At the age of 34, I think I’m finally coming around to something I should have done or realized many years ago - namely, that my mother is never going to change.
There are a lot of good things about my mother. There are also a lot of terrible things about her.
Her good side is that she is very generous, will do a lot to help, quite communicative, etc. Her bad side is that she is highly manipulative and controlling, buys into all sorts of wild conspiracy theories or bizarre logic, highly condescending, gives away or spends large sums of money in secret, cannot understand or relate to others, etc.
My siblings and I have quarreled with her for decades over her traits - we have combative tendencies too, and I’m hardly saying this as if I or we are free of our flaws in any way - but by this point and age, I have come to the realization that I must simply resign myself to it. At age 65, my mother is becoming more hardened in her ways. Mentioning something a thousand times to her won’t budge her an inch.
It’s hit me lately that all I can do is appreciate and accept her good and minimize or downplay her bad. Sounds obvious, but it took 34 years for me to realize it. As far as our traits clashing is concerned, she is sodium and I am water. It’s impossible for sodium and water to not have an explosion when they meet.
Any advice on Dopers who’ve been in similar situations?
I don’t think you’re particularly late about this, it’s a difficult thing to judge your parents objectively. I was a bit over 40 when I finally got into therapy, one important result of which is that I was able to just let my parents be who they were.
Once you realize you can’t change them, the next big realization is that you may have to stop caring so much about keeping their good opinion. And to learn to refuse to put up with any of their bad behavior that affects you personally.
How you do that will vary tremendously depending on what the behavior is, and how much control you have over your participation in it. For example, my father tended to be a bully towards people who couldn’t fight back, like waiters and store clerks, and I had always been very embarrassed to be associated with him on these occasions. I called him out a couple of times, right there in the other person’s presence, and he didn’t do that any more (when I was around at least). He had a tendency to bait me with loaded questions, and I just ignored them, and eventually he stopped. I was able to do these things because I no longer cared whether he got mad at me or not. And he knew it.
It’s also true that I didn’t love him very much, hadn’t for a long time, but I didn’t hate him either. And since he was a typically complicated, some-good some-bad person who had had in many ways a tough life and who had done me some good in mine, I owed him some debt of care, and that’s what I gave him. I helped him out in ways that he needed as he got older, and rushed 600 miles to be with him when he died. For what it is worth, I think I did my duty.
The other thing that is important is to let you be who you are.
Once both I and my parents realized that I had no need or use for their approval, that I didn’t really care what they thought of me, we got along much better.
I had to go in a different direction. I found that the bad far outweighed the good. I eventually came to the realization that for my well being and my family’s well being that I had to cut my mother out our lives (nearly) completely. It was a long, anguishing decision. The verbal and emotional abuse of me and my wife and then eventually, my kids, were just far too destructive to write off. I do often miss the good parts of the relationship and even more so, the previously very positive relationship with my father that also had to end due to her controlling nature of him. I don’t think 34 is particularly old to come to any realization(s) about your relationship with your parents. Frankly, I am not sure that I had enough life experience before that age to truly understand the relationship. I’m happy you have found a way forward that works for you.
One problem that makes this so hard is that my mom is starting to make huge financial decisions based off of her warped/conspiratorial thinking. In the past, when conflicts or disagreements were confined only to matters of tone or attitude or whatnot, that was easy to overlook. But now that there are immense financial consequences at stake, her behavior has become much harder to ignore.
I don’t want to run in the same loop of argument, but I feel like I must because the $$$ stakes are very real now.
Kudos for coming to the realization that you have to (mostly) accept your mother the way she is. Many people never get there.
The “(mostly)” is because I think you’re right to worry about that dangerous combo of CT and large expenditures. I don’t know how old your mom is. Is she retired? On a limited income? Does she have a financial advisor? You don’t want to see her destitute because she gave all her money to crackpot causes or spent it on snake oil. I don’t think you should wade into this, but an objective third party your mom trusts might be able to prevent some trouble.
How huge is huge? I.e., does it put her future at risk? If so, you and your siblings might have some sort of intervention with her and threaten to talk to an attorney about a conservatorship over her assets. Of course, if she is spending what she can afford, but what she spends it on seems irrational, there isn’t much you can do about that.
She’s retired; she lives off of my dad’s income. As for an objective third party - I don’t know if there is one. She might fish around until she found one that agreed with her, or simply disagree and do things her way anyway.
Hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars huge.
My parents are wealthy enough (for the time being) that even big losses won’t put their future at risk, but it perturbs me a lot to see the way she makes monetary decisions, and especially the warped rationale behind it. She gets very angry whenever we disagree with her core assumptions (such as the US being near civil war, Texas secession being very likely, inflation never coming down, etc.) She is very CT/alarmist in general.
What does your dad say about it? Anyway he could help limit what she has control over? If she’s not making financial decisions that will ruin her (giving a huge percentage of her assets to a Nigerian prince, for example), it would seem unlikely that you could get a court to appoint someone to step in to help stop her.
You’ve been pretty vague on what exactly she is doing (which I fully appreciate), but there is a whole list of what she could be doing that matches your description that range from simply weird to downright harmful.
I have realized that there are two types of thinking when it comes to “family”. Family are those that share chromosomes with us or family are the people we chose. Which are you? I am of the second viewpoint which has affected how I dealt with my dad and my mom (different issues).
Based on my experience w/ my in-laws, I’ll observe that while you feel you’ve figured out how to deal with things at this moment, that might change in the future. Your circumstances may change, your mom’s words/actions might change, and you might find your current approach unsustainable over the long run.
You say your parents are wealthy enough, but are you financially secure? We are $ secure. My wife’s parents were pretty wealthy. They made a number of $ decisions over the years which we knew were not to my wife’s/kids’ benefit as potential heirs. But we declined to try to influence those decisions. They were the in-laws’ assets to dispose of as they wished.
What we found challenging was trying to figure out how to deal with their personalities over time. My wife kept trying to have SOME relations with these pretty flawed people. Over 35+ years we tried just about ever approach we could imagine. Noe of them were completely “happy” over the long run. After their deaths, it has become clear that they were even bigger jerks than we had thought/feared. So maybe we should’ve just completely cut off relations some time back, but we were trying to conduct ourselves as we thought good people ought to behave. We assumed long ago that we would inherit NOTHING - which has proven to be the case.
Just saying, make whatever decisions you feel are best given the info you have at this time. Realize that your opinions and the information you have may change over time. And don’t kid yourself that there is an option that you will be completely comfortable with. IMO/E, w/ screwed up families, the best you may be able to hope for is a relationship that is the LEAST troubling for you.
@Dinsdale , I attempted to fix your formatting – I think you inadvertently triggered Mathjax. Hope this is what you intended to say. If no, let me know.
My father, unfortunately, has a pretty Type-B personality and is very conflict-averse. My mom has ridden roughshod over him for almost their entire married life. Whatever she wants or dictates, is usually what goes.
So if she has made up her mind that a big chunk of money needs to be donated to a certain cause of hers, or spent on buying something, he won’t veto it.
You should set boundaries and keep them in place. Your mental health is more important than your financial wealth.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe that you will be able to influence your mother’s financial decisions. She’s gonna be her, especially after 65 years. So you just may have to live them.
My wife and I have had to deal with this, related to her family.
Details below, but tl;dr: my wife’s mother and sister routinely engage in psychological abuse, but my wife has decided that a dysfunctional relationship with them is better than no relationship at all. And, this is what you (@Velocity ) need to decide for yourself, with your own family.
Her mother (my mother-in-law) can be kind and thoughtful; she also has bipolar disorder, which meant that, for significant parts of my wife’s childhood, her mom made her daughters’ lives miserable with unreasonable demands and irrational behavior. My mother-in-law has been prescribed meds for her bipolar disorder for decades now, but often refuses to take them (she “misses the highs” when she’s on them). She can also be exceptionally selfish, and routinely expects (even demands) overt displays of affection from her family (gifts, dinners, etc.) as “proof” that they love her.
My sister-in-law also has her own psychological issues, and is also tremendously selfish. She has no close friends, and is insanely jealous of the fact that my wife does have close friends, with whom she likes to do things. She also has a serious lack of empathy, and cannot understand how anyone could have a legitimate opinion or point-of-view that differs from hers – someone who does (like my wife) is clearly wrong, and must be convinced of their error. Finally, she is highly emotional, and any sort of disagreement nearly always spirals into a screaming argument – which she feels is the only “healthy” way to deal with a disagreement.
As a result of all of this, we weather several incidents a year with my MIL and/or SIL, in which they berate my wife for perceived slights or errors, and make her into a sobbing mess.
This is exactly one of the things with my mother. Her opinion or interpretation of something - no matter how hastily or incompletely it was arrived at - is ironclad and infallible, and if you disagree, you’re “being difficult” or “stubborn.”
And it doesn’t matter how much expertise or knowledge I may have. Even on the topic that I have a master’s degree in, my mom thinks her twenty-second Googling of some conspiratorial website or on-the-spot opinion completely trumps and debunks my knowledge. Even if I have spent over 10 years of time researching and analyzing a particular subject, my mom won’t accept any of it because her ten seconds of Googling or rumor she heard on a chat app from some similar conspiratorial friend totally outweighs it.