Do you feel your parents misremember your childhood?

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Went for lunch with my mum and my husband today. She spent ages talking about when me and my brother were young. How she’d meet us at the school gate every day, we’d bake, play games, she’d slave away to do a home cooked meal and have it on the table every evening at 5pm when my dad came home so we’d all sit around and basically sing kumbaya.

That’s not my recollection at all, and not how my brother remembers either. He’s six years older than me so doesn’t remember it from his early years, or mine.

The truth is my parents did not have a good relationship. My father was a workaholic and I have practically no memories of him when I was young. Mum did stay at home when I was very young but then went back to work when I was 5 and I had a childminder after school. The childminder finished up when I was 6 so I used to walk home from school, then stay on my own until my brother got home two hours later. I have a scar on my arm from when I decided to make myself a cup of tea and knocked over the kettle.

There wasn’t any baking, and dinner was usually Crispy Pancakes, a Frey Bentos pie, or something from a Dolmio jar. There was always a roast on a Sunday but my father would eat it in the “good” room which we weren’t allowed in so we never sat eating dinner together.

My father was horrifically controlling and doing even small things became a battle. There was no physical abuse, but he was cold and could be very manipulative.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a bad childhood (this post definitely gives some of the worst examples), it just wasn’t an easy house to grow up in and I was pretty free-range once old enough to cycle. We were well provided for, but my parents really should have gone their separate ways. There was always lots of tension and they always wanted us to take sides when they’d argue. They married really young and had both grown up in very abusive households so just didn’t know how to communicate or compromise.

Before anyone asks, I don’t think my mother has any form of dementia etc. I think she has just told herself these things so often that she believes them. I’m very close to her and love her loads but anytime I tell her I remember things differently, she gets very, very defensive. I assume it’s her way of coping with such an unhappy marriage, so I tend not to push it too much anymore.

So I guess I’m not asking for advice on how to deal with my mother (she’s mid-80s now and not in great healthy, physically, so I don’t want to stress/antagonize her) but just wondering if anyone has a parent who also misremembers their childhood?

Yes to an extent. My mam isn't very happy with my dand and he's quite selfish. She worked and did everything at home in the 90s. I think she lives us and tried, I do have lots of nice memories and there's things I can reflect on now as an adult that were definitely her making an effort.

But the absolute miss remember stuff too. Or its maybe a lack of awaness of my experience of stuff. I think alos probably like your mum it's a way of coping.

My mum has always lived in a bit of a fantasy world, and has managed to embellish the reality of my childhood and her hero presence in it. I do wonder if she retreated into her own world because my father was such a misogynist bully that it was the only way of coping open to her. I wonder that about lots of women from generations gone by actually, when it wasn't so easy and culturally acceptable to divorce. ( I know it is never easy to divorce by the way)

Although recollections may vary ;) generally speaking I think people know if they felt good or bad for a prolonged period of time. Denial allows people to carry on and not shut down. As an adult my Mum told me the physical abuse I suffered as a child didn't happen, later she conceded it had happened but didn't want me to make "too much of it". She could carry on if she convinced herself she had been a good parent and that evidence to the contrary wasn't to be entertained. Her memories were consistent but the accountability was variable.

I think the truth is usually somewhere in the middle. As parents we tend to remember the work we put in, the places we took kids, the efforts we made. It is natural for parents to minimise the mistakes they made when remembering the past.
Young children do not appreciate the work you put in so won't remember this. My father did nothing, my mother did it all. With three young children, no washing machine and no support from anyone she must have been really busy. My memory is of her sitting in the sofa drinking tea.

This is so true @AskMeMore. My mum was a busy woman with a full time job, two DC, no family help at all and no cleaner (although tbf my dad did pull his weight). My memory is of her reading the newspaper!

Yes, my mother and I have very different recollections of things. Some are mundane shit, but many others get pure WTF reactions from me because they are so invented.

@DucksNewburyport That is funny!

Some misrememberings are a rewriting of history. My father claims he frequently changed my nappies. My mother said he never once changed a nappy. I believe my mother.

I'm aware of some rewriting of history by everyone, but I had a broadly untraumatic childhood and I think my sisters did too (accepting that siblings often have a completely different upbringing within the same family). However, just very recently my mother surprised me by snivelling over how upset she'd been when we all left home at the earliest opportunity.

Me: "But that was to go to university. We HAD to leave home for that, and you WANTED us all to go to university."

Mum: "But you could have gone to the nearest university, in a city an hour away from home by train and lived at home."

What I remember is that she hated having teenage girls under her roof and couldn't wait to be rid of us. And on previous occasions she's spoken of me and one of my sisters having been off the rails and impossible to live with as teenagers though as I recall we were both staid and studious and didn't have boyfriends or go out on the razzle.

I think some people, especially when they become elderly almost suffer from a form of false memory syndrome. Topically, I remember my parents bickering over their conflicting recollections of where they watched the coronation of 1953. My father recounted a heart-warming idyl of all three of us and the neighbours watching it on our specially acquired television set, while my mother claimed she saw snatches of the coronation in the day room of the hospital in which she worked, on a set specially provided by the League of Friends.

My mother's version of events is more likely to be correct as I do not remember having a television in the house until I was about ten when the Redifussion Pipe TV System reached us.

My MIL is amazing at rewriting history to suit her mental narrative. She's fallen outwith most of her family and says things like 'we'll never know why x turned on us, they just won't talk to us' but the odd thing is she often gets things off her chest by writing letters and emails etc so we all have the evidence of the toxic bile she spewed that led to no one wanting anything to do with her.

My mum will say she was amazing and wonderful and I was awful and terrible . Yeah,sure.

Confirmation bias. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

It's hugely common in parents once their child becomes an adult. My counsellor explained it to me, it makes sense.

Me and my mum have completely different memories of my childhood. She's blocked out a lot of the negative due to trauma, but I've remembered it all.

Oh absolutely. My mum used to smack us regularly with her slipper, often quite violently and angrily. Now I've got a DD she says 'You should never smack, I'm totally against smacking'. Of course I challenged her on this and the response was "I only smacked you once or twice and then I felt terrible afterwards". She also whacked me over the head with a bag of potatoes and once washed my mouth out with dishwashing detergent because I swore whilst playing a video game. My Dad was the non-violent one

Sounds like mine. She insists we had the same childhood as my cousins who were taken everywhere, had a very busy social life and had a stereotypically ‘golden’ childhood. I remember long boring holidays, asking to go somewhere, being told she was busy (teacher). We have very different recollections. My aunt backs up how I remember it.

I could have written this!

my mum recently complained that my sister and I were lazy when we were children.

my mum had horrific temper tantrums of the house was messy, the ironing wasn’t done or if dinner wasn’t cooked.

she worked and got home at 6pm every night. Dinner had to be on the table and the house had to be tidy or she would rage and yell and take herself to bed. I remember spending the very Sunday afternoon ironing. She then threw a for if the clothes weren’t folded properly or if I hung dads shorts on the gold door handles! I was eleven.

she laughed when I said we cooked dinner every night - said I was making it up. I remember the meals clearly - spaghetti bolognaise, chilli, gammon and waffles.

my dad sued to tell us to keep her happy - he also now says we were lazy.

My mother goes on all the time about how me and my cousin grew up playing together. He lived 5 doors down from our house and we'd run up and down the street to call for each other to play. All very lovely, except it didn't happen. We moved out of our house the year before my cousin was born. My mum gets really angry when I point this out.

I think I agree with OP. My memories of childhood are really vague - I blame it on a traumatic experience I had aged 8 (not my mum's fault), so I feels there's a large gap in my memory where I tried to forget. At age 16, I started drinking quite heavily and I think this has also had an impact on my memory.

I have some lovely memories of my childhood but I find it odd that the things I remember my mum has no memory of and vice versa. There were definitely times when I was largely ignored because my sister was so demanding and a complete drama queen.

It's weird how people's memories work. My DH swears BLIND he was in work every week during Covid (first main lockdown), he wasn't! He went in like once or twice but on the whole he was home for the majority of that lockdown. And he's just completely convinced himself otherwise. He was abroad for the bloody hard one over winter, he'd remember if he'd been home everyday for that one I can guarantee you!

I didn’t have a happy childhood because of my mothers emotional needs / depression but my father was good to me

I couldn’t wait to leave home and one evening my father encouraged me to apply to university as far away from home as I could (I was verbally attacked and criticised all my life by her)

many years later I said to my mother she was too critical and my dad went off his rocker shouting that they did everything for me and I should be ashamed - like I lied about it and she was in the right

so he must have convinced himself

The thing is, some of the stories people have recounted were shameful even by the standards of the time. They are horrific now. Parents have to lie to themselves for their own self esteem.

I do often think, when people are horrid to their children, how are they going to feel when those children are adults staring them in the face and looking for answers.

I think the truth is usually somewhere in the middle. As parents we tend to remember the work we put in, the places we took kids, the efforts we made. It is natural for parents to minimise the mistakes they made when remembering the past.
Young children do not appreciate the work you put in so won't remember this.

Agreed.

Our natural subconscious supresses things and helps us block out a lot of what we don't want to remember. Think childbirth - if we didn't suppress that memory, we'd all only have one child.

My twopenneth is that both recollections can be true.

For you, it sounds like you didn't always get what you needed from your parents in terms of emtional connections and feelings of warmth/safety. That's the result of childhood emotional neglect, which is a hidden epidemic. It sounds dramatic, (it's neglect, not 'abuse') but it is really common - mostly because people can't give (emotionally) what they didn't get themselves.

For your Mum, she was probably doing the best she could with what she had, and so her memories are of the things she tried to do to make life as good as possible for you. It sounds like she had some challenges to contend with - not least of which is a controlling husband. Her recollections are as real to her as yours are to you - it's just different perspectives.

I've been through this with my own family, and have 'done the work' of understanding it, going through some anger and grief, and come out the other side feeling peace and acceptance. I am also a better parent.

If you're interested in exploring further, I recommend Jonice Webb's books as a good place to start.

No, quite the reverse. My parents, both medical professionals, have been brutally honest about the challenges they faced trying to maintain a reasonable work-life balance, which is why my sister and I spent so much time with our grandparents and the reason we went to a Private School that could provide breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea break. We also spent quite a few Christmases at my grandparents' and holidays abroad with close relatives. At 12 we were able to sort ourselves out and got to school at a more normal hour. By 14 we were pretty much self-reliant altho my mother was working as a district nurse by then and had more time. My father was/is a cardiothoracic surgeon, and was always working long hours.

I'm glad to say my sister and I still enjoy a close relationship with our parents, as do our kids.

I think it's a bit unfair to say it's common in parents of adult children - it is, but that's because it's common in absolutely everyone. People's childhood memories are very much not immune.

My mother has rewritten my childhood in a way that Stalin would have been proud of.

She is in total denial of how stressful and shit it actually was - because of the poor decisions repeatedly made by her and my father. Both myself and my two brothers have challenged her on it, she either completely denies what happened or refuses to discuss it.

Makes me extremely angry. I'm being treated for C-PTSD, have been under the care of a psychiatrist for 30 years, so I'm not talking about low level stuff here. I'm now very low contact with my mother, I haven't actually seen her in 14 years.