The actual content of what she said — that she couldn’t wait for her mother’s life to end, in the context of describing the difficulty of the relationship — was itself a real and complicated statement, one that people who have had difficult relationships with parents can recognize: the exhaustion, the inability to fully separate, the feeling that the relationship will not stop demanding things until one party is no longer present. It was an honest expression of something real. It was not, in the full context, a simple declaration of ill will.
Jaid Barrymore has given her own interviews over the years and has her own perspective on events that differ in various ways from her daughter’s. This is not surprising; it is, in fact, almost universal that children and parents describe shared experiences differently. What is clear is that Drew has not cut her mother out of her life, that she has described their relationship in 2021 as being in a better place than it had been, and that she has continued to define herself partly in relation to and partly in resistance to the mother who shaped her earliest years.
She has said that she can’t turn her back on the person who gave her life. She has also said that she had to grow in spite of her mother being on this planet. Both things are true at the same time. The relationship persists in its complexity, refusing the clean narrative of either total estrangement or complete reconciliation.