Mothers who are jealous or resentful of their daughters

[nodneat]

I have suffered this, it had resulted in low self esteem and depression. Constant comparisons, no compassion, love or support. I recognise now, this was a failing in my mother and she didn't haven't the skills to parent.. or did she?
So, any mothers out their who undermine their daughters, contradict, or are jealous. Is there something I'm missing? I'm very sad about it, but am finally coming to terms with it and moving on...

My mother cannot bear to pay me a compliment. She's always criticising me. I'm getting married soon. I tried on my dress and she said to my fiance. 'Don't let her eat any more cakes its a tight squeeze' no compliments at all.
She then said she thinks I should change for the evening reception into 'normal clothing' as a wedding dress isn't practical. Oh and apparently 50 is too old for a wedding dress full stop. I should be relegated to a trouser suit at my age.
I told my partner and he said she can't bear the thought of you in the limelight.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
I don't have daughters but I tell my sons all the time how proud I am of them and when they look nice. No way will I treat them like my mum treats me. I laugh it off now. Each dig. But it really did affect me when I was younger.

I know my 'mother' doesn't actually like/love any of her kids. She played us against each other and none of us are close. She has different favourites at different times. She treats the grandchildren differently depending on who is in favour.

I have massively distanced myself from her and quite frankly, when she passes I won't care. it sounds dreadful but I have after many many years, had to set boundaries.

I have my own family now. They are my priority. I tell my kids multiple times a day how much i love them. i am proud of them. They are beautiful and I let them know how they make me smile everyday.

I cannot understand how a mother cannot love her children, especially when we all fawned on her. My siblings continue to fawn, i refuse to do so now.

She has let me know I have caused her nothing but grief since i was born.

I am a professional. I bank rolled her. Never caused problems.

Her loss.

She also managed to drive a wedge between me and my dad. He wasn't perfect or that great, but he did love me unconditionally and was fairly supportive and proud of me. So she would take to her bed and cry and claim migraines because of how awful i'd been so he would have a go at me. Or cry to me about how awful he had been . She'd ask him in front of me what does he think of fat women , how unattractive he finds them , how he rejected this fat woman or that fat woman etc.

Coupled with the fact that I put most of my efforts to win her love and approval (stupid,stupid kid, so many years wasted) means I had a nearly non existent with my father and I even resented /despised him/found him annoying at times. I do actually regret that.

I was sexually abused by my dad between 11 and 13 and it sent my mum into a frenzy of bitterness and jealousy.

When I was 15 we had a foreign exchange student to stay for 10 days. After she left she never write to me again. Years later my mother told me that on the girls last day with us, my mum had got up to find a letter my dad had left for the girl saying he was so sorry they hadn't been able to spend more time alone together and he knew she felt the special connection between them. My mum found it and just ripped it up, then treated the poor girl (who must have been terrified and desperate to get home to safety) like absolute shit until she dropped us off at the airport. Like this 15yo girl was responsible for seducing her 42yo husband. 🤮

My mum also gave me very disordered eating. She was always telling me I was fat. When I lost weight, she was happy if I stayed around size 14.if I hit size 12 she would tell me "you've lost too much, you look thin" and deliberately give me trigger foods that I had specifically told her I couldn't eat. It was insidious and never ending.

I am glad I didn't have daughters because I honestly don't know how I would have been. I bought into her narrative of "all women are in competition for the almighty penis" for many years. It's only been in the last 8 years or so that I realised how damaging she was and went NC.

These women will never recognise how they treated us. They will deny, minimise and blame. If confronted with undeniable truths, they will start to cry and become the victim. It's pointless. Forgive if you can, but only if it is healing to you.

Huge compassion for those posting here - well done to all of you who have consciously avoided repeating those toxic patterns. ❤

I can relate to a lot of this, but my mother focused on slightly different things and, I think, flip-flopped between feeling proud of me and resenting me.

One thing I found baffling about my mother is the competitiveness she felt around illness. Sadly, endometriosis affected both of us, and when I was a teenager and into my twenties, I experienced debilitating pain. My mum got so angry with me when I was sick, or in hospital having tests etc. One Christmas I was in bed experiencing appalling pain. My brother came and sat with me, holding my hand. My father went looking for an emergency chemist. My mother stood in the doorway telling me how selfish I was for ruining Christmas, especially as they had guests around.

She was always critical of my appearance, the most memorable example being on the day of my father's funeral. My brother had a glamorous g/f at the time and she was wearing a black dress. I was in a dark trouser suit (which is entirely in keeping with my personality, which is generally androgynous). My mum gushed about the g/f's attire, and when she saw me took one look and said 'aren't you going to do anything with your hair'?

The worst was when we had been having a relatively nice time at my house when there was an item on the news about an ex-Christian country music singer coming out as a lesbian, and the pain that church doctrine caused her. Having been brought up in a similar church my mum asked me if I felt the same way. I thought, my god, she's actually showing empathy over the church thing. I said yes, it had been painful at times. She paused for a second or two, and then she said, "I sometimes wish I'd never had you."

I have to remind myself of this stuff fairly regularly to stave off the guilt I feel for having gone NC ten years ago.

Wow I can see a lot of my Mum in these posts! Critical, jealous, controlling… it’s so damaging to have a mother like that, people who have ‘normal’ loving mothers just don’t understand how much it can affect your life. I’m in my 40’s and have only realised in the past 2 years what she is really like and just how much it has affected me and still affects me.

I have psoriasis and if I don’t cover up completely when I see her, she will say things like ‘Your skin is bad isn’t it!’ as if I haven’t noticed 🙄 I also have adult acne due to PCOS (under control currently with tretinoin) and when it was bad last year, she said ‘Whatever is wrong with your face, you look like you’ve got chickenpox!’ I eat for comfort (have done since I was very young, I realise now it was me looking for the comfort I didn’t get from her) and years ago I put on a lot of weight due to this and depression (wonder why!) and she said to me one day ‘I almost didn’t recognise you, you look like you’ve got Downs Syndrome!’

She absolutely hates me having a better relationship with my Dad than with her, to the point that if he asks me to do anything for him, she flies into a massive narcissistic rage over it 🙄

I’m very sorry for anyone with a mother like mine…

Every time I read a lost, someone has said something that reminds me of something else.

She told me once that she wished I'd been born disabled because then I'd have been deserving of her love.

I understand that one..

In her mind, parents of disabled children are held up in the eyes of others as saints. Regarded as wonderful, angelic people but, more importantly in her eyes, they are pitied and considered to be superior to parents of more ordinary children. She had a very romanticised view of how the parents of disabled children are viewed and treated by others!

I have acdisabled child and my mum said dead pan to my MIL "he doesn't get it from my side of the family" I mean wtaf? So if I'd been born disabled you would probably have been treated with shame from your toxic mum.

My mum was obsessed with my bf then dh having affairs. When I finally said I don't own him, he is his own person that tended to shut her up. I wanted to say 'yes I look a lot like you don't I? Of course no one could love that' never did. Because I'm not a crazy nasty spiteful bitch.

What scares me is that I have learnt every trick in the book to be a psychopath. I feel if I snapped I could make my kids and dh beg for death. I'm very gentle kind and shy but that though is always there when I get mad. However I have no urge to act on it. Would gain nothing from seeing others suffer. My mum got off on it. Always smiling and laughing as she called me fat and stupid. She would seek me out to torture me.

I just pity her so much.

I don't think it has made me a good parent and I've made an awful lot of mistakes. I can see, looking back, that it's possible tried to do the complete opposite to my mother and smothered and spoiled my youngest child. I take full responsibility, of course, but I think that's partly why I made some of the decisions I did.

Yes I think my mother was jealous of me . No support , delights in my misfortune, used to ruin happiness for me , upset me if I was going out on a night out so I would be tearful, made to have boy short hair while my sister had long hair , compared unfavourably to others and any achievements were undermined. It really kicked in in a viscous way at puberty . She stirs and interferes in my private life so now is on an information diet .

Yes I think my mother was jealous of me . No support , delights in my misfortune, used to ruin happiness for me , upset me if I was going out on a night out so I would be tearful, made to have boy short hair while my sister had long hair , compared unfavourably to others and any achievements were undermined. It really kicked in in a viscous way at puberty

Some of these experiences are so similar, even down to the haircut. I had my hair cut to above shoulder length at a young age without any consultation or conversation. It was horrible, a hairstyle for an adult not a young girl. There was an enormous puffy fringe too, and it made me miserable because of teasing (I was called mop head). My sister (the favoured one!) was permitted to grow her hair to waist length.

I risked trouble by scraping it back into a ponytail (fringe and all) while it grew out, but I lived with the hair for a couple of years before I dared do that.

@jelenaj

Yes hair seems to feature a lot with these nasty mothers . Just check out "but we took you to stately homes thread " the golden child is allowed long hair . Also public humiliation is common and being told your overreacting or being sensitive. Last time she tried this I just sook my head and walked off . We were at a family party and I could see I had rattled her by doing this . She never did it again .

People have said mine is jealous of me but it's hard to see it as she is more wealthy than me and has more in many ways (not important things to me, but they are to her..).
She also has a thing about hair - mine is thick and wavy (I battle with it in actual fact), but she's always been a bit funny about it because hers is incredibly thin..it's odd.

I look at my daughters and as another poster said, I'm in awe.

Also, my mother got very close to my eldest daughter when I was very ill a few years ago;
she actually used the line 'I think I'm on this earth to look after my DD'. Because of things in the past (me being ill essentially), she thinks I'm a crap mother and she is a brilliant one.

Whereas I find her covert, selfish, controlling, prone to being a martyr to get sympathy and deceitful.

She has thrown me under the bus more times than I can count.

if I had my time again I would have kept my DDs away from her. Some mothers and grandmothers can be very damaging.
The best I can do now is mitigate her influence; it's hard.

Once I was allowed to grow it out (HA!) at about 7, I sported this haircut until around 15. Fun,fun times.

My mum wasn’t jealous of me she just despised me but this encapsulates how I feel too. I think people sometimes punish their own kids for the lack in their own lives or the hang ups they were given, I don’t think they necessarily realise what they are doing though.

Sometimes I’m amazed she’s mine tbh she’s an utter barbarian sometimes but simultaneously brilliant.

Oh my mother had my haircut to look like a boys, I mean practically had my head shaved. I look back it now and realise it was a way of punishing me. Utter bitch. Can’t imagine doing that to my own child.

My sister also had beautiful long hair. We both had very thick hair so it wasn’t the reason it was cut.

My mum has had mental health issues, all her life. She has been an appalling mother to me and I finally went no contact 7 yrs ago, after 45 yrs of her increasing crap. She got pregnant with me before she was married, then had to get married to my Dad. Dad wasn't great either as a husband or father but did his best for us. It was always clear to me that I was the mistake, the reason my parents life was so rubbish. My younger sis was planned and well loved, I was not. As I grew older I took care of Mum and repeatedly reached out for help for her, she consistently refused. Took me decades to realise that whatever I did ( i achieved great things and more than my dsis ) was never good enough but, my DSIs was always golden. The affect it had on my self esteem looking back, informed many of my poor life choices, usually bad. But, i broke away and learned about boundaries. I built a good and happy life. Mum told me 8 yrs ago, while sitting in my lovely home and in front of my toddler children, she was jealous of me , that she wished she had had me aborted and she said it in front of my two young DC at the time, I was finally done. No way was I going to allow my children to be exposed to this rubbish . My Dad then passed and i have been no contact with my mum and DSIs since, honestly, I have flourished.

I have not looked back and the confidence in myself has blossomed.

I had friends who had amazingly loving parent's. I have accepted I have not had that. I have however, been an amazing parent to my 2 DC and they have grown into 2 amazing,successful and confident young people. We have a lovely, happy, secure and loving family unit. They are often horrified when I describe my childhood to them now that they are grown.

I think the story of how she shopped sorry , adopted me. Sums it all up. This came straight from her so not gossip or supposition or assumptions.

There were 4 babies in the maternity ward that week that were left in the care of the state. One was a boy so he was out. The other was an undesirable ethnicity so she was out. Then there were two baby girls , both resembling my dad , but apparently I looked more like him. My birth mother was a 16 yo high school girl, whereas the other birth mother was a 22 yo student who apparently should've known better , should've kept her legs crossed,shouldn't have abandoned her baby etc so they picked me instead.

My "origin" story starts with looks and misogyny. Didn't get much better after.

Yeah, my.mum used to keep my hair cut very short when I was a child. And she would dress me in similar clothes to my brother and then laugh at me because I looked like a boy.

There were so many times before I was 10 when people would ask if I were a boy or a girl.

I remember being about 7 and someone asked what sex I was. I didn't understand the question, and this older girl took me aside afterwards and told me that if anyone ever asked me what sex I am, I just had to tell them I was a girl 🙁

We went away for the weekend when I was mid 20s. I was quite alternative, and this lad looked who was dressed similarly looked at me when we were out. She was wittering on about how he'd done a double take at her and how much younger he was than her and how he was closer to my age and still looking at her. For the first time ever I actually said, "Has it even occurred to you that he might have been looking at me?" "You?" She sneered with a genuine look of surprise. "Why would he have been looking at you? "

Crikey our mothers sound similar

I got told to lose weight because no child wanted a fat parent bearing in mind I had just returned from the epau to tell her I’d had a miscarriage

@AngryGreasedSantaCatcus when I got my gcse results (straight As despite being moved schools half way through and having to start new subjects as the new school didn't do the same ones as the school before, just because my mother wanted a bigger house) my mum actually rang the school that day to check there wasn't a mistake. I was as surprised as her tbh because she had absolutely convinced me I would fail due to my 'laziness'

From my experience with my god awful DM who was jealous and saw me as competition you won't get any response from mothers like this because they believe they are perfect and beyond reproach.

If my DM was pushed about anything and couldn't manipulate her way out of it she would scream.

When you type it all out, it sounds so unbelievable.

When we chose our GCSE options, mum took me to school.for a meeting hecause she didn't want me doing 10 GCSEs.

She wanted me to drop two A levels and do Childcare and RSA typing because they were going to be more useful to me as a girl.

Fortunately, the Head told her it was my choice, and I should be thinking of going to university. She wasn't happy because she thought a university education would reduce my chances of getting married because men don't like intelligent women. The RSA and childcare options were offered for the least academic student (girls really) who were unlikely to get the 5 GCSEs required to go on to college or 6th form. I did go to university and got a first class degree and a Masters. She was very critical of me for getting an education and having a career and said I should have 'done my duty' by staying at home and raising my children.

Given that she spent the rest of the time telling me that I was too this and not enough that for anyone to ever love me or want me anyway, you'd have thought that being educated and independent would be a priority. But no. The focus was on mitigating my most unattractive qualities in the hope that someone would lower their standards enough to marry me.

Unfortunately, she did such a good job on my sense of self etc that I have been single for most of my adult life. I've been unable to sustain a successful long termrelationship so her greatest fear (that I would be single and no man would want me) was, to all intents, realised. It's a bloody good job that I have been able to support myself!

Gosh that's so wierd about the hair with everyone here - I was made to keep mine short too, and I hated it, I felt like a boy.
Eventually she was forced by my grandmother to relent and I could finally wear it in pigtails - I used to beg for hair ribbons for birthdays and Christmas, I had a shoebox full of them, I so loved finally feeling like a girl!