Can we have a thread for those of us who are daughters with difficult mothers?

[PinkyofPie]

Been thinking about starting this thread for a while.

My mother is a difficult and sometimes toxic woman and we have a strained relationship.

I think IRL there's not enough people around like me, all my friends are best friends with their mums. My mum recently moved back to the area and all I get is "oh I bet you're so happy". Actually, no, her being closer is awful if I'm honest.

There's so much to my relationship with her, too much for an OP.

A huge bone of contention is that she knows about a family member sexually harassing me quite badly through my teens (I've posted details in another name). I'm talking flashing, suggestive language and grabbing me now and again when no one was looking. I have told her the details. This person is still very much in her life, she bigs him up to anyone who listens and can't understand why I despise him and won't be near him. She minimised his behaviour massively and We Don't Talk About It.

She also made comments along the lines of "well did you lead him on?" yes mum, I was 16 and he was 55, I was gagging for it with a relative.

being in her presence is very tiring. She has no friends so I feel pressured to see her now she's back near me. I met her today, and I am drained. I always feel like I've done something wrong, she's in a constant mood. Everything is crap, she hates any food we eat, complains about people nearby and won't look for the good in anything. Where she lived before was so much better apparently. Spending just a few hours round that negativity is exhausting.

The funny thing is she makes out to others like we extremely close. A daughter of her friend - who I had just met that night - once said to me "I'm so jealous about the bond you and your mum have"

Anyway I know MN has lots of people who feel the same so thought I would start by having a place for us long suffering daughters to share, moan, vent and generally get everything out into the open!

All of this is very familiar.
The favoured sibling
"You made me have gynae probs, HOLD my hand while I sit on sofa and bleed, for three days, because you made me so ill, I cant have anymore kids" 10 yrs of that shit. I made my mum infertile apparently??? Fucking nut job
The narcissism"You will do what I say" really, REALLY, at 45, you aren't paying FOTTFSOFAFOSM.
The expectation "You will do/ behave/choose what I say
The "I love you but don't like you". Repeat every 2 weeks about ANYTHING
The guilt "I am getting old /have terminal illness (what every year??) 15 yrs
No one has mentioned "Tough love" justification for being DM a bitch to my DSis and me
Btw there have been five weddings since, but only "the one wedding" counts.

Thankfully my mil is the same. DH and I walked away 5 yrs agp.

Who needs that shit. Seriously walk away until you feel strong enough to return. Not there yet.

Contrary13- so refreshing to read your post (and many others!). My DM regularly tells me what a nightmare I was as a child, "always crying", "never slept", "refused to eat anything", "always ill" but not said with a shred of sympathy, just contempt.

I told her that it sounds like I probably had reflux (which one of my dc's had so I knew what it was like) and she said "well whatever it was you wouldn't bloody shut up" . Let me see... It probably didn't help that she and my DF were chain smoking throughout my childhood (but she "cut down" when she was pregnant )

Isn't it strange how bitter people can be about how someone behaved as a baby? My DD is 3 and was a nightmare sleeper, I'm talking 6-10 times a night until she was 2.5. I can manage to not hold a grudge with her about it

Pinky - ditto, my ds was awake multiple times a night for at least a year. DH and I were exhausted but I feel nothing but sympathy for my ds. How can our mothers hold it against us decades later??

I used to feel so guilty for being such an annoying baby/toddler. Seems ridiculous now.

Ah yes, the health issues. Could write a whole thread about my mothwr using health lies to manipulate and control people.

OP I am 39 and have not had any relationship with my mother since I was 18. She's toxic abusive and generally just a horrible person. Even wishing her own grandchildren dead. Hence I have never wanted or needed anything from her and have nothing to thank her for. I have my own children now and I can not understand it at all..I'm totally different with mine I'm very close to my daughters in particular. I believe that there is much more to being a mother than just giving birth which is all my mother did. I recieved no love, affection or any of the things that my friends had with their mothers. It was hard for a bit but I'm cool with it now as I'm very happy with what I have achieved without her and how much better of a mother I am.

My mum is the main reason I left it until my late 30s to have kids. Prior to that, I just felt I didn't want any - that I'd be a shit mother, and that I didn't want my kids to gave the miserable upbringing I had.

Out of curiosity, is anyone's toxic mother a real animal-lover? My mum's dog is her world, she doesn't go anywhere without him (she goes shopping and leaves him in the car). Apparently leaving a 12yo dog in the car would be like leaving a newborn baby

I say it because she has shown that dog more love and kindness and patience than she's ever shown a human. She fiercely protective of him and goes in a mood of I say he's "a daft dog" or something.

Funnily enough, he was my dog. I got him as an 18th birthday present, but my mum kind of took over and when I moved out age 19 she insisted she keep him (which I agreed to as I worked longer hours than her and was moving to a pokey flat and didn't think it was fair on the dog)

Yeah, mine has cats and treats them like children.

The animal lover thing I think is they can't argue back, the same way as she was a good mother to very small children, crap once we wanted any independence.

My mother treated other people better than I was treated. She just wanted to control everything. I was hit all the time shouted at sworn at called names...told what friends etc I could or could not have. I was always expected to stay in to take care of the other children I was 1 of 7. She has 5 sisters herself only one that actually has anything to do with her..my brother also does not have anything to do with her...again she couldn't control his life so he was pushed to one side.

Yes, mine treats her Yorkie like her baby.

She got her from a pet store selling "tea cup" Yorkies.

The dog is yappy, runs into doors and pisses every where. It's also about 18 lbs. She likes ice cream, you see. Chocolate chip is her favourite

When I was younger she threatened to give my puppy away because she kept having accidents. But her baaaaby is different.

I'm another one who was scared to have a DD - and worse, to have 2 DD's, so I could play them off against each other for greater emotional effect.

I sobbed when the sonographer told me that I was having a girl. I will do better though.

I'll never tell my DD that she was a nightmare, that she was difficult and not what I hoped she'd be.

Even now, at 32, my Mum is still at it - when my DD (2) threw a (normal, toddler) tantrum, my DM gleefully told me that she'd be a nightmare, just like I was, "just you wait and see." It sickens me that I smiled and nodded, instead of defending my beautiful girl.

Tiggywinkler, I feel you. But honestly, you didn't do a disservice to your DD. You wouldn't get through to your mother if you did challenge her. They never listen.

My mother called me today and told me all about the gossip of everyone she doesn't like. Her doublespeak is unbelievable. She slags off one person for doing something, but if someone she likes does the EXACT SAME THING, and it's pointed out to her, she scoffs and says, "We don't know the whole story."

Like, for example, my father cheated on her and left the family home=bastard

My uncle, her boyfriend (cringe) cheated on my aunt and left the family home=no one understands the whole story.

Wow, reading all the previous posts, some much worse than my own experiences and many similar, it's sad and comforting at the same time as I know I'm not alone in this madness. The sharing helps.
I have been slowly remembering more and more things she did which are completely out of order, I suppose I was trying to forget but am sure many of you will have had similar.
She pretended to have been diagnosed with cancer when I was a teenager (she didn't want me going out that evening)
She has been at deaths door so many times, makes up illnesses, lies and she even told me to not tell anyone I was sick once...it was stealing the thunder from her own illness. I was in agony and had to drive her to the doctors for one of her fictitious concerns. She was worried I would tell anyone.
She never gave me birthday presents and made me wear nighties instead of dresses as 'no one would notice' they did and I die of shame thinking of it. I had one outfit outside my uniform.
I never got birthday presents because I had 'plenty already'
She regularly lied to my father about my behaviour, he would then hit me and roar at me whilst she shut the kitchen door and turned up the radio.
She never gave any pocket money, she 'didn't believe in it'. I spent most of my youth being dependent on neighbours and friends. Irony being she had more money than them. She didn't (and still doesn't) give a shit how bad she looks with her behaviour.
I just realised reading last nights posts...my DM does the same thing when I'm wearing 'niaace' clothes/on my way out/just got hair done. She made me go up her attic (vitally important) in a new silk dress, hair just done etc
Her new one is to make me take the vent out at the back of her dryer (which she never uses) before I go out anywhere. To do this I have to kneel on the garage floor and she stands watching as No lint comes out. I thought it was just a quirk of hers but I now see the reality. Not fucking doing it again !
I also remember her 'accidentally' putting an expensive mohair jumper in the washing machine. She can also lose anything she doesn't like. She hates me having nice clothes, gives me the Spanish Inquisition on everything I wear. I have to remember not to wear anything new/not seen before to her house as I know she will question me and then take it out on me a different way later. I would get a phone call, reminding me not to waste money, my bills, how useless I am with money, how old I am, and generally by the end of the phone call I'd happily shoot myself.

She cannot be trusted, and this is the most important one. Whilst all the other stuff is sick and annoying, the fact that your own mother would hang you is (for me) the worst. She doesn't have my back. She opens any mail 'accidentally', she listens in phone calls, I can't even bring my handbag in as she'd go through that too. She moans if my phone goes off when I visit.

Talking of which...I am now not answering the phone when she calls, am limiting to one a day (normally 3-8 calls). I am not sharing anything but trivial details with her, I will be pleasant but that's about it.
I am setting boundaries as quite frankly I've had enough. It's time for DD and my life now as I've spent far too long pandering to her.
I don't have the balls to go NC at the minute, but I wouldn't rule it out in the near future.

Another one who is so glad she had boys!

BITCAT Mine was the same. Everyone thinks she's lovely because they see the gushing, can't do enough for people, side. I get the other side.

For example, I got ready for a family wedding at her house, came downstairs and asked how I looked. I got a disinterested glance and a half-hearted 'alright' response. I felt so deflated. A few minutes later and one of her neighbours, also going, walked in. She was dressed very similar to me. My mum was instantly beaming and gushing about how gorgeous she looked and asking questions about where she got her dress, who did her hair etc. I stood there in silence feeling like the ugliest person on the planet.

My mother said my daughter was manipulative, and 'knew what she was doing' when she gave everyone a big cute grin. She was 8 months old.

LadyDepp - it's weird you should mention reflux. My daughter had it, very badly (threw up every feed, like clockwork, was under a consultant for that and her sleep aponea for years). I was diagnosed four years ago with gastritis and a hiatus hernia - which the doctors reckon was caused over years. Maybe I had reflux as a baby, too. I know that I was hospitalised when I was 8 months old with seizures, and on anti-seizure medication until I started school as a result, so there was probably an actual reason for my lack of sleeping. But to my mother... I was just "a bloody awful child" who forced her to take sleeping pills

I'll be honest: I didn't want children at all, I was so frightened of repeating the cycle. And when I was pregnant with my daughter, I was terrified of her being a girl. I was diagnosed with PND, a lovely counsellor type came to the house to talk to me a few times... until my mother interferred (it was her home, you see) and said to the counsellor "you have no children of your own, so I don't see what use you'll be to my daughter - I can do a better job than you, don't come back!". The counsellor didn't. I was left to it. But considering that I was diagnosed as being bipolar when I was 16 and have been incredibly anxious my whole life... God alone knows what I might have done because of my mother's behaviour. Thankfully, I didn't. But I did dress my daughter in boy's clothes for about a year until I realised that I could break the cycle simply by loving her (which I did from the moment I set eyes on her!). When she's asked why she was always in boys tee-shirts in the photographs I have of her, my excuse is that at the time little girls clothing was incredibly boring (which it was, but it was also the start of the "girl power" era... and I'm sorry, but I wasn't letting my baby wear mini-skirts and crop-tops...!!!). Boys clothes? Were better!

And yes to the animals... although my mother quite clearly doesn't love hers at all. She's recently acquired a puppy - whom she's cheerfully informed me will view her as its disciplinarian, and me as the idiot who gives it love, and attention, and plays with it. The pup is 10 weeks old and whenever he sees my son or our dog, he snaps at their faces. It's worrying. The animals with whom my son and I share our home, are a part of our family and are very loved - perhaps even a little spoiled, in the case of the eldest cat - but our dog? Is trained, well behaved, and has never snapped at anyone's face. Not even as a puppy!

At the moment, I'm nursing my son's beloved cat back to health following an accident... I know that if she dies, my son will be distraught. She had a knock to the head and has lost sight in one eye, the vet thinks, which she can adapt to - even though she's 18 - but it's also knocked her confidence hugely. I spent two nights without sleep syringing water into her, because she wouldn't drink and the vet didn't want to put her in their sick-room, but wanted her to stay in a familiar environment where she felt safe. When I told my father this, he obviously informed my mother, because I had a 'phone call informing me that "it's just a sodding cat!" and to "let it die - it's too scraggy anyway!". The cat and my son are devoted to one another. She's part of our family. And I trust the vet's advice/opinion far more than I do my mothers! In short? My mother has animals because they make her look like she has a heart... but she doesn't. When her last dog died a few months ago, it was me who took her for the final trip to the vets, my arms she died in, me who still cries for her... My mother had found the new puppy within a week. Her last dog is never mentioned.

planned ariande and pinky My DM gets cancer, any time I tried to break away from her, she trotted this out. The last time I actually laughed in her face. She was LIVID when my DAunt got terminal cancer - bloody thunder stealer!

Yes, I was a hopeless child apparently. I used to get lost all the time and lose my stuff. That may have been because from the age of seven I was expected to get myself across the city on two different buses, and some days she would tell me not to come home but to meet her somewhere else. Strangely enough sometimes I forgot or got lost. I remember some kind people trying to help me once, I couldn't understand why they thought it was so weird that I was so little and alone in the city.

Oh, I was also very "promiscuous" as a young child apparently. When I asked her what the fuck she meant by that, she just looked at me all disgusted and said "You know exactly what I mean." I really don't!

When I was 7, I was sexually abused by one of my father's brothers. I'd been sent to stay with him, his wife and their months old baby for the Easter break from school, because everyone else was "too busy" to have me. Anyway. When I eventually worked up the nerve to tell my mother a few years ago she demanded to know why I'd not told anyone (ie, her) about it. I said that I was too frightened to tell her, but that I'd told my Gran about it - and hadn't she ever wondered why, every time my "uncle" and aunt invited me to stay after that, my Gran insisted on going, too?! Whilst my Gran didn't inform the police about what her son had done... she didn't leave me alone with him from that moment until the day she died. And when my daughter was small, she was never left alone with him, either.

My mother took huge exception to this, but at the time I was genuinely too terrified of upsetting her to tell her. Same when I was raped at the age of 10 during a break in. I didn't tell anyone until I was 16 and tried to kill myself. At which point, she pinned me against a wall and screamed at me for embarrassing her, refused to partake in the counselling that my shrink wanted the family to do (everyone else apart from her and DB2 were willing), and interrogated me as to whether her father had ever touched her. She claims that he abused her when she was a child... yet happily used him to mind DB1, DB2 and myself as children, every single school holiday and some weekends when my Gran couldn't (my grandfather never laid a finger on me, incidentally and, as awful as this sounds, I don't think he did, her, either. My DB1 said a few years ago that it was almost as though she came out with this statement as a way of diverting the help I needed away from me and towards her).

Ever since, she won't discuss anything that doesn't jive with her memories of events. We're not allowed to bring up "the past"... but she can rehash how awfully DB1 and I've treated her endlessly, and will happily insult my late Gran as being a shit MIL until the cows come home (I don't know if she was, or if she wasn't - but she was a fantastic grandmother who really stepped up and did her best to give us a happy childhood/protect me from my "uncle"). My therapist when I was 20 or so, that my mother is a deeply unhappy woman - and that she has no interest in changing, just in making everyone else around her as unhappy as she is, so that her view of normality is normal (ie, she's not the only unhappy one, everyone else is, therefore she's normal...).

And just lately, when I stand up to my daughter (who has her own issues, but reminds me horribly of my mother in a lot of ways), my mother - who said daughter now lives with - clutches at her heart, shrieks like a banshee and claims that she "can't cope with the stress of it all". Yeah, because I can, apparently!?

Honestly, if I were braver (and not so worried about her sinking her claws into my daughter and destroying her permanently), I'd go NC like DB1 has. Even the Golden Child, DB2, is LC.

I think I'm getting there, though. This thread has stirred up a lot of forgotten things, and a lot of "what the hell?!" memories which I'd buried. It's also made me understand that, actually, I'm not alone. So, OP, thank you. Sincerely.

Oh, and when the "uncle" I mentioned above died a few months ago, she got arsey about the fact that I refused point blank to attend the funeral or allow my children to.

I feel sorry that his children lost their father. I feel sorry for his second wife (whom I never met) having lost her husband. But... I don't feel sorry that he died a horrible death. I wasn't going to "celebrate his life", thanks. Because he effectively destroyed mine when I was 7 years old and in his care for a week.

She can't comprehend that fact.

This thread is both so sad and also incredibly liberating. My children are around right now so I don't want to type out the whole thing and get upset in front of them, but I think i really have found my people! I'll pop back later when they are elsewhere.

I moved continents to get away from my DM, but I'm presently in the middle of a two week visit to her house and I don't know how I'm going to make it through. She is undiagnosed OCD, controlling and judgemental. She doesn't make me cry anymore as I've erected massive emotional barriers, but my God she's a piece of work to be around! (Eg: she has a list of things she has to do around the house before her cleaner comes each week).

I posted early on before reading all of this thread and my post was positive and affirming. That is how I feel, that woman won't break me.

Having now read all of the thread I am surprised by the many similarities between my own mother and other peoples. She too would pick fault with my hair and clothes and say they didn't look good or didn't do anything for me. She also told me lie after lie after lie and the realisation that these were lies was devastating. She also put several men before me. I also was a difficult labour, baby, child and teenager. She also had cancer. (Lies)

I could go on and on but I will not because my life is better with her not in it and always will be. I will not attend her funeral and I will not shed a tear when she dies.

She is a psycho. I cannot believe how many women are out there just like her. The world would bae a better place if they did not exist.

To anyone who is wavering about whether to go nc, do it.

We all deserved better than what we were given.