If you feel like sharing more, we’re all ears.
Or did I miss an earlier post?
Thanks, but I pay a wonderful woman a whole lot of money to share those horrors, and to help understand that it wasn’t my fault that my parents didn’t create a safe place for me to share with them at the time.
To a degree, I think the social construct of a loving parent/child relationship is something we accept.
When the reality that some people suck at parenting hits us, well shit happens. Gotta move on.
Tell that to the “women gotta have more babies” GOP.
Anyone can become a parent. Yet you need a license to sell real estate.
Keanu Reeves’ character Tod in the movie Parenthood said, “You need a license to buy a dog, or drive a car. Hell, you need a license to catch a fish! But they’ll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father.”
Financial literacy. Mostly because they didn’t have any. Dad had trouble keeping a job, and the one’s he had didn’t pay much. Mom was the bread winner, but was a spender. We were the typical lower middle-class family. Sometimes choosing which utility got paid that month, and hoping the other wouldn’t be shut off; which sometimes they were.
My older brother taught himself when he graduated college. He was determined not to repeat our parents’ mistakes. I took a little while longer for my oldest brother and me. We’re all on pretty good footing now, thankfully.
[hugs]
“Gotta move on” is a pretty staggering dismissal of the difficulties in doing so if you don’t have a good upbringing.
That’s just how I dealt with it. It was a personal statement.
It’s hard to take someone seriously when they make an excuse like this if they are doing the exact same shit they have always done.
Also, in my Mom’s case, I told her what she was doing at the time she was doing it, so I’m not giving her a pass for the “I didn’t know any better” spiel.
I was left to my own devices a lot as a child and watched tv a lot. All those happy funny families! They had their little problems, but everything was resolved with loving hugs all 'round at the end. I truly believed things like mothers would be kind and understanding when their daughters started navigating the bumpy road to love. I came home crying because my high school boyfriend dumped me, and instead of getting a hug, I got a swat on the back of the head, told to knock it off, and he was a stupid loser who only wanted to ‘get into my pants’…I believed when I got engaged, it was up to the bride’s parents to invite the groom’s parents over for dinner and discussion about the wedding! My GOD, what a fool I was!
All of those things seem perfectly reasonable to me too.
To me, too. I mean , I guess I might not think it was so reasonable depending on exactly what
means .There’s a big difference between a net worth of a million dollars and a net worth of ten million. Or if there was a different set of examples - for example, she wouldn’t buy a condo/house because it was cheaper to stay in her dilapidated , roach-infested rent controlled apartment or if she complained about the conditions in coach but wouldn’t pay for business. But as the post was written, it seems like she just values things differently than her brother does - that doesn’t make it pathological.
Betrayal of trust for me. When I was young, in elementary school, I was bullied a lot and also had a teacher that I didn’t like, contributing to an overall complete dislike of my school day. Many times my mother probed for what was wrong and, after her promising complete confidentiality, would always betray that confidence and report my feelings back to the teachers, parents, principal, etc. This resulted a few times in even worse bullying, a teacher singling me out as troublesome and resenting me, and others losing trust in me by implication. Even at-home or family issues she would promise trust and confidentiality, and then discuss and gossip about it to others at large.
The result of this is that by about 10 years old or so, I had completely lost any trust in my mother and totally locked down any and all sharing of feelings or experiences since I knew they would just be gossip fodder or worse. Hopes, dreams, loves, fears, aspirations…none of it was shared with mom, only with other friends, aunts, teachers, etc that I actually had emotional trust in. I had long-term girlfriends, friends, jobs, travels, that my mom didn’t ever even know about. To this day, I reflexively don’t share anything specifically with her and have to force myself to at least small-talk to her about the safe mundane things in life.
- Marrying and having kids as late as they did. Mom was 42, Dad was 66.
- Denying to themselves (and us) that there would be problems down the road with having kids so late.
Very true.
You know the adage “when I was 15, I thought my parents were dumb. But when I was 25, I realized how smart they were”?
Well, that doesn’t apply to everybody. People at the low end of the scale for intelligence (and character, good habits, etc.) can have kids too.
Overall I think my parents did a pretty good job, and we have a good relationship today. But I do have some points to raise…
My parents always talked about what an “easy” kid I was; in retrospect, they could have worked a little harder. It was convenient for them that I didn’t make many demands and mostly preferred to stay in my room reading comic books (and, starting around age twelve, smoking lots of weed).
I was severely introverted and nerdy and bullied a lot (I know this is very atypical for SDMB members). They were always very sympathetic, but never really did anything to help. I see now how hard my wife works to make sure our son has good friends. Stuff like reaching out to other parents to arrange playdates, offering to take him and his friends on outings, making sure the house is always stocked with snacks so kids will want to hang out here. I had no idea there were parents who did that stuff.
I can’t really blame them for not getting me into treatment as a teenager; in retrospect, I was clearly depressed and had severe ADD. But mental health treatment, especially for kids, just wasn’t really part of the culture back then, at least in our social strata. It probably wasn’t a great choice for them to basically give up on trying to stop me smoking weed when I was about fourteen. OTOH, if they’d tried it would have been a huge power struggle and I might well have been stupid enough to run away from home, and then God knows what might have become of me.
They took no interest at all in my college application process, leaving me to handle the whole thing myself, which didn’t go super well because, y’know, ADD and weed. I wound up going to the local State school, which worked out fine, but I probably could have gotten into someplace better with a little guidance and supervision.
Not aborting me.