The Fight With My Mum That I Never Apologised For

I didn’t say goodbye to my mum the last time I left.

This was 2019, right before the pandemic. We’d had the kind of fight that only Balkan mothers and their daughters know how to have: the kind where the volume goes up, the buttons all get pressed in sequence, and somebody ends up packing a suitcase faster than they meant to. I left for London with my jaw set. She watched me go from the kitchen window, probably.

Then the world shut down. Borders closed. Flights cancelled. The casual I’ll come back for Christmas and we’ll be fine I’d assumed I had, I didn’t have. The slammed door I’d planned to walk back through within weeks stayed slammed for a lot longer than that. And every time I thought about the fact that I’d left on an angry note, with a pandemic and a closed border between us, it sat a little heavier.

The fight was about men. Of course, it was about men. It’s always about men, until you realise it isn’t.

The Grandkids Question

My mum was worried I would be alone forever. More specifically, she was worried about where the grandkids were coming from, which is the polite Balkan way of saying you are running out of time and I do not approve of your plan.

I was in my mid twenties. Living alone across the continent. Decent salary, no savings worth mentioning, no partner, no plan to acquire one on her timeline. From where she was sitting, I was being wilfully difficult about a problem that, in her view, had a simple solution: lower the bar, pick someone, make it work.

For her, it had always been a matter of will. You decide, you commit, you grind. That’s how she’d raised two kids, four, if you count my dad and the cat, while working sixteen-hour days. That’s how everyone she knew had done it. The women who didn’t manage it had failed at the willpower stage, and she wasn’t going to watch her own daughter fail in slow motion.

What she would not (could not) see was the part of her own story she had edited out.

The Village She Pretended Wasn’t There

My mum has never, in her entire adult life, lived without a village.

Her parents gave her a mortgage-free flat. And then they kept giving.

My grandmother was a nurse, a cook, an emergency childcare provider, a farmer, and our full-time keeper through every school holiday. She was, functionally, one more parent, and on most days, the first one we went to.

My grandfather was the ATM. Bless his doctor’s heart, he was working two jobs at the time, supporting his own household and ours simultaneously, and somehow never once made it feel like a complaint.

My aunt was the logistics. On-call twenty-four hours a day. A part-time mum on top of having her own life. Part-time ATM. Pickups, drop-offs, sleepovers, the lot.

Did I say a village? I undersold it. It was a small, well-staffed institution.

My mum worked sixteen-hour days and came home and collapsed. The actual rearing of the actual children happened around her, not by her. Not because she was a bad mother, she wasn’t, and isn’t, but because the village was doing the bulk of the labour and she was free to focus on the earning.

This is not a criticism. This is how a lot of Balkan families functioned, and frankly, still do. Three generations under one roof, or close enough to walk between. The grandparents raise the kids. The parents earn. Everybody eats. It works.

What does not work is taking that model, removing the village, and telling your daughter to just figure it out.

What I Was Actually Saying No To

When I told my mum I wasn’t going to partner up with someone who didn’t meet my standards, she heard I am too picky and I am going to die alone and you will never have grandchildren.

What I was actually saying was: I have looked at the maths and I cannot do what you did, because I do not have what you had.

I had no flat handed to me. No grandparents around the corner. No emergency network. I lived alone with my cat, in a flat I rented, in a country where I knew a handful of people well enough to call in a real crisis, and most of them had their own crises to manage. If I had a child with the wrong person, in the wrong city, on my salary, I would not be running on willpower. I would be running on fumes, alone with a cat and an infant, until something broke. Probably me.

I had also, by that point, watched enough women try the just pick someone and figure it out approach to know how it ends. It ends in resentment. It ends in money fights. It statistically ends in worse health outcomes for the woman and the children. Sometimes it ends in real, physical danger. Bad men make women poorer, sicker, and more frequently dead. That’s not pessimism. That’s the actuarial table.

So I said no. Not no to children, not no to family. No to ruining my own life on purpose to satisfy a deadline I didn’t agree with.

She heard rejection. I meant self-preservation. We did not, in that kitchen, find the words to bridge the gap.

The Logic That Broke Me

The thing that genuinely confused me, still confuses me, if I’m honest, is the way the logic twisted in the middle of the argument.

In one breath, my mum knew exactly how much effort and money children require. She’d lived it. She’d worked herself to the bone. She had scars and stories.

In the next breath, when I pointed out that I couldn’t replicate her conditions, she’d say: kids grow up in poverty too and still become grown-ups.

As if she had worked sixteen-hour days for fun. As if she had been fine with us being poor. As if the entire visible effort of her life: the grinding, the sacrifice, the sheer Balkan stubbornness she had poured into making sure we had more than she did had been optional.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot tell me children are an enormous undertaking that demands every ounce of your strength, and tell me I should just have some anyway and trust the universe. Pick one.

She picked both, depending on which one would get me to do what she wanted in that particular sentence. And the buttons got pressed, and the volume went up, and I packed.

Six Years Later

I left for London still convinced I was right. I am, broadly, still convinced I was right. But the years have softened the edges of the memory.

I think my mum was, in her way, terrified. Terrified that I would end up as alone as she sometimes feels in that flat she still shares but doesn’t really live in. Terrified that the version of love she’d built for herself: the autonomy, the replaceability, the men-as-snacks doctrine, was the version I was inheriting, and that it wouldn’t be enough for me. Terrified that holding out for something better was the same as holding out for something that doesn’t exist.

I get it now in a way I couldn’t get it then. She wasn’t trying to ruin my life. She was trying to spare me a kind of loneliness she recognised, using the only tools she had, which were not the right tools.

I also found him, eventually. The good one. He met all my criteria, okay, almost. He’s not six feet tall. That one I could compromise on. But he ticks everything else, the important bits. And life is good.

I think about what my mum will say when I tell her she’s going to be a grandma. I think she’ll cry, then she’ll get bossy, and then she’ll start planning things I didn’t ask her to. That’s how she loves. It always has been.

What I’d Tell My Younger Self

If I could go back to that kitchen, I wouldn’t take the fight back. The fight was the right fight. I’d just maybe, maybe, say goodbye on the way out.

Not because she’d earned it in that moment. She hadn’t. But a slammed door and a pandemic on the other side of it is a long thing to carry, and I’m the one who’s been carrying it, not her.

Standards are a strength. Refusing to ruin your own life is a strength. Knowing the difference between the village your mother had and the village you don’t is a strength.

Saying goodbye, even when you’re furious, even when you’re right, that’s also a strength. I’m still working on that one.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.