To actually not like my Mum

[Mrchubster]

I have always had a strange relationship with Mum. Although I don't doubt she loves me, since my parents divorce 25 years ago, it's like our roles have reversed. I'm the mother, she's the child.

Approx 10 years ago she moved 150 miles to be near us and as she was retiring it made sense. At the same time I was pregnant with DS and thought how lovely it would be to have her close.

How wrong was I?! She is massively needy with a big dose of passive aggression. Everything is "poor me". She has made very few friends since moving here and so her whole world seems to revolve around d me and my DCs. Trouble is I don't enjoy her company, we have nothing in common and she only talks about herself, doesn't want to put herself out. She can be very critical of other people which I find wearing.. I can tell her something quite important and it will go in one ear and out the other. She'll then phone 2 days later wanting to discuss the issue. Well, no thanks I've moved on!

If I confront her behaviour she gets all teary I'm on my own, no one cares about me" etc...

Sadly I alsoI find her embarrassing company to be with. At a recent family event she spoke over everyone, talked about me as though I wasn't in the room and generally lacked any social skills.

It's now at the point where I don't tell her anything personsal because she just doesn't listen. It's a standing joke with me and DH that no matter what you tell her, she'll change the subject! I look at her sometimes and wonder how the hell we're related!

I feel angry, sad and guilty in equal portions. Guilty that I encouraged her to move here ( although I have said if she wanted to move back I'd be fine), and because I shouldn't feel like that towards my mum.
Sad because I would so love a close relationship with her (am quite envious of friends who are close to their mums). Angry that she just doesn't get it.

Her whole life seems to revolve around me and the DCs which I find suffocating. I have given her info on the local WI, church, gardening clubs but she's not interested. She has made very little effort to make any friends.

Her health isn't good, mainly caused by poor lifestyle (which admittedly I'm not very sympathetic about) and so she's doing less and less, becoming more dependant. I feel such a huge weight of responsibility to be everything to her, it has the opposite effect of driving me away.

DB lives 300 miles away and keeps his distance for exactly the same reasons.

She's 70 btw. I know I should accept her for who she is and get so frustrated with myself for having any expectations of a close mother/daughter bond. Sorry to bang on

Same here Sugar. I have lost count of the times I've tried to talk to my DM about her behaviour. The shutters come down and she bursts into tears, then I feel guilty for upsetting her and therefore don't discuss it again. Repeat ad infinitum.

I love my mum but I don't respect her I'm afraid.

She has character traits and habits that I just can't respect. She's basically a good person though.

Sugar...don't be so simplistic.
The fact that someone gives birth to you does not make them a good person, or fit for the job!
I would love to have a close relationship with my mother but she is the product of a rural Irish Catholic upbringing and IMO due to that has battled serious mental health issues all her life.
In many ways she has had a sad life.
but she has done things that I can never forgive.
My childhood ended at age 11.
That was when I became parent to my siblings.
I don't feel like I have much to feel grateful for.

Sugar. Most of my problems are lack of self esteem and extreme guilt - EVERYTHING is my fault. Only one person caused that and I refuse to feel guilt anymore. Your post is naive and insulting.

I have tried talking, over and over. I get sulked at, phone put down, pretending it never happened or insisting I am wrong. I was pushed into an abusive marriage. I tried to talk to her about the abuse once. I got told that I'd made my bed and I'd better lie in it and I didn't know how lucky I was.

She called me the other night. Seven minutes of her dog's illness, how her neighbour hasn't got long left and how much fluid they drained from his lungs, some random person I don't know who's died, her 'funny little foreign' doctor, and how the dust in the air has set her chest off. Nothing about me or the DCs. I did tell her last year that she was a negative person who always goes on about misery. She put the phone down on me.

sugar I'd bet a month's salary that all of us being horrible, as you say, share your longing for that mother. (V sadly I think our mothers do too. ) And I'd bet a week's salary that a hell of a lot of us have fixations on mother figures. Took me years to work out why I kept 'adopting' mothers in my head, and it's only just calming down now that I'm approaching 40.

Sugar have you never met anyone who you thought was nasty, then?

Well, nasty people sometimes have children. I recognise you feel alone, and may have spent your life yearning for a family, but some families aren't very nice.

I recognise I'm not 'allowed' to be 'unappreciative' of what my mother says to me, so I'll treat you to a selection of what she says about other people.

MNHQ, I do NOT hold any of the beliefs below.

On Katie Price, formerly known as Jordan.
"It's all her fault her son had cancer. It's those breast implants that caused it. Serves her right."

On Furriners
"Black men are rapists and very involved in the white slave trade, but no-one cares because of political correctness"

On gay men
"They all have sex in toilets- serves them right if they get beaten"

To two 13/14-year-old girls sitting on the bus
"You're fat. You need to stop eating!"

On the BNP
"They have some good ideas. They recognise that women should be in the home"

On Hitler, in response to Israel's actions regarding Palestine
"Hitler had a point"

And of course, she can't fathom why I don't like her referring to her local shop as the P* shop.

Euphemia...last year we took my mum on holiday as she is now widowed.
Fucking hell, it was grim.
I went to bed in tears most nights.
It was so bad we left a day early (I made some lame excuse) and when we arrived home I took to my bed for 2 days to recover!
It will not be happening again.

Well she is what she is.. but from having similar but more overtly aggressive DM, I feel for you I really do. A few suggestions that worked:

Give her something to look after. My DM always protested she wasnt a pet person, my more assertive sister ignored that & got her a kitten when my Dad passed. OMG the 'uptight OCD witch' (my DS's secret name for her) not only mellowed, she melted. It gave her unconditional love/a focus. She has never, ever hugged us: but that kitten got loved to death!!

Second, we widened her social circle. She didnt need to work but we insisted/chivvied her into a charity shop job just to get her out of the house twice a week. Low and behold she made friends for first time in years. She was still me, me , me and never ceased to tell us how awful being a mother was, but she wasnt quite so poisonous with it.

Also research local Age Concern clubs and volunteer schemes. And get her on the internet and search for over 50 friendship clubs, there are loads.

Sugar, Graham Dwyer has children but he's a sadistic murderer.

I'm very, very grateful to my mother for one thing: She has practically given me a handbook on what not to do. My greatest fear is ending up like her.

She is just a self-centered, conceited person, mother or not. She would have been lost without my Grandmother when we were little because she worked and she went out drinking while my Gran minded my sister and I. She has never offered to watch my 2 younger kids, she used to watch my eldest once a month but wanted €20 for doing it, plus she would land with a list of TV shows on Sky that she wanted to watch. I just don't really like her as a person, unfortunately.

When I was getting married, I wanted a Mum who would go wedding dress shopping with me. One who would give me away, one who would say she was proud of me. Instead I got one who acted like a spoiled brat and demanded her name be put on the invitation (it wasn't), and asked to borrow money off me to go. We paid for her clothes, hotel room, and got no gift. She made a speech and mortified my husband. She got blind drunk and tried it on with a neighbour. She told me off in front of my in laws for "an attitude" and then went round saying my husband verbally abused her. She twists everything. She spent Christmas 2013 with my sister and her husband, and was asked to stay where she was the next year because she was so negative. She missed my son's communion after promising she would cook a curry and bring it up. Cancelled last minute. She missed his first birthday because she had a headache. She missed her friend's 50th after promising to make a banner. Another headache. She is unreliable and untrustworthy.

If you could put up with a Mum like that and appreciate her, please give me some tips because I feel awful about not wanting to be near her. I can't believe a word out of her mouth and she is constantly on her phone on some stupid facebook group cribbing and crying about how she has nothing, about how she can't enter competitions because "I exist on very little a wk and I only have an old nokia phone, it's very hard" - she owns her own home, she has no debts, no mortgage, a car, all her faculties, she just wants everything handed to her and hates to see anyone succeeding.

I could go on all night but I think there are sadly a lot of you here who could finish the essay yourselves. You're not alone OP x

This is why it's so hard for children of emotionally abusive mothers. It's like living in a prison of silence. You can't articulate it as a child and society is in some kind of cognitive dissonance, in that it knows mothers can be nasty or even evil, but won't accept it in reality.

Haven't read the whole thread but your OP just made me feel a bit more brave (thank you?), I'm in a similar situation but at the potential move point. Hope you find a way to manage how she makes you feel.

sugar another thing. I want you to think about this very hard. It goes for amamai too. Would you say the same if this was a thread complaining about fathers?

Agreed, alteredbeast. I tried to tell people that my mother was quite upsetting sometimes as a child. But because I started with the small disclosures first to see whether it was 'safe', so to speak, I always got shut down before I could get up the courage to speak about the big things.

People will only listen if you tell them the most major details first, and that's just not how people disclose. They test the ground carefully, whether they're victims of child abuse or adult victims of domestic violence.

WyrdSmyth mine has put me down in front of my kids too - I don't allow food in my sitting room because I don't want it destroyed like ours was when we were little. In front of my then 7 year old she said "Oh let him eat his food in there, when did you get so bloody MEAN?" I was livid.

My sister is a make up artist and did makeup for one of my mother's only friends (is it bad that I don't even want to call her Mum?) and she sat heckling. "I hope you like big eyebrows". "I hope you're not planning on a subtle look" etc. It's all jealousy rather than encouragement. I gave my sister a box of makeup/jewellery/books that I was clearing out and my mother sat sulking like a child "have you nothing for me?" JESUSUSSSS

I'm another one who has an odd relationship with my mother. Thanks to MN I'm beginning to realise that she is probably a narcissist and that it's not me being a crap daughter. My DM also lives in a total shithole of a house yet will ring to tell me how tired she is because she's been cleaning all day. I refuse to go there now as the place is a definite health hazard.

The world revolves around her. She recently had an operation and rang me in raptures to tell me how the surgeon had written to her dr (allegedly) to tell him what a marvellous patient she was and how fantastic she has been in recovering so quickly etc, etc. She'll even bring me her birthday cards to read, and is delighted if someone has written something more personal that 'Happy Birthday' inside as it would seem to her that this in some way validates her as a fantastic person. I've given up trying to tell her about any of our achievements as the conversation always comes back to her.

As a child she would often threaten to abandon us. If we didn't kiss her goodbye every morning before school she would get really upset and ask us 'how we'd feel if she died during the day without having said goodbye properly?' Talk about making a small child feel insecure! She only lives half a mile from me but will often ring every day, sometimes twice if I'm really lucky, to lay on the guilt if I haven't rung or seen her for a couple of days. I work pretty much full-time and have my own DC to care for - a fact that seems to completely bypass her in her self-centered world. I'm sure she thinks I should be at her beck and call. She is incredibly overbearing and needy and I just don't feel that I can give her whatever it is she wants. I know that her childhood was not particularly happy - packed off to boarding school at a very young age, a father who made no bones about not wanting her and a mother who was also overbearing and clingy.

She is also strange at social gatherings - likes to be Lady Muck, holds court, laughs loudly and inappropriately, holds racist and homophobic views which she is quite happy to broadcast.

I really envy friends who have close relationships and enjoy spending time in their DM's company as I just cannot ever imagine being like that.

No definitely not unreasonable. You don't get to choose your relatives. I go through the motions with my own mother purely out of duty. But we are so different in our values (my mother is quite the snob) that I never really enjoy my mother's company. I think some parents particularly the last generation saw having children as a duty rather than a privilege. And that's how she raised us with many a martyred sigh. I on the other hand see my daughter as a much awaited blessing. When i see my mother trying to treat my little one with the same disinterested distain with which she raised me I have to bite my lip. Sometimes I honestly don't know why I don't have it out with her but I know the ructions it would cause wouldn't be worth it. And she wouldn't be able to take it.

Total shock at how many of us are out there feeling exactly the same way. It's almost like the last taboo.

I never thought of my mum being emotionally abusive because she doesn't put me down, but actually that's exactly what she is. She looks to me to fulfil her life, yet offers nothing in return.
Thank you all for helping me to see that

Last week she said to me " you do realise you're exactly the same age as I was when your father walked out on me". What am I supposed to say to that, as if it was some kind of challenge?? Very tempted to say " Yep and I don't blame him"

Yes Napolean - I have for too long felt it was just me being a crap daughter

Yanbu, my mother is horrible. I actively dislike her and frankly it will be a relief when she dies. There. Written that down now and won't take it back.

Yes, google NPD. It will be revelatory for you.

Mrchubster - I'd have said it

I live in constant paranoia that I'm like my mother with my own children. It's exhausting

MrChubster, my mother liked to tell me how awful her life had been, for exactly how many years. Those years just happened to coincide with how old I was at the time. Yet it still took me a long while to relate the two, how stupid of me .

She once told me 'your father said I'd die all alone, no family around me'. He was an asshole, but not a wrong one. It's not of cruelty, it is of her own doing. Telling me such things were meant to guilt me into staying, it did the opposite.

I totally hear you everyone. Can relate to not being able to express it as a child. I thought there was something wrong with me, as I felt uncomfortable and disliked a lot of the time. Though, she was/is always very nice to strangers (needs their approval) and I do remember her chatting to a stranger in a shop, being all friendly, and I wanted to tell the woman "she's not like that at home, she's horrible to us!"

Also remember her making fun of me and trying to get my two closest friends to laugh at me, aged 12/13. I could tell they felt uncomfortable. I just couldn't understand why she was doing it. Now I see my role was to be used by her, in that case to get approval from two young girls. There isn't even a straightforward emotion for how I felt! Confused, sad, angry, embarrassed, shocked - how could I begin to make sense of that? So I just wanted to be anyone but myself.

I learned early on never to go to her with a problem, she'd react with fury "how dare you make my life even harder!" In fact she's rage at my sister and I every night regardless. I was very scared of her.

If ever reminded of any of this she'll without fail either deny it or claim it was justified. I've never known her apologise for anything, I think she's so emotionally fragile, it's subconsciously too threatening for her to cope with.

Blimey this is cathartic!

Same altered. Thing is, I genuinely don't know where the line is between normal parenting and the toxic sneering and anger.

My mum always used to try and shame me and brother when we grew up for our appearance, saying that we looked dirty and scruffy and that I dressed like a "council house kid" because I had my ears pierced, Well, we were council house kids. It might not

Have been her fault that she couldn't afford nice clothes or a shower, but it certainly wasn't me or my brother's either. She was very ashamed of our poverty and blamed us for looking poor.

Sometimes I hear her voice when I'm telling my girls what to wear or to wash their hair and it makes me cringe.