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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To think moving as a teenager was traumatic

152 replies

Fizzyducklings · 14/07/2024 21:07

When I was a young teen we moved from a small town where I’d grown up. It was all I knew, I had lots of great friends I’d grown up with. I lived in an amazing estate where we would call for each other and spend hours playing outside. My best friend lived across the road. I was a very happy, confident child.
One day, I came in from school, my brother had been crying. DM turned to me and said not to make a big deal of it like he had but we were moving to a city, it was devastating.
We moved a few months later. I was bullied in my new school and it took months before I made any friends. My parents never let me visit my friends from home (with no traffic it’s a 30 min drive away!!!) My siblings got to go as they were older and would get the bus - I was not allowed to go with them. I lost touch with all my friends from home over the years except my best friend who I managed to keep in touch with, although we drifted and only see each other once every few years now.

It came up in conversation today and my DM said it wasn’t traumatising and I was fine. I said I wasn’t fine but it’s in the past now so no point in falling out over it now. But looking back through the lens of an adult and a mother myself I could just never imagine going about such a big move like this in such a harsh way. I have social anxiety and used to use alcohol as a means to cope with it and be confident around people, I often wonder how I would have turned out if we didn’t move at such a sensitive time…

I understand that people suffer much worse and it’s very much a first world problem but I think it’s wrong for my mum to just dismiss it and not acknowledge how it would have been difficult. AIBU?

OP posts:
LoremIpsumCici · 14/07/2024 21:15

I don’t think you can blame a single house-move only 30miles away as the cause of your social anxiety and alcohol issues. It usually does take at least months, sometimes years to make new friends, no idea why you are saying it took months like that is a bad thing.

I do know what it is like to be uprooted as my parents emigrated with me to another country. It isn’t easy thing.

Im not sure your mum is dismissing it as difficult, but dismissing it as “traumatising”. A house move of 30 miles is not traumatic, I think she isn’t buying into your dramatisation of it.

MichaelAndEagle · 14/07/2024 21:11

I don't know when this was, but I think back in the day kids were just expected to fall in with whatever was best for the family, and very little consideration was given to how you might cope.
New kids came, and kids moved away quite frequently.
It probably did have a big and lasting impact on you though.