To be succinct and private… My incubator worked me for weeks to build rapport and trust with me in my younger days, to get me to tell her a something that she would ultimately, and immediately use and weaponize against me and others.
This wasnt the first time I tried to have a relationship with her, but it did finally open my eyes and become the last. In the many many decades since, I’ve not so much as acknowledge her existence when crossing paths.
My mom told me that she heard my soon-to-be-wife say some really horrible things about her and my kids behind my back.
Whatever she thought that would accomplish didn’t work, because I had already told my wife to start recording her interactions with my mom. (Clearly not my first rodeo)
Mom wasn’t real happy when I told her I’d listen to the audio.
That is utterly evil (in the everyday sense). Glad you were prepped for that, but I’m very sorry that you’ve had life experiences that taught you it was necessary.
I still don’t know what Mom’s problem was with her, not that I even care. Before that point, they would each text me “You won’t believe what she said to me!”. I was stick on the middle trying to figure out what really happened, but something my mom said didn’t match with a major detail that she didn’t know about my wife’s past, so I had a feeling she was the one causing the shenanigans. That’s when I suggested the recordings.
what Mom’s problem was with her
She competed for your attention
I wouldn’t doubt it.
I have to ask.
If your moms such a piece of shit, why is your solution to your wife “make sure to record every interaction” instead of “Lets just stop dealing with this bitch”
Definitely a fair question.
We all lived in the same house at the time, and Mom’s name was on the deed, so up until that point we were walking on eggshells to keep things civil until other arrangements were in place.
Ah, thats fair then. Sometimes you do have to make sacrifices like that, as you make your preparations for the future.
This one may seem silly compared to the things I’ve read.
My parents gave me a strange eating disorder that it took a while to get over.
Mom refused to accept that there were foods or perhaps ingredients that I was either unwilling or unable to eat. As an example, Onions are horrible and they literally make me sick, whether its whole chunks of onion or powdered onion. But she kept sneaking onion into stuff she made because she just knew I’d like them if I just tried them! It wasn’t a matter of “like” it was the fact that if I ate some I’d end up doing a technicolor yodel over the toilet while she told me I was being dramatic. Sometimes if I was really unlucky I wouldn’t make it to the toilet which would make her even madder. So Id get spanked after puking.
This caused me to be really mistrustful of food that I didn’t prepare myself. I also had problems eating in front of other people, because mom (both parents really) would get upset over how I was eating, and it took me until I was in my 30’s before I was comfortable eating with other people around. Which did wonders for my social life in my 20’s.
Your mother feeding you food that makes you vomit, then beating you for vomiting, isnt silly my dude…
Yeah that occoured to me after I typed it all out. ☹️
Called my partner a gold digging whore (hilarious, considering she was earning 3x as much as I was at the time) and outright said I should marry the woman (daughter of a family friend) that they liked for me and keep my partner around as a side piece because “a real man knows how to make everyone happy”.
I don’t speak to them any more.
“The girl you like is a whore, you’d be much better marrying this girl instead, and fucking other women, you know, like a whore, but a good one”
What stellar logic they have.
During covid my dad would not wear a mask willingly.
It shattered my perception of him, that probably will not ever go back to what it was.
Covid and MAGA/Trumpism broke a lot of families, sadly.
So many good people who became permanently twisted into the nastiest of creatures.
I already had a rocky relationship with my dad after he made some questionable statements concerning COVID, but there are 2 distinct memories that just keep popping up.
No 1 was him helping me move into my own apartment while my maternal grandfather was dying in the hospital. We were talking about vaccinations (a requirement to visit patients) and how me and my brother got one, he started tearing up and said something about how kids shouldn’t die before their parents, how egotistical we were for getting vaccinated, and how we’ll die in 2 years.
No 2 was a few years later, we were standing on the sidewalk after having watched a movie, and someone had hung a pride flag from their balcony across the street. And while I’m not part of the LGBTQ community, I have good friends that are, and am firmly of the opinion that people should be allowed to do who and whatever they want to, as long as everyone involved consents. However, my dad apparently felt important enough to complain about how that’s just “gay propaganda” and how he “isn’t against it but they shouldn’t force it into everyone’s face” and so on.
My guy, it’s a flag. On a balcony. On the 4th fucking floor!? Chill out.And yet motherfuckers are still allowed to hang a Confederate battle flag off of their house and nobody burns their shit down. So yeah, I don’t want to hear anyone’s whining about a pride flag.
Refused to acknowledge cystic fibrosis is actually a real difficult struggle that I needed help and support with
Calling me heretic and deviant in my early teens, Getting enormously angry when I try to challenge their viewpoints (once they said that even if we are wrong, you have to say that we are right, upon which I remained silent and they get angry), Being against other religions and ideologies, mocking them and calling LGBTQ+ a mental illness (luckily, I did not come out to them), Being angry and thinking I am arrogant if I choose not to talk to them and to be in my own space, Forcing me to eat and drink a lot more than I want, Comparing and belittling me yet still saying “We love you”, Not letting me go outside and now they complain why I don’t go outside, Always saying, “We did not even beat you or did anything physical. We give you so much comfort but you disappointed us, you pimp, dog, bastard”, Saying I am not masculine just cuz I am extremely careful not to neglect my sunscreen, I get sick here and now and so I trust medicine over the pseudoscientific remedies, and many other things which made me lost trust in them and entire humanity and even myself sometimes. I will not forgive them.
My dad was a rush limbaugh guy in the 90’s then moved to info wars, my mother who he married when she was 16 dotes on him due to his history of being abused as a child, so my dad never grew up, never learned any hard lessons, and she never made anything of herself but to be his voice box when I refused to debate him on politics.
My mom then only called to relay her struggles, or to nudge me on politics, I would call her on holidays and gift them lavishly with my nice IT job, especially after my dad was forced into retirement during Covid.
Anytime I mentioned a challenge in my life they would turn it around and tell me how they had it worse, when I told them good news, it barely registered.
The last straw was when she called me just before the last presidential election to strongarm me into voting for Trump. She crossed a line and I hung up. Haven’t talked since, and finally have peace in my life, well some peace anyway.
Despite countless requests to not, they sent me to a parochial school where I was physically and sexually abused.
Cheated on my mom with a vile woman who had vile children (most much older than me) Let her push my sister and I around and eventually away. Stood there and did nothing while her entire family belittled and emotionally abused my sister on a near daily basis and had the balls to ask us why we don’t reach out to him. There is a lot but that’s the tldr.
Neglect stories… I’ve got a few.
From the time I was six or seven she tried to reason with me (with +3-hr scoldings) and get me to change to her christo-Amway of thinking up till I was 16. Than I has a choice: knuckle under or get out. Being 16 and full of great, well thought out plans I left with three garbage bags of winter wear and clothes. Yes, she and him (my father) agreed that the decision to leave was my own to make. At sixteen.
Fast forward to me being 62. She lies dying in a home, and forgives me as her final act of charity. Yeah, ok, so buh-bye.
And him? Dementia. Game. Set. Match.
Treat your children as precious (if temporarily irritating) treasures and remember you only get to throw them away once.
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entering my flat multiple times without my consent/knowledge and not leaving when asked to (thanks for the 3h meltdown where I was completly locked inside my brain and couldnt do anything but repeat a few words over and over and rock back and forth on the couch, really liked that one)
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ignoring obvious signs of mental/neurological issues in their child (because somehow children cant have those??)
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treating our relationship as something transactional
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forcing me to do activities i really dont want to, trying to argue away my fears and thinking they “won” after i shut up
I might talk to them again if they write a letter apologizing for atleast something. I havent told them this and i realise that its kind of unfair to set a condition that the other party doesnt know about, but if they dont come to this conclusion themselves then it doesnt feel genuine to me. It really sucks because I have no other people to rely on (emotional and material) but it also kind of was like that before I stopped talking to them, because every favour needs to be repaid or might be used in an argument against me and every fear and concern is argued away.
edit: oh and i realise that some of this is my fault because i really am sometimes difficult to deal with and very stubborn and i try to take responsibility, but at the same time it often feels like I have to work with both of my hands tied behind my back and I wasnt given the tools as a child to do better.
None of its your fault, bro.
Its all theirs for their failure to get you the help you needed much earlier in life, and for being domineering shitbags.
You owe them nothing.
Thats very nice of you to say but I often think of them more as ill-equipped and overwhelmed. I dont hate them and I understand its really hard to reflect on your arguments if your opponent is a literal child who doesnt know better and is dependant on you. Ironicly I sometimes think the people who dont want children, because they are afraid of doing something wrong, would be the best parents but whatever.
they would 100% be better parents, because they are already so concerned about the childs welfare that they are terrified of harming it.
unlike pieces of shit like the parents being talked about here.
I understand that you need to vent and I dont know if you are talking about my parents or yours or just the thread in general, but just in case please dont call my parents that. they are very flawed people yes and they didnt do what they should have, but I havent written everything in my first post and for all you know I could be lying (conciously or subconciously). They tried (maybe their best) but it wasnt enough. Sometimes it just doesnt work out. It just sucks that you, I and the other people in this thread in similar situations have to deal with the fallout.
None of its your fault, bro.
But you don’t know this.
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I’m reading this at the moment. It sounds like you might have active abuse rather than detached neglect (which I believe is also abuse).
This stuff impacts us and those around us in the future. From personal experience it’s well worth talking to a pro about it.
She got drunk and was crying about her regret about not aborting me. She came from a larger family and wanted more kids than she ended up having, but my dad’s personal limit was 2-3 kids — and kid number three was only to try for a daughter if kid number 2 ended up being another boy. Me being a girl meant that she could only have two kids, and the fact that I was pretty fucked up means that she felt like she’d “wasted” a kid on me, so to speak
I don’t blame my mum for having these thoughts, as awful as they may be. At the time, I had not long since been diagnosed with autism, and my mental health was pretty awful too, which must’ve been a lot of stress for a parent to handle. What I do blame her for is being deeply depressed and having her teenage daughter be her primary (and basically only) emotional outlet.
Whilst I am theoretically open to having a relationship with her in future, if she ever got sober (though that seems unlikely I’d learn of her being sober, as I went No Contact with her years ago), I’ll never be able to forget how much she hurt me. She wasn’t the root cause of my mental health problems, but she certainly made them a hell of a lot worse. And given that she never remembered the stuff she said when she was this drunk, I’ll never get the closure of a genuine apology.
What’s especially tragic about my mum is that she’s actually pretty well adjusted, considering the awful childhood she had. The main thing she wanted from life was to be a mum, and to do a better job than her own mum had. I do think she achieved that, and there are so many things that I feel appreciative of her for. Unfortunately, no amount of good can make up for the hurt that she caused when she’d get drunk and pile her grief onto me. Most of the time her drunken tears were far less hurtful, but it’s still a heavy burden to put on an already struggling teenager.
It’s a shame, because I think she could’ve been an incredible parent if she’d been able to get therapy in the few years after she moved out but before she fell pregnant.
he main thing she wanted from life was to be a mum, and to do a better job than her own mum had. I do think she achieved that
How fucking awful was her mom, if she achieved being better with how you were treated to emotional incest and bearing the brunt of drunken grief bombing.
It’s weird because like my mom was a pretty terrible mom and yet because I know how evil my grandmother is like she actually did succeed at being a better mother than her own mother.
Just the bar was so low that going up three or four notches was still deeply in the bowels of hell.
Like the only thing that separates my mom from being a good mom was her own psychological issues stemming from having been raised by her mother.
If she had been able to find a good man and hold on to him to fill in the gap between what she had and what she lacked, she would have been a great mom.
For instance, my dad was a pretty good man. But he wasn’t white, and so my grandparents conspired together to get my mom to separate from him and isolate her, which then led to her cheating on my dad and getting pregnant with my little sister, so she had to divorce my dad because of the shame of her own actions.
My dad was in the military and my mom got pregnant with me while they were stationed in Germany and my grandparents used the idea of me needing to be born in America to get her to come back to America.
His deployment didn’t end until just before my first birthday. He got back and was immediately served divorce paperwork, and while the divorce was going on, my mom gave birth to my little sister, who is just slightly more than a year younger than me.
The really sad thing is, is my dad still loved her and probably would have figured out a way to make it work and to forgive her if she had tried, but she didn’t try, she absolutely rejected him and he carried the emotional pain of that for the rest of his life.
When my mum was a child, when she wet the bed, she had her nose rubbed in it, like a dog.
Her step dad used to get her half siblings to restrain her arms as one of them beat her up.
When still a child herself, she was made responsible for the wellbeing of multiple of her very young siblings, necessitating her teaching her younger brother to help her shoplift food if they wanted to eat anything before their evening meal.
The thing is with my mum is that the good times were very good, and on average, she was still pretty decent — and that’s with awful things like the emotional abusive dragging down that average. As much as I still feel hurt over what she put me through, I also feel a like of sympathy for her. She tried to be better than what she had, and whilst she did succeed in that, that says as much about the extremely low bad as it does about the good she achieved as a parent.
I heard him shout to someone else that he didn’t care about me or my siblings. Today, the feeling is mutual.
