wow ditto! But I seriously think I learned my morality from T.v
My parents are both dead. Mom was a kind, decent, loving mother, but I now know she was too submissive to Dad’s tyranny. Dad taught me I could fail at anything I put my mind to. He taught me I was a failure and a weakling. After he died, though, I found out he was better, and worse than I ever knew. He taught me tolerance for other races and religions. I learned after his death that he hated black people and never hired any in his business. I still don’t understand that. So, now, I’m going to Thanksgiving dinner with my older brother. I hate holidays.
If I had my way, I would never speak to my mother again. She is bitter, meanspirited and no nice. The only times she ever told me she loved me was while we were fighting, as in “How could you say that to me, I love you more than life it’s self?” She’s ruined my father’s life: no friends, no real career, no hope for the future. Now she’s sick and won’t admit it, even though we can all see it and have called her on it. I’ve given up.
My father could have been a great person, if not for my mother. Now he’s bitter and older than his years. I’ve wished for years he’d get up the chutzpa the move out, but I’ve given up on that hope. The one time he was close to doing it, he didn’t because she would have gotten custody of us and he wasn’t going to let that happen. Of course, he blamed me for ruining his life, but I delude myself into believing that he’s blaming my mother and not me.
And people wonder why I want to move to Califonia as soon as I graduate.
My mom used to be like this, too. She was popular in high school, I not only wasn’t popular, I didn’t care that I wasn’t popular. I didn’t dress right or wear my hair right, according to her. I didn’t take as many advanced classes or extracurricular activities as my sister did (I’d rather be at home playing Nintendo). I didn’t keep my room clean. I stayed up till 4am if I could instead of going to bed early on non-school nights.
But, when I was about 18, when one of my friends from high school got pregnant, I think she realized that, although I could have been a lot better, I could easily have been a whole lot worse.
And, of course, around the same time, I realized that my parents could have been a whole lot worse.
We started getting along a lot better once we realized that about each other. We get along even better now that I live 3000 miles away and she doesn’t have to see me dressing like a slob and having “hippie” hair and see the usual state of my housekeeping.
I hope the same happens someday with you and your parents.
My parents were actually fine during my childhood, it was only when I started a company which my mom became involved in that things started to go sour.
My mom has a very strong, somewhat dysfunctional work ethic, and believes that when you own a company, you should sacrifice whatever it takes to keep it alive. Our company became her whole existence, and she frequently criticized my wife and I for not making the company our top priority, above our marriage, and our happiness. She actually criticized us for choosing to have a child because it would have a negative impact on the company.
The company has now died, and we are beginning to heal from the years of extreme differences, but it is hard, and it is often tempting to just leave, but i would lose my Dad and sisters as well.
the moral: Never go into business with your parents
I don’t think that I still don’t like my parents but that, as I have grown up, I have lost respect for them over the years.
First off, I love my parents. I just wouldn’t choose them for friends.
My dad is always right. Well, he seems to think he is. Growing up, he would have an answer for any question I asked even if he had to make it up, as I have found out to my own embarrassment. Now that I am older, he tries to bait me into petty arguments. He seems to do this whenever the conversation goes deeper than “Nice weather we’re having.”. My mom believes that all is right with the world no matter what. Blind eye to everything that would burst that bubble. Basically your standard parents. They still try and parent. Mom, Dad, I’m a big boy now with my own family. I have my own value system that I want to pass down to my kids so they can reject it. I may have a wierd view on parenting but I think that once the kids are older, your parenting is over and you can hope that your kid chooses you as a mentor, or at least stays in touch.
The coup de grace came a few years back when my sister and I had a falling out. I felt wronged and hurt. I rarely get excited and abhore confrontation so I have to feel that I have been greatly wronged before I do something about it. I discussed things with my sister and told her that we needed some time apart to let things heal, to which she agreed. My parents, on the other hand, were phoning me several times a day to get me to pretend things were just peachy. They made fun of me when I expressed how I felt wronged and needed time all the while saying that “one day I would understand” :rolleyes: I was 25 years old being treated like I was 6 and didn’t understand the situation. My dad even told me “I can still manipulate you to get what I want”. Brilliant pops. That hurt because, as a boy and young man, my dad was the next thing to a deity. That statement and the situation surrounding it finished off any lingering sentiment in that regard.
At family gatherings, my sister and I get along great, I just don’t bother talking about anything worthwhile with mom and dad.
Wow, that’s spooky. My mother’s exactly the same. And I’m talking denial in the face of some serious disasters. I thought mine was unique…
My relationship with my parents went from usual awe as an infant, to disillusionment and rebellion as an adolescent, embarrassement as a late adolescent, and eventual acceptance as an adult. My respect for them started high, then went down, and then back up. Hell, they raised four kids, and though none of us are what you might call “normal”, none of us are criminals or drug addicts, we’re all pretty stable, and what’s more, they did the best they could given their physical and emotional resources.
However, my wife’s mother is cut out of our lives. She has some kind of awful chronic personality disorder, has been emotionally abusing my wife since she was a kid, and her ghastly behaviour at our wedding was the catalyst for total loss of contact. It was my wife’s decision, and, despite some initial misgivings, I support her. We don’t miss her, she contributes nothing to my wife’s happiness and wellbeing, and more importantly, she is no less miserable and nasty now we’re out of her life than she was before.
My inlaws are still in touch with her, and they report back that our being out of her life has made no dent on her at all: if we called her tomorrow, she would still be a hateful, miserable bitch, and our contact would not improve her situation. So why bother, when all we would ever get is grief? Someone who makes my wife cry every single time she talks to her is not someone I want in our lives.
Hey jjimm. Do you think we are brothers merely separated by our ancestry?
Is your mother-in-law totally insane too? 
Nope. I married into a fantastic family.
[QUOTE=Moonchild]
Because my Aunt died, my Mom is currently in town (from Montana) and staying with us for a month. She’s 71, has all her faculties, but just won’t SHUT THE FUCK UP. It’s just one endless stream of chatter. Sometimes about things that might be of interest to some – she’s into herbs, holistic healing and astrology – and some times not – about this or that person up where she lives, what sign they are, what year they were born, etc. – but it is endless./QUOTE]
Off-topic question: Is she a member of the Summit Lighthouse near Emigrant? My SO’s mother is into all those things and she lives in Montana and works for the Lighthouse. Just curious!
My father was what I used to refer to as an equal opportunity hater—he hated everyone without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin, although blacks had an edge on everyone else. His most concentrated hate was reserved for blacks, although I never knew why. If you were a WASP, he would grant you the benefit of the doubt, but he knew full well he would hate you eventually. He had the highest morals, his ethics were superior, he was honest where everyone else was not, and he knew more than anyone else even if the other person was a world renown expert in a field my father had never heard of. He taught me to believe I was and always would be inferior and a failure at anything I attempted. In short, he was a complete prick. I wish now that I had severed all relations with him when I was eighteen. If I had, though, I would have missed learning to be friends with my mother. I think now that my mother considered her mission in life was to keep my father from being worse than he was. As it happened, she died before him and I truly wish it had been the other way around.
I’ve learned to like and appreciate my sister as we both get older, but if we weren’t related, we wouldn’t even know each other.
Let’s see. . . My mother died when I was almost eleven and was very sick for years before that, so I never really knew her very well. My father, though. . .
Once, during family therapy, the therapist asked my father to leave the room so she could speak to me alone. We had our little talk and then my father and I went home. On the way home, he asked me why I felt a certain way about something that the therapist and I had discussed. It was clear from his wording of the question (and the fact that I’d never discussed the subject with him before) that he’d been listening at the door during my supposedly private conversation with the therapist. When I said as much, he screamed at me for the rest of the drive home. How dare I accuse him of such a thing!?
When I was born, a credit union account was opened for me (but under the control of my parents, of course). Every year on my birthday and at Christmas, people—mostly family—would deposit money in the account for me so that when I turned eighteen, I’d have something to start life on my own with or to put towards college tuition. By the time I turned fifteen, there was over five thousand dollars in that account, a significant percentage of it contributed by my mother before she died. Then, my father remarried. A few months later, he cleaned out the account in order to help my stepmother pay off some credit card bills and send the two of them on a cruise to the Virgin Islands while I was sent to Baptist church camp.
He and I lived with my stepmother for about ten months before the conflicts between all three of us (but especially between me and my stepmother) got so bad that it was decided I could no longer live there. So, I was sent to the Owasso Baptist Childrens’ Home for about ten months. When that didn’t work out, I was sent to the Tulsa Boys’ Home—which is sort of a softer, gentler version of juvie hall—where I was housed with rapists and theives. Once, during one of my rare parental visitations from my father, he asked me, “Why do you call me Dad?” The implication being that I didn’t respect him the way a son should respect his father. You know how the best comebacks always come to you after the fact? I always wish I’d thought to say, “Good question. You sure as hell don’t act like one.”
The last time I ever saw my father in person, it was right before I started college. When I told him I was planning to go to college, he said, “I don’t why, you know you’re not going to make it.”
Wonderful man.