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.

I didn't love my parents beyond the fact there were my parents and a feeling that I ought to feel something about them.

I have had counselling and understand why it has been better for me not to love them fully. They were both pretty flawed people, who no doubt parented in the best way they could. However neither of them loved me or the rest of my siblings unconditionally so it's not really surprising I struggled to truly love them.

It was only when I had a DC myself, I became able to experience what proper healthy unconditional love felt like.

When I was a child, I wanted my parents to separate, so that I could go to live with my Dad. When I realised it was more likely I would end up living with my Mum, I wanted them to stay together, so I wouldn't live with her on my own. Now, I am upset that my Dad didn't stand up for me and my siblings. My relationship with both parents is complex. Deep down I think there is unconditional love, but our relationship is quite superficial. I try not to scratch the surface, as I probably wouldn't like what I would find underneath. I sometimes wonder how I will feel when they die. I fear that I may feel some sense of relief, but I'll never say it out loud and will continue to mourn for the relationship we never had

Well, I just adored my parents, I was so close to my mum but now I find it harder and harder, they moved abroad over ten years ago and now there is little common ground, I don't feel she is interested in my life but likes to talk about hers and people I don't know in a lot of detail so I'm lost half way through the conversation.

I'm sad that my kids might disregard me in such a way one day though :-(

I also get what you are saying. My parents were very abusive.
After she left my dad, my mum used to hit me for no reason. I was the eldest of 3. She was the single mum and she relied on me I guess. But I was 11 and didn't always get it right.
She was never there, always working, coming home stressed and the screams and sometimes beatings would start and go on and on...
Despite the pain I still loved her... but I have a 8 old DD. I would not even dream of physically or mentally harming my dd. This has made me ask myself many, many times how my mum could harm me this way... do it once and do it over and over again.
I wonder sometimes if I love her as much as I should. I don't seem to feel much empathy for her when she is hurting and I feel guilty about it. If I don't speak to her for some times I am fine with it.. The sad thing is that she is now reaching and trying to be the mum I have always wanted but it is as if.. I no longer want it/her...
I do understand and it is so very sad that adults do not always realise the impact their actions can have on their children and on their future relationship.

I do wonder if there is a disparity between how people judge (? wrong word but I can't think of the right one right now) their own parents and how they imagine their own DC will 'judge' them.

I feel shit reading this because I think I'm a pretty crap mother. I love them (3 dc) so very much but find the demands of being a parent really difficult. I dread to think they'll feel ambivalent or even negative about our relationship when they're older. Feel quite teary now 😓.

Not my biological dad (don't know him), but my stepdad from age four. My mum died when I was ten and my first thought as he awkwardly hugged me when telling me she was dead was along the lines of "but you don't even like me". When he died two years later, I cried. I had always wanted him to love me, but he didn't, despite what his family still tell themselves. Very rarely I think he tried, but I was scared of him and the difference between his relationship with me and the one with my brother, his real child, was obvious. Although he is still "Dad", I'm ashamed to say I was also relieved when he died. His family took us in and the rest of my life had so much more love in it than he would ever have given me. But my little brother never quite settled/fitted into the new family as easily and that makes me feel guilty for my relief.

Margot I'm (horribly) relieved that I'm not the only one.

hownottofuckup I've been reading the thread properly as I'd just skimmed before, and I don't think I'm too bad. I have far less patience than I'd like but the three dc together would test the patience of Job, quite frankly.

If I lose my temper I apologise and talk it over afterwards, and they get loads of hugs and kisses and I tell them I love them every night at bedtime (and other times as well). I just feel stretched too thin. Don't know how people with large families cope.

My mum did love me but disliked me and didn't enjoy being a parent.
lovebeingonthetrain OMG! YES! that's it exactly for me
with the added nuance that she craved motherhood so much before she became one, so on the one hand was bitter and externalised the fact that she didn't actually enjoy the experience when it happened (was always someone else's fault that she didn't get to be the mother she wanted to be, often mine) Whilst at the same time keeping up the appearances to the outside world that she was embrasing motherhood and all was fine and she couldn't understand why I was "difficult" with her (when behind closed doors it was a very unhappy home for me)

My mother makes me feel deeply anxious. My Dad, not so much, but he died a few years ago. She has been staying with me for the last fortnight and I feel like i am going to burst, I am so stressed. So no, OP, you are not alone.

Honestly I never really loved my parents. My father was a sociopath. He wasn't abusive towards me, but I always knew what he was, even when I couldn't have put it into words. I cut all contact with him as soon as I could. I don't think I ever really even thought of him as a father, not even as a little kid, he was just that thing that was to be avoided. Luckily he saw that I saw what he was quite early on, and he mostly stayed out of my way from that point.

My mother was just a very messed up person. She'd have said she loved me, that I was her world, and that was probably true, but it was always just something said, never something that came through in her actions. She was very anxious, always extremely stressed out even when everything was fine, and she could be very mean and rude. I was always on edge when I was around her. She made her own life miserable and dragged me down with her for years. I hated her at times. The most positive feeling I ever had towards her is pity.

On top of their personal faults, they were just terrible parents. Every decision they made seemed designed to set me up for failure. I don't think they were actually trying to do that (my father certainly might have done just for kicks, but I don't think he was interested enough to bother), but they weren't really trying not to either. I wasn't even an afterthought, I just didn't factor in at all, they did what suited them.

Love has always been a rational emotion for me. I love people because of how they treat me, not because it's expected. I've never really understood how people can love people who don't treat them well, or love people just because of what they signify and not who they are. If I don't like someone as a person I certainly can't love them.

And whilst she does feel a form of "love" towards me, I don't doubt that. I feel like she loves her idea of what her daughter should be to her. In a very selfish way. And she is constantly disappointed and angry towards me because I am not the abstract daughter that she imagines she should have. I was always a square peg and she loves a round hole.

She had no interest in who I actually am. Just feels sorry for herself that the daughter she imagined when she was pregnant or TTC or whatever isn't materialising in me.

And all that comes out as bitterness and anger. She loves me, but it's bitter angry love.

And that's not worth having. Its better to not have her around than to be loved in that way.

I haven't stopped loving them but I no longer hero worship them. They aren't the all seeing, all knowing beings I believed they were as a child.

They're just people who muddled their way through parenting and presumably adulthood as best they could.

This was a realisation which only really fully hit me after I had my daughter last year.

It has made me see them in a new light, but not a negative one.

I know what you mean, OP. Although I do still love my Dad and will be utterly devastated when he dies, I did have some issues with my Mum, and although sad that she died, was not totally devastated.

I started to fall out with Mum more and more as I got past my teens, and we just didn't see eye to eye at all. She was pretty emotionally unavailable a lot of the time (to be fair to her, with good reason) and I only honestly remember one time as a child that I truly felt loved and cared about by her. One time. I'm sure there were others, but they don't register in my memory. She never used to cuddle me - apparently I used to wriggle as a baby/toddler to get off her lap, so she stopped trying. :(

Anyway, I understand - but it's a bit of a taboo to say it to people, isn't it, especially if they do have parents that they still love and adore - they just don't get it. :(

hownotto - this is something I do worry about. I notice that I do copy some of my own mother's less pleasant behaviours (shouting when stressed etc.), so I make huge efforts to offset them by being loving and cuddling my DC as well. They know they are loved; I didn't.
My mum also used to go off pop with no warning - so I make sure to warn mine that their behaviour is starting to stress me and if they don't stop I'm going to end up shouting. I realise this isn't ideal as a parenting tactic (obviously!) but it's better than going off like a landmine when they don't expect it.

No one is perfect, obviously, but I hope I'm doing a little better at being emotionally available and less unpredictable than my own mum.

Sometimes you have to love your parents, not as parents because they probably fucked up in a lot of ways, but as people, whether that's people who are mentally ill, people you can't have in your life anymore or people who aren't very nice. Everyone has some redeeming qualities. Focus on those. Try to see how short life is. You might end up only feeling sympathy, not love. Most people do the best they can with the wiring they've got and most people only want to be happy.

Thanks for this thread OP.
Hope it's helping you. it's helping me. I had what sounds quite a typical outlook pre-kids- thought things were normal and needed to believe that DM and DF did their best in bad circumstances, had bad childhoods, didn't know any better. parenting was different back then etc.

Since having my DC I know hell would freeze before I would make my parents' choices. I question if there was/is any love for me. They had affection for some of their DC but not others of us. My DPs are alive but I am grieving what I wish they had been like, the grandparents they could have been to my DC etc.

OP and anyone else dealing with it, please give yourselves a break and at least allow yourself to feel the way you want to feel about your DMs or DFs now that you are all adults. They're not in charge of your feelings any more, they're not looking into your mind. To me it feels like it's part of reclaiming my adulthood to at least do this. More

I think it is possible for people, including parents, to exhaust your ability to love them. Not that you hate them either, just end up detached.

^^This statement sums up a lot for me.

No one should give you stick for you wanting to explore how you honestly feel. Not everyone has great parents - they can leave a tangled ball of confusion in their wake

I couldn't honestly say I love my parents any more.
I did, until relatively recently - as you say OP it's a gradual thing.
I don't feel people who are emotionally/ verbally abusive deserve to be loved. They always made me feel like a joke, not good enough.

With my DM everything is about her. I too feel that I've somehow disappointed her - in my career, my choice of husband and in the way I parent my DC. I do think that she and I both feel sad that we don't have the relationship we'd like, but for totally different reasons. She can be a bully.

My dad can be very narrow minded, lazy, critical and argumentative. I think that's more a case of being a grumpy old man though tbh. I love him and he's very supportive but I do find him difficult at times, despite being fairly close to him.

Both of them are quite controlling I guess.

My parents split when I was little and I think the things I've heard them say about each other over the years has damaged me no end. How can it be healthy for the people you love best in the world to slag each other off? All in all, their divorce was reasonably amicable and I think they genuinely put us kids first. But as I got older I could see their imperfections and they both chipped away at the other to reinforce that. I actually think my childhood was pretty fine (despite mums rages), it's the stuff that's gone on since I hit my mid-20s that's hurt the most.

Friends with normal relationships with their parents fascinate me. The parents are supportive and involved without being overbearing or controlling. DH often finds me analyzing what's so different really hope I can be like this for my DC...

I wonder sometimes if I ever loved my Mother (Dad out of the picture). I was certainly afraid of her (and still am a bit). Its so long ago I barely remember any good times.

She was abusive, self-centred and selfish, never supportive. She doesn't know me know and to be honest I feel like she died already. Hopefully I won't care when she dies though I have been plagued with guilt (though nothing for ME to feel bad about) so perhaps this too will be awful. She did say she loved me a couple of years ago but that was during one of her many hospital visits (over my lifetime) where nothing was found to be wrong with her (possible Munchausens) and she may not have known who I was. When she did recognise me she was often very nasty and accused me of stealing, etc. Before she had dementia she kicked up such a storm I almost had to have her sectioned (mentioned by various Health Service professionals).

Good to know I am not alone but so sad to hear it all. Have had counselling but it drags up so much horrible stuff I'd rather forget I stopped it.

Margot, you mean you have triplets?

OP I kind of get what you're saying. The relationship I have with my parents now is definitely different from what it was when I was younger.

I get on with my Dad really well and we have very similar personalities but my Mum and I have locked horns a few times. I think it started happening as I was getting into my late teens and really becoming my own person with my own opinions on everything. There's plenty of things she did that I don't agree with and wouldn't do myself but we get own more like friends than parent/children now.