As you get older, is it normal to find your mum increasingly irritating?

[makeminealeosayer]

I do mine. She is baby boomer age. She used to be very easy going, laid back, open minded. Now she is very DM in views, moans about immigrants, generally uptight and of a curtain-twitcher mentality. Anybody else found this?

schnitzelvonkrum, you think we don't know our mothers won't be with us forever? You think we don't love them completely? Which is why we feel so damn guilty when they drive us up the wall!

But schnitzel, a lot of people's irritation with their mum's appears to stem from the fact she won't let them grow up, and insists on treating them like a child.

Obviously, the reason my mum irritates me is because of my wholely unrealistic (first world - ??) expectation that once i grew up and became a mother myself, i could have an adult relationship with her. Silly me.

Also I think writing about our experiences with our mothers - and finding out there are a lot of shared issues (Hi, Sally !), might help us take some steps towards making those relationships better in RL. Just because it might look a bit negative doesn't mean there couldn't be quite a few positives in the process too.

I feel it's helped me a little to develop a better perspective on things - I'm sure though there are women all over the world having some issues with their mothers !

I've been lurking on here for a while, trying to learn what not to do in order to avoid irritating my own kids! It's been very informative. And very moving too, especially the posts from people who have had such difficult upbringings.

My mother and father both died young. She was incredibly strong in spite of having a tragic life (losing her own mother aged 5, losing her brother and then her son when he was 17, and a divorce).

But I still got irritated with her. What puzzles me is that I don't get irritated with anyone else. It was a feeling I reserved just for her. Maybe it was because we were so close, or maybe you just want your parents to be perfect because it gives you something to live up to?

Schnitzel surely petty irritations between close family members are an international shared experience. Just because we live in the western world we are not protected from poverty and abuse either. I know the generations before me in my family experienced both. Irritation at our parents is very normal and probably necessary as teens as part of growing up and away from our parents. As we get older some relationships fail due to lack of communication built up resentment and others improve as we understand our parents as adults ourselves.

But you probably posted out of irritation how indulgent.

I do agree with you Schnitzel though - that generally we can be quite bad at keeping a sense of perspective and remembering how fortunate most of us are in the West.

I'm quite moved by the "WaterAid" adverts on ATM. They're trying to encourage us to give £2 a month towards everyone in the world having clean water to drink.

So, maybe in thankfulness that our mothers carried us, bore us, and probably did the best they could in the circumstances, we could try and do something to help other mothers around the world ...

I know ... probably a thought for another thread ... but just thought it might be worth a mention here. crap at keeping to the thread topic

That is a very good cause and worthy of its own thread, I think what irritated me was that despite numerous threads complaining about very trivial issues looking for style advice or complaining about people not putting dresses back when they have tried them on....

Schnitz decided to comment ons thread about interpersonal relationships which in many ways transcend class and geographical boundaries .... Nor do I believe that giving birth and looking after a child means you are exempt from critique by your children, I am far from perfect and will no doubt be blamed for all sorts of failings.

'They F--- you up your Mum and Dad, they do not mean to but they do.'

Lucky ole schnitz having such an idealistic view of the world and such a fabulous experience of her Mum. If you had read this thread then you would see that many of us have deeper reasons to feel irked by our Mothers,how rude and insensitive of you to tell us we are wrong to do so.I hope you have gone tbh.

Thanks mathanxiety and bigmouth

• look out for a new thread on "Can You Give £2 a month to WaterAid ?"

I'd like to do this, and hopefully make my £2 go further by encouraging others to do the same.

Sorry for thread hi-jack but I didn't start it and it is in a good cause

Great thread. I suddenly feel a whole lot better about my irritation with my mother, seems it is normal!

Just a few highlights:

She is 84, very fit but completely inactive. She has been retired for 25 years, but has no interests, hobbies (other than tv and doing puzzles). I feel she is wasting her life. She finds it astonishing that her friend, also in her 80s, still does private tutoring (she clearly loves it and it keeps her young).

She expresses very loud opinions about nearby strangers ("she was a po-faced bitch") was a recent example

She comes to stay and rarely offers to help me with anything. If I ask her to do something, she sniffs and says "I was wondering when you were going to ask me to do that".

I will make dinner, will be serving it out and every time she announces "I think I'll feel better if I go to the toilet first" then disappears while the food starts to go cold!

If I complain about anything to do with the children she says "We've all been there...". She really hasn't, her experience with three girls and huge age gaps is nothing like the reality of my family life.

There are many things I admire and respect - she is intelligent, mentally still as sharp as a knife, looks fantastic for her age, she is much more stylish than me, she can be generous, she is fiercely independent having been widowed since she was late 50s. But essentially she is very very self-centred and stuck in her ways, and is getting worse with age. I think she would have been a very different person if my dad hadn't died such a long time ago. I don't feel I knew him as an adult as he died when I was 18 but I think he was a nicer person.

I have never said any of this to anyone but it is how I feel. She has said that she did not feel grown up herself till her mother died and I wonder if I wll feel the same one day.

I truly can understand some of your frustrations, especially if you feel she's not had many interests since your Dad died. That must have been very sad for you too, as well as for your Mum of course. But just thinking now she's 84 she probably will be slowing up a bit, so be as kind to her as you can while she's still with you.

< Sorry I seem to have put my judgey pants on today by accident, goes to change into something more suitable - if less comfortable ! >

I suspect they wind us up because we secretly fear turning into them.