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.

For years I felt ambivalent towards my parents. Friends commented it was odd that I seemed to care so little for them. I felt guilty and confused.

Through therapy I realised that actually I am bloody angry and disappointed with them, but for various reasons I had learnt to suppress these feelings.

I would explore your (lack of) feelings more, through therapy ideally, or by self reflection/ talking to wise friends/ the mumsnet relationship board.

You have my sympathy. I love and appreciate my dad more now but the opposite is true about my feelings for my mum, unfortunately. I won't fall out with her but get no support or warmth from her - she is disinterested in my children and that hurts. No massive big one off incident- just 30 years plus of low level avoidance of parenting - starting when I was a tween and been ongoing ever since. Sad.

I think I went through a slight ambivalence when I became an adult.

I am not very close to my mum, although I love her, but I really adore my dad and it's taken me until my 40s to realise fully how lovely he is.

I love both of my parents. It makes me very sad to read these threads and see just how little good mothering some people get. I suspect a lot of it is projection; the mother only sees the child as an extension of themselves and projects their self-loathing onto him/her.
Disclaimer: this could be bollocks.

I'm not sure OP really wants to keep hearing how much others love their parents and how sad her situation makes them.

Clearly there are some issues around your upbringing. Were they abusive do you think?

It sounds to me OP that you're feeling a distance with your parents that makes you sad, but sad for what? What might have been? The parents theyight have been - if eg age 3 your mum didn't scream at you, laugh at your clothes (that presumably you didn't buy), didn't call you names like 'bitch', didn't over-react and blame you for accidents and minor mistakes?

If this wasn't balanced out by a lot of love the rest of the time you were growing up with them....maybe it's perfectly understandable you feel emotionally distant. As a child you are totally dependent on your parents and as an adult you can see their flaws. Sometimes learning emotional distance is just a coping strategy. Are they still this difficult? (Hugs)

sort of spank. I think my mother saw having children as a fulfilment she expected in herself. And I am her disappointment that motherhood wasn't the experience she wanted it to be (including things that happened before I was born including not meeting my father earlier to have a bigger family etc - all that disappointment is projected onto me, the manifestation of her becoming a mother)

Me being born wasn't about me as a unique person in my own right for her. Even my birthdays are about her, if I saw or spoke to her on my birthday all she'ld talk about was her experience of my birth, it was never a celebration of who I actualy was at that point in my life! (the 10 year old, the 20 year old etc)

Parent's don't have to be "abusive" to be difficult people to love.

Some people are just cold, distant or troubled.. or plain un-likeable! some people just aren't likeable and some of them become parents.

They don't have to beat, swear at, neglect etc their children for their children to grow up and decide that they don't enjoy being around them and there is no point in continuing to invest in a relationship that isn't fulfilling

op I think you are in the FOG a bit still, it sounds like they were abusive - the scale is vast but saying to your child "you stupid fucking bitch" for an accident is abusive.

Be kind to yourself

I feel the same as you OP. Not so much 'odd' behaviour but I always felt that we were something to be put up with.

Mum could make things crap if she was in a bad mood or you didn't agree with her on something she'd got hung up about. It made her extremely hard to love with and I just ignore it now.

I always felt sorry for my Dad for having to put up with her quite childish behaviour.

I really struggle to buy birthday/Mother's Day cards because I just don't feel the words in the cards.

I am extremely conscious of this with my own children and hope that I can be a better mother.

I understand what you mean OP

I didn't get how dysfunctional our family was until I was older. I remember being about 12 and going to my mates house and thinking it was so weird the way she acted with her parents. Turns out it was normal.

Does anyone else ever read these threads and worry their DC might say the same about them when they're older?
I know I sometimes shout too much, can be sarcastic when frustrated (really working on that!) and my relationship with their father has been rocky, they've witnessed arguments they shouldn't have and behaviour I deeply regret.
But despite all the times I was wrong, selfish, unkind I hope they know I cared desperately and wanted to get it right. And that I really do love them to the moon and back.

I love my parents dearly, but there have been many, many times when I've deeply disliked them. My dad made my life a misery when I was growing up, he was financially very generous but horribly emotionally abusive. My mum was quite passive throughout it all, she said 'that's just how he is', but there have been times when she fought like a lioness for me against him.

It emerged last year that much of my dad's behaviour is caused by an illness that he has absolutely no control over, but I still struggle every day with the legacy of that behaviour and how it's damaged me as an adult and as a parent myself. That said, I love him and I wish nothing but good things for him. I'm trying not to let his treatment of me ruin my treatment of others, if that makes sense.

My BFF stopped loving her mother when she was a teen. Her mum used her as unpaid labour and childcare, criticized everything she did, and (at the same time) tried to be 'one of us' and flirted with her boyfriends. It was embarrassing.

She never went NC and thought of everything she did for her mother as her 'duty'. She was a much better person that I would have been.

So many comments on here resonate with me. It's been a slow process over many years but I don't love my parents any more - it is difficult to come to terms with because it just seems wrong.

Essentially I think that they're just not that interested in me. I'm an only child and I think DM probably didn't really want children, as another poster said, I can't remember being kissed and cuddled as a child, or them ever telling me they love me. DH and I tell our kids we love them all the time, to us it's just a natural thing.

DM is a bullying control freak and is constantly undermining DF, looking back it was a horrible environment to grow up in, now it goes on in front of my DCs, they are 10-14 and think it's awful. I was raised not to question my parents and that their way was the right way - for a long time, until I realised what was going on, I treated DH like shit, there was no respect, very unhealthy - it's better now, I don't think we'd still be together if it wasn't.

We're there for each other in a crisis and I'm truly grateful for their support when I need it - but I've got to the point where I only ask as a last resort with emergency childcare etc., because there's always an underlying current of it not being at all convenient. We don't socialise much, just fairly brief duty visits every few weeks, sometimes longer, although they don't live very far away, consequently they have become very out of touch with the DCs, who openly say they don't like DM I'm afraid neither do I, and that's the crux of it.

CooCooCachoo, your point about mother's day cards rings a bell with me.

My sisters all buy my mum those cards with pages of verse about how much she means to them. I always buy a completely plain one.

I do love my mum a lot, but I just don't feel the same way as my sisters or indeed that she has been everything to me. She certainly was never emotionally supportive of me and has only told me she loves me once, and that was in writing!

It seems normal to me. I haven't loved my parents since I was a child. My siblings would probably say the same. My father is a very difficult person, very self centred and he was quite abusive to us as children, I'd say. I think my mother is the only person who likes him, she isn't nearly as bad but she's spent her life putting my father's needs first.

I would really prefer never to see either of them again but that's tricky to manage.

It doesn't make me sad, maybe it did a long time ago (I'm in my 40s now), I have many strong and long-lasting positive relationships, so I do feel lucky in general about relationships and friends. Also sometimes you don't miss what you haven't had. I find the idea of an adult wanting to spend time with their parents rather odd, I'd much rather spend time with friends.

I nearly didn't have dc because I didn't want them to think of me how I think of my parents, but actually I think that's unlikely. My father is particularly difficult and many people go to some length to avoid him, it's not really a parent-child problem in particular, and he's totally insensitive to other people's needs so he can be very hurtful. So I try quite hard not to be like that with my dc.

I must admit that a part of me is relieved that my mum's dead, because I can just picture how she'd have been with my DC as they get older and stroppier and it would have been awful. I'm glad that I don't have to deal with the stress of going NC or low-contact, because it would have been necessary but wholly awful - the FOG would have been overwhelming. It's a fucked-up way to feel, frankly.

Does anyone else ever read these threads and worry their DC might say the same about them when they're older?

Nope.

Used to really worry about this before I had children myself - that my (future) kids would experience me the way I experienced my mother.

But since having them, nope! I'm not perfect, I have a normal amount of shouty days, but I'm a normal mum, mine wasn't (she was in public, she played the part of loving mother.. but without actually being consistantly loving, which is really hard to describe to anyone who hasn't experienced it)

I'm almost relieved to read this thread. My mum is coming to see me Saturday and I'm fucking dreading it like I do every time she comes. I haven't loved them for years and I'm sick to death of feeling guilty for that.
People who meet them say they are lovely.
people I know, who don't love their parents have so much more 'official' reasons for it, that it makes me feel like a drama queen for holding on to anger and hostility, for my mum keeping me at arms length and just being too busy.
The main reason I don't really like her is the way she enabled my brothers to make me feel like a stupid waste of space with their constant belittling and teasing, and making me the fussy Whiney one if I complained. I don't tell her how I feel she has selective memory at the best of times, I know she would deny it.
She acts so hurt and bemused now when I exclude her from my life, she sniffs around me because I have a young child and she is all about babies and toddlers. I can't wait for him to be too old for her to be interested.

It's hard to tell if odd is odd, or odd is the tip of a very large and shitty iceberg!

People seem to believe that if you had abusive parents, that it's a very big and significant thing to happen, as abuse is such a dreadful thing. But, it's not that simple when you're looking from the inside -out.

I hope my son never feels like I do about my parents, especially my mum. But I console myself with knowing that I would never behave like she did to me.

I spent my pregnancy terrified that I would be the same parent as her, especially as she always said 'wait until you have children, then you'll understand', and also that I was just the same as her. So I was very very scared that I WAS like her and her behavior WOULD make sense.

It was rather amazing in the end. As soon as I held DS in my arms and fell in love with him, I saw my mother for what she was. Never have I felt that much conviction. I don't have it in me to be what she was. And I know I will make mistakes they'll be my own mistakes and not hers.

It was a liberating moment .

I was so worried I'd turn out like her I was determined to fake love if I was incapable of being a good mummy naturally...

Turned out I hadn't needed to swat up on attachment and how to create unconditional love between you and your child, or read with horror attachment disorders and how they can break a child before they're even a year old.

I was SO happy to find out by having DS that you don't behave like her as some kind of debatable, middle ground, borderline ok sort of thing.

What she did was so extreme, it turns out, and it made me see that no one would accidentally fall into behaving in the same way, unless they were already an extremely warped and unpleasant person.

I still find it incredible that she could ever have normalized her disgusting behavior. Especially now DS is getting to the age where I have 'and then she did this' type stories. Looking at him, seeing what a beautiful, innocent vulnerable child he is, makes her abuse fall into focus. I believed I was to blame, and somehow always felt much older and much more responsible, accountable than I now know could ever have been the reality.

And no, it was never 6 of one and half a dozen of the other.

Sorry, a long way of saying... Start with 'odd' and as you start questioning, you may come to forgiveness, or clarity, about your childhood and your parents.

You don't have to love them by default. Not if they don't deserve it.

I'm terrified my dc will grow up and feel about me how i feel about my mum.

I know she tried, i know she had it tough. I know she did everything with the best intentions. I used to do everything i could to please her and make her proud.

Until i realised that i couldnt live my life and make every decision based on whether my mother would agree/approve. I realised that everything she did wasn't about me- me behaving well and doing what i was told was a reflection on how good a parent she was, as were exam results, jobs, more about bragging rights.

I really felt it if i did things she disapproved of. Basically i was never allowed to be my own person or have my own opinions or feelings. if i dared be anything but happy and smiling i was "moody" or hormones. Never ever did she ask why i wasnt happy, or try to help.

I detached a long time ago. I feel ambivalent towards her now.

Yep anything to keep my mum happy to avoid a slap or an evil onslaught of criticisms. I was stupid, I looked ugly, I was boring etc. She would make me apologise and apologise until I was hysterical and would tell me I wasn't sorry at all. She used to turn all the lights on if our rooms were untidy and make us clean even if it was midnight. Everything was a huge deal couldn't confide in her as the reaction was awful about anything. She's nosey and asks pathetic leading questions I actually pity her for being such a boring cow. So yeah that's my story! My dad is fantastic and could have done much better

I know what you mean OP.

I grew up thinking I didn't quite belong, or fit in to the family.

I don't not love them, but I sometimes not like them, one parent more than the other.

There are things about them I find unacceptable, despite the "love" I have, which I may appreciate more once they are gone.

I appreciate them more, however, with geographical distance, which I have attained, by accident (?) or who knows (?)

I judge them harshly on several things they did, and they weren't small things, and they were ongoing.

I think the "stockholm syndrome" thing is a very good one to ponder, in relation to our own parenting - whilst we don't want to be our own children's "best friend" necessarily, how does one foster a relationship such that they can parent effectively whilst not jeopardising the bond that will glue you together as a family beyond the difficult years? I suspect a lot of it is to do with trust and empathy. Answers on a postcard...

*don't like them not not like them