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?

My DM started doing this after she turned 75, when she was formally retired from Sams. She had never been dull, and we'd have a weekly chat in which we'd endeavour to wind up each other up. Then all of a sudden it was ailments, the neighbours and her gardener's latest car crash. Then her diagnosis arrived, and she just went "little old lady". The next 2 years were boring and painful at once.

My mother is the same. I live overseas and we skype once a week and it's basically just her monologuing. My Dad asked her to stop, because she wouldn't let me get a word in edgeways and kept cutting me off to talk about herself, so they never heard my news.

She's a hypochondriac, but also a hypochondriac by proxy and is OBSESSED with other people's health problems, almost to a gleeful extent, the more serious the better. She regales me with the health problems of everyone she knows, no matter how tenuous and it's SO boring.

She barely knows her grandson, she doesn't even really know me any more. It's dispiriting.

I love my dm. She is a wonderful person and mother but i am finding this about her since she retired.
I get told the same conversations over and over. Even if i say "oh yes you said" she will still continue her story.
I can be in the middle of telling her something and she will interrupt and talk for the next 20 minutes.
She reads story after story out to me from the paper as if i never/ cant read the news myself.
I know its because she is lonely, but her sheer desparation for conversation kills the chance of any natural chit chat. She used to be so fun and we would have a lovely giggle but it has changed.

@rainbowbug88, solidarity sister! It drives me crazy, it's so superficial. I've been going through a separation and would love to be able to have some solid emotional support from my mother, but I've realised it just isn't going to happen. As you say, it's ok to do what you need to do to protect yourself. As a result, I would say we were pretty low contact. The sister situation rings very true for me too. I really believe that maxim that says even siblings of the same parents grow up in different families. I think my sister genuinely thinks I am being a bit oversensitive when I talk about our mum's lack of interest in my life. They are way more similar to each other than I am to my mum as well. I have only just realised, in middle age, how hurtful I have found it.

@DoesThisMakeSence Oh God, yes, the news thing. My mum does that too. Like we don't have global news where I live. She'll also recap tv programmes for me that I don't watch.

My mum occasionally bleats about having no grandchildren. I feel like shouting at her 'Well you were so cold and unloving when I was a child, WTF do you expect?!'

Same with my mum. I think she has NPD. Zero empathy, zero interest in others, total self-absorption.

She knows practically nothing about us or her grandchildren (although she does love to get the odd soundbite to retail to aunties, cousins and any other audience). Like a previous poster said, we can go on a holiday somewhere really interesting and when we next see her she will not mention it or ask questions - we just get another monologue about her neighbours or what she had for lunch yesterday.

She monologues to the point where you can put the phone down, make a cup of coffee, go back to the phone and she's still talking. Sometimes she leaves voicemails several minutes long where she talks non-stop with no actual news or content at all.

I really don't like her.

*@allfurcoatnoknickers - She's a hypochondriac, but also a hypochondriac by proxy and is OBSESSED with other people's health problems, almost to a gleeful extent, the more serious the better. She regales me with the health problems of everyone she knows, no matter how tenuous and it's SO boring.

Oh god this !

Do you have the guess who's dead game? She doesn't actually say ''guess who's dead'', but that's what DH and i call it. The build up is almost gleeful. I can tell when a particular medical story is going to end in death. It's quite macabre really.

It goes on for bloody hours. Every fucking detail of who said what to whom and which appointment went on where - she doesn't stop even if you try to say ''yes, you know i don't know this person mum!''. SHE doesn't even know the person half the time! It'll be the woman at the bus stop's daughters dogs vet's window cleaner or something. Where do they get all the bloody detail??

Recently i tried a bold interruption:
Half way through the story i suddenly said ''.....and they've died?''

• there was a pause. A slight look of confusion for a moment. Then she ploughed manfully on with the story! No yes or no.

And the conclusion was ... they're dead! A week last Tuesday. Surprise surprise

In the same boat OP. It's sad. I think she's always been like that but maybe I notice it more now. She's better on the phone as she seems more focused.

@laiste ooh, she's done the "guess who's dead" game a couple of times, but I think my total lack of distress when people I don't know die put her off a bit.

She once rang me when I was out, and told me to buy a sympathy card and to come home ASAP because someone had died and she couldn't tell me over the phone. I spent ages panicking it was my best friend, or Godmother and dashed home, only to learn it was my former boss's daughter that I'd never even met. She then went on to gruesomely speculate about her death, which was horrible.

Which leads me to...death fan fiction (for want of a better phrase) coming up with elaborate stories and speculations about how someone died in detail, which turn out to be untrue. Our milk man from years ago died in a car crash (obviously, so sad for his lovey family) and she MADE UP A WHOLE STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED and told me the whole thing at length like it was true.

I could go on, but I'd be at the risk of monologuing

What drives me batty is the importance placed on what DAY something (dull) has happened. "Well I spoke to Sue on Tuesday. No, hang on was it Tuesday? We'd been to Asda the day before, so actually it must've been Sunday. Or was it last Weds?". The day it happened never has any actual relevance to the story but we spend about 5 minutes deciding on bleeding day!!

Lots of people Describing my Mum here. I didnt realise i had so many siblings!

Could write the book on this one! Exactly the same here, even if she looks like she's listening, its just thinking time before the next completely unrelated monologue starts! It's just alternate speaking, not a conversation at all. It's not like she's lonely, she is either working or out the house 6 out of 7 days! It's so tiresome, I just go through the motions and save my news for others.

If she finds out I've spoken to another family member about something that she didnt know, she'll moan "why dont you tell me these things?" (cos you don't actually care) and turn into interested mother for about 2 days, then normal service resumes.

@rainbowbug88 Thank you so much for starting this thread 😂. I though I was alone but there are a whole dysfunctional group of us!

Ah, fellow sufferers! My late mum was like this; it was both sad and exasperating as it meant we had very little in the way of a real relationship. She’d always been obsessed with the past, even when I was a child, and it got worse and worse as she grew older. Towards the end of her life, I really don’t believe she had any interest in me and was simply absorbed in a sense of having wasted her life. I had to withdraw emotionally to some extent otherwise it would have been endlessly hurtful and distressing.

And endlessly repeated stories about the past, and I mean I must have heard them thousands of times. I’d have travelled several hundred miles down country to see her and the second I got through the door we were into what auntie Flo said in 1962. It was like competing for her attention with a bunch of ghosts.

My mum is the same , she never says ' have you had a good weekend ?'. Ever. But when we do spend time together we get on great and have a laugh but I do often think if I didn't volunteer information how much would she actually know about my life. On a 70 mile journey with her once just me and her she talked about her sil the whole way 😫

I've found my tribe. My dm is the same, expects me to listen to a half hour monologue at the same time every day after I finish work.

Without fail the subjects will include what housework has been done, including loads of washing, the walk she did, what random person she talked to, that I do not know. A health update on random people, daily covid report, she might finally ask about me and the family.

Thankfully the gym has reopened and I can make excuses to cut it short.

Lord, Lord, hello sisters! Mine will phone to ask how my new job/house/other major life event is going and I have 10 seconds max to tell her everything before she starts telling me about someone I don’t really know died. I call her the harbinger of doom, she phones and I immediately ask her who died. I also get the repeated stories which can’t be stopped.

I think we have the same Mum OP, I could have written your post.

All phone calls and messages are about herself, or whatever entirely over dramatic and unnecessary thing she's grasped hold of to worry about at any given time. She's not happy unless she has some extremely unlikely future scenario to wring her hands and chew over day and night, and any snippets of knowledge she does take in about my life are immediately regurgitated to all and sundry, colleagues, ransoms in the local pub...

I've learned over the years just to say nothing and let her rattle on. She is at least a bit better in person than on the phone, but only marginally.

I wonder what this says of women of this age. Is it that their daughters are their only confidents?

It’s sad though, that there are these women who love us but don’t know us.

(Or maybe I have had too much wine )

My mum is increasingly like this as she gets older. What makes me sad is that I remember when she and I used to have a giggle about my grandad doing it. Which in turn makes me scared because one day I'll probably do it myself. I try to stay patient and think 'it comes to us all', but it's so difficult, so I end up snapping at her and then feeling guilty.

On a lighter note, has anyone seen the episode of Motherland where the main character's slightly elderly in-laws come to stay? It's so well-observed and familiar it made me weep with laughter.

I always thought I was an only and turns out I have all these siblings

The hypochondria (I daren’t mention I have a cold as she will then think she has the plague, and as for COVID...), the minute detail of every conversation she has with everyone, the sharing of anything I tell her with everyone, the dithering about making any decision, fretting about minor things, castastophizing and needing to talk about it in excruciating detail...
I do try to have sympathy, as it is probably due to being retired and not having much on, too much time to think, etc. However it’s times like this I feel the weight of having no siblings!

OMG I think you're my sibling.....