AIBU to wonder why the hell my mum was obsessed with the water bill?

[YourProudSnail]

We were only allowed to shower when she was in the bedroom (shower in en-suite) where she would wait in the bedroom and start counting the minutes down in her bedroom. Once 5 minutes was up she would shout to get out or barge in while I was in the shower.

This was done to "save money" at the time but looking back on it while we were on benefits we were definitely not poor (outlier case with high child maintenance and a paid off house due to accident) and there were no issues with money when she wanted a long hot bath every day.

I didn't think it was odd but the idea of doing this with own DC or a partner just seems absurd now I think about it. Even as a student where people were scraping by on £5-£10k a year absolutely no-one cared about how long people took in the shower (unless they needed to use ti obviously).

A form of control or just plain old batshit!

Did you have an immersion tank?

Perhaps it wasn't about the bill but the volume of water. I.e a five minute shower leaves enough for a bath.
These tend to run on economy 7 overnight so it's hard to just give them a quick boost.

To be honest I'm a bit worried I do this to my kids. We are on economy 7 so a shower in the day is extra expensive (no gas) and they'd just stand under the water half the day if I let them. The shower ups the bill like nothing else.

My mother controlled our washing very carefully because of financial pressures, was very frugal and basically hard up (no heating etc). The difference is that I don’t resent her for it - I understand that she was frightened about money. You have other issues with your parent - I would explore those.

Definitely not a power shower, was it?

You can drain the tank pretty quick with a power shower, so no one else gets hot water for ages. I remember this vividly as a teen. I used to love nothing more than a long hot shower until the bathroom was completely dripping with steam. So the steam was the problem in one bathroom, together with the cost of heating the water, whilst the 'luxury power shower' off the master bedroom was time limited to 3 mins, plus switch it off entirely inbetween whilst shampooing, which sort of took the shine off the added 'luxury' 😂.

Some people have ideas about what is frugal and no perception of what really is not.

Most people could reduce the amount of fuel they use when driving and save far more money than many economies they make. As an example.

I think it was one which ran off the immersion/hot water tank and was heated by a gas boiler, it wasn't powerful though and it would have easily taken half an hour to fill a deep bath.

In my situation mum had lots of money coming in and there was no water rationing for herself which I feel makes it a lot worse. I don't know your own circumstances and we are in a good financial situation but I definitely would limit it for my own DC when they get to that age.

She sounds similar to my Mum, who was on massive power trip. It was just another part of her abusive personality. She enjoyed being cruel.

Definitely WOULDN'T limit it I mean. Typo.

Hot water tank fed non power shower if I remember correctly. No that wasn't an issue.

Yes that is unhinged.
My parents would line us up in the hallway in our towels, turn on the shower and we’d get 2mins each. They’d stand with a stop watch and yell “next” so the one in would have to hop out as the next one hopped in. The water ran for 10mins total (5 of us). They also would “issue” us toilet paper squares. We would get 20 squares a day. The toilet paper was locked up. As was all food in the house. Hot water was only turned on in evening for showers and dishwashing. Summertime they’d turn on the lawn sprinkler and we’d get a scrap of soap to pass around our “shower” was in the garden in our swimming costumes.

We weren’t on benefits, or poor.

I had a childhood of neglect and abuse. So what you describe seems like an element of child abuse imho.

Wtf that's awful I'm so sorry you went through that. Not to imply the rest of it isn't wrong as well but limiting toilet paper is truly ridiculous.

Did yours keep you dehydrated when out because they didn’t want the bother of taking you to the bathroom? Mine did that. I still vividly remember that thirst. It was physically painful.

The shower thing was obviously just the tip of the iceberg in terms of her poor treatment of you.

Yes exactly this. We were also barred from using toilets when out and about so would try to drink plenty before we left the house but inevitably would be absolutely desperate for the toilet AND thirsty. I swore blind my children would never ever be deprived of fluids or toilets. You are right, the thirst would be physically painful. I have never been close to that thirsty since

Bloody hell. I'm sorry you were mistreated like that. I hope you've been able to recover. And I hope your parents are nowhere near you now.

Thank you. I am working on it- that’s just one element and I thought it important OP knew what she experienced was abusive. Frugality was an excuse.

My parents are both dead.

Maybe you were on a water meter so charged by usage?

Yes, both of these.
Like my father not letting friends phone us in case emergency calls were trying to get through.

So you're 26, and you're still looking back and wondering about why your parent did something in your childhood. What are you expecting to gain from this ? Some form of closure? Or another reason to hate on a parent that your hating for many other reasons? Either way, what difference does it make to why she did it?

I suppose what I'm trying to get to is, life's too short to spend your time looking back wondering why someone did something. Learn from it, and shut the door on it.

Do you have to be so unpleasant?

OP’s mother’s behaviour was not frugality. She was limiting her child’s showers obsessively but having daily long hot baths herself. It was nothing to do with money and everything to do with controlling and restricting her child.

It isn’t that OP has issues with her mother. It’s about the way her mother treated her, and connected to the abuse that has led OP not to speak to her mother for the last 7 years.

In summary (and there's much more), it's:
the shock of realising that your own formative years were not normal;
the confusing discovery that the parents you relied on were not reasonable;
the agonising self-examination over whether you 'deserved it';
the bewildering effort to understand why they did what they did (or didn't).

Onlookers sometimes fail to appreciate that children have no detached perspective, no wider experience against which to judge their own caregivers. A child's world is formed by the adults in charge: it's all they know and it forms their identity, their understanding of who they are and their place in the world.

Once you realise your childhood was not as it should have been, you can't go back and have a different one. You're faced with re-evaluating everything you know about yourself. This often involves questioning many details like the one OP's raised here. It can be intense and quite upsetting, particularly as people usually need to separate the good and not-bad elements from the grim.

Some people really do need to take a stance that it was all absolutely terrible, their birth family are monsters, and reject their entire childhood. That's an extreme position because it also means rejecting themselves, the person resulting from that childhood. It can only be done successfully with intensive psychiatric support. The rest of us are luckier, if you like, but it still means picking everything apart as the issues arise.

I was limited to 1 'bath' (about an inch of water in the bottom) per week, despite living on a farm and being covered in all sorts on a daily basis.
Looking back my parents bathed daily as they needed to for work (had jobs outside the farm).
Apparently being bullied for smelling every single day at school was no reason to have a bath, I just needed to get a thicker skin.
My supposedly white school shirts had black tide marks around the collar permanently and my school trousers had holes in the inner thigh (they would not be replaced until the summer holidays even if the holes appeared in January). I was told we couldn't afford these things, it was only as I got older I realised that any spare money was going on the 30 cigs a day my mother smoked and a couple of bottles of whisky they drank through the week.
I understand that parents should enjoy themselves and a few drinks at night is a nice way to relax but I couldn't enjoy it knowing my child was dirty and in inadequate clothing- some people really shouldn't bother having kids and it sounds like your mother (and my parents) were the people that shouldn't bother!

Oh and @toomuchfaff I'm in my 40's and this still bothers me. Raising my own children has made me realise how rubbish some aspects of my childhood have been.
It is natural to look back and think 'why on earth did they do that'.

Her behaviour was not ok but in our current house the hot water is not constant (as in our previous house). Only two of us can have long showers without the hot water running out for a while until more gets heated up. I do remind my children of this occasionally.