How do I get over my mum telling lies about me?

At the same time, it’s really cathartic to get everything out into one document. I don’t have to hold it all in my head, and I can actually share it and continue to be frank and open about my mum’s behaviour with other people. People who behave like this thrive on our silence, don’t they?

Thank you @pikkumyy77. I agree with you. It’s such a horrible situation - I think she’s really unwell, but that isn’t and never was our fault.

My document of her behaviour over the years has hit 7 pages and seeing it all like this (I’ve made it into bullet points and grouped into ‘ages’ to try to make it easier to read), it’s pretty unpleasant and damning to read. I hope it’s useful context when I take it to the station. Emotional abuse is so hard to prove, isn’t it, because it’s just my word/memories with no physical evidence, but the effects are so so damaging.

It’s actually hideous to read through everything and then think about how I’m ‘too sensitive’ according to my dad, and how ‘she’s so looking forward to being a granny’. It’s sickening and they’ve really done a number on us.

I received a reply almost straightaway suggesting I report a current or previous safeguarding concern. I’m planning to go and have a chat with someone at a local station about it at the end of the week - I wrote out an account of everything I can remember going back to our earliest years and it’s about 5 pages long, so far too long to fit in the online form. I’ll print it and take it with me in the hope someone at the station might read it.

My mum is also a chair of governors at a primary school. The term ‘safeguarding’ in the police reply has made me think about this more this morning. This has made me feel very uncomfortable for a long time, that she’s got a DBS check (because nothing has ever been reported or raised with authorities before) and is in this very important community role. It’s not that I think she’d harm them, as I think that’s specifically reserved for her own children (particularly me), but it’s more the hypocrisy that she’s outwardly a pillar of the community and in private is a deeply disturbed and harmful individual.

Thank you all for your replies. I’ve sent a message this morning to ask for advice and also to share my account of the abusive behaviour with someone. Thanks again x

Hi everyone,

sorry to bump this thread as it’s from ages ago, but it seemed to make more sense maybe than making a new one without all of the context of this one.

I’m 30-ish weeks pregnant and a few weeks ago, my mum made a comment that she ‘would have to come up and pinch’ or ‘hijack’ my baby from his nursery. I felt incredibly uncomfortable about this language. When I raised it with my dad, he said I was just like him and ‘too sensitive’, and that my mum was clearly only joking. However, in the context of 30 years of her atrocious behaviour and trampling of any boundaries I’ve put in, I don’t see the funny side at all.

I mentioned her comments to my midwife at my latest appointment, and she is extremely concerned, to the point where she suggested I raise this with the police and/or social services as a serious safeguarding threat. It’s such a relief to have a person in real life and in her position take this seriously, but at the same time, I’m scared. Is it really that bad? Has anyone else had to do this with a family member, i.e. preemptively alert authorities or at least get advice from them about poor or abusive behaviour?

On the one hand, I feel relief to have shared my concerns and to ‘blow open’ my mum’s behaviour, which we’ve been trained to keep secret for so long, and on the other, I’m terrified that I’m overreacting. But I know at my very core that I don’t want her behaviour around my baby and I will need to be resolute about my boundaries in the postpartum period (she told me ‘we will have to arrange for [her] to be up all the time’ when the baby is here. Absolutely not.)

Sorry for the ramble. Can anyone advise about the police/social services?

Oh god, that really hadn’t occurred to me 😣😔 I felt (and feel) so awful for granny’s brother, he had so wanted to say a prayer and had written it out and brought it with him, and my mum ruined his last moment with his sister.

No, I don’t want pictures on social media. Mine and DH’s are locked right down to friends only. Mum doesn’t tend to post any so I’m hoping that doesn’t change, but it’s another bridge to cross if we come to it.

Thank you, no, I definitely won’t be telling her and dad about going into labour. I’m already envisaging a strop because somebody will have to look after our dog and my ILs normally look after her, so that’ll be wrong and bad, but hey 🤷🏻‍♀️

I’ve discussed childhood trauma and my relationship with my mum with my midwife already and will do so again in the lead up to birth, and be really clear that I do not want her anywhere near me in labour.

She does not react well to big events like this.

My granny (mum’s MIL) died in hospital a couple of years ago and we were all with her when the time came, it was calm and peaceful and we were saying our goodbyes, her brother was reading a prayer. And suddenly mum completely freaks out and runs off to get the nurses.

I still don’t understand why, because we knew granny was dying, that was why we were there. My dad called after her not to, but she ignored him, and when the nurses came in, it changed the atmosphere entirely and the nurses were in between us and granny when she died. It wasn’t what anyone wanted, but my mum just seemed to lose it.

She’s deeply emotionally immature and like a child in many ways. She was also furious when afterwards I wanted to go home to DH, I got the full glare (which is meant to scare us into submission) in the middle of the hospital lobby for that. My granny was a hugely important person in my childhood (she looked after us a lot of the time like a mother should have), and apparently I was wrong for wanting my DH at that moment after we lost her. It all baffles me.

Thank you @CantDealwithChristmas, so sorry you have and have had similar difficulties.

I think it would help so much if the rest of my family would see her behaviour for what it is, and see that she’s not telling the truth about me. The fact my dad was right here when DH told them the date but claims he ‘genuinely can’t remember’ is so typical of him placating mum and throwing me under the bus. But there’s nothing I can do to change them or how they think/behave.

I do wish that something had been done to help mum or to investigate whether she needed a diagnosis/treatment for something, but all anyone cared about was tiptoeing around her and trying to placate her (my sister and I learned that behaviour from dad). And then the bulk of it was hidden from the wider family because we had an image to uphold. An adult in our lives should have done something a long long time ago, but nobody did and now I have to do what is right for me and my own little family in the current situation.

Weirdly, on the first day of my PGCE when mum was really kicking off, my dad drove up to see me and was crying in his car about it all, and he said he was worried that, because of how mum was behaving, I wouldn’t let him and mum see my children.

I was early twenties at the time and hadn’t been with DH very long, certainly not long enough to be thinking about children, so it seemed a weird thing to say at the time as they weren’t even on the radar. But actually, it does mean that he knew it wasn’t right, doesn’t it? And he predicted how I might feel 7-8 years later 🤷🏻‍♀️

She’s different towards my sister but has been equally damaging, particularly where body image is concerned. Things like saying ‘let’s just ruffle this up over your tummy’ and rearranging her top to make her look ‘slimmer’, or saying to my sister after she’d been quite ill for a week or so that she looked great and really skinny. Both of these as a child, btw, 12-13 at the oldest.

But my sister goes and stays with my parents for the weekend every few weeks, so she sees more of mum ‘behind the scenes’ than I do and she seems to feel more desire to keep the peace (which usually means me forgoing the boundaries I’ve put in place and all the bloody time-consuming and expensive but worthwhile work I’ve done in counselling over the years).

I’m fed up of having to placate our mum, who never gives two hoots about how anyone else feels. Even after I had my miscarriage in December, mum wanted to know if I’d had a scan before they’d done the operation, at which point she goes ‘so it had died then’. She’s just not right and I’m not putting up with it any more.