Family members who rewrite history

In My Humble Opinion
21

My sister married and moved hundreds of miles away when I was twelve. Now, fifty years later, she is the expert on the lives of my friends – who they married, who is a gay, who went to which school. It wouldn’t be so bad if she didn’t have the audacity to correct me! And she’s wrong! These are people who were my best friends at the time. Some are still part of my life. She wasn’t there!

I understand her need to be right. Both of us had the same mother and that mother “was never wrong” and still isn’t. But it does look like a person would have the good sense not to claim authority on something she wasn’t involved with.

22

It’s pretty much ancient history, but FWIW, I got my own checking account in 1966 at the age of 16. No problems, no parental unit co-signers needed.

Things may be different now, I do acknowledge that.

23

Aw, dang it! Meant to click of “Preview Post” not “Submit Reply.”

I intended to add that my mother has done this as well.

In the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, I was such a worry to her…out partying all night, booze, fast cars, faster women, etc. But once my younger brother came on line (15 years my junior–dropout, never got past the 8th grade, couldn’t hold a job until a few years ago, 2 bankruptcies, etc., etc., etc.), the story changed.

Suddenly, I was always the good son, she never had to worry about me. Never lost a minute’s sleep about me.

WTF? It’s a wonder my brother doesn’t hate me!

24

My mom’s got a pretty good grasp of reality, and is not generally prone to re-writing history. So that makes it all the weirder when it does happen.

When my son was born 13 years ago, my best friend April bought him a musicbox. Cute thing from San Fransico Music Box Company, which was all the rage at the time. I’ve held onto it, and it now sits on his baby sister’s shelf (because for some odd reason, a 13 year old boy doesn’t want to display a pastel, teddy bear-covered music box next to his swords and video games. Go figure.)

My mother is very uspest that the music box she gave my son is now in my daughter’s room. WTF? I know it came from April. But my mom is scouring the globe looking for a music box she can give the baby, so that both of her grandkids will have musicboxes “from her.”

She clearly “remembers” picking out and purchasing this music box. Only she didn’t. Weird.

25

Woah what a perfect Mother’s Day thread. I agreed to have dinner with my mother tonight. She invited me over out of the blue on mother’s day without mentioning mother’s day. My dad will be there too. He has dementia so he has an excuse for not remembering anything straight. My mom is nearly as bad as him though.

Rewriting history is such a widespread problem in my family that any person who doesn’t do it winds up so confused, frustrated, depressed and full of crippling self-doubt that they have to seek out medical attention. Then after that happens they have no credibility since now they’re mental. I’m in that group. It really doesn’t matter what I remember so I don’t argue. I just try to think that people’s bullshit memories are mostly about their present emotional reality and take it as them telling me what they feel like at that moment and nothing more. I have as much trouble coping with our family’s reality as they do and I just happen to be one of the rare members of my family whose primary coping mechanism is to opt the fuck out instead of inventing alternate explanations.

Being around them used to wipe out my confidence for days but now after I leave them I usually go for a drive and listen to music and drink a big Tim Hortons until I remember who I am and all the things that my life is really about. Then I go home and feel fine again. So when I decide it’s time I’d better see them, like today, I just look forward to my drive afterwards. Sometimes I even watch Stuart Saves His Family before I go so I’ll be apt to laugh inside when they start acting like that family and it will feel more like it’s just a universal funny thing about families and not some dark and private tragedy.

26

My mom and my uncle (sister and brother) have almost completly different memories of their childhood, even though they are only a few years apart. My mom thinks that they were starving all the time and lived on ‘a chicken and a pound of hamburger’ a week. My uncle remembers no such hardship. (And my uncle is the type of guy who would notice if he missed a meal). Furthermore, my grandfather also remembers no such hardship. My grandmother and the other sibling they grew up with are both unavailable for comment. Now, they farmed and I have no doubt that they sometimes struggled to make ends meet, but also, they raised livestock. I can’t imagine if they were really that hard off, they didn’t slaughter something to eat.

Then she tells me about all the things I should remember and don’t…like my first Christmas which was at my grandparents farmhouse. She argued I was 1 month old. I showed her the pictures where I am clearly crawling, standing, sitting up on my own, and interacting with people and toys and point out that my first (and only) Christmas at the farmhouse must have been at the age of 13 months. Besides, according to the Christmas Rotation™ it was my parents year to host the family and my dad remembers my grandparents coming to their house. Then she tells me I should remember my grandparents moving out of the farmhouse because I helped…which they did the summer before I turned 2, so I was like 18-20 months old. Not exactly mobile enough to help move.

Fast forward to the summer of 2000. I was living in a cheap upstairs apartment in a bad neighborhood when my (dad’s) car got stolen. It was recovered, but wasn’t in good shape. My dad got me another car that was merely 10 years old, not 12 years old like the one that was stolen. Plus, it was black, which makes it better than the older one which was white, and the black one cost $850 instead of the $750 the white one cost. Obviously I was living large with my stylin’ “new” car. By Thanksgiving, I had deliberately gotten my car stolen so as to manipulate my dad into buying my a nice, new sporty ('cause black cars are sporty) car.

And my aunt is evil because cookie sheets my mother specifically remembers my grandmother owning weren’t in the house when we moved my grandpa out of it. The only possible explaination is that my aunt destroyed them by putting htem in the dishwasher and then threw them away. Now that my mother has spoken it, it is truth. Again, my grandmother is unavailable for comment. I could go on, but I won’t.

I think that, in general, people make up facts to cover for lapses in their memories and that sometimes cling fervently to the made up facts in the face of contradictory evidence because they don’t want to admit that they were wrong. If you remember being miserable in your childhood, it must have been for a reason and hunger is as good a reason as any. My sister and I have varying memories of childhood events that are sometimes contradictory, but we both conceed that 20 year old childhood memories are likely skewed strongly by perceptional bias that your average 5 year old can’t grasp. We haven’t had many irreconcilable disagreements of more recent adult memories…I’ll get back to you as we age to see if we get worse.

27

Me and my parents were at a banquet in Guangzhou, held by various People’s Liberation Army medical bods in my father’s honor. He started grabbing food and loading up his bowl with all the goodies, like one would in a Chinese restaurant at home. I, having lived for a couple of years in Chinese society, quietly whispered “Dad, just so you know, in China it’s considered politer to put rice in the bowl first, then sample one dish at a time, using the rice to rest any excess on.”

A year or so later this incident became “When we were at a banquet in China, jjimm told us that we were being rude!”

Five years later, “When we were at a banquet in China, jjimm got really angry and said we were insulting our hosts.”

Now, ten years on, “When we were at a banquet in China, jjimm literally yelled at us that we were insulting the Chinese!”

I have tried to correct this report of events to no avail, so I guess it’ll carry on getting more and more animated: “When we were at a banquet in China, jjimm leaped across the table and started to strangle me! He stuck a chopstick in my eye!”

28

I’m pretty lucky. Talking with my Mom the other day, I reminded her that one of my nephews was a pretty rotten youngster. She replied that she doesn’t remember that - as a Grandma to the kid, she only has to remember the good stuff.

That is kind of the way she is about me, too - she forgets that I was a lousy student compared to my siblings.

I like that in a Mom!

29

You realize that somewhere there’s a parenthood board with a thread called “Children who rewrite history”… How do you know that your version is the correct one?

30

I refer you to the thread title. Everyone’s fair game.

31

Yeah, I know, it just seemed to be mainly older relatives who were targeted. Still, how do you know your version is the correct one?

32

I have pictures proving I was >1 year old, either that or the most talented 1 month old ever. And most of the family recalls a similar pattern of events, my mom remembers a completely different pattern of events. I have to think that one person is wrong, mom likes to think we are all conspiring against her.

33

In my husband’s case, he and his two siblings both recall numerous occasions on which their mom made them Kool-Aid. Now she swears that she never let her kids have Kool-Aid, since it’s nothing but sugar water. Given that all three children remember it and, given, that my mother-in-law today prides herself on her healthy cooking, I think it’s much more likely that she is the one with the incorrect version.

Frankly, given that she was raising three children and running a household on a very tight budget and little support from their dad (who was in med school), I’m impressed she didn’t just make them drink from the hose in the yard. But the implication that she might have fed them Kool-Aid still bothers her.

34

In our family, people don’t re-write history, they just omit large portions of it. For instance, if anyone starts to tell a story about my dad’s drinking (he quit 14 years ago), they get the death glare. We are to act as if that, and any other bad thing, never occurred. Even if I bring it up just with my mom she will pretend that it wasn’t that bad and that I’m exaggerating.

My dad doesn’t like to talk about the past, bad or good, because it makes him sad (nostalgic?) or something. He will sometimes tell a story, but mostly keeps everything current. My uncle died last summer and no one brings it up because it could be upsetting. Stuff like that kind of sucks.

I know I’m just like my dad though because I don’t like to talk about, or be reminded of, certain events of my life. It’s shame, I suppose. It’s very hard to come to terms with bad things we’ve done in our lives, easier to pretend they never happened. We want our good deeds of today remembered, and because we’ve improved we feel that the past is of no use to us.

We are sick. :smiley: