My Mother just talks at me and never listens!

[rainbowbug88]

My mother is in her 60s and no longer works. We had a rocky relationship when I was in my teens but after I left home at 19 we do get on well. She was a good mother and I do love her and enjoy seeing her but she has so little interest in me.

She does call me up but after a quick hello she launches into a monolog about her life, what she has done, what she's watching on tv, often in minute detail. She will give me a run down of all the various things that has upset or annoyed her often repeated herself several times over the course of various phone calls.
If she does ask about me myself or my family unless I launch into a monolog myself she just starts talking again right after I say fine and if I do try to say anything she will often say how she's busy and that she has to go (with the implication being that I have been keeping her back).

Basically its fine, I don't think she will change and its pointless arguing over but it feels like a bit of a superficial relationship. She lives with her new husband and they are pretty much happy. I think she was always a bit like this, more interested in my when I was more her's as a child and now in my sister who is a lot more similer to her than I am. It has probably got a bit more noticable as she has got older, especially the repeating things.

Anyone elses mum like this?

Is that you Bro?

@IHateCoronavirus

Is that you Bro?

lol no but I take it I'm not alone

My mother is like that. She’s been a very poor mother but she wasn’t mothered herself. Most of what she wants to know is for instant regurgitation to her circle of cousins and Facebook arseholes. No actual interest in us as people. Classic example was 40 minutes on her interaction with some landed gentry local to her, then ‘how are the children? Good. Right, that’s all my news, bye.’ I really dislike her in fact.

rainbowbug88 sadly not. I could tell my DM that I’d won the lottery and was going to replace all of my teeth with diamonds and she would interrupt me mid-flow to bring the conversation back round to herself. DAunt is the same. Get them together and it is like watching Wimbledon!

Yes, MIL is exactly the same! We spent 3 weeks in Africa and when we got back, she spent an hour talking about SIL!

Sorry to hear that your Mother wasn't so great. The bit about regurgitating any juicy to others rings true for me as well to the point that I probably withhold things from her after the time I saw on facebook immediately after I'd told her that I was having some investigations done for heavy periods that I'd was just off the phone in tears and worried sick that something was really wrong with me and that she was distraught herself!

That post cause various aunts and cousins to call me up worried when in fact it was nothing and I had told her so but she was just looking for attention and wanted something dramatic to say.

Do you bother trying to actually share with your mum or have you just given up like I have?

MIL is exactly the same. It drives DH potty.

@Wearywithteens, sounds familer I'm very worried that I'll end up like that too one day!

I hate it but I try to be the dutiful daughter and just put up with it.
What would happen if you tell her that you aren't interested in whatever boring things her neighbours are doing?

Oh my god, I was just thinking about this today after spending the morning with my mother.

I now know every conversation she has had with every single person in the street, at the shop, how many seagulls are nesting on her roof, some shite about someone’s cousin somewhere who’s kids did something sometime ago.

Pfft.
Her grandchild passed his theory driving test, got a qualification he has been working towards for the last year and got a pay rise.
I got a new job & haven’t had a day off for 3 weeks.
She knows non of this, because she is just not interested.
Pffft.

@crosser62, You would think they would at least want to hear our news so they could pass it on to someone else! Perhaps the reality is that nobody else listens to them?

My mums like this. It's exhausting and shit. I feel for you, it gets quite hard to bite your tongue at times.

@rainbowbug88 I tell her as little as possible! I don’t have her on Facebook, I refused and she tried about three more times even after I’d said I didn’t want to. We talk almost never now. It’s sad in one way but she’s been so unbelievably negligent as a mother, I can’t do it any other way.

My mum's a diamond, but has this tendency too! She's single and has been for decades - I think maybe she has forgotten the art of conversation.

I can usually get things back on track by saying "oi, woman, it's my turn to talk now!" but that's the kind of relationship we have - she doesn't get offended, and does take the (not subtle) hint.

Same here. I don't tell her anything, and I don't need to make any effort!

She's constantly complaining about other people who don't do what she wants when she wants. She's dreadful.

I'm going to be helping her move house shortly, it's been a nightmare.

My mum is like this and getting worse. I find her phone calls absolutely draining, one way conversation and she just goes on and on and on , absolutely no self awareness whatsoever

@nibdedibble Sometimes you do just need to do what you need to inorder to protect yourself, its sad but possibly the best thing

@GreeboIsMySpiritAnimal lol, not sure if I could do that with my mum, she's a bit touchy!

I have got one of them too. As she has got older ( now 80) she has the same conversation at me every single night. I dread answering the phone.

My DM to a T unfortunately

I don't tell my mother anything other than the most basic details about my life as I know it will be passed to her gossipy friends and the whole village will know. My husband is not from the area but she'll talk about all these people he doesn't know but says "you know, she lives next to the pub". Errr, no, he really doesn't know them! I will try endlessly not to become like her.

My mum is exactly like that too, we can have a phone call for an hour when she will tell me all about what she’s done in the smallest detail but unless I interrupt with some information she rarely asks about me or my daughter, even though dd is going through some pretty big health problems. My mum stopped speaking to me for six months once because I dared to disagree about something so I don’t really have the sort of relationship where I can joke with her about it.

I don’t know anyone’s real situation here, but I wanted to say that I intentionally withdrew from my mother about ten years ago. I didn’t make a song and dance. I just stopped contacting her apart from birthdays/Christmas. She’d ring me and I allowed that. I had moved away many years ago and I stopped taking the kids to visit. She’d come and see us and it was bloody hard work when she did but it preserved the idea that she had grandchildren if that makes sense.

She stopped visiting and I didn’t chase her. Then she came by, and it was clear she was off her face on right-wing Facebook conspiracies, interspersed with long tales of cousin Sandy’s hair problems etc. She all but ignored the dc (then a teen and a pre-teen).

And now she doesn’t visit and we text only. You’d have to know the history to understand why that’s ok with me, the kids don’t care, and dh is relieved.

I only mention this sort of gradual withdrawal because as your mums are getting older they’re going to rely on you more. You might be fine with that, but I couldn’t be, so I wanted to draw boundaries early-ish that (for example) she wouldn’t be moving in with us when she gets old, she couldn’t come on holidays with us, we wouldn’t be travelling to see her if she had a twingey back. (All real examples.)

She has a second family and isn’t alone. She just never cared for us and I realised that anything ‘motherly’ about her was for show. She has ignored my children. Obviously I’m a huge fuck-up about this but she’s genuinely a terrible person: it works for me and I no longer live in fear of being obliged to help her.

My mother has become somewhat similar as she's gotten older. We talk about 5 times a week and she yammers on and on and on and on about people I barely know. She even goes into detail about people these people know, individuals I have never heard of or laid eyes on. I couldn't possibly give less of a fuck. I want to scream sometimes.