Even as my brother lay in a coma my mother and I couldn’t stop fighting. I ache for her love… but I can’t let her back in my life: KATIE GLASS’s astonishing admission

I met my mother’s eyes across the hospital bed where my brother lay in a coma. Ten years my junior, he had suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm. This was the first time I had seen her in almost a decade.

The emotions of this moment last August – terror for him, anger and sadness that my relationship with my mother had come to this – felt too painful to give way to, so instead I held my breath.

I have been separated from my mum for most of my adult life. ‘Estranged’ feels too small, too formal a word for the never-ending ache of such a loss, one that ripples into every aspect of my life. Looking at the woman opposite me, she felt like a stranger, as strange as the concept of even having a mother. I haven’t called her by anything other than her first name for perhaps 20 years. I’m now 44, with her nearing 65, and we have never been more distant.

As I write, I do not have a phone number for her, I do not know where she lives and if, by some insane coincidence, I saw her in the street, my first feeling would be panic.

It wasn’t always like this. Growing up, we were so close, we were enmeshed – and she was the woman I wanted to become.

Whip smart, well-read and effortlessly beautiful, she had cropped gold hair and mysterious grey-green eyes that, when she was happy, seemed to flash blue.

She had star quality. As a child, I watched as her charisma blindsided men, coaxing them to write off parking tickets and let us into art galleries for free.

At parties or just the school gates – where she would inevitably turn up late to pick me up, Annie Lennox blaring from her Austin Mini Metro – people flocked to her. I wanted to be close to her, too. And for a long time, I was the closest. But she was never really mine. I don’t think she ever belonged to anyone. Perhaps not even herself.

She filled the houses I grew up in with feminist literature and David Hockney pictures, and a wardrobe of treasures – Parisian leather trousers, a real Burberry trench – that hinted at her life before motherhood, when she had travelled the world working in sales with my dad.

Even with me in tow, they had moved from Birmingham to London and then Georgia in the US. But then in 1984 she left him when I was barely three years old, their divorce so acrimonious that I barely saw him and would only get to know him years later.

After all, he lived in London… and she took us to live in a house up a mountain in rural Wales. Back then, she was the most playfully curious person, dragging me to gospel churches and Welsh castles with equal enthusiasm. In the park on my birthdays, she would shake pink blossom over me, calling me Queen of the May. ‘You’ll always know it’s your birthday because of the blossom on the trees,’ she would say.

It’s fair to say I idolised her. I suppose most little girls feel like this. And now I eulogise her, like anyone grieving their mother does – although mine is not dead.

I was 15 when our relationship first splintered. When my mother and stepfather (they met shortly after she split from my dad, and later had my baby brother) separated, I was devastated. He had become like a father to me so I mourned his loss from my life. I hadn’t expected to lose her, too.

Suddenly she was out working, socialising, reclaiming herself, her freedom and her life.

At first it seemed exciting. But soon it became a chaos into which she disappeared. As I struggled as a teenager to adjust to the family break-up, I felt abandoned when I needed her most.

Later, this would become the echo of all our arguments: I’d accuse her of not being there for me, she would retaliate that I wouldn’t let her in.

Recollections may vary, but mine are that as I studied for my GCSEs, our home became one long party to which I wasn’t invited. I would come home from school never sure what I’d find. Things became erratic in ways I found frightening.

At first, I buried my feelings in my studies, while my mother stayed up late entertaining new friends she’d met on the A-level courses she was taking in literature and art history. ‘How interesting she is!’ people would say. I longed to have her quietly to myself.

Did she sell the family home when I was 17 and buy a one-bedroom flat? Yes. But did I choose to move out or did she push me? We still argue bitterly about the details.

By the time I passed my A-levels in 1999 – living independently, claiming housing benefit and working as a waitress while on a free place at a private school – I had to call her in Prague, where she was living with her lover, to tell her my results.

If she was writing this story, she would cast me as the difficult one. She would say I was always very independent. There is a story she tells about how I once packed my bags and told her I was moving out when I was barely ten.

‘You were always leaving,’ she says. I grew up hearing this story. Only as an adult did I look down at the small child holding that suitcase and wonder about it – and wonder too about the rose-tinted way I saw my strange early childhood.

After passing my A-levels, I saved for an extended gap year to New Zealand by waitressing, obtaining a working holiday visa so I could earn while I travelled. I went away for almost a year during which my mum and I kept in tentative contact.

When I ran out of money and got sick, I turned to her. She lent me money. She was so kind to me on the phone that I boarded the plane home to England full of hope, softened by her promises about time we could spend together.

I was delighted when she met me at the airport with a bouquet of flowers and a fur coat, before taking me back to her Glastonbury cottage for Christmas. I lasted one night.

Her then-boyfriend (a vicar) and she had a fight so explosive that I moved out on Boxing Day to live with a friend. Such chaos was symptomatic of the drama I always felt she brought into my life.

For a long time, the sheer act of trying to stay connected caused our most explosive rows. The bitter push-and-pull – and desperation on both sides. The ‘I hate you, don’t leave me’ battles.

I suppose we learn our attachment style from our parents and are destined to repeat them. Indeed, my mother was estranged from her own family.

I reached out to her – always hopeful, sometimes desperate – when I needed her: when I’d fallen out with boyfriends, when I needed a place to stay, when I bled in the bath at 18, having what seemed to be a miscarriage.

I turned to her in my 20s, when my dad died. But she could never be there for me in the way I needed.

We tried to connect again as I went through university. Once or twice, she visited me in Brighton where I was reading English Literature at the University of Sussex.

After I moved to London to become a journalist, her erratic behaviour continued. Often, I had no idea where she was. I did not know where she lived and had no certain way to contact her.

She changed her mobile phone so often that I had ten different numbers for her stored on mine, each hastily added in some sort of rushed order that might remind me when she had rung.

Even now my contacts are a mess of ‘X June 2010’ and ‘X mid-August 2011’. Never ‘Mum’ – by then that word was as lost to me as she was.

If I could get hold of her, she might not answer. If she did, she might be surprisingly sweet.

For a blissful 15 minutes we would tentatively share stories as if she was still the mother I had when I was six.

Sometimes she would encourage me, especially in my writing. But mostly she would unburden her current chaos on me, ask me for money, or criticise me, complaining about my friends, judging my life – particularly my career, which I had always hoped would make her proud.

Even if things started well, arguments were hiding like land mines, anything could set one off.

When they exploded, I was left rawer, more vulnerable each time, and each time I retreated filled with anger, pain and longing.

And we would then not speak, sometimes for years.

It became a vicious cycle and with each failure, my self-esteem was crushed further. There is no one you want to love you more than your mother; not feeling loved by her, I felt unlovable.

Around 2012, after a close friend took her own life, I tried to reach out to my mother with the usual traumatic results.

I knew I had to address the pain of our damaged relationship and so I began therapy. I had been drinking too much to numb my self-loathing and finding it impossible to let anyone get close to me.

When my therapist suggested disconnecting from my mother entirely, I was shocked. I felt so much responsibility to make the relationship work. But I was drowning in the sorrow of it.

I did not tell her I was cutting her off. I just stopped answering the phone when she called in the night.

I felt I had stepped off a rollercoaster. I already had a strong circle of friends – which comes of not having a family – but for the first time in my life I was able to form a stable relationship, with the man who would become my fiancé.

But estrangement is a superficial fix. Although it brings freedom, you must still confront the trauma you carry.

I have found the grief of separating from a parent comes in waves. I wished I could tell my mother about my engagement . . . and when we broke it off. I wanted to reach out to her when I began IVF, and then again when I was forced to abandon it during Covid.

I still miss her every time I see a painting she adores, or go somewhere we went, or when Mother’s Day lands, or any time someone asks something quite normal about my family – and I feel that infant yearning for my mother that never goes away.

I miss little mundane things, too: the advice on cooking, someone to tell me about my family history, an emergency contact, a place to visit on the weekends or someone to call during a break-up.

But as strongly as I still love her, I know I can’t have her in my life. When I met my future fiancé, I hadn’t seen my mother in years. He encouraged me to reach out. He thought reconciliation would fulfil me, which is how most people respond to our estrangement.

‘Why don’t you just call her?’ they say, as if I don’t think about that every day.

I met her again just before my 34th birthday. She would have been 56 then, and still fashionable in jeans and a sun hat.

We went to London’s Hyde Park and walked around, tense with each other.

She shook a branch of pink blossom over me as she had when I was a child, and I felt desperate to hold her – but was too scared to. I took her to the Roof Gardens in Kensington to impress her but she found it too commercial and made some comment about my shallow life.

Then she said something critical about my fiancé and I felt furious that she would try to undermine the fragile life I had built with a man who loved me.

We fought; I felt the anger and longing rise in me, and wished I hadn’t let her in. And then she was gone again. When my fiancé saw how profoundly impacted I was by seeing her, he told me not to do it again.

But I still hold the panic in my chest that one day something will happen to her… and the chance to have her back will have gone.

The last time I saw her was last year in Brighton, across that hospital bed where my brother lay so gravely ill. She was dressed with her usual panache, striking up conversations in the intensive care unit, while I was dumbstruck.

I felt the usual heady mix of fury with her, and that deep familiar ache.

I was struck by how similar we are in ways perhaps imperceptible to others – in the flick of our lips, the angle of our cheekbones, the odd references we share.

I thought how in some ways I had become her after all – in the way I had tried to live a brave, independent life and, perhaps paradoxically, in the parts of me I like best about myself.

I wondered about her life, where she lived, if she had a partner or a job or if we still knew each other at all. I suggested we take my dog for a walk – heading towards Brighton beach where I could blame the wind for the tears on my cheeks.

We made small talk fraught with yearning. I felt myself tentatively reach over the steel fence I had constructed to keep her away. Perhaps in this crisis moment, finally we could be there for each other.

It was barely days before we rowed. We disagreed about the treatment my brother was getting and how the other was behaving, perhaps only because we love him equally.

But still, the back catalogue of fights past rolled out. She said things I found cruel and she probably felt I was cold.

Even in that moment, we couldn’t connect.

Our arguments became so explosive that in the year my brother has spent in hospital recovering, we have had to avoid each other’s visits.

I turn 45 next year. I don’t expect I’ll hear from my mother. Still, every May when the blossom bursts pink on the trees before my birthday, I think how beautiful she was.

But then those days pass and I know it is right to keep our distance.

I make the decision to separate again and again, each time reassessing and regretting it.