To feel a bit sad when my mum rewrites history? Anyone else have this?

[dontletthemugglesgetyoudownn]

I'm feeling sad tonight, not sure why. I saw my family this weekend and we were swapping the old stories etc, then one of my sisters mentions my nephew lost his pe kit and she was annoyed by it, and my mum immediately jumps in with

'Oh yea we had that all of year 7 and onwards with dont, lost her pe kit regularly, lost £10 for the bus, got the wrong bus repeatedly, lost things constantly' everyone laughed at how forgetful I was etc

Yes I did all of those things and a lot more, I once forgot to get the bus home on parents evening and waited for my parents to finish but they left whilst I was wandering round the school and they had to come back to the school to get me. It's not neglectful because I didn't tell them I was still at school and my phone was dead.

However!! I wish she would remind my family of the context! I had undiagnosed adhd and dyspraxia, my dad was having chemo and we were driving 2 hours to see him every night in hospital I was doing my homework on the floor of the hospital room or in the back of the car, I was tired and my siblings were older, then he died and we were moving across the country but I only had 2 weeks between him passing away and starting year 8..

When we moved house I started in a smaller school and flourished, got my diagnoses and got the help I needed. I'm now an ODP and I can take patients myself in icu, I've have 2 masters. But yet when I'm with my family I'm relegated to that bumbling child when I was 11!

Grr!!!

My DM is non toxic and means well but as a few stories she tells to her friends and acquaintances which make them look like saintly parents and me very useless

What she said 1: they bought me a car and offered to pay for my driving lessons but I was too lazy

What happened: My dad came home with a car from a mate for me to ‘learn to drive in’ but was never mine. He never taught me to drive in it and I was told I had to pay for all lessons myself. I had no savings and no job until I left for uni, at which point ‘my car’ wasn’t there any more.

What she said 2: I was terrible with money and they frequently had to send me take aways when I was at uni because I spent all my money

What happened: once my card was cloned and I had to freeze all of my accounts. I had no shopping in bar a loaf of bread and some jam so my dad offered to send me a Chinese takeaway where I could use the leftovers.

I frequently pull them up when these stories are rattled off. She’s a lovely woman but loves the drama and any opportunity for a ‘kids, who’d have em?’ conversation

I think lots of parents minimise children's pain and experiences (physical or otherwise) if it doesn't tally with what they see. We often see it on here - school issues or emotions which are big for kids minimised as not life threatening. Or kids punished harshly for what could be misunderstanding and miscommunication.

Its hard to take a kids-eye perspective as an adult. Worth trying to and keeping listening though.

I noticed when i met dh, his mother did this too. She constantly had little digs for him, which made him sound daft, like he couldn't do anything for himself. Yet he was the only one out of her 3 kids who left home and made a life for himself. He could cook and clean and iron and anything else needed. By contrast, his siblings either lived at home well into their 30s or never married and visited their mother every weekend.
I often thought she wanted to punish dh for being independent and not needing her as much as the others.

I wonder if its the same with you @dontletthemugglesgetyoudownn?

You sound like you've done well. Maybe she resents this? Or. As in dhs case, she wishes her favourite child had done as well as you, presuming you have siblings? Sorry not rtft yet

Yes this happens in my family too. I find it really distressing.

@MarleneDietrichsSmile

It’s a kind of gaslighting really, a power trip in a way?

I think it’s horrible

It is sometimes. Sometimes it simply is a imperfect, perhaps unpleasant, parent retelling history so they look better. It’s still not right, and causes implant and sometimes damage. Adequate parents do it too though-

When I started big school my mum went to work full time. We got ourselves home from school and had to have dinner on the table for her getting home from work. I can still remeber the time her car would come down the driveway and the panic to get everything tidy and sorted.

She now denies that we made dinner when sylhet talks about being a working mum. Her grandchildren are that age now and she says there is no way we were cooking every night - claims she did it😂.

It does irritate me because it was so stressful and she got really angry if the house wasn’t today and dinner wasn’t ready or nearly ready.

Silvershroud That sounds dreadful! Sorry you had such a bad time .

This is just families. Snap back a bit and they'll soon get the message. I'm the youngest so I know.

Often I think they do remember the past ,but it suits them to rewrite it! They feel embarrassed and like to paint themselves in a good light!

And BTW @dontletthemugglesgetyoudownn, you weren't a "bumbling child of 11". That's your mum speaking there, not you. You were a young girl with a very poorly dad who was trying to navigate her life without much direction. And it sounds like you coped very well under very difficult circumstances.
So replace "bumbling" with "courageous"

Why don't you reply with oh yes, I remember that, it was when that was a tough time for us all wasn't it?

In the case of pp gym and swimming for example "oh yes, I remember. It turned out I had broken 3 fingers in gym class and I had to it was very painful.

My sister does this. We had a pretty ordinary, happy childhood but it's very different to how children experience childhood now. E.g. we were of the generation that pretty much spent the whole of the summer holidays out with our mates building dens etc and barely seeing our parents.

Once my sister became a parent she pretty much seemed to decide that our childhood was awful and borderline neglectful. I just think times were very different in the 80s! We've had to agree not to talk about the past now as we just end up arguing.

for you OP, in fact for everyone. I thought it was just my mum who was bad for this.

The same as many others, my brother was the golden child despite him being a troublemaker and me being the quiet one who just got on with stuff. So mum often talks about either a naughty thing he did and says it was me, or something I did, like good marks in my exams, and says it was my brother. She used to always have a go at my gran (her MIL) for telling stories about my cousins and saying it was DB when she did the same thing without realising it.

I was once reminiscing about something that happened at my other gran's house with my mum and we had a lovely time talking about it. Just a few weeks later my brother was around so I started telling him about the memories and my mum denied all knowledge of not only what I was describing but even the conversation we had had about it.

Just the other day she told me she had found photos of me as a teenager and how skinny I was back then. I spent all my teenage years constantly being told I was fat by her. I once walked into a room when I was 15 and she shouted at me to suck in my belly and said I looked 6 months pregnant. Which of course she later denied doing. It's caused a lifetime of issues with my weight for me.

I also didn't tell her I was pregnant with my eldest until I was 6 months along. I was quite young still (just started university but still living at home as the university was close to us) and it had been an accident. She had always told me she would throw me out if I got pregnant so I was too scared to tell her. She eventually worked it out and then told the whole family how awful I was for hiding it from her and denied that she would ever have said such a horrible thing to me. My eldest is now a young adult and that one still hurts me a lot.

I think in OP’s case it isn’t really rewriting though is it, as those events did all happen. It seems to be more of a case of the reasons for those events not being included in the story.

So a big question is whether OP’s mum accepts the diagnosis, and that it, along with her dad’s illness, is why all those things happened.

My entire extended family did this in a really toxic way just hours after my mother died of terminal cancer. Sat around discussing how nasty and abusive her husband had been and at least now she was free of him. This was after they'd spent all my teens telling me I was making it up and that I just didn't want my mother to be with anyone else every time I asked for help or acted out because home was so horrible. My sister also tried to claim she'd known about my mother's cancer for months before her actual diagnosis, as some kind of infantalisation and oneupmanship. NC was the best thing I ever did.

Some of these sound terrible, but there are example where people genuinely remember things differently. I had a thing where I was sure my first car was my granny's old car but then my parents and brother said no, it was him who had my granny's old car, and I had a completely different (old) car!

My 15 year old is currently in the process of rewriting her own history because she now believes she is autistic and trans (neither of which I accept and she has actually been assessed for autism been told she is not). I remember her young childhood very clearly and it is infuriating that she says things like she never had friends or she never played with toys normally, when I was there and remember quite clearly that she did.

OP your story reminds me of when I was younger and left my PE kit on the bus and once my umbrella. I'm now labelled as being forgetful and always losing things by my mother despite these being the only 2 instances in my 44 years of life that I've left something on the bus. The ironic thing is she's constantly losing things!

I regular get shoted at that I let tbe family down at 18 when I left home and mo ed away while mum was sick and lots of other stuff were going on in tbe family.
Mum forgets or chooses not to remember WHY I left.
Who wants a 10 clock curfew at 18? Who wants to be called a slut and a town bike because she found out I was on the pill with my boyfriend of 3 years etc etc.
I am 56 and .I'm cant believe tbe relationship I have with my two adult sons, I.e. we spend time together, go out for meals and drinks,phone each other up and so on.
History is re written in my family.
My sister had it worse but she tells me that our parents are old now and I should let things go. I cant.

Another one here , my mother has created a completely different narrative to the reality. She was making fun the other day about how indecisive I was as a child , how funny my brother thought it . Was on the tip of my tongue to ask her why she thought I was so terrified to take responsibility but what’s the point . I am her only family practically in the U.K. I just make sure I know inside myself that it’s not true.

I hate this!

My dad randomly made up a story where I was caught kissing a boy at a charity event - which didn't happen. No bit of it happened. There was no boy, I was there with a girl friend, no one else was doing anything like that either so couldn't have been mistaken for someone else. It was over 10 years later and I was so angry hearing this story when it wasn't true!

My mother did this, it used to infuriate me.

I'm pretty sure she just rewrote anything she found uncomfortable, and did it so much that she just didn't recollect that she had done it.

The only answer is a tinkly laugh and 'we all remember things differently'

I'm not usually much of a royalist, but was glad to see HM use the same 'different recollections' line when there seemed to be some rewriting going on in her family, too.

Reminds me of my mum completely omitting the fact that her and my dad used to beat the shit out of my older brother and me, whilst my younger brother was spoilt and cosseted.

I remember spending some time with family friends. The mum looked at me and 'I'm sorry, Clarepetal, when I look at you all I can see is that chubby overweight girl you were'.
What the hell can you say to that?! Rise above it, be proud as you sound really successful 👏

Agree it’s a way of covering-up their own failings. A strategy for maintaining power and avoiding being exposed by their now adult children who might perhaps by now be realising that something wasn’t quite right about their upbringing. Just crappy parents trying to cover up their own failings by trying to bring you down.

THIS
Robloxdiamonds
“My mum and dad both do this. They think I have a 'role' in my family and are determined to put me back in my place every time I see them. I think both of my parents are completely blind to what I do everyday and my real life. I've always been portrayed by them as naughty and difficult. I'd say they were borderline neglectful and my mum was controlling. I didn't agree with her (like my golden child brother did) so I was difficult.”

AND THIS
MarleneDietrichsSmile
“It’s a kind of gaslighting really, a power trip in a way?”

Yes, so much yes of this going on. And it is typically that my mum does it and not my dad.
The telling thing is that everything the way she remembers it was always positive. Me and my siblings were apparently great sleepers, she never had to wake up for us. We never cried or had tantrums. And this is always said (of course) when my kids are acting up, implying somehow that I must do something wrong with raising them. Whenever we have to punish our kids for misbehaving (we take their tablet away or give them a time out) she wants to intervene as she feels we're too harsh. That we were subject to physical punishment, often ran to our rooms to hide out of genuine fear and I was forced to witness my brother being pushed in a cold shower is conveniently forgotten. We live abroad, so I have (literally) taken a lot of distance from her, but it does hurt me. Very occasionally she brings up that our childhood was not ideal but then it is often packaged in a poor-me story and ends up with her accusing me of being distant. I am.