My mother annoys me because.......

[Pruni]

She pronounces urine and genuine as "yoo-righn" and "jen-yoo-wine".
She cackles, throws her head back and cackles and waves her feet in the air when laughing.
She holds her knife like a pen.
And she pokes me, prods me, brushes my hair off my face and examines me for fat deposits.
And finishes my sentences - wrongly, every f**king time.
I could go on.
[rictus grin]

My mother infuriates me by being perfect - immaculate house as a child though she worked full time with two children (1 with very bad adhd and allergies, dyslexia, ear problems - you name it the other one (me) with anxiety problems and eating probs), while running youth groups, being active on church councils, etc, and always being there for us - it makes me exhausted just thinking about it!

Now i can't match up to her standards, which makes me feel very inadequate - she makes comments, I snap. She disagrees over points of childcare with me (I'm more laid back) and she looks after ds most of the time. And also the fact she is partially deaf (since birth) and has refused to wear a hearing aid SINCE SHE WAS AT SCHOOL.

But we get on well (mostly) and she adores ds as much as he does her - and she's 'only trying to help'.

tsap - my mother likes to make 'comments' and whenever I have followed them she still criticises what I have done so mostly I try to ignore them now (its hard though)

Oh and she's also always saying 'aren't you glad you've got me for a mother not xxxx' - well, mostly I am.

I do usually try and ignore the comments but when there is a grain of truth in them - and my house was a tip the day she visited I tend to try and act on it.

A psychologist person I have read says you shouldn't ignore such comments, you shouldn't rise to them you should simply (ok!) state something like:

"I am upset by your comments and will not allow you to speak to me in such a fashion.Please refrain from making them or I will not be able to continue spending time with you like this, which would be an awful shame."

This is supposed to be the most effective way of dealing with poor parental behaviour.

I study psychology and do at times employ a similar method.

I have tended in the pastto act like a sulky child with my Mum which then allows her to act as the superior parent telling me off as if I was 4 again. So recently I have tried to avoid my inner child and embrace my adult side!

Sometimes I say something like I hear what you say but I think
or
I hear you but what you are saying hurts me and I cannot take that on board right now.

It does work as I put myself into an adult position which tends to make her react in a more adult way to me and the sniping stops.

Although sometimes she will snap back something along the lines of
"Don't inflict your psychobabble on me, yet another useless degree that will get you no where why didn't you do law?
or
"If you spent less time reading those psychbabble books and more time on your family I am sure they would benefit!!

Geez, you can't win can you tsap?!

Have you been reading up on Transactional Analysis by chance?!

Sorry if my post was at all patronising before

Yes mixed with a bit of psychodynamics and the odd bit of whatever is to hand!

You didn't patronise me, I thought after I had clicked post message I bet she thinks I think she is patronising me!

AS I am doing this I am analaysing a study I have done on myself and I have discovered there is one person who is far more critical of myself than my mother and that is me!

Why do we give oursleves such a hard time?

because she will drive miles out of her way and come back on herself just to avoid one tiny queue of traffic, then other times will sit for hours in traffic to avoid going a different way home, even though she knows the way perfectly well.

because she cannot get her head around mobile phones, answering machines etc. example: one day she complained that i had not answered my phone. i told her i never heard it ring. no, she said, she had rung my mobile several times, not the house phone. i asked why she rang my mobile when she knew i was at home. her answer? because her battery was dying. eh? sometimes i try to show her simple things, like how to send a text and she turns into a stroppy child and shouts "no, im not doing it, i dont understand...just leave it... JUST LEAVE IT!!!"

and sometimes because im in the kitchen with the washer on and dont hear the phone, i get a lovely message on the answering machine of her tutting and saying in the background "WELL...she's obviously got one on her and avoiding me"

lol nightowl.

My dp mother will drive for miles to save a few pence on baked beans! Forgetting that she has spent more than that on petrol.

Or will drive thirty miles to return a piece of 99p tat to the poundshop so she can get her money back!

Glad we are both okay about that then tsap!

I could spend all day thinking about the psychodynamics of familial relationships, esp. anything to do with mothers - be they in-law or otherwise!

Am currently avoiding my mother as I have made a few personal discoveries (in the emotional sense) that have radically changed my view on her parenting.

I know what you mean about being your own worst critic. Whole thing is scary when you think about it overly long...

My dad is the one to drive for miles to save pence on something. Ridiculous. He also forgets that time is money or even that time is time sometimes. By this I mean that when in a hurry he will drive round some wobbly, twisty short-cut just because it is a short-cut even though it means driving at 5mph or getting stuck behind a tractor.

oh i forgot this one...she will drive for miles to get petrol as she will only use one particular garage as its cheaper apparently.

CD I hope your dd doesn't, either, because it's a symptom of a lot worse things that are wrong in our relationship.

Basically if you don't abandon your dd when she's nine, then spend the intervening years contributing nothing but the odd weekend of being paraded like some show-pony in front of appallingly sympathetic relatives, if you can manage to be a bit honest when you have to and shut up when you don't want to be...I'm sure things will be fine.

Funnily enough most of that doesn't light my touch-paper but the almost deliberate mispronunciation really gets my goat.

When I'm trying to grab half an hour's peace and read the Sunday paper, she comes in for a chat!!

I love her to bits really

my mum says en-suite as "ong sweet"

giving the "ong" a full throat

AARRGGHH

i hate even thinking about it

and she says "ball-kony" for balcony

grr

My mum isn't nasty at all, she just does my head in! She will phone when i'm out, then will try roughly every 10 minutes until i get in. The conversation will go something like this

Mum "I phoned before there was no answer"
Me "I was out, that's why there was no answer"
Mum "Where were you?"
Me "Just out"
Mum
"Yes, i know you were out, BUT where did you go?"
Me "Well i went to the shop"
Mum "Did you have the kids with you"
Me "No"
Mum "Why did you not take them with you"
Me "because they are at school"
Mum "oh, i forgot they go to school"
Ds are 8 and 6!!
You get the general idea. She cannot accept "out" as an answer, she has to know where i was, what i was doing, who i was with, if i looked before crossing the road etc etc.
Another annoying thing she does is, if i'm visitng her, and one of her friends give me say, a £1.00 each for the kids, before i even get the chance to say anything, she hits me on the arm and says
"Say thank you to X, i didn't bring you up to have no manners"

I'm 35 FFGS.

She gets up at 5am when my idiot brother is working, so she can make his breakfast, put out his clothes for him and make up a packed lunch and make sure he gets up. He's 30 by the way.
I never, ever tell her if the kids have something minor like an ear infection or a cold cos she phones up about 10 times a day to see how they are, then we get the carry on i mentioned above with the phone calls.
She refuses point blank to have a mobile phone, a DVD player or a CD player, saying "why should i have to get thoses just because everyone else does"

I could go on about how many other annoying things she does, but i'd be here all day

...she is weird and agoraphobic

Saltire-- I think you may be my secret sister.

We got rid of our answerphone because every time we went out we came home to 15 messages from my mum.

Call 1: Hello, it's me. Are you there? (sounding irritated) would you pick up the phone please??

Call 2: You're still not answering the phone. Are you really not there? You didn't tell me you were going out (accusingly)

Call 3: Are you in bed?

Call 4: (sounding extremely cross by now) Well I can see that you don't want to speak to me.

Calls 5-13: HELLO? (mad tutting before hanging up)

Call 14: (just mad tutting)

Call 15: (extremely wounded, dignified tone)Well, whenever it's convenient perhaps you could phone me. It's nothing important. i just wanted to see how you are...

We only lived across the road at the time.

lololol at all these posts

my mother keeps everything that she has ever owned. eg she has this massive 3-in-1 tv, radio and cassette that was bought for me by my dad (who she divorced so no sentimental value there) for my 15th birthday. it is huge, 1980s Star Trek computer size.

the tv doesn't work. the radio doesn't work. the cassette makes a deafening noise. when I said why don't you get rid of it she said 'it has a little microphone on it to make voice tapes'

when did you last use that then. 'I used to send you tapes when you were at college'. I graduated in 1991. I told her that dh has a proper digital recorder at work she can borrow if she ever wants to again but no, she still hangs on to it, even though she has moved from a 3-bedroom detached house to a 2-bed terrace and is constantly complaining she has no room to put anything

My mother gives directions using her personal memories as landmarks, rather than the usual churches/pubs, eg. "turn left just after Amy Smith's house (Amy Ryan that was) as though you were going to Janet Brown's parents' house (Janet White that was)". Not only do I usually not know these people and therefore never visted them, but in many cases they no longer live there and haven't since before I was born. Db and I have decided to view it as harmless eccentricity, and always produce a map and make her point out the destination on it before we set off. Incidently, she always gives both the married and maiden name of anyone that she's talking about if she first knew them before they were married.

I used to get much more wound up by her though, I would hear implied criticism in things that she said. If she said "I was late because I was talking to you" I would get annoyed because I thought she was blaming me when I didn't even know that she had somewhere else to be. My db, who's much more level-headed than me, pointed out that she was just stating a fact and the inference of blame was all in my imagination. Once he'd pointed it out it was obvious, and now I behave much less like a teenager when I'm with her.

Ha! Have just seen nightowl's post. Seems I'm not alone in the answerphone-mother combo hell. Don't know whether that's comforting or scary.

oh god the married name/maiden name thing yyy my mum does that and will suspend her story for ages while she remembers which house they lived in and where they moved to - all details of her past that I cannot understand because I never lived in those places with those people.
My mum keeps planning to emigrate and never going. I want her to GO.

my mother texts me in the middle of the night 'while she remembers' and then gets peeved when I haven't got the message the next morning

I don't actually check my text messages before my breakfast

pruni oh god yes the endless subordinate stories

and then stories about the friends of nephews of stepsisters of people that I have never even met in the first place

My mum tells me in front of my kids how she was playing chess with the kids she babysits for on Saturday night and how she won or lost and she has never played a game of chess with my kids and she says this IN FRONT of them. So they know shes got the time and energy and effort for these other kids but not them. Makes me want to slap her. In fact the next time I think I might say something.
She also refuses to come up to date with mobile technology. Wont learn how to use a computer. Makes a big point of telling everyone she cant. Well she could if she tried.
She moans that people didnt do things for her, for example take out her wheely bin, yet she didnt frigging ask them too...so how on earth would they know she wanted it done?? They should know my bin goes out on Monday OH REALLY?????
She also says shhhh a lot and Her Upstairs Is In and she thinks the woman up the stairs is listening to everything....I have said WTF makes you thinks shes interesting in what your buying in Tescos when shes SHHHHHing me when im asking her if she wants me to get milk....she tells me to shut up.
People HAVE got better things to do and its you thats obsessed with her actually...ho hum.

My mum's a retired teacher and still behaves like I am one of her primary pupils. Always asking "Have you washed your hands?" when we sit down for lunch and the like.

Her most annoying habit is simultaneously being fascinated and repelled by new technology. She has to have it, but won't ever use it. She bought herself a mobile phone (an offer in the Women's Institute Magazine) mainly in case she broke down in the car, but she never switches it on "because I don't want to phone anyone". I spent an hour in a car park in St Ives waiting for her and my dad to arrive to join us on holiday, so I could show them where the cottage was. I kept trying to phone her to find out when she was going to arrive, and assumed the lack of answer meant there was no signal on Bodmin Moor or something, but when they eventually turned up, she said the phone was switched off "to save the battery"!!! She had to go into a mobile phone shop so the man could show her how to retrieve messages. No way will she read the instruction manual and find out herself, because that would be admitting that she uses/needs one of these horrible 21st century contraptions.

Similar story with email. Since Dad died, she's gone on a computer course, got a PC and gone online. She never sends anyone emails though: "Why should I when I can phone them?" and can't understand why my cousin and her dad email each other regularly. However, she wants me to forward all the emails with funny jokes to her.

She also bought herself a satnav for the car, even though she never goes anywhere she hasn't been before or doesn't already know the way to. If she goes a long distance she gets someone to drive her.

Grrr. And of course she can never remember me or my brothers being naughty as small children, it must be my and DH's fault that our 2 year old has tantrums!

Love her really...