Anyone else have a parent like this?

[tuliprosedaffodil]

This is about my mother but could be anyone.

She has a habit that drives me crazy. Whenever I see her (or we speak on the phone) and we have a conversation and she tells me a story she narrates the whole thing.

So she'll be telling me about for example a neighbour who has annoyed her (everyone annoys her). Our conversation will go as follows:

Her: "So I went round there and said 'John you need to the turn your music down' and he was like 'no, I like it'. So I turned around and said 'well, the rest of the neighbourhood doesn't'
Me: "Oh dear, that sounds annoying Mum. Are you doing anything nice this afternoon?"
Her : "Well, not relaxing! Anyway, I said 'John I've asked you nicely, could you please turn it down' and he was like 'well I could a bit' and I was like 'that would be great, I just want to hear Gardeners World without your music over the top' and he said 'Oh Gardeners World I love that' and I said 'yes it is nice' and then he said 'oh your roses are really flourishing this year'

Etc etc etc. That's how she speaks all the time. It's even worse when she's telling a story about work involving people who I don't know at all. She could rattle on for hours in this way. She does it all the time too for example if she's here like she was in the garden over the weekend (she's part of our bubble) and my in laws were here too. My in laws obviously don't know anyone that she works with or really anything about her job and no exaggeration she talked like this for fifteen minutes about a long and boring thing that had happened at work. It always has to be about how someone has crossed her and she's put them in their place too. I was cringing!

She isn't elderly, she's late fifties!

Anyone else?

I work with a woman like this (a young woman)
When she is telling a story, there is no break. Not. a. pause.

She is going to press play and get to the end and there will be no conversational back and forward.

I think she's kind of scared of the conversational back and forward that other people find easy, ykwim/

Uncle Colm in Derry Girls is such a brilliant example of this - even when he's been tied up by paramilitaries he's going on about his new shoelaces...

Oh god DH has a friend like this and he makes me want to tear my hair out! He goes on forever with these embellished stories and they almost never have a punchline it can be 25 mins of he said she said it goes nowhere, he's only in his 30s so def not an age thing!

My mil does this

@mnahmnah

Oh - also - stories about people I don’t know but she insists I do. I live 150 miles away and have never lived in the village she lives in now. But I will get ‘you know Chris and Jane in the village?’ ‘No’ , ‘yes you do, they live in the cottage by the farm, CHRIS AND JAAAANE’ ‘no’

Oh come on, you know Chris and Jane, they've got that big dog and the yellow fence, they get their oil from Ted - you know Ted? His brother runs the shop round the back of Alford's? No? Well perhaps it's his cousin, you know the one who had the baby with her from the Co-op....

@CongealedCrags

Do you know my mum?!

How nasty so many of you are.
Can’t have a conversation with your Mum once a fucking week without eye rolling and whinging?
Jeez.

I have a friend just like this. I hear every single detail of a drama at work, where I know no one involved. What happened first, next, last. Who said what to whom. I don't mind when it's a dramatic story, it's like listening to an audiobook! But most of the time it's just mundane.

And just like your mum she also picks up where she left off if you try to change the topic.

We don't speak much.

I have 2 friends like this...its draining and exhausting...i love catching up with them in person but i don't answer their calls anymore...i just can't do it.

I know someone like this, she's in her 40s and will go on and on about people I don't know and have never met in minute detail. I actually think it's rude, I know every detail about her friends and family but she would have no idea about mine and it's because I can never get a word in edgeways!

My gran does this, always about neighbors I don't even know and often a story I've heard before but she thinks shes told someone else

It's an age thing, definitely!

Yes my DH does this. He is a lovely man and he gets upset when someone tells him to get to the point. He genuinely can't help it - he tends to have low self esteem and I think his narrating is his way of trying to make himself sound interesting and funny

Just ask her if there's a pie and bovril at half time @tuliprosedaffodil

Am I missing something? I think all of my family plus many of my friends talk this way!! It’s the telling of a story, surely? A story that you want people to listen to? Kind of setting the scene etc...you know when you have a really good story and you don’t want to rush it?! Sometimes this is the e case, and other times it’s just nice to feel like you have an audience or someone is listening to you, waiting to hear the punchline. Maybe it’s more prevalent right now because there’s nothing to do or talk about so to embellish and draw out a story more Makes up for having less to talk about?

I don’t know.

We have some neuro diverse genes in our gene pool and I get this a lot. I think partly they have rehearsed in the head how the story goes and so must play out the tale as rehearsed. And partly they are processing events with you and so need to replay them. In our case anyway 😊
In some cases you don’t even need to be there for the performance, it will play out how it plays out regardless; and if you are there then audience participation is not encouraged!

@1wokeuplikethis

I think the art of storytelling is about important details. As much as I love my mum, she does not have this art perfected it’s more of an obsession with including unimportant details in a not very important or interesting story

I raise you that - my dad would mimic (badly) peoples accents during that account.

So if John was Scottish his ‘parts’ would be said in a bad Scottish accent.

It’s so annoying!

My mum and mil do this, dh usually interrupts with "was the sun shining that day?" But they just laugh and carry on!

Apparently he says I can do it but I disagree, the details I tell him are important

My DP would do this if I hadn't trained him to get to the fucking point over many years. Agree with PP it's a low self esteem thing, probably as a result of being the youngest of many brothers.

When he gets together with his family it's hilarious - all speaking in restricted code and narrating their driving stories at each other.

@Joeblack066

How nasty so many of you are. Can’t have a conversation with your Mum once a fucking week without eye rolling and whinging? Jeez.

But the point being made on the thread is that it ISN’T a conversation, it’s a one sided, tedious monologue, where no participation is required, just an audience. Passive. Boring whoever it is, mother, father, sister, brother, colleague, friend, milkman....

Can you not see the difference between what is being described and a conversation? You know, where more than one person gets to speak?

@1wokeuplikethis

Am I missing something? I think all of my family plus many of my friends talk this way!! It’s the telling of a story, surely? A story that you want people to listen to? Kind of setting the scene etc...you know when you have a really good story and you don’t want to rush it?! Sometimes this is the e case, and other times it’s just nice to feel like you have an audience or someone is listening to you, waiting to hear the punchline. Maybe it’s more prevalent right now because there’s nothing to do or talk about so to embellish and draw out a story more Makes up for having less to talk about?

I don’t know.

No, it’s the opposite of good storytelling! Good story telling involves capturing and keeping the attention of your audience by knowing what details are necessary or interesting and skipping the ones that aren’t.

OP, my mother is exactly the same. It’s as if she’s handing you a DIY story kit with waaaay too many components, and letting you excavate your own story from the large amounts of extraneous irrelevant stuff.it’s excruciating to listen to.

I used to have an old neighbour like this.
When we moved away I would ring occasionally because I knew she was lonely.
All of her conversations were about other old people that I didn't know.
One day she was telling me that some new neighbours had upset Doug. It was awful because Doug had bad breath and the fallout had made it worse.
It took a few minutes until I realised Doug hadn't in fact got a particularly bad case of halitosis. He suffered from respiratory problems!
Another time Phyllis had won a bottle of liver free milk. No Mary, she had won a bottle of Liebfraumilch!

I have a friend who will do this if not pulled up on it. I sometimes ask her to tell me if a part of a story should be in brackets.

My dad is like this. It used to drive me mad but now I just accept it as part of his character. He's nearly 70 - he's not going to change. Once I accepted it, it became kind of endearing - it's the sort of thing myself and my siblings will remember once he's gone.