To realise I sort of stopped loving my parents when I grew up

[lovebeingonthetrain]

Did this happen to anyone else? I adored them as a child so it's sad really.

[ThumbWitchesAbroad]

Beau - I'm with you on that.
My mum was the sort of person who, if I got 95% for something, wouldn't congratulate me, but would ask "what happened to the other 5%?"
She would also greet me when I went home for the weekend, while working away during my "sandwich year" at University, with "what are you wearing?" or "you've got really bad spots" or "what is the matter with your hair?"

She was an utter emotional vampire. Sucked the life and joy out of everything. :(

[MiscellaneousAssortment]

I snorted at that, I've found my people (in a kind of sad way but we'll ignore that for the moment!).

I was in my late 20s before it dawned on me that I wasn't a complete failure at primary school. I just thought that I was stupid and an also ran, a shy awkward ugly child who had no redeeming qualities of wit or cleverness. Not that I dwelt on this, it's just who I thought I was.

It finally dawned on me that it's not normal to tell someone off for 'failing' their 11+ because they dropped two percent in the English paper. I was better at English than Maths so there was no excuse, apparently. Oh and also I should feel guilty because I stopped the other more worthy kids from getting higher than me.

So let's just rewind that. I got 100% Maths, and 98% English.

And I was told I failed. And I believed it!

Ffs.

And clocking in on the self centred emotional vampirism:

My husband left me when he found out I was pregnant... I phoned up in a state, sobbing, from a park bench where morning sickness and shock had got the better of me. Told my parents and they ... put the phone down on me! Apparently it was very upsetting for them and they needed time to process it, oh and I should have broken it to them gently. No question over how I was, how I got home, care, support, concern for me. Nah.

Then it was 'Oh how could he leave the family, I'm so upset he left meeee' err, that was mum other speaking, not me!

Follows a long trail of everything being about my mother, all the time. When I was ill, it was 'how can you do this to me'. When I broke my ankle, it was 'how dare you come home in that state' (having had to walk 2 miles home with the bones crunching together each agonizing step of the way). When I got electrocuted, from the mains, and was thrown from one side of the room to the other, hitting my head and blacking out, came downstairs for help, got screamed at to go away, as I was ruining dinner.

Lots more and mostly worse, but don't want to dwell on it too much today.

[TolpuddleFarterOATB]

I understand OP, but my situation is different from yours.

Since having children I realise I don't love my mother. She wasn't abusive, in fact mostly she was a good mum. However, my father was an unpredictable, sometimes abusive, alcoholic. Since I've had children, I can't reconcile how she carried on living with my father and putting us children at risk. She says it was for financial reasons she didn't leave, which in some respects I find harder, as money really isn't everything.

Funnily enough, I don't hate my dad. In fact, in some respects I love him more than my mum. He had a very abusive childhood, which has led him to a life of alcohol and mental health problems. He couldn't choose his past. However, my mum did choose him, and that I can't forgive. Complicated!

[gonetoseeamanaboutadog]

I feel very sorry for your mum tol. Sounds like she also has had, and is continuing to have, a hard life. You can't help how you feel but please remember all she did for you and that she's getting an unfair deal.

[ScreenshottingIsNotJournalism]

I understand that tolpuddle.

In many ways I find it harder to forgive bystanders who do nothing, they condone and confirm the attacker's actions and make it so many times worse

[WhoTheFuckIsSimon]

I do have sympathy for my mother.

Her mother was very similar to her, so thag was her role model. Oddly enough she hated her own mother, resented her and slagged her off and could barely tolerate visiting. All the things she slagged her off for she was guilty of herself but totally couldn't see how similar she was to her mother.

And in turn my Gran had an awful upbringing. She was the youngest of a large family and at about the age of 3yo her mother decided she couldn't cope with her anymore and sent her to live with her her grandmother. So my gran never lived with her parents and siblings and from what I hear her grandparents resented her.

My family is fucked for generations back.

[murmuration]

All the things she slagged her off for she was guilty of herself but totally couldn't see how similar she was to her mother.

This is what I'm really terrified of. What if I'm like my mother but can't see it?

[WhoTheFuckIsSimon]

It terrifies me as well. Sometimes when I'm stressed I can hear her in me and I can't stop!

[ScreenshottingIsNotJournalism]

my mother also didn't like her mother

I used to REALLY worry I would be like her when I had kids.. to the point of thinking I should never have kids…

But I'm quite confident I'm not. For a start on some level I think my mum knew I wasn't happy at home with her (specifically with her).. even if she'ld never ever have any insight into her own behaviour. Because of the constant excuses:

• well if I didn't have to work I'd be a better mother
  
• if your father was more supportive I'ld have had a different career and would have been a better mother
  
• I'll be a better grandmother than I am a mother (she's not) because I'll have the time I didn't have with you (she has said this for as long as I can remember, at least back to when I was 7 ish )
  
• I always wanted to do (insert something superficial like more holidays) with you but I couldn't because (insert excuse)
  
• I wanted to have lots more children. (as if she'ld some how be a better mother if I was one of many)
  
• I wanted to work from home but excuses excuses excuses
  
• Mothers and daughters are always a difficult dynamic
  
• Son's wreck your house but daughters wreck your head (so she'ld have been a better mother if I'ld had been a boy)
  

She knew. She'ld never ever ever admit it. But she knew. My childhood was filled with her searching for external excuses for home being miserable.

I'm happy in my skin as a mother. Which was a BIG surprise to me. She never was.

[ScreenshottingIsNotJournalism]

re the working excuse, it wasn't that she was grinding to keep a roof over our heads, she actually was a stay at home mum at first. She hated it and got a part time job more for adult company than anything else. And that led onto full time work. My dad worked in a well paid job though she wasn't a single mum doing it to cover the rent!

That's what actually happened. But she'll never admit anything in her life was her choice. She's so bitter. her life happened to her and it's everyone elses fault. And if life had been different she'ld have been a different mother…..

bullshit.

[ScreenshottingIsNotJournalism]

That said, statistically there are probably quite a few parents on MN whose kids will stop loving them once they realise they don't have to.

I know a local mum who reminds me a lot of my own, the way she is with her daughter. I don't see it ending well. Maybe I'm projecting on her for some reason bu t I don't think I am, she doesn't physically resemble my mother in any way. Just the way she is with her daughter and how she talks about her and other people.

[murmuration]

I suppose I do have the advantage that I wanted kids - I was accident, and my mother told me as a teen that she had considered abortion. Doing the maths with all the US abortion stuff in the news recently, I'm realising quite how much that meant she didn't want kids - given she didn't find out she was pregnant until she was over 5 months and abortion had only just been legal in the US at those dates. I'm not even sure it would have been legal to abort a 20+ week fetus at that point, and contemplating that must have meant she really didn't want kids. Although I suppose some of it could have been the shock of discovering how far along she was.

My Dad totally didn't want kids and continued through that pattern until I was a preteen, at which point he realised he wanted a baby/toddler and it was too late. He actually is a better grandfather than he was a father.

I don't give my daughter lots of excuses, although she has recently been asking me not to go to work :( , and I have to explain that it's something I do for the family to make money to buy stuff (I am sole wage earner, DH is chronically ill and is SAHD). But I feel like it's more an explanation than an excuse, if that makes sense?

[ScreenshottingIsNotJournalism]

Also, I'm hugely generalising based on my experience of my one mother, but I'm guessing that it's not just me who didn't turn 18 and go "right I'm off, you were a shit mum when I was a kid and I don't have to love you any more". I tried and tried and tried to build something resembling a loving adult daughter-mother relationship with her as an adult. For far too long. I spent years of adult hood being hurt by her over and over. If she'ld have been able to be kind and nice to me as an adult I'ld have got over the childhood stuff and just enjoyed finally having some sort of mother-daughter thing.

[UpsidedownDog]

I don't love my mother one bit. I can't even find it in myself to care about her. I pulled her up on the lack of contact with our DC (her GC), and she came of with "I don't have time to chat". She said that and yet just a couple of hours before I arrived at her house, she was on the phone to her DB for over an hour. So much for her 'not having the time to talk to her GC'. She's a hypocrite and 2-faced to boot. When I pull her up on her hypocrisy, she goes absolutely nuts, shouting and screaming at me that I'm a bitch etc, etc.

There's been a lot of stuff she did when I was a child, but the main thing was that she rarely listened to me. I was abused by a couple of neighbours, and although I tried to tell her about it, I kept it to myself because of her previous form of either not listening to me or just plain dismissing what I've said as my 'quest for drama'. Unfortunately there's no chance for justice as the abusers are now dead (one from cancer and the other from a fatal accident).

I'm coolly civil to mum, but I will never tell her about things such as being in hospital, going on holiday, how the DC are doing at school or other things about our lives that I would deem too private to share with her.

[LucyGrotson]

This thread is so helpful. to all of you struggling with these kind- of parents.
My DM is a narc, her own DM physically and emotionally abused her as a child which must be why my DM is how she is.
I know I should give my DM credit for not being as bad to us as our grandmother was to her, (for example she didn't regularly hit us) but I am still very angry at her for how inadequate she was and how unhappy we all were.
I do accept she won't change now but am still struggling with where that leaves us/me.
Does anyone else find it helpful to spend time with other nice DM-age women as friends?
I have a really nice older friend and she has a nice granny-like (well, like how I imagine a granny should be with them) relationship with the DC. I think it helps, although it can be painful to see the difference between the friend relationship and mine with my own DM.

[ScreenshottingIsNotJournalism]

No, lucy. That's the short answer.

No. My mother who disliked her mother used to allocate me surrogate grandparents. Not just older people we knew and were close family friends with, she saw them as her choice of grandparent for me. It was part of the problem.

Some were more than happy in the role, but at other times it's made people visibly uncomfortable. She did it to my DDs too, she called a distant cousin and her husband their aunt and uncle (to the children, on front of them).. because he was her chosen preference for an uncle type in their lives. Everyone looked a bit creeped out (including me!)

It is not healthy behaviour.

If your DCs have older people they are close to that's great! there is merit in that in itself, you don't need to turn it into something else

[ScreenshottingIsNotJournalism]

It was just one of the many ways that my mother tried to make reality fit her vision of what she wanted it to be: trying to squash people into roles of other imaginary people. For the people close to her it's like being a square peg constantly being pushed into a round hole.

She couldn't just love people for who they were, it always had to relate to some bitterness. We couldn't just enjoy a close family friend who happened to be of grandparenting age, she had to be my "grandmother figure" because of my mother's resentment and bitterness that her own mother didn't fit her ideals

[Choccywoccyhooha]

Yanbu. I have no love for my own mother, who in turn, never showed me love as a child. I have no happy memories of her from my childhood at all, but plenty of abusive, terrifying, shaming ones. I don't think my mother ever even held my hand, let alone hugged or kissed me. She has systematically tried to control every aspect of my life and still does so and yet biology still pulls me in and stops me being able to cut her out of my life - I feel guilty everytime I try. My life will never be my own whilst she is alive and this is the source of much heartache for me.

I hope you can work through your feelings, it's a horrible situation.

[ScreenshottingIsNotJournalism]

choccy

biology kept pulling me back for years and years too.. then one time.. it just didn't!
Usually after a bad "episode" with her I'ld be upset but also hate that things went bad and I'ld crave a reconciliation.

Then one time… nothing! that feeling never came! I realised that I didn't miss her like I usually did whenever she crossed a line or goaded me into falling out. Nothing. I felt nothing… except this niggling thought/feeling that I should miss her and it was wrong of me to not miss her.. but that faded with time

[CancelTheCheque]

I don't love my mother and no longer have any contact with her. Don't feel guilty about disengaging with an unhealthy relationship, you can't change someone else but you can protect yourself. It took a while to work through all the feelings but I am 100% I did the right thing for me. Wish I'd done it a lot sooner to be honest.

[SeaEagleFeather]

perfectstorm wrote something some years ago that still seems to sum it up for me:

I will never fathom why blood alone should mean you're forced to let people hurt you over and over again, as long as they aren't physically or sexually abusive. It makes no sense. Life is too short to let bad/damaged people screw with you, no matter who they are, unless they are your own kids. You don't owe anyone else your unconditional love and time.

[LucyGrotson]

Thanks screen and sorry that your DM tried to do this inappropriately.
I appreciate the warning and your post has made me think, but I don't feel this relationship is forced. Though I'd be the first to admit it doesn't come from a healthy place. (I don't come from a healthy place!). I wish we all had a better relationship with my DM.

Fact is, it's well apparent to my DC that their DGM is not really like the other adults that visit us. They comment on how their DGM 'doesn't ever play with them'. Worst is that they will try to give her their toys to keep, as bribes to be friends with them basically, or possibly to 'cheer her up'. (yes, she takes them away and keeps them) this is why we are LC as it became apparent once the baby stage was over what my DM expected from the DGM relationship.

I think this friend relationship is probably on the right side of what I do agree could be a grey area. She's a family friend, known both my parents since they were all kids together. she's kind, pays my DC attention. We don't see her frequently due to distance but it's always nice and not about role playing in an unhealthy way, I don't think.

Where's my DC are ignored while my DM talks about herself or literally complained at for falling short in their affection for my DM. She takes very little interest in their actual lives but feels they owe her Hollywood style displays of total adoration when she rocks up.

Her expectations as DGM wrongfoot me because my DM has never told me she loves me, she never hugged or cuddled us but did only normal ritual social greeting type hello or goodbye kissing. But she demands ostentatious narc supply from her DGC?

I do remember how much I hated her putting me on her knee to stroke my hair on the rare occasions she felt affectionate towards me. It felt so out of character so it was confusing and made me feel resentful and then guilty I didn't like it.

As far as loving my DM or not, being LC is helping my anxiety whereas loving her was/is not actively not helping my MH. i'm hoping to get where she affects me a lot less in time. It's hard so this thread helps.

[LucyGrotson]

X post seaeagle
That makes a lot of sense. (And/but requires boundaries to be in place/built to apply)

[nauticant]

I didn't love my father and I don't love my mother. What I do feel in the case of my mother is a crushing sense of obligation. When I phone her at her home once a week, as I hear the ringing tone my heart rises that perhaps the phone won't be answered but when it connects my heart sinks.

I can't say I was abused as a child but there was something very off at home. It felt like a place where a number of individuals would gather without anyone having any affection for anyone else. Having not gone into therapy I struggle to find the words.

On the positive side as I've become older I realise that my parents had shit childhoods. I think it would have been better in some ways for them not to have met and had children.

Writing this makes me guilty because I didn't receive the spectacularly awful treatment others received. In fact, as far as family is concerned, guilt is far more appropriate than love.

[ScreenshottingIsNotJournalism]

I can't say I was abused as a child but there was something very off at home. It felt like a place where a number of individuals would gather without anyone having any affection for anyone else. Having not gone into therapy I struggle to find the words

IMO family should be your "safe place" where you can be yourself and getre-charged with love when you need it.
I didn't like being at home, I didn't feel relaxed around my mother (and still don't as an adult). She didn't have to be doing anything awful, I felt like that all the time. She wasn't a person you could let yourself be vulnerable around, she would either take it personally (she used to get pissed off if I was ill for example) or else she'ld be temporarily kind, and then throw it back in my face later (possibly years later)