To think my mum is strange

[Arachnophobic]

While sorting through some old stuff today, I saw something written which suggested that when I was a toddler, mum was going to take me to the middle East with her then new DP to live! Apparently he got a job out there.

This was 30 years ago. She hadn't been with him long. As the authorities were funny about unmarried couples she changed her name to his to get out there. But get this......I was 2.5 years old and she left me with my Grandma for two weeks while she checked the place out . It was all expenses paid as I understand it, by his company.

When I asked her why we didn't go she said it was because my real dad vetoed it, and made him out to be the unreasonable one!!!

AIBU to think that a) she was selfish leaving me for two weeks so young and b) that she felt my dad was BU for vetoing it.

I just don't get it. I would never leave my DCs for two weeks and if me and DP split I would never dream of taking them overseas - they love and need both parents. But perhaps my generation is different?

Sorry, bit long.

You didnt remember it, so obviously it wasnt a traumatic experience. It was just two weeks with your grandparent. You were not shoved in an orphanage or left to fend for yourself. Your mother sounds like she was trying to do her best and left you in good care while she went to check out the place.

When my Dad was born, it was during the depression, and there was very little work up North. His parents left him with his granny for nearly 2 years while they went to London to work and earn money. He didnt suffer, and had a fantastic relationship with his granny, who lived to be 104.

John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, pioneers of attachment studies, showed back in the 60s that the risk of attachment disturbances is relatively low if a toddler is left with a single substitute attachment figure, especially if that's a close relative. So your mother did the best thing she could have done in the circumstances.

Bear in mind as well that Bowlby and Ainsworth's work on attachment in children was ground-breaking at the time and relatively few people had any idea at all that it might disturb children to be separated from their main caregiver. Children in hospital were routinely separated from mothers, and mothers sometimes even forbidden to visit in case it 'upset the child'. Lots of policies changes as a result of his work. You're judging your mother from the other side of a radical change in our understanding of mother-infant relationships and feeling hurt on the basis of things your mother may simply not have known.

great post werewolef

Yes werewolf - I was in hospital in the 60's as a 3 year old. There were strict visiting times when my parents could visit. My mum says I was so distressed I refused to eat or drink when they weren't there. She said she had to bring in lots and I would be gulping drink down and eating ravenously when she visited. And when they left she said she could hear me screaming the place down as they walked down the corridors. In the end they discharged me after a week, which was medically far too soon,but everyone could see how distressed I was. But of course it never occured to the hospital to let my parents stay outside of visiting hours!

I think two weeks is not that bad- considering she was going to the Middle East- it is not exactly a quick jaunt to check out Blackpool. Travel has advanced a lot over the years and it is maybe possible to do a quicker journey now, but you have to remember things were different then.

I also sensed straight away from your post that there were other issues niggling you. If my Mum had done this I would have thought

1. She has always been a good Mum so why take offence over 1 thing?
2. I can't remember it anyway and it did me no harm.

The fact that you are so pissy about it suggests that all is not right. Therefore I think YABU to be upset by this one incident, but perhaps NBU if , as you have hinted, there is a lot more going on that we don't know.

Off to deal with the splinter in my bum from sitting on that damn fence!!!

My mum was a nurse on childrens ward in the 50's. One little boy was dying of Leukemia and they would not let his mother see him. He screamed for her for days. His mother came to the hospital every day, only to be turned away each time. She was in the corridor and could hear him screaming for Mummy. Absolutely heartbreaking. My Mum never worked in a children's ward again after that.

However, it is not quite the same as being left with your Grandmother in familiar surroundings for 2 weeks.

Bowlby and Ainsworth made some absolutely heart-rending films as part of a study called 'Young Children in Brief Separation'. One of them, 'John', is about a 2-year-old boy who is put into a residential nursery in the 60s (basicaly a children's home for babies) when his mother goes into hospital to have her second child.

Over the 10 days he's there the film shows how he starts off searching for her everywhere, going to the door constantly as though waiting for her to come back, standing up in his cot looking for her, basically expecting her to come back any minute. After a few days he cottons on to the fact that she doesn't seem to be coming back, and starts trying to get cuddles from the nurses - but they're so busy with all the children that he doesn't get much joy there.

Gradually he gets more and more miserable, stops eating, kind of gives up and just sits there crying all day. And by the time his mother comes back he's listless, deeply depressed and has sort of given up. When she comes in he looks at her, looks away, looks back and then starts crying; he doesn't run to her, as it's all too confusing. Apparently their relationship was never the same again.

We were all in tears watching the film but while you probably couldn't have made the film nowadays it was crucial to all kinds of public policy changes, from the introduction of key workers rather than interchangeable officials, through to adoption/foster care over institutional children's homes, to visiting rights in hospitals. Before that it was commonly thought that infants under 2-3 years old didn't have an emotional life as such and that as long as their physical needs were met they'd be OK. Attachment studies argued that attachment - love - is a survival need for very small children and disturbing a small child's attachments can have hugely wide-ranging consequences for its subsequent development. This is now widely accepted and neuroscientific research on the cognitive development of babies backs it up.

But when the OP was 2 the very beginnings of this research had barely been published, let alone being widely understood and built into the way we think about babies and toddlers as it is nowadays. It would have been commonly thought that leaving a 2.5 year old for 2 weeks would have no consequences at all.

So, OP, YANBU to feel sad about having been left for 2 weeks as a toddler. Perhaps this brings up other aspects of your own relationship with your mother where you felt uncared for. But YABU to think this makes your mother uncaring - she was just doing something that at the time was considered fairly normal and not cruel or damaging at all.

OP If you are suddenly getting upset for something your mum did briefly, and sensibly, 30 years ago then your life must have been amazingly trauma free. And I salute your mother for that, and think she must have loved you a great deal.

YABU and you know it, assuming this is real.

Jesus Lizzie, wish I hadn't read your post about that little boy - how heartbreaking!

Sorry Begony, I should have put a wariing on it!!

Thankfully things are so much different now!!

Warning, even.

But isn't the OP talking about something that happened in the early 1980's? John Bowlby's work was 20 years prior to that.

I left my dd1 with her grandparents for ten days, then five days, then 2 weeks on consecutive years for holidays abroad. Now we have dd2 and she has someone to play with, we take them both, although there has been talk lately of 'dumping' them again during February half term and me and Dh going away together for the week.

If I split with DH and the opportunity of a good job and a better life for myself and my children in another country, hell yes, I'd take it. I'd try to arrange as much contact as possible between them and their Father including flights home during school holidays and daily phone calls, but no, I wouldn't allow it to prevent me getting on with my life in any way I see fit.

I am clearly a bad person .

I left my children in the care of my mother for 10 days when they were little, I didn't think it was remotely neglectful, any more than I think my husband is some type of monster for working away for two weeks at a time, then coming home again. I wouldn't say there are no consequences, your child might be a bit miffed when you turn up again, but personally I think this is fine and not remotely disturbing. I would have found her taking you with her to check it out much more problematic. Leaving a child with granny IS leaving them with an attached carer (unless they have never seen granny before in their lives). Grandparent care was the norm for many childre- my husband was brought up by his granny while his mum worked.

...The fact that you can't or don't remember it, makes me think it hasn't affected you in life!! Get over it!!

YRBU. Two weeks with Granny? You weren't even newborn, you were two and a half. I'd say she was being responsible by not taking you when she went on an initial recce. She has a right to move her young kids abroad if that is right for her (look at it the other way round - suppose you were married to an American and lived in America because of him, then split up. Would you then stay in America for the next twenty years?) - but in any case, she didn't even go, because your dad was against it. That sounds like the opposite of selfish to me.

I also think it is healthy for children to grow up aware that they are loved and cherished, but also that their parents have their own lives to lead and their own needs to fulfil. I would have hated to feel my parents focused their every waking move on me. What a huge weight on a child's shoulders that would be.

Birdsgottafly, you said "You have to remember that your GP's would have been of the evactuation generation and the sending unaccompanied children to the Australia's."

The OP is talking about the 1980s, FFS! Her mother would have been born in the 50s, I suppose - nobody was being evacuated or sent off to Australia in the 50s!

OP, I don't think your mum was "strange" or BU. Sometimes you have to take a chance in life and try something new. In the end, she did what she thought was best, presumably for you, and perhaps put her dreams of a different life, of love, on hold for YOU. And now you think she is the unreasonable one!?

And leaving you with your granny does not mean she did not love or care for you.

Imperial- her GP's would have had some influence, they didn't have to look after the OP, they probably suggested that it was a good idea. They were the generation still influenced by such ideas.

I remember the 1980's well and the hate campaign raged against single mothers. The worst thing that you could do was be a LM (or not pay your poll tax). The OP's mum probably thought she was acting in everyone's best interests.