To wish my mum would accept the real history of this non event???

[LellowYedbetter]

God almighty.

When I was about 13 I played a daft joke on my mum. I asked her to go into the record shop and ask for a fictional album. I named it something really gross like “Suck the infected toenail” by “necrotic foreskin”

She went in and asked for it. Back then there was no computer records so the poor staff had all their books out searching for this album and commenting on how gross the title was. All the while my mum is arguining them down that they should stock it as I’d told her it was a new release.

A daft, non event really (although hilarious at the time)

Anyway, 25 years later she refers back to it constantly “hey, remember when you ... “

Thing is she has all the details wrong and has plain made some of it up! She now insists that my two kids were present and they were doubled over outside the record shop (I was 13, they weren’t born!) my sister was present and was really embarrassed (she wasn’t born!) and loads of other stuff

If I challenge her on it she gets arsy and defensive and insists that her version is right. Everyone knows it isn’t! My kids tell her she’s wrong all the time and she gets mad and makes up more parts to the story to back herself up. She tells all the family her version which causes everyone to believe that I was in my late 20s when I did it!

She does this with loads of stuff and I find it so annoying. No dementia etc, she just likes adding parts to stories to make them sound better but it makes me look a twat at the same time

My mother does this!!!!!!!! There’s a particular story - my eldest brother removed my door handles to spite me one day, and she is still telling everyone I bloody removed them myself to avoid going to school. No matter how many times he and I correct her. Makes me look like such a twat.

Glad to hear it’s not just my mother!!!

Good prank though

My mum does it too! Although the story she tells is one that I'm am really embarrassed about, and she makes it a million times worse by adding all these ridiculous made up bits, and if I argue it just makes it worse!!

A non event to you, perhaps but a continuing embarrassment for your mum?
She makes herself feel better for falling for your prank by making you sound worse?

My mother used to do this but to the extreme.

I’d speak to people I hadn’t seen for a while and they’d ask about events that had never happened but they’d heard it from her. Really mad stuff like me dating a butcher to trivial things like me buying a new phone

I never understood it.

If there isn't dementia involved, then I would say that this is a case of "Who laughs last, laughs longest".

Play her at her own game, think of something that happened which was fairly innocuous (say she farted once on a bus in town), but make it get bigger every time, culminating in her shitting her pants right in front of the Queen.

My mum does this and it's worst because she is adamant that she has a completely faultless memory and you aren't allowed to challenge her otherwise she sulks and my dad takes her side. She would not be told that a VERY famous mid-90s song did not in fact come out in the early 80s. No, we were all lying, despite the singer still being around and no way old enough, she remembered exactly when it came out because she bought it from the shop as a teenager and listened to it at X party etc etc. NONE OF IT POSSIBLY TRUE AS IT CAME OUT 15 YEARS LATER. Even wikipedia doesn't stop the sulking.

My mum changes stories to suit her narrative. I told a teacher my mum told me off if I didn’t do a particular thing myself. I remember clearly saying it and why I did. My mum changed it to I told the teacher she’d beat me with a stick if I didn’t do this particular thing myself, which I would never have said as it just wasn’t true. I didn’t say it but I play along now because she genuinely believes her story is true now. Tell a lie often enough etc.

Oh well.

It was a dickish thing to do. Perhaps making up stupid stories is a family trait?

This is actually a psychological phenomenon i.e. distorting/misremembering past events. Doesn't mean there's any malice or dementia about it.

She’s always done it. Another non event - my son said something offensive in the post office queue when he was about 4. I told my mum and she asked if anyone heard him. I told her there was a woman behind him that pulled a bit of a face.

When she retold the story to family members it had changed to:

“Oh guess what happened to Lellow! DGS said XYZ in the post office and there was a woman stood behind them who Lellow said looked “dead hard” and she tutted and told him to be quiet and so Lellow ended up arguining with her!!”

It morphed further down the years to us being asked to leave the post office as everyone was complaining!!!

Early dementia possibly ...... or what is known as 'received memory' that is if we rerun scenarios over and over in our heads, they becaome an alternate reality.

I have exactly the same situation with my Mum. It drives me mad. For example I did very badly in my A levels because I did subjects that I was told to do in order to get into a specific course at uni (which turned out was a load of rubbish) and i wanted to do other subjects that i actually enjoyed and was good at. To this day (20 years later ) she still brings up to everyone that she will never understand why I did so badly and why I chose to do those A levels when i was no good at them. Absolute fiction and a period of my life that I really would like to forget about as it was truly awful. Situations recently mostly involve her sulking for days over not being included in family information that she actually has been told but has completely forgotten about.

It's called getting your own back.
You reap what you sow - enjoy!

My mum does this and it has led to all sorts of arguments. Most recently she asked me to return shoes that she believes I had borrowed (4 years ago!). What actually happened is that I tried them on and then we chatted about how, although lovely, they didn't match my outfit. So, I never borrowed the shoes. But my mum will NOT be told and outright called me a liar . She does similar things with my sister and my BIL, weaving fanciful tales that she pulls out at family gatherings to insult/offend whoever is the star of these stories. Incredibly frustrating when you are on the other end of these tall tales. And like yours, my mum will not hear of it if you tell her that she's wrong. I get told off like a 5 yr old for "contradicting her". I get angry just thinking about it

@notsofast - Ah, it's like we have the same mother! We have the exact same drama with mine where she will literally be in tears to aunties etc wailing about how we "never tell her anything". So, we get calls from family members annoyed on her behalf all about why are we not including our mother etc etc, when in actual fact she was informed several times! I can't fathom if she actually can't remember, or if the drama is just far more appealing.

Seriously though, you'll probably both find you're misremembering the event for the same reason, the Self Promotional Bias.

This phenomenon is caused by each individual wanting to remember the event in a way that puts them in a good (or not so bad!) light. For your mother, she is likely to make your prank sound more elaborate in order to make herself seem less gullible and also make you look more scheming and mean to her. For yourself, you are likely underplaying how mean you were in order to salve your own conscience that you played an embarrassing trick on her.

It's not just a parent/child phenomenon, it's a human trait across all relationships and its just the way we remember things. If we truly saw how we had behaved/spoken then I reckon I would die of shame for some of things I have done. I suspect most people are the same.

Its a mechanism to retrieve memories without hurting our own minds so much, so don't sweat it, just be aware of it.

Then tell everyone about the time your Mum shat her pants in front of the Queen.

Pay backs a bitch eh? hahahaha

So you made up some bollox to make her look like an idiot, and now she's making up bollox to make you look like an idiot.

🤷🏼‍♀️

It was a really good joke, though. Necrotic foreskin😂

I'd love to still be around when your children are making the same sneery comments about you, you do realise that none of this is original behaviour, people embellish. The OP played a cruel prank and maybe deserves all she gets back!

My mum does this too, completely makes shit up or embellishes actual events. No dementia either, I think hers is attention seeking.

My auntie tells people that she lost 1lb a week on WeightWatchers over the six months it took her to lose a stone.

No level of discussion or explanation will persuade her otherwise.

And the number of times I've said to my mother "There is a difference again here between what I actually said and what you heard" can't be counted. The last example was on Monday. Drives me bonkers.

YANBU OP

My mother does the same. I swear that she would insist the sky is pink if it suited her to do so. She will never back down, and when presented with lots of evidence to show that she isn't right she comes out with a very wounded "well I don't remember it that way" so we're dicks for spoiling her lovely memory of something fictional.

We don't speak much these days, and this is one of the reasons. I can't trust her to be honest about anything.

My mum is the same, although she has a version of a good sensible parent with lots of happy times . . . not sure where I was?
Anyway, I heard a memory is a recollection of an event of the last time you remembered it. (If that makes sense)
So if it happened 20 years ago, she may have had 40+ memories of the day, so its like chinese whispers and that's why memories are not as clear after time

My DM used to do this too - with much more serious consequences.
She made things up and believed they had happened. It was dreadful when my DF was diagnosed with dementia because she just wasn't caring for him [getting her own back for a very acrimonious marriage] and SS didn't believe me.
She even wrote complete lies in a diary [which I had got for my DF to help him remember what he had done each day but she used it instead].
I think it's called confabulation.