I currently rent and have been lucky enough to inherit some money and am soon going to be able to buy my own home. My current home is a terrace in a northern city, everybody uses their back doors here, which means the middle terraces like us have to allow our neighbours plus all their visitors and delivery men etc access through our garden and we can’t lock the garden gate which opens out onto a busy road. It also has two “sheds” which are actually the huts for the disused toilets of the houses either side of us but our in our garden even though they are their sheds. It’s far too dangerous for our kids to play out there unsupervised and their garden toys are forever being nicked. There is one bathroom between 5 of us and the toilet is in there which causes issues. It has three bedrooms, but all the terraces around here have the loft converted into the third bedroom, so we have very, very little storage space. We have a kitchen and living room downstairs, but our living room is tiny and very cramped when we’re all in there, the kids have very little space to play with their toys. There is no hall and the external doors open directly into the rooms. We’re not amazingly well off people and have to be careful with money usually.
My parents live in London in a very nice 4 bedroom house with two large receptions, kitchen, 2 bathrooms, study and a conservatory and a large garden. They bought this for peanuts in the 80s and both retired in their 50s. Which is lovely because they come from working class northern families and my Dad grew up in a council flat and my Mum in a traditional terrace where she lived with her grandparents and parents.
For some reason, my Mum seems to have become really fixated on the idea that when we buy we should buy a terrace like the one we have even though it is really unsuitable for what we need.
This first came up when I mentioned our new house would need a second toilet downstairs for when the bathroom is in use and because a disabled family member who visits can’t manage stairs and hasn’t been able to visit recently because of it. It would be impossible to do that in a terrace around here. My Mum instantly got a right bee in her bonnet about it and started insisting that the solution was to buy a terrace with an outdoor toilet “shed” and get it back into working order. So we can send our kids in the dark, through a garden which is publicly accessible to strangers and anybody who cares to walk in, in any weather, with no heating and accessible to any small animals strata or wildlife that would like to make their home there. Apparently she had an outside loo in the 1950s and once we went to stay at a caravan for ten days which had an outside loo in the south of France, not fucking Yorkshire so that means it must be okay. Tried to argue back, not least because I think social services would frown on that arrangement, but she just wasn’t having it and insisted it was the perfect solution.
A few months later, the subject came up again because I mentioned how much I was looking forward to getting a garden we could make use of. She immediately said we didn’t need a garden. The house she grew up in in the 50s had no garden and it never did her any harm. So I pointed out it was the 50s, far fewer cars and kids played out in the cobbled streets, it was much safer and they lived in a community where everybody knew everybody else and most mothers were housewives so could take their kids out to the park any time they wanted to. It was common in those days pre Moors murders for fairly young children to walk from the city to the countryside on their own. But she was adamant we don’t need a garden.
She’s also adamant that we don’t need any more room because in the 50s they had a similar amount of room and it never bothered them.
So it all came to a head today because we have found a semi we like and she is dead set against it. I send her some pictures, and she responded with a picture of what she thought we should get instead, it’s smaller than what we already have, it’s an end of terrace, no room to expand. What used to be the kitchen has been converted into a downstairs shower room, and a tiny kitchenette has been installed in one of the reception rooms. It’s overpriced and a bit of a dump, maybe had a lick of paint, but clearly a buy to let where the landlord has just put the cheapest option in to make it habitable so it looks a bit institutionally and grim. Very small overgrown yard which has access through it. Overpriced too.
I told her I hated it and would never buy it. She emailed me back and said it was perfectly suitable because her Great Grandmother had lived in one just like that. In the Victorian era. In a great deal of poverty.
So I’ve finally pulled her up on it and said how hurtful it is that she keeps justifying telling us that we should live like others did when they were really poor and in a great deal of poverty. It’s like she doesn’t see us as worthy of anything nice and just thinks we should move into any old shithole because it’s all we deserve. I would imagine most parents would want to encourage their children out of a situation where they had to use an outside loo, were overcrowded and had no space for their children to play. I can’t understand why she is so desperate to push us into that situation. My brother, who she has always favoured, has a smaller family than me but a very large house in London. She never told him he shouldn’t bother with a garden or have an outside karsey or was buying somewhere too big because some Victorian relative who was one step up from the workhouse had made do fine with a tiny house.
I asked he to stop saying these things to me and told her it hurt me because she’s making us feel beneath her and less worthy than the rest of them and just that she sees us as undeserving and believes we should accept living a life in poverty. She has all the things she’s told us we don’t need, and has never in her adult life lived in the sort of place she wants us to live in.
She’s adamant she has done absolutely nothing wrong and wants me to apologise for being upset about it.
So AIBU, or is she?