope not, but if I can't set boundaries like this with my mother, I'm in for a rough ride with the kids.
I have much more respect and understanding now for people like my father's family. You hear things like, oh yeah, his family kicked him out at Christmas in 1984, in the winter in Michigan, and it's cold, and they knew he didn't have anywhere to go. They kicked him out of the house anyway. Why? Because his drunken behavior was so unacceptable that he was ruining everyone else's Christmas season. Some people die in that situation. My father eventually chose to get sober. I look at it now as: setting healthy boundaries with my mother is the best way to give her the chance to change, because if I go back on them, it's not going to be good for either of us. If you're working through forgiving a parent yourself, I've shared more about that side of it in how to forgive a parent who disowned you.
The emotional stability I found by stepping back
I've found that since stepping back and giving my mother space, I've never been this emotionally stable before, and it's been wonderful. I feel absolutely in the zone in my life. The things I've tried to do in my business, like focus on making music, having fun gaming, feeling like I have enough, making evergreen videos, really honoring myself, and showing up for my family, it's all come together. Stepping back from the emotional instability of my mother has helped me become emotionally stable, as has letting go of those two hours a week with the alcoholic massage therapist.
That was about 10 hours a week, at least, that I was spending one-on-one with people in the middle of their addiction. Out of 160 hours in a week, minus the 60 or so I sleep, eight-plus hours a night, seven days a week, I have about 100 waking hours a week, and I was literally spending 10 percent of that time one-on-one with people in the middle of their addiction. A lot of my creative life since then has gone into the kind of work I share in my Life playlist.
The prayer that turned my anger into love
This was hard, though, because my mind told me, and other people told me, thankfully not my wife, but other people told me: a good son never gives up on his mother. If you want to be a good son, you just show up, no matter what. Family is forever, no matter what. People have told me that. And other people have said, hey, I had to let go of my mother too; she was too sick for me to stand to be around anymore.
One thing that really helped me: I was in conflict, upset, and I prayed for guidance. I imagined talking to my mother when she was the age she is in the pictures from when I was a little boy, and asking her, Mom, 30 or 35 years from now, when you get like this, what should I do? I pictured her and my dad just saying, go on with your life. You don't need to stick around. Go on with your life. I had a really good cry, and I was able to change my anger at my mother into love, and to realize that when she was my age, she would have told me, if that's what's happening, move on with your life, take care of yourself. She would never have wanted me to let her drag me down.
I'm grateful to talk about this today, because I've known I should make this video, I've known I needed to talk about this, but I didn't want to. I thought, well, I don't want to share my mother's business. But my mother's business is my business. We can't really separate, in our lives, what is my business versus what is your business, especially when we have close relationships. This is exactly why it's so important to choose our close relationships carefully.
My family just got home from visiting my mother, so I hope they had a wonderful time. I'm glad I was here working through this, because it helps me remember how we got here today. I would love to have a wonderful relationship with my mother in the future, and I'm open to that, but I will not have anything less than a wonderful relationship with my mother. I told her that a bunch of times over the years, and I made it clear: I only have good, healthy, happy relationships with people, and I will let go of any relationship, I don't care who it is, that doesn't meet those standards.
I hope this is useful for you. This has been one of the biggest things going on in my life in 2024, straight from the heart. If you'd like to share your own story and connect with me, that's exactly what the community over at the Jerry Banfield Family is for.