I voted “Other.” I didn’t have significant issues with either parent until college. My father had been the breadwinner, letting my mom take care of household stuff and parenting. Then my mother died under unsavory circumstances, which left my father and all of us kids with some degree of anger towards her. My father was thrust into actual, hands-on parenting. My brother and sister both developed a lot of frustration and animosity towards him, because they interpreted his attempts to parent as nagging. I was the responsible one, so my dad didn’t nag me. But then my father re-married, and gave his new wife all kinds of favoritism – wanted me to pay her cell phone bill, would celebrate holidays with her before us other children got off work, stuff like that. Since I received much less attention from him than my siblings did, and much less affection from him than his new wife did, I developed some hostility towards him at that point.
But I feel like answering “father” wouldn’t be in the spirit of your question. I think that would imply that I was closer to my mother than I was to my father. Since the death of my mother is what spawned the tension between me and my father, and I felt some hostility towards my mother because of the way that she died, “Other” seems like the best fit to me.
My mother loved me–too much. How to put this. She was emotionally demanding may be the most descriptive. Master of the guilt trip. My father was a true friend. Still, I had a good childhood with them.
Father. He left us when I was 11 years old. My mother supported us with a low paying job, and she cleaned homes in the evenings to help pay the bills.
During college I got by on Pell Grants and assistance from my mother. My father didn’t help me at all.
They’re both still alive and remarried. I see my father a couple times a year at family gatherings, but I don’t say much to him. He’s always been a narcissistic, self-centered asshole, and always will be a narcissistic, self-centered asshole. Ironically, he has also become a Born-Again Christian, and talks nonstop about being saved to whomever will listen.
Both of my parents were great and loving. I chose Father in the poll. He could be crabby and we hated asking him for permission to do anything. We’d always go to my mom first and of course, she would say, “you have to ask your dad”. UGH Then we’d beg her to ask him for us. Sometimes she would and sometimes we’d get up enough nerve to ask ourselves. It was usually stuff he didn’t approve of - like going downtown on a bus with friends and no adults when we were in junior high or going to a dry-night dance (1970’s). He would start out by saying no, just because he really worried about us (4 girls!). Sometimes we’d beg until he couldn’t stand it anymore and then he’d let us do whatever it was.
He loved his girls and would have rather we stayed home, safe and sound.
My mother loved her kids a lot - maybe too much. She was sometimes smothering and overbearing. It was done out of love, and not a need to control. But it drove me nuts.
Dad was super chill (in a good way). After my mom passed, I took care of him the last few years of his life, and we became really good friends.
My mother. She is this paranoid, obsessive-compulsive and, quite frankly, somewhat narcissistic control freak who doesn’t know the difference between a fact and an opinion. If you contradict her or disagree with anything she says, it’s beneath her dignity to debate with you. My father is mellower, though he has also shown signs of paranoia, but he is very phlegmatic and won’t stand up to her. He is an enabler for her various bad behaviors. My mother wasn’t always evil; when I was small, she was definitely loving and caring, though always the main disciplinarian in the family. However, she had high expecations of herself, and conversely had high expecations of everyone else around her. With my father, she was unhappy that he had no initiative, and I was a disappointment to her as I had behavioral problems in elementary school and had fluctuating academic success. This gradually strained our relationship. By the time I was in high school, I had very much cleaned up my act; I was almost not getting into trouble at school at all and was seriously applying myself; I was probably much less of a problem than the average teenager. But by this time, mother had morphed into a “tiger mom”. She kept setting unrealistic expectations for me and when I failed to meet them, attributed it to laziness on my part and responded with fits of rage, threats and punishments. If I ever even slightly complained about her treatment, she would just get insulted and try to guilt trip me, pointing out what a great mother she supposedly was and what a failure as a son I supposedly was. As a teenager, I had a period when I wanted to become a police officer. She highly disapproved of this career and took it personally that her son had so little regard for her that he would consider such a supposedly dangerous and corrupt job. She directly bullied me into not talking about it. Later at university, I was taking a liberal arts degree and planning to be a teacher. This again was not good enough for her and she tried to pressure me into going to graduate school and working toward being a professor. At the time I was living at home and more under her control than most people are while in high school. She would often threaten to kick me out of the house (she actually once forced me to live with my grandmother for two weeks or so when she got angry at me due to a complete misunderstanding) and by way of “picking my battles”, I actually went along with this plan, but in my third year, it became apparent to me that I would not manage to get into graduate school and put my foot down and insisted on going to teachers’ college. Unfortunately, I failed to be admitted to teachers’ college twice due to high demand for the field, which made my mother furious again. I ended up going abroad to teach English, in large part to get away from her and become independent. Long story short, my relationship with her has remained bad into adulthood; after two attempts to return to Canada, I am now permanently living abroad, and because on the second attempt I left following my mother’s repeated attempts to bully and exploit me under the pretext of my parents needing assistance in their old age, she and I are not on talking terms. It is no shame for me to admit that I have an abject hatred for her, and don’t care for my enabler father either. I don’t intend to see my mother again as long as she lives and would quite frankly not visit my father either; they are two toxic, dysfunctional people. I just send home a short, civil e-mail once a week, to which I get an even curter response (in my father’s sole voice but dictated to him by my mother). The only reason I maintain even that contact with them is because I have a lot of my stuff in their house which is gradually being sent to me (but for a lot of which I don’t have space where I live) and am hoping to get a critical mass of it back. Otherwise, I would just break contact with them.
Dad had a drinking problem, not at horror story level as I know many people endure growing up, but still enough to permanently damage our relationship. My Mom was an extremely good person, even though not so warm and fuzzy to her kids, who she really believed needed a firm hand. But see really walked the walk of her professed beliefs. I remember for example her visiting my widowed senile great uncle every day after work: nobody in the extended family was watching that so it wasn’t done seeking other people’s praise or from peer pressure. She just cared enough to do it; others in the extended family as closely related to him, didn’t. My dad was more of an average person morally, a lot more selfish and professed moral beliefs more shallowly held when the chips were down. I’m not saying I’m superior to him, I’m probably closer to his level than my mom’s as a moral person. But, it was just much hard to have ‘hostility or problem with’ a person like my mom, even when we disagreed.
This is, IMHO, one of the most defining characteristics of a narcissist or abuser - someone who can’t recognize the difference between these two things in their opinion (although generally they are perfectly sharp in dissecting whether ***other ***people’s views are facts or opinions.)
But Mom is a social narcissist, and solipsistic. Where any of us is the main character in our own movies but we have coprotagonists, and extras, and so forth, my mother is convinced that the whole world came into being for her. We’re not secondary characters, or character actors or any of that, we’re attrezzo.
My mother hated me, and was quick to show it. She kept me out of school till I was a year older than my classmates, saying I was “stupid.” When an IQ test showed I had an IQ of 148, she said I “guessed lucky.” Nothing I did was any good, and every thing that went wrong was my fault.
My father just ignored me, though I remember a fierce battle when he insisted I was to go to my mother’s parent’s 50th anniversary party, what with my right arm being in a cast.
My parents were both great parents, I just had pretty normal conflicts with my mom the most, as she was the stay at home parent. But I’ve nothing to complain about. I’m saddened that poor parenting (or no parenting) is so rife.
My parents were wonderful. They provided me and my siblings with memorable childhoods. They weren’t soft on discipline by a long shot, but they administered it justly and fairly. They were good people and provided good templates to which we modeled ourselves.
I did once overhear my mother tell her best friend that I was a mistake and she wished she never had me. That stung me like a bee and still kind of hurts almost 60 years later. But, I gotta admit, I was a handful to deal with. In hindsight, I realize those kinds of remarks are just blow-off steam parents say to friends when they’re exhausted and/or overwhelmed.
One time, I brought the lawn sprinkler into the living room and turned it on, soaking our carpet, ceiling, and furniture. Another time, I collected dog poop from the neighborhood lawns and put a piece on each of our living room bay window sills, then invited neighbors over to see my “art exhibit”. Another time, I started a bonfire in our basement to cook hot dogs, which got out of control and nearly burned the house down. Another time, I…well, you get the idea…I was a bad hombre.
But, I straightened out quite a bit once I hit kindergarten.
My parents took good care of me when I was young and I took good care of them when they were old. They were wonderful grandparents, too. They both died naturally and peacefully in my house months apart, in the presence of me and my kids. We miss them greatly. They were my best friends.
In childhood, Dad. Adulthood, still Dad. My mom and I were close. The last time my relationship with my dad was any better than “ok, I guess” I was eight.
Dad was bipolar and his meds kept him from being manic, mostly. They did nothing to keep him from being irritable and he yelled. A lot. I don’t yell. Ever.
When my mom died and I had to take care of him (it shocked everyone that he outlived my mom because he had COPD for years already) people predicted we’d grow closer. Nope.
That’s how it was with my parents until he died. Then we realized how much effort he’d put into getting Mom to behave semi-rationally, and how much of her cruelty he’d shaved off by simply being there to disapprove of it.
My mother was a wonderful woman but, sad to say, completely under my father’s thumb.
I won’t go into details on my dad. He was no monster, but over the years I’ve noticed that one of the best indicators of a good parent is whether a son or daughter will go to them with personal problems and generally confide in them. None of the kids in my family (including me) would have ever dreamed if confiding in my dad or asking him for advice with a personal problem. Not in a million years.