To feel sad at losing the rose tinted view of my parents?

[Missingmybabysomuch]

I don't know how to explain it, it's like in the last year or so I've just started to see my parents as actual people, flaws and all, rather than the idealistic version I had growing up.
I had a good upbringing, well provided for, fairly typical middle class upbringing with a stable home life, parents together and happy, close knit family without any drama, lots of extra curricular opportunities, a few holidays abroad a year etc. I was a total daddy's girl and adored both my parents. Since leaving home I've always phoned every couple of days and visited as often as I could. I have an older brother but I've always been the "go to" person for help required etc. But increasingly now it feels like they tolerate me more than they like me.

For various reasons over the last year I feel like the rose tinted cover has fallen away and I'm almost grieving the version of them that I thought they were.
It turns out in reality my dad is incredibly uncompromising, belligerent and incapable of seeing things from anyone else's perspective. He point blank refuses to discuss anything he disagrees with. My mum is very independent, and to be honest as much as she loves us, I think she would have been happy in a life without children.

I don't know if any of this is making any sense, I'm just feeling very sad and lost. Its like I didn't really know them at all. I don't know what I'm hoping for from this, maybe just to see if anyone else ever had the same?

To clarify - its not that I think they are totally awful people or my whole childhood was a lie, just that it's like the parents I had in my head and the parents in front of me are 2 different people and it's hard to accept that they are one and the same. I don't know if older age (they are in their 60s) has made them more set in their ways and cantankerous (dad) and more detached from us (mum) or whether they've always been like it but just hid it better when we were younger 🤷

It could be them getting older, but I do also think you do start to see parents differently as you get older. Parents are complete people with good points, bad points, flaws and are probably just different with adults compared to children. It’s hard, it may be worth having some therapy, I’ve found it really useful to help understand and start to let go of what my parents (particularly one of them!!) are like. I find it super stressful being a parent myself that I will have this impact on my kids.

I don't have any magic advice, but wanted to post my solidarity with your feelings. I've always felt I had a pretty idyllic childhood, but after a year of therapy I've come to understand a lot of my anxiety comes from expectations set on me as the "good, easy child" by my parents. I still love them, and I by no means think they are solely to blame or were bad parents! But that loss of rose tinted glasses really resonates with me.

I think it does happen to us all though. As we progress through different stages of life our relationships change. My DH finds it very hard to deal with the fact he is now the one providing help and support to his DM. Not that he resents this, but more the change from your parents being your safety net to you being theirs.

It's hard and I sympathise! I think it is part of the natural order of things unfortunately (to a degree).

I didn't become a parent myself until older (41) and for the first couple of years I had the same opinion of my parents as I always held. However, as my DC grew I started having my own ideas of what a parent should be/do etc, if that makes sense. I started seeing my parents differently, which I initially put down to growing up in different generations. But as time went on I saw that they were 2 people who continually tried to please each other. So, if DM had strong opinions on say food, DF would back down and if DF had strong opinions on education/politics, DM would back down. So, despite them compromising, which sounds good on paper, I nearly always felt the 'battle' or uncertainty. I started feeling disrespect for them. Don't get me wrong, I loved them dearly. Quite simply I think I finally grew up. I think there comes a point in our lives, doesn't have to mean being a parent yourself, that we realise our parents are just normal fallible people.

From the perspective of a parent - I'm in my 60's. Utterly adore my children, but don't want to seem to be vulnerable because I worry that THEY will worry about what's going to happen with me in the future (I live alone).

So I expect that I give them the impression that I'm independent but really it's that I NEED to be independent and don't want them to have to think 'what shall we do with Mother'.

This could be the case with your mother.

And your children will feel the same about you.

Posting as I have no advice but I have 100% felt this recently!

Very similar circumstances / upbringing to you, however I'm realising more about my mother than father. I've come to realise she's actually quite rude and some of her comments in front of my In laws make me cringe...

Perhaps they feel you are in contact too much and don't know how to say it?

I've been a parent for over 30 years and frankly I'd like a break. I'm not getting it.

I love my parents very much but through therapy realised that quite a lot of my issues do stem from the expectation of being a perfect child, because my parents were too tired and busy to give me the time I probably needed.

I still adore them and don't resent them because I recognise they were just people doing their best and different behaviours will have different impacts on different children anyway. I think giving both yourself and your parents some grace, you're not in the wrong for feeling upset by things they did and they aren't bad people for getting things wrong.

I think the fact that you had a good childhood, despite their flaws (which everyone has) showed they did their best and did a good job

To be honest, this just sounds like part of growing up. Would you really want to idealise them forever? I think losing the rose tinted glasses is inevitable - your parents are people.

Sound as though your mum wants to enjoy life now chn grown up, which is fair. Life has stages and it’s her time to meet her needs .

It's amazing what you don't see when you aren't looking for it!. Also becoming a parent yourself definitely opens up a new perspective on how we were treated as kids.

Add in that it seems inevitable that people seem to get more selfish and entitled the older they get , and you have an interesting mix of things.

My parents are in their early 80's and divorced, and whilst they are kind and generous to my daughter , they are demanding and expectant from me and my sister.

I have come to the conclusion that my Father in particular has some deeply unpleasant views..racist and bigoted..and always has had when I think back to my childhood. He wasn't a great parent either, not really attentive or interested. Neither parent really looked out for us kids, we never had any hobbies or out of school stuff, and there was little interest in our school life or friends.

I really appreciate the 'But we took you to stately homes!' thread on this site, which has loads of posters confronting 'in denial' parents about crap childhoods.

This. How old are you, OP? It just sounds like a normal, necessary stage of growing up. I love my parents, but I’m also very much aware that, despite them doing their best, they were poor parents at best, having had far more children than they could afford, financially or psychologically, and, being themselves from deprived, dysfunctional backgrounds, they had no models to follow.

I can acknowledge this (in therapy) while still loving them, and recognising they did their best, but that best was woefully inadequate.

I'm 34. It's not so much about wanting to idealise them forever, it's more about struggling to come to terms with the fact that despite loving them, I may not actually LIKE them very much. I am not even sure I know them to be honest. And I fear they feel the same way. Because of how I know they feel or would react to certain things, there are huge swathes of my life they know nothing about because i know they would disapprove. Nothing especially salacious or exciting, things like the fact I was under the crisis team after a suicide attempt (mental health "isnt a thing" in our family 🙄) My dad shuts down anyone he doesn't agree with, totally refusing to discuss or engage. Everything is his way or the highway. I feel desperately sad that as children we were a very close knit family who loved each other a lot but it feels like as adults we just don't see eye to eye or get on well as people.

Ah I was just about to ask, Are you mid to late 30s? You got there early at 34. Welcome! Welcome to the OMG They've Got Feet of Clay and They Kinda Suck club.
I hit a massive, massive wall with mum when I was 38. All this resentment and pain came out like bile... and then it sort of flowed and cleared and became a stream of understanding, of compassion even. Poetic shit, I know. But honestly, it's a good thing. It's a catharsis. And you will come to a place of acceptance for who and how they are. As time past, I grew to understand mum better based on her upbringing, her experience at boarding school with Irish Catholic nuns in the 1950s, and how that not only shaped her views but shaped my own experience of being raised by someone who was fighting views she felt obliged to embody. She was conflicted. She tried so hard to tear herself free from the societal pressures of her time. Instead, she unwittingly lumbered me with them. I'm lucky that I have zero issues with my dad, rest his soul. And I no longer have any issues with mum.
But I still see mum's feet of clay. She's 88 now and in a nursing home, riddled with dementia and a very difficult patient. But... I love her. I see her good stuff. And I see it more since I acknowledged the hard stuff. I get her now. What it's made me do is try harder as a mother myself, sweep my side of the street, break bad habits and patterns passed down to me. Gotta keep the soul well oiled and in a loving, nurtured state. Mum didn't do that for herself. We're living in a time that allows us to be better to ourselves.

I think a few things have coincided for you. I dont believe people are truly adult until their 30s, and it makes sense that this is a time when we reevaluate our relationships and the people around us. Your parents are also at a point in their life where they may be getting more set in their ways and or rebelling against expectations, especially women. And I think in families, we may get stuck in behaviour loops that keep repeating and stop engaging in ways that make us enjoy each other. It sounds like they did as good a job as they could, but are normal flawed human beings. Talking to a therapist may be helpful.

Are you a mum? I ask because I grew up seeing my parents flaws but loved them 100% but when I became a mum I went through another adjustment of feeling more critical of some specific decisions but more accepting of them as humans and of my own struggles as a mother.

I know I'm not perfect but I hope my kids will love me anyway.

We never know how motherhood will shape us. Some days I feel perfect, others I feel terribly guilty over every moment. We have to just hope we do more good than harm.

I TOTALLY understand this OP, I have been feeling very much the same. For me it's also the realisation that the magic you felt as a child/young person, about life and the future just really didn't come to anything. A bit of an awakening that life really is just about working, bringing up the kids, making ends meet and trying to fit a bit of fun in the middle of that.
I have to admit I didn't read your whole post but I just wanted to say I feel the same!

Are you the same than 20 years ago? Parents are growing up too and still changing. You should consider yourself lucky of such good upbringing. Your parents maybe have other priorities now, and expect different things from you, the relationship with parents is an ever evolving one. Love is still there obviously but maybe you just need to work a bit harder at it.

As people grow older they change and that applies to both your parents as well as yourself. I think that as an adult and living apart from your parents, the changes, which would have been almost imperceptible otherwise, are brought inyo sharp relief.

Though fully adult you are still growing into yourself and developing your own patterns and habits; not replicating those of your childhood. Perhaps part of the changes is that you are changing but they aren't.

This sense of dislocation happens to us all, so have the relationship with your parents that you can. We all gripe through gritted teeth about our belovéd mater and pater. Oscar Wilde once said sonething pithy but I'd go with Roseanne Barr when she spoke about the myth of the happy family. No one has a perfectly happy family off television so do your best snd have a good gripe afterwards.

You are not alone.

It's a very normal thing to experience but I think you're going through it rather late. I remember experiencing it in my early 20s. I do remember also when I had my first baby it brought a lot of things back from my own childhood and I began to realise some things were wrong. It does get easier as time goes on.

It’s perfectly possible to love them and mot like them, or to acknowledge that you’re sad because you’d have liked that close childhood relationship to continue into adulthood.

I know that having my own DS made me angrier with them, because my mother married into a household of men (my dad, his father, his uncle, whose house it was, his younger brother when on leave) where children were regarded as a ‘woman’s thing’ that shouldn’t disrupt meals and cleaning. I thought both parents should have postponed having children till they could ensure this didn’t happen, and that my mother should not have brought up her daughters to believe that their number one aim was not to disrupt men’s terribly important male concerns. And yet I know she did her best. It’s not her fault she had no idea children needed more than basic good and shelter.

This is so depressing. Parenting is bloody exhausting, many many parents do their best and here we have a lot of complaining about parents that in the same breath are described as a loving, giving a good childhood.

Yabu. People change. They may find you full on and needy calling them every couple of days at 34. I know if my mum rang me every other day I'd probably get a bit ratty after years of it.

My parents do know about my mental health (I was in hospital for 3 years so a bit hard to miss!) but they don't ever talk about it. They never ask how I am mentally. It gives the impression they don't really care. And I thought they didn't for a long time. But I just think now they find it a bit difficult to talk about. I've had to try and accept it with mixed success.