<p>A dear friend told me that on Mother’s Day. How many of us have the same feeling ? How about respect ? I have a feeling her mother do not respect her much either. </p>
<p>I think my parents respect and approve of me. However, I think they love me the least of all my siblings though they will deny it. I know for sure my mother love one brother the best of all, but respect and approve of him the least. She said so.</p>
<p>No two children ever had the same parents.</p>
<p>My mother disowned me several years ago. I know she doesn’t like me. But I like myself and that’s turned out to be enough.</p>
<p>For my friend, I think I understand her mother. My friend consistently made bad choices in her life leading to dependency on her mom financially in her forties. I know her parents are not well off so it cause hardship. For some reason both her brother and her are not doing well and dependent on the parents. </p>
<p>I think it is hard to respect anyone, including our own children when their conduct and values conflict with your own. I don’t think I will approve or even like my kids if they turn out to be swindlers or mean people. </p>
<p>I just noticed I made grammatical mistakes in the op… :o</p>
<p>It takes a long time to get over feeling unloved or unaccepted by one’s parents. I believe that deep down my parents loved me, but they often didn’t like me much. My mother has never loved either my younger sister or me as much as she loved my older sister. She made that abundantly clear. That hurt a lot and has impacted our lives more than we think it ought to have.</p>
<p>TheGFG, Well said. </p>
<p>My sister has a great relationship with my parents. They don’t speak to me. It’s taken a lot more time and effort to get to being okay with it than I wish it had. And sometimes I’m still surprised by how much it can hurt.</p>
<p>Much of not liking your kids is self-loathing. I know a couple who don’t like their grown son, and boy, they absolutely created who he is today. He is the personification of all of their parenting mistakes and believe me, they made more than their alloted share.</p>
<p>I’ve been thinking about my mother a lot coming up to Mother’s Day. This is my second Mother’s Day without her. 
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<p>I was telling my kids how much I knew my mother loved me and how I always knew she had my back. And I hoped that I had been a good enough mother to them that would have those same feelings about me 30 years from now when they were middle aged ladies.</p>
<p>My sister, on the other hand, clashed with my mother terribly! She says that my mother was horrible and that I am “in denial.” </p>
<p>Well, what can you say to that?</p>
<p>missypie, There is a straight line between my time in therapy/married to an emotionally healthy person and setting up appropriate boundaries with my parents and their decision to bow out of my life. </p>
<p>I stepped out of my role in the family. When I stopped taking responsibility for my family’s chaos (I was a child, for goodness sake), there was no place for me.</p>
<p>We are to the place where we are polite to each other when we have to be in the same place but that’s it. Sometimes it painful to me that they still have a relationship with my sister but then I remember it’s just luck that I got assigned the bad kid label and my sister the good kid label. </p>
<p>I still wish it didn’t hurt so much sometimes, I wish I could just be done with it. But that’s not real life.</p>
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<p>You and your sister had different mothers. I’ve had to do a lot of work in therapy to get past (well, mostly past) my anger with my sister. It’s one thing to have a terrible relationship with your own mother, it’s quite another to watch a sibling have a wonderful relationship with that same parent. </p>
<p>I know my mother has my sisters back as surely as I know she does not have mine. </p>
<p>Sometimes it still hurts that she chooses to remain close to the people who have been so vicious to me. I dont’ know the answer. My sister and I are very, very close but we’ve only talked about this once. It was just too hard. Now we just don’t talk about our parents at all, unless they are visiting her or she’s going out to see them. </p>
<p>Also, her children are very close with them, my son barely knows them. They send them all gifts and the like but they see my sister’s kids every other month and haven’t seen my son in nearly two years. They are taking him on a trip this summer for a few weeks. I still trust them, they are good parents to my sister and good grandparents. They are just not good parents to me and they are okay with that because they believe that’s my fault.</p>
<p>^Well, PMK, as you can guess, my sister and I don’t talk about my mother much, since neither of us can agree about her. But we both agree that my father was a *#$%@, so that gives us a lot of common ground. :)</p>
<p>Family dynamics are very challenging…</p>
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<p>Glad you went to therapy…it sometimes takes a third party to see that the issue is with the parents and not the child. In my Husband’s family, there is a definite favorite: the one who has made the most money. To me he is the devil incarnate, because money is the most important thing in the world to him - but that is what the parents value. So be it. That’s easy for ME to say - they aren’t my parents and I can see it all as an observer, rather than being emotionally involved.</p>
<p>ellemenope, My sister has a good relationship with both our parents. For about a year after my mother disowned me, my father stayed in touch, promising to never do that. Then, of course, he disowned me as well. Unlike my mother who at least had the decency to write up a letter letting me know she thinks I am a horrible person and she “gives up” on me, my father just stopped returning my calls and emails. </p>
<p>I really don’t know what else to say. It’s very difficult to not write it all out, to explain my side because, of course, the child in me still believes that my parents know me best, see me best and if they find me intolerable, well… But I’m going to fight that urge. I’m nearly 40, I have my own life and loves.</p>
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<p>I think that is a perfect post for the 6 word memoir thread (except that it is 7 words…)</p>
<p>I’ve been reading a book called “Coping with Your Difficult Older Parent,” and I’ve found it extremely helpful in dealing with some issues with my own mother (and it has also shown me that some parents are lots more difficult). Here’s a link:
[Amazon.com:</a> Coping With Your Difficult Older Parent : A Guide for Stressed-Out Children: Grace Lebow, Barbara Kane, Irwin Lebow: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Coping-Your-Difficult-Older-Parent/dp/038079750X]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Coping-Your-Difficult-Older-Parent/dp/038079750X)</p>
<p>thank you, ellenenope. I think you are right about that.</p>
<p>My parents have somehow been able to convince us all that they love all of us and we all love them. My kids & hubby insist that if there is a favorite, I’m in the running because I will always drop everything and help them with whatever favor they need (they really don’t ask that often) and we’re always “reliable.” They also can be themselves around us and don’t have to do any posturing.
There are others in the running as well, each for his/her own special reason and relationship with the folks. The big thing is that we all know we’re loved and love them and one another, faults & all.
There are times when one or more of us is in the “doghouse” and not much beloved by our folks or anyone else, but it doesn’t seem to “stick” very long.</p>
<p>I feel very fortunate that my mother has always said “my favorite is the one who needs me most at that moment” and has always meant it. We can (and do) all make the case for being her favorite.</p>
<p>My MIL, on the other hand, was a piece of work. She favored her oldest to the point at which the other two (including hubby) were neglected. He has a serious and permanent impairment because she ignored years’ worth of warnings from the school and the pediatrician that he had a problem. On her deathbed (literally) the favorite son emptied her bank account and stole her remaining property, to the point where we paid the copayments for her cancer care, and we and her other rejected child paid for her funeral expenses. The favored child paid nothing, but got all her possessions, including family pictures and documents. I got the final word, though, by being the one to write her obituary. My SIL is permanently scarred by this rejection, but thankfully my husband never could care less. He’s ridiculously close with my mother. I wonder if men and women view this kind of difficulty differently.</p>
<p>I cannot imagine loving one child MORE than another, it is NOT possible for a mother. But I also imagine that mother’s love for her children is very different, since they are different and need different type of treatments / attention / support. Is love the same if kids are of age difference of 15 years or so? I do not think so, but it does not mean that one is loved more than another.</p>
<p>I don’t think you can really speak for every mother, MiamiDAP. I can tell you with certainty that my MIL despised her two younger children. You would have had to know her to understand the dynamic. It is certainly unnatural, but it does happen.</p>