Cognitive dissonance re. parents' lack of intelligence making me truly miserable

[lancia24]

My parents are in their seventies but this is not an age-related issue, they've always been the same.

I've come to realise that 24/7 my whole life I've been psychologically bending over backwards and tying myself in knots to not to acknowledge just how airheaded my parents are.

I know it sounds cruel, but the evidence is simply overwhelming, and it's caused real problems.

Examples my seem trivial but this is hour-by-hour, day-by-day, week-by-week, year by year...:

My eight year-old niece visits DM/DP & wants to go to a Disney Store. DM/her grandmother insists there's one in the nearest town. Swears blind. Literally refuses to check online and insists 'nicely' nobody else needs to. Family trip to town, no Disney store, devastated (and confused) niece, and no apology (just a lot of 'well I could have sworn' etc.).

Problem with mice. They have bird feeders too close to the front door. The birds drop food, which attracts the mice, who end up venturing into the house. Takes literally years to persuade them of this. Finally, after bird feeders have been gone for a few months, no more mice. Their response? Put the bird feeders back out, because the mice have gone.

I could go on forever. It has always revealed itself when we've watched films/TV together too - they honestly don't pick up on any subtlety whatsoever, no emotional grey areas, no piognancy etc. If it's not white hats vs. black hats and the white hats win, they don't understand.

And yet when I was a child - as I'm sure all children are - they seem to have indoctrinated me with programming that makes it impossible to see that they are stupid. I seem cursed to entangle myself with trying to figure out why they do the hundreds of things they do, as in, why non-stupid people would do the things they do...

There must be people out there experiencing something similar, surely...? How do you deal with it?

It's often a bit distressing to recognise yourself isn't it?

My parents are both quite clever but have led very sheltered lives and are incredibly narrow minded and obstinate in their views, so they actually sound/seem stupid at times even though they are not. I can just about live with that but what I find really hard is that when I say something they feel cannot be right (even though it is) they roll their eyes at each other and snigger because they genuinely think it's me who is stupid and ignorant.

Couple of examples:
I used to have a ground floor flat. When I bought it the windows were at the end of their lifespan and I was planning to have them replaced. Parents went on and on and on about how I should replace the living room window with French doors. This was expressly prohibited in the terms of the lease. I told them, I showed them but they just pretended they hadn't seen or heard. Every time I saw them they parroted the same thing. When I sold the flat my mum said "you should have listened to me, you'd have got more money for it if it had nice patio doors". No mother, I would have had a big fat fine and the cost of reinstating it back to original. Aaaaarrrrggghh!

When I started my solicitor training contract I was a few years older than the others in my cohort (second career). Parents kept telling me my employer would "have to" pay me more than the others because I was older. I wish!

They don't sound stupid to me.

The Disney store example - she was simply mistaken. Maybe there had been one there and it had closed, or maybe there was one she had seen in another town. She didn't feel the need for anyone to check because she was convinced. That's not stupidity, that's just being mistaken. All towns start to look alike when you get older.

The bird feeder - the problem has been sorted and they are eternal optimists perhaps? They prefer the bird feeder closer to the house and they live in hope that the mice won't come back. If they do return, they will fix the problem as before?

The film example - this is down to interpretation. We all interpret art differently.

OK I admit I laughed at 'every generation is smarter'.

Anyone else getting massive Adrian Mole vibes from this post?

I see what you mean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

I love it when I surprise my kids with my brilliance.
I don’t acquire skills as quickly as I used to, so wrestle with all the accounts, passwords, connections in tech. They are great at sorting me out.

But I know and understand all sorts of stuff they haven’t even heard about yet 🤣

Mum drives me mad too. She keeps buying things then needing to return them. Pays postage and return postage for something that was obviously useless. Complains about how busy she is returning all these items that she could simply have not bought.

Through 2020/21 in every phone call I ended up listening to the saga of the horrible stray cat that bullied her cats and wouldn't go away (because she kept feeding the bloody thing). It would have been nice if she'd had a glimmer of interest in enquiring about the DCs.

I wouldn't say that she necessarily lacks intelligence but she would rather moan about a problem endlessly than actually deal with it.

We're now at a stage of after decades of empty nothings about tidying up and moving house, that she's elderly and struggling in a deeply unsuitable hoarder house.
The pattern has repeated and actually even more embeded as her own mother did the same. I would not be stunned if there's a long line of ADHD involved.

It's affected our relationship because she now struggles to travel, won't leave the cats and since 2020, won't let people into the house.
Added to that, she proudly chose the luddite route so communication is only possible via landline... which doesn't work when her hearing aids aren't in. The ability to send messages would be very handy now. There was technology in the house 30 years ago and the capacity to engage but she didn't want to.
Not that I'm desperate to listen to repetitive rantings about immigrants, stray cats and the GP practice.

I'm sad that choices she actively made in younger, easier years have now created huge barriers in our relationship.

No doubt I'll make my own cock-ups with my offspring, but at least I can stay in a practical home and location to make my old age easier for them to cope with. I hope I'm better at accepting them for the people that they are

There's lots of different types of intelligence, and academic intelligence isn't everything. Self-awareness, open-mindedness and a bit of practicality go a long way. I used to enjoy teaching bottom sets; while generally of low IQ they were often nice kids to know. The harder individuals were average or a bit above with closed minds and more arrogance than self-awareness/ critical thinking.

My mum isn't particularly bright. I could reel off the things she told me growing up which just weren't the case. She does have a lot of practical skills though. It's the lack of critical thinking I struggle with. If it's written in the Daily Mail then it's true in her eyes. So she's also a big bigoted and racist which is a shame. I have learned to take a deep breath and continue to point out regularly that facts can easily researched in this day and age.

Don't get me wrong I had a MUCH better childhood than my DH's, and he was privately educated and his parents are both Oxbridge alumni. Every decision my parents made for me was made with the best intentions, but often not backed up by knowledge. For example our hometown had three secondary schools, two okay schools and one absolute shithole. I'm talking legendary shithole. Made the national media for being a shithole shithole. Guess what % of kids in my year got A*-C in GCSEs? I'll just tell you actually. 19%.

They sent my DSis and I to the shithole. They'd never visited. Had no idea what they were doing. Why? Because we were in the catchment area. It didn't occur to them to do a tiny bit of research or even just asking around. I also didn't occur to them that we were actually well within the catchment for both other schools and one, in fact, was even closer to our home! 'Yeah but you did fine!' 'Yeah but we could have done even better at a school with competent staff!'

I would choose my upbringing over DH and his academic success every time but I'm definitely more discerning about where my own learn, and do my research!

Christ on a bike. The cult of the child strikes again. The 8 year old will live without seeing a Disney store and I'm pretty sure she won't become a psycopath or run off and join ISIS because of it.

It does children good now and then to know that things go wrong, that people get old and ill, that trains don't always turn up and that the world doesn't always live up to their Disney fairtale expectations. How else in god's name are they going to negotiate a very unforgiving adult world when they grow up.

They say that common sense begins to develop around age 7, so I have to wonder what happened in their childhood that prevented it from developing?

I think my parents were fairly intelligent, and they seemed to have common sense. Father didn't graduate from school, and mother just graduated from high school, and that was all. I think they both were well read and had a lot of different experiences in life.

My two siblings, on the other hand, seem to have gotten dumber as the years have passed, and I think that is because they are isolated and have some type of undiagnosed mental illnesses.

Both of them are hoarders. One of them is severe and absolute filth, and squalor, any other is an animal hoarder.

I had to smile at the story of the bird feeder and the mice, and I think that is a perfect example of how there's this disconnect of cause and effect.

The hoarder sister has a bad moth infestation beginning every spring.

The ceiling is covered with insect nests, but she doesn't seem to make the connection that her filthy kitchen and all the insect nests on the ceiling are the cause for the moths to be coming back every year at the same time.

Like clockwork, she will put up an insect tape over the kitchen sink, and then she will get a couple of cans of insect spray.

Then, if she sees a moth, she will spray that individual moth. Last year, she bought a teeny tiny insect zapper about the size of a bluetooth speaker that she sits on her stove.

It's the same with fleas and all the cats she has.

It's the same every year and that even though I know and most people know that the cat should be having flea treatment year around or at least the very least beginning in early spring, but not her, even though she has been shown and told by her vet many times.

She still waits until they are absolutely infested with fleas, and then it's like this light bulb goes on . Oh, they've got fleas. The cats have fleas, and then she does something about it

So I guess there is a lack of curiosity, the slack of connecting the dots between two different events, and then add rigid fixed thinking to that.

The other sister has made her world so small over time that she depends on her husband to do everything for her now, even make the simplest phone calls. She and her husband believe every wacky conspiracy theory out there.

As a dietitian I can’t help a wry smile at this one. I had a patient who went onto Orlistat and thought its job was to give her diarrhoea so the calories would be flushed down the loo. No amount of explaining the actual point of it ( avoid fat so you don’t get diarrhoea) could shift her belief.

@grinandslothit that sounds a lot like my brother. Forms unhealthy attachments to objects because he lacks the skills to make successful relationships. His house was badly hoarded and then he had a nervous breakdown necessitating admission, which was the opportunity for me to do some major decluttering and the council did a deep clean. He’s been diagnosed with autism and dyspraxia and there’s no doubt his hoarding is linked to these conditions. It makes you wonder how many adults there are out there, more or less masking mental health issues and learning difficulties.

@TheGander , there's just multiple shades and degrees of behaviours. I haven't much stuff, but I do hoard certain things, that to others would appear to be rubbish. My Mum has her house rammed, along with three sheds and a garage. And thinks she is on top of it. My Dad collected cars. Working and not working. Never any room in the drive.

I know a couple of oldies that just want to be spoon fed everything. And be entertained. Don't do any research for themselves and haven't enquiring minds at all. I remember showing them the Internet, thinking I might open the door to endless possibilities, but they just sat there staring at Google. One now happily clicks the Youtube recommends that take them further and further down certain rabbit holes. Even those weird robot narrated bullshit auto-generated videos.

After posting earlier my mother has just given me another classic. When speaking about how I asked my boss for a pay rise my mum asked how old he was. About the same age as me I answered (mid 40s). How can someone the same age as you be your boss? Was the reply. She assumed seniority at work is directly linked to age. She didn't believe me when I said that someone 30 could easily be managing someone who is 60.

That's hard. all sympathy,

I hear you. This was my parents, who sent me to the notoriously failing school (locally famous for drinking, truancy and pregnancies), even after the mother of one of my friends diffidently suggested it wasn’t a good idea for a clever child. Why? Because people would think we were ‘up ourselves’ if they sent me anywhere ‘better’. Which was more important, clearly, than me having to deal with bullying from classmates, having to learn to fight, and trying to hide my own light under a bushel for six years while applying for university scholarships completely alone. They still think it was ‘fine’. It really wasn’t.

Bit sanctimonious?

It’s fascinating how many people are getting their knickers in a knot on this thread. Why is it so hard to accept that, however ‘kind’ and well-meaning they were, having parents with low intelligence can mean that all that ‘doing their best’ stuff is still inadequate? My parents absolutely did their best, and I love them, but that best was nowhere near adequate, and their low intelligence meant that they had, and have, absolutely no idea just how inadequate.

I don't think it's about education or intelligence really, but rather a willingness to learn from your mistakes or admit that others are more knowledgeable than you in certain areas and you may need to ask for help. Maybe some of it is driven by insecurity.

I find the kind and well meaning thing interesting. If your behaviour starts to negatively impact on others around you and you choose to continue doing it, are you actually kind? OP's mother may have felt insecure when it was suggested she check if the Disney store is still there (or maybe she didn't like her child questioning her? Impossible to know) but as soon as OPs daughter was involved she should have put her pride aside and double checked to avoid disappointment.

Similarly if someone doesn't know how to do a certain task and is afraid or unwilling to learn, it's fine if it affects only them. But if other people have to step in and sort things out, causing unnecessary stress, that's quite selfish. A kind person would appreciate the help but see how it affected their friends/family and take the necessary steps to learn or get professional support.

Loving parents will also accept that their child is a separate person with their own skills, knowledge and experience and their will be occasions where their child is the expert, not them. Just like a parent can also be in the wrong and shouldn't expect their child to accept poor treatment just because they are the parent.

BraveToaster - has just said what I wanted to say, a billion times better. My mother never said, 'look I know I keep leaving the back door open and then we get burgled, I'm sorry about that, could you just check it's shut for me' - she'd just scream that of course she'd locked it, how dare anyone insinuate that she'd ever do something like that, and stop anyone going to check.

My mate at school had a father like this. He was adamant that a bidet was for washing your feet in. Impossible to convince him otherwise. He never went abroad fortunately.😂

Low IQ is usualy the issue in this kind of scenario IMO. A lot has been made of the role of critical thinking skills which are strangely being corellated with educational level.

I'm not convinced. My dad left school at 14 and was both intelligent and well informed. He read a broadsheet newspaper everyday and he could hold his own in conversation with those with higher education.