So mundane -- Mommy issues. Got 'em?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

They mean it when they say that mother/daughter is the most complicated relationship.

Here’s a couple of easy, little things you can do to improve your relationship. It ultimately comes down to our mother’s are not as we would wish them to be,( behaviour, emotional connection, mean, whatever.) Often that behaviour or meanness is triggered by you not being as they would wish.

If you choose to, you can see this as an exercise in giving, what you need to get. Your relationship will measurably improve when you reach a place where you stop wishing she were otherwise and accept that this is, in fact, (disappointing as it is), who she is. When you can accept her as she is, knowing it’s not going to get better, accepting that you’re never going to get what you’re looking for from her, it will then be easier to accept that you can make do with whatever she can bring to the table, no matter how meager or dysfunctional.

Sometimes people with Mommy issues actually have hordes of pent up love to give and no place to put it. When they are around her, she’s vile to them, yet still they harbour this unexpressed love, that yearns to get free, in some way. The need to love our parents runs really deep in the human DNA, in my humble opinion. So deep, even viciously abused children have it too.

Here’s a little thing you can do, that seems kind of silly, I know. But it’s one of those tiny things that can have a big impact, and I found it really helpful. Go through some old photos, you’re looking for one of your Mom looking good, smiling, happy, young and full of life. From before you were even a twinkle in your Dad’s eye, if need be.( I always suggest doing Mom and Dad both, two photos. Myself I like to convert them to black and white.) Get them enlarged, mounted and framed. Display them in your home where you’ll see them every day. And from now on, you shall honour your parents the way the ancestral worshiping Asian’s do, as an act of respect you will proudly display their photos. If you look at those photo’s you should be able to recognize that you can love this woman! Now you have a receptacle for your unexpressed love, you get to pour your loving feeling onto the woman in the photo, disconnecting your love for her, from her current vile ways.

This silly little exercise helps to relieve that ‘need to love’ valve, helps you to have love for her separated from her actions. And should, reinforce that she was then, what you are now, what we all are, raw material only! Sometimes it’s the tiniest little things that shift our perspective and lead us to a better place.

I wish you nothing but luck, I know it’s not easy.

42

I lost my mom just over a year ago. I am sorry to hear about your loss, but not all of us feel that way. When I miss my mom I miss the potential of what could have been, not of what was. She wasn’t a good mom and I don’t feel any guilt in not missing her for what she was.

43

Furious George, thank you for adding you piece to the conversation. I’m sorry you lost your mom. I hope that by the time my mom passes, we’ll have worked out some of our issues and created a new, more positive relationship.

elbows, I like your idea about the photos. I have a small picture of my mom and dad, happy and smiling into the camera, which is a rare sight to see.

Gleena, it sounds like we’re sistas from the same mother. I like the way you’ve set your boundaries with your mom.

I’ve had little else running through my head the past week, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I am just exhausted from trying to please my mother. When she railed off on me for my weight and finances, I realized that those are HER two big problems. She’s always thought she was fat (which is sad, because she has a lovely figure and always has, and I think it was HER mom who made her feel fat) and she and my father struggled terribly with money until she finally started earning a good amount in her later years once she opened her own successful business.

So when she sees the way I eat and the way I spend my money, it drives her batty. Like, *mean *batty. But what she doesn’t realize is I don’t WANT her advice on these issues because I’m happy in my life. I could stress more about money, the way she does, but then I would be seriously unhappy. I’d rather rent a home than spend money I don’t have to own a home, because that means I can spend more money on my husband and daughter and our fun, wonderful life together. I don’t WANT her to tell me how to eat, because she doesn’t know any better than I, and if I want to eat a pizza, then damn it, I’m gonna eat a pizza and not feel the horrid regret she wants me to feel.

So it’s apparently up to me to refuse her advice – and it’s a slippery slope, because there are some matters on which I do value her advice, but if she can’t distinguish between them, I simply must not turn to her for advice in any way, shape, or form – and to just let myself be a happy person, and hope she sees that I am living a much happier, healthier life than the one she’s always wanted for me.

I must embrace my place as the black sheep of the family and revel in the ebony, no? 'Specially if it means I’m the happiest one in the lot.

44

“Mom, that’s completely inappropriate, and I don’t want to hear it.”

I would add that she doesn’t get to bad-mouth your husband to you, either. He’s your husband - she doesn’t need to like him, but she does need to respect him and you.

Do you think it would be possible for you to make these two topics taboo for when you visit or talk with her? Something like, “I don’t want to talk about my weight. How is your job going?”

The two best things I’ve heard about parenting is that very few parents get up in the morning and set out to screw up their kids as much as possible - most people do the best they can. That doesn’t mean that they get a free pass on toxic behaviour, but it can help you to put them in perspective.

The second thing is that no one gets everything they need from their parents - what your parents don’t give you, you need to find for yourself.

45

My mom went through some very bad times with her mom. One day, my mom, dad and myself were at the supper table and she was trying to figure out how to deal with grandma.

She said, ‘she knows just the right things to do to push all my buttons!’
My dad said, ‘well, she had ought to, she installed them.’

While I doubt this was an original statement from him, it’s something that has always stuck with me. Whenever my mom (or dad for that matter) says something that just hits me like an emotional tom of bricks, I step back and think about it for a minute. They aren’t trying to be hurtful and say dumb things just like everyone else. Maybe they are being toxic but I can’t control them. I can, however, control myself and how I handle the situation.

This has made dealing with them (and our relationship) much stronger.

46

I see your dead mother card and I’ll play one back. My relationship with my mother was difficult to say the least and I’m pretty sympathetic to the posters in this thread.
A few years before she died a great big family truth telling session occurred*, in which the root cause of our difficulties was laid bare. Mum was terribly upset. I felt relieved to finally get some understanding abotu the way things were and move on.

Anyhow our relationship improved and when she died I was devastated. However in the midst of the grief, unable to sleep one night this voice in my head said “It’s over” and a great feeling of peace and relief came over me: she never have one of her bad episodes, ring me and send me into turmoil again. I slept beautifully that night. I still miss Mum after 14 years. I’d love to have one of our chats again. However she won’t cause me that particular mental pain either.

Relationships with difficult parents are complicated. Sometimes you have to establish distance to one degree or other for your own good. I lived a couple of hundred miles away from my mum, we spoke once a week on the phone and visited now and then. Everything people have said in this thread about setting boundaries is right.

What I’m trying to say to you Furious George is that unmixed grief is a blessing and one that I wish I had. I’m lucky that my relationship with my mother had enough good in it that there was a lot to grieve for. However for some people the mourning comes before, mourning ther good relationship they could never have.

*Rows between my father and I had followed a pattern for years which ended with him telling me I knew nothing about him and implying he possessed a devestating secret that would show me how wrong I was about him and me breaking down and running away. This time I returned and said OK then tell me and kept on until he did. Worked for me, I don’t neccessarily recommend it.

47

If you ask me, this is part of your problem right here. Don’t try to please her- you never will. As soon as you’ve think you’ve pleased her by doing A, B and C you’ll find her demanding the rest of the alphabet. It’s not really about about your weight or your finances- it’s about control. *

My mother thinks she has a say in everything I do. She wants to tell me how to spend my money , raise my kids , which car to buy and to give me and my husband bad career advice . One minute she’ll tell me I’m too heavy and the next she’ll ask me if that’s all I’m eating - and BTW until recently, I wasn’t overweight at all. I’m only the heavy one because my sisters are both size 5’s. She lives in a better neighborhood which I should move to ( as if I didn’t choose my house in part because it’s not walking distance for her ) and knows everything better than anyone else. If I have a disagreement with my husband , she feels free to join in on my side (because my sister allowed it). It all goes in one ear and out the other (except the butting in)- because I don’t live my life to please her. I live it to please me. There’s no point in getting upset - that’s just who she is . I can’t change her any more than she can change me into someone who worries about pleasing her.

  • My mother is such a control freak that when she wanted to do some estate planning, she not only wanted to get a specific result , she wanted to do it in a specific way which was not possible. She actually got mad when two different attorneys told her she can’t control events from the grave.
48

Oh, God. I don’t know how I missed this for the last couple of days. My mom doesn’t seem nearly as bad as yours (I don’t think of her as toxic, I am secure in knowing that she loves me, and she has never even thought about giving my baby a bath while drunk :eek:) but she has many of the same issues with criticism and trying to control me. And in some ways it’s even worse with the baby – whenever we call, she frequently spends at least half the phone call lecturing me about what I should be doing differently, while ignoring both my preferences and the doctor’s advice (e.g., trying to put bumpers and stuffed animals and pillows in the newborn’s crib even AFTER being told about the SIDS risk). Sometimes my sister and I (and even our dad, though he’s been kind of beaten down) try to point out to her that constant criticism is not good, and she always responds that a) it’s for our own good, and b) if you can’t be yourself around family, who can you be yourself around? AGH.

Yeah. My mom does not understand how I can be happy with a husband who doesn’t make a seven-figure income. And it drove her crazy it took us five years to buy a house (this was even when house prices were crazy through the roof). Now, of course, she doesn’t remember nagging us EVERY SINGLE WEEK to buy a house.

I agree with what doreen said – we will never please our mothers to our own satisfaction, so there’s not much point in trying. My sister took a long time to get there, but I think she’s finally there.

My daughter gave me the strength to do this. When she’s just yelling at me, I’m resigned to it, but when she’s on video chat and my toddler can SEE and HEAR her and she’s directly contradicting my parenting it’s different. E.g., the other day she asked for an orange, but I was trying to get her to eat yogurt, and my mom told me to just give her the orange already, and KEPT insisting on it even when I told her that I wasn’t going to and that the doctor had told us we should be encouraging her to eat more dairy… and I just hung up on her (“Okay mom you see I’m busy got to go bye.”). And told her, in our next conversation, that would happen every time she did that. Because one of my goals in raising my child differently than I was raised is united-front parenting. (I didn’t actually say that, because that’s something my mom would never, ever understand. I just told her I couldn’t deal with conflict from two directions, and she’d just have to live with that.)

And, my gosh, if she ever, EVER tried to give my baby a bath while drunk I would never let her alone with the baby again. That is still really bothering me.

49

Yeah, she doesn’t get to be alone with the baby again. That, and she and dad are getting old-old, and I don’t think I can trust either of them to be able to make the kind of snap decisions and quick movements you need when you’re watching a baby.

Lately I’ve dreaded speaking to my mom. But gosh, now I’m kinda looking forward to our next contact. I can’t wait to hang up the phone on her face when she gets sassy with me.

50

elbows I have a framed picture of my dad as a little boy for the very reason you mentioned.

The other day my mum was making some catty remark about my sister. I just said quietly “You’re talking about my sister”.

She did something similar to this to me:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/minette_marrin/article5864699.ece Made a bunch of shit up, so when I went home my cousins, who’d read it all - I knew nothing about it - were all treating me with kid gloves, didn’t want to take me out for a drink etc. They were pretty shocked as they quickly realised I’m not at all as she portrayed me and one of them confronted her, and she showed me one of the articles. I could only read half way through, it made me sick. I can’t bring myself to tell you guys her defence of it.

The other day she posts on facebook “Doesn’t anyone ever say anything except nice things about each other here?”

51

This made me smile - what an encouraging feeling! :slight_smile: Practice ahead of time, until you have the script down cold: “I’m sorry, but if we can’t have a pleasant conversation, then we’re not going to have one at all. Have a great day, I’ll talk to you [x date].” click

Repeat, repeat, verbatim, as firmly and consistently as you would when training a puppy. Eventually, she’ll learn that this is the only response she’ll get when she does [whatever].

52

This whole situation has been making me smile nonstop. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my chest, and I’m free to be the person I want to be. I can NOT believe it took me so long to figure it out, but I’m grateful it happened while I still have a lot of amazing life to live.

Seriously, it’s like I got my groove back this past week. AND I won 2 tickets to see any showing of Harry Potter at any Regal Cinema, thanks to being the 106th caller into a local radio station. I used to win awesome radio contests all the time, but not lately. Woo hoo!

53

My mother has always been a massive pain in my ass and a mess of issues that I can’t even begin to touch, but she’s recently developed a habit that might very well lead to me snapping one day. Every time something good happens to one of her daughters, from a job to dating to just a personal accomplishment, she gets an ugly look on her face and says in the most accusing way possible “I don’t have a boyfriend/Why should you get to have a job/etc” Her resentment of everything we do is palpable.

54

I bet your mom is jealous of you! How sad that she has to express it like that.

I’d find it hard to believe my mom isn’t at least a tiny bit jealous of my relationship with my husband. She despises my dad and has for as long as I can remember, but Mr. Smaje and I are all over each other. I wonder if that’s why she’s not very friendly with him…

55

That really does suck. I thought mothers were supposed to be happy for their kids and their accomplishments, not jealous and resentful.

That wouldn’t surprise me, either. When you say “all over each other,” is it, er, tasteful? You don’t have to change your lives to suit other people, but you don’t have to rub anyone’s nose in something, either (unless you WANT to make things more difficult :slight_smile: ).

56

Ooo, you just reminded me of a story about me and my stepmom that was very eye-opening for me.

My stepmom dropped out of high school at 15 to have the first of her six children. She worked as a waitress for many years, and by the time she got up with my dad, she was working in a factory. It was difficult, repetitive, mind-numbing, backbreaking labor type work. She hated it. She came home every single stinkin’ day complaining about how horrible the job was, how hard it was on her body, etc. She made it sound like a fate worse than death.

My 17-year-old college-bound self thought I was being empathetic when I said to her in my-heart-goes-out-to-you sympathy that I hoped going to college would make so I would never have to work like that, and by that I meant “be miserable in a terrible job that I hate.”

What I meant was “I’m sorry you have to be so miserable in your life with your crappy ass job. I hope I have better opportunities and choices.”

What she heard was “I hope I’m better than you when I grow up.”
:smack:

She whipped around on me and lit into me about what an ungrateful, spoiled, bratty pain in her ass I was. I was shocked. A few weeks later, I was hanging out with my mom and I relayed the story. I asked her, “Mom, I know you like being a nurse, but isn’t it normal for a mom to want more for her kids? Would you want me to be a nurse too?”

Mom said, “No, I’d rather you be a surgeon because you have a better personality for that than for nursing. Your stepmonster is petty and immature. Let it roll off. She’s just jealous because you didn’t make the same stupid choices and mistakes she did and she can see how much better the opportunities are for you. Blow it off.”

On the other hand, my stepmonster’s deep-seated insecurity and her over-the-top reactions to unintended insensitive comments taught me to be really careful about what I say and how I say it to people. What some people hear as empathy, others will hear as personal insult. Frankly, I was just tired of hearing my stepmom complain constantly about her job and her health. Now that she’s retired… she still just complains about her health. Instead of, you know, treating the problems.

57

There’s an easy solution to this. Don’t video chat with her. Countless generations of people managed to survive and have relationships with their grandkids without video chat. It’s not mandatory for you, now, if it’s causing problems.

If you want to tell her why you’re not doing the video chats any more, you can, and let her decide whether she’d rather video chat or contradict your parenting. If you don’t, you can just tell her your toddler gets too excited by it, and you can’t get her to nap afterward (or something else plausible).

58

Well. True, but countless generations tended to live closer together (we’re cross-country). And I do want her to see and hear her grandparents (barring them saying/doing obnoxious things) as much as possible, because I grew up with basically no relationship with my relatives/grandparents since they all lived far away (also, we hate my father’s father, but that’s a separate story), and I didn’t like that at all. And it kind of bothers me that, although I keep showing her pictures, she doesn’t really recognize or understand her paternal grandparents (who don’t video chat with us because, even though we’ve set up everything for them to do so, they are very poor at handling technology). But I think it is a reasonable compromise to hang up on my mom when she starts contradicting my parenting.

(Now… they are coming to visit next month, and THAT I am not sure what to do with. I suppose they’re on probation until the first time my mom yells at the Little One. I’m not totally opposed to yelling at kids, but I am opposed to a) yelling because I’m angry instead of because the kid would benefit from it, and b) yelling at the Little One herself unless she’s willfully disobeying, because it seems to have deleterious effects except in that case. So… we’ll see.)

smaje1, sending good thoughts your way! Just be aware that it can be a lot harder to have hung up on your mom than you think right now. Seriously, when I did it I felt really good, but then five minutes later I felt horrible. (Ten minutes later I reminded myself that it was a situation where we were much better off apart than together, and then I was all right again :slight_smile: )

59

I’m sorry to hear about your relationship with your mom. Unfortunately, your mom sounds a LOT like mine. I still remember the “good old days” when she’d scream that she wished we’d never been born. I think I was 3 or 4 when that started. She was a single mom and I’m sure the stress of taking care of two little kids by herself wasn’t easy to handle. But no kid deserves to hear that or to be called a cunt.

Then when I got older, I noticed that she’d get really sloppy and smell funny at night. She was drinking herself senseless almost every night. She and my sister hated each other. Things got a little better when my sister went to college. I was considered the “nice” kid, so mom’s drinking backed off a little and I got to see a side of her I’d never seen before. For a couple of years she was actually pleasant to be around.

Then I moved out, and she’s been drinking herself senseless every night since. I won’t leave her alone with my kids because I know she’ll drive them around, and sometimes she takes a travel mug filled with gin along for the ride. Doesn’t matter if it’s 10 a.m. That gin’s always there.

She also is very selfish. Everything is about her. Everyone else’s drama is her drama. When someone held a gun to my head during a mugging, I refused to tell her about the robbery until the next day because I knew I’d spend at least two hours comforting her. It was a good decision.

When my daughter was born, she was supposed to be home watching my son. I got home to find that she’d been drinking for a couple of hours before we arrived. And she was irritated that we’d kept them waiting, even though we had no control over the discharge process. That night when my son had a tantrum, instead of holding it together or offering to help, she started crying when we disciplined him (we picked him up and carried him to his room – not exactly child abuse), then screamed she “couldn’t take it anymore” and went downstairs where she slammed the door a few times for added effect.

Combined with all the times she’s chanted, “calories, calories, calories – couldn’t you look more like your cousin? (who modeled for several years, then quit because she was starving herself to death)” and all the comments about my husband, her behavior has become totally unacceptable lately. I visit sometimes, but avoid it whenever possible. I hope you can, too.

I try to make sure she can have a relationship with my kids. She dotes on them both and mostly makes sense when she talks to them. But I try to make sure that any time we spend together is done on my terms, not hers. I hope you can do the same.

60

Yeah, sorry! That was a bit of hyperbole. We do not make out and lick each other’s faces in front of each other or anything. But we do hold hands, and kiss, and show each other a lot of affection. I’ve NEVER seen her kiss my dad. Poor people… no kisses in their lives.