Sorry for the incredibly long post.
Basically, as the title says- my mother keeps shaming my DS and we’ve fallen out after I brought this to her attention. AIBU?
She generally has a very good relationship with my 3yo DS and has looked after him once a week since last Christmas and he loves her to bits. The only thing is is that she regularly shames him.. examples being she has held him in front of a mirror when he was crying as a 1yo and said “look how ugly you are when you cry” or when he has thrown a toy at her dog, instead of talking to him about unacceptable behaviour she will say things like “that was weird. You’re really weird” in a really bitchy tone or call him “uncool”.
I brought this to her attention as kindly as possible when out for coffee explaining that I thought shaming was a learned safety mechanism also used by my grandmother and my mother was doing it subconsciously without malice- she said that if she was damaging him so badly she wouldn’t ever look after him again and left. We’ve had a brief text since and she said that I have been very clear about how I thought she was a bad mother and so it’s very painful that I was also calling her a bad grandmother.
She was not a good mother to me or my siblings- had children by accident v young at the start of a v promising future. She’s professionally brilliant and was always very driven and didn’t want her children to get in the way of that. My father would beat us with a wooden spoon when we were little, we had 7 different nannies over the years and she went to work in another city 4 days a week when I was 12. They would party all weekend taking class As for days which I got into at a young age because of them and because I was struggling with childhood sexual abuse- i would take drugs with my parents from the age of about 15. I got expelled from school at 16 and went off the rails. My parents set no boundaries and I would often be out of contact for weeks on end which wouldn’t bother them.
Even with such terrible modelling she was always very disappointed that we didn’t excel at anything and would always criticise and shame us which left me furious at how she could behave so badly yet try and make us feel so terrible. I’ve always been angry at her and she’s always felt that I was a horrible DD- when I’ve tried to talk to her about my childhood, she’d blow into a emotional hailstorm and lock herself in her room or call me a little bitch saying that “other people had it much worse and you weren’t burnt with cigarettes!”
Fast forward a few years and she’s cleaned up her act and is now an activist and for the most part doesn’t party anymore. I have spent many years in therapy sorting my life out and getting to a good place and always tried to maintain a relationship with my family. My DS doesn’t really have a relationship with my DF as he’s uninterested in DCs and my MIL is dead so I want to nurture this relationship but I can’t let history repeat itself with her shaming my DS.
AIBU for calling her out on this as my DF says I am. Am I letting my own childhood and subsequent anger get in the way of their otherwise lovely relationship?