mother who can't handle either good stuff or bad stuff?

[HardCheese]

I started this in response to the thread on the mother who only wanted to hear the good stuff, then realised it was all about me, and of no help to the other poster.

In the case of my mother, I've learned from bitter experience not to tell her any of the bad stuff, even when I desperately want to, because she's just not capable of being calmly supportive - she obsesses about it, and turns it over in her mind, says novenas, and worries desperately about it in the early hours. She's someone with terribly low expectations of the world in general, friendless, someone who feels herself to be a victim and eternally disappointed, and she projects this on to all her children, whom she also expects to be misfits/loners. Anything anyone confides in her is evidence of the fact that This is Just the Way Life is For Her and Hers. (Complicated by a very traditional Irish Catholic belief that life is a vale of tears.)

However, the complicating factor is that she's also something of a grief vampire - happy stories of success etc make her feel excluded, so she's always on the lookout for stories of bereavement, marriage breakdown, unemployment etc. This is what phone conversation with her consists of (we live in different countries) - who's dead, who's sick, who's lost their job, who's got dementia.

I'm in the final weeks of my first pregnancy (older first-timer) and feeling spectacularly vulnerable and a bit frightened of giving birth, but I sound like Little Mary Sunshine on the phone to her, because any confession of feeling inadequate or frightened would both frighten and appal her, but also be grist to her mill. At some level, she both needs me to be the confident, happy optimist (and I'm not, by nature), but it would also gratify her at some other level if I'd had a very difficult pregnancy, a problem birth and an ill baby - because that's what she expects and understands, awful though that is to say. Plus it would give her something to talk to other people about - she's always been embarrassed by my achievements, and she would include my uncomplicated pregnancy as something she can't talk to others about because it looks like boasting!

She'd be completely appalled if I said so as she's not aware of it at all, but I saw this pattern at work when my younger sister was recently ditched in unpleasant circumstances by a longterm partner she genuinely loved. My mother's response showed all too clearly that this was what she's expected all along, and that my sister was naive for getting into a relationship with a much older man with two children from a previous marriage - but it's really no help to my sister, who needs to be allowed to grieve without feeling she's making anyone else's life worse!

I'm the only one of my four siblings who is in a happy longterm relationship and is having a child, and I sometimes feel under a stupid amount of pressure because of it!

Sorry, don't know where this all burst out of or what I'm actually asking - didn't really sleep. I suppose I'm afraid I will pass on something of this to my own baby, even as I'm determined not to.

Thanks for reading, if you got this far. Please don't flame.

If it's any help my mum believes too that 'this is a vale of tears' Though strangely she is a glass half full type of person whereas i am pessimistic and sometimes therefore am pleasantly surprised! Best of luck with your pregnancy. Enjoy your baby- happy times.

Personally I went from bright and breezy to no information to just not calling. When in person I do a lot of "oh really" when I mean "oh, really "

My MIL is very much of the age of phoning just to say someone we don't know has died. I think that's age not temperament.

You sound like you have a fantastic handle on it.

Thanks, everyone who responded. Maybe some counselling is the answer, only I already know what's going on - what makes me sad is that this continues to cast me in the role of sole adult in the situation, with my mother as the child who is apparently unaware of the consequences of her actions.

The mildest reference to a less-than-ideal aspect of any of our childhoods - like the fact that we lived in a desperately overcrowded house with elderly members of the extended family who absorbed so much of my mother's time and attention that there was very little left over for her children - makes my mother say 'Oh, I can't do anything right', or 'We didn't know any better', or to say I always twist everything to make it look as black as possible.

(I don't exempt my father from this either - this is a man who persistently refused promotion to a foreman's job at work, despite the fact we badly needed the money, because it was 'too much hassle'. I have only recently realised he is on the Asperger's spectrum, which explains a lot of my childhood.)

I think one of the things that has really put my childhood into my mind again is the prospect of having to have internal exams in labour, something I have an ingrained phobia about. I was abused by an elderly man when I was ten, at an activity my mother sent my little sister and me to, though we never wanted to go - and though I managed to get my sister out of the situation, it never even occurred to me to tell my mother, just as it didn't occur to either me or my sisters to tell her when we were all horribly bullied by the same awful teacher in primary school. I'm not sure whether we all felt instinctively that she wouldn't cope, or whether we were just afraid she wouldn't do anything because it would 'make a fuss'.

I'm determined not to pass this on to my baby.

that's awful that you were abused, so sorry.

There's a book called "blooming birth" that has a section in it about concerns about internal exams/the birth following abuse, think it advised talking to the health professionals about your concerns and that they result from abuse (if you feel able to do that, you wouldn't need to reveal details of what happened), there're things they can do to reduce stress for you during the birth.