So I decided to stop making an effort with my mother I haven't spoken to her since Christmas

[sweetkitty]

Very very long history between my Mother and I, in a nutshell she is quite toxic, a nasty two faced person. She would never say anything nice to me try to bring me down and make me feel crap about myself at every opportunity whilst to the outside world making out she was so proud of me and that she is a great mother.

I have suffered from low self esteem, anxiety and depression in part because of my childhood, during counselling sessions this came to a head and basically the counsellor said that some mothers are jealous of their daughters and that she felt the need to belittle me whenever she could.

Anyway things have gotten really bad between us over the past few years, we live about an hour apart and the only time she would visit is if she gets driven there and back, she doesn't work (is very lazy) and cannot be bothered to get on the train to come and see her GC. The only thing she has ever done is be a mother and thinks she knows everything having had 2 DC, now I have 3 I think she feels I am a better mother than her now and in some ways I think she is jealous of me having 3 DC. When I had a mc a year ago she told me it was for the best and that I was stupid to have 3 DC no one has a big family these days.

So usually I would have phoned her maybe once or twice a month but the calls left me drained and angry. For instance it's always about her, how poor she is, how ill she is, last year she told everyone she had a cancer scare self diagnosed on google. So I phoned her after Christmas and had the usual rubbish phonecall so thought sod it, she's not making an effort neither shall I, so we haven't spoken since.

I don't miss her but I miss having a Mum if that makes sense, I know she did nothing for me except make me sad and upset but I lok at other people with Mums supporting them and it makes me sad that the DDS will never have a typical Gran relationship.

Don't know why I am typing this probably just to get it off my chest, no one will read it anyway.

morningsun I hope you feel bad reading that

No its not an excuse

SK does not need one of those

for a mother to be treated as one she needs to act like one

sk i totally support and understand you

feel happy that your lovely girls will always be there for you xxxxxx

theres a big difference between a poor relationship which you may have counselling for and being abandoned or abused
i still think apart from outright abuse you should care for parents as an adult

Morningsun, you obviously have no idea at all what it feels like to be mistreated by a toxic mother.

I most certainly do not agree that once you have been (badly) brought up that you have to give something back. No one asks to be born and I certainly do not expect my son to give me anything back. I decided to have him, I decided to bring him up. All I want him to do is enjoy the life I gave him.

Talking of growing up. Her/our mothers are adults too you know, they should not need their children to look after them being grown adults themselves?!

What a depressing thought that you are only born to end up returning the 'favour' your parents did you by raising you.

Parents are supposed to give unconditional love, that is, to not expect anything in return.

I think you should stick to commenting on things you actually know about. I don't think you should be making insensitive comments on someones thread who is clearly already upset and distressed by a situation.

agree

no one asks to be born it is parents choice

selfish if they are unwilling to love their children

morningsun - maybe that comment was a pretty unfair. Generally in these situations you find that people have been taken to their absolute limit before getting to the stage of 'deserting' as you call it.

As you can tell by the 1st post and subsequent posts, there is a lot more to it than not going on holidays.

People in this type of situation often find themselves being judged.

Constructive comments are much more helpful and more likely to be taken on board TBH.

i didn't say the only reason to be born,but the op said the phone calls to her mother involved draining conversations about her mother being poor and ill~but the op expects her to travel by train to help her with her own dcs,while calling her lazy!
i can see she may not want to see her mother but expecting a lot from her doesn't seem right either

sk, really sorry to hear you have this situation in your life and that someone on this thread can't see past the end of their own opinions to see what is going on.

My mum, thankfully, wasn't as bad as yours is and I never had to completely cut her off. But she had her moments and did always put me down, did undermine me, did leave me raging after phonecalls etc. But she had been a good enough mum when I was growing up, unlike yours seems to have been.

Still, I also felt the lack of a "true" mother figure and can empathise with that - my counsellor was the sort of mum I wanted, she was lovely and so obviously adored her 2 sons and would do anything for them.

Visiting my mum would frequently end with me leaving the house swearing I wouldn't go back. Then I learnt something - it's a bit airy-fairy but it worked for me - my mum was an "energy vampire". Whenever I saw/spoke to her, she would puncture me with her snidey comments, her put downs, her attitudes - and every puncture caused me to leak some energy which she could suck up and grow stronger from. This is what people who are deficient in some way themselves do - my mum had dreadfully low self-esteem so she tried to make mine lower so she could feel superior to me and feed off my misery. Once I realised this was what she was doing, I was able to combat it by a variety of visual images - protection against vampires, wearing an invisible impenetrable armour so that her barbed comments couldn't pierce me, that kind of thing.
Helped enormously!

If you do decide to re-establish contact (and there is no real reason you should) perhaps that image will help you - she can only suck on your energy if you let her pierce you, so stop her piercing you in the first place and you will stay strong.

well if she was totally inadequate and causing you trauma in childhood,no,if your childhood was good enough yes.Reading your post23.13 it sounds bad so i apologise if those events were when you were a child

morning sun - 'she would never say anything nice to me try to bring me down and make me feel crap about myself at every opportunity'

THAT IS ABUSE, EMOTIONAL ABUSE

It is because people such as yourself simplify abuse into mere abandonment that emotional abuse is still largely suffered in silence.

Morningsun, you really are not getting this at all are you? In fact you are so far off the mark it's funny.

Her mother is lazy, always has been. Her mother only cares about herself and therefor does what a lot of toxic parents do which is to emphasise their own problems/ailments/ poor situation and go on and on and on about it over and over again so that they are the centre of attention. Her mother is not actually seriously ill, she is exagerrating. Her mother is poor (when she wants to be) becuase she is and always has been lazy.

Her mother is generally not a nice person, are you getting this yet? Your problem is that you are thinking of her mother as a normal everyday person or as if she were your mother, she is not. She is manipulative, selfish, nasty, petty etc etc and just wants everyone around her to think that she is not, she is a victim and everything bad that happens is the OPs fault.

The Op has been hurt by her mother time and time again and just like a hundred times before someone like you comes along and blames it all on the OP because her mother seems worthy of your sympathy.

Are you getting it yet? If you're not and you're jsut going to make another closed minded, ridiculous comment then I guess you'd better leave.

My deepest sympathy sweetkitty, for what you have endured. Have you tried the stately homes thread?

I didn't realise how nasty her mother was
well i get your point that her mother was nasty but even if you have a rubbish mum isn't it better to rise above and part of moving on is forgiving them and to some degree looking after them
but maybe i'm thinking more of neglect or abandonment whereas if they are intentionally nasty its different
sorry didn't want to upset the op if she suffered emotional abuse and is still being manipulated by her mother
sorry am in odd mood and have alcoholic mum who i looked after as a child and adult
sorry sk

nasty for you too ms - having alcoholic parent must be dreadful to deal with.

Morningsun, thanks for apologising to SK.

Really sorry for what you have been thru, it can't have been easy having an alcoholic mum and certainly explains why you feel the way that you do.

Can we all be pals again?

Pals

Yes pals i am usually nice
I have always tried to help and look after my mum but she would never get any help and she got really bad brain damage from the toxic effects of the alcohol about 10 or 15 yrs ago

I'm glad morningsun apoligized.
In my experience people who jump to the defence of another person's neglectful/abusive mother do so NOT because they don't know what its like to be irrepairably hurt by a parent, but because they know only too well what it IS like. I was not a bit suprised to find out towards the end of the thread that morningsun's mother was far from perfect.
The reason I am singling morningsun out is because its important to look for the motivations behind the people IRL who might say "Oh, but your poor mother raised you" "aren't you being a meanie". AS HOlyguacamole said, it is usually the people who are scared to face their own stories, their own childhoods, who are VERY quick to say that another person should forgive their mother. THere will always be someone who will be quick to jump in to make you doubt your version of events. I would like to say to those people:
"Don't you think I want a mother in my life? Do you think I would cut my mother out of my life if it wasn't the only option I felt I had. With stakes this high, do you think I would do this on a whim? Don't you think I have thought about forgiveness, but have realised that in order to nurture my children properly, I have to nurture and love myself, and nurturing myself means not allowing myself to be treated badly by other people?"
Of course you could never say this to these people because they are very blind, usually.But its the kind of thing you can tell yourself whenever someone comes along to make you feel like shit for being brave enough to admit what your mother is really like.

Well sais Sakura

I'd also like to say that maybe I was a tad harsh yesterday. I was feeling a bit emotional myslef as i'd just recieved 3 nasty answerphone messages from my toxic parents . So sorry if I went a bit ott.

Wow so mnay posts I am humbled as I know there are so many people who have had a lot worse than me thrown at them.

Morningsun - thankyou for apologising I do appreciate that it is really difficult to make judgements sometimes without having all the facts, how could you, you do not know me or my life.

What I do want to say is that this is not a rant about my Mum not helping with the Gcs or coming on holiday with us, I was using that as an example of other peoples Mums I see every day and always think "I wish I had a Mum like that," I do not expect her help but I do expect her to care for me.

The last time I spoke to her I called her to wish her a Merry Christmas and thank her for the money she had given the DDs. She is not poor, although she does not work she lives off my stepdad, the poor thing is a lie to make me feel sorry for her. So she was moaning about not being able to afford Christmas etc so I said well don't bother about any presents for me and DP and just get the DDs a token gift then, then they open cards with a total of £150 in them so I phoned her to say thank you of course and thats far too much, of course then she says "oh take it while you can, I won't always have it" so turning it around into poor me again. Oh this is the woman who said she couldn't afford £10 for a train ticket to come and see her GCs. Then stepdad is saying he has a new pc, Skyplus, pressure washer etc. I even offered to send her the money to come and visit.

As for the ill thing, it's lies as well or exaggerations, there is always something wrong with her everytime I phone. Imagine telling everyone you had a cancer scare as google told you. She always has a stomach bug every weekend so spends at least one day a weekend in bed (hangover), arthritis, memory loss, depression, dermatitis the list is endless. She is only 54 so not old BTW.

Anyway sorry to go on but I wanted to try to explain why I was calling her lazy and that she is not poor. I call her lazy as I had years of putting myself to school and making my own dinners as she wouldn't. I remember coming home from school being sent to the shops then doing the dishes as they hadn't been done since the morning.

Whoever said emotional vampire is spot on. The thing is I don't want to cut her out, I phoned her last, I have said she is welcome anytime she wants to come up and visit, I have visited her and had to get her out her bed then felt really unwelcome. I have phoned her to have the energy zapped out of me.

I would truly love a Mum like my friends, I have given her every oppportunity in the past, to have it thrown back at me, all I have done now is put as much effort into our relationship as she does, I have not cut ties I would speak to her if she phoned. I am concentrating on MY family now.

I am sorry for your Mothers problems with alcohol too

sweetkitty hi,i understand you have tried to have a good relationship with your mother and it has been to no avail~that must be very frustrating when there appears to be no reason for it and you have tried your best,sounds to me as if your mum has a personality problem of some kind maybe.
In some ways my situation has been easier in that i have sort of been the parent in our relationship and altho its very disappointing she wouldn't agree to help to get off the drink until it was too late I don't really judge her as i think we can all go wrong and she just went spectacularly wrong,i do feel sorry for her.
All the bestx

Thanks morningsun, I think that's the frustrating thing now I am a parent I have such love for the DDs always hugging them, praising would do anything for them as every parent would. It has made me question my own Mother's parenting IYSWIM, why she sets out to upset and belittle me? I know that sounds very self pitying but I do think a lot of it is why me? What did I do to get a Mum like that? Counselling made me realise it's her that has the problem and not me and it's nothing I ever did but it cannot stopping me wishing I had a good mother/daughter relationship.

Sorry to hear about your Mother and you having to be the parent, you do sound very understanding in that you accept that people go wrong and that you feel sorry for her, a lot of people in your position would blame her nad that says a bit about you as a person.

OP thank you so much for opening this discussion. I have stumbled through a toxic mother/daughter relationship for years and her latest shenanigans are just the icing on the cake.

I had felt that I needed to walk away - but didn't have enough confidence that I wouldn't get totally demonised by others.

Its so good to hear how well others have done after realising that they need to move forwards without their mother in their lives. I too have recieved years of counselling to try and undo the damage she has wreaked. I do appreciate that my mother had issues whilst I was growing up and her relationship with my siblings, whilst far from perfect, is alot better than it is with me. I can only guess as to why this might be....its taken me a very long time to realise that it is a result of changes in her own circumstances not that I am somehow not worthy or a "bad" person compared to the angelicism of my siblings.

I have wasted many years trying to work out what I did wrong and why she treats me the way she has. Its like she feels I owe her something for ruining her life if that makes sense?

I am working VERY hard to ensure my children get a wonderful warm and supportive loving mother and the sad fact is that I can only do that by eliminating the poison she has hypothetically drip fed me over the years.

Thank you again - this has been a real uplifting thread and I am feeling ready to move on without her controlling influence in my life. Incidentally she's another one who never calls or visits unless I go to her! And again, I am only discussed by my achievements - when I chose to become a SAHM she hit the roof - after all - how can she brag about my professional acheivements now? WHich of course only came about as a result of the education she provided me with......

Time to go before this turns into a rant! But thank you again

And best wishes and support to you all on this thread who have taken this step. Good for you.

I think I'm coming at this a lot further down the line;one has to understand the problem first,then come to terms with it and then one can see or not see ones mother,but it is with a detachment so those encounters are not upsetting.So i still feel a loyalty to my mother altho i know she has thrown away her life and spoilt a lot of family life.If she needed anything i would try to help her,and i would defend her from criticism from others.
In actual fact i feel i have let her down by not being able to save her from her addictions~this was the hardest thing to come to terms with for me,that i couldn't fix it.

morningsun - such a difficult thing, accepting that you cannot change someones behaviour, especially if the behaviour is destructive or especially unhealthy. You don't want to accept it but you somehow know it is the only option you have.

when i was younger it made sense to think if i pointed out the problems to her and offered all my help,she would take that chance but as the addiction got worse and worse that became impossible until eventually her health forced a hospital detox and by then not only was it too late to save her health but she also continued to drink anyway.
Now I'm older i understand the reason for her to drink was escape and that got worse with time so there was never really going to be any going back as by then there was much more to escape from.