AIBU to snap after my mum kept calling a bike a trike?

[Crayo]

i am looking to get my daughter her first bike. She’s 5 and has had a balance bike before but never a real bike. Everytime I speak to my mum she asks me if I’ve found a “trike” yet. I keep telling her it’s a bike I’m getting, 2 wheels” and she always says “oh yes, you know what I mean”.

Well this has been going on weeks and literally everytime I speak to her she asks about the “trike” and I constantly correct her and say “bike”. She does have a habit of asking the same question for weeks at a time and she also has form for deliberately saying the wrong words for attention and it’s tiring.

this morning I was at my mums and my sister was there. I went to toilet and when I came back my sister said “not being funny but isn’t DD old enough for a proper bike now?” I asked what she was on about as I am getting her a proper bike and she said “mum! You said she was getting a trike!”

So I lost it, screamed and shouted “stop saying it’s a fucking trike!! You know it’s not so just fucking stop it”

my sister said “Jesus Christ is there any need for that?” So I told her she’s been saying trike for weeks and it’s winding me up so she said “she gets mixed up, there’s no need to scream like that” but the annoying part is she doesn’t get mixed up!!! She does it on purpose and has been doing this for years!

Was she calling it a micro tree or something? 🤣

Yes, this sort of behaviour would rile me too, and it’s often clear from someone’s general attitude whether they’re doing something on purpose or not. To do it so often and so consistently does seem purposeful, and the karate/judo example sounds particularly patronising and dismissive. It sounds very disrespectful to me.

Sounds like her way of taking an interest in you and your children.
Fine to find it frustrating, but your response and behaviour are appalling!

To refer to it as behaviour is just nuts.

I wish I had your problems.

Not if (as the OP says) the child has been using a balance bike for a while.

If the child uses the balance bike a lot, and has pedled any kind of ride on (anywhere - at a friend's house or a playgroup or some schools have rideon pedal toys for the reception children, or nurseries with suitable outdoor space do) she may well just get on a two wheel bike without stabilisers and ride.

None of my kids had stabilisers - they weren't common in the country we lived in when they were little. Pretty much all the local kids went from balance bike to regular two wheel bike without stabilisers.

Growing up, a friend of mine had a mum who would do this. If you told her something, she would then say “Oh right, you’re doing XYZ” where XYZ was something worse than what you’d told her. I ran into her once and introduced her to my boyfriend and she made a point of calling him my ex’s name. My Mum ran into her and told her I was (then) going to start my graduate job at the end of August and she said “Ohhhhh - so she’s not working” and told people I hadn’t managed to get a job out of university. There were a bunch of other things like this.

If it had just been one thing then I would have not thought much of it and put it down to her being from another country. But after a lot of them, it started to look like malice.

I didn’t give much of a shit - I didn’t need to see her much. But it was hard on my friend and she doesn’t see much of her now. She would definitely have called her granddaughter’s bike a trike.

Sorry, duplicate post.

This made me stop. So awful for you. I hope you have made yourself a happy life away from her.

I do have some sympathy because my mother does this. With certain words or certain things.No matter how many times you tell her or correct her as to what it really is, she reverts back to saying the wrong thing in the next conversation as if you'd never spoken at all.

It's infuriating. It's awful impossible to have a normal conversation about certain issues.Because she just doesn't listen, doesn't remember or is doing it deliberately and I don't know what it is.

Think you are wrong to scream, shout and swear at your mother in her own home though.

That aside I don't really why anyone care so much about a child being bought a bike. Does anyone really care about that?Just buy it.

Example of something my mother does - she lived in a nordic country, for some time in her twenties for work and in the language there a J is pronounced as a Y.

She would deliberately mispronounce words and names here saying a j as a y. For example, as a child, when I liked teenage mutant ninja turtles she would pronounce in Ninya. It was really annoying.And as soon as she got that it wound me up, she did it even more. I would correct her, and she would correct me back and say it's ninya. I'd show her the actual cartoon with a catchy theme she'd still say it was ninya.

That's just one example, but she said it was so many other things.

Then, one of my best friends from university was in exchange student from a nordic country named Johanna, pronounced Yohanna. My mum always called her Joanna - pronouncing it the english way. I said a j is a y and you of all people should know that and she just smiled at me and said, no, it's joanna.

Don't know why she did it.She's just an annoying wind up merchant but it's not worth screaming, shouting and swearing over just ignore. I get the extreme frustration with it, but I think it's the argument they want.And I genuinely don't know what my mother gets out of doing this. It would be to have zero value add to anyone's lives.

Sadly you hadn't rtft

I can imagine my (similar) mum calling a balance bike a trike or something because she didn't approve of it. In her day you had a bicycle with stabilisers, then took them off. She would have declared that a balance bike is "not a bike" because it doesn't have pedals and therefore it was pointless rubbish and a rip off. Thereafter she would give it a stupid/incorrect name to indirectly press her point.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I have similar stories. I'm convinced my mum does it to try and wind me up on purpose because if I ignore it, she keeps escalating it.
I have wondered if I'm oversensitive and ratty but my young adult son has noticed it too (without prompting from me) which confirmed I wasn't going mad!

She does it in a lighthearted breezy way so it's easy to miss the intent unless you're the subject of the needling.

I'm quite a stoical person and always have been, even as a child, which seemed to irritate my mother. She and the rest of the family are more emotional and vocal. She's said a couple of times "you seem to think you're better than the rest of us". (I really dont think that.) She will keep goading to see if I lose my cool as if to say "see you aren't so perfect". Aaargghh. Sorry have selfishly derailed thread talking about myself!

This. On the face of it you seem U but I dont think anyone who hasnt experienced the full context can understand how maddening it is. But you have got to work out another way of responding to it or you'll just drive yourself mad and ruin your relationship with your mum.

You need to either stop reacting at all, so just pretend she has said the correct word and respond e.g. in this case "no, still looking,"

or instead of snapping look genuinely bemused "no? Why would I get a trike? What an odd thing to say?" Really over exaggerate it and laugh at her as if she is slow. Roll your eyes at your sister and say "another example....!" as if she's left out of a private joke, or say to dd "granny thinks you are getting a baby trike, silly granny" etc.

Pps have suggested possible early dementia and you could even go down this route, looking concerned, getting out your phone and making an ostentatious note of the time and date "mum, im really worried about you, you keep saying the wrong words despite being corrected, I've looked online and thats one of the main indicators of dementia, I really think we should go to the doctor."

If you're right and she's getting some sort of psychological pleasure from saying the wrong thing then if she doesn't get any reaction or one that makes her feel embarrassed and stupid she'll stop doing it, at least to you.

I've derailed the thread a little bit too as well.But perhaps we haven't, because it's similar to what the op has to deal with. So movies maybe it helps to hear that her mother's not the only one that does this.

It wasn't just miss pronouncing words.My mum will completely use a different word to represent something else.And then just shrug, and say, oh, you know what I mean.

Sometimes she pauses and looks at me with a smile to see if I'll say something and I just ignore her now. I don't think she realises how utterly stupid she makes herself look.

Back in the nineties, british airways did a lot of catchy adverts with music and songs. I was a child back then still at primary school. One particular british airways advert had a catchy song on it - she used to sing along and say stupid things and pronounce the words incorrectly - she'd sing along saying OOH LALA in time with the music. She did it constantly until the advert was over and she knew it really pissed me off and she sounded absolutely ridiculous.

We lived in a flat and once when we were in bed, but not asleep yet and I could hear the t v through the wall that advert came on.And she started singing loudly OOH LALA for the entire duration of the advert, because she knew there was a possibility we were awake and could hear her. So even if she was alone in a room she still did it for attention just in case she could be heard.

If I asked her to stop it she'd say they're singing silly things so why I can't I.
I don't understand it.I've never understood it, but my mum's always wanted attention for saying silly things and deliberately saying the wrong words.

You're right, i also get that - you think you're so smart. You know everything don't you - she turns it into we're putting her down and being arrogant rather than simply correcting her and asking her to say the right words.

Anyway, enough about me. I can understand why the op has snapped, but it's really not worth screaming and shouting and swearing - just ignore her.

The problem with looking concerned and saying that she should go to the doctor is that this is still a form of attention, which she will really enjoy (even negative attention is still attention).

My mum is exactly the same! She will make comments to me like ‘oh you’re so calm and collected aren’t you, just like your father’ (they’re divorced) then deliberately try and wind me up to prove that I’m not calm and collected.

I was making light of the possibility of it being neither a bike or "a fucking trike" 👍

How often do you see her?

I wish the only concern I had about my mum was her calling something the wrong thing

I get words muddled all the time. It really annoys my son. Have done it all my life though and there is no malice in its He/she and dinner/breakfast and dance/gymnastics as examples. I 100% know what I’m trying to say but the wrong word comes out. Most people in my family ignore me and after a few seconds if I realise I’ll try and correct myself.

Must be annoying sometimes but definitely am not doing it on purpose. I think if someone had a go at me like you did to your mum I’d probably start crying as I genuinely can’t help it.

But being genuinely confused is very different to what you're describing.

What I and the original poster is talking about is where the mother is doing it most likely entirely deliberately.

The examples I gave of my mother are her being a windart merchant, knowing that she's saying the wrong thing and doing it deliberately just to wind me up.

I thought she was just genuinely confused or forgotten.I wouldn't have got so angry with her

I think the op knows her own mother.

FIL was like this. Used to call the GC pram a ‘trolley’. Did it with them all. Drove me bonkers!!

I feel like OP is more annoyed about what the mistake represents than the mistake itself. i.e. people thinking her daughter is slow or developmentally delayed because she can only ride a trike when she should be riding a bike at her age. Especially after the comment from the sister. I really think this is the real issue here. I doubt OP would be so het up if the mum was saying something wrong that didn’t have the same effect.