My father never got a handle on the whole “dad/family” concept until he became a grandfather. I think he’d say his biggest mistake was marrying my mother–probably because he or she thought I had already been conceived and was on the way. Mathematically possible, but if so, it couldn’t have been more than a week or two, as I arrived exactly nine months after they got married.
My parents believed, and instilled in me the same belief (at the time) that counseling and therapy were an industry of charlatans, propped up by weak people who couldn’t handle their own business. If they had noticed the signs of depression in me when they first appeared at age 12-13 - like, isolating myself, wearing the same stinky jacket day in and day out, lack of interest in activities, etc - and if I had known to see them in myself, maybe I’d have gotten the help I needed and my life would have turned out differently.
Maybe.
They also ate freshwater fish and expected me to eat it too, on paint of going hungry. I’ll never forgive them for that.
I think my mom’s worst mistake was getting married and having kids. I think she would have been much happier as a single woman able to have her own career and her own friends and do her own thing without being tied down by a husband and kids who insisted on being different than her, which she couldn’t understand. I think she has a lot of anger about being married at 19 (she always counseled my sister and me to marry as late as we could) and a lot of anger about not being able to do the things she wanted to do because she was always feeling like she had to take care of her kids and/or her husband (who actually was completely capable of taking care of both himself and us, but who kept being told he was doing everything wrong and gradually stopped doing anything – a bad dynamic on both sides). But she married my dad in the early 70’s and would not have been in the US if she hadn’t married him, so idk if she really had good single-woman-career options at that time, and I also don’t know that it would have been socially acceptable for her not to get married… so maybe her worst mistake was not being born thirty years later.
I think my dad’s worst mistake was marrying my mom. It would have been much better for him to find someone who wasn’t so angry all the time or at least someone who didn’t combine with him in codependent and dysfunctional ways.
I briefly met a couple recently from the same country my parents are from where the man reminded me a lot of my dad, only ten years younger – and he and his wife had a great supportive relationship, complete with inside jokes, common goals, and even teasing each other. It made me really sad because I could see what my dad’s life could have been if he’d married someone like that instead of my mom. But maybe that wasn’t possible ten years previously.
Heh, I asked my husband once what he wished his parents had done differently and he couldn’t think of anything. Now, this may say more about my husband’s memory than anything else… but my parents-in-law were pretty awesome. I always tell people I won the parents-in-law lottery! My husband is the one with the crazy in-laws, oops.
Brilliant! I’ll take two!
My parents made their share of mistakes, but I know I wasn’t an easy child either, at least to some extent. When I look back on certain events, I can’t help but feel sympathy for all of us. In many ways, my parents were shaped—perhaps even constrained—by their own upbringing and the society around them. If magic were real, my only wish would be to travel back in time and help them. That’s all.
I don’t think my parents ever made any intentional mistakes. I think they were genuinely trying their best. But their extreme-unreasonable-irrational religious-or-conspiratorial beliefs caused a lot of unnecessary hardship for my siblings and I, and also lost them huge sums of money. Even now, at age 37, I’m still pulling many weeds out of my mental garden and still have great difficulty discerning what’s real and what’s fake, what’s genuine and what’s a scam, what I should say and not say, who I can trust and not trust, etc.
I had a very good friend whose father was like that. He never did get glasses till he went to college. He discovered that he could see better by making a pinhole lens between his two thumbs and two index fingers, but he got punished when his father caught him doing it. Of course he didn’t play any sport, although as teen-ager he founded and ran a Sci-Fi fanzine for a number of years.
I honestly find this story the most baffling one here. It’s not like near-sightedness is a rare and obscure condition.
And being able to see - that’s life-changing. I got glasses in fourth grade and still remember being in awe of everything I had missed.
Yeah, this is one of the most disturbing stories, just because it must have affected every moment of your life so drastically and for so long. And it probably didn’t look like abuse to anyone.
In hindsight, it was moving us from Montreal to Los Angeles when I was a teenager. Although they had good reasons for it at the time.
This compulsive stinginess even once a person gets to have enough money for nice things seems to be a very common issue among those who have grown up around want. My mother is not stingy per se, but has a compulsive problem to throw old things out. At times, she has behaved like a pack rat (though I know of much more exteme cases). Her father had grown up in Jugoslavia in the Great Depression. His parents ran a not-too-lucrative cafe or tavern, and his father was reluctant to buy him even things like a pencil for school. When my grandfather had his own family, he would send a chunk of his pay to his parents and sisters, which angered my grandmother. My mother grew up in a home which had a certain amount of want, and in adulthood she would refuse to part with old things, insisting on trying to sell them (at garage sales, antque stores, etc.) and even haggling over the price, which led to the potential buyers refusing to buy it from her. She would even sell our old, worn shoes at her many garage sales.
The mother of my best friend from middle school told me that (circa the early 70s) her father, apparently a strict Presbyterian and a child of the Great Depression, had such a strong Calvinist work ethic that he wouldn’t take a day off work to attend her high school graduation!
The following is edited from an earlier post I made in 2021. When I was 7, I once had a day off school and was spending it at a neighbor’s at-home daycare. We were outside at one point and as it was a very wintry day, it happened that a small child slipped on the icy pavement. I moved toward her wanting to help her up, but the babysitter thought I had pushed her down. I don’t remember well how, if at all, I had attempted to defend myself, but she believed I had pushed the child. I dropped the question and ended up forgetting about the incident. Later, when my mother came to pick me up, the babysitter took her aside and told her I had pushed or beaten a smaller child, outside of my earshot. My mother approached me absolutely furious and started dragging me home across the street, demanding to know “what I had done”. I had no idea what I had done wrong. At home, she started beating the bejezus out of me, trying to extract a confession. I had no idea what I was supposed to confess, and tried to find possible faults in my behavior that day; my mother kept demanding “and what else?” She did not stop until I was covered in bruises. It took some time for me to be told what I was being punished for, but I had forgotten the incident from earlier that day and could not recall having beaten up any small child - as indeed I had not. Only later did I remember, and managed to explain, that I had not beaten or pushed, but had actually tried to help the child that had fallen down herself, but it was obviously too late. My mother is a person who, as time went on, morphed from a generally loving and caring (if always the more disciplinarian) parent to an authoritarian, paranoid narcissist. In adulthood, following various disagreements and my calling her out on her treatment of me, I received a half-assed non-apology for this event: she stated that the only thing she regretted as regards my upbringing was that she beat me for something I had not done, while asserting that it “wasn’t her fault” as the babysitter had told her otherwise. Mother’s paranoia has caused her to accuse me, my father, and many other people, of various forms of malice, misinterpreting (I would almost say deliberately) various innocent and honestly meant actions, comments and opinions as if they were somehow aimed against her, whereas they weren’t. She’s a textbook paranoid narcissist.
Yeah, I know how that goes. My mother ruminates on shit for years. When my uncle died, she was on a train on the way to visit my grandma and my Aunt. Because my Aunt and my grandma are reasonable people, they waited all of three hours until she got off the train, sat her down, and informed her of her brother’s death. There was no incident at the time.
But she started thinking about it. And obsessing. She started calling me and demanding to know exactly what time I was informed of his death and whether or not I had somehow known and kept this fact from her because it was the height of offensive to her that my grandmother did not call her while she was alone on the train and inform her the instant they knew. She has recounted this event as if it were deeply traumatic to be informed this way and nursed this grudge for easily a decade. She has put together timelines of the event to try to figure out who is lying to her.
My husband says there is a diagnosis for this. Delusional disorder. It’s a type of psychosis characterized by paranoid delusions that are plausibly true, like, “my spouse is cheating on me” or “my family is conspiring against me” in the absence of all evidence.
At this point I’m my mother’s life, nobody in the family, not one single person, will talk to her. Including me. She spent so many years inventing reasons to justify her malicious treatment and insisting that we were all out to get her that we had to end it.
And the tragedy is we all actually really genuinely loved her at one point. Me especially.
The stories about glasses reminded me of my parents’ (really my mother’s) worst mistake. She made a few pretty big ones - didn’t notice I was basically blind in one eye until I went to school and got a vision test , didn’t notice that my youngest sister couldn’t turn her hand palm up (which is more limiting than you would think) but the biggest was my middle sister. She always had ear infections and went to an ENT regularly. He poo-pooed the idea that my sister might have allergies. I’m nor sure what exactly the “treatment” was , but I do know it involved something being poked around in her ear that was so painful my father had to hold her down when she was 4 or 5 years old. Somehow , it never occurred to my mother to get a second opinion or talk to the GP about whether this was normal.
Eventually , this quack retired - and of course the new ENT tested her and my sister was allergic to almost everything you can imagine. The constant ear infections led to bone damage which resulted in my sister being deaf in one ear. Between damage to her eardrum from the poking and the refusal to test for allergies, the new ENT spontaneously offered to testify against the former one, which is not something doctors do very often. The fact that my mother refused to give my sister any assistance in suing the doctor ( she felt sorry for him and he was old and retired) has had a negative impact on my sister’s relationship with my mother ever since. That might have been the worst part of the situation - my sister may have been able to forgive my mother for not getting a second opinion because my mother was young and overwhelmed ( she had 4 kids before she was 28) but she could not forgive her for feeling more concerned about the doctor than her daughter.
Yeah, this is just crazy. My dad would do things like that all the time.
There was once that he demanded I tell him why I was angry at time. I wasn’t angry and said that so he started to beat me. He used to lift me up by grabbing my (short) hair and shaking, and it was terrifying. I was so scared and thought I would die whenever he would.
So, naturally, I agreed with him that I was angry, but that wasn’t good enough. I had to tell him why I had been angry.
It turns out, that I was supposed to be angry at him because he had corrected me the day before, and he was really upset about it, because he was in the position off responsibility for the family, as commanded by God. By getting angry and not submitting to him, I was endangering all of humanity, so something like that.
Funny thing was that he hadn’t corrected me the day before. He had just imagined it, like he did with so many other things.
Something interesting happened today. We have a high school girl doing a homestay with use for a couple of months.
She’s been here for about three weeks, and is opening up more and more. Sweet girl.
Anyway, she was telling us today about her homelife and it’s absolutely insane. Just crazy. Her mother is batshit nuts.
The part that did make me understand something was that while she was talking, there still was a part of me that was wondering if it really was that bad, or if she’s exaggerating.
this is despite me having grown up in such an abusive household.
It helped me better understand why other people didn’t intervene.
Of course, I didn’t tell her about my questions, and since we are on the other side of the world, there isn’t much we can do, other than be sympathetic. She does have resources and is working on becoming independent.
My parents were damn near perfect. One sister was pretty screwed up but I was too young to tell if they did anything wrong. I suspect not. The other three of us didn’t turn out like that. I suspect she had something like ODD.
They didn’t buy that house at the shore that was cheap at the time but would now be worth a lot.
Dad made the mistake of dying too young. I had just barely made it into my 20s and could have used his wisdom.
In her old age mom in some ways turned into her mother. It would have been a lot easier to help her if she wasn’t so stubborn.
They both probably coddled my brother too much. I suspect he has ASD but he graduated college and has always worked. His social awkwardness has led him to have a very lonely isolated life.
Without going into my own life story, I watched “The Last Showgirl” last night and it related to me.
Pamela Anderson plays a 57 year old showgirl in the last 2 weeks of the last “Showgirl” type show in Vegas. It’s a decent movie.
What related to me was that she has a somewhat estranged daughter. The common “I did the best I could in my situation “ excuse was dismissed by the daughter. We also learn other things about the relationship.
That’s where I’m at with my mom. Alcoholic Dad died 30 yrs ago.
I’ve rejected the “well I made mistakes”. “I tried”. “I didn’t know” excuses and let a toxic person out of my life. The fact that she still behaves the same way as when I was twelve, like the last Showgirl, just made the decision easier.
My mom didn’t drink much but when she did the truth would come out. One day after some wine she said the only reason she got married and had kids was because she felt like she had to. So I guess my sister and me existing was her worst mistake.
When I dropped out of track and my grades went from almost all A’s to barely passing, my parents gave me a lot of shit about it.
But they never asked me why…
I really think my mom should have just gotten a job.
She spent our entire childhoods complaining about how much she wanted to divorce our father but never actually went through with it. She was essentially a bored housewife who for some reason thought everybody else (her husband and us kids included) were all dragging her down and preventing her from attaining “true happiness” which just happened to be drinking alcohol all day and getting into fights with literally anybody within arms reach.
My father made enough money so she wouldn’t have to work, but this turned out to be a super bad decision because it meant she now had unlimited free time and meant she could pursue all her hobbies of sleeping in every single day until 2pm, drinking hard, and then getting into fights with random people at the supermarket. If she had just had a job she wouldn’t have to do any of this. She was a bored housewife who made her own entertainment much to the detriment of everyone around her. When she was in jail or on her court mandated community service we did find out she could function in the real world just fine, she just chose not too because she didn’t have too.