To find people reminiscing about their hard childhoods somehow repellent?

[NeoMaxiZoomDweebie]

I know my thread title makes me seem horrible but bear with me please.

I had a particularly poor childhood but in a very loving, stable home...but sometimes we were extremely poor...fine...that;s how it was and I don't remember minding too much because we all had such fun etc. My Mum also had a very hard childhood and not such a loving one as I did. But again...she's come to terms with it all...she's wonderfully balanced and loving etc.

MIL however LOVES talking about her poor childhood. She's the same age as my Mum and she gives anecdotes about things which happened or things she went through which actually aren't THAT bad...things like her Mum having to hand sew all the kid's knickers because they couldn't afford to buy any....nothing shocking and not half as ingenious as some of the things my parents made through necessity...and I grew up in the 70s when this kind of thing wasn't even that common,

She tells these stories with a sort of tragic expression on her face...and she's expectant of sympathy or shock...and I can't give it...no more than I could tell her some of my experiences as A they're too private and B it would appear that I am competing for "poorness"

Right. That's off my chest. I feel better already. Fire away! AIBU to not respond much at all during these long, self indulgent diatribes about her childhood and NOT to go "Aaaaah...." at the end?

TheCat that's a good point I think...I did have some embarrassment about my childhood when I was in drama college at 18 and so many of my friends were from a diffferent world....I remember my uber posh mate saying

"And did you go down the street for a chip BATTY from the chip shorp....did it look like Coronation Street where you grew up?" he wasn't evil he just had a good sense of humour and would laugh equally at his own childhood and time at Rugby.....he had no real snobbery and I spent some holidays at his parents marvelous house.....but then his Dad was from working class Irish background and had made his money from his wits...he never told any painful tales though I know he went barefoot in Dublin as a boy and spend time in a terrible children's home...maybe people who know real poverty don't want to upset others by going on about it.

However my embarrassment has gone now...I just don't think MIL's childhood was very poor at all....I know her parents were extremely loving and that she is very materialistic now...a side effect from her going without shop bought pants as a kid.

I suppose I haven't really forgotten some of the poorer times...but they don't fill me with shame...I'm not vain enough!

I agree with waddlecakes

Perhaps your mil is trying to find common ground for a conversation, knowing that you had a similar childhood and trying to draw you closer together with shared conversation. sometimes I am so Pollyanna I make myself sick

We didn't have similar childhoods. She grew up on a farm in a foreign country and I grew up on a North West housing estate in England!

YABU, and you sound hard work. Why shouldn't people chat about their lives. Maybe you don't like your MIL very much, you might have good reasons for that. But being repelled by other people's conversations about their childhood, that's just odd.

I don't see what reading misery lit has to do with telling your own experience, tbh.

I grew up with tales from my Nan of living as a LP with four children during the 30's. Although I had my children before minimum wage and CTC's and suffered relative poverty, things were no where near as bad as many have had it, or do in the rest of the world.

I think it is good to remember how lucky we are to have the standard of living that we do. I think more and more we need to learn to appriciate small pleasures.

There are many that would like to return families to the poverty of past generations, some who unfortunately have the power to do so. It doesn't hurt to be reminded that there are people damaged by being bought up in relative poverty.

OP, I think you should share more of your own past and then move the conversation on. I don't understand why some on here think that it is rude to talk to close family members about personal stuff. What should you do, sit around making small talk, like in Victorian times, under some pretence that you are part of the "polite society", or "chattering class"?

My dad does this a lot, and he did have a horrific childhood and adolescence. But he does it from a sense of pride and has a ridiculous sense of achievement about how far he's come.
He also used it as a spur to ensure that his own children never went through the same levels of poverty and abuse. It's an insight for his children as to why he's a bit weird about some things as well.

Altinkum who are you addressing when you say "You've no clue"? Not me I hope...because you have NO clue about my childhood or what I experienced.

When I saw the title I immediately thought of the thread about remembering a hungry boy at school, then lots of people shared their stories about being that child.

Wasn't that your thread OP?

I think how you feel is much more about your feelings about your own background.

I also don't think its your place to define how bad or not bad your MIL or anyone elses childhood was.

OP I know what you mean.

SIL is always going on and on and on about how awful her childhood was. Mine was utter shit, and by objective standards, 'worse' than hers. It irritates me that she keeps going on about hers, when I don't mention mine at all, and DH doesn't really talk about his either. But I know that that is because I have had shedloads of therapy and have reached a better place (although clearly not good enough to not get annoyed by SIL!), whereas SIL has had none. The thing that I find really hard to deal with is how she talks to my Dad about her childhood, with the result that he gets all worked up about how awful things have been for her and for MIL (her DM) and how dreadfully sad it all is. He gets really maudlin about it and it makes me want to scream! I know why it annoys me - it seems that he has more insight into someone else's misery rather than that which he helped to create. But that is exactly the reason why he does it - he has more distance from someone else's misery than he does from that which he helped to create.

Yes, it can be bloody annoying, especially when SIL says things like 'You have no idea what it was like for me!'. But I try to hang on to the fact that my response to it is my problem and that no one is saying anything to wind me up - they are saying what they are saying because they are still effected and hurt.

I can't speak for neo, but I enjoy hearing about people's experiences and their pasts and their anecdotes and dramas etc, but when it's a matter of fact sort of thing or humorous or pertinent to the current conversation.
I am also fine with someone having a moment and wanting to have a chat about difficult stuff.
What I find irritating is when it's presented in such a way as to elicit a certain response, you know when its clearly not just a conversation its an invitation to sympathise. orinappropriate timing (my dear mother bringing up the awful story of how she got the scar on her head in front of my young child) or the same things being repeated over and over and over with no advice (such as I think you would really benefit from some counselling to talk all this through) ever accepted.

As someone said upthread, it's really not about experiences it's about personalities.

OP you sound a little like you think there is a 'cutoff' where people can talk about their poverty.

Does this mean I win? We had to be careful with water, not just food, actually had a limited amount we could drink because it could quite literally have meant the difference between life and death.

Such was life on the land in the 70s in outback Australia.

neo why are you always so angry?

Is it the 'tragic expression' that is the issue rather than actually what she says and whether someone has had a worse experience?

My gran tells of her childhood, using the netty, the twofold joy of getting an orange because it would be wrapped in tissue paper which meant you didn't have to use newspaper to wipe your bum. I enjoy listening to these stories because they help me understand how much things have changed, but they are not told with a 'woe is me' face, they are just matter of fact, there were streets of folk doing the same thing in our town in the 1920s.

Sorry OP but I think you are being unreasonable. Why does someone have to experienced the worst of something in order to be allowed to talk about their lives?

If you feel that your childhood was poor but happy (cliche number one) then it shouldn't be such a major leap to have a childhood that was both poor and unhappy - or even not that poor but very unhappy.

I think you're talking about personality and behaviour, rather than poverty really.

You are a self-reliant introvert who finds gushing, attention seeking and trying to control your audience's reaction weird, repellant and manipulative.

Your MIL is an extrovert, used to having people around her and living through them.

Perhaps you feel you've had to be self reliant and envy or find bizarre her easy assumption that she will always have a compliant audience. Or I could be projecting there.

I think this thread might have gone differently if you didn't post such a grim title.

Your issue is that you think your MIL is attention seeking and exaggerates her childhood to get sympathy. This irritates you as you feel that your mother and you are dignified and restrained in not talking about it.

The trouble is you can't tell people what they feel. You can't tell people how to process the damage done by heir childhood. And a person who becomes attention seeking and endlessly seeks sympathy may well be acting out the lack of attention that had in their chikdhood

I went through years of being ashamed. Then when things got better I felt oddly guilty.
I try to talk about it now because I really refuse to feel ashamed anymore.

Anyone looking at me from the outside may well roll thir eyes because life must look easy. But you deal with a dreadful childhood until you deal with it.

It's the subtleties of how someone presents their life.

I can't deny that there are some people I have come across who aren't conversing with me, they are undoubtedly telling me I should treat them specially or differently purely based on this one aspect of their life experience. I find it manipulative personally.

It's really hard to try and put the subtleties into words, but somehow it's presented as an excuse for some character flaw they're aware they have but have decided they're justified into not tempering it because of a particular life experience. Sometimes they're almost daring you to compete with a worse example and then they can judge who gets precedence and who they may deem worthy of them toning it down a bit.

Just as an example I have a wonderful, kind friend who has gone through some horrific stuff and just occasionally when she's at her lowest or something cuts particularly close she may say or do something she instantly regrets and apologises for. She may offer an explanation, but she certainly never justifies and condones herself with it.

Amber that was my thread yes. Maybe I'm going through something at the moment related to coming to terms with things....I don't know. I never thought about that thread I must admit but it's an odd coincidence that that memory surfaced recently and now I'm finding MIL hard work...

Feminine I don't know what you're talking about...I'm not "angry" as a rule at all