<p>To those of you with the truly awful, and mentally ill moms, I send a particular post-Mother’s Day salute. How on earth did you know what to do next? By what compass did you set your mothering boat?</p>
<p>My mom? Is she perfect? Gosh no. She is needy and anxious and likes to be the center of attention. She has terrible self-esteem. But she is warm, and loving, and wildly generous, and productive, and active, and would always do her best for her kids, and for society, really. And absolutely dedicated every bit of her skills to being the best possible mother. Although my father left her eventually for another woman, she has remarried since for a >20-year marriage to a man who thinks she is a great prize.</p>
<p>I feel guilty I don’t like her more. We were brought up so differently. She, a Smithie in the '50s, raised to marry well. Stay at home mom. Looked down on by my dad. Me, sent off to the Ivies in the first 5 years of co-education, an MBA, a stint in sales, traveled alone through Asia, far more testosterone in my blood, or so it seems on the surface. So I have seen the world very differently than she did. And yet, I have only lately come to realize how very similar we are, in temperament, in constitution. Now I do my best to treat her very well. She deserves it, whether or not I would choose her at this point as my closest friend.</p>
<p>Sounds like my step-mother…gee, some people have to put down others in order to make themselves feel more important. My step-mother was oh so fond of saying to me " for a smart one, you sure are dumb" ;you can guess that I got out of dodge as soon as I could, at eighteen, and went off to Barnard… She however, never finished high school…so I guess it was some fear flung as a negative at me…</p>
<p>Still to this day, I see the effects of her comments though…I can only swear each day to be a better parent than she was…</p>
<p>Suzy (great name! It’s mine too)
your mom’s jealousy issues are like my own mom’s (although not as severe). For example, if I cooked a fabulous meal she’d say something like “oh, I’ve made that before” which was hard for me not to laugh at because she rarely cooks, hates to cook, and frankly is not as good of a cook as I am. But who cares? There are things she is better at than I am. She just can’t stand the fact that there are things I am better at than she. Whatever.</p>
<p>Well, since this is a yes/no question, I will be the one who says “no”.</p>
<p>My mom is not perfect. She was frequently badtempered and inpatient when we were growing up. My sister, who has fairly severe psychological problems, wishes Mom had realized earlier she was in trouble.</p>
<p>But—Sis and I both realize the important thing–Mom did the best she did in impossible circumstances. Dad was in and out of jobs, alcoholic, irascible, then dead, leaving her with three kids to finish bringing up on her own. She worked full time, commuted hours each way, but kept our house when we were in danger of losing it, and kept us fed, and warm, and loved, even if it was seldom vocalized.</p>
<p>It wasn’t till she was older that she was finally able to take a breath and enjoy life for itself. I would never hold against her her mom-imperfections, and I hope my kids give me the same leeway when I am old.</p>
<p>I have to say that I am shocked that so many CCers grew up with such unappealing mothers. I guess I’m like Mary in TN–I always feel like I’m the only one. I’m so envious of people who had loving parents. And I wish that my mother had been a stepmother, as it would have explained a lot.</p>
<p>To answer the question of how it’s possible to overcome this and be a good mother–my theory revolves around my grandparents. My mother’s parents, ironically, babysat for us because my mother worked until I was about eleven. My grandparents were very gentle and loving. How on earth did they produce two such children? Because my mother’s brother is a truly awful father as well. Go figure. </p>
<p>The funny thing is that I have adored motherhood since the moment that baby girl popped out nearly twenty years ago. Geez–what’s not to like? Even when I was swamped with work and commuting, she was a darling little doll and every moment was a gift. It was a tremendous leap of faith to get pregnant, given my parents’ repetitive, negative message about the horrors of marriage and parenthood. I suppose we are all examples of the resilience of the human spirit.</p>
<p>This is such a sad thread. My sympathies to all who have shared their stories.</p>
<p>I would have to say no, in answer to the original question. My parents both died of cancer 15 years ago, within three months of one another. It was devastating. While they certainly weren’t perfect, they did the best they could with the resources they had. They immigrated to the US with 3 children and one on the way, and had my little sister a few years later. My father worked in a job he hated for 25 years to support us, and my mom did everything she could to help us achieve an education, and to “better” ourselves in the world. She never lost her sense of humor, through some truly horrible times, and could always find a dollar to give to someone else who needed it more. My friends, and many of my siblings friends, would confide in her. She loved children insanely, and was happiest when just watching the grandkids play. I miss her every day of my life.</p>
<p>95% of the time she is a living doll, an inspiration.</p>
<p>5% of the time I could throttle her. Most of our conflict is about my success. She cannot reconcile it in her book. It’s tough to be fundamentally misunderstood by your own mother. Not like dire poverty tough–but worth a vent or two tough. Unconditional love. Find it in your heart and give it to your kids. I would have loved a bit of that as I was coming up–but had to wait until I met DH to get it. I still cannot get over how much that man loves me.</p>
<p>I sidestep the conflict with my mohter–if I see it coming. We’re close but I’m on guard.</p>
<p>My mother has been mentally ill for most of my life. I didn’t grow up with her. I cannot imagine how messed up I would be if I had. We still talk on the phone (not about anything that matters), and she sends me stuff. Sometimes she sends normal things, other times, just really odd things, you never know what is going to appear in the mailbox. She didn’t choose to be this way, so I do what I can, talk to her on the phone and tell her I love her. It’s not much, but I can’t be more involved than that, it’s just too hard, and I don’t have the mental toughness to be more involved.</p>
<p>Alumother, you asked how did those of us with truly awful mothers know what to do next. I think for me, I just wanted my children to have what I did not have: kindness. A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to see the Dalai Lama. He repeated a Tibetan proverb: Home is where you are happy and parents are those who are kind to you. I got home and I sent the proverb to all three of my kids, my son and my two girls who the daughters of my heart(no biologic or legal relationship - yet the girls both consider me their mom). I truly want them to know that kindness is the most important thing in relationship.<br>
This thread is so painful to read, yet I keep coming back to see what has been posted. I keep thinking of balance and wondering what the OP is struggling with. And hoping, especially if they’re a young adult, they can understand the difference between struggling to find ones way in the world and stand on your own and having differences with your parents and what it is to have parents that are abusive. There are so many different degrees of difficulty/disappointing relationship with our parents, a whole spectrum from cruel and abusive to the everyday disagreements of even the best of relationships.</p>
<p>I had the weird experience of a very loving, connected mom when I was a kid who later, due to some combination of the death of my brother and-- I suspect-- some significant OCD neurotransmitter issues, has become very hard to deal with in my adulthood. </p>
<p>She means well; she is kind. But she can be really weird and hard to take. She has the degree of mental illness that she is definitely quite nutty, but then she sometimes “catches herself” being nutty, gets embarrassed (which is actually quite tragic), and then she becomes very angry and defensive to anyone who “witnessed” it. </p>
<p>So I will “upset” her (through no fault of my own, other than being in range when she catches herself doing something weird) and then she’s furious, and then I get yelled at by my Dad for upsetting her. Double whammy.</p>
<p>My main sorrow is that (other than my eldest daughter, a little bit) my kids have only known her loony version-- and not her sweet, “earth mother” version of her which luckily I knew as a kid. </p>
<p>She has pretty much withdrawn from her grandkids and is absorbed in her comforting ritual existence with my Dad (who NEVER addresses any of it and mostly walks on eggshells). I was really baffled and hurt when the withdrawing began and it took me a long time to realize it had nothing to do with me/us but everything to do with her managing to function on an increasingly slippery mental slope.</p>
<p>It thus took me a long time to realize she is just as crazy as a full-on crazy person even though she can sometimes “pass” and even though she also catches herself once in a while. I once thought that because it wasn’t full blown it was something she could address or fix. I don’t think that is true now.</p>
<p>I would so LOVE a mom who was just on the planet, without a hair trigger setting! There are times one wants one’s mommy without the fear of an explosion for no reason.</p>
<p>You just do what wasn’t done for you, and what you know you wanted as a child and never received.</p>
<p>I thought I was the only one…as I see, I’m not. My life story would make a crazy tv movie…Parents divorce when child is 5, child lives with Grandparents while Father is in the Army and Mother is busy living her life. Father comes home from Army, marries stepmother and live happily ever after…nope! Father dies when child is 13 - since there was really no relationship with the mother, child remains living with stepmother…until stepmother “turns” gay and moves in her lover…child decides at age 16, gotta get out of here and moves in with mother who knows nothing about her and wonders why there is no relationship and she doesn’t try to nurture one, she is busy living her life. Mother marries a man named RICHARD…why is it that most men with that name really deserve it…he proceeeds to beat her. Child eventually marries and decided never to have children of her own…until hubby changes her mind…flashforward 25 years later…Mother on deathbed and crying wanting to know why I can’t ever be there for her when she really needs me. Mixed feelings but make the trip…keep my true feelings of abandonment to myself for her sake. She died 4 days later (2/10/07) and I sit here feeling guilty - and wondering why???</p>
<p>SBmom, I can relate, b/c this is the mom that I have. The explosions occur about nothing, and usually when she is feeling stressed (the stressor does not need to be much at all). I am so embarrassed to be in public places with her. My father died over 20 years ago, so I don’t get that double whammy, but he tried to be a peacemaker when he was alive, but was always in the middle. Frankly, she was very tough and critical of my father. She is now critical of her children and their spouses, and her grandchildren. She is not embarrassed about her explosive tantrums either.</p>
<p>When we were growing up she was never there. I was raised by my grandparents (her parents). My mother walked through the door after 7:30. She never dealt with HW, cooking dinner, or sitting at the dinner table with us. She never learned how to cook, and her mother served her and my father dinner, and we banished from the kitchen.</p>
<p>I also thought that I was the only one, but I guess plenty of us had some sad experiences.</p>
<p>How did I manage to mother differently than my mother did?</p>
<p>I read books, lots and lots of parenting books. I joined mommy groups, attended conferences, talked to moms I admired.</p>
<p>I combed through the advice, chose what worked for me and filed the rest away.</p>
<p>Now I am a Mentor Mom in a mothers’ of young children group. All that advice, those strategies, the new ideas that I gathered over the years are being used to help others.</p>
<p>And here’s the irony: If had had a great mom like my SIL did, I wouldn’t have the resources I do now!!!</p>
<p>My mother belittled me and made me feel that I wasn’t a real person, just an extension of her. She was also narcissistic, believing that my behavior was a direct reflection on her. So she was also very controlling. Until I was about 15, I truly believed that my goal in life was supposed to be to make her happy and make her proud of me. But I was a constant failure. She was never satisfied, and every success I had was always met with, “You can do better!” Or, “But can you keep it up?”</p>
<p>Miserable in college. There was no “there” there. No insides to me. I just tried to be what I thought everyone else wanted me to be.</p>
<p>After college, six years of therapy with the same therapist. Helped a lot.</p>
<p>About five years later, I started working for a woman who reminded me strongly of my mother – so back into therapy, this time with a different therapist. Helped me lots.</p>
<p>Then, I had my first child, and my mother died when he was five weeks old. It was the best thing that ever could have happened to my mothering. I got to be the mom I always wanted to be, with no one looking over my shoulder and criticizing everything I did.</p>
<p>This thread is very cathartic for many of us. I KNOW I wouldn’t be the person – the wonderful, warm, smart, attractive, successful person – I am today if it weren’t for the first 20 years of having my mother try to control me.</p>
<p>I cannot tell you how sad these stories make me. My mother was the greatest person in the world, and I almost feel guilty about it when I read these truly horrific tales. (Sure, my mother had her “mishugas,” but who doesn’t? ;)) Kudos to all of you for turning out to be wonderful, warm, witty, wise, loving mothers in spite of the odds you faced. My mother died several years ago from a simply horrific disease and I think about her and miss her every day. I know that her grandchildren also have great memories of a loving, caring, giving human being.</p>
<p>It’s been over twenty five years since the wrong parent died; I could have told tales about my father, but it was my mother the smoker who died. She was one of the few people who understood me, and I wish she could have met any of her grandchildren or my husband. When I rarely have talked to my sister about our mother we have different stories to tell, partly due to our different perspectives/personalities (as unalike as we are, while in our 20’s we once told her in a friendly conversation that she didn’t care if we got married, she only wanted grandchildren). I wish she would have lived long enough for me to have been earning enough money to give her some of the things she couldn’t afford. Sometimes I have tried to imagine her as if she were around, also making myself take off the “rose colored glasses” as I know she wasn’t perfect. My son could tell you what an awful mother he had, but he’s still 17 and seeing me through the eyes of a teenager…(but I must state that he actually called from college to wish me happy mother’s day, and told me he loves me- surprised, we may have a better future). I never knew any grandmothers either, and have no daughters- I feel like an outsider regarding the mother/daughter mystique. I tend to want mother’s day to pass quickly and be over with. Life isn’t fair, is it?</p>
<p>PS- Is it better to have no relationship, as I do, or a toxic one? The optomists will say the latter as there is hope for a better future, those that suffered for far too many years would disagree. BTW, I will live a long, long time because, as my H says, only the good die young (grin symbol- to end on a lighter note).</p>
<p>Allright, now for the happier side of it. I mentioned earlier that mom was a cold,distant, neglectful alcoholic but I didn’t mention that she had wonderful children - sisters all of them and we absolutely cherish each other and each other’s families, successes, failures, ad infinitum. i also didn’t mention that after she died I haf a wonderful relationship with my dad for 10 years. I also didn’t mention that because my sister was disabled, we had a lady “from the neighborhood” help in the house who was an absolute saint and was an incredible model for all of us. So you see, not all bad…</p>
<p>I honestly can’t thank you enough for these kind words. They truly mean the world to me, for obvious reasons. {{{{{{{hugs}}}}}}} As I mentioned, my mother was about the farthest thing from an all-loving earth mother. In fact, I believe that if things had been the way she <em>really</em> wanted, she’d never have married or had children. She was an exceedingly resentful and generally poor mother who foisted off most of her responsibility to others. </p>
<p>To be honest with you, I am not totally sure how I ended up so very different from her (and also from my three sibs). I consider part of it to be luck and perhaps the gift of birth order (I was the middle child “pleaser”), but also the fact that in my earliest months and years, my mother DIDN’T provide much of the care for me, instead delegating it to the Cajun woman who lived in with her OWN family when she was a girl. This woman was an emotionally normal and loving woman who did contribute to my emotional needs in the earliest time of my life.</p>
<p>In addition, I have an uncanny type of intuition. I don’t know really what to call it, but I can “read” people–see through the exterior, whatever that may be, to the “soul” beneath. I am not sure whether this “gift” saved me, or whether it came as a result of my experiences. Either way, the effect of it was that I have always been able to choose friends/relationships wisely and have been EXTREMELY fortunate to have surrounded myself with loving, supportive, wise, and empathetic friends who have, in an almost literal sense, saved my life.</p>
<p>It was only when I had children that I began to be aware that some “baggage” was seeping into my thoughts/ideas/feelings about the parenting process. I actively examined these feelings and tried very hard to make sure that I was bouncing them off of a “normal” perspective, rather than the warped perspective that I had been raised with. I actually still have to do this sometimes, even after all these years. To give a concrete example, I very occasionally react to perfectly normal squabbling between my two oldest daughters (two years apart) with the dire and distressed feeling that they’ll NEVER truly get along (even though they DO much of the time ), and that they’ll end up estranged like my siblings and myself, when cognitively, I very much realize the vast difference.</p>
<p>About 6.5 years ago, I sought out therapy with an EXTREMELY competent and gifted marriage/family psychologist to work through the issues around my birth family, which had worsened by that time. I think I started going to her about a year before my mother’s death. Her help has been INVALUABLE, if only in the reassurance that I was/am FINE and that it really <em>WAS</em> my mom (and then my family), even when they tried to tell me otherwise. The “gaslighting” that narcissists inflict is perhaps <em>the</em> most damaging behavior. They cause you to doubt everything that you perceive and tell you that what you’ve seen, heard, and experienced never really happened. Pretty wiggy stuff. When my therapist declared, within the first five visits or so, that I was “in the top 10% of mentally/emotionally functional/healthy people she’s ever met,” it was so healing. She constantly tells me that she cannot BELIEVE the kind of mother I turned out to be, and she said that in all of her 20+ years of practice, she’s never seen a family, no matter how dysfunctional it is, deny someone access to a deathbed or a funeral. All of those things validated my observations and emotions around them.</p>
<p>So, I guess the kind of mother I’ve been fortunate enough to be can be attributed to a number of factors, and I am incredibly grateful for being able to break the cycle of hideous dysfunction and to leave a new, emotionally healthy legacy for my precious children–and their children to come. :)</p>
<p>I was lucky enough to have the best mother in the world! She passed 5 yrs ago, and I miss her so much (OK now I’m crying.) Today is her birthday. Happy Birthday Mom. I love you.</p>
<p>How you deal with a difficult mother is to be patient and kind and give as much as you can and then politely say," I have to go now mom. I love you. Thank you for this conversation. It made my day! I really appreciate you so much." And if you lied, so what. Move on. Buy a nice nail polish or lipstick.But also buy her a funny or silly card and send it to her. You will know you did the right thing. You will sleep well and feel proud of yourself. Nothing is to be accomplished by arguments.</p>
<p>This is my opinion of the overwhelming number of negative posts here concerning mothers . Your mother is the one who gave you life. She is not perfect. She deserves a certain amount of respect and consideration just because she was your mother. This does not mean self sacrifice and self torture. It just means a card and smile and a little listening. It means just a little giving. How you manage a relationship with your mother is to expect nothing. Simply GIVE and you will feel good because you gave . You did the right thing. You will sleep well at night when she is dead. You will have your own self respect. </p>
<p>I will not go on and on and dump on my mother. I won’t tell you she took advantage of me or the demands she made of me or my own self sacrifice for her and how in return in her frail mental state she left me with nothing .</p>
<p>I will tell you I had a wonderful mother. She gave me life. I am here because of her to enjoy this bright sunny day! I can rest at night becasue of the wonderful way I treated her in the face of great adversity. What a wonderful woman.Wow, her life mattered!</p>
My sympathies to all who have shared their stories.</p>
), and that they’ll end up estranged like my siblings and myself, when cognitively, I very much realize the vast difference.</p>