To hate my mom because she was controlled by my dad

[TheDaringOchreQuail]

Trying to simplify this. All my life it was about him and treading on eggshells to please him. She always has to be the victim too.
he is basically like a dictator. Everything revolves around him and his needs. I feel so much hate for her. She didn’t put me first. She never spent time with me or listened to me. Even now, as he controls the money she has to pretend that I ordered food when she was the one who paid for it but he can’t know, please say this isn’t normal?!

This!!

Of course you are perfectly entitled to be angry with both your parents, they both failed you in different ways.

However having higher expectations of your mother for behaviour than of your father is very misogynistic. You learned this misogyny from him at a very deep level. That misogyny makes you despise your mother and her behaviour but accept your father's behaviour 'just his way / how he is "

Your father absolutely could have changed his behaviour. It might have been very difficult for him to do but he could have if he wanted to. He didn't want to enough.

OP was the child and she deserved consideration from at least one of her parents. That didn't happen.

It isn't OP's responsibility to value, respect and cherish a mother who did not protect her from her abusive controlling father.

first post nails it - support her and try to let her see how abnormal it all is.

Yeah. Blame the woman for being abused.

OP is blaming her mother because she never put OP first or spent time with her when she was a child. Some women do stand up to their abusive husbands and some women actually leave them to protect their children. OP's mum wasn't one of these women and OP, as the innocent child in this scenario, has every right to feel let down.

Children are not, even as adults, responsible for the actions of their parents. Expecting the OP to think of her mother as a victim to the detriment of her own feelings is totally unreasonable.

Her mother failed her children, and failed to protect. As an adult the OP may see that, but the child who suffered is still very much hurt and or afraid.

Stop centering this mother who has made a mistake that has consequences not just for her but her children; and in playing along with this cruel man, is still trying to blame the OP. This is a kind of head wreck beloved by abusive men.

Awful, inter generational trauma being done. We can all understand why this woman may not have left. But she is still in it and hurting her adult child.

What's the matter with you? OP was in that situation when she was a child.

It sounds like she's being abused and in need of help herself. It's horrible that she let you down, but it sounds quite complicated if she was being abused herself.

It's all about choices, lots of people could leave, could protect their children and don't. I've lived it. I know women who have stayed because they loved the man/made him the centre of their world/put him before their kids/didn't want to be alone.The idea that everyone is a victim and broken by it and made powerless by it is completely false. Lots of women cannot get out of it, but lots and lots choose to stay. And thankfully many women leave. You're allowed to feel resentment - but to be happy you need to move past it and only therapy will help. I hope you find peace with it.

So at what point is a woman supposed to take some kind of responsibility and protect her children? When they're actually beaten black and blue? Sexually assaulted?

Is there a threshold?

Feeling for you OP. I have some pretty complex feelings towards my parents, particularly one of them. I grew up with a complicated family dynamic involving two parents (one of whom is no longer alive) and two step-parents. The expression ‘hurt people hurt people’ resonates deeply. One parent’s infidelity, plenty of damaged and damaging behaviour, multiple co-dependencies (plus other mostly unacknowledged mental health issues) plus two second marriages in which both chose to remain, have all had an impact. I can see that on one level or another, all four were hurting and damaged. Whilst there was definitely some arguably ‘abusive’ behaviour - I can also see that (without wanting to make excuses for any of them!) they were all sad, confused and broken people, trying their best - and living with the heartbreaking consequences of their own family histories and personal choices. It’s hard. Sending compassion and solidarity…

I believe it can be very difficult these days for a woman to leave an abusive partner.
I would go so far as to say that in the past it was effectively impossible without strong family support or unless the woman was qualified as eg a doctor and capable of supporting her children independently.
Think social, religious disapproval, plus womens lower wages, and that in the past they would be less likely to go to university. Also ready meals and modern technology and gadgets didn’t exist.
I think it’s complacent to think that emotionally damaged women can just get up and walk away or ‘get their ducks in a row’ without strong and effective external support , if there are children to provide for.
but if they do have family support, they possibly wouldn’t be in difficulties in the first place. It’s people without external support who end up in marital difficulties imo.

But even then is it always a 100% free choice to stay? The very fact there's abuse means it may not be.

My situation was virtually the same as yours...my father left when my younger brother turned 18, my mother put her marriage and my father above her 3 children etc

I blame both my parents equally, I'm mad at both of them equally. Neither of them put us first. My mother also didn't want to have to work, she felt my father owed her financial support for the whole of her life because she'd had his children. That gave him far more power over her...

My mother is very misogynistic. She looks down on mothers who work, and said to me recently, when I was talking about a friend whose husband had hit her 'what did she do to provoke it'...that's the sort of person my mother is. I have absolutely zero respect for her. I've been no contact with my father since he left, 35 years ago, and very low contact with my mother for 25 years...I've not actually seen her in 15 years, I deliberately live on the other side of the world from her.

Your mum is a victim of abuse, she probably doesn’t even realise that she is being abused. Don’t hate her, she needs help not hate.

Your mum is a victim too and you're blaming her because you think she could have changed things. Even if she left him, you would have had to deal with him 50% of the time and he would have made your lives hell anyway.

I write as someone who left an abusive marriage at the age of 30 in 2017.

I was told:

• I didn't try hard enough
• I didn't know how to manage his emotions
• I triggered him too much by not doing what he wanted (he changed what he wanted all the time)

I LOST ALL MY FRIENDS (except one).

It was so isolating and horrible. The divorce was horrific. Thank god we didn't have children yet and I had some money. I'm not sure i would have been strong to leave otherwise.

You really shouldn't minimise how hard it is to leave. People say they would support a woman running from abuse. In real life, most people really don't.

Yes. But she doesn't appear to attach any blame to her father who was the abuser and that makes her misogynist. As other posters pointed out she has been conditioned by her father and his behaviour to think like this but worryingly doesn't get it or even want to.

How do you know he wasn't controlled by his wife?

In MN the default is men = enemy, women = victim

Men have all the brains and women have none

We only know what the op is telling us, women are equally responsible for how they raise the children they chose to have

I spent a lot of my life angry at my father for how he treated us. It wasn't until I had children myself that I let myself be angry at my mother for staying with him.

I love my mum but if you stay in an abusive relationship then your children do too. You make that choice for them as well as yourself.

@PrincessofWells she labels and recognises him as the abuser. What else can she say? That automatically puts him in the wrong and an awful person, no discussion needed.

Or was she supposed to first write some long paragraphs about how awful and horrible he was , in order to also be able to complain about her mum without being branded a mysoginist?

It's completely fine for the OP to be angry with the mother who put her in harms way.

Nobody can judge how any of us feel about our childhood - we're the ones who were actually there. I have a loving relationship with my mum but I grew up in a house of mood swings and frequent tension, all of which she blames on my step dad. But I was there.

I've had concerned friends of my mother try to gently ask me to be nicer to her and I've replied politely, after all her friends won't question her take on things. But I'm clear that it's between me and my mum, nobody else had my childhood.

Like others, having a kid of my own has flung a few issues into sharp relief. I'm not interested in going over the past but sometimes I just think.... what the fuck?

But not angry with her father who actually was the ‘harm’.

Yeah, it all sounds very fair.

OP said she feels nothing towards her father, but feels hatred towards her mother.

Perhaps the OP should aim her hatred and anger towards her father, and save the nonchalance for her mother.

@NorthernGirl1981 because the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

He means nothing to OP anymore, it's like he doesn't exist, she has no expectations of him, or hope he will change or be anything else other than an abuser.

Hating her mum means there's still something there. Some hope of reconciliation, that she will be the mum OP wants and needs, that change can happen, that things could be different and the wish for that.

A lot of you can't see that. OP would probably be a lot happier and settled mentally and emotionally if she felt nothing towards her mother either. Just let them both fade into nothingness and have nothing to do with them.

Thank you @BlueSilverCats you articulated that far better than I could.