Yeah, they were married for 51 years. Very few couples today can claim that. I was proud that they had stayed together all of their married lives.
Love them dearly and have only the greatest respect for them as people, parents and life partners. They’re both truly remarkable people.
Mine were just fine. No wonderful or horrible upbringing. But when they die, I won’t really care, because I just… don’t care. They were there. That’s all, but more than some. I can see the future. My wife, with an insanely supportive and far-reaching family, will boggle when I tell her that I don’t care. I just have severed that arm.
Joe
I like them when I don’t have to live with them.
My mother’s a bit of a clueless ditz. She does what other people say without questioning them, and when she doesn’t want something done, she doesn’t ask, she “suggests”. She also assumes that people will take her suggestions at face value, since she does what other people want, no questions asked. In my teenage years, it was frustrating because there’s no denying I was a brat, but she’d say things like “Don’t you want to pick up your clothes off the floor and put them in the hamper?” and my response would be “Nah, I’d rather not.” And that lead to a lot of nagging and tense situations.
My dad is controlling. Things have to be done his way, and if you don’t share his opinions, he’ll just yell until you do. And as a byproduct of his generation’s views, he’s very gender divided. Women do the dishes, wash the clothes, and go comfort the baby when she wakes up in the middle of the night. He’s the bread winner and occasionally does yard work. He’s also very proud of “saying what’s on his mind”, but it mostly just alienates people. I see myself having some of his stubborn traits and will speak up when slighted, but I still manage to be tactful. For example, my grandparents have a handicap tag for when they go out. They don’t drive so either my aunt and uncle cart them around or my dad does. When the grandparents stay with my parents, most of the time, my uncle holds onto the handicap tag even though it’s for my grandparents. My dad will straight up say to my uncle “Give me the tag, you selfish prick. It’s for my parents and if you want to use it, you better have a broken leg.” whereas when I ask him for it, I’ll say “Did you forget to give my dad the tag again? You know they (grandparents) have a hard time walking, so can I get it from you after dinner?”
Another remnant from their generation is that they don’t know much about child psychology. They both assume that children are blank slate, so they never quite got that even though my more rambunctious and demanding sister needed a heavy hand, I shouldn’t have been dealt with the same way because I’m more of the quiet introverted type.
Anyway, I see a lot of flaws in their parenting, but they worked with what they had. I can’t live with them, but I do respect most of what they did for us.
My father was and is absent emotionally. Physically he’s there; going through the motions. Doing as little as possible of the actual “child rearing”, yet always there with a caustic comment should we pause in our achievements. I’ll never forget him asking to speak to me after I’d gotten into a few colleges in high school. He said how excited he was and that he’d worked his whole life to be able to put me through any school I wanted to, regardless of scholarship or not (I got into a top 10 school with no scholarship and was debating that or a school with a 1/2 scholarship). To him, money was being parent. Even worse, he felt it was all his money. I’ll never forgive the bastard for that.
I told him in no uncertain terms that he was contributing to half, not the whole of my education monetarily (my mother worked and earned just as much as he did) and that if for some unforseen reason he decided not to pay for college that I could call up my uncle or grandmother to foot the other half of the bill. He was shocked and stunned.
On my 21st birthday I actually went home. I wanted to see my mom. My dad refused her request to carry up a laundry basket (she has multiple slipped disks) so I did it for her and told him he was a jerk. He stews about it for hours and blows up while we’re in the car on the way to the restaurant, and turns around to go home. I get out of his car at a red light and walk the rest of the way home, grabbing my keys and getting in my car. My mom begs and pleads with me and cries. I meet her at a shitty Chinese buffet halfway between where I was in college and home. She tries to make the best of it. I wonder why she doesn’t divorce him. Openly, I support her thoughts at divorce.
My mother appeared to have no idea how to be a mother when we were very young. Once we started talking, she fell in love with us - we were people, with interesting ideas and takes on the world. She led by example, an example that inspires me every day. You can be smart, successful, and still be attractive and take care of yourself. It’s not one or the other. Her lectures never made an impact, but her reflections on life and her stories about growing up poor brought me to tears. I never disrespected her by smoking - not because of the thousands of anti-smoking lectures she gave me, but because of her idly thinking out loud. She once murmured about how quitting smoking was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Harder than learning English in grade school, harder than being in labor, harder than finishing med school in 3 years. I never told her bad stories about kids smoking or drinking in school; I only brought her the happiness she so wholly deserved. She did 90% of the parenting (but on two incomes) her whole life. She’s a little crazy and sometimes believes in conspiracy theories, but she’s brilliant and fun and she adores us, even when we stumble.
I have no idea why my mom tolerates him being such a shitty father. He’s not a bad husband but he should have been in therapy for his anger and his narcissistic personality a long time ago. I wonder what their life will be like when the Littlest Bluth is out of the house.
There are some really sad stories here!
I love my parents very much. As dad ages he’s becoming a little more of a challenge to deal with, but he’s still a great and fun guy.
I have a lot of mixed emotions about my mother. I feel as if I have had 3 moms in my 30-some odd years. The first one (birth-late teen years) was distant and cold. I never knew what I was supposed to do to be good enough in her eyes. I don’t ever feel like I had an emotional connection with her. I don’t think she ever told me she loved me until I was a teenager. She married 3 times by the time I was 13. When she divorced my father, I was too young to understand what was going on. When she divorced my first step-father, J, I was devastated, but had no where to go with that pain. I really saw the time with J as idyllic and felt like I had a real family. I had an older step brother and step sister whom I adored. When I “lost” that family I was deeply shamed.
She married my second step-father two years later. I purposefully refused to like him or get close to him. He’s not a bad guy, he coached my softball teams as a teen and was never abusive or mean. I just closed myself off when it came to him and my mother. Around the time I was 15 or so, my mother tells me that she can’t stand the tension and the nastiness in the house anymore, so she was going to be treated on an outpatient basis at the local hospital for the next 5 days, so if I needed her to call her there instead of calling her at work. That was it, no other explanation or discussion. I was vaguely aware that she was put on Prozac, but again there was no discussion.
There was no change in our relationship until I went off to college (Mom #2). Once in college, our relationship was much easier. I finally felt like we had a mother/daughter relationship. my mother was much more open with me emotionally and I attempted to be with her as well. The relationship was still flawed, though. All my life seemingly small things would make my mother fly off the handle at me. I never knew when to expect them, so I did my best to hide as much as I could and only offer what was asked of me, never more. She would make promises and not keep them. The one that really pissed me off in particular was regarding my wedding photos. My father paid for my wedding and honeymoon, I bought my dress, and my mom offered to pay for the photos/video. When it came time, she balked. I was fuming. I called her out (something I had never done before) in front of everyone and she did pay up. At least then she would tell me she was proud of me and that she loved me…
Recently in the last few years, my mother has taken to drinking. She rarely drank when I was under 18, and I never noticed her problem drinking until a few years ago. I have no idea how to react. I’ve told my stepfather that I will have nothing to do with her when she is drunk and I’ve told her not to call me when she is drunk. She grew up in an abusive alcoholic home. It just puzzles me that she picks now to start drinking. Also, she seems to be in some sort of game of copy cat with me. My husband and I buy a new car, she buys a similar model not 2 months after we do. We redo our kitchen, suddenly she needs a new kitchen. Many, many more instances…
I harbor no ill will towards my father. He did the best he could as a long-distance parent. He never lived closer than 500 miles from us, so we saw him on vacations and school breaks. He called every week and took an interest in what I was doing. I love my stepmother, even though she is closer to my age than my dad’s. She’s never really been a parent, but more like an older friend.
It felt good to actually get that out…
**LavenderBlue ** and some others I’ve read here - Sounds like hell and it’s not fair that you had to go through that.
I had a love/dislike relationship with them through my younger years when I felt like they favored my syblings. Looking back I see that that was probably just my preception.
Now that I have kids I see that they just had a more hands-off approach than a lot of parents but did the best they could with what they had to work with (me). Would have been nice if they had come to a school event sometimes. Could have been much worse if they hadn’t obviously loved and cared for me.
I love my parents and mostly get/got along fine with them. Overally they’re good people and they raised me right.
There were little things, like my Dad, though he loves me and encouraged my geeky interests, was/is a Ferdinand-style guy. Most of the time he was quiet, easygoing, and let my Mom run the show. Occasionally he’d have enough of it and start yelling, and my mom knew that was when all her domineering ways weren’t going to mean a thing. This was not a bad thing–my dad doesn’t have a mean or cruel bone in his body. I sometimes wished when I was growing up that he would do this more often, because he was far more reasonable than my mom.
My mom (and again, I love her dearly), was, the entire time I was growing up, an extremely domineering and narcissistic person. Everything had to be her way. If she didn’t want to do something, we didn’t do it. If she didn’t want me to do something, I didn’t do it. She was overly protective (I was essentially an only child–she had other older children before she married my dad, but I never met them and didn’t even find out about two of them until I was 11) and I was rarely allowed to go far from home. My friends weren’t allowed in the house (we had to play outside), and, since both of us were strong-willed types, we were in a near-constant battle for dominance the entire time I was growing up. Funny thing was, I didn’t want much–I was a very mellow nerdy kid whose idea of fun was usually hanging out in my room reading or writing stories–but she had this idea of how a girl should be and I didn’t fit that idea.
On the plus side, she taught me by example that you stood up for yourself and didn’t take crap from anybody (this was tempered by the fact that I inherited my dad’s mellow geeky personality, which resulted in my being very quietly strong-willed and assertive only when necessary, as opposed to extroverted and self-centered). And she was better than anyone I ever met at finding the unfindable. Whatever toy or video game or comic book I wanted, she somehow managed to locate even when nobody else could. She was friends with everybody and could be very charming when she wanted to be.
Overall, my childhood was very good, though. Mom and Dad are both still alive–Dad hasn’t changed much and we still get along great. Mom, sadly, has lost a lot of her short-term memory, which makes talking to her difficult sometimes. But she’s also mellowed out a lot.
My parents were far from perfect, as am I; but I loved them and they loved me. I, like anyone, could get into specifics and blow those specifics up into issues and use them as an excuse for being lame, but I really don’t feel strongly enough about it to do that.
They’re both dead. I spent many years semi-estranged from them because of a variety of reasons. Never really got to rebuild the bridge to my dad before he died, but I did with my mom before she did.
My mother is an enigma. She had me when she was barely 16, and broke up with my biological father when she realized that he would only hold her back. She went through high school, college, and medical school–graduated from med school when I was 11, and married my stepfather shortly thereafter. She met him when she was 19, so they’d been together for ages when they married. She’s obviously a damned strong woman. She also has next to no common sense, is terrible with money, and is an alcoholic. I’m beginning to think she’s suffering from early dementia as well–she does a lot of bizarre things and forgets stuff that you wouldn’t think anyone would forget, like the alphabet song. I’m not sure if she could function in day to day life without my stepfather taking care of her. She’s like an idiot savant in a lot of ways.
My stepfather, who is essentially the only father I’ve ever known, is one of the biggest assholes I’ve ever met. He doesn’t treat me badly, and never really has, although children were never his strong suit. We get along much better now that we’re adults and not living anywhere near one another. He just hates…everything. He never has anything positive to say about anything–everything that comes from him is a giant stream of negativity. He’s a cantankerous dick, and watches way too much Fox News. But he taught me how to cook, and gave me my love of football, and a whole lot of who I am is due to his influence. Plus, despite his frustration with his lot in life, he takes really good care of my mom, and always has. When she was diagnosed with epilepsy about ten years ago, he would stay by her bedside and watch her sleep, then sleep himself when she left for work. I think for months he only got 3-4 hours of sleep a day–he works afternoons and evenings teaching community college science courses, so he only slept from about 8 to noon. He drove mom everywhere when she couldn’t drive anymore because of the epilepsy diagnosis, and then moved to NYC (which he loathes) because she got a job there and wouldn’t have to drive.
The short story here is that I love them both, but I’m glad for the distance between us. They’re visiting a bit more often now that they have a grandchild (and it’s amusing to watch my stepfather interact with her–he’d never let on how tickled he is to get unconditional toddler kisses, but I can tell). I recently survived them living in my house for 8 days in December, so I guess they’re not so bad.
IMy parents loved and cared for me as a child, and loved me always.
Sad to say I am sure I was a great disappontment to them although
they never said so, and they were always glad to see me on each of
the many times I came home after going out on my own.
My father died on Chrismas Eve 1984. The last words I heard him say
were “The main thing is love”. My mother is still in good phyical health
for her age (85). Unfortunately she is afflicted with constant detrioration
of her mental powers. That will never stop her from bneing a loveable,
kindly little old lady. I wish I had been the better son she deserved.
You know that one trashy family on the block who’s always throwing and breaking glass things inside, then going out on the lawn yelling loudly at 2am and having the cops called on them? That was my mom and dad.
[spoiler]My mom at least wanted to raise my sister and me to be good people, but she was controlling, and tried to overprotect my sister and me from the world. This was ironic considering our biggest threat lived under the same roof as us. She didn’t like to work because it meant she could spend less time watching us to make sure we didn’t do anything without asking for her express permission, but she did work part time as a nurse since she didn’t want to waste her degree (and we needed the money).
My dad was a pedophilic incestuous alcoholic, comprising the aforementioned danger. He worked full time at the steel mill, which was a “good job” (as in, lucrative), but he drank away a lot of it. He hit my mom a lot and called her foul things in front of my sister and me (it’s only very recently that I’m able to see the word “cunt” without hearing it in his voice). He sexually abused me once I hit puberty, and a slightly older female cousin as well (but thankfully never my little sister, or else I would find a way to make him die).
We didn’t have a lot of money growing up… well, that is to say we did okay on incoming cashflow, but my mom was a compulsive over-saver and my dad drank away most of our disposable cash. She was born in the early '60s, so it wasn’t a holdover from the Depression. I really don’t know why, but she just did not like to spend money on things like clothing or school supplies, unless they were from Goodwill or the flea market (this was back before it was cool to shop at Goodwill, lol). I always thought we were hellaciously poor growing up, until I grew up and realized we were actually pulling in decent middle class wages. But we lived in a very small, cheap house. Our clothes were secondhand. Our meals were the very cheapest edible crap since neither of my parents liked to spend much time in the kitchen. I was never allowed to learn to drive because getting a license would cost too much for insurance (and allow me out of the house during non-school hours). Later I just realized that my mom kept us in “scrape-by mode” for years and saved every penny like a chipmunk (she may have been hiding money from my dad at the outset, but after she divorced/remarried she continued her miserly ways).
She didn’t want to divorce him until me and my sister were old enough to look after ourselves at home, though for years I used to pray every goddamn night that he would go away (and became an atheist when my prayers were never answered). Luckily, we lived a short walk from the library, where I was allowed to go sometimes provided I called her from the pay phone when I got there, and returned home very quickly. I led a rich inner fantasy life (and to this day I am still avoidant and escapist, though I play computer games instead of reading now). I loved to read, I spent hours reading on the weekends because it was my only method of escape when I wasn’t allowed to go places. I often dreamed about being saved by my white knight of the moment (whatever guy I had a crush on–alternating between classmates or characters in books).
Once in middle school, I missed the bus home and decided to walk instead. It wasn’t THAT far, though I had never walked it before, and I got home about 45 minutes after I normally would have (I dawdled a bit since there was a lake on the way with lots of cute ducks to chase). When I got home my mom yelled at me for hours. She had called police to report me missing, because she was sure I had been kidnapped or killed. She had called all the family and all of my friends’ families to try to track me down. I had to call all of those people and apologize personally for worrying them. It was fucking insane.
I still remember one time when my dad got piss-drunk while my mom and us kids were out running an errand. We came back home to find the front door barricaded with our piano, and our dad was ripping up and throwing library books and cassettes (which we had rented for a Girl Scouts unit on dance) against the living room wall. I spent a lot of nights crying myself to sleep on my teddy bear’s shoulder. They did finally divorce when I was 12.
Neither parent helped me through college. I wasn’t on good terms with my dad at this point (though we were still speaking occasionally then, mostly out of my sense of guilt and family duty at that point–which thankfully no longer applies). I would rather have been homeless before asking him for a dime. I managed to get a full academic ride to a state school 2 hours away, since I was blessed with genetic smarts and was a very dedicated student (school being much preferable to being at home, I was a straight A student ever since 3rd grade). My mom, being herself, of course wouldn’t have parted with a penny (she tried to convince me–the class valedictorian–to forego college and stay at home after high school and work somewhere within walking distance. She almost succeeded–thankfully my AP English teacher, whose opinion I valued more highly than either of my parents’, convinced me that not going to school would be a monumental waste of my writing ability).
Nowadays, my mom gets her feelings hurt that I don’t want to spend more time around her, but I don’t see that changing anytime soon. 8 years after I moved out of the house, and I still don’t feel that I’ve spent a long enough time out from under her iron thumb for me to feel comfortable opening up to her. And frankly, I also hold her partially to blame for not divorcing my dad sooner (a viewpoint from which no amount of study on the victimization of battered women has yet managed to dissuade me).
One day I should get therapy for all of this shit, I realize, but I just can’t yet. I get shaky just thinking and typing this out; I wouldn’t be able to talk about it to a doctor for more than 5 minutes without having a total fucking meltdown. I’ve managed to have a few functional romantic relationships in adulthood, but for now I am doing the dating pool a wonderful service by keeping myself out of it, until I feel my problems are at least on the path to resolution. I am still too bitter; a rude person might say I have “daddy issues.”
I haven’t spoken to my father in years, and for all intents and purposes he is no longer my family member.[/spoiler]And holy* hell *this turned into a novel. Spoilering it for longiness.
I respect my mom a lot; she’s a damned tenacious person with a genuinely kind heart. She is also one stubborn woman with a massive attachment to worse-than-useless woo (alt-med that does nothing for her chronic illness, things like “The Secret”) and likes to accuse me of being closed-minded while cheerfully denying any evidence I show her because “science doens’t know everything!!”. We used to fight a lot, but moving to another continent seems to have fixed that, and though we still talk a lot we’re a lot kidner to each other.
My dad and I are pretty distant, though we do obviously care about each other. We’ve lived in different countries since I was 11. I always got along with him really easily, but 16 years of not seeing each other took its toll. We talk online now and then, but we’re both slightly awkward cusses so it’s not really “sharing our feelings”. He’s a good guy, but crap at staying in touch (kind of like me).
Being my mother’s daughter is the most painful thing I have ever had to do. We have a very complicated and intense relationship which is very difficult to summarize.
Lavender Blue describes my mother’s worst behavior fairly accurately (almost to a creepy degree, right down to the Why I Have The Worst Daughter Ever telephone marathons.) She was often unpredictably violent, paranoid, suicidal and abusive and living with her was traumatic. However, my Mom is not only defined by her worst behavior. I don’t hate and despise my Mom, I love her more than I can describe, and for every horrifying story of how I thought she was going to kill me in a fit of rage, I could tell you a heartwarming story of personal sacrifice or mother-daughter intimacy. With my Mom I find it very difficult to ignore either aspect of our relationship, especially now that she is honestly trying to cope with her mental illness and no longer blaming others for her behavior. She’s done horrible things, but she’s not a bad person - just a deeply traumatized person with no idea how to control her emotions or relate to other people. I make a distinction between my mother and the disease - Borderline Personality Disorder - which drives her worst behavior. (Which is not to say I would tolerate her abusing me any more - NO WAY. But pretty much nothing could stop me from loving her.)
As for my bio Dad, he’s an alcoholic and I didn’t have a relationship with him from age 12 to age 22 - I asked for his legal rights to be terminated because he was pretty useless as a parent. Like my Mom, he also had a traumatic history and deals with it by drinking. He openly admits that he is an alcoholic and has been telling me since I was old enough to talk that I was going to have to just deal with it. Apparently he was super abusive to my mother (and apparently also a date rapist - awkward) but he doesn’t drink whiskey anymore so I’ve never seen him violent like that, ever. He’s obsessed with me and now that we see one another again talks about how I’m his only reason for living, which depresses the hell out of me because I don’t feel close to him at all. The only person I ever felt anything close to a father-daughter bond with is my Mom’s fourth husband and he used that trust to abuse me and has been ‘‘dead’’ to me since I came to terms with that so long ago. So I guess I’m SOL in the Father/Daughter department. The closest thing I’ve got to a father is my paternal grandfather, who was a terrible parent but has always been an absolutely rockin’ Grandpa.
How do I feel about my parents? They made me who I am today, and I like that person, so I guess I’m grateful for them, scars and all.
Mom is my best friend. She’s just a wonderful person who spoils me far too much, listens to all my problems and is my rock. She’s not without flaws, no one is, but I’d be lost without her.
My Dad is, well, a different story. I hear such amazing stories about him and what he’s done. He’s advocated for rural hospitals and the farmers that use them. He loves nature. He’s a great musician. He can make a friend out of anybody and takes everyone at face value. He’s worked with inmates who came to respect him because he didn’t dismiss them out of hand.
But like I said, I’ve just heard these stories. Dad stopped farming when I was 6, got a job he hated to support the family and spiraled into alcoholism. He had the more flexible work schedule so I was around him more. He wasn’t abusive or anything, but he’d come home from work, sit in the same chair and just drink until 8pm when he’d go to sleep and pass out.
He’s been sober for about 2 years now. When he’s sober, you can see the man he used to be, and I’m jealous of my older brother for having had him then. I love him, but sometimes I just don’t like being around him. I can’t trust him. Every time I talk to him on the phone I expect to hear his drunken drawl. Every time I go home to visit I expect to see him passed out. I can’t smell whiskey without cringing.
I wish Mom had been around more when I was little, but just to offset having to hang around my dad.
My folks fed me, loved me, kept me safe, raised me to adulthood, put me through undergrad, bought me a plane ticket to Europe after graduation, helped put me through law school when I came back, my dad taught me everything about practicing law that law school didn’t, and my mom just called to find out what size dress shirt I wear because she wants to send me and my wife some clothes for Valentine’s day. They’re not perfect and they can drive me crazy, but they’ve always been in my corner without fail. Love 'em to pieces.
Can your parents adopt me? I mean, mine are cool, but they don’t send me free shirts.
Wow, this thread is very humbling, think I should go and call my Mum and tell her I love her for not being a lunatic. Some people really shouldn’t have children.
My parents were/are pretty perfect parent material – a loving, stable, easy going, immensely kind, unselfish and sensible couple who put their children and grandchildren (and great grandchildren and step grandchildren and step great grandchildren) above all else. They deserve sainthood.