Love and possessiveness can sometimes look very similar from the outside.
A parent (or even a sibling) calls, asks questions, makes arrangements, gives advice, worries, wants to help. Wants to sort out your life for you. And they may genuinely believe that all of this is love.
But what happens when the adult child says no?
If the parent is able to hear, “Thank you, but I want to decide this for myself,” and step back, then there is room for the other person’s independence.
But if they become offended, resort to emotional blackmail, keep trying to persuade them, bring the subject up again and again, arrange things behind their back, or simply ignore the no, then we are no longer talking merely about care. Their own need has become more important than what the other person is saying about themselves.
For many parents, the words “my child” can unconsciously also mean: I have the right to know, to interfere, to tell them what to do, to protect them, to correct them, to decide what would be good for them.
But an adult child is no longer an extension of the parent’s life. They are a separate person.
Excessive fussing over someone is interesting from this perspective too. Because treating a twenty-, thirty-, forty- or fifty-year-old the way you would treat a five-year-old is not necessarily loving anymore. It can become a violation of free will and an exercise of power:
“I still know what you need better than you do.”
(They want to monitor and supervise.)
Sometimes the parental role has become such a large part of a person’s identity that when the child separates and becomes independent, a real void is left behind.
If the child no longer needs them in the same way, they would have to rediscover who they are outside of their child.
What do I like?
What do I want?
What is missing from my life?
What is going on inside me?
What happens when the calls become less frequent?
It may be easier to fill that void with the adult child’s life.
But I think there is an even harder question behind all of this:
Do I love my child, or do I need my child to need me? Or am I constantly present in someone else’s life instead of my own, so that I can control it?
Because those things are very different.
Real letting go is when the adult child chooses something the parent would never choose for them, and the parent is still able to say:
“I wouldn’t do it this way. I’m not even sure I understand it. But this is your life.”
At that point, two adults are standing face to face.
Not a parent and their forever-five-year-old child.
The only question left is whether the grown child has actually grown up — or whether they are still hiding behind their mother’s skirt, continuing to play their part in the old dynamic.
Dajbukát Ildikó
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