Bumpity I definitely agree with your comments about "happy mum, happy child" as it concerns normal people. I think that motherhood gets so idealised sometimes that there is an expectation that it should always be really great and fulfilling and stuff, and then when it's not like that sometimes then I think there is a danger that people either blame themselves or blame their children. It's far healthier I think to realise that it won't always be good fun, that there's sometimes tension between the wants and needs of the child and the wants and needs of the adult and part of parenthood is judging where the compromise should lie. I think with most nice, well-intentioned people though they will tend, in the first few years particularly, to always put the baby first, and if women who already have kids have a bit of authority to be able to say e.g. "go and have your shower, if the baby cries for two minutes while you're getting dried, it'll be OK" that is a good thing.
The amount of adult MNers that hold significant resentment towards their parents as a result of childhood experiences proves that DC are not as forgiving or resilient to the consequences of our parenting decisions as perhaps we would like
I don't really agree with this. I think with Stately Homes, and just the nature of an anonymous forum, there's an overrepresentation of adult children of abusive parents on Mumsnet. I think AIBU attracts a lot of abuse survivors trying to get an impartial opinion on their relationships with parents who were abusive when they were children and are difficult now. I think it's a mistake to extrapolate back from there and say that if there are so many adults on here with toxic parents, then lots of the people who are on here who are parents are going to turn out to be toxic. I think that the number of people on here who turn out to be toxic parents will be small, as it was in my generation, but they will be all over whatever the 30 years hence equivalent of Mumsnet is, spamming the boards up with tons of stuff about their dysfunctional parents.
Your comment about "forgiving of past decisions" suggests to me misunderstandings, miscommunication, well intentioned people who are nice but get it wrong sometimes. The thing is, abusers steal the clothes of nice people like this. They make trouble under the guise of misunderstandings, accidents, miscommunication. A few examples:
- you're ill as a child, you tell your mother you feel really bad, and she tells you to stop being lazy and get to school. You get to school and you clearly have a fever and you're shivering, your mother gets phoned to pick you up, she goes "darling, why didn't you tell me you were feeling ill?" She puts a cool hand to your fevered brow and asks the school to phone a taxi home. In the taxi, she shouts and screams at you for making a fool of her, making her come to school, having to spend money for a taxi to take you home etc. You know that if you'd insisted about feeling ill in the morning you'd have had this screaming match about that instead. In the future when this episode is referred to, it will be that time when you were feverish but you insisted in going into school because you were so keen on school and then dear mother had to come and pick you up half an hour later.
- your granddad "playfully" pokes you in the chest, repeatedly, every time he sees you. It hurts. You tell your mum, his DIL, and she tells him to knock it off. With fake concern he asks if the child's skin condition has been reported to the GP yet, and whether it will affect her chances in school, where surely she must be excluded from games and so on. DIL tells him what mince this is and to give it a rest, and from then on, your granddad barely speaks to you and refers to you to other family members as "the sensitive one".
- your toxic MIL appears to be a reformed character once your kids are born, saying lots about how precious these children are and how much she wants to be able to support you all. So you invite her to come visit, for a few days every few months, and she accepts gratefully. But it's weird because she seems to get more and more angry as the visit continues, like you get the impression that she really hates you but she's trying to hide it. And then you notice every time after she goes home something in the house is missing, or broken. Some of them are small things like the shelf of the fridge is broken, some of them are potentially very dangerous, like the little tin of ant poison has been taken out from under the hall shelves and thrown in the kids' toybox, and there's ant poison all over their teddy bears now, which you have to throw out, and just be glad that you found them before they did. And you think, there is no way someone would do that deliberately, would they? But it's just... one thing. Every time.
Can you see the difference between these sorts of episodes and how normal, well intentioned people behave? It's subtle, specially from the outside, but the truly abusive ones have some things in common: there's usually a pattern, it's usually repeated. It's small, plausibly deniable things. There's one story for the adults and one for the children. And there's efforts made to discredit anyone who calls them out.
Honestly if you've lived it your life, and I did, you get to a point where you doubt your own grasp on reality. Maybe it's me, you think. Maybe I am the problem. And women who grow up in those environments often walk straight out the house and into a relationship with an abusive man. And they use exactly the same tactics, gaslighting, isolation, being the life and soul of the party outside the house. And the thing that drives me up the wall actually is that people have no problem accepting that men do this to women and we call it domestic abuse or coercive control, but when people do it to children it's all "you probably just took it the wrong way" and "when you're older you'll understand" - i.e. people outside accept the abuser's disguise. And it is hard, I know that, it is hard from the outside to know what really goes on behind closed doors. But it's also not all that helpful I think to try and avoid the difficulty by saying, well, every kid probably has a different (valid) perspective on their childhood than their parents have - @bumpitybumper that's what I perceive you to be doing. I mean every kid does have their own valid perspective on their childhood. But that doesn't mean that there is no difference between abusive people and people who are a bit shite but trying their best. I had one bog standard not-that-good parent (sorry dad) and one abusive one and you could drive a bloody artic lorry through the space between their parenting.