I know that in the grand scheme of things, my mom is not so bad. She never beat me, we always had food on the table, etc. But man, she can be mean.
I’m a fairly sensitive lady in my mid 30s. I don’t see my mom often, but I now dread each and every visit. She always ends up making me cry. She made me cry during my last visit a few weeks ago. When I told her that she hurt my feelings (and honest to og I did it in a very mature, non-crying way), she didn’t seem to understand what the big deal was. I told her how sometimes, when she hurt my feelings, all I wanted was for her to give me a hug and tell me she’s sorry she made her little girl cry.
She informed me that I was no longer her little girl, and hadn’t been for a long time. She considers me her “peer” now. I guess peers don’t get hugs when someone makes them cry.
I’m old enough to have my own daughter, so the idea that I may, at some point, stop thinking of her as my little girl is astounding. That perhaps one day I will make my daughter cry and just not care. Luckily, I doubt that’ll ever happen. But it makes me sooooo sad that my mom thinks of me as her damned “peer” and not as her little girl.
For the record, I’m super sad about the whole situation and am not really looking for “suck it up and don’t cry, big baby” kind of advice. Instead, I’m looking for folks who have had similar experiences with mean parents and how they manage to keep a relationship with them. I’d like to keep up a meaningful relationship with my mother, but I also know that for my own happiness, I need to either change the relationship or limit the time I spend with her. I want my daughter to grow up with her grandma, you know?
Try to stay away from the issues she uses to hurt your feelings - and hope to hell she doesn’t start treating your daughter like she does you. I wouldn’t be wanting to spend a lot of time with anyone who is insensitive to my feelings, mother or no.
Well, my problem is similar but also opposite, in that I’m a grown-ass woman and my mother refused to stop treating me like a 5-year-old. It manifested itself in myriad ways:
Minor: calling me at 11 p.m. on a Friday night (giving me a damn heart attack that something was wrong) to remind me to wear a jacket. In mid-November. :rolleyes:
Not-so-minor: not understanding that I am entitled to opinions of my own, and that while she is welcome to offer advice, I am not being “disobedient” or “a bad daughter” if I take that advice as such, and not as a direct command.
Minor: telling me I’m not qualified to be a stripper.
Not-so-minor: trying to get my best friends to get me to dump Mr. Horseshoe when everyone but her could see that he’s the best thing to ever happen to me.
However the basic problem is the same: a lack of boundaries. You setting and communicating them, and her acknowleging and following them. (Note: please don’t take this as criticism, since I was an abysmal failure at the former until it was far too late to salvage any relationship.)
You may want your daughter to grow up with a grandma, but are you still going to think the same way when grandma is just as casually cruel to her as she is to you? It’s one thing to shrug off your own tears, but your daughter’s … ?
My daughter will still be my baby when she has grandchildren of her own. I can imagine seeing her as an adult someday but as a peer? There was a time I could put her entire foot in my mouth – never done that with any of my other peers.
Setting boundaries is not a bad idea at all. How did you go about that? What did you learn too late? I’d rather fix this if I can, but at the same time, I want to be realistic.
I think my mom feels the same way about Mr. Smaje as yours does about your man. Mr. Smaje is shudder the kind of guy who WOULD hug me if my feelings were hurt. As a matter of fact, he gives me lots of hugs every time my mom makes me cry.
And I’ll punch her in the grandma-face if she ever makes sweet baby Smaje cry.
My grandmother isn’t quite as bad as your mom, but she’s always made it really, really, really clear that my mother is…less worthy/valued than my aunts and uncle. Not big overt things, but pissy little bitchy shit like getting her a book for her birthday but telling her she can’t have it on her birthday because the person Grandma lent it to isn’t done reading it yet. Or refusing to hang the birdhouse Mom got her for Christmas while hanging the houses/feeders other people give her.
She’s always been good to my brother and me, but even so we don’t have much of a relationship. Part of it is distance–I live 5 hours from them–but mostly it’s just that I plain don’t like her very much. It’s hard to like someone who’s mean to your Mommy, you know?
Seeing this thread was great timing as I am currently sending my mom remote stink eyes. My MIL is quite sick and has been fighting stage IV colon cancer for two years now. She just had surgery and my wife was up there (upstate NY) last weekend to help with that. We had planned to drive up next week for a visit but my wife has decided she needs to get back sooner and is flying up tomorrow with our daughter. So this afternoon my mom calls to see how things are going and lays a guilt trip on my wife about me having to drive the whole way this weekend myself. Fuckin’ A mom that is not helping!
Now it wouldn’t be that bad except that last December we really thought my MIL was going to die and my wife was up there for like a week by herself while I played single working dad. Not fun but lots of people do it for real. One day I get a call at work from crying my wife that my mom had talked to her and made her feel like shit for being away from our daughter so long. Thanks mom!
I’m sorry to hear your own mom is casually mean to you - my mom frustrates the holy hell out of me sometimes, and we don’t always see eye to eye, but she’d never in a million years hurt me on purpose.
Could you give us a better idea what she says or does that ends up making you cry? We might be able to come up with some defences against her.
This is easy to say, and not easy to do, but is there no way you can grow a thicker skin where she is concerned? She probably loves you, in her way, but has issues of her own that get in the way of allowing you to see it and feel it.
In other words, acknowledge her for the flawed human being that she is, and don’t let it in. Recognize the hurtful things she says as coming from her own problems, and realize that she probably doesn’t mean them the way they sound to you. The more you can cultivate this approach, the less those things will hurt you.
Full disclosure: it took me two years of therapy to get to this point, in my relationship with my father. So I know it isn’t easy. But it can be done. Good luck,
Roddy
I’ve mentioned before the concept of the “good mother”. If your own mother isn’t giving you the hugs, the apologies and the validation that you deserve, come up with your own mental concept of the mother who will. Thinking about the good mother provides two benefits. First, it makes you feel better to give yourself some compassion. Second, it puts your actual mother in perspective. If you can start to tease out what the good mother would say to you, and recognize that as the right way to behave, you’ll feel better and your mother will lose some of her emotional power over you.
I had an even more contentious relationship with my mother and I dealt with it by not dealing with it. Seriously, there was no talking to her. No concept that I had feelings - I was only Daughter and not really a full person.
These are called toxic parents, and they really are not very good for you. First of all, if you want to maintain the relationship, you have to set ground rules and be willing to keep up with them. Treat her like a child - if she cannot follow the rules, see the ‘punishment’ through. So if the rule is “treat me respectfully or I leave” then leave. You don’t have to be mean about it, and DON’T CRY. Women like your mom and mine don’t care about tears. They think sensitivity means weakness. Just say “I’m sorry mom, I really don’t like what you just said to me, it hurt my feelings. I’m going to go home. I’ll see you again when I can, OK?”
And practice statements like, “Sure, mom, whatever you say,” and learn to let what she says roll off your back. You will never have the mom you dream of; neither will I. We have to accept this.
Some good neutral statements:
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“Thank you for the advice.”
“I’ll consider that, thanks. Now have you seen the new movie?”
Please tell me a little more about what your mother does, in specifics, and I can try and give you some more advice.
From the OP, I can’t tell whether the OP’s mother is toxic, or whether she’s just very blunt and no-nonsense and unsentimental, which the OP, with her sensitive nature and need for nurturance, interprets as insensitivity and meanness. Would the same sort of treatment on the mother’s part, directed at a daughter (or son!) who was more stoic and self-confident, still look like meanness?
Depending on this, the best course of action could be anywhere from complete avoidance, to just giving up the expectation that the mother is a different kind of person from what she is.
My mom is a cyborg. Okay, so maybe not an actual cyborg but she has the emotional range of RoboCop. She just doesn’t show any kind of emotion for any reason. When I graduated from high school she clapped politely and congratulated me but never shed a tear or said she was proud or anything. When they took me to college and I was officially moving out of their house and into the dorms she helped haul my things in and said goodbye, no hug or anything. When I called her to tell her I was engaged she said, “That’s nice.” :smack:
When I found out I was pregnant I thought that this was the perfect opportunity to surprise an emotion out of her. I said nothing to her about it and instead ordered a World’s Greatest Grandma t-shirt and had it mailed to her house with no note or anything, expecting to get a confused and excited phone call in a few days. What I got was a voicemail message saying, “Did you and mr.pbbth send me this package? I think the mailman gave me someone else’s mail but it has my name on it.” When I explained that it was, in fact, from us and that we were going to have a baby her response was that she is too young to be a grandmother.
At this point I’ve just decided that she will never get really happy, sad, angry, hurt, or otherwise experience any kind of extreme emotion about anything. It doesn’t have anything to do with me and it doesn’t make her a bad mother, just confusing and difficult from time to time. Life is easier when I don’t fret about why my mom isn’t excited about whatever awesome thing is going on in my world.
I would say that knowing you cause your daughter to cry, and still not attempting to change, still qualifies as meanness. Being matter-of-fact is no excuse for knowingly causing someone you love to hurt.
My mother was crude, blunt, mean as a snake when I was young. She was a bad-tempered, unstable shrew, unhappy with her lot in life, I guess. She constantly bad-mouthed love, marriage, and especially children, all I ever heard was 'don’t have kids! Men are only after one thing! You’re young, you should travel and take risks and have adventures, don’t get married and tie yourself down! (directed to young adult friends and relatives, certainly not ME!) I don’t know why she was so bitter, she lacked for nothing and my father did whatever she wanted. But she didn’t like me. I spent weekends with my loving grandmother. Things were never good between us in all the years growing up, and they were worse after I got married and she wasn’t much of a grandmother, either. Months, hell, years went by with very little or no communication… To be fair, there was a sad family situation for my mom to deal with (which I wanted no part of) beginning when I was in my early 20’s and mom has had a sad life…So, after my father died several years ago, we got to a better place. After a year or so, Mom adjusted to living in the house alone and has been very happy on her own. She’s quite elderly now, and oddly we are closer than we have ever been. Though she still gets around and still has most of her faculties, she’s been going downhill. But we go places together and can sit, talk, and laugh for hours now! I still have resentment, but I push it down, what’s the use of bringing up the past, and bad feelings? Mom is like a different person now, and everybody thinks she is just a darling old lady, bless her heart, look how she lives on her own! …So, OP, things CAN get better as time goes on and the sharp edges are filed down. And I’ve always taken comfort in the phrase: “Living Well Is The Best Revenge”.
Mommie issues go deep, generations deep, I’ve gained insight, compassion, a hard shell and my voice, once hidden and stubborn. I’ve received “curses” but also “gifts”.
My mother is emotionally manipulative. I would dread interactions with her and try to avoid her as much as possible. I have come to realize that the problem lies with her and not me. No matter how much I try and fix her, I can’t, I can only be aware that she has these behaviors.
The latest and greatest of her mind games (which may not sound like a big deal, but if you knew the history) is telling me my favorite Uncle has cancer. No one is supposed to know, so I can’t call my Aunt and Uncle to see what is going on, she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone until they got more information. I am traveling to see family next week and can’t discuss this with them because they don’t know yet. Thanks, mom.
My mom’s mother is a bad person. She never should have had children. Instead she had 4 children, and fucked them all up. Until my mom met her mother-in-law (my good grandma), she never had a role model for how to be a wife and mother. So I understand why she is such a difficult person to have as a mom, but it really doesn’t make it much easier to deal with.
I thought when I got pregnant we might get a fun change to our relationship. I’m going through something she’s been through before, we could talk about how neat it is to feel the baby move and how awful the back pain is, and how scary it is to think about birth, etc. Instead every time I bring something up I get the same old brick wall.
“Wow, my back really hurts lately, how did you deal with that?”
“I never had any chronic issues while I was pregnant.”
“I was hoping to do a natural birth, I’m open to medication but I’d like to see if I can do it without first.”
“Oh.” (Look of disapproval)
“Oh wow, your grandson is really squirmy right now, I can feel his head right here!”
“Oh.” (Look of not disapproval, but not exactly interest)
“I know you guys cloth diapered my brother and me, I was thinking about trying it out too.”
“Most day cares won’t use cloth diapers.”
No interaction, no stories about her own pregnancies, no words of encouragement or anything. If I do get a reaction out of her it tends to be negative and discouraging. I try really, really hard to come up with topics to talk about, to ask her about her life and her day and what’s going on with her, and give positive feedback. I get the feeling that what I’m getting back from her is her actually trying 100% and she’s just not that good at being a mom.
Emotional abuse is not “not so bad.” It’s freaking awful, moreso because of the stigma that is still attached to the notion of psychological damage. And asking yourself, “What’s wrong with me that I can’t get over all of this? It’s not like she hit me.” Wrong, it’s worse than if she hit you. She installed your hot buttons, and she keeps pressing them into adulthood–this is not ok.
At some point, speaking from one abused child to another, I hope you can get up the courage to prevent her from visiting you, unless she stops the abuse. It’s ultimatum-time.
And for the smile too, that suddenly appeared on my face when I pictured you nommin’ on your peers’ toes.