Things I feel really pissed off about thirty years later …

[Retortsit]

So I don’t know if anybody else finds it helpful to just share, even if there’s nothing useful anyone can say or do, but I do.

I had a really difficult relationship with my parents in a lot of ways and it’s a shame as they definitely weren’t horrible people and they meant well. I’m now in my 40s and I’ve become a lot more mellow as I’ve got older.

The summer I did my GCSEs my mum got absolutely obsessed with me finding a job, and when no paying ones were available she decided that I wasn’t going to spend the long summer sat on my arse and I was ordered to do some voluntary work, which sounds very noble except the place she sent me to were not best pleased to have a teenager under their feet and let me know about this. They were absolutely awful to me, and I told both my parents over and over that it was horrible and I was really unhappy, but they ignored it. (I think that they put it down to teenage strops, and it probably did sound like that but I really was treated very badly.)

I went past the place the other day and felt renewed feelings of pissed-offness. And I’m wondering if I’m alone with this or whether some people harbour some resentment with stuff like this … I mean, on the surface I can see she thought she was doing a good thing but I have a bit of a teenage frustrated reaction still!

Oh gosh - some very sad stories. Never has this poem seemed more apt -

This Be The Verse
BY PHILIP LARKIN
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

MadmadmadamMin - you do realise you don't have to see your parents who continue to abuse you. You have my permission not to if that would help

I love my.Mum (as I did my dad until he died) but still resent them for choices they made about my secondary school.

We lived in a town with super-selective grammar schools - one for the boys and one for the girls. Less than 3% of children got offered a place. I was lucky and got a place in the girls grammar but my parents decided I should sit the scholarship exam for a private school 20 miles away. And I got offered that as well.

Their rationale was that my younger sister was very unlikely to pass the 11+ so they wanted to send her to the private school. They couldn't really afford two sets of fees but if I had a scholarship, a chunk of my fees would be paid. So we ended up going to a crappier school in a town we didn't know, with a horrible commute, when I could have gone to the nearby grammar school and had a much shorter school day, plus had friends locally.

In my view, my parents wanted my sister I a small, less academic, nurturing school and I got sacrificed for that. God knows why they didn't just send us to different schools where we would both have had our needs met.

Its over 40 years since I started secondary school and it still rankles,!

I guess they thought if they'd paid for private school for your sister, you'd have resented them for that. And from the outside, if you heard that one child got sent to a fee-paying school, but the other in the family didn't, you'd think there was some dreadful favouritism going on.

@DPotter Thank you! I would be in the wrong again...and I know they don't mean to be shitty parents. I would feel guilty if I abandoned them and if I'm brutally honest I don't want to be entirely cut out of their will. I'm aware that I'm the least favourite of their children. But I'm the only one nearby and they will be scrupulous about keeping things 'fair' on the surface.

The other week my mother said 'You really need to lose some weight! You're dreadfully overweight at the moment" and I responded with 'I know. You tell me every time I come round. I'm aware of what I weigh, and how I look. Is it absolutely necessary to point it out to me every time I visit?' and she was taken aback and said 'I don't suppose so', but I know after more than half a century of this that it won't stop her and she will have complained to my father later on that I was 'so touchy' again. I think she genuinely feels she's being helpful and that it's her job to point things out to me.

But I'm a post menopause, size 20 graduate with a professional career. I'm not dim. I know what size I am and that it would be nice to weigh a bit less. I don't need someone telling me...

Sounds grim, sorry to hear you had such a miserable time.

However, let it go. Life is way too short and every parent makes cock ups thinking they are doing something for the best. Focus on the good and your life now.