Background: My parents divorced in the early nineties. My dad moved far away, and after I turned 18 my brother, 11, went to live with my dad. My mom was devastated by this. She wanted him to go to college (he didnt) didnt want him to join the military (he did) and constantly complained he didnt visit enough/picked fights with her when he did. I stayed with my mom another 5 years while I finished college, found a few part time jobs and eventually moved out. Growing up, I always thought I was the “good son” and while I had a lot of insecurities, felt confident that my mom appreciated how loyal and supportive I was to her. She was generous to us, always went to recitals and school pageants. While she was kind of suffocating and a helicopter mom, I considered her a Good Mom since she was involved. I would constantly defend her from people who criticised her.
It took me 32 years to realize I was getting screwed over. I guess what finally did it was seeing some restored home movies from 1990 to 1992 (shortly before my dad moved out and my parents divorced) and seeing how she treated my brother differently than myself. For a long time, I just wrote it off as big sibling/younger sibling drama. I thought that by complaining about unfair treatment would make me look immature, petty, and ungrateful for what I had. So for decades I just sort of…accepted inconsistent treatment and rationalized it as “its fair, I just cant see it from my perspective”.
Recently my mom had given my brother and I copies of home movies she had transferred to DVD. My brother, haven seen them first, told me on the phone, “wow, mom was MEAN to you!” Which of course made me curious. The two years of home movies were mostly centered around my brother. My mom always used the video camera- she didnt seem to trust anyone else with it and seldom let other people film (or even photograph) her. I got to hear her call my brother’s name about a billion times. I was barely in the video, and most of it consisted of my mom telling me to get out of the way or be quiet. Any time I was shown getting visible upset about something the footage would cut out abruptly (no doubt so I could get punished for making a scene on-camera).
Watching the video, and dealing with other inconsistent behavior with my mom (she is super involved with helping with my brother’s wedding vs me having to BEG her for help, visiting him freqently but never seeming to have the time to spend with me, etc) lead me to see “The Rust Under The Paint”. The whole time my mom acted like she was so selfless and dedicated when in reality she was insecure, needy, manipulative, and grossly inconsistent with us. I feel mad I spent this whole time convinced she was a Good Mom and I was so loyal and stuck with her, when in hindsight I shouldn’t have let her guilt trip me into staying with her for so long.
There is no point in trying to punish your mother for her past behavior.
Ask yourself, given who she is today and how she behaves today, do you want her in your life? Don’t expect her to change. Don’t expect the favoritism to change. If you can accept her current behavior, then, by all means, keep interacting with her. If, on the other hand, you find that you can’t accept her current behavior, then don’t feel guilty about limiting her involvement in your life.
Your feelings are valid and despite what others in this thread are gonna say, most people would feel very hurt after discovering late in life that they are the less favored child.
Perhaps the thing that hurts the most about it is the cold, honest truth: your mom isn’t required to treat you and your brother the same way. She doesn’t owe you her help just because she has given it in overbundance to your brother. Would it somehow be better if she was indifferent to his requests too? You feel cheated only because you’re (understandably) jealous. Don’t let this base emotion blind you to the fact that you’re not really entitled to anything from her.
Consider the tradeoffs to being Mama’s pet and then thank your lucky stars. Who is gonna have to endure the most guilt trips and emotional blackmail from her? Who is gonna have to put up with her yammering on the phone when you just want to be left alone? It’s not you, but your bro. When she’s older and is the one needing help or company, she’ll more likely be bugging your brother. Not you. But if for whatever reason, she chooses you to be her savior, you can put her off with a clean conscience. Your brother? If he decides to pawn her off on someone else (like you), he will likely feel very guilty because he knows he got the better deal between the two of you and thus, owes her more. Who needs that eating away at them?
Try to focus on the positive and not dwell on how unfair your treatment has been.
I think it’s okay to give yourself some time to rail at the unfairness of being the less-favored child*–really you are mourning the life you THOUGHT you had all along, when it was really just smoke and mirrors. It’s totally natural to be upset in your position, as long as you don’t wallow for an excessive period of time. If you feel yourself dwelling because you can’t get over it, then it might help you to see a counselor. I also think it would be a good idea to limit your interactions with your mother going forward. Losing your child’s adult friendship is a natural consequence of treating your kid like shit when they’re young, and I am *all *about natural consequences.
However, don’t delude yourself into thinking you can *change *her. If your brother is her favorite, then that sucks a whole lot of donkey balls… but there’s nothing you can do about it. Don’t confront her, because she wouldn’t acknowledge it out loud (and maybe hasn’t even admitted it to herself). It sounds like your brother is aware of the disparity, though. That’s about all you could reasonably hope for in this situation.
*I am the less-favored child. I am somewhat over it. I have no interaction with my father and very little with my mother, by my choice. I did actually try to confront my mom ~5 years ago about why she favored my sister (both emotionally in childhood and financially in adulthood–private music lessons, private college, free car, multiple expensive musical instruments, etc). It accomplished *less *than nothing–actually made our relationship temporarily worse. But it doesn’t bother me much at all anymore, because I have chosen to stop basing my happiness (in whole or in part) on parental approval. It’s quite liberating.
I mean, what’s your mom going to do if she doesn’t like it? Ground you from miles away? Withdraw financial support that you were barely getting anyway? It’s SO worth it to live more cheaply than to get money from an emotional vampire.
Ya know what can be just as bad as un-equal treatment? Totally equal treatment.
That’s what I got.
Everything I got from my parents was because they gave one of my siblings something and then had to get me somthing to be ‘fair’. Never because they loved me and/or wanted me to have something / be happy.
It’s because my dad was the only boy w/ 5 sisters. He had to work while the girls played house and dress up. But knowing that doesn’t help me feel like a loved child instead of some moral-contract obligation.
I don’t see where or how the OP got really screwed, so I can’t tell if it’s reality or perception. Or just an ongoing desire for attention.
I realized my situation rather young. So I joined the Air Force as soon as I could to get away from it. I was ‘gone’ 20 yrs. And now I’m the ‘unsociable child’. It will be interesting to see how equally we’re ‘treated’ in the will…
My family had a somewhat different situation, likely with different reasons, but the upshot was that my mother raised me differently than my older siblings. One of my sisters didn’t hold it against me (pity she’s dead these past 25 years), one of my sisters tries hard not to let it color our relationship, but the third one… she blames me for everything bad she feels mom and dad did to her. Like I had any control over that. (In retrospect, by the time I came along things had changed for mom and dad, and in part I think they were trying to do some things right with me they felt they had gotten wrong with the others)
Mom may have been “mean” to you, but your brother’s actions from a young age - choosing to live with dad, following a radically different path in life than mom had mapped out for her favorite - tell me he knew something was amiss and wasn’t happy with the situation at all.
Don’t let what your mom did years ago come between you and your brother.
The ironic thing about this is my brother is not only aware of the discrepancy, he’s sympathetic toward my position. My brother assumed my mom would be closer to me since I chose to stay and live with her vs my dad. For him, he found my mom’s attention stifling. At the same time, he saw that I genuinely wanted more of a connection to my mom (especially after I moved away and later got married) that she wouldn’t give.
My brother get along better and better over time. During Thanksgiving weekend, he drove a total of 1200 miles all over California, with his fiancee, his dog, and infant baby in tow, just so he could visit everybody (particularly me :D) in his family and his fiancee’s family. I love my brother because he’s really willing to stick his neck out for people he cares about, and over the last couple of years he’s grown up a great deal. Even though we are on opposite sides of the fence politically, we get along great.
When we were kids, we kind of felt like rivals to each other. Parents always say kids turn adults against each other, but I sometimes wonder if it was the other way around in my family- my parents inavertantly turned us against each other, but once we moved away from that influence and had our own lives, we really rebuilt a great relationship together. Him and my wife get along very well, which is very important to me as well.
Its true having things be truly ‘fair’ might not be all thats cracked up to be. But what bothered me the most was not that my brother was treated ‘better’ (since even he didn’t care or see it that way) but that we were treated differently while in the same breath convincing me that everything was fair.
Well, if nothing else you seem to have a super wonderful brother - you’re a lucky person to have him.
As for the rest - over time I’ve gotten mad at the parents for this or that, groused about it, forgiven them, found some new thing that annoyed me, rationalized it, then… well, lots of rinse and repeat. When I accepted them as flawed human beings just like everyone else it made it easier to put behind me the things they had done I disagreed with.
It’s upsetting to find stuff out about your family such that you discover what you thought you knew about the past isn’t what was really going on. My sympathies on that.
I wonder how many threads you are going to start on this perceived imbalance of your mother’s love/attention. What can anyone say that will give you what you are seeking? Parents are human as are their children. To expect that your mother would treat you the same way as your brother is like asking you to treat both your mom and dad the same way. You are all people and all adults. From your other thread it seems that your wife is stirring the pot a bit. You lived with your mom while finishing college, my guess is that that arrangement benefited you at least somewhat. Take that and value where you are. Accept that some of this is both because of and in spite of your mom. Then live the life without a bunch of meaningless comparisons that will only serve to make you miserable.