Dear Prudence,
I’ve always had a tumultuous relationship with my mother, and she has a history of exploding. I’m working on trying to be more sympathetic to her, and I’m really feeling stuck about our most current argument. I grew up very poor, but I’m now 25 and have a good job. My husband works as a cook in a kitchen, but we have chosen to forgo children and home-buying, so we live comfortably. I have student loans, but we travel, go out to nice restaurants, and enjoy ourselves. Last week was our anniversary, and we had dinner at a nice restaurant and signed up for a vacation in 2020 to South America (that we’ll be paying off in installments every month until we leave). We posted about both of these things on Facebook.
My mom called me after seeing the pictures and berated me for “not being generous enough with her,” that she would “love to do those things,” and it makes her mad to see that I’m doing those things when she can’t even afford to pay her bills. For context, my parents have four adult children, both finished college recently, and make a combined income of $150,000 a year—twice what my partner and I make. They have some student loan debt (not as much as I do) and a mortgage but spend frivolously on expensive electronics and home goods. And yet they are constantly asking to borrow money, which I give them, and they never pay it back. When I ask them to, they claim that I’m ungrateful for everything they gave me during childhood and for letting me live at home until I was 24. I find this incredibly hypocritical, considering every time I asked for money, even for help paying college tuition, I was almost always denied and told that my college degree and adult spending were my responsibility and that my parents were “too poor” to help me. I was exasperated and just unfriended my mom on Facebook, since 90 percent of our arguments come from things that I post. I would like to continue posting benign updates about my life (isn’t that the point of social media?) without having my mother harp on me about how I choose to spend my hard-earned money. She’s now incredibly hurt that I’ve deleted her from Facebook. How should I handle this?
—Not Broke Anymore