Small ways in which your parents fucked you up

[SaladBap]

Over the last few days, I've come to the uncomfortable realisation that what I thought was clever, edgy humour is actually unpleasant, mean and arrogant.

I was raised to think that our family was a bit of a cut above other people in terms of humour/intelligence - edgy jokes that cut very close to the bone, self deprecating humour, but also snobbery regarding other people's hobbies and interests (anything pop culture)

Other people were humourless, dull and couldn't take a joke

I've realised that this isn't a sign of how quirky and funny I am, nor of my moral superiority, but actually makes me seem an arrogant snob. It's also caused a kneejerk habit of thinking negatively about people

It explains why I've struggled to make friends, I think, and why my self esteem is quite low at times - I apply that really sarcastic voice to everyone including myself

I'm looking at my parents through totally new eyes. Things like their sneering at "catalogue families" who brought rounders sets to the beach or park - we could easily have done so too, my parents didn't want to, but us children would probably have quite liked it instead of being forced to just sit there while they read the newspaper!

It's a small thing, but I actually feel quite cross about it.

Can anyone relate?

Where to start? I wasn't wanted by my mother, she aborted my siblings but kept me because my father wanted me, he was hoping for a boy. He didn't get one and had an affair and had a son who is 3 months younger than me.

My mother frequently told me she didn't want me, she wanted a daughter who was lovely but instead she had me. I was constantly a disappoint at school, I didn't achieve anything educationally and wasn't good enough for my primary school and was eventually told I wasn't the sort of child they wanted there and was moved to another primary school for less academic children. The secondary school attached was highly academic and they knew I wouldn't achieve anything if I went there and would take a space from a child who was deserving of it.
I went to a secondary school which was the one that everybody in the know wanted to avoid, there I was in the bottom sets for every subject and it was made clear I fell far short of their targets academically and so I was in a separate remedial class who weren't expected to pass any exams. At 15 I was made to leave without taking any exams.

I got married young, my parents warned my future husband against marrying me right up until the night before the wedding. They did this in my presence so I knew it was true they had said it. They took his side when he left.

When I had children they would frequently tell the children how wonderful I was but would tell me I deserved awfully behaved children because of how awful I was - this in front of the children. My children were told by them that they wished they could have had grandchildren without having to have had children first. They turned my children against me.

I wanted to go to college to try and get some exams but my parents refused to support me, I had to work unpaid for them in their business. I got pregnant and they forced me to have an abortion. I tried suicide several times and they turned up at the hospital playing the loving parents, the last time I was due to be discharged they didn't turn up to collect me so I left by myself and slept rough overnight.

I have no self esteem, I don't form any relationships with anybody as I know just how horrible I am.

@finalsoddingstraws what a pair of absolute horrors. Are you still in contact with them?

It's never okay to be ill. Always a figment of my imagination, and there's nothing really wrong with me. (I now have health anxiety).

If I can't get the hang of something straight away then I'm probably no good at it and there's no point bothering. (I'm learning in my late 30s that this is very untrue and stops me from doing a lot of things).

Having opinions is embarrassing and indulgent and will make people irritated. (I'm a person who loves to debate but feels really awful about it afterwards).

Arty-farty people are pointless and self-indulgent. (Creativity is basically my life, and I've been arty since childhood, so that one makes me feel like my family spawned an alien).

[quote Fanthorpe]@finalsoddingstraws what a pair of absolute horrors. Are you still in contact with them?[/quote]
They are both dead.

@finalsoddingstraws I’m very sorry you didn’t get the parents you needed or deserved, and your life has been so hard.
Not really that useful to you, I know, from a stranger on the Internet, but I wish you well.

My parents are very cold and quite selfish people. My mum is very jealous of others and it comes across as quite snidey 'oh we'll never be able to go on a holiday like that...' and always comparing. The impact on my sister was greater than on me I think. As soon as possible we both left home and got involved in inappropriate, co-dependent, big age gap relationships which says something. We both have totally screwed up relationships with food too. Interestingly neither myself, sister or brother had any hobbies as kids and Also few friends, and none of us has a best friend and never has. I do blame my parents really. They never showed us how to embrace life, it was always about being functional and never about enjoyment. The only thing I've ever seen either of them enthuse about is diets and (my mum) food/chocolate.

@Boeufsurletoit no I wasn't allowed to be ill either. I've actually got Crohn's disease and my mum is still very dismissive if I say I'm not feeling too good!

My mum never ever had/has my back, she always took the side of my friends or boyfriend, and even once asked a couple of my friends who she was meeting for the first time how they put up with me 🤨

She told me s few years ago that her own mother always stood up for her and took her side against any friends, and took it too far and she was determined not to be like that.

I'm more like my Nan and stand up for my dd and wonder sometimes if my dd will be like my mum and go the other way 😁 so I try to be more even handed, but apparently I don't get that right either 🙄

I would say I have definitely been fucked up by my parents who are very fucked up themselves. My DM was hospitalised with Anorexia, as a child she couldn’t be bothered to cook for us so fed us any old crap, so if we wanted a whole packet of biscuits for breakfast than that was just fine. It has taken years to unlearn these bad food habits and learn to eat proper healthy diet. My DF is a controlling bully I realised after lots of therapy that my OCD is a direct result of the anxiety living with him caused, he would enjoy bullying us and putting us down I would live on my nerves being around him. He’s managed to finally destroy our relationship after some horrendous behaviour and comments made (bad even by his standards) over the last couple years. I am civil and polite but that is all he will get now and he’s lucky he gets that. My DM likes to pretend everything is ok between us and I go along with it but when someone asks “Is that your daughter?” And she replies “yes we are always together” or “we are joined at the hip” I want to scream “no we aren’t I’m here on a rare visit out of duty nothing else”

Mother is an alcoholic, father her enabler. He had a very sociable job and often brought his team home in the middle of the night, where they’d carry on drinking. The other wives wouldn’t tolerate this, of course.

They never once said ‘I love you’ to us. My brother was aggressive with me, we were often left together. That was fun.

They went to the pub one time, I broke my arm and needed stitches on a nasty gash. Fortunately, a relative phoned and took me to hospital. Their drinking continued when they babysat my brother”s kids, my sil went crazy about it, particularly when they hid the bottles.

Very interesting thread OP.
I’m very close to my mum but she was /is a massive enabler of my alcoholic Dad. And she was a lovely mum when I was a younger child, we have a great adult relationship but she was a dreadful parent to teenage me.
I have quite low self confidence & I always tell DD how clever & funny & beautiful she is. I fully expect that DH and I are royally fucking it up in other ways though - in fact I know we are 😬

I suffered for years with poor self esteem, worthlessness, poor sense of self, difficulty asserting my own needs and guilt for doing anything nice for myself.
My mum was completely disinterested in my emotions and was only concerned that I do well academically. She let her husband bully and resent me. I was told at nine that my ‘dad’ was my stepfather but it was a secret and I mustn’t talk openly about it. Fitting in was sneered at and so were most mainstream pop culture interests. She was mean with money, partly through necessity but also habit, so I never had the ‘right’ clothes and felt self conscious around my peers. Doing anything ‘additional’ for me was a big drama: ingredients for food tech, lifts home from after school clubs, taking me to a hobby she didn’t think was worthwhile etc were all a massive inconvenience and she would often forget or be late. The value and necessity of ‘working hard’ was drummed into me and I was made to feel guilty for doing nice things for myself.
I think my mum struggles enormously with who I am as a person now because I am more ‘mainstream’, I didn’t end up having a high flying career and I do ‘self indulgent’ things like going out for dinner, getting my hair done, buying nice clothes, going on holidays etc.

I was shown actual photographs of animal experiments and seal clubbing while still in primary school. My brother told me about poor dogs in Philippines and how they were/are tortured again while under 11. I now have an absolute hatred of Cultures/Countries who abuse/torture animals and I will not ever sleep peacefully again. So yes I was messed up by my parent but I probably would have found out anyway with Social Media showing videos of it.

@finalsoddingstraws, I'm so sorry to hear about your parents. They sound incredibly cruel. I'm sorry life has been so hard for you.

Just remembered another thing. One of my earliest memories was playing on top of a slide with another girl. We both fell off at the same time, quite heavily. My mum ran to the other girl first. I remember the other girl’s mum standing there looking uncomfortable and bewildered.

It was the crime of the century in my family to put yourself or your children first. This would lead to ludicrous situations like our family sitting on an aeroplane waiting for every single passenger to disembark before we were allowed to. Even as an adult I get a crazy thrill getting off planes ahead of the rows behind me, and after the row in front of me.

TheKrakening you've actually just crystallised something I've never quite understood with DH's family (also in general good parents but with a few strong threads of dysfunction) they actually almost praise other children at the expense of their own children and grandchildren and have always responded really weirdly when I praise my children or the DNs

My dad would always dismiss or mimimise any illness I had, saying I needed to toughen up. I now really struggle with knowing when to take a day off work through illness as I don't trust my own judgement and can't tell if I'm I'll enough. Thanks dad! Does anyone else have this problem?

I totally can relate OP.

My mum came from nothing but met my dad at 17. Her family were very very poor and very dysfunctional.

My dads family were very working class, they owned a toy shop so were perceived to be richer than they were i guess.

My mum often thinks she has achieved masses in life and that they have what they have now due to how hard they worked (she was a SAHM then worked term time till we were mid teens). My dad was a skilled manual worker so earned reasonable money.

I feel my mum is very negative towards others and also needs to compare to others all the time, someone else can't be good unless they are compared to how good one of us or the GC are. I realised a year or so ago this had really rubbed off on me. Really caught up on how clever DS was but only in comparison to others, how good he was at sport but again in comparison to others. I don't see it like that at all now.

Also my mum is very caught up about people's weight. She has such a bizarre view and actually hasn't been skinny since she was in her 20s but is so critical of others and has actually ingrained it in me about how awful overweight people look. I have had extremely disordered eating over the years and always unhappy with my weight.

It makes me cross at my mum but I have to remember she had the most horrific upbringing and she has tried so hard to be the opposite of her mum but it has sent her to extremes the other way.

Ah, @boeufsurletoit I see you had a similar experience with health stuff. Funny thing is my dad was a nurse!

Oh my goodness @ThisIsGonnaHurt you’ve basically just described my mother and her beliefs/achievements.

@Fanthorpe its strange isn't it, I myself didn't even realise it wasn't normal till I was almost 40. I think my eldest DS pointed it out at about 12 yo.

Every time he told me a test score I would ask what others got etc. Even if it was amazing like 19 or 20 out of 20 to see if he'd done well or if everyone had got similar. Its insane and I wish I had my time again with the kids as little ones.

I would never tell my mum though as it is never malicious with her.

Ah, I’m afraid my mother and I parted ways last year, I realised I was turning myself inside out trying to accommodate her increasingly difficult behaviour. I tried hard not to do to my children what she and my DF did to me until I became two different things, one for my parents and the ‘real’ me. I still feel incredibly sad about what they lived through in childhood but it’s not up to me to soak that up for them. Don’t inflict your own damage on others or it’s never ending.

@TicketToTheWrongFilm

I also could have done without that awful 'I love you but I don't like you' from my mother.

God yes. My mother never said this out loud (though she said many other things) but she might as well have done.

I don't look back that often any more. I do wonder what the hell I'm going to do to my kids though. I love them so much, but it's inevitable!

Absolutely this! My mother was so proud of this little parenting nugget. I vividly remember her telling me that she had just read about using this phrase (in one of the sunday papers) and it summed up exactly how she felt about me. I was about 8 years old.

What's worse is that she still uses it regularly on me even though I'm 41!

mine were just small..small people with small safe ideas..life ran to routine ..they were scared of the big wide world and anything they didnt understand was bad.No ambition ,no drive everything that is normal would happen to other people not them.They liked what they knew and were familar with,never taking chanes therefore keeping themselves down.Never bought a house always rented cos thats what you did and buying houses was for other people? getting a car from someone who knew someone who said it was a good car,not a car they wanted or aspired to or even chose just because someone said,,,only going on holiday to a certain place cos so and so liked it ...everybody knew best and they followed.. never changed gas or electric suppliers stuck with what they knew same with banks...so small...so well.........

My Mum WAS Hyacinth Bouquet. Enough said.
My Dad was adorable, intelligent, caring, wonderful ... but he was a natural born extreme worrier, and that passed on to me. It's taken me decades to learn to live with the level of anxiety I get about everything.

But I loved both of them, and they meant well.

to all those who have shared their issues here.