RHOSLC’s Monica Garcia Details ‘Volatile’ Relationship, ‘Abandonment’ Issues Her Mom Wants Her to ‘Get Over’

Heather Gay gave Monica Garcia a shoulder to cry on in the final stretch The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,

In Tuesday’s episode, Monica opened up to fellow Housewives about her troubled childhood and detailed her “volatile” relationship with her mother Linda and her “huge abandonment issues.”

After witnessing Monica’s fight with her mom at Angie Katsanevas’ Easter breakfast, Heather (49) approached Monica (40) and invited her for a snowmobile ride. After the action-packed outing, the pair sat down to discuss the previous day’s events.

“My mom and I, our relationship is so unstable. I think it stems from my whole childhood,” Monica Heather said before breaking down in tears. “When I turned 12, my mom decided she wanted to make her dream come true, so she left me with a family in Pennsylvania and went to live in New York. My dad left me when I was 4, and then my mom left me, so I have big, big abandonment issues because of that.”

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Monica then revealed that she “started in high school” in Pennsylvania and that the people she was staying with “were not even family.”

“There were friends that my mom and I knew and they moved to Pennsylvania, and she called them and asked if she could drop me off there,” Heather said, adding that the lunch became “so intense because at that point I felt so abandoned by her.”

A shocked Heather shared her condolences with Monica, who told her she was “so grateful” for reaching out. “I wouldn’t even get out of bed, really, it’s not a joke,” said Monica Heather, who replied, “You’re going to be fine.”

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Later in the episode — after cross-country skiing with Heather, Whitney Rose and Meredith Marks — the women asked Monica if she had a new car. Monica explained that she was driving a rental car because her mother took her car after their fight.

She told the women, “When I had to buy a new car, I paid for it all, 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 fucking car and my four children.”

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After Meredith, 51, remarked that the car situation was a “nightmare”, Monica added: “This is what she said: ‘I want the car by 4pm or I’m going to call the police and say it’s stolen.’ It’s sick.”

Meredith said it sounds like she has “no reasoning” with Linda when she’s angry. “It’s a control tactic” and a “tantrum,” Monica told the women, who all said she needed to “take back control.”

Monica then compared her mum to a notorious serial killer, saying: “It’s like Ted Bundy, isn’t it? No one ever thought he was a killer because he was so charismatic.”

In the confessional, Heather joked, “There are a lot of Ted Bundy legends in Utah. I didn’t know Linda was one of them.”

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The conversation also led to other women opening up about their relationships with their mothers, with Heather revealing she doesn’t speak to her mom and Whitney saying she hasn’t spoken to her mom in 13 years.

“It’s actually so crazy that we all have daughters and we all have these crazy relationships with our mothers. It’s like we have to do so much better for our kids,” Monica told the ladies.

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Monica later met her mom for dinner and the tension between them seemed to be going nowhere. After an awkward start that saw Linda in tears, the pair soon went at it over their issues.

Linda told Monica that she recently watched a movie about “an old lady in Croatia who had problems with her mom,” and her mom died before they could resolve their issues.

“I don’t want this to happen to us,” Linda told her daughter, who replied, “You want me to feel guilty for you? When I cried, you didn’t care.”

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Describing how Linda felt at Angie’s house, she continued: “You made me feel completely alone. You chose someone else’s side. You apologized on my behalf to these people you just met. And then you expect me to sit here and feel bad for you why are you crying now.”

Her daughter’s words didn’t sit well with Linda who pointed at her and said, “I’m not asking you to feel bad for me. I’m asking you to talk to me.”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” Monica replied, to which Linda added, “I’m not going to talk to you like a weak bitch either.”

Linda said she was just trying to “calm her down” at Angie’s breakfast, which also saw Monica get into it with the host.

“You don’t know the half of it, nothing, but you immediately sided with her,” Monica told her. “I don’t have it 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 “rude” and “don’t make fun of my feelings”, but when Monica cut her off to try to defend herself, an upset Linda told her: “Let me talk to mum… . . .

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When the guacamole arrived on the table, Linda tried to change her tune and asked her daughter where these problems started.

“My childhood,” Monica said. “I’m not saying you’re 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. Me too. I’m telling you, if you want to get to the bottom of this, you’re going to have to hear those hard things from me things you don’t like to hear.”

Monica then revealed her mother’s relationship with her grandmother and said that Linda was abandoned by her parents and that they never liked her.

“You treat me the same way you hate how your mother treated you,” Monica told her mom.

Monica said in the confessional that she comes from “a long line of complicated relationships between mothers and their daughters,” adding that her grandmother never wanted to have a daughter, which strained Linda’s relationship with her own mom.

Later in their heated argument, Linda calls her daughter by her full name, and Monica notes that she hasn’t called her that in “decades” but uses it because she treats her like “a little girl who can . . .”

Monica then recalled a moment from her childhood when she sat in the back seat of a car while her mother kissed a man. (Linda was not sorry for doing this and did not understand how it affected her daughter.)

“I’ve been dealing with emotional and mental abuse my whole life so I think I’m completely screwed,” Monica said in the confessional. “All I can do is make sure my kids ever feel that and break that cycle of, I guess, emotional and mental abuse.”

But things didn’t seem to be healing anytime soon when Linda told Monica to “get over it” and asked when she would be forgiven.

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The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City airs Tuesdays at 8:00 PM ET on Bravo.

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