Disclaimer: My family, including the extended family, is refreshingly drama-free. My dad and I provided most of the drama, which more or less wound down when I turned 18 and moved out; and even there it was more actually-yelling-at-one-another drama rather than endless-mind-games drama.
That being the case, I have no frame of reference for what I know about the Russian court epics going on in various friends’ families - constant little turf wars, subtle and not-so-subtle put downs, and immaturity galore (and not only from the minors).
The degree was varied - they run the gamut from “sitcom” to “Sampiro post” to “the city police, and possibly the RCMP and CSIS, really should have been involved at some point.” And this is a very wide range of people - in fact, my dad’s and my boring old nuclear personality conflict looks downright quaint in a world that seems to be entirely populated with very creatively dysfunctional families.
But perhaps the most bizarre thing (at least from where I’m sitting) is that they all seem to have in common. This one will come into the kitchen, taste the food from the entire Thanksgiving dinner her daughter has been conscripted into making, add salt, and then announce that she (the mother) cooked it and the daughter helped a little. That one will describe her daughter’s contribution to the raising of her younger siblings (whom she, the daughter, fed, cleaned up after, taught, took to and from school, signed notes for, and otherwise brought up) as “you helped a little.” The other will spin lies so Kafkaesque about every facet of life that the child begins to half-believe them, despite having actually been there, and will actually doubt their own sanity until comparing notes with a sibling.
Why do people do this, whom do they hope to convince (when telling these stories to a person who, again, was there), how fucked up is that, and could we have some examples from your lives?
Why does she do it? If I could unlock that mystery, well…I don’t know what I’d do. Why do I think she does it? To convince herself that she wasn’t that bad of a mother, that she was a victim rather than a perpetrator, that she Did The Best She Could (one of her favorite lines). I honestly think she believes her versions of history. When confronted with a different version, she will become upset and fight to the bitter end to defend her version. I truly don’t think her lying is the result of her being malicious and manipulative. She just doesn’t have the ego strength the face the truth about certain things she has done and what the ramifications of those actions are.
An example? When my parents separated and eventually divorced, she made my sisters and I choose between her and my father. It was a false choice in most respects—we had to live with her, so of course we were going to choose her. But my dad had visitation rights and would take us out every Sunday. Sometimes he would take us to events that his extended family was having—a holiday meal, a wedding, whatever. On those occasions, my mother would become furious. She would make the time leading up to the event a nightmare in the sense that she would be angry and sarcastic and make comments about going to see “the people who don’t give a shit about you”. After we returned, it was not unusual for her not to speak to us for several days. She would be icy, bitchy, angry, and you never knew when (or, more importantly HOW) this was going to end. Eventually my sisters and I opted out of these occasions, as it just wasn’t worth the price we were paying at home. (FTR, we ranged in age from 12 to 16 when they separated; they divorced something like 3 years later).
Fast forward to last year, when my father’s mother was dying. I spoke to my mother on the phone the day before my grandmother died, and let her know that the woman was dying. My mother started saying something about “all those wasted years”. When I asked her what she meant by this, she went on and on about how the family turened their backs on my sisters and I after the divorce, and how she wanted us to be able to maintain a relationship with them, but they all sided with my father and didn’t want to include us in anything. When I tried to present my experience of what happened, she came back with, “I refuse to feel guilty about what happened. I know that I Did The Best I Could, and it was not my fault.”
That is just one of about a billion examples I have of how my mother seems to live in an alternate reality than the rest of the family.
I have a great one: I have a student whose family is under considerable finacial pressure. He had a job last summer, and made about $2000. He turned over every check to his mother to put in the bank for him. He’s not stupid, he knows that they are teetering on the edge of ruin, so he also told her that if she needed the money, to consider it hers. Half way through the summer he did spend $200 on a car stereo. He priced them, picked out the one he wanted, and she did give him the $200. She was vauge about whether or not she needed the rest of the money, he figured it was gone, that was fine, whatever.
This spring, we were filling out his FAFSA and it gets to the questions about personal finacial resources. So he needs to know if there is a bank account with his name with cash sitting in in. He’s pretty sure there isn’t, but he needs to check. So he calls his mother, and she acts like he is crazy and reminds him that he spent $2000 on a car stereo.
It’s hard to explain how devestating this was. He really didn’t mind working all summer and turning the money over to her–there isn’t anyone else to shoulder the load, frankly. She’s dying, slowly, and she can’t work. But her compulsion to steal the credit of that contribution–to rewrite history so that the reason he didn’t have any money saved for college is that he spent it all (instead of 10%) on a selfish indulgence–that was about as much as he could take.
Needless to say, he now has a seperate bank account and statements aren’t sent to the apartment. He’s planning on giving her a large lump sum at the end of the summer, but it’ll be much more under his control.
Even without pointing out the 20/20 hindsight that allows us to do a double take at these two juxtaposed statements, I’ll just express wonderment: I got my first bank account, oh, a decade or so before I had my first job. I can’t fathom this circumstance.
My mom likes to tell people of my misspent youth, how wild I was in high school, how I ran with a bad crowd, etc, etc, and how she, defender of my virtue, had to rush in and save the day at every opportunity. According to her I was on drugs, sleeping around, high all the time, etc.
In fact, I was an anorexic virgin who used to pass out from a lack of food. I had very few friends because the ones I did have she would assume were trying to corrupt me. She would call their homes and warn their parents that they better stay away from her daughter, or else, etc. etc.
Mom regularly starts in about how awful I was in high school, how she was such a martyr to put up with me, poor, hard done by mother, etc.
I mentioned all of this to her about a year ago, and she thinks I’m making it up .
I guess it would make a mother feel pretty stupid to know that her kid was starving to death for years and she never noticed, so it’s easier for her to remember it her way.
I am sure it was a joint account, though, as banks won’t let you have an account if you are under 18 that is JUST in your name. That’s what happened here, and he gave the checks to her to deposit. Understand also that he always intended that the money he made would go to his mom: he got a summer job explictly to help out at home because they really have nothing. What killed him was that instead of accepting it as what it was – him trying to take an adult role in the family as best he could–she had to turn it into a story about him being flaky and irresponsible while she’s giving him everything.
My sister, for years, believed that my mother took everything when my parents divorced, because my aunt (Mother’s sister) told her so. My sister and I were present when our parents separated and Mom moved into the apartment with us, and I remember - so why would she believe this? For 31 years, sister believed this to be the honest truth, because Auntie said it was so. My sister is three years older than me, so should have had a better memory of the whole thing.
In point of fact, Mom got us kids, the car, and very little else. I set my sister straight sometime last year when she mentioned how Mom had “done him wrong”, even got my mom and another aunt (Dad’s sister) involved to give her the straight story.
Without a parent as a co-signer? Maybe you can do that for a savings account, but for a checking account there are contracts involved that a minor can’t sign–even if it’s just the agreement that you are responsible for overdrafts.
I agree with those who disagree Having my own savings account at the age of 12 didn’t prevent my mom from taking several hundred dollars from it and my brother’s account, tearfully confessing to it several months later with the promise to repay, never repaying, then conveniently “forgetting” it happened when my brother and I remind her of it.
Which reminds me of the time that she revealed she had a revolving loan at a [del]loan-shark[/del] check cashing company, paying at least %5 or more per 2 week loan, and I paid it off for her, and charged her (only around %5 a year) interest on the loan at her insistence. Then, when I told her she owed me X amount plus Y interest she acted as if I was robbing her and she would never have agreed to borrow money from me if I was going to charge her interest. Well, did you want me to charge you interest or not?
(Of course, in that particular case she could just have been a little vague on what “interest” means, since she claimed she invested a large majority of her retirement check in “money market” funds, as per my recommendation (she’s planning to buy a house with it in the hopefully not-to-distant future,) only to have me discover that she bought mutual funds investing in stocks and bonds (at around a %5 load, too! I’m surprised that the fees and expenses are at a pretty reasonable ~%0.4, rather than the highway robbery I’d expect from a company that charges a %5 load.)
Okay, yes - I only had a savings account back then. But I could still deposit my own paycheques, when I started getting them, as well as cheques written by my parents and others; take out and put in cash; keep my own records; buy money orders; use direct payment (like a debit card); etc. Wow. I didn’t know someone could need their parents to deposit their paycheques.
He could have deposited the check himself, but he was 17 and his mom offerered to deposit them, and probably, since he’d never been to the bank, it was easier to let her do it. He runs lots of errands for her and his elderly grandparents, it’s not like it’s a crazy thing for family to do. And, again, he was giving her the money. He offered her the money from the get-go, “Here’s my check. Put it in our account, use it if you need it”. He didn’t mind that she used the money. He minded that she rewrote history to say he never helped out at all, he squandered a summer’s worth of work on a stereo while she’s dying . . . .
I think the confusion came from me mentioning that he gave the checks to his mother. He didn’t need to do that, and perhaps it would have been more adult for him to go deposit them himself, but it wouldn’t have made any difference.
And it’s worth mentioning that this guy is first-generation American, and I think there is some cultural stuff going on with the money–certainly he didn’t seem to attach the emotional importance of putting his OWN check into his OWN bank account the way I did with my first job and the way I think many people do in the western world, as well as a certain anxiety over going to “the bank”, which he sees as hostile and mysterious. After this incident he sorta sucked it up and did so, but he was resistient to the idea.
My sister has this astonishing ability to re-write history as well.
Suring our childhood, my mother pointedly and dramatically favored my sister to the point where it could only be described as rubbing my face in it. She saw my sister through a teenage pregnancy and is now raising the baby for her, as well as supporting her financially.
As an adult, I get along fine with my mother, but my sister and she are almost always at odds. (Too much alike to get along, I say.) Recently, my sister wrote mom a nasty letter in which she stated that Mom had always favored me and had never helped her a bit through all of her struggles. All I could do was laugh.
I’ve got an ex-wife who seems capable of fabricating matter from ether… she should receive a prize for fiction.
One uncle who survived the war as a child in eastern europe, has never seen a concentration camp (thank goodness) but is trying to convince that he personally met Eichmann and picked his pocket. :eek: :smack:
Another uncle is starting to weave a childhood of abuse and frightening incidents that his older sister (my mother) swears have never occured.
As to why this happens; I wish I had an explanation.
Wow, me too. My dad took me to the bank when I was six years old with the entire contents of my Batman piggy bank. That’s still the account I use today and it has only ever been in my name.
Oh, I just read Manda JO’s post and realized that when I was six, it was just a savings account. I converted it to a checking account many years later, but I don’t remember when. Um… carry on, forget I wrote anything.
My mom does this, and I have no idea why. Unlike lorene’s mother, mine lives in a reality very similar, but not identical, to the rest of the family. It’s not like the things she fabricates make anyone look any better or worse, so it’s impossible to figure out the motivation…unless it’s to make me wonder if I’m insane and doubt my own memory.
For example: When I was eight or nine my aunt (Dad’s brother’s wife) gave my parents two stiff, lacey Christmas ornaments. She’s never liked them. But a few years ago she decided that they were a gift the first year she and Dad were married, and every time she hangs them now tells me all about how they’d gotten the ornaments as newlyweds.
Then there’s the story about our recently deceased cat, Halfie.
This is what I remember happening: One day when he was two or so (so about 13 years ago) Halfie ran off into the woods, and I spent a couple hours trying to find him and calling for him. A couple of days later he came back on his own, and was a little wet and dirty, but otherwise fine.
Her version: Halfie got loose and no one could find him for hours. My childhood friend Dawn called all upset because she’d seen him in lying the road, and her step-father wouldn’t stop so she could check on him. But she saw a jogger stop and pick him up. The jogger, apparently psychic, knew which house to bring him to. Halfie apparently had been “hit by a car” but other than missing part of a fang and being stupider he was okay. (ftr, in my opinion the cat was dumb from birth, and no one noticed the missing fang to comment on it until years later)
When I’ve asked her about it, she claims that both things happened, apparently forgetting to mention in her version that he’d been gone for a couple of days like I remember. Why don’t I remember the involvement of my friend and a good samaritan jogger? According to her it must have been “too upsetting for you to remember.” :dubious:
Your guess is as good as mine as to why she “recalls” either event and others like them differently.
Having my own savings account at the age of 12 didn’t prevent my mom from taking several hundred dollars from it and my brother’s account, tearfully confessing to it several months later with the promise to repay, never repaying, then conveniently “forgetting” it happened when my brother and I remind her of it.