I don't want to be a parent any more

[failedparent]

I'm not new here. Been around a long time, but I have name changed.

You know how you see threads sometimes - I'm selling my kids on ebay, lighthearted ways of saying you're fed up of it all.

Well, I've been a parent for 19 years. And I've had enough. This is not a joke/lighthearted.
I would just like to stop being a parent. Just walk away, leave them all and start again. Single, keep my job, keep everything else, just go and find a flat somewhere on my own.

I love them, I just can't do it any more.

Mine are 19, 17, and 14. All on paper doing well, eg at school. Youngest 2 have had a lot of emotional needs over last few years, and some things have left me heartbroken, and I just don't have the energy to support them any more.
Over the last week I just feel as if the parental love has gone, got used up finally. Not because of them, but because I just cannot gather the emotional energy to keep doing it.

I don't even really know how to say it. They aren't bad kids, the issues aren't even that great, it is just as if I had the time patience and emotional depth to deal with dc1 as a teen and I just can't keep doing it any more. The emotional cost is too high. I've run out of capacity to be nice.

If I could, if it wouldnt cause so much damage, I would walk away tomorrow.
I love dh, he is a good 'un, and I don't want to deal with that either.

It is like an intense selfishness, I just want to stop being there for everyone else and just do my stuff. Me and the cat in a tiny flat with a little courtyard garden.

It isn't even as if they don't appreciate me, they do, but I just have nothing left.

Don't even know what I want from this thread, just felt like I needed to write it down somewhere.

I will keep on, keeping on as we all do.

@steppemum

It’s quite a common reaction to a child transitioning that the parent shuts down / pushes the family away as the family isn’t what they perceived it to be - it’s a very typical reaction, although a sad one.

this is at best patronising and at worst a direct criticism of OP and how she is dealing with her dd. (pushing her away) so yes it was rude. Not kind at all.

Oh for goodness sakes. I was trying to say if the op did feel like that I think a lot of people would understand that. That’s all. It was actually saying it isn’t that unusual to feel that way IF that was the case: what’s unkind about that?! Hiding the thread now as it seems sometimes here you can’t say anything right.

For disclosure; my dd is 19 and has a lot of trans friends and we talk about these things a lot - from the point of view of her friends, and their parents. I wasn’t being at all judgey as I can see it from all sides.