Being very melodramatic (the e-mail was in all caps). (I recently hung up on her, haven’t spoken in about a week) Upset that she had to hear about my move from my aunt. Reasons: I only moved 100 yards, my dad has a bum back, in NO condition to be carrying furniture. Telling me my brother had emergency knee surgery, and that our Father’s Day (a U.S. holiday) get together is postponed one week.
Er, um, okay, I guess?
What is it you want to talk about? Her being melodramatic? The having hung up on her part? The not speaking for a week? Huh?
What does your brother’s knee surgery have to do with anything? Or the delay in the Fday celebrations? Did you not want to be told? Were you told too dramatically? The all caps was offensive?
I’m unsure what you’re looking for here? Sympathy? Vindication? Discussion? Of what, exactly?
Not to offend you, but if you’re looking for responses, you may want to try again to make whatever your point is.
Just looking for other people’s experiences with melodramatic family members, especially from Dopers whose parents wouldn’t allow them (In the Doper’s opinion) to have negative feelings toward their parents.
I want to understand, really I do.
Please explain what this means:
You, or other dopers, have parents who won’t allow them to have negative feelings toward them?
Say what? How, exactly, does anyone’s parents keep them from having negative feelings. About anything?
I’m still confused, sorry. But I don’t want to bug you, so I’m out. I’ll leave it to others as I cannot make sense of it, still.
My parents IMO, don’t allow me to feel they are anything other than the greatest parents ever.
She sent another message. Claimed that I’ve been diagnosed Aspbergers (patently untrue), and telling me I’m an inappropriate conversationalist. (she couldn’t cite anything specific). Also questioned my PSYCHOLOGIST’s qualifications to daignose me! To be fair, if an unbiased professional DID diagnose me as having Aspberger’s I’d be fine with it.
I think you and I have the same mother. Never allowed to feel anything but happiness, never allowed to mention any unpleasant topic, accused of causing drama on purpose when I say something she doesn’t like.
I love my mother, and I’m pretty sure she loves me, but…damn.
GAH- for me, it’s my sister.
She’s unemployed and has been involved in on-line stock trading, and her world is slowly crumbling around her ears but she is convinced that if she can just try it a little longer, all her dreams will come true. I’m guessing she’s lost about $25,000 in the last two years and is in constant danger of losing her house and car.
Every time I call her, I hear “I am so sorry. I just don’t have even one minute to talk to you” because if she takes her eyes off her penny sock for even one minute, it might move up 0.002%.
Yet, on the rare occasion she calls me, it’s always to “borrow” money and it’s always a dire emergency that I must solve immediately or else (insert something bad here- electricity cut off, insurance lapse)! Every time I see her, it costs me 40-60-80-100 bucks or more. She can’t even afford to do free stuff with me because she can’t afford the gas to drive anywhere. She now owes me and my brother about 4K. I know she has borrowed from others, too. But, don’t fear, her stock ship is coming in “tomorrow”, “next week”, “soon”. So, my brother and I have agreed to not “help her out” anymore.
She said she’s so anxious she can’t sleep or think. She’s called the “We Buy Ugly Houses” guy to get a quote (again) (she’s delusional about the value of her house and doesn’t understand why these guys won’t pay her the full value of her badly neglected house just to help her out). She’s making noise about declaring bankruptcy and moving to another state.
So, she hit me up for $82.00 (I did not give it to her) and then sent me this note asking me to to discuss her business with anyone-
"Just gotta ask - as I go through these challenges, I would prefer that you respect my privacy and not discuss my personal business with others or in front of the kids. I think it would just be stressful for them to be exposed to it.
Ultimately, things will work out and I will land on my feet with the freedom that I am seeking. But the perception that gets created between now and then can become like a bug in amber, preserved forever at an unfortunate point in time.
Please allow me the freedom to go through life changes without being the subject of gossip, labeling or judgment. "
Ugh.
Now I’m getting it. You mean ‘never allowed to express’, right?
I was scratching my head how anyone, even one’s parents, can control what you’re ‘allowed’ to feel.
Sorry for being so dense, I’m feeling much better now. (And without anyone’s permission, too!:D)
It’s in MPSIMS. 
There doesn’t have to be a point.
That’s pretty much it. It’s like they don’t care how we actually feel, all they care about is the superficial expression of emotion to reassure themselves.
They actually do control how we feel, just not in the way they want.
No probalo, it’s hard enough to understand it when you’re in that situation, harder when you’re not.
Oh, I’ve been in this exact circumstance, don’t get me wrong. My mother went to her grave convinced she was the best mother ever! We were never to express that she may, in any way, be flawed. She created her children as satellites to orbit her with adoration. Cool when you’re a kid, but begins to chafe once you reach the age of consciousness.
You know what really helped me? Recognizing she could control what I expressed (sometimes!:D), but not what I felt.
When you confuse the two you’re doing yourself a great disservice. If you think it makes you two faced to not express what you actually feel, you need to reflect on how you do so everyday, in other interactions in you life, it’s called tact.
Thinking you’re not ‘allowed’ to feel something, is giving your power away. Frame it differently, ‘you’re not allowed to express something’, and things will change, in small but significant ways.
Not my melodrama, directly, but I’ve been going through my Aunt’s things and evidently my Grandmother used to handwrite and distribute wills to her grown children. CAPS were the least of it. She either did not trust punctuation or did not trust the reader to inject the proper amount of emotion into her words.
There are sections with CAPS, sections with BIGGER CAPS, italics, underlines, double underlines, wavy underlines, exclamation marks!, and sometimes red ink. Odd as it makes the page look, you can totally hear her voice when reading it.
And she loves them, and she worries about what they will do without her, and she’s leaving them EVERYTHING, and they should look out for each other and love each other like she would, . . . and then the specific instructions start. The first one wasn’t that big a deal. It had the excuse that she was about to take a big trip by car, and you never know what’s going to happen. By the fifth one, I was wondering how many of these she had written over the years.
It’s probably very cynical of me to be reading these and thinking that this is a wonderfully thrifty way to be generous. I’m giving you everything! Well, I spent some time and ink and a stamp. Then I checked the envelope. No stamp. They were hand delivered. What do you say to someone who hands you something like that and then watches you read it? Thanks? I love you too, Ma? Oh, I can’t bear to think of life without you?
She’d have liked that last one. It’s a good line. She was a sucker for good lines. No matter how manipulative she was being (at least with the grandkids), she could always be diverted if you could feed her a good line. One that she could repeat to other people. Many times.
I don’t think it’s a lack of tact, it’s not being allowed to be human. It’s not being able to come to her for any sort of support. It’s not being able to be sad, or talk about things that don’t suit her, or just being myself. It was never cool as a kid. It’s not cool now. It’s not right.
As for everyday interactions in life, I often interact with strangers, or people I don’t know very well. She’s not a stranger. She’s my mother. She feels no compunction about being sad around me, or coming to me for support, or having a bad day around me. Why do I deserve less?
If your approach helps you, that’s great for you. It doesn’t work for me.
My mom is great but I’ve been very puzzled by her behavior when I say something negative about my father-in-law. I haven’t ever told her much about what he’s like, but when I started trying she would immediately go on about he was always so nice the times she met him. Well, yes, to her face he was. He schmoozes people at first, but will be an abusive jerk at a moment’s notice if it suits him.
I think he reminds her of her own father too much (who was similar in behavior), which she did mention at one point, and maybe she’s still trying to protect herself emotionally. Unfortunately the result for me sounds like, “I don’t want to hear it” or “you’re crazy,” which I know she isn’t saying.
It’s just weird, though. I was trying to update her on my mother-in-law’s progressing Alzheimer’s disease, and started talking about how my FIL will browbeat MIL, and Mom would just jump in with “oh but he was so nice” and totally shut me down. I was half-tempted to tell her how FIL hated my (deceased for years now) father to snap her out of it, but if it’s her own defense mechanisms over her own dad, that might not do any good.
Another reason might be that they just don’t know how to deal with the problem. During some serious depression in my teenage years, Mom once said out of confusion, “But you don’t have anything to be depressed about.” I think some family members go into denial mode when they feel helpless/like they failed.
My husband did that on his Father’s Day card this year. He wrote to his dad something like, “Thanks for making me the man I am today.” The unspoken part is that his dad served as the example of what not to be like.
You don’t deserve less, but you’re not going to get this thing you want from your mother. Think about it, accept it, move on. My father, seriously loves me but doesn’t really care specifically about me except how it reflects on him. He’s had a lot of trauma in his life, and I work on feeling compassion for that. It just is what it is, and it’s not important to me anymore to get something he cannot give. Yay! Therapy!
I had forgotten what a drama queen my dad can be, and then I called him for Father’s Day. Idle chit chat, thanks for the gift, blah blah. “So I hear your going to the memorial service on July 2” (2 Great aunts passed away in the last 6 months, and they are having a combined memorial service. I never knew them. I am going because I think my grandma would appreciate my presence.)
Then he goes into a crazy rant, filled with whiney bitchiness, because my grandma has not identified the location of the memorial service. She is saying that the plan is to meet at a Super 8 in the dinky-ass town and we would all go over together. Its only a half hour before the memorial service, so I’m thinking - no biggie. My dad got all crazy about it - and keeps saying, I’ll be driving 3 hours to get there and if I can’t find it, I’ll just go back home, I’m not meeting up at a god damn hotel.
10-15 minutes of the call later, and I said that since I’ll meet them at the hotel, I can text him with the location of the service, and thus there is no need to get so worked up. Then he tells me not to take any crap and to make sure they tell me the address, blah blah, because otherwise he’ll just go back home. Plus, somehow, his dogs are involved, which I do not understand. Its a memorial service - leave them at home. Anyway, at this point, I’m thinking (not saying) please just stay the fuck home, no one wants your shitty attitude there.
He has a crap-ton of issues with his mom. Bitched a lot about her being nosy. then tried to tell me that my brother’s girlfriend’s kids (3 teenage girls) didn’t like my gma either, as if that would be meaningful to me. And I said “Like I give a shit what those spoiled little girls think”. (They are seriously spoiled, its a little sickening). Which of course turned into a “you didn’t think that way when you were their age”. (which is a serious no-shitter, who didn’t go through that realization at some point in their lives?)
Anyway, thanks for reminding me why I don’t call you much dad. And happy Father’s Day!
Sorry you’re not open to the very advice you seemed to be asking for, but as long as you believe you’re not ‘allowed’ to feel something, you won’t be able to resolve this. When you can actually appreciate the difference, between ‘feeling’ and ‘expressing’, in this instance you’ve cited, you might be able to move forward. As long as you remain convinced someone else can control what you ‘feel’, you’ll get nowhere.
Good luck pushing on that rope.
Bravissimo! Four thumbs up! lifting hands and feet