Wait a minute. ISTR someone on this site who was telling really insane stories about their job in a college dorm, and if it’s you, I had wondered if it might have been Job Corps.
Two things I remember were that you had a lot of students who didn’t change their trash bags because they didn’t know how, and two of the best roommates you ever saw were a self-identified white supremacist, and a black guy. Yeah, in the same room!
Back in my pharmacist days, I had a colleague (RIP Chris) whose sister was a Job Corps recruiter for a while, and she liked her job for the most part, but she did leave because she was spending most of her time dealing with parents who would ask, “Is there anything you can do to get my kid off the couch?” Nope, the child has to enroll themselves.
As an adult I have been to many weddings where I knew the bride or groom, recognized a couple of other faces, that was it. The rest are strangers.
It can be a profoundly lonely experience while the rest of the room is having a joyous family / friends reunion and you’re not part of any of that. Nor does the bride / groom have (much) time for you personally, nor any others similarly situated.
As an adult of greater social skills one can gravitate towards the table(s) that look like they’re also composed of other outer circle friends who know nobody here. One can also drink heavily. As a teen still learning this game and not yet able to drink these options are harder.
This obviously has scarred you a bunch. And that’s a darn shame; you deserve better.
But I wonder how much that is you having encountered a near-worst case example of a commonplace situation at a vulnerable time in your life in a vulnerable mood that day. And, sadly, gotten no support from your Mom at the exact time you needed it most. And you’ve nursed that hurt carefully for decades now to where it’s a big problem for you, not a small problem.
“All they can talk about are new phones and other electrical devices, and videogames, and strange music and Tik-tocs and ugly slang, and they are all druggies and immoral animals hooking up in the bushes outside and threatening to disgrace the brilliant family name of Shitzlipz. They never heard of ‘Gone With the Wind’ and don’t know who the Beatles were and they are all destined for a life in the gutter face down in a puddle of vomited drugs, knocked up and riddled with venereal diseases.” … I have heard some version of these proclamations (not all at once!) coming from the lips of adults I have known over many years. Teenagers are either envied, lusted after, or despised.
Wow. I can only think you had a very weird and dysfunctional family. I mean, I know adults who are awkward around teens because they’re not sure what to talk with them about, but I’ve never seen a family shut them out in the way you describe.
To some extent I think it’s natural and healthy for teenagers to pull away from their parents in the course of establishing their independence and becoming an adult. As for parents pushing them away, I think it becomes a bit of a two-way street. Is it pushing them away, or letting them go? You can’t interact with your teenagers the same way you did when they were children, because it just won’t go over well. When my kids were children, I told them ‘I love you’ every single night when I tucked them into bed. I don’t know at what age I stopped doing that on a regular basis, but I know if, by the time they were teenagers, I told them ‘I love you’ they would have yelled ‘stop it, dad!’.
I remember when I was a teen, I wanted nothing to do with my parents. It was an embarrassment to even be seen with them by my peer group, even though I was living with them. I remember one time at 13, I was shoveling snow off our sidewalk, and my mom insisted on helping me. I told her to go inside, I could do it myself! Then the worst thing ever happened-- a couple of my classmates came walking down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. I frantically told my mom to go inside NOW and she said “why are you so embarrassed to be seen with me?” I remember thinking “wasn’t she ever 13?” Then next day at school I had to endure hearing “can’t shovel snow without your mommy helping you, huh?”.
Of course, it’s important to distinguish between normal teen pulling away to establish independence, and sullen withdrawal that can indicate a problem. It’s difficult to do when your teen wants nothing to do with you, so you just have to try to monitor their friend relationships as best you can, determine that they have friends and that their friends are good influences. And keep close relationships with their teachers to make sure they are behaving appropriately in class and getting decent grades.
But from everything you said, she seems to have set the tone for the rest of the family to follow.
My own experience: I was an only child, raised with severe but benign neglect by people from deeply dysfunctional families. As a teen, no one was interested in me: it was like they were trying to raise Generic Boy with as little interaction as possible. I remember staying overnight at a friend’s house when I was 15, and calling home really late (say, 11 pm) to say where I was. (Edit: they didn’t know this friend, and it was maybe 15 miles from my house.) I woke my parents up: I hadn’t come home or called, the first time I had ever done anything like that, so they went to bed, assuming I’d turn up later.
Starting at 16, I worked full time while finishing high school. Why? I don’t know. We didn’t need the money, and it was an easy way to never be home. I left for college shortly before I turned 18 and kept in touch but visited as minimally as I could.
I am close to my parents, but I’ll never believe that they love me, because for those critical years they didn’t seem to care about me at all. They wanted me to get good grades, have a girlfriend, and go to college. They didn’t want to get to know me as a person.
Extended family was mostly a write-off: half of my family really had no interest in my existence, including most aunts, uncles, and cousins. Thank the gods for distant letter-writing kind relatives.
Looking back, it wasn’t me (but the self-hatred I carry for FEELING like it was all those years is intense). It was just damaged people doing their best, with some successes but a lot of damage-causing failures.
A young woman I know well (because I’ve made an effort to!) is currently going through Something Bad. I’ve offered support, and she’s made it clear that she appreciates that (no snark), but her support system is her mom, her best friend, and to an extent, a counselor. So I have all this empathy and caring ready to go, and nowhere to expend it.
I’m old enough now that all my women friends have had their weddings. But now their daughters and sons are getting married, and I go to those weddings. And I keep telling myself it doesn’t matter, but…I was never a bridesmaid, or a junior bridesmaid or flower girl, or even a reader of a Bible verse or circulator of the guestbook. I always go around to all the attendants and tell them how pretty they look and all that jazz, but it’s hard not to remember that I never got that. Every woman should have a bridesmaid story to tell, and I…don’t.
Bear with me on this: On another forum, there was a thread where someone told a tale of a teenager who had been sullen and uncooperative not just at a wedding, but all during the preparations. The solution? To pull a humiliating prank on her during the photo session. Winning! Of course, according to them, the next day Sulky was back to her usual self, but at least they have pictures! You know, if she ever shows up again, they can wave them at her and say, “Watch yourself, missy!”
And it brought this incident up for me again. So I started another thread, telling the story from this one, and…wow. A couple of “I hear you” responses, and then a tirade from someone who had had her Perfect Wedding almost ruined by an uninvited minor (and her uninvited parents). Not because of anything she/they did, but because that meant $$three extra plates$$. “Well, it was obviously a child-free wedding, and you were obviously not invited. You probably really pissed off the bride, not to mention the invited guests who were promised a child-free evening. You cost the bride money, and being ignored was the least you deserved. Sorry-not-sorry, if you think you were the injured party in that, you’re obviously still too young/immature to understand about weddings.” And a couple others: “Eh, I wouldn’t want to talk to a 13y/o either. I currently know a teenager who doesn’t talk, or talks too much, and I’m extrapolating that to all teenagers.” And one or two “That would never happen in my family, because there are so many of us, everyone has one or more people the correct age to hang out with!” So I started this thread in the hope of getting some constructive comments.
And I am feeling better now, because of the responses I’ve gotten in this thread. So thank you all who have replied, and thank you everyone else who didn’t respond to tell me how I’d brought it on myself.
salinqmind1: Preach!
Yep. Hey, look at some of my other threads. Or don’t, if they would depress you.
I think a lot of times, parents are trying to make up for perceived or real inattention when their offspring was in the single digits. Only they try to provide the support an 8y/o wants and needs, to a tween who is determined to be independent! And by the time they’ve figured out that age, it’s the late teen years, and there’s another routine to learn.
Same here. A lot of damaged people, but at their worst, they did their worst. Oh well, successes? Both my parents saw to it that I valued education and loved learning. My mom made sure I knew my way around a kitchen; my dad made sure I knew my way around a car. There were some good times. But the bad times were really bad.
I’m sorry you took it that way. My intent was helpful even if my words were clumsy. I apologize for the discomfort I’ve caused.
My point was that if this is bugging you significantly, and it seemingly is, then working it out with help is the way to get better. Continuing to ruminate on it, and to find similar examples in other people’s lives to vicariously feel bad about, is how to work this infected splinter deeper into your psyche. Not to slowly extract it.
Said another way, if you continue do what you’ve been doing, you’re going to get the same result you have to date. This legitimately hurtful thing from decades ago seems to be continuing to hurt you now. And that’s probably not the outcome you want. Which suggests to me that perhaps a different approach to it would prove more helpful for you.
Heard. I was raised not to be racist, given a lot of independence, allowed to pursue rather expensive interests despite low SES, and taught the value of a good education, among many other positive things. The bad things were just incredibly bad.
I don’t talk to my Mom anymore. It’s not to punish her. I wish the good things she did right were enough to sustain our relationship now. But they are not. And she is still crazy so it’s not like moving forward is even possible.
I have sifted through the ashes sometimes trying to figure out where it all went wrong. She pathologized normal teen behavior, took my ADHD personally and created a love triangle between me and her husband, so I think she really hated me. I think she would never admit it, but she did really hate me. And that bubbles to the surface periodically decades later, her total and utter resentment of me, for being born, for ruining two of her marriages, for being financially well-off, for being an intellectual, for being liberal, for having good relationships with other family members, for whatever. She’s a hateful person and I used to define myself as whatever she isn’t, but as time wore on, I have come to set a much higher bar for myself than “don’t be like Mom.”
There was a time when that loss was the most painful thing in my life, and now I go months sometimes without thinking about her. It’s all very sad but she had many chances to change, and she made her choice, so I made mine, and my sanity definitely would not hold if I had to deal with her bullshit on top of everything else going on in my life right now.
Good grief, I never meant you! I just meant the absence of the kind of replies I got in that other forum. If anything, you’ve been the most supportive person in this thread, and believe me, I appreciate it.
I just saw and read through this thread, and GOSH. I come from what I would not characterize as, er, the most warm fuzzy family in the world, and I’m appalled at what you went through. My mom has always been very hard to deal with and she would never have told me to shut up in a roomful of people, wtf. (To be fair, she was generally very hard to deal with privately, and behaved beautifully publicly, so there’s that too.)
I will say that you (or rather Mr. Rilch) mentioned control, and I think that may be a useful way to think about it. Not nearly as bad as your case but something kind of similar: My mom was really great with my kids when they were babies. Very loving and sweet. Now that I have a tween and teen she doesn’t talk to them at all. Like, I call every week and she never asks to talk to them. We visit a couple of times a year and I don’t think she’s started a conversation with either of my kids in years. (My dad tries occasionally, both on the phone and in visits, though he’s got the opposite problem that he thinks caring means asking whether they’re getting straight A’s in school, but that’s another issue. At least he asks!) She’ll talk to me and give me her opinions on what I should do with them, and she’s proud of their accomplishments when they accomplish things, but she doesn’t talk to them.
And I think the difference is that babies don’t demand anything emotionally, they just need to be held and fed and napped, they don’t have different opinions than she does. If she interacted with my kids now she’d have to come to terms with them being different people who don’t want the same things she does. And there is a large part of her that’s not okay with that.
I personally think my kids are super super more interesting now than they were as babies, and it’s her loss. (Fortunately my kids don’t care a whole lot, and they had absolutely lovely grandparents on the other side so they did have that experience.)
I remember the day I decided to stop speaking to my grandparents. I was an adult, about 30, and I got off the phone with them one day and realized that while they’d answer the phone and talk to me, they would really rather not. So I never called, wrote to, or visited them again. Not out of anger or spite, just realizing that my attempts to build a relationship were all one-way. They were polite enough in their responses, but just not interested.
My grandmother lived for five more years, and my grandfather lived ten years after that. I don’t think that either of them ever even noticed that I had cut off contact.
My daughter was the stereotypical miserable human being when she hit her teens. She basically just disappeared for several years and then returned when she was about 19. Lying, sullen, smoking, drinking, pregnancy, abortion, lashing out. You name it. My sons were way less of a problem. Pretty much all of them were ready to get out on their own after graduation. I think “pulling away” in whatever form it takes is a natural progression from childhood to adulthood.
And for some people, it’s easy to tune out childish prattle. Just keep smiling and nodding. But as kids get older, they want to converse. It doesn’t even have to be a difference of opinion; to some adults, it’s all noise.
Chefguy: Good heavens. What changed when she approached 19, d’you think?
This is the best thing about having a kid getting older! They start talking about all the information their little brains have been processing - and what they think of it!
I don’t know that I think of my family in terms of stopping and starting speaking to them. Other than my Dad who I call on a regular basis, my extended family are sort of just these people I see for special events like weddings and bar mitzvahs. I think we all have fun when we get together. It’s just everyone kind of lives far apart and we all have our own busy (and often very different) lives.
My wife’s Mom’s side of the family we see constantly and it’s a bit much. But my kids like spending time with all of them so fuck it.
Is it? Not like I’m an expert, but I think if children don’t have that healthy mix of “push” and “pull” as they grow up, it can effect them negatively well into adulthood (which it might have for you, given the tone of your posts/OP).
As a member of Gen X, I think we tended to grow up under a model where even if our parents were supportive, they were largely in the background/sidelines. Maybe they were divorced and one was absent (mine weren’t). But I think around middle school, I always kind of felt that I and my peers lived in a different world from my parents. Certainly more than my kids (my oldest who is in 7th grade).
Like I think that’s ok for parents to be like “I love and support you…but I really don’t understand your clothes and music and slang and you kind of have to figure out your own problems anyway.”
My paternal grandmother had loved me, so I extrapolated that expectation to my maternal grandparents, and tried to have a relationship. It took me a long time to figure out that they didn’t want that, is all. I was a lonely child and hoped my family would be interested in my existence. A few were, most weren’t.
I don’t have a grand unifying theory on family other than most of them are weird and flawed because most people are weird and flawed. The problem is that as people grow up, they are looking to those weird and flawed relationships for emotional support and guidance and often those family members aren’t really in any position to provide it.
Too much independence too early, your kids end up fucked up delinquents.
Too much coddling, your kids don’t develop as their own people.
If it’s any consolation, lots of women don’t. Maybe it’s because their friends had bridal parties full of sisters or their friends didn’t have weddings that involved a bridal party. Or maybe there just wasn’t a story to tell about the time they were a bridesmaid.
