You god damned selfish bitch.

The BBQ Pit
1

So we were talking about that For Better or For Worse storyline, about Mike sulking until Weed gave Ned back to him. You said the same thing you said before, about “first right of refusal” on something you gave away. Heads up, bitch: when you give something away, it’s not yours any more.

So I ask if this means that she really was mad that I gave Sean those barstools. Heavens, no! you say. They were cheap! Whatever that has to do with anything. But you have a better example. Rosaline was giving stuff away after Aunt Rosie died, and it was right and proper for her to offer back the Lladro you gave to her. Of course you didn’t want it, and you didn’t accept it, but clearly, she owed it to you to offer to return your gift before she gave it to Valerie.

So I ask if the same applies to The Pasta Maker. Oh, that was a long time ago. Besides, Cindy has it now.

“Well, I hope she’s happy. The way you two were frothing at the mouth about it.”

“We were?”

“You were screaming and yelling and cursing Grammy all the way back home. You almost had a wreck on the highway.”

“Well, Grammy didn’t need the pasta maker!”

“And you didn’t need to scream at me. I was trying to get you to calm—”

“We were upset!”

“You screamed at me for no good reason.”

“Well, of course! You were at the end of the line!”

“It really made me feel good. It was really fair to take it out on me—something I had absolutely nothing to do with. I could just feel the love in that car.”

“Oh, what difference does it make?”

“A lot.”

“Well, you’re not perfect yourself. Oh, I don’t want to talk about this any more!”

You god damned selfish bitch. You scarred me for fucking life, do you realize that? And you think that’s just the way it had to be, because I was eleven? You don’t love me at all, is that it? Kids are just there to dump on? To vent over a god damned fucking pasta maker? That was worth it?

You realize that it wasn’t just the Pasta Maker Incident, but that whole summer, when you and Cindy treated me like I wasn’t even related to you? Like I had invited myself, TO MY OWN HOME, such as it was, and you couldn’t understand why I didn’t get the hint and leave? And it wasn’t just any summer: it was the summer before grade 6. Of course you don’t realize how crucial that year is socially, Miss Apple Blossom, but it is. So I started school still feeling utterly rejected, and thinking of myself as completely worthless, and guess what happened.

I swear to fucking god. If Dad called me right now and told me you’d keeled over unconscious, I would say…well, I don’t know what the fuck I’d say. But it wouldn’t be anything like “Oh, NO!”

You are the most self-centered bitch I’ve ever known. But fuck, what do I expect from someone who once called a “family conference” and didn’t allow anyone else to talk. Fuck you and your pasta maker. Or whosever the fuck it is.

2

I feel like I need a play by play to understand that, but I think the gist of it is: you hate your mom.

3

“He should be here.”

“He didn’t say for sure he’d come.”

“And if he doesn’t come?”

“We’ll come back tomorrow.”

“And then the day after tomorrow.”

“Did he say he’d bring the pasta maker? for Grammy?”

“Possibly.”

“Grammy doesn’t need a pasta maker.”

"Well – "

“And so on.”

"So we wait – "

“Until he comes.”

4

I thought Rilch hated her sister.

5

I don’t hate either of them. I’m just very, very upset right now. I’m going to have to come to terms with the fact that my mom STILL thinks it was okay to treat me like SHIT. Needless to say, this is not easy.

6

Wow, For Better or For Worse is getting really bizarre…

7

I hate my sister, she’s such a bitch.
She acts as if she doesn’t even know that I exist.
But I would do anything to let her know I care.
But I am only talking to myself ’cos she isn’t there.
…
She’s got a wall around her nobody can climb.
She lets her ladder down for those who really shine.
I tried to scale it, but to me she’s blind.
So I lit a firecracker, went off in my eye.
(Juliana Hatfield)

So you’re really upset right now because your sister made a comment about a cartoon strip and you drug out a bunch of ancient family history?
Normally you’re the voice of reason, Rilchiam, but either I don’t understand what happened, or you’re over-reacting a bit here.

Your sister didn’t scar you for life. Throughout time immemorial, older sisters have and their friends have been ignoring and tormenting younger sisters. Why didn’t you find your own friends? Why didn’t you find things to do that interested you? Why should your psychological well-being be so dependent on your sister’s behavior?

8

I kept reading and reading hoping that by the end it would make sense. Maybe I’m slow but I can’t make heads or tails out of it.

Haj

9

My mom made the comment. My sister wasn’t a participant in this discussion.

Can’t help it if I was reminded of the incident. That “first right of refusal” business pushed a button with me, because it’s inconsistent with my mom having told me “Once you give something away, it’s not yours any more.”

Why, thank you! :::blush:::

Well, I know my OP was ambiguous (to say the least), but people do that here: vent first and fill in the blanks later. Perhaps after I clarify, you’ll understand and won’t think I’m overreacting. Or perhaps not.

The incident with my sister and my mom scarred me. Picture this: We’re on the interstate after finding out Cindy wasn’t going to get the pasta maker. Maybe it wasn’t fair that Rosaline didn’t give it to her. But the two of them were screaming at the tops of their lungs, like guests on Jerry Springer, I’m not kidding, about how awful my grandma was and so on and so forth. They kept at it and kept at it, and I was getting scared, and very upset. Partly because it was just such an ugly scene, and partly because we were on the highway, for crissakes, and the way my mom was driving, she could very easily have swerved and killed all three of us, maybe others as well.

So I piped up to suggest that she pull over until they calm down. Unfortunately, I put it in the context of “maybe we should stop and get ice cream or something.” So as jacked up as they were, they probably heard it as, “I’m a spoiled brat and I want ice cream in the middle of a crisis.” Whether or not this was a crisis is, of course, subjective. But nothing justifies my mom looking over her shoulder at me and roaring that “We are very upset and we don’t want to hear anything from you unless you’re telling us that a train is coming across the tracks!!!”

My mom simply cannot control her emotions. This is but one example. But I’ll be amazed if anyone can claim, and back it up, that that wasn’t a horrible thing to witness, and that my mom wasn’t putting three lives in jeopardy. Over a fucking pasta maker. She did admit, at one point, “Of course, you probably wouldn’t have used it anyway…BUT IT’S THE PRINCIPLE OF THE THING!” Jeez, I can barely stand to hear that phrase because of this.

My sister is 17 years older than I am. It’s not the same dynamic as if we were 2-5 years apart. She didn’t ignore me because she was in middle school and wanted to hang out at the mall instead of playing Barbies with me. She didn’t torment me at all, either. Listen, I would love it if the worst memory I had of her was something like her stealing my favorite toy, or breaking something and telling our parents I’d done it. Instead, I get this unstable party animal who comes to visit every so often, totally monopolizes my mom, clashes with my dad so that he, too, takes it out on me, and acts as if I’m not even related to her.

And she was so glamorous to me. And the two of them seemed to have so much fun (when my dad wasn’t around). I wanted to be part of the Yahoo Sisterhood, and I was repeatedly told to get lost. And before anyone asks, I wasn’t interrupting them with non sequiturs. I’m talking about stuff like, they were talking about a TV show that I also watched, and I spoke up to say, “I remember that episode! They were—” “SHUT UP!”

I did have friends, but I’m not talking about my entire childhood; I’m talking about that crucial summer. We lived in a rural area. When school was out, I had phone friends; there were no kids in my community. So there’s my mom and my sister, watching videos together, drinking together, shopping together, and gossiping together. And I couldn’t be part of any of it. Yes, I realize that they couldn’t have included me 100% of the time. But they didn’t include me any of the time.

I did, but I had to do all of them alone. Look, this was all the family I had. I needed them. I needed to feel like I belonged. Instead, they made me an outsider in my own home.

At one point, my mom said, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.” But I don’t think they needed to drink every fucking night. And I don’t think my needs were so much less important. Or that they were impossible to meet. Like, I was old enough to Start Liking Boys, and I had some questions, like, “If a guy does this, does that mean he likes you or not?” God, the reaction I got…You would have thought that I’d taken a dump and asked them to inspect it. “We don’t have time for this!” Fuck you, too. (Them, not you.)

As I said in the OP, grade 6 is a crucial year, socially. That summer set a pattern for me: trying to get the attention of uppity bitches who thought I wasn’t worthy. If your own family rejects you, you’re not going to make it at school. Not that some people don’t wash out socially even if they do have stable families, but when you add in the fact that I didn’t have the two-doors-down kind of friends, I was doomed. (And there were some other Springeresque moments too, not just the scene in the car.)

But it’s not really my sister I’m mad at. I’m angry, today, because my mom STILL thinks she was justified in screaming at me simply because I was there. She has no concept of how she affects others. Nothing adds up, and nothing is ever the consequence of her actions.

10

I guess my family is disfunctional too. The OP made perfect sense to me.

I feel for your pain, Rilchiam, but it’s time to let it go. Talk to somebody, ok?

11

Rilchiam, there comes a time in every adult’s life when one must either accept the fact that their parents are not, and were never supposed to be, perfect, or just can the whole lot of it and check yourself into an asylum. I guess the same goes for your relationship with your sister.

I’m not talking about people that suffered abuse or severe neglect, by the way… those people need therapy to deal with the past.

My point being that, at the end of the day, what it comes down to is this: Either accept your family and love them for who they ARE, instead of being pissed at them for not being who you WANT them to be, or shut them out of your life and have no contact with them. Bringing up mistakes made in your childhood and dragging out the family drama during ‘together time’ doesn’t help anything or anybody. I second the grow up.

12

Oops. I was thinking of another thread when I wrote that last sentence. Sorry.

13

On preview: Okay: I was gonna say, “No one else has said it, so you can’t second it.” But since you did mention it, if you want to tell someone to grow up, tell it to my mom.

I just came here to vent. That’s what people do in the Pit. I’m ready to accept that my mom will never admit that a dog wouldn’t deserve the kind of treatment I got. But I’ll never categorize her behavior as simply “not perfect”. There are times when an observer would have said she belonged in an asylum.

I’m on okay terms with my sister. This is not about my sister. I mentioned her because she was a participant in the PMA; other people took that and ran with it. It’s about my mom. Cindy just followed her lead.

I was emotionally abused. For years. This is not the whole story by any means.

I can’t help wondering what your family was/is like. Probably highly functional, allowing for the fact that no family is 100% functional. That’s not an insult, BTW. Just that I’ve noticed people’s perceptions are usually based on their own experience. If the worst scene you’ve ever had with your parents is their blowing up because you got a bad report card (not applying that, specifically, to you), then it’s hard to imagine how bad someone else’s “bad” can be.

And it wasn’t just “a mistake”. And I didn’t bring it up during “together time”; it was a phone conversation. I didn’t plan on bringing this up; the discussion just led to it. And I changed the subject when she wanted to. Then I came here to vent.

So I’m venting. This person actually thinks it’s okay to scream at her youngest child, who was doing nothing wrong, because she needed a target and the child was there. Do not tell me that that’s acceptable. The only way I can deal with it is by forgetting, which I plan to do. But you’ll never get me to admit that that’s any kind of way to treat someone you supposedly love. But that’s just the way she is: objects are more important than people. If I had to choose between Mr. Rilch and anything that I own, of course it would be Mr. Rilch. But my mom just wants to have the most things when she dies.

14

Well, since you asked- MY childhood was so terrible that I would’ve gladly sacrificed an arm to have a summer of being yelled at to bitch about. My father molested me (more than once), broke my nose, screamed in my face for hours at a time, made me wear underwear on my head to school once, and beat my mom regularly.
My mom worked second shift to avoid being home when my dad and us kids were home at the same time.
I gave dear old dad the boot from my life several years ago and went through therapy. Still working on forgiving good ol’ mom, and that’s how I know that the way to deal is either DEAL with it and let it go or get out of their lives. Your emotions and reactions to your childhood is actually YOUR problem, not theirs. Get help to deal with it and let them live their lives. They’ll answer to somebody some day, or not; you can only be responsible for yourself.

15

Well, I’m sorry to hear that you had it like that.

16

I didn’t mean to sound like a bitch, I’m just trying to say: yeah, I know how bad things can be between kids and parents, and I’m not condoning bad behavior or abuse, but you either have to deal with it on your own or stop communicating with them. Dragging it out for years, making accusations that they follow with denial or excuses, fighting and tears, it does no good. People that act like that aren’t going to suddenly come to their senses and realize that they’ve wronged you all this time. It’s just not going to happen. The only way it can be worked out for you is within yourself, and one day I’m sure you’ll understand what that really means.

17

Hey, I didn’t say you did. You seem to be well-adjusted, so whatever you did must have worked/must be working.

Okay then.

Good point.

You mean, “Someday, you’ll have children of your own”? :wink:

18

Rilchiam, I fully support your right, and need to vent. The problem (or maybe it isn’t a problem, maybe it’s an advantage) is that venting sometimes exposes things to other people that we are unaware of or are aware of, but didn’t intend to expose.

The advice given in this thread (I know you didn’t ask for advice, but you’ve got it anyway - for free!) is the same as would be given to anyone in similar circumstances, whether they had had a childhood like trublmakr (and I sincerely hope that they are few), or one like mine, where loving, well-meaning parents still managed to do things that have a lasting, negative effect.

Your mother is unlikely to change. It is very sad for her that she values material things more than human relationships, but that’s the way it is. All you can do is accept this, and try (easier said than done) not to let it trip your switch. Whoever said that we aare all responsible for our adult selves is right: either we can allow ourselves to be dragged down by emotional baggage, or we can make a decision to be responsible for outr own happiness, and refuse to allow ourselves to be affected by other people’s treatment of us. In the words of the immortal Philip Larkin:

They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad

I hope you don’t feel that people are jumping on your case unnecessarily, because I don’t think that is the intention.

19

No, I don’t think that. I wouldn’t disagree with anyone who thinks I need to move on; I know I do.

But I just hope there isn’t anyone here who agrees with my mom, that she was right to behave as she did. I mean, I hope none of the people who are telling me to get over it are thinking, consciously or subconsciously, “Oh, that doesn’t sound like that big a deal. I’ve done the same thing to my kids: vented on them when there was no one else to dump on! Doesn’t everyone do it?”

I’m on my way out the door now, so I’ll just add that I’m not trying to provoke anyone by saying that. I’ll respond to any responses when I return this evening.

20

I too have pitted my mom, who at 82 continues to let me know that I’m not at all the daughter she wanted, that I am incompetent at everything, and that she is always right. What I know most of the time, as I’m sure you do, is that Mom ain’t gonna change and that if you let her hurt you, the only person that hurts is you. No one is defending your mother; people are just stating the hard reality that the only one who can stop you from feeling bad is you.

I once attempted to make a list of what I’d have to be like to make my mother happy. It didn’t take long for me to realize that it was an impossible task, and it actually became funny. For example, I would have to be a fundamentalist (like her) and be a missionary, but simultaneously I would have to be beautiful, vivacious, charming and popular. I would have a rich handsome husband (the missionary!) who would flirt with Mom and fawn all over her and make her feel like a fantasy princess, since her own husband doesn’t. Desite our missionary career, the husband and I would have a big beautiful house where Mom would spend a great deal of time, and we would entertain her constantly (how I don’t know because she doesn’t like anything). Most importantly, in the midst of all this, Mom (not me) would be the shining star and the constant center of attention.

Once I realized the impossibility of ever pleasing Mom, I felt a lot better and could get on with the business of trying to please myself.