Creme de la Crepe

[MrsSchadenfreude]

New thread...

Largely due to my wild and mis-spent youth rearing its ugly head to bite me on the arse years later... the second time in a month.

BD that feels like real progress towards something better! Good luck with it all!
MI I was slim in the 70's but desperate because I wasn't thin
I so regret not enjoying who I was then because of it....
beachy good luck for DDads appointment and welcome home to your trooper DD.
Waf oh no re passport. I love a good clear out... I'm not sentimental but draw the line at important documents! What a pain.
I'm at the hospital. dC have gone out with paternal grandparents for the day. The staff are washing and changing DDad. He hates it and is uncooperative. I am hiding in the stairwell so I don't hear the fuss.

MrsS is that the 'biblical sense' one :)

Congrats anyway - clearly struck the right note! Keeping fingers crossed....

WAF, I missed that - eeeek!

Every B&B in the SE seems to be booked up!

MrsS, just do it!

Good luck to you too MrsS You can do it!

tilly mad as it sounds, DH and I used to sometimes decide to book a hotel in central London, go to the theatre, tea at Harrods or Fortnums, walk in the parks, galleries etc etc. stupidly expensive, I suppose but if you can run to it, they're more likely to have rooms than country B&b's at the moment. I used to have a life.....

Hooray for interviews for BD and MrsS! Go get those new jobs!!

WAF - oops re: passport. Bummer.

Hope news was good for your ddad, Beachy.

Rose, I hope your ddad will soon be able to move to the care home and your dmum can accept the situation.

Glad to hear all the travellers are enjoying themselves. It was very nice to see Herbs for a brief mini-MU earlier in the week. The weather here today is rather changeable but quite sunny and warm this afternoon, so I am hoping that Herbs and family are able to enjoy some outdoor activities and not having to travel back eastwards just yet.

Monty, I don't have much new to add to all the wise advice already given re: dcs and food/weight. I have always encouraged my dcs to do a lot of sport and keep active and have been quite fierce about them eating 3 meals a day, sugary drinks only for high days and holidays, no between meals snacks (on the whole), but also allowing sweets/choc etc as puddings every day if they wanted. Dd was, until about 6 months ago, pretty sensible about her eating and very slender, but her current mindset includes flicking the Vs at me about food. So she has enlarged her arse by a full clothes size by refusing to eat meals with us a lot of the time and by constantly snacking on vast amount of junk (most of which she buys herself). She is now moaning about being "so fat". I'm resolutely saying nothing.
Ds has a completely different, stocky build and tends towards tubbiness. He is very conscious of this. He does a fair bit of sport and absolutely loves all vegetables, but has a horrendously sweet tooth and a gargantuan appetite. He was once left somewhat unsupervised with access to a lot of cupcakes (at school, not at home, and I have no idea why no one stopped him) and ate 8. And that night he was very sick. He did learn something from this experience.

My dm was exceptional in her peculiar attitude to body image and food. She was unrelenting vicious in her comments to me when I was aged 10-12 and I developed anorexia at age 13/14. I am a similar build to ds - very stocky, with a wide ribcage and no waist, whereas my dm was more of an hourglass with skinny legs. Over the following decade I moved through every known eating disorder and ended up spending a year in hospital in my mid-20s. I have a necessarily strict regime concerning my eating now, because it's the only way to stop a relapse, but even my nearest and dearest have no idea because it's extremely well-camouflaged (the regime is still based on what I was taught in hospital, so it looks like "normal eating" ). I have always been worried that my dcs would catch body-weirdness and food-weirdness from me, but it hasn't happened yet.

Soz about typos. Am a bit tired.

Why did our mothers do it to us, Stropps? I look back at photos now, and think, I was actually quite nice looking in my teens and early 20s, and had a good figure - I went in and out in the right places, maybe a very little bit overweight (unlike now ) but not the galumphing heifer my mother made me out to be, and how she said others saw me: "Aunt Rachel says it's a pity you're so fat, as it's very difficult to lose it once it's there." "Aunt Aydel thinks there is nothing worse in life than being fat." I am sure neither said any such thing about me (now I am sure!), and in any case, why should I have worried about what they thought about me? It is terrible that your mother was so utterly vile to you, Stropps. Was it lack of self confidence on her part? Jealousy?

Anyhoo, in S & B news, I have discovered the wonder cure for hard skin on horned hooves: chiropody sponges. I have just had a go at my feet and they look like new - much better than the PedEgg, pumice stone, expensive foot roller sandpaper thing. The hard skin has all gone. Top tip: don't rub it on non-hard skin otherwise your feet bleed. And my fingers and thumb are a bit sore, where I was holding the thing. And these things cost a couple of quid from Amazon. Not glamorous, but they work.

MrsS, short answer: at that point, she was a mad witch with massive control issues. In fact, probably a highly anxious and depressed individual, who got marooned in the middle of the countryside with an eccentric old buffer of a spouse, and who had some unreal 1950s idea about how life with children had to be. Her behaviour to me as a small child was utterly abominable (let's just say I have a powerful flinch reflex when anyone at all - including dh and the dcs - moves too fast into my space when I'm not expecting it), so I suspect she had untreated PND which festered on for a long time, which caused all manner of issues and I was just the most obvious target for her ire.

Sounds lovely Rose, but he/we wanted to be out in the countryside for a walk! I think we'll just go for the day and have a nice lunch/dinner out.

Stropps, DS did that at a couple of parties at about that age. He could probably eat 8 cupcakes now without even blinking!
And no way are you stocky

I am at how horrid your DM's were about your teenage bodies - mine was quite the opposite, forcing treats down me at every opportunity. Well, she didn't have to force too hard! So I was "big-boned" as an older child/teen, but lost it in my first year of working, once I realised that I simply ate too much. I still eat too much, but try to exercise as much as possible!

My mum? Well, she had issues a gogo - her mum killed herself when DM was two, shunted around, horrible SM etc etc - all adding up to massive self-centredness and insecurity, along with no models for healthy relationships of any kind....oh and at 14 she had been 'fat' but "got it under control"'and has remained vv slim ever since. Fat, both my parents felt, was the ultimate sin. Probably below lack of academic achievement.

And then she got lumbered with this alien white baby - when she was absolutely renowned for her own beauty - and then living in a particularly racist and insular part of the UK doing a job she hated teaching sullen thugs, because she'd done child care and hadn't been able to finish her PhD, and then her white child becomes lumpen and fat.

That's the kind version. I have genuinely only in the past few months, as the mother of a teenager myself, started to question the assumption (on everyone's part) that obviously she felt let down by my failure and that everyone has always found her more attractive than me (with the honourable exception of DP).

She also found it unspeakably vulgar that I've got boobs.

But seriously, MI, in what way have you failed??
But yyy, to fat being the ultimate sin in the eyes of my parents. My df clearly stated that getting fat demonstrated extreme dimwittedness and an utter lack of moral fibre. Both my parents had been overweight at some point and then "got it under control". My brother was so thin he was virtually transparent until he was about 25.

Well, I failed to look the way she expected. She should have got a slender doe-eyed Indian-looking daughter. And you can't blame her for expecting one - or so I felt - it's not as if she could have expected a lumpen white disappointment.

Gosh - my mother seems to be a saint compared to these. The only thing she did was make me have short hair (there was a whole thread on that and apparently I was not alone). Mrs S - in the FB photo of you in the fountain your figure looks fabulous. Stropps DD2 is stocky (I've been searching for the right word) - it has been very difficult to manage tactfully as she was a terrible cupboard raider.

I'm sorry but I had to laugh at the 8 cupcakes story - that sounds typical boy.

So glad you enjoyed the Alhambra MI and the girls managed in the heat. They look absolutely gorgeous by the way.

And congrat's on the job interviews BD and Mrs S.

I am now off to get my Achilles tendons looked at by the physiotherapist.

Well done on job interviews.

Hope the physio can sort out the tendons - I had a really bad ripped calf muscle last year & the physio sorted it for me. I was saintly about doing the exercises between sessions, which I am sure helped.

My mother thought I would never 'catch a husband' if I was fat & ungroomed. As far as she was concerned that was the summit of any girl's life!! And my father was pretty much the same. He didn't think it was worth women training to do anything too hard, like medicine or law, as they'd just go & get married & give it up.

They fuck you up.......................

I dread to think what the DC will say about me. I am sure I will have been the cause of all DDs woes. Perhaps slightly less so for DS who is (like his father) not particularly introspective.

I must admit, I never really had weight issues with my mother. My dsis was fairly flare filling until she reached her late teens, whereas I was always very shrimp like. My mother took quite a lot of abuse as I was so skinny as a child, with a big bobble head and sticky out ribs. I'd been quite ill until I was seven so it was hard to gain weight.

I managed quite well after that on my fatness regime, especially living in the US for a couple of years in my twenties where I thought it was rude not to 'finish my plate'!

Woo - two job interviews. Excellent. It's a good time for it.....

Ddad does have to have a surprisingly large amount of lower eyelid removed. I know this because the surgeon drew it out for me - ddad doesn't know this as I said 'Oh that's not too bad!' when I saw the picture. Horrible - not looking forward to that week, whenever it is.

I've made 8 x 20 mins journeys in the car today - dropping off and picking up everybody. Only 2 more to go and I shall have a glass of wine..... Ds has gone to a very fancy pants events locally for which I wasn't warned about the dress code. He's gone in smart black jeans, and a checked shirt and has had to change and borrow his friends clothes. Once again, Why Doesn't Anyone Tell Me Anything.......???? I could have bought him that spiffy suit Goaty (or is that Giddy!) linked to above.

Beachy, oh no, your poor dad :( and poor you.

I have to say that I have finally realised (duh!) that part of the reason I have been so very upset by dd's "challenging" behaviour and raging outbursts/general unpleasantness, is that I have tried soooo hard her whole life NOT to be my mother and therefore found it inexplicable when dd still found so much to dislike about her home life and me. And also, of course, if I had behaved to my mother the way dd does to me, I would have been black and blue. I was scared stiff of my mother and tried to avoid talking to her about anything. Dd is not remotely scared of me and feels perfectly able and entitled to express exactly how she feels. Which I dare say is a success of sorts. Now I've had that realisation, I'm finding it a bit easier to "detach" during the bad bits.

Anyhow, my dm is coming for lunch tomorrow. I forgave her a long time ago for being crap, and I'm beginning to suspect that she is almost ready to forgive me for being crap too. Still drives me up the wall if I have to spend more than a few hours in her company, though.

Oh Stropps, that is so wise and so true! Well done indeed for reaching a place with your mother where forgiveness feels like it's a possibility / been reached - i'm waaay behind you on that one and that's on having psychoanalysis until it comes out my ears (so to speak).

It is such an achievement that you dd feels able to show / tell you just how she feels - really no mean feat. You are doing a good job you know - even if it doesn't always seem like that.

So pleased you haven't left us Stropps and have kept on posting here.

MWAH!

It was lovely to meet you too stropps, as ever, and glad you saw the menfolk, large and small. Naturally, we spent the entire day, now the weathers better, travelling, apart from a brief stop at lulworth cove. Then about an hours wait in a very scenic, but hopelessly inefficient, cafe.

Then a SEVEN HOUR drive back to london, through horrendous traffic. By the end, I was ready to KILL. not least DP, for not driving, meaning that I had to drive all 600 miles of the past week. I did in fact manage to express this to him, such was my ire.

Re fatness, it seems to have too high a place in my mother's hierarchy of what's important, but I remain relatively unscathed. Not so my sis, ever since. Y dad said, when she was 15, 'why can't you be slim, like herbs'. Hello, bulimia.

But! DP got a call on the way home, saying that his dmum had had a scan, and her cancer is on the wane! She's in remission!

Hooray, Herbs, that is good news!! Sorry to hear about the hellish drive, though.
Mwah right back atcha, GGGiddy

Herbs, that is very good news indeed. And sorry for hellish drive. It's always the way.
Stropps , not only are you detaching, you are giving dd the gift of responsibility for herself. I know I have learned that my own dd, afloat on a boat of her own making, is actually mostly all right. And is discovering that domestic drudgery is what it is. I have learned too. And that us that dd is not me, (quite brave and sociable) but is timid and quite conservative. I feel now I pushed her a little into exciting and new things when she was scared shitless.