Do you find yourself never looking forward to Mother’s Day? Is she to you, more like a distant acquaintance than a close relative and friend? Could be you squabbled a lot when you were younger, and you’ve come to the realization, telling yourself ‘I don’t like my mom.’ So, you’re wondering whether there are any essential 10 tips on how to improve your relationship.
The mother-daughter bond, just like any human relationship, can become strained, pulling you apart. However, while many of these differences are reconcilable, others require self-work, intentional effort, patience, and time to heal. Eventually, you’ll need to give her leeway, seeing as she’s your mother, an elder whose wisdom can influence your life.
You’ve heard it said that time heals all wounds, but you’re thinking that some will require decades. You can improve the relationship with your mother with forgiveness, letting go of the bias each has against the other. Find out here how spending time together or sharing a mutual interest will strengthen your bond.
It’s Time to Be the Bigger Person and Repair Your Relationship with Your Mom
There’s always cause to want to repair your relationship with your mother. Not only is time actively running out for such opportunities, but you’ll also not want your daughter or son to feel the same way about you. Past arguments, existing tensions, and toxic comments hang in the air, and Mother’s Day is a bitter-sweet reminder of what the two of you are missing out on.
Despite having once said how ‘I don’t like my mom; you can’t ever have another mother. Lord knows you would have tried it. It’s not your fault she is who she is, and that doesn’t validate the distance it’s created between you.
If you envy those friends of yours who claim ‘my mom is my best friend,’ here are ten tips on how to improve your relationship with your mother.
1. Find Interests in Common
Spend time together with your mom, and discover common interests or hobbies that deepen the mother-daughter bond. For instance, you could read the same book and then chat about it, or stretch together in a yoga class. If the two of you don’t have the same taste, find something new that you could both explore.
Accompany your mom to places, and carve out time spent together in an activity, creating fun memories. You could take a knitting class, go antique hunting or rent a tandem bicycle.
2. Exercise Patience
As a child, you would say the most irrational things or bang doors when you’ve argued with your mom. Even while you’re older your rifts and crashes arise from immature temperament or moodiness. It’s time to start practicing patience with her and not react to her every comment. At the end of the day, you know she means well, and don’t punish her for communication errors.
3. Control Your Temper and Judgment
Learn to recognize a bad mood, whether yours or hers and give space instead of interference. Unfortunately, we tend to dole out the worst of our tempers and moodiness against those we supposedly love. You’ll also spare each other unnecessary heartache if your criticism or anger isn’t mistimed or misplaced.
4. Take and Offer Thoughtful Advice
The advice can be valuable, especially when given or received from a close relative. However, it’s difficult for a mother or daughter to be impartial when their thoughtful instructions aren’t followed.
Sometimes, the recipient can view such insights as interference, while the other will feel dismissed. Nurture an understanding that each one of you is free to take a different path without misrepresentation or mistrust.
5. Create Connecting Time
As you grow from a mama’s girl into your own independent woman, circumstances have brought separation, and you’ve walked a different path. But it’s not difficult to maintain a long-distance relationship, especially with today’s innovative communications media. You can now have phone calls, emails, video calls, texts, social media chats with your mom at any time, day or night.
Other traditional ways to stay in touch still work wonders. These include letters or Mother’s Day cards, or gifts. You can improve your relationship by finding time for meaningful conversation that seeks to find out how she’s doing.
6. Keep the Peace to Avoid Hurt Feelings
Every mother and daughter has that one issue they can never see eye to eye about. There is that one ‘hot button’ topic that almost always ends up in an argument whenever it surfaces. It’s easy to let emotions or tempers flare, but for the sake of your relationship, pause and breathe.
Holding back on an angry outburst lets you consider each other point of view before running to your defensive posts. Find common ground, somewhere you can be empathetic, even if you’re in disagreement.
7. Limit Your Time Together
Spending time together with your mom is great to improve a relationship on the rocks. But familiarity breeds contempt, and being in too close proximity for long brings up those petty little annoyances. It may be difficult to stay separate again for a while, but your bond must be tested against natural pushes and pulls.
Strike a healthy balance of the amount you’re in your mom’s face and when you’re using other forms of communication. The amount of time spent together differs with persons tolerance levels. But that’ll help to resolve conflict with an absence that makes the heart grow fonder.
8. Cultivate Communication in the Place of Assumption
We often combine body language with other things like tone or how one delivers a topic to interpret their emotions. Assumptions can conjure up visions of a finger-pointing mother against a sulking daughter, but the result should be a bear hug full of love. Instead of misinterpreting feelings, improve your relationship with mom by relying on words to find the meaning of signals.
Assuming what your mom is feeling based on her facial expression, gesture or posture will result in misunderstandings. Instead, ask and build rapport from which you’ll uncover interesting things about your mother.
9. Keep a Secret
You probably know a thing about your mom that isn’t so flattering, but that goes both ways. Nobody is a saint, and there’s no need to let others in on her dirty laundry. The ability to keep intimate issues or discussions in confidence is precious if you’re going to become friends. It also goes a long way to strengthen the mother-daughter bond and improve your relationship.
10. Forgive and Let Go
Yes, your feelings were hurt, and you felt personally attacked. Emotions always run high whenever you try to level the playing field or fight back with words, and it’s often hard to forgive. However, rather than wait for your mother to validate what was said and done, calm down and apologize. You may lose a battle but win a war, plus you don’t want trivialities to take your relationship down further than it is.
Saying you’re sorry opens the opportunity for candid conversations, which might help better understand actions and words, or how they made you feel. Your mom’s pesky worrying and inquiries are only a sign of love, but you must come to a meeting of minds.
Conclusion
Your mother won’t be there forever, and neither will you. Plus, you’ve got your offspring to deal with, and there’s no need to transfer bad blood while you still have time to do something about it. Try to cherish who she is in your life, take the best of her, and discard the rest. You’ll be surprised that it’s your stubbornness that has kept her from reaching out for a more wholesome mother-daughter relationship.
I’m Cathrine and I’m a 39-year-old mother of 3 from Utica, New York. And I’m extremely happy you’ve come to visit my hide-out on the web. Here I post about everything related to family-life and usually it will involve babies and lessons I’ve learned over the years from experts, friends, and my own mistakes. So hopefully you will find what i write fun and informational!
