Heather Gay provided a shoulder for Monica Garcia to cry on in the latest installment of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,
On Tuesday’s episode, Monica opened up to her fellow Housewife about her troubled childhood and detailed her “volatile” relationship with her mother Linda and her “major abandonment issues.”
After witnessing Monica’s fight with her mom at Angie Katsanevas’s Easter brunch, Heather, 49, reached out to Monica, 40, and invited her to go snowmobiling. Following an action-packed outing, the pair sat down to discuss the previous day’s events.
“My mom and I, our relationship is so volatile. I think it dates back to my whole childhood,” Monica told Heather, before getting teary. “When I turned 12, my mom decided that she wanted to chase her dream so she dropped me off with a family in Pennsylvania and went and lived in New York. My dad left me when I was 4 and then my mom left me, so I have major, major, abandonment issues because of that.”
Monica then revealed she “started junior high” in Pennsylvania and the people she was staying with “weren’t even family.”
“They were friends that my mom and I knew and they had moved to Pennsylvania and she called and asked them if she could leave me there,” she told Heather, adding that the brunch got “so intense because again in that moment I felt so abandoned by her.”
A shocked Heather shared her sympathy with Monica, who told her she was “so grateful” to her for reaching out. “I wouldn’t have even left my bed, truly, that isn’t a joke,” Monica told Heather, who replied, “You’re going to be OK.”
Later in the episode — after a cross-country skiing tailgate with Heather, Whitney Rose and Meredith Marks — the women asked Monica if she got a new car. Monica explained that she was driving a rental because her mother took her car following their fight.
She told the women, “When I had to buy a new car, I pay for everything but it’s in my mom’s name, so every time she gets mad at me she takes the car. She took my car after Angie’s Easter dinner and left me without a f — -ing car and my four kids.”
After Meredith, 51, noted that the car situation was a “nightmare” Monica added, “This is what she said, ‘I want the car by 4 p.m. or I’m calling the police and saying its stolen.’ It’s sick.”
Meredith said it sounds like “there’s no reasoning” with Linda when she’s angry. “It’s a control tactic” and “tantrum” Monica told the women, who all said she needs to “take the control back.”
Monica then compared her mom to a notorious serial killer, saying, “It’s like Ted Bundy, right? No one ever thought he was a murderer because he was so charismatic.”
In a confessional, Heather quipped, “There’s a lot of legends in Utah about Ted Bundy. I didn’t know Linda was one of them.”
The conversation also led to the other women opening up about their own relationships with their mothers, with Heather revealing that she doesn’t talk to her mom and Whitney sharing that she didn’t talk to her mom for 13 years.
“That is actually so crazy that we all have daughters and we all have these insane relationships with our mothers. It’s like we’ve got to do so much better for our kids,” Monica told the ladies.
Monica later met her mom for dinner and the tension between the pair didn’t appear to be going anywhere. After an awkward start that saw Linda in tears, the pair soon got into it over their issues.
Linda told Monica she recently watched a movie about “an older lady in Croatia who had issues with her mom,” and the mom died before they could resolve their issues.
“I don’t want that to happen to us,” Linda told her daughter, who replied, “You want me to feel bad for you? When I was crying you didn’t give a s — -.”
Describing how Linda made her feel at Angie’s house, she continued, “You made me feel completely alone. You picked everybody else’s side. You were apologizing for me to those people that you just met. And then you expect me to sit here and feel bad for you that you are crying right now.”
Her daughter’s words didn’t sit well with Linda who pointed her and said, “I’m not asking you to feel bad for me. I’m asking you to have a conversation with me.”
“Don’t talk to me like that,” responded Monica, to which Linda added, “I’m not going to talk to you like some weak-ass bitch either.”
Linda said she was just trying to “calm her down” at Angie’s brunch, which also saw Monica get into it with the host.
“You don’t know half of it, nothing, but you instantly took her side,” Monica told her. “I don’t have that in me to apologize to someone I’ve never met before for my child.”
Linda then scolded her daughter and told her to stop being “disrespectful” and “don’t mock my feelings,” but when Monica interrupted her to try and defend herself, an agitated Linda told her, “Let me talk motherf — -er.”
With guacamole arriving at the table, Linda tried to change her tune and asked her daughter where these issues started.
“My childhood,” Monica said. “I’m not saying you are a bad mother, I’m not saying any of that. What I’m telling you is that Easter at Angie’s was reliving my abandonment as a child. And I’m telling you if you want to get to the root of this, you are going to have to hear these hard things from me that you don’t like to hear.”
Monica then revealed her mother’s relationship with her grandmother and shared that Linda was abandoned by her parents and they never liked her.
“You treat me the same way you hate how your mother treated you,” Monica told her mom.
In a confessional, Monica said that she comes from “a long line of complicated relationships between mothers and their daughters” in a confessional and added that her grandmother never wanted to have a daughter, which strained Linda’s relationship with her own mom.
Later in their heated discussion, Linda called her daughter by her full name and Monica noted that she hadn’t called her that in “decades,” but she used it because she treats her like the “little girl she can s — — on.”
Monica then recalled a moment from her childhood when she sat in the back of a car while her mother made out with a man. (Linda wasn’t sorry about doing this and didn’t understand how it affected her daughter.)
“I’ve dealt with emotional and mental abuse my entire life so I think I’m just completely f — -ed up,” Monica said in a confessional. “All I can do is make sure my kids ever feel that and break that cycle, I guess, of emotional and mental abuse.”
But it didn’t seem like things would heal any time soon when Linda told Monica to “get over it” and asked when she would be forgiven.
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET on Bravo.
