I really resent my parents for labelling us as children

[Tigss]

I am one of 3 girls. I have a sister who is 16 months older than me and a non-identical twin. We are now all late 20s.
As children my parents had a really bad habit of labelling us and boxing us in with expectations. For example my older sister was the kind one, the musical one, the friendly one, the easy one. I was the smart one, the quiet one, the shy one, my twin was the pretty one, the sporty one, the social butterfly etc. This approach made my teen years somewhat hellish. We all went to different secondary schools, my older sister went to a school that had amazing performing arts alongside academics, I went to a very academic school and my twin went to a very sport focussed school. I think my parents believed this was them treating us like individuals and allowing our own talents to thrive but the reality was it meant my sisters and I had very little in common.
There was a lot of pressure put on us based on our presumed talents, such as my sister was expected to do very well in music, attend the Saturday lessons at the conservatoire, I was expected to get top grades, apply to oxbridge and my twin was meant to perform really well in her chosen sports. This all backfired when my twin sister actually outperformed both my older sister and I in her GCSEs and A-Levels and went to a better university.
In the same way we didn’t all follow the same rules. Such as I was allowed to be out much later than my twin sister, they said this was because she had training in the morning, was too likely to go off with a boy, where as it was expected I’d just study with friends. This built a lot of resentment between us. My parents also constantly pointed out how gorgeous my twin was and would say things like “you got all the smart genes, your sister got all the pretty ones”, obviously this made me feel awful, even more so when she did better in her GCSEs and I felt like I couldn’t even claim to be the smart one anymore.

Now we are all adults, all successful in our own rights but none of us in careers particularly related to our perceived strengths. We aren’t very close as I think a lot of the childhood resentment runs under the surface. We are also all in very different life stages, my older sister is happily single, moved somewhere rural and is very happy with her life, I’m married with a DS and live 10 minutes from where I grew up, my twin sister has lives abroad and is now living in central London with her fiancé.

We are meant to be spending Christmas with my family but the more I think about how awful many of their comments made me feel and how much I have grown to resent them and my sisters makes me want to back off, go to therapy and work on reconnecting with my sisters.

AIBU?

Ah this sounds a bit like my childhood - I'm the youngest of three girls.
The eldest daughter was 'the sporty one', middle daughter was the 'pretty/musical one' and I was 'the bookworm'.

We weren't sent to different schools, but like the OP we were treated differently. Eldest with judo and horse riding. Middle had clarinet lessons and loads of extra pocket money for clothes and make up. I got tuition and practice papers after school to help me pass the 11-Plus to get into the local Grammar. (ha ha - it didn't work)

I wonder if parents (this was in the 1960s/70s) who have three daughters felt that labelling each one differently made them seem more unique and special?
I know dad and his family were hugely disappointed I wasn't a boy after 2 girls, and they frequently told me. There was a huge burden on me to try and make him proud, but I was a girl, so I was never good enough.

Sorry for the childhood 'hangover' OP. I hope it helps to talk about it x

That sounds incredibly hard. Being boxed into roles like that really does stay with you into adulthood. It makes total sense that you’d still feel the impact now. Therapy could be really helpful, and reconnecting with your sisters at your own pace sounds healthy.

Maybe they took it too far OP but it does sound like they were trying to work with your interests and personalities. Much too much though with the labelling which seemed to imply that the other two couldn't possibly be pretty, or sporty, or musical etc. My parents didn't do this but I still have absolutely nothing in common with my sibling.

But you did. Otherwise your sister wouldn't have been able to perform academically.

Presumably in order to be a good netball player your elder sister wasn't prevented from participating in sport.

Perhaps what they expected from each of you was off but it sounds like they still gave you many opportunities.

Did you want to do the morning sports or go to the same school as your sister?

I'm not saying they were completely right but I can see where they were coming from.

You also have to decide things at set ages for school. At 11 you probably were more academic than your sister but we don't all develop at the same pace.

Crikey, I must be totally out the loop on this one then because I think it all sounds bloody weird.

I just think some parents are odd. There's no such thing as a perfect parent, just some that make fewer mistakes than others.
Go to the Xmas gathering, make good with your sisters - tbh, you all have your parents in common, am surprised you didn't stick together more and instead it became resentment to each other. Am pleased that you all went your 'own way' anyway, despite your parents labelling.

My own dad pigeonholed me to be a secretary, married and pregnant by the time I was early 20's as I was the only girl.. That was all he wanted (nothing wrong with that, just not for me). He spoke down to me often, took the mick because I struggled with the maths and science subjects. You can imagine his disappointment when I went to art college instead and came home with a mowhawk when I was 17. Then off to uni at 23 to study photography, film and TV!

It doesn't sound great as I believe parents should enable children to be who they want / feel themselves to be. On the other hand, it's hardly abusive. Presumably your sisters had the talents / interests themselves. Your sister getting better exam results doesn't negate your achievements.

I think it can be healthy to attend separate secondary schools. My siblings and I did, though it was more down to circumstances (an11 plus system was changed to comprehensive). My children did too - one attended a school that opened after their sibling had started secondary.

Bring close or otherwise as adults is based on all kinds of things - different personalities, life stages, circumstances. I'm closer to one sibling than another but it's more that we are close in age and have mostly lived close to each other as adults. I actually have more in common with my other sibling.

Siblings also experience the same family differently. My preference as a child was for my mother - my father worked long hours and rarely engaged much in our family life. I was surprised to realise as a teen that my siblings favoured my father.

Talk to your siblings!

Some people are being quite hard on you OP. But my personal response is to say thank you, as this has given me a lot to think about. I am a mum to a 7 year old and non-identical twins who are two and a half years younger.

It is a fine line to tread, treating them like individuals whilst also not pigeonholing them. As a parent yourself (you don’t say how old your DS is), perhaps you’ve had the experience when your son was a baby / toddler of this weird process by which we are are half responding to and half creating our child’s preferences. Perhaps your less than one year old has cooed a couple of times at pictures of tractors with no such reaction to dinosaurs. So you start favouring clothes with tractors, and tractor picture books. Before you know it, he’s 6 and into LEGO vehicles and saying he’s going to be an engineer. He’s still into that when he’s 8/9/10 so by the time you’re looking at secondaries you have it in the forefront of your mind which ones offer the best science and maths provision, etc. etc.
When you have twins, let alone three, this phenomenon is even more exaggerated. It’s a lot looking after three kids close together and at times it feels like you are just bombarded by one great wave of ‘child’. But then you feel so bad about feeling that way - of course they’re individuals, you have been able to tell your twins apart since they were born, long before anyone else could! So you’re more invested than anyone in finding and fostering the interests and talents that make them different. And perhaps you do so even more if you have the money to make that happen (as it sounds like your parents did).

This is very rambling, apologies - I think what I wanted to say was thank you, it sounds like your parents should have focused on fostering the relationships between you and on making you feel equally valued, and I will take that lesson to heart. But I hope my perspective might help you a bit too.

I hope therapy helps you make peace with and sense of it all.

Honestly the crux of your issue seems to be that your not close to your sisters and you appear to face built this alternate reality in your head where you and your sisters are super close and best buds. That doesn't always happen in the best of families. Are you perhaps a bit lonely at the moment which might make these feeling coming to the fore?
It sounds like your parents did what they thought for you all.

I went to the same school as my sister and we had absolutely nothing in common for many years. She also had very different rules, much more relaxed, which is weird since I was the well behaved one generally. I think rules should generally be consistent, but I understand variations have to happen sometimes.

No, you didn't get to try all the things, but that's really not possible. If they tried to follow your interests, as lead by you rather than imposed by them, then that'd doesn't seem unreasonable.

I sent mine to good schools but also found it important to make sure that their personalities were considered. Most of mine went to good standard kind of schools, one of mine went to a more technical school because that fit their talents and interests more than a more academic school, yet another one went to an elite performing arts school that required rigid auditions and cost us a small fortune. Believe me, we didn't do that one for us and it would have been inappropriate for us to try to send the others there.

How on earth can you possibly know that? I think it is ridiculous to be so judgemental and so certain of your damnation of OP's parents.
I take it you are not. a parent yourself, or have not brought up any children. Parenthood teaches humility.

So essentially they tried to help you thrive in the areas they thought you excelled at. They went to work to pay for your tutors and spent their spare time ferrying you all about to extra curricular. The absolute bastards.

Grow up & get a grip, OP.

Do you have any understanding that some kids have genuinely awful childhoods? Neglected, abused, starved, harmed, abandoned? This stuff actually happens in real life to real children.

Your self-indulgent bleating about what sounds like a very privileged middle-class childhood with loving parents who tried to give you & your sisters everything they could is pathetic. Ok, so they put labels on you, which may not have been ideal. But, in absolute terms, so fucking what?

You know what? You sound ungrateful. If the worst your parents did was try to support your individuality and you literally don't want to see them because of this maybe you should get some therapy about your entitlement. It sounds like you were raised in a stable home where your parents sacrificed greatly to provide for you. My mother was a mentally ill alcoholic and I still think she did the best she could. YABU

My Mum did this in a very much simplified way.

I was the older, in a village school, and I was bright. Sibling followed after having my written work read to her class as examples of good work.

Mum, trying to be kind and level the playing field for younger sibling, kind of told us that I was the hard bright one, she was the soft, pretty one. As the hard bright one I was a bit of a problem. Yes I rebelled, I was 15.

guess what we took from that? I'm not pretty, sibling isn't bright.
Neither was ever true.
it gets even worse. Sibling had two children. Guess what? One was a problem one was perfect.

children of the two each had two a
Also. Each one has a perfect and a problem child according to my sibling.

generational stuff like this has a very long reach. I really don't know how you stop it happening.

I have only one child. It wasn't deliberately, but now in my mid 70s, I wonder if it was subconscious?

guess what? My child is the golden child of their generation. They are aware of thi s and they don't like it. Though they acknowledge that on some level they revel in it.

what can you do, except try your hardest not to pass it on.

You sound so ungrateful, your parents tried their best 🤷‍♀️

Had they not bothered to encourage you I expect you’d be here moaning about how your parents didn’t care or push you to achieve your potential- they can’t win.

If you’re dissatisfied with your life that’s on you - can’t blame your parents.

I had a friend who experienced something similar. Her parents thought she was a genius, while her sister was seen as fairly stupid. Many decades on, my friend barely has a career and her sister is successful. I don’t think my friend could ever live up to her parents’ crazy expectations.

I don’t think people should minimise what you went through. I agree you should go to therapy.

☝🏻

I hope you are the “perfect” parent now and never make a mistake!

Blunt, but this in essence.

I was the gifted child. My mum gushed about it every opportunity she got. In the top 1% of the UK's academic learners, always perfect scores on absolutely everything without needing to give an ounce of effort. Musically talented, a keen ear and eye for patterns.
That pressure was insurmountable, and now I am a broken burnt-out cognitive mess of a person, and I ended up dropping out in college.

You have to get over it and realise you're only seeing it from your perspective. You might need therapy, you might just be able to reconcile with it yourself over time without therapy and a lot of introspection, but you're doing yourself more misdeeds by dwelling on this than you are by not taking active steps to get over it.

You and your sisters sound like a social experiment to be perfectly honest. What did your parents study, if they were academic?
My sibling and I were always compared. We were pigeon holed. You couldn't come out of that box for the fear of disappointment. For me, it made me raise the bar, for my sibling, he lowered his. I'm now stronger, he's weaker, no surprise there. We don't act like siblings as we've always had some kind of competition going on, created by our parents, indirectly. They caused resentment between us. It's difficult to navigate now they're gone.
Thank god I only had 1 child.

Definitely try therapy, it would be good to talk it through with a professional.

I get the hurt, I wasn't pigeon-holded compared to a sibling, but told as I started secondary school that I wasn't sporty/musically or artiscally-inclined. I'm not a natural in those areas, but I'd not really had much exposure to them either by 11, so on later reflection it all seemed rather unfair these areas were ruled out for me/discouraged because I had no immediate natural flair. I did discover some of them later in life.

I also recall being v angry with my parents in my late 20s. I wasn't at a happy place in my own life and stewed with resentment at all the injustices in my upbringing and the impact it had on me. We never fell out, but the these thoughts simmered away.

20 years on and being in a happier place, I look back and recognise the good in my upbringing. It wasn't perfect (whose is?) But there was no neglect, many good things and yes some not so good things... but I also recognise my parents are human, they did love us and tried their best, and they made mistakes.

We have a good relationship on the whole and while they do sometimes drive me crazy, i value that we have good bond and that they're really good grandparents to my children.

Talk it through with someone. I think many people carry resentments from their childhood and these surface especially when you're not happy in the present. It's good to process and acceot these and have a think about why they're upsetting you now.

Final thought, you're only in your late 20s, there's still plenty of opprtunity to learn new things. I'd embrace that.

Yes. I sounds like they really tried to do the best they could for you. My dd has always been pretty but I never complemented her on her looks as I didn't want her to think that was where her value lay and everyone else used to remark on how pretty she was anyway. Turns out she thought she was ugly because I never said anything. Imagine how complicated it must have been to bring up virtual triplets

Yes, my mother & sister always teased me about “puppy fat” when looking back at photos I was clearly skinny. Stayed with me.

How do you know that??

Lots of people fuck up. You (like me) are a stranger on the internet - how on earth can you second guess what another stranger's intentions were from the limited (and possibly skewed) information the OP has given.