No sane (maybe I should say *polite * or properly socialized) person intentionally & constantly dumps on the person who’s just there without apologizing. For those of you who doubt, consider what you would think of a co-worker who did it.
Sure, everybody dumps occasionally, but to have one easy target who’s someone who can’t get away is just wrong. If you mother cannot see this, then she needs a boot to the head.
laina_f: Okay, I see what you mean!
TD’sG: Thank you; I just wanted to be sure. …You know, I think the first bully I ever met was my mom…
Yes, that’s the secret.
My mom is a good sort but she’s kind of clueless and has had some messed up ideas. She was worse when we were younger but she’s a lot better now.
One thing she did when we were growing up was focus on what she thought we should be, and discourage anything and everything else that we did. She also had a way to bring down any accomplishment that we did. So we got a good grade? That’s nice, but we need to spend more time at church. So we have a talent. That’s nice, but really, we are wasting our time because we ought to be focusing on this other talent. No matter how well we did, she’d find a way to indicate that it wasn’t good enough.
She did this because she was afraid we’d get “swelled heads” or something. It was screwed up.
This is not to say that she treated us like losers—not at all. She somehow managed to leave the message that we were all pretty, smart, accomplished girls—or at least we could be. It was just that we weren’t spending our time or using our talents properly.
It was useless trying to get a genuine compliment or a genuine expression of approval from her. Her expressions of approval were always marred by, “But I wish you’d spend more time doing this instead . . .” Or, "But it would have been so much nicer if you did it this other way . . . " Argh!
Anyway, she’s much better now. Not completely cured, but much better now. Something snapped in her and she finally got a clue. I remember when she first started to give genuine compliments I was shocked and asked, “Who are you and what have you done with my mother?” It was truly bizarre.
So, this long, drawn-out ramble is brought up for this reason: laina_f’s post reminded me of something that my sisters and I had to do when we were quite young—give up trying to pin hopes on our mom really approving. One of my sisters even wrote an essay about it in high school. We found it years later, among my dad’s stuff. My sister wrote that for a long time she tried to gain our mother’s approval by doing these different things that she believed would please our mother. When it became clear that nothing was ever going to 100% please our mom, my sister gave up and just focused on making our dad proud. (Unlike our mom, our dad was capable of unconditional approval.) That’s sort of the conclusion I came to as well, though of course I kept on hoping that our mom would come around.
I remember when I was 14 and was seriously getting into art, my mom bitched and bitched about me “wasting paper.” She was pretty horrible about it in a lot of ways. One day I decided to “give up art” because she was making things so depressing for me. But as I was putting all my art supplies away in the garage (never to be used again) I realized that my mom wouldn’t notice, wouldn’t care, that nobody would care, and all it would do would make me miserable. So what was the point? So I quietly took my art stuff back inside and never contemplated giving up art again. I still hoped to gain her approval but I knew that I didn’t have to have it.
Sorry for the ramble. I guess my point is the same as laina_f’s—you’ve got to give up hoping they’ll change. Either they will or they won’t, but there’s nothing you can do so, hey. Screw it.
The rich handsome husband and I, while simultaneously serving as missionaries in a heathen land, remodelled my mother’s home into a mansion, where we all live. She didn’t want to move and would’ve been uncomfortable living in someone else’s house. For the good of everyone, my father agreed to pass away with a minimum of fuss. We got the city to reroute all traffic within half a mile of my mother’s house because the street had become too busy for her over the years. We cut down all trees on the property because she just doesn’t like trees.
There was a bit of a problem about keeping the mansion immaculate. I’m too incompetent to clean house, and I don’t do it right. Mom would be happy to do it, but she has a tendency to get very resentful about it and occasionally throws a big tantrum, especially around the holidays. Mom doesn’t want servants (no reason, she just doesn’t) and anyway, they wouldn’t do it right. We solved the problem by getting robots. The robots respond only to Mom’s voice.
We’re still having a small problem getting the basic structure of the universe altered so that Mom is always right. We tried just believing that she is always right, but things had a way of going awry when her will was carried out to the letter. No, the universe must change, back to its perfect condition, the way it was before people like me screwed it up.