My mother - not toxic, not narcissistic, not hassling me or putting me down...I just don't like her

[Prunnhilda]

Words can't describe what a heartsink my mother is.
She left when I was young and despite my parents being shite at organising contact, despite her moving to the back of beyond (so I had to take a 3 hr train at 13 and accompany my younger brother or he'd have had no contact), despite having had no meaningful pattern of contact and certainly no maintenance from her - we managed to have a half-way decent long-distance mother-daughter relationship. (I was desperate for attention, my dad isn't exactly mr wonderful either, though he is decent enough.)

Now I'm much older and I look back on the things I accepted and I cannot believe I did it. She's been an astonishingly bad mother without actually being as awful as some of the ones described on here.

I'm at the stage now where I loathe everything she says and everything she does. My brother has no contact with her at all. She rings me and brightly chats away not knowing that I actually think I hate her.

I would just like her to go away, really. Not die, just not 'be'. I don't suppose there's some magical way to make that happen?

You could say: Actually, mum, you weren't there for me when I was young and now I don't want to be in touch with you anymore.

Just not being in contact is a very effective way of making her go away!

Change your phone number and dont tell her the new one :)

Seriously though, did she have a good reason to abandon you? Have you ever properly discussed it with her?

Do you want a relationship, and want to build on the future rather than dwell on the past?

You can just cut her out of your life, but you have to be sure that it is what you really want to do.

Despite many questions, I'll never really know what went on between my parents - one says one thing, the other another. She claims my dad prevented her from seeing us. I was old enough at the time and I don't think that's broadly true (though he is a passive-aggressive old git so maybe it was sometimes true). He didn't make her move to the top of the country where she could hardly have seen us less.

What I really want is for her to be excised from my brain. Meantime I don't answer the home phone during the day and try to keep to email (but if I email her, she rings to talk).

I wish I had sorted this before having a child.
Now they have a relationship it is harder.

Are there other family members (aunts perhaps?) who you are close enough to to delve a bit more into your parents relationship.

It takes a lot for a mother to go far away and leave her kids behind. It is usually because of a need to get away from a controlling, abusive and often violent man.

Is your mum perhaps still trying not to badmouth your father too much?

It sounds to me like there is an awful lot of background that you may not have been told, or not told truthfully, and as you are now an adult, you do deserve the full story. I would say to your mum that in order for you and her to carry on with any sort of relationship, then you need to know why she left, and what really happened.

Oh I tried the aunts. TBH it's a weird family.
My father isn't violent or physically abusive. He's a decent enough person. He's pretty horrid to live with (passive aggressive etc) so I can totally understand them splitting up.

Her sisters don't understand it any better than I do.

Sorry, not being v coherent! (It is hard to distil it all into about 3 sentences!!)
I would say that my mother isn't self-aware or truthful enough to break out the truth. Also, I've caught her out with lies before and therefore don't trust her.

Is it really your mother that you want to escape from, or is it the feelings that you have about your mother?

Dealing with the first is easy- as others have said, you could just drop contact, either totally, or just by taking longer and longer to respond to her messages until you reach a point where you feel comfortable.

However, even if you have no contact with her, it might not mean that you are able to forget the feelings that she invokes in you. It might make it easier to bury them, but they might not go away. Have you considered finding a good counsellor? It is understandable that your feelings regarding her may be difficult to deal with.

It's both. I dislike her pretty intensely anyway. We're very, very different (politically/humour/taste/money/attitudes towards people/everything really).
I know therapy is the answer, I'm also angry about that - why should I have to spend potentially thousands of pounds dealing with this crap?

I understand why you feel angry, but as I am sure you know, that is not enough to solve the problem. You have been dealt a rough set of cards- it is up to you how you play them and what you do to make the best game with them. Unfortunately, (to continue the metaphore) you can't just put them back in the pack and ask for another set.

She sounds toxic to me OP.

As you said she didn't have to move down the other end of the country. There's not really many defensible reasons for leaving your kids so far away.

If your Dad was so bad, she couldn't live with him, yet she left her kids there.

Plus she's a liar.

Defnitely toxic.

On the point of her not being self-aware or truthful to listen to the truth. Often with people like that I think they cultivate that mask so they don't have to hear the truth.

They go on with the 'bright and breezy' facade in order to make you feel churlish/awkward about bringing up anything real.

I also understand your anger at having to deal with the aftermath of the crap. You are right.

I'm paying for some counselling privately. I'd been on a list for nearly a year and now my free place has come up. I'm not doing it for anyone except myself though.

I cut my toxic parent off. Some of them are just not worth it. You could tell the kids she's dead. We did. Just a thought.

Honestly - she's not bright enough to be toxic on purpose. Though I see what you're getting at. She's not abusive to me when I see her, in any way, just fucking annoying and dim. She's in another world in some ways. She does have anger issues and showed that side of herself to my son a while ago - big scene, she completely backed down, but didn't show that she really got the problem (she is not allowed sole care of ds now). She is scared of me. Never argues with me, will do a complete u-turn to agree.

I think the truth lies in her being very depressed by having had children far too young, and living with my father (I find him a very depressing, challenging person) - therefore leaving. After that - no idea.

Meant to say - I like the deck of cards analogy. The trouble is - I just don't know what to DO. Cutting her off isn't really, truly an option but being around her is so awful that I can't cope.

God I hope I'm a better mother.

It does indeed stink that therapy is the answer. But it is. Alternatively, you can try self-help to detach yourself emotionally but it's likely you'd get better results with professional guidance.

I didn't want to cut contact with my mother - who is probably less toxic than yours - but am delighted to report I simply don't care that much about her now I don't think she knows how I (don't) feel about her.

I haven't actually cut myself off from my mother, we still see her and dd and ds have a relationship with her. In fact, weird as it sounds we go on holiday with her and my father. But I keep the relationship at arms length and on my terms. She is too complicated, manipulative and untruthful to trust either with any personal information or to tell the truth. So emotionally, she is nothing to me. Dh's mother is the mother I never had. I feel guilty about it because the reason she effectively abandoned me for two years is due to mental illness contributed to by family tragedy. But I have come to the conclusion that no one will win if I am made unwell or unstable by relying on her. I keep contact for my father's sake who is still with her. But get angry beyond words when he asks that we have a more normal mother daughter relationship. It takes two, I have tried. Op, stay away if you need to and if you feel like maintaining contact, then look after yourself.

Though you don't feel she's narcissistic, you've mentioned a few things that could be signs of other personality disorders, actually. Her anger control issues, her lying, her lack of appropriate emotional connection with her own child and seeming difficulty sensing the feelings of others properly. Those are significant; it's the rare parent who has several of those things and doesn't have traits of a personality disorder. You might try www.lightshouse.org , which is a site for adult children of difficult and toxic parents. There's a lot of information there. I agree with the above poster - it takes a lot for most women to abandon their children like that, and it can often indicate a lack of empathy and other PD traits. Light's House also has therapist finder tools, if you're looking. Makes it a bit easier.

Can you think of her less as your mother and more as a time donation to charity? Sounds like she's a weak woman, but that doesn't mean you have to despise her.

It might be helpful to say to her that you don't want to chat on the phone because it feels false and brings up feelings of resentment about your childhood. Set boundaries: she can email, she's welcome to spend time with her dgc at these times. Sounds to me like you have to be the grownup because she's never learnt how to?

That last sentence, lostinafrica, is exactly how I feel - I remember first saying it when I was about 19

These are all really useful posts, so thank you for them - I'll have a look at that website. I find the stuff about personality disorders really confusing and as a lay person I don't understand at all the subtleties of them. Certainly my brother is so very horribly odd now as to have rung lots of alarm bells with me, and my mother's mother is weird too. Selfishly I worry terribly that I have whatever they have and will keep this trait going (realistically I can be a bit overwhelmed at times and have to hide upstairs but I'm ok I think).

Splodge, it is interesting to read about detaching from your mother but managing to be in her presence - I have to work on that. What do you do when your mother pushes your buttons? Mine doesn't even do it deliberately. It can be something as simple as the wrong tone of voice (eek, there is no-one else in life I am so intolerant with!).

Personality disorders are psychiatric conditions involving a very RIGID personality. We are all somewhat narcissistic, controlling, cruel, weak, selfish, deluded, desperate, etc, etc. Normally we move between various states and are able to understand why other people see things differently or feel the way they do. In PDs, the sufferer doesn't have this ability. The way they interact with the world is the only way they can. In olden days, this used to be called being mad.

I've just written an embarrassingly long post in Stately Homes about detaching from my mother. It's only hard for a little while - as long as it takes for you to set & enforce your boundaries. Good luck!

Garlic butter, that's the most sensible and reassuring post. Have been doing very foolish googling recently and have self diagnosed almost every personality disorder! Ruled out narcissism, everything else was in! But I think I'm seeing elements of me (and my mum) that I don't like and putting two and two together and making millions.

"The way they interact with the world is the only way they can. In olden days, this used to be called being mad."

LOL - much quicker, but not as clarifying!

Sorry, not good with the links. I was trying to make it clicky. I'll try again.

www.lightshouse.org

It worked! That is magic.

It's just that, isn't it? Knowing what's rigid and what's normal. I have this with my dad, too. I'll see him five times and it'll all be normal, quite affectionate, I'll think 'oh finally he's mellowed and we get on ok" and then the sixth time, he'll revert to the stonewalling that he used to do when I was a teenager ("you didn't ask me a question, you made a statement, it doesn't require a response" ). So I'm left thinking, is this it? Is this just him? And I think the answer is 'yes', not 'well he has a personality disorder.'

I had a look at that Light's House thing but nothing fitted that well. She's just not controlling or unrelenting enough. If anything, I've shown that I won't take any shit so well, and she backs down so immediately, that I'm in danger of being quite toxic towards her ('Any shit' being stuff like abusing my 5-yr-old son in the street and screaming in his face...not trivial.)

I mean clearly she has ishoos, she's not had what I'd call a happy life, and yes leaving your children is pretty extreme. I wonder if she's not just quite a clueless mess. In a way it doesn't matter what it is, because the only way I can deal with it is, as some have suggested, to have therapy (grrrrr £££££) and learn to bear her.

I have just looked at lighthouse and realise I have a problem- every tine I see a diagnosis thing for a damaging parent I put myself into the category. I assume this doesn't mean people who have rules, boundaries or systems, parents whose children fulfil some need in them, or parents who are occasionally or even often anxious. Or when you're sone of those things at times? I have it in me to be controlling and needy. And became more so when had two very young children. But is part of it realising this and making steps to make sure you put your children first? Hope I'm not trivialising it but at bedtime when I'm tired I do struggle to put dc first, I just want my space. And having read about parents who have done a seriously poor job and the results for their children, I really worry. Sorry if this is a bit of a hijack.

Lookandlearn, I didn't want to leave you unanswered because it must be upsetting for you to think this way. I hope one of this board's talented psychologists will be along soon for you! (Start your own thread??)

Conventional wisdom says that, if you're concerned about your behaviours, you're not 'mad'. So rest assured on that one It is true, though, that we can follow set patterns or scripts, almost as if there's some hidden being pulling the strings. I did it myself for years - and it can be confusing, not to mention worrying. The good news is that everybody's like this to an extent; it's a question of the extent.

Are you replaying behaviours of your mother's, or some other adult from your own childhood? Are some of the important people in your life very anxious & nervy? It could easily be a style of being that was imprinted on you at a young age, or a family script that you're only just beginning to notice.

Working to 'control' yourself can be effective but, annoyingly, tends to result in other self-undermining behaviours. Understanding is usually the key - and the understanding, itself, often fixes the problem. I'm a huge fan of Transactional Analysis - all about the 'life scripts' and so-called games we pursue throughout our lives. Also, if you had parents like Prunnhilda's (Isn't that a brilliant name?!), you may want to Google something called FLEAS, which basically means warped styles of thinking you learned at your mother's knee.

Plus ... Do relaxation exercises! That's an order Get yourself a mindfulness meditation CD and use it. Taking up martial arts helps quite a bit, too - helps you gain confidence, feel grounded and channel aggression, all in one go.

Lookandlearn - I worry about that too. But I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm copying parenting methods from my mother, doing things she did to me, rather than doing them because that is my personality, iyswim. And because that is not really me, I can learn new ways of doing things.

It is hard because a lot of things that you do as a parent are instinctive, and I can't always be instinctive cos my instincts were shaped by a woman who was "mad" (garlicbutter I think I love you! ).

I work on one thing at a time and then move on. At the moment I'm focusing on not saying "no you can't do that" as my default response to everything they ask.

Garlicbutter is right when she says that, if you're concerned, you're not mad. My mother would never in a million years question that there was anything wrong with her behaviour towards me. When I question it, she gets disproportionately angry.