My mom was manipulative and passive-aggressive as sin and so is one of my older sisters. So is your mom. Her expectations are unrealistic and self-centred and she has demonstrated no margin for error for other people’s behaviour. You’ve done nothing wrong - people miss calls from time to time.
The appropriate email would have been something like “hi dear (or whatever). I don’t know if you missed my messages but there was a family event blah blah blah and I hope everything’s okay.”
All the historical stuff in her email is irrelevant guilt-trip ammo.
Yeah, she sounds pretty manipulative. Is she italian, by any chance? Because she totally has the catholic, italian guilt trip thing down to a “t.” It’s very common in my family.
Mom, I explained to you that was going to be busy on Sunday. You’re not stupid. You understood exactly what I said. And yet you chose to disregard what I said and phone me about the family event anyway. What does that tell me?
Holy hell yes, manipulative. If this is her normal mode of interacting with you, and not an aberration, this would, for me, tread dangerously close to dealbreaker territory. You’re an adult. She’s going to have to accept that your life doesn’t revolve around her, and sometimes you actually have other stuff to do.
No, but we’ve all noticed this about her. She has good quantities in spades–but she can also be very manipulative and judgmental.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmhm. The most recent part of ye olde email chain had me actually suggesting that she print the whole thing out and take it to a therapist.
In TherapistJay’s defense, Dad at that point really was a fairly selfish, immature person. (I seem to recall hearing that at some point he dumped their two cats at an animal shelter while my mom was out of the house–at the doctor while she was pregnant with my brother, I think.) And my parents definitely did need to get divorced.
She is. She’s also under a lot of stress right now, doing a lot of the coordination on moving my grandparents to an apartment from the home they’ve lived in for 50 years. But it’s not like this kind of emotional manipulation is anything new.
This is the *Irish *Catholic guilt trip, faithfully handed down from her mother. Her siblings seem to have avoided it more or less, but Mom picked it up, cherished it, and made it her own.
I say the key is when she says how important it is to her that you return her messages. In other words, YOUR life needs to revolve around HER needs and she’s not afraid to play the emotion card either.
This sort of crap is female. It would be passive aggressive feminine nonsense committed by a man. Very unlikely to happen though.
For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not a misogynist*. I just recognise that certain behaviours are, while not exactly gender-specific, semi-confined to one gender or another and pointing that out isn’t sexist. Denying the existence of these tendencies is political correctness taking over reality.
*It may be possible that I focus upon quirks from the fairer sex here, I dunno if I do or not but I have definitely been accused of such in real life. My answer to that is that being a male, male quirks seem more natural to me so I notice and point female ones out more. However, I am basically pro-women… fuck that, I love women - I’m no caveman!
Oh I hate that argument, it’s such bullshit. Can’t she see that she doesn’t care enough about your wants and needs to not be a slave to her unnecessarily rigid concept of phone etiquette? If you really loved me you would give me exactly what I want and do exactly as I say, but don’t expect me to do the same to prove that I love you.
(I would take offence if it weren’t so obvious I can convince you eventually that I’m being reasonable; I was the first ever male member of a sex equality society in mainland Britain… but amusingly what was obvious then remains obvious now, and perhaps the pendulum has swung too much… ;))
This is what stuck out for me (yes, she’s manipulative, I voted!)
The thing is you are not married to her, and yes, it is OK if you DON’T care enough about her feelings/needs/wants to remember to acknowledge every single communication from her. I love my parents but I certainly don’t care enough about their feelings to do that for them.
My mother tends to the manipulative too but living on different continents has helped our relationship incredibly! That said, I’m still smarting from our month long miserable trip two years ago, and sadly last year she did herself out of a visit from her grandkids on the strength of that. Luckily there were other true reasons for us to give to the parents as to why we weren’t going. But had we really, really wanted to go, we’d have gotten around those reasons somehow…