AIBU to be bitter about something that happened nearly 20 years ago when I was a child?

[StardustHunter]

In the spring of 1997, when I was 7 years old, I attended an entrance exam for a very prestigious private school. It was arranged by my mum. At the time, I was attending a poorly performing state primary school. Despite the passage of time, I vividly remember the details of that day. I remember marveling at the opulence of the private school and its surroundings. Compared to my school, which was a crumbling, decaying dump, the difference was like night and day. It almost resembled stepping into a parallel universe. I remember the playing fields with their immaculately cut grass, the smartness of the uniforms, and the palpable sense of prestige as I entered the school building. Though I was very young, it felt like a vitally important moment in my life. Despite being from one of the poorer areas of the UK (I actually feel ashamed telling people where I'm from), and being from a polar opposite background to most of the other kids who were there, I remember thinking to myself that this was where I belonged. I was awestruck by how well behaved the other kids were and how polite everyone was. My school was a chaotic madhouse of disorder and indiscipline by comparison. I remember sailing through the entrance exam and being one of the first in the classroom to complete it. As I left and returned home with my parents, I was hopeful and confident that I would be accepted, and genuinely believed I would be returning there a few months later. That didn't happen. Those few hours I spent at that school, on that day, are the closest I have ever felt to being where I wanted to be in life. I have never came close to experiencing that feeling ever since.

This remains a cause of friction between me and my mum. After I repeatedly pressed her on why I didn't get accepted to that private school, she finally revealed that it was because she couldn't afford it. I am uncertain as to what the fees were at the time, but I believe they were several thousand pounds per year. Yet still she sent me to do the exam, knowing that she wouldn't be able to pay. To this day, I do not know why she made me do it anyway. To be honest, I'm surprised the school even allowed me to. They could probably have deduced by looking at my home address that I was probably from a poor family and my parents were unlikely to have the wealth needed to sustain a private education for me. Yet off she sent me, dangling the carrot and giving me false hope. I had my chance, did everything I was supposed to do to grab it, but it then transpired that I had no chance whatsoever from the start. Here I am now, 18 years later, languishing on the scrapheap with no job, money or prospects, waiting for the end to come. I was sadly not able to overcome the constraints imposed on me by the upbringing I had - being from a poor area, having a poor family, going to an appallingly bad school and having uneducated, unintelligent parents. I feel that getting into that private school was my only plausible route to success. Also, I have two extended family members who went to private school as kids. They used to look down on me because they were all in private schools and I wasn't. I went NC with them a long time ago for that and other reasons. They're thriving now as adults, which further foments my bitterness about the whole situation. I've been wanting to get this off my chest for a while.

So your life from then on was a big pity party? YABU so much I could sing it.

JOURNO ALERT!!!

I and many others have fell for this big time, the op posts an inflammatory post then sits back and waits for the replies, and usually doesn't bother coming back as she/he has all the material they need for their story

, I've been here years, I should know better...

Ah.

The ASD explains the strange familiarity of the writing style. It's just the sort of phrasing DS uses when he's in a down patch (yep, I bet he'd use 'foment' as well, because he relates to books better than to people).

Stardust, at a guess, what you need is some regular structure to your life. It doesn't need to be The Big Career, but it needs to be something that takes you outside the house, regularly, to people who are expecting you to be there. Isolation and depression are really common in young people with ASD.

Doesn't sound like a journo to me, SSD. Not unless the style manuals these days say 'Write in old-fashioned circumlocutory style'.

Every thread could be a journo or a troll

To be honest, if this helps the OP or another person reading it, then no harm done

I think the most important thing you need to learn in life is resiliance. You need to be able to pick yourself up when life has dumped on you, scrape off the shit and start marketing it as fertiliser.

I am academically inclined but didn't go to a great school. My DM died part of the way through my schooling so I didn't the A level grades I was capable of. So I got on two buses every weekday for another 2 years to go to the local FE college and sit another set of A levels. Got the grades I needed and became the first person in my family to go to university. I now have a good job.

Your life didn't stop when you were 7. You still have the abilities you had then. How are you going to make the most of them. I know from other threads here that some people with ASD do need to revisit issues frequently to try to process what happened. However, if it is stopping you moving forward with your life then can you find a way of labeling as "one of those shit things that happens in life" and move on from it. Don't let something that happened when you were 7 put your life on hold.

Another story to think about
Harland Sanders' father died when he was 5. As he was the oldest child he used to look after and feed his younger siblings whilst his mother worked. He started work as farmhand aged 10. He started a number of businesses as he got older but his big success was in the food sector when he started selling fried chicken. KFC was born.

Your poor mum. She's trying so hard to say that you simply didn't do well enough to get the scholarship you needed. So instead, she's letting you resent her and blame her. Grow up. You're 25. Take some responsibility for yourself. No one stopped you doing well whatever your school, plenty of people have worse childhoods than you, worse starts in life, but they get on with it and do well anyway, through character and determination. Pull your socks up.

SSD, it sounds very plausible that that's the case.

Just one other thread from the OP, it asks how she will manage the finances of her parents when they die despite them only being in their fifties.

Since you don't have the wherewithal to get up off your bum and achieve something for yourself as an adult, instead choosing to harbour bitterness and resentment for poor reasons, I doubt you'd have flourished in private school either. You would have needed determination and a lot of effort and positivity to do well in that environment.

You're 25. I was older than you when I started my degree, which I paid for myself, and then my masters, then some more postgrad qualifications. Who are you blaming for your lack of effort now, it can't still all be your mothers fault?

I agree with clam and others. The OP reads like the first few lines of a particularly bad Louise Mensch novel.

YABU. Only a tiny fraction of children go to a private school and the rest muddle along somehow!

YABU to let something from so long ago colour your life now. Do evening classes, do an OU degree, read! There are loads of ways to educate yourself, out of school, as an adult.

And work. Work hard at whatever job you're in, and you'll be promoted. Be positive, be determined, and stop writing yourself off at the age of 25 and blaming your poor mum for it!

Having read your OP, have you considered writing for a living?

Don't.

Your prose is unrealistic and flowery. You probably think it's eloquent, so just don't. Save the world the pain.

YABU the fact you don't have a job is not your parents fault, even in the most deprived areas there are opportunities there, i agree that if you don't come from money then its harder to get into some professions, I'm a senior nurse and earn decent money , i paid for my own university fees and i come from a working class background in one of the dodgiest areas of the uk, i don't think you can blame your parents, they obviously recognised your potential but just didn't have the funds to see it through.

ssd, there's also the possibility that this is a genuine poster, who has read all the YABU's - I think almost every post is saying that in one way or another - and has decided that she's not coming back because we're not giving her the answer she wants and she's upset about that.

It is very hard to let things from the past go. There is no telling what the real circumstances surrounding this are but on the face of it I would advise you to let it go.
You can't change the past, you can't change what other people are and what they did but you can change your attitude to it.

I have two sons, one is extremely clever and when it was time to go to secondary he sat for a scholarship and was awarded a full bursary. I thought long and hard about it but declined.
We are dirt poor and struggling financially at the moment. It was a long journey, fancy uniform and other barriers that persuaded me. My son accepted my decision, although quite reluctantly.
He trusted me, as his mother who has always done her best for him, including going hungry so him and his brother could eat. He sees the massive sacrifices that I make to ensure that their needs could be met. When he is an adult I believe that will combine with his own hard work to enable him to achieve success in his chosen field.

I speak as one who had a really shit education and who had a younger sibling receive a far better one due to naivity on my care givers' part.
Parents and care givers often do the best they can with the circumstances that they find themselves in at that time along with the experience they have.

Only you know what their true motives were if you look deep inside yourself and examine this with the utmost honesty and integrity.

Hth.

Let it go.

Since you don't have the wherewithal to get up off your bum and achieve something for yourself as an adult, instead choosing to harbour bitterness and resentment for poor reasons, I doubt you'd have flourished in private school either.

I agree, tbh.

Hi OP,

I too come from a very sh*tty area of the country that usually makes the headlines for all the wrong reasons. I also went to a dump of a state school, came from a single parent family and I didn't succeed in getting the best grades... the first time.

However after a couple of months feeling sorry for myself and working a minimum wage job I decided that no one but me was going to look out for or do the best by me. So I took a couple of years out to work and save up as much as I could then resat my A-levels, was accepted into a very good university and got a first class degree in a challenging subject. Through hard work and perseverance at uni I earned a scholarship to study for a PhD and through that have a way in to decent career. That sense of 'nothing comes for free' has stayed with me and I have 'climbed the ladder' in my chosen career much quicker than my peers.

There are times I also feel bitter about my upbringing, nothing wrong with feeling a bit of self pity once in a while, but really it's not helpful or an excuse for doing nothing about it. My siblings let it consume them - my sister became a heroin addict and died in her 20's and my brother is a functioning alcoholic who lives on benefits and hasn't worked for nearly 15 years.

Instead of being bitter and looking to blame your parents / upbringing on your sh*t life, empower yourself. Sit down and make a list of things that are important to you, and start to think about what is required to achieve those goals. Think in years, decades even. There is no quick fix, no helping hand, no easy ride.

Agree with comments regarding the irritating, weirdly familiar style of writing.

Assuming OP is genuine, something similar happened to my DH. He was actually awarded a full scholarship to a very well known school, but his DM fretted about the distance he would have to travel to get there - about 30 mins on a bus, each way, and the place was turned down. He went to the local Grammar, instead, and has done very well. As memory serves, he has only mentioned the full scholarship story to me once - as an amusing example of his mother's lifelong over-protectiveness - it certainly doesn't haunt his days! Forget about the past and move on - you can make your own good fortune.

All of which is assuming the OP is genuine, of course.

OP, your education couldn't have been that bad to enable you to write in the way you do

Being ashamed of the area you come from and sneering at your parents is not good. Thousands of people every year don't pass entrance exams, job interviews, X Factor auditions...

Dh sat Winchester College exam. No way pil were going to be able to pay the fees as fil was a telephone engineer. Dh was completely flummoxed because there was a French component to the exam. His knowledge of French was precisely nowt. It was a shame, as in spite of this he did very well indeed but not well enough to beat those who had been coached since a foetus to get in. I don't think the experience ruined dh's life!

My mother gained a full scholarship to a (very) top girls' school. She hated it and left when she was 15 in spite of being top of her year. It prompted a letter to The Times from the headmistress on the theme of scholarship girls being a waste of money.

Anyway, the fact of the matter was you sat an exam, didn't pass, or at least didn't pass at high enough a level for financial assistance. There you go.

You've implied you went to a shit school with no discipline but your OP doesn't contain the errors I'd expect from someone who was as uneducated as you say you were.

Whatever do you want to do? Go back in a time machine? Punish your parents for their failings?

If you have problems currently, you need to define those problems and get them sorted. You must only be about 25. You have a lot of time to go and get the GCSEs/ALevels/Degree you need for what you want to do. You need to forget the past and influence your future proactively.

Your poor mum. I can only imagine she hoped you would get a scholarship. You really need to let go of this, decide what you want to do and go for it. I went to a shithole school. I'm not languishing on the scrap heap. Theres no reason for you to be either, your future is in your own hands. Do something about it rather than blaming others.

The writing style is incredibly irritating and littered with basic grammatical errors so OP should definitely NOT pursue a career writing anything more than shopping lists - and even those with caution.

Strange that someone else thinks it's weirdly familiar - it is, but damned if I know why.

Have you been to Zeebrugge OP? Or maybe you were too MissDisorganised1 in the past?

A Jewish woman, whose mother thinks Communion wine looks delicious, perchance?