Is anyone else NOT close to their parents?

[outofmydeppth]

I'm not very close to my parents and seem to be the only this applies to amongst my friends. I sometimes get upset by it & would like to hear from others in the same boat as me. No "my mum is my best friend" messages please!!!

Agree, wholeheartedly, hmc

Of course its not your fault how you were treated as a child. But as an adult you can make choices.

Choosing to forgive your parents will heal you, it may not create a good relationship with your parents, but it will make you feel better about yourself (and possibly them)

My comment may sound unfair but children do absorb and copy and imitate everything, and therefore I don't think generational cycles are broken by rejecting.

I hear all your justifications for not having a relationship with your parents but what have you got to lose giving forgiveness a go?

Yes, you are right, children do copy and imitate everything but I think they are more likely to copy and imitate the way their parents (i.e. us) treat them than the way their mum & dad are with their grandparents.
I haven't come across many threads on MN to do with us mums stressed and depressed because of their parents relationship with grandparents. That is one step too far.
For me, it is too late to totally forgive and forget because both parents are gone now.
I do think generational cycles are broken by rejection otherwise I would be the same as them and I am not. I made a conscious effort to bring my children up in completely the opposite way they brought me up.
At times, I forgive them but it doesn't go away and you don't forget.

I do have a relationship with my parents. I don't get on with them well, but I suppress all of that to an extent since they didn't 'abuse' me in any sense in the same way as has happened to other posters on here. So out of a sense of duty I seem them fairly regularily. If they had been actively cruel or hurtful towards me during my childhood or at a later stage I would feel no such sense of obligation.

I don't see why anyone should feel obligated to have a relationship with someone (relative or not) where that relationship would be / is a source of continuing misery or pain for them. Why for goodness sake?

hmc, god, I know that word "duty" well!!! It all hinged on duty!

Beacuse they're your parents and you hope that your children will want to have a relationship with you when they are adults?

Also, helliebean its not too late to forgive them.

Children aren't robots! They are much more astute than you are making out. Admittedly, mine are older but they had rejection also from my parents (their grandparents) and even they put up some barriers and I actively encouraged it!
I did not want the nasty comments to them so I would shield them from it. Besides which, my mother didn't particularly like DD1 (didn't look like the other 9 grandchildren - dark hair and brown eyes the reason I think).
How, on earth, can you forgive this sort of thing?
Just because you get old does not give you carte blanche to ride roughshod over ppl's feelings.

i don't get on with my mum, infact she seems to go out of her way to undermine me and to be nasty, but i do get on with my dad, even though he does frustrate me sticking up for my mum

I actually agree with Cam to some extent. In most situations, you have to forgive your parents, because all of us want our children to forgive the parenting mistakes we will make.

Easier said than done.

I also think you have to take into account that you can't heal by yourself. If the parent in question won't play ball, you can't then continue an unhealthy and destructive relationship, which your children then learn from. You have to balance whether breaking off a destructive relationship is more or less damaging than continuing it.

I'm quite lucky in that my mother, while being a nutter is generally supportive in practical ways and as my father died before both my children were born, I don't have to deal with it. And I do try and switch off from the annoying bits of my mother, but i hope that from my relationship with her, my children are learning that no matter how mad, maddening and generally loony your mother is, you've still got to have the old bat in the house (and when I'm a purple hat wearing old bat, I do hope they'll have been brainwashed enough to remember that. )

Cam,

If my children decide not to have a relationship with me when they are adults I'd be pretty damn devastated - but I would probably have done something to deserve their rejection.

hmc, I work with elderly people who see their kids maybe once every 8 months or so, not because they deserve to be abandoned or because they were particularly bad parents, but simply because their kids can't be bothered - they're busy getting on with their own lives, raising their kids, working at their marriages, doing their careers - their parents come way way down the list.

But they don't deserve to be alone and isolated. (OK, OK, maybe about 15% or so of them do. But I'd be very careful about assuming that elderly people who don't see their kids don't do so because they were bad parents. In a heartbreaking number of cases, that's simply not true. It's just that we live in a society where family bonds aren't that valued.)

agree, hmc.
Children are not going to reject you because you rejected your parents. The reasons would be greater.
PMSL Caligula - love the purple hat bit! And agree with you somewhat - despite my mother and all that I have said, we had a relationship of sorts up to the end - not the sort of relationship I would want but I just kept on going with it out of a sense of duty and the plain fact, she was my mother.

There's the rub, what people deserve. Forgiving your parents is for (because you will feel better about yourself, or "it" or possibly them), its not about what people "deserve" (that's about pride)

You hope your children aren't going to reject you because that's what they have learned from you.

Well like I said Cam - it doesn't really apply to me ...but for some other posters, I doubt they would feel better about themselves for forgiving their parents. Perhaps in some cases but not in all. Not if forgiveness means a resumption in contact with parents who have been and are cruel and hurtful. Surely it would just subject the 'forgivee' (lol, is there such a word) to further pain.

Well like I said, if my kids reject me; that's their prerogative. I don't own them.

Sorry for the tedious repetition of "well like I said"!

I agree as well that forgiving isn't just for your children's sake, it is for your own and your own mental health. I wouldn't be able to put up with my mother if I still felt continually resentful and angry with her about how awful she was.

and I'm with hmc - forgiving, or coming to terms with, doesn't always mean contact with parents. Depends on the parents.

Doing my best to ensure my children would never reject me. Trying to be everything my parents were not. teaching them how to love - something me and 3 of my sisters were never shown. One of my sisters says she dare not have children (She is 35) because she does not know how to be a proper mother. says can i teach her. I want my children to be aware that of the fact that my reasons for rejecting my parents were valid ones. I dont think that wil affect their relationship with me - maybe just make it a more honest one. Whats the point in pretending eveythings alright?

Message withdrawn

Pruni, I don't think you can forgive until you've come to terms with your own feelings about it. And until you've ceased to allow their behaviour to upset you. (And even then, there are times when my mother still really pisses me off! But I do just try and rationalise it almost with the same arguments I have with my children "I'm the adult, they're the child" - only with my mother it's, "I'm the sane person, she is the lunatic. I must not allow myself to behave in the same lunatic way she does!" But I don't think it's something you ever completely resolve, iyswim - like any other kind of relationship, it's just something you have to continue to work at.)

I agree Cagligula. My mother is nuts, drives me crazy BUT she's my Mum I can't change her only my reaction to her.