I´m currently in my 40s with great kids. Overall I am happy with my life. My parents live abroad in the (EU) country I grew up in. Every week my mum is making me feel like a ´bad´ daughter as I do not engage in the contact that she wants with me. She used to call her own mother every day and exchange small talk. My mum keeps contacting me by sms asking me for updates regularly. I´m sure that she would love for me to call and respond more often but I just can´t.
Somehow I cannot forget how it was growing up. My parents both have their traumas and my childhood seems like an endless procession of rows, drunkenness and making us kids/me as the only girl -feel guilty about one thing or the other. As long as I can remember, she would put everyone else ahead of us: her friends always seemed more important. Still now, when I have her on the phone, within seconds she is detailing the lives of others. For instance, i can tell her about one of my kids having a cold and while she sympathises, seconds later she is then off again on a story about how this or that friend has a grandchild that is seriously ill etc. etc. I´ll give some examples of the past and would love to hear whether I should just get over it or whether I should indeed hold a grudge (I do not enjoy holding a grudge, my kids love their grandma and I do want her to be happy).
- My mum always used to make me feel so guilty. If we had not bought her something for mothers day/her birthday (and we wouldn´t as we had no money as kids) but instead made her a drawing or plucked some flowers she would have this reaction from which it was clear that she was very very disappointed. I now have my own kids and honestly I am much more happy with a nice drawing than I could be with something shop-bought. I think my mum was often angry with my dad for not ensuring that we got a proper gift, but as my dad did not care less, she took it out on us.
- My mum never trusted me: if I received mail, she would open it. Books and agenda´s were checked. There was always this expectation that whatever I did it would involve boys or drugs. When I was 17, I was kicked out of the house because I went to visit my (future) university city with some friends and moved some of my stuff by myself instead of letting them do it. Looking back I feel that she was mostly angry at me becoming independent.
- There was always the comparison: between me and my brother (one year older), between us and the kids of friends - and we would always be less good, less polite, less clever etc. I do blame them for ruining the relationship with my brother who must have heard a thousand times why he couldn´t study like me (I only heard this afterwards).
- There were a lot of secrets in the house. There was secret drinking (my father did it openly, my mother would go to the storage room and come back smelling of alcohol), secret eating (she was always on a diet but kept buying snacks ´for us´), and more serious secrets regarding her past that were never shared. At one point, one of her friends got angry at us and snapped "you know what day it is, have mercy on your mum" - but we never knew as we hadn´t been told anything. I have never found the guts to ask what really was going on.
(sorry for the essay, thank you for bearing with me)
Anyway, with my own kids I try to be equal, I try to listen to them. I try to spend most of my free time with them (I work FT), I don´t drink etc. Unfortunately I still discover a lot of things that I took over from her (the yelling, the passive aggressive behaviour- but then directed at my husband, the secret eating etc.). I´m aware of this and I am trying to change. I just cannot seem to forgive her and be as the daughter of her friends who do call their mums all the time. (I´m not speaking of my father here, because he has alzheimers and really lost the capacity to have conversations a long time ago). What can I do?