NEED TO KNOW
- A woman says decades of secrecy finally boiled over during a fight with her mother
- One comment about her personal life left her mom crying and tearing down family photos
- Now she’s questioning whether she went too far — or if her mom is simply out of touch
A woman seeks advice from the Reddit community following an explosive clash with her extremely religious mother. The 38-year-old shares that after losing her apartment, she had no choice but to move back in with her parents while also helping to care for her ill father.
“I know how nuts this sounds, but my mother is extremely Catholic,” she writes. “Moving back in seems to have given my mother the idea that I’ve turned back into an underage teenager.” She explains that while she is grateful to have a roof over her head, she did not expect her personal life to suddenly become a point of family drama.
Part of that drama centers around her friend Gary. “I have a gay friend, ‘Gary.’ I cannot admit to having gay friends due to my mother’s extreme religious views,” she explains, adding that her mother believes “associating with gay people can lead to ‘demons attaching themselves to you.’ ” For that reason, she has kept Gary’s sexuality a secret, something he even finds funny.
Things took a turn when Gary recently went through a breakup and asked her to stay over for emotional support. “I mentioned I was staying at his, said he’d just split up with someone and needed me…and I wouldn’t be home,” she says. But to her surprise, her mother immediately jumped to the conclusion that something romantic was going on.
Her mother pressed further, demanding to know, “Well, where are you sleeping at his?” The daughter, growing frustrated, admits she snapped back with, “Wherever I pass out.” That answer only led to more accusations from her mother, who worried that Gary “might have bad intentions” now that he was single.
That line of questioning pushed the woman past her breaking point. “Decades of repression, forced secrecy and rage suddenly came to the surface,” she recalls. In a moment of rebellion, she laughed in her mother’s face and declared, “Well, if he does, I’ll be very happy since I’ve not had sex a while, and frankly, I miss it!”
It was the very first time she had ever admitted to her mother that she was not a virgin. “I’m pushing 40,” she writes, noting how surreal it feels to still be hiding something so basic about her adult life. Her mother, however, reacted as though the confession was a personal betrayal.
“You would think I’d just slapped her,” the woman explains. Her mother immediately began crying, “wailing, trashing the hallway, ripped down all the family photos off the walls and kept screaming that I’d ‘ripped her heart out’ and ‘destroyed the family.’ ”
The fallout has been severe. “That was last weekend, and she’s barely left her room since,” the daughter shares. “She has been lying in bed all week, crying and refusing food because her nearly 40 year old daughter isn’t a virgin anymore.”
The daughter admits she deeply resents having to maintain this illusion of purity. “I haven’t been a virgin for nearly 20 years, and I deeply resent all the time I had to pretend to be one, just to stop her histrionics,” she says. According to her mother, she now has “no respect” for herself and is someone she “can’t even look at.”
Her father, whom she calls the “sane parent,” is more understanding but still wishes she had chosen her words more carefully. He believes she should have avoided such a blunt confession because of how much sex “deeply offends” her mother. “She cannot even say the word ‘sex’ without whispering, and here I was admitting to having it,” the woman writes.
Still, the daughter insists that this is about more than sensitivity. “I get that her religious beliefs are strong, but at the same time, I feel she needs to get a stronger grip on reality and stop with the endless dramatics,” she says. She points out that she does not bring men to her parents’ home and has never asked to, despite helping them financially.
Her frustration comes down to one simple truth: “My body is simply not hers to control outside of the house,” she declares. While she admits her words may have been “crude,” she cannot understand why her mother’s reaction was so extreme.
She also emphasizes just how draining it has been to dodge her mother’s relentless curiosity. “Before this, she kept finding creative ways to ask me if I’m daring to have sex without outright saying it,” she says. “She is absolutely exhausting.”
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Commenters were quick to reassure her that she is not in the wrong. One person summed it up: “You’re nearly 40, not a teenager. Your mom’s meltdown is about control, not ‘sensitivity.’ It’s not normal to have to hide your sex life from her into adulthood.”
Another pointed out that while her answer may have stung, it was not the real issue. “Yes, your blunt answer stung, but her hysterics and manipulation are way out of line. Your body and choices aren’t hers to control.”
“Who gets upset, let alone THIS UPSET, that their nearly 40 year old daughter has the audacity to have a sex life?” she asks, leaving readers to sit with that question.
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