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?

By "they" I mean my children, not my parents.

I googled FLEAS. Snort. LOTS of advice on how to de-flea your dog there. What other word should I google with FLEAS to get info about the thinking thing?

It's here: lightshouse.org/fleas-fleas-fleas.html

Thankyou! That's a bit of an eye-opener.

Prunnhilda - interestingly your family set up is very similar to mine (and I suspect it's not that common).

There's been some really good advice here, but all I wanted to add is that, having been in a quite similar place where no one in the family tells the truth about what happened and being afraid of my own feelings about it all - I did spend a couple of years seeing a therapist and it was, really, life-changing. My family hasn't changed an iota, but the way I deal with them - and what they do to me - is unrecognisable.

I'd say more, but have to go out now. And also, I really enjoyed quite a lot of the therapy - it was difficult at times but it was fantastic getting a different point of view on our odd family.

Onesandwichshort - really? I've never met anyone with a similar family history, so if you wanted to share it I'd be really interested! It is totally unusual, isn't it? Before I became a mother, I (very immaturely) felt it was 'special' in some way (look at me, I can survive this weird situation), but now with a child I am slowly dying inside and exhausting myself really. Yes I know I have to sort it via therapy. I have reached the point where there is no other way. I did have a very little therapy a few years ago and it was indeed really useful.

Lookandlearn and anyone else who thinks they are doing the same sort of thing - rest assured that I do too. The very fact that you can read something like this and go 'oh, shit!' I think is a huge (painful) advantage that my mother, for one, doesn't have. She'd read something like this and think 'I can't be doing with People Like That' and would spit out some venomous stuff about Other Parents and how they can't do a good enough job. Or how hard it is to be a grandparent (in contrast to what every normal grandparent says!) woe woe woe. I regularly get to the end of the day and frankly, like a toddler, I am overstimulated and want a dark quiet room with only the light from QI on the telly to illuminate my glass of wine. At that time of day I do a LOT of pretending to be calm through gritted teeth

Hello - just wanted to say yes I will, but probably later on today when I have some time to write properly. But I know just what you mean about the dark quiet room; I had no idea how much time I had on my own (and needed!) before I had DD and I do miss that. Back later...

My mother story is very similar. She has now come to terms with it. She has chosen not to facilitate further contact between her and her mother. She just stop doing the walking and the contact reduced on its own.

Now she sees her about twice a year. Both are ok, neither of them like/care about each other very much anyway.

I think she just decided to forget she was her mother and deal with her in the same way she would with a person she didn't like at all.

Why should you learn to bear her? More than that, why should you pay to learn to bear her?

What would you if this was a friend?

What are you getting out of this relationship?

What does she bring to this relationship?

She abandoned you, can't (won't more like - because it means forfeiting the power & please don't think she doesn't want it) explain why

She makes you feel awful.

Abuses your child in the street!

Really, what are you & your dc getting from her that means you want to keep her in your life? Because I don't fall for this 'she is family' stuff. I stopped talking to my mother 18yrs ago. She is as narcissistic as they get! She would use my children to get to me & upset me.

Just because she is your mum, doesn't mean you have to have loyalties to her!

You've had a lot to deal with prunnhilda and it's not surprising it is surfacing. I 'like' to think that pain can stay dormant for only so long, but it will resurface intermittently because the soul crucially strives for health and pushes for resolution. Your strong feelings towards your mother are a 'good' sign that you are striving for something closer to the truth versus eg the distorted pride you felt about coping with the situation up to now (that was your way of coping at the time btw, nothing wrong with that imo).

Our generation has a lot on its side in terms of working out dysfunctional patterns - there is a lot of info and support out there - but in previous generations, emotional/psychological health wasn't part of general consciousness iyswim (dont know if I've made that clear). It sounds as though your mother has been crucially damaged at some stage and, as the adage goes, hurt people hurt people (and I'd add: particularly those close). She left her children which is a colossal stigma, to this day, and probably always will be, but in our current parenting-obsessed culture this is seen as particularly incomprehensible and contemptible. It doesn't sound as though your mother has ever addressed the damage/trauma in her life - it bubbles away under the surface, putting her to sleep, only surfacing in a volcanic eruption sometimes. Maybe she felt that she had to get as far away as possible from the disgusting crime she had committed: a mother leaving her children?

But you were one of the children she left and you rightly have a great deal to say about it. You sound intensely angry, which is showing as hate at the moment - I totally support you in what you are feeling, and why. She let you down, she abandoned you, she was a crap mother. You may not ever get what you should have had from her but therapy will help you to come to terms with the past (though it's galling to have to deal with it and also pay for it! grrrr) and prepare you for the present. What you get from it can be precious though, life-changing as someone said. It will also free her too up to a point, though that wouldn't be the point of you doing it.

Prunhilda, is your own child still quite young? I ask because I found that my feelings towards my mother changed a lot after I had children - I started to think about things that happened in my childhood that I had not thought about for a long time. Nothing terrible and possibly things that were normal for that era but still things I am cross about iyswim. And I do understand that some of them were probably due to her immaturity or lack of confidence or having PMS...

I am lucky in that I live a long way from my mother & can manage the level of contact. We talk on the phone once a week but if she us irritating me I make an excuse to curtail the call.

We have never spoken about the issues in question & I'm not sure we ever will!

It does sound like mental health issues (perhaps as straightforward as PND) were a probable cause of your mother leaving. That has certainly been the case in any similar situations I have encountered where there has not been any domestic violence.

Onesandwichshort it struck me that you might not want to make it all public (it could be quite identifying, not many people have deliberately absent mothers!) so if you want to then great, or PM me, or if you decide not to rake it up then that's totally understandable.

Maelstrom that's what I foresee for my mother and I, once ds is grown up.

Differentnameforthis, the trouble is that she isn't narcissistic or controlling or anything like that, and she does try quite hard to have a relationship with us. But I wouldn't have a friend like her, not in a million years. If we had a more normal family history, it would just be me moaning about dear old mum and her irritating ways. Without the love there, I can't cope too well with having to put up with her, but I'd have to be really cold just to break contact totally. So there's the conflict for me.

Springydaffs - that's a good summing up. Her family is pretty fucked up (yet they are the people she mainly socialises with, too) although they consider themselves quite close-knit. No doubt there has been some horrible behaviour over the years and she doesn't really analyse it, just shrugs and says 'ah well.' It will be very telling when her own mother dies.

Decorhate - yes I had thought bad depression was the most likely reason for her leaving. She's never mentioned it. It's hard to find out. I can't just ask her to tell me what was going on in her head at that point (thirty years ago!) because frankly the merest hint from me that I think it was depression will be seized on and turned into her truth. (Another one of her annoying ways, but quite common I think.)

No, I'm happy to answer on here - I name change quite regularly, so if people manage to work out who I am, they won't know much else (!).

And also, I'm reasonably comfortable talking about it now, which is one of the benefits of therapy. I do rather disagree with differentname, it was well worth paying for, simply because I'm not carrying it around with me any more, at least not in the same way.

I will try not to write an entire novel, just the outline...

My parents split up when I was 7 and I lived with my father (and my step-mother, but that's a whole other story). Like you, I will never know what really happened; my father 'persuaded' my mother that we would be better off with him, but he had a will of iron and she had no self-confidence at all so of course he would win that. I saw her reasonably regularly, but we don't have a proper relationship at all - as someone else said, I'm the adult, not her.

She's a depressed sometime alcoholic who lives in a very messy house which I refuse to visit now I have a child. She did have a terrible childhood, in a very detached upper-middle class way (and which would make a whole novel in itself), which does make me understand some of the way she has been. But I still find her very hard to deal with.

I stay detatched from her (she phones every week but only comes to see us about once a year) because otherwise I would be furious with her for not looking after me. But I can't be angry with her because she is so fragile (and I don't think that therapy has quite sorted that out properly in my head). I think two things upset me most; that she didn't look after us (living with my dad and step mother was far from plain sailing, esp for me) and there will always be a bit of me which thinks that not even my mother loved me enough to look after me. Which very easily - I am such a bad person not even my own mother loves m - converts into self-hatred if I am a bit down.

Depression makes her selfish (when my father died she rang up and her first words were 'Oh I am so sad'. She'd been divorced from him for over thirty years, he was my dad...); drink makes her muddled when she is drinking. I can't fix her, all I have been able to do is disentangle my messy emotions enough for me to live my own life.

Very interesting you said that it will be telling when her own mother dies - that's exactly when my mother fell apart completely.

Sorry, this reads a bit rambling and pointless, and possibly not very helpful, but do ask if there's anything else.

I realise this may sound easy for me to say, but I'm wondering if the villain is the mother here. Sorry if that puts the cat amongst the pigeons. Something drastic has to have happened for a mother to leave her children, plus there is clear evidence to suggest that the mother, in OP's and sandwich's case, is subsequently a basket case. In all the situations I have ever known where the woman has left her children (and there aren't many), it has been because of domestic abuse - a controlling, abusive partner. I realise this isn't always the case - PND is often a factor - but the mothers you describe here sound, to this day, like traumatised people. Perhaps you could research domestic abuse to understand how controlling abusers can brainwash and dismantle their victim's mind to believe they are worthless and the trauma in the victim as a result.

I realise that this could be an incendiary thing to say - I am sorry. The thing is, I was so very nearly that mother but somehow held on. I'm quite a basket case in my own way and my children are extremely angry with me for being a broken person. In my case it was horrific DA, which has had a catastrophic effect on my soul one way or another. I held on to my kids but they are angry that they lived with a mother who struggled for years with the trauma of the horrific, ongoing, abuse from their father, even decades after the marriage ended. Your mothers left, you are still angry with them; also angry with the effects of a broken and damaged woman who can't be a proper mother to you. From my pov it seems we can't win - whatever we did we are blamed and vilified.

I'm just trying to give you the perspective of someone in a similar positon to your mothers and hope this has not been offensive to you. It is not your job to feel sorry for your mother but, as you are older, to have some compassion and understanding about the way things turned out - compassion for you first, space to be angry and grieve for what you didn't have but should have had, then, hopefully, compassion for you all.

I hope this is ok but can I ask why your mother's comment, sandwich, after your father died, re "oh I am so sad" was offensive to you? This is a genuine question. My children's father died suddenly (and prematurely) and my children were extremely angry if I showed any sorrow or sadness (I was sorry for them, it was extremely sad for them to lose their father so suddenly and so early). Could you shed some light on that? What would you have wanted her to say/do - what would have been appropriate for you?

Springydaffs, I read your post last night and spent some time mulling it over. I'm not offended at all.

I've always said that my parents splitting up was for the best and that on balance we were better off with my dad as he was/is more stable. My biggest problem, I suppose, is how things went after that. (eg her moving far away/lack of involvement in our lives)

My dad just isn't a physically abusive person. He has his moments of being really passive aggressive and certainly when I was a teenager living with him, I was very, very unhappy (for other reasons too, where we grew up was dismal) and I left home as soon as I could (so I understand the need to get away). Funnily enough just recently he did one of the PA things he used to do, which I have just typed out and deleted because it's just not that bad compared to real, proper emotional abuse. He is hard to live with and I would never choose to live with him. I don't doubt that he had an effect on my mother as a young woman that was not good, but my own experience of him is not one of sustained emotional abuse - more like living with an unhappy person who never learned not to turn unhappiness round on others.

Not to diminish the effects of that. It's certainly thought-provoking.

(Aargh have you ever just wanted two totally different parents?!)

I meant to say - he does all that passive aggressive stuff but he's not controlling. His way is to show no interest in what I do (though others get to hear about it once I am gone, so I know it goes in despite the staring into middle distance at the time) which is very PA but he's never tried to change my behaviour. He uses indifference as a way of taking no responsibility for how things turn out.

Onesandwichshort - ah yes those feelings of unworthiness. Sneaky little bastards.
I don't know about you but I find I'm relieved that I'm not repeating the general pattern of my mum's parenting. Sometimes it takes quite an effort - in little things like not losing my temper over certain things (I don't always manage). The bigger things (like not running off!) are not a problem. I think deep down I have had a fear that I will be as feckless as she has been.

Prunnhilda - could have written your sentence about being with your dad being the better option of the two word for word. Exactly the same here.

Although my father was difficult in a different way - everything was fine so long as we all believed together that everything was fine. Which made being upset about the divorce/my mother/anything in our family situation nigh on impossible, and stored up a lot of trouble for the future. For me at least.

And yes, I am definitely a better parent than my mother, but always haunted by the fear of becoming her. I think she felt (or I felt) that having children ruined her life, and so I was terrified before I had DD that it would be the same for me. But my therapist spent a lot of time saying, but you are not your mother. It went in a bit...

Springydaffs - I hope you can see from this that, although elements of what you say are true, about emotional abuse and so on, there were good reasons why I stayed with my father. I do try and be kind and compassionate to my mother, but it's quite hard work sometimes, it really is.

As for what she said when my father died, he was pretty much the only person in my entire family who really looked out for me (albeit in his own odd way). When he died, it was the one time when I could really have done with my mother looking after me, just for once, and thinking about me. But it was all about her, even though she'd only seen him once in 35 years.

My ex was never physically abusive prunnhilda, it was what he did to my mind that was terrifying.. He was great with the kids, moreorless, it was me who got it. My kids would probably have had a much more stable time with him but he was constantly away on business so it wasn't viable.

Though I'm not pushing the point, just needed to clear that point up. Thank you (both) for taking my points well. I appreciate that it's a very touchy subject.