Was this normal behaviour?

[mermaid101]

I have a difficult relationship withy mother. I'm starting to do some "work" on this; I've been lurking on the stately homes thread and reading some of the books suggested. I've also slowly started re-drawing some boundaries.

This has led me to revisit/remember some incidents from the past. One which has troubled me a bit is this one.

When I was about 16/17 I went to a music festival with a group of friends. We came from a small village, so to get there we had to get a train to the nearest city (about a half hour journey) and then get another train to the festival.

On the day, my mum drove to the station in the city, hid in a corner and watched myself and my friends until we caught the train. I was not aware she was there. She told me she had done this a few weeks after I returned.

I remember being very upset and unsettled about this. I tried to explain this to her, but as a teenaged, didn't really have the vocabulary or ability to articulate my disquiet effectively. She brushed it off.

Could people give me their opinions on this? It was a long time ago and I suppose it doesn't really matter, but I would be interested to know what others thought. I have my own DCs now, but they are young. I'm not sure if this would be a normal thing to want to do if you had teenagers?

[mermaid101]

Him looking after ME. Not him looking after him!

[pocketsaviour]

Mermaid, both those two phone calls are definitely not normal. That behaviour is very obviously designed to keep you in a role of "stupid child" who cannot be trusted to look after herself.

It must have been embarrassing both for you and the two people who received phone calls.

[mermaid101]

Thanks pocket saviour. It was really embarrassing all round, especially with the ex boyfriend. It was so weird as well because my mum made it clear she didn't think much of him. I had spent quite a lot of time trying to convince myself the break up was his loss ( he dumped me) and after that, it made me feel I had been a complete burden on him.

When I spoke to/confronted her about this, she kept insisting it was only polite and that she was Doing The Right Thing.

It left me feeling confused and humiliated.

Thanks for you input. I think it's hard for me to work out what's normal and how much is me being over sensitive. I used to thick because it was all a long time ago it doesn't really matter, but making sense of the past is helping me-very slowly- re-draw some boundaries with her and alter some badly intrenched ideas about myself.

[Jux]

No, those calls aren't normal. While you can stretch things to allow the watching you get on a train thing as being due to an uncertainty within herself that we all suffer to one extent or another, those calls do not fall into that category at all.

I did once find it on the tip of my tongue to thank someone for being dd's friend (when she was v small and had gone to new primary where some pupils thought the new girl was put there to be taunted, and dh and I thought she'd never make a friend again, she'd come home crying every day and so on), I didn't actually do it, and I would certainly not do it now!


It is odd.

[RedRugNoniMouldiesEtc]

It sounds, to me, like she struggles with social norms and with seeing you as an autonomous person rather than "her child" if you see what I mean? The phone calls sound very much like thanking the host parent of a sleepover for children making me think that she hadn't grasped the difference between parenting a young child and being the parent of an adult. I'm not surprised the recipients felt awkward!