<p>^That. Made. No. Sense. Whatsoever.</p>
<p>you are not helping and you do not know enough about my upbringing to be able to say those kinds of things.</p>
<p>Life is not a pity party where you get to haul around your emotional baggage and use it to justify your current state.
Unless you want to remain tied to your childhood.</p>
<p>No, we don’t expect you to know solutions in advance. Yes, most of us know how hard it is to dig out from this sort of thing. </p>
<p>On CC, most life advice from adults is pretty solid. I think most of us get a little kick out of hearing back from an OP that they’ll consider our suggestions- or that they took the first step and are waiting to see the results. We don’t mind if there is a question back, to clarify what we wrote. </p>
<p>But, it’s hard when we get to, say, 95 responses, and there hasn’t been any change. You could respond: ok, I’ll try that. Or, ok, if I call the dental school, what sort of info will they need? That sort of thing validates our efforts. That sort of interaction works in life as well as in a forum.</p>
<p>At a certain point, sympathy is empty. It’s like that old saying about Chinese food: an hour later, you’re hungry again. </p>
<p>Advice: tomorrow or Friday, call the dental schools. Explain your needs. You’ll probably need to wait for the evaluative appointment- to see if your condition is of interest to them. You may even have to wait for the right person to call you back. </p>
<p>The decision is yours. You have the power.</p>
<p>^That. Made. No. Sense. Whatsoever.</p>
<p>I’ll talk slower.
If he had friends that were offering the sort of support to help him develop a responsible & successful adult life, why would he be stuck trying to get approval from a relative that isn’t able or interested in giving him the sort of justification he is looking for.</p>
<p>Okay. So, you have today to feel sorry for yourself.</p>
<p>Tomorrow you start over.</p>
<p>It’s okay to take a day or two to feel sorry for yourself.</p>
<p>I think what people are trying to say is not to make a “lifestyle out of it.”</p>
<p>The problem we all “see” so easily from our vantage point of a couple of decades out is that the worst possible thing you can do to yourself, the most disempowering position you can take in this or any situation, is that of permanent victim. Yes you were victimized. Your feelings around this are legitimate. No, you are no longer a victim, but you continue to victimize yourself if you do not take personal responsibility for your health…and this includes your mental health and moving on from the past.</p>
<p>I know you find this hard to believe at this point, but with the right amount of time and some therapy, you really can get to a point where you accept your mother the way she is, forgive what happened in your past, and learn to love yourself the way you needed to be loved when you were younger.</p>
<p>Again, good luck to you.</p>
<p>You may be in deep debt, have a bum hand and rotten teeth. But, you are getting a million bucks worth of great life advice here.</p>
<p>I have already made plans to call various dentists and contact dental schools – I just can’t really say much other than thanks for the advice – but I can’t really say much more until I actually go through with things and budget everything out accordingly. It’s hard to get myself out of the victimized mindset when I feel like I’ve been a victim for so long, and especially when there are current-day problems that tie back to those victimizations. All I can think is “If I had a family that cared none of this would be a problem,” etc.</p>
<p>I realize it isn’t healthy to do that. It’s just a massively bitter pill to swallow, and it’s hard to move on.</p>
<p>I agree, completely. It is hard to move on.</p>
<p>Also, in the past, you probably tried to move on too quickly and just not deal with it. Now, you are here.</p>
<p>This is just where you are. You start from here, and you take small steps forward a day at a time. You are not the first, nor will you be the last to be dealt a mixed hand in life. It’s what you do with it that counts. So far, let’s face it, you’ve done quite well with what you have been given.</p>
<p>Now, you’ve simply reached a new point where you need to face another level of what happened to you. You are fully capable of this. You will be okay. In fact, you ARE okay. Sometimes as we reach new levels of adulthood we realize new ways we were let down…it stings. We hurt. We get help for that. We move on.</p>
<p>One day, we wake up and we realize it isn’t broken anymore. It doesn’t hurt anymore. </p>
<p>Make a list of all the things you are grateful for in your life. Start with something as simple as a roof over my head. You’ll be surprised by how much better you feel by the time you get to the end of that list.</p>
<p>Hey Max,</p>
<p>You can consider us your large extended family :)</p>
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</p>
<p>His quarrel with his mother started because he realized that she neglected her maternal duties; initially, he wasn’t looking for approval. They then became disconnected. I suggested that he seek solace in his social life, instead.</p>
<p>Max, if you make your physical pain go away by taking care of your teeth and hand, you mental pain will be much less agonizing… And it will slowly go away with time and therapy. Take care of yourself.</p>
<p>How did you end up being able to go to Penn?
I see from rereading a five yr old thread, that your father died suddenly your sr yr of high school, that neither your father or mother were educated & were not comfortable with you going to school across the country, but that you discussed possibly borrowing money for college from your fathers life ins policy?
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/55601-my-mom-wishes-bury-me-college-financially-please-help.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/55601-my-mom-wishes-bury-me-college-financially-please-help.html</a></p>
<p>I also see that you worked part time while in college, but I can’t imagine that being enough to pay for tuition & housing expenses let alone the extra perks that you mentioned being frustrated you couldn’t afford in college.
So did you borrow money from your mother to attend or did you get money some other way?</p>
<p>Your mother doesn’t seem very worldly and while I can understand your frustration & pain, I think you have already taken your pound of flesh.</p>
<p>You may be distant enough from your fathers death for counseling to help you grieve, and mend what ever is holding you back from living a life.</p>
<p>This is from the New York City website, I believe these hospitals offer discounted services for those uninsured or underinsured. </p>
<p>[Resources</a> for the Uninsured | Programs and Services | Dental Clinics and Centers](<a href=“http://www.nyc.gov/html/hia/html/resources/services_dental.shtml]Resources”>http://www.nyc.gov/html/hia/html/resources/services_dental.shtml)</p>
<p>Try the universities, especially, Columbia. Make sure you take care of your teeth now, you don’t want to be losing them in your 40’s!</p>
<p>My dear Max,</p>
<p>I, too, am a parent who has followed your posts for many years, and I am so pleased that despite your current issues, you have made it through Penn, were able to focus well enough to succeed there, got yourself out of your miserable living situation in Texas (do I have the location right?), and got yourself a job, an apartment, a girlfriend, and the beginnings of a stable adult life.</p>
<p>I want to say also that I am really dumbfounded at some of the cruelty on this thread and hope you will simply ignore it, looking at the really good advice you have received from CC’ers who have come to care about you and your journey.</p>
<p>And for what it’s worth, there is a school of thought that holds that it can be healthy for a victim of the kind of treatment you have received from your mom to tell the person who treated him or her badly, exactly how they feel about that treatment. But then there has to be a way to let go and not let old feelings have a stranglehold on your future.</p>
<p>So now that you have told her, please back away from the email and focus on taking care of 1.) your immediate medical and dental problems, which will eliminate some of your physical pain; 2.) the chronic pain in your hand; and 3.) the emotional pain that is still with you and is still getting in the way of the life you hope and deserve to lead.</p>
<p>You can do this. Just because your mother didn’t take care of some of your basic needs doesn’t mean that you have to live with the medical and emotional consequences forever. You deserved to have those needs taken care of when you were younger, and you deserve to have them taken care of now. Your history is your history, but it doesn’t have to screw up your future. Your health and your emotional and spiritual life are precious; please treat them that way and actively pursue the help that will improve your life.</p>
<p>babyontheway, I really hope that when you are a parent you manage to figure out how to find a little more empathy in yourself than you’ve displayed in this thread.</p>
<p>I also very strongly disagree with the people in this thread who seem to think that expressing anger towards one’s parent, in the way the OP did, is “hate speech” or “hate mail” anything equivalent. I don’t think it’s the same thing at all.</p>
<p>Go pick up a book Toxic Parents by Susan Forward. You should be able to find it in the library. It was published 20 years ago but I honestly think it might help.</p>
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</p>
<p>Hi, LegendofMax. I read the entire thread just now to make sure nobody else had suggested this already: try Al-Anon meetings.</p>
<p>If your Mom abuses alcohol, then communicating via email is a problem. You never know when you reach her, or when she shoots back a zinger like this “lawsuit” idea – whether you’ve reached her drunk. </p>
<p>So don’t do that anymore. I know what you’re facing. You just don’t know which Mom is on the receiving end; sloshed or not sloshed. She can sling back an email and you don’t know in what state she’s in. The fact that she changed her mind on a different day is telling. Meanwhile, you suffered trying to figure out her threat. Assume she wrote you while drunk.</p>
<p>Instead of all the therapy suggested above, which I realize is expensive when you have to work on dental and other medical needs, consider checking out Al-Anon meetings, which are free and might get at the issue I quoted above in my post here. Therapy would also help but it may take time for you to get to that, whether due to money or medical triage with your painful teeth. Meanwhile, Al-Anon is readily available.</p>
<p>I think it’s wonderful that you have a girlfriend and can imagine yourself a better parent someday. </p>
<p>Al-Anon is a peer support meeting for the children and relatives of substance abusers. It teaches how to circumscribe that relationship so you can move on with your own life. You can’t change your past, you can’t change your Mom, but you do need ways to come to terms with the past so you (and perhaps your g.f?) can have a positive future.</p>
<p>BabyOnTheWay, I find you harsh, here and elsewhere. Your philosophy is slick, formulaic, one-size-fits-all type thinking. Am not surprised that LOM here found you so unhelpful and others mentioned “cruelty” not necessarily in your post, but I did find them cruel. “Man Up” - c’mon.</p>
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</p>
<p>It’s not that I don’t have empathy. I do. </p>
<p>But I’d like to see Max fix his issues rather than wallow around in self-pity that his childhood was not what he wanted. It’s too bad. Nobody would choose a mother like Max’s. But he can’t change that. His childhood is in the past, his father passed on when he was a senior, and he has a mother that he wouldn’t choose. These are anchor points in his life - things that he cannot change.</p>
<p>What he can change is his teeth. He can get medical treatment for his hand. He can take progressive action to heal himself physically, and hopefully mentally. These are the options he has for himself.</p>
<p>But as long as he sends out e-mails to his Mom ranting about what a bad Mom she is, I don’t see that he is making progress to live the life he would like to have.</p>
<p>I also very strongly disagree with the people in this thread who seem to think that expressing anger towards one’s parent, in the way the OP did, is “hate speech” or “hate mail” anything equivalent. I don’t think it’s the same thing at all.</p>
<p>i’m curious really, since being on the spectrum I have few social skills ( on the computer I have a handy little program called " Julie" named after the cruise director on * The Love Boat*).</p>
<p>His parents apparently were quite low income ( when his father died, they had zero income, and his mother was seemingly set adrift by the sudden death.) </p>
<p>It seems he may have borrowed money from the fathers life ins policy to be able to afford to go to an expensive university & now that he has graduated & is living across the country in NYC, he pens her an email stating * angry email saying that I was basically never going to forgive her for all her neglect and irresponsible parenting.*</p>
<p>He was bitter 5 years ago by his own admission when she didn’t understand why he wanted to attend college & he still is trying to make her into something that she is not.</p>
<p>I missed the calling of the email " hate speech", but continuing the back and forth is an effort to do what exactly?</p>
<p>there is always, at least one other face to this tale.</p>
<p>IMO, LOM, could do well to more on, take care what he can take care of, be more empathetic to other’s plights, and be pleased that his woes are small compared to others.</p>