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 MIL rewrites events - DH does to often their telling makes a better story and they hate to be corrected by anyone.

However, they both seem to have very poor "event" memories and I think that plays a role.

Sometime though even when I was there I don’t recognise the event as it’s so distorted often through retellings that I've msised - each one getting more away from what other people there remember.

I would love to hear your Mothers' versions of these events or are we to assume that your recollection of events is 100% accurate? Maybe you did borrow the shoes and, horror of horrors, you're the one who's wrong!

Fucking hell, OP was a kid at the time and it was a great joke. If her adult mother is trying to make her look like a twat now then she's the twat

No advice but just want to say I've laughed my head off at that prank

Ha! Yes, my mum does this too.

I stayed in hospital when I was three for an eye operation. My mum insists I didn't stay in.

I remember vividly Coronation Street ending, my mom saying goodbye, and the nurses turning off all the lights. Then the girl in the bed next to me immediately threw up all over herself and my mom helped the nurses to change the bed before she went.
The next morning, my mom turned up with some bread to make me toast because I wouldn't eat hospital food and the nurses let us use their staff room/canteen. Then we went to eat it in the smoking room where another patient told me I shouldn't rub my eye because I'd just had an operation on it like she had.

I remember it so fucking vividly.

My mom insists it was a day operation. It wasn't. Aaaah.

My Mother tells everyone that she and I were always “so close”; that I could tell her anything, we had a lovely relationship, and so on.

It’s all complete bollocks. She’s never wrong and has never been wrong, in her mind. If you contradict her delusions, she’s bloody vicious.

In the years I’ve been No Contact she has completely changed history. Absolutely bonkers. She’d argue that the sky is green and believe her own lies.

YANBU, OP; your mum sounds saner than mine but it’s still infuriating. I’d tell her to move on; it’s been years and she needs to get over it.

I think that “self promotional bias” stuff CheekyFucker posted sounds spot on.

I think your mum was probably quite badly affected by this “hilarious” joke which made her look like a twat in front of loads of people. It’s maybe a bad memory that keeps resurfacing, which is no doubt why it has come up so much in conversation over the years. It’s like a scab she can’t help picking.

@IHateUncleJamie My mum does that now. She tells everyone we're really close. We're not. We speak once, maybe twice, per week. She knows absolutely nothing about my life because she never asks anything about me and just talks about herself during our phone calls. She comes to visit me once a year and spends the entire time making clear she'd rather be at home. During her visits, we go clothes shopping and that basically constitutes our "closeness"

It's quite worrying how much this is a thing for so many. I've never had parents or came across anyone acting like this before. I'd be a bit concerned.

When I was probably around 10 or 11 and my brother was 8 or 9 we were out in the garden playing with some friends. It was a big garden and I was playing with a friend at one side and he was playing with the sisters of my friend at the other side. So I was no where near him, but I could see him.

Anyway, he got into a row with these two girls and he kicked the older one in the face. (!!!) In retaliation, she punched him in the arm. True to form he went crying to our mum, claiming to be the injured party.

In the meantime, I was discussing this with my friend, and I said "He deserved it, he shouldn't be kicking a girl" but as I said that my mum appeared behind me and heard it.

What happened next still boggles my head. I was taken into the house, smacked with the wooden spoon and sent to bed for the rest of the day "for not being loyal to my brother."

Twenty years later at a family party, my mother sat at the dinner table and said "Remember that time (sheepsheep) kicked (friend's sister) in the face?"

I was so dumbfounded that I just looked at her. I was speechless. We are no contact now, this being just one example of her antics, but this one event I still kick myself over that I didn't stand up for myself.

My mum tells anyone who will listen about my drug free birth..... I had g&a and pethadine, and a local block and morphine (after)
So strange! First birth, she was with me. I didnt let her in for subsequent deliveries (they where drug free, ironically)

www.theguardian.com/science/video/2019/mar/14/why-your-memories-cant-be-trusted-video

This video is very interesting about how memories can change and be changed. A story loses nothing in the telling, as they say and if its elaborated on for years that's the person's reality. Your memory may not be as reliable as you think even if it is closer to the truth.

I think your mum was probably quite badly affected by this “hilarious” joke which made her look like a twat in front of loads of people. It’s maybe a bad memory that keeps resurfacing, which is no doubt why it has come up so much in conversation over the years. It’s like a scab she can’t help picking.

Puppymonkey has it ^

@DirtyDennis Absolutely batshit, isn’t it.

My mum does this.

I have a distinct memory from age 5 of a particular pastel coloured sweet.

My mum insists that no such sweet ever existed. That I must be referring to a memory of a pastel wrapped sweet, from when I was 18m old. And uses the anecdote as an example of my prodigiously early memory.

Yep, my mother does this too. Like she's always going on about how me and my brother lived next door to each other and how DD would sneak out and call for her cousin and they would play together. We did live in houses next door to each other, but I moved out about a year before he moved in when DD was only 4 months old (so definitely no sneaking out to play). She gets really angry if her version is challenged.

My mother does this!

She likes to add details that give the story a whole different slant based on things that happened afterwards.

For example, a recent story about my sister being asked to do something by her then-partner, very innocent and normal, becomes him "demanding" that she do the thing "OR ELSE", and everyone present knew that there was threat implied.

This is not the case.

It was a normal innocent request and nobody had any reason to suspect that he would later become very demanding and controlling. I got really annoyed by this and confronted her, saying that had there been "threat implied" that there is no way I would have let it pass unchecked! She insists that we were all blind to it, but that she JUST KNEW. When I then say that she had a duty to do something about it if she thought he was threatening her she gets really defensive and everyone comes to her aid saying I am being horrible to her.

She does this about her relationship with my father and it leaves me never quite sure what to believe. She is in other respects a very truthful person, so I cannot fathom why she chooses to misrepresent things in the past like this. I honestly think she projects so much that she really believes this version of things. It's like she is looking at the past through a lens.

Try the head tilt and a suggestion of a dementia assessment next time she comes out with this fiction.

It was a good joke! You enjoyed it back then.

Now she is enjoying embellishing it. It might be based on a true incident, but is her story now and has an independent life of its own.

It might be best to accept it as a good story, not a true historical account. And have a good laugh as it evolves.

Truth is very subjective. I am sure your remembered version of the event is not 100% accurate. It’s as true as it needs to be to suit you. And your mum’s version suits her.

We have this going both ways in our family.My mum, my sister and I all have differing memories of specific events. I don’t think any of are consciously misrepresenting our memories but time and experience has shaped what we can recall, what we have conflated with other events and what we need the ‘truth’ to be. Equally I remember events in my DC’s childhoods very differently to the way they remember them.

Interestingly my husbands memories are generally very accurate as far as they go. He’s often mentioned something I have totally forgotten or remembered very differently and subsequent checks have proved him to be absolutely right. He has an incredible memory for details of dates, names of hotels or pubs, who was there, what was worn, what car we had, what was in the charts at that time etc. At the theatre last week he reminded me that the last time we were at the venue we had sat about 4 seats over on the left hand side and I had been wearing X and the band had played X, Y and Z. All I could remember is that I was pregnant at the time and that child is now nearly 30 years old! However he is not good at remembering conversations or bits of family gossip or history arising from events. I have long thought that he is undiagnosed high functioning ASD and his incredible memory for facts of this sort is part of my thinking around this.

Ooh, I have to admit a bit of guilt with this phenomenon as well .

Our teenager years were quite tough - had a rough family situation going on, and our parents didn't handle it well - weren't great parents of teens. My mum especially became obsessed with a piece of historical research, and would discuss it endlessly to me and my sister, who were a bit traumatised and distressed on top of the normal teen angst.

I screamed at her during one argument 'Nobody cares about the bloody history!' (I was, pathetically, trying to get some family time at an age when kids normally think family time horrendously uncool).

My sister was already at university. It couldn't have been her. But my mum still recounts this to me as if she said it, complaining about her selfishness etc etc.

😂😂😂 That is hilarious. What on earth would make you do something like that? Poor woman.

Sounds like making up stories is in your family though 😂

This so reminds me of DH lovingly recounting a tale of one of our the two year old twins giving a bottle to his newborn brother.

Except said newborn never ever took a bottle!

LOL.

I thought it was just my Mum who made up random embellishments to things. I have an excellent long-term memory so it doesn’t work on me. Sometimes it is just out and out bollocks e.g. “El8888 said she would love to have a slim waist and body shape like mine”. I have never said anything of the sort, call it vanity but l prefer the taller and long limbed body my Dad’s genes gave me. My mum by her own admission has short squat legs.
I thought the prank you did OP was funny. I used to work at HMV and lm sure we were on the receiving end of these a few times!!!