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S/O Oprah Estranged Families - Bethenny on Call Her Daddy
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Anonymous
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I just watched the podcast episode with Bethenny Frankel on Call Her Daddy. She talked about cutting off her mom after her first marriage and her attempts to reconnect so her DD Bryn could know her. I knew about all of this as a longtime RHONY fan, but it got me thinking, because I have a less than perfect relationship with my own mother.
Bethenny talked about sort of forgiveness/letting it go. She talked a little about some of the ways her own mother had trauma in her own childhood, and the idea of generational trauma. Same story here--my mom had her trauma from her childhood and then inflicted trauma on me. However, I, like Bethenny, hold myself to a very high parenting standard with my own kids. I am super loving and work hard to be a good parent. It ends with me! It ended with Bethenny. So why was I able to break the cycle? Why was Bethenny? Why were you, maybe? I'm just curious because honestly, it makes me have less empathy for and desire to forgive my mother. I was so hurt my things she did to me in my childhood, still am- but I knew I could never do that to my children. Why didn't she know that? Why didn't she think, I have to do better? What do you think? |
Anonymous
| My mom was raised by a Holocaust survivor. That lead to a LOT of trauma, it was passed on to me but not nearly as bad, and yes, hopefully, it ends with me. I think we need to look at the generation who raised our parents (WW2 survivors) and how much easier life has been since then, and how many more accessible resources we have (internet, friends, therapists, doctors). If my mom or her mom needed advice, they'd have to call someone (could be embarrassing) or pick up that book by Dr. Spock. |
Anonymous
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I know my mother 100% wanted to do better than her childhood; it was her entire impetus for having kids in the first place (perhaps misguided). But you can't discount that the culture they were raised in and parenting in was under-resourced and undereducated. Not to mention that (at least when my mom was raising kids in the 80s) it was a tumultuous time for feminism - a shift from stay-at-home-parenting to "women can have it all". I know my mom and so many friends' moms who started out at home and then built careers as kids got older and it was not well-charted territory.
I don't say this as an excuse for how my mom treated me. She was raised by abusive alcoholics who were not much more than teens when they had her, and even still I know they loved her (and were decent grandparents to me). By that measure she did break the cycle, even if she was still abusive to me in different ways. I'm also still very hurt by the things she did to me and wonder if I'll ever get over it. The best I've been able to do is set decent boundaries with her, seek to understand, and try to do better. There are days when I have zero empathy for her and days when my heart breaks for her. I think it's only human. |
Anonymous
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My parents both had trauma but tried their best, until they didn't. After they divorced when I was 10, dad started another family and mom moved us 3000 miles away and treated us horribly and abusively.
That said, I don't blame them for my childhood. I grew up to be a good parent myself and I have a wonderful life. It made me resourceful. However, i am NC with my mother because of how she treats me now. She's cruel and narcissistic. No more. I deserve peace. |
Anonymous
| Bethenny is a narcissistic loony toon. I wouldn’t take any advice from her situation. |
Anonymous
This has nothing to do with anything and we can still have a discussion. |
Anonymous
Maybe the discussion would be better in the Family Relationships forum than Entertainment since it's not really about Bethenny or entertainment. |
Anonymous
A lot of people discussed their family relationships on the Oprah thread and they may want to be part of the spin-off discussion. This all stems from popular podcasts. |
Anonymous
I don't necessarily know that our kids are going to grow up and think they're trauma-free. I've known families where the parents were amazing, and their adult kids would talk about how traumatic it was that mom bought the store brand instead of name brand yogurt. I think it's a pretty typical cycle where kids grow up, dislike things from their childhood, claim it's trauma, then have their own kids and realize parenting is a lot harder than they thought it would be. I also know adults who had *extremely* traumatic childhoods (like straight-up horrifying physical and psychological abuse), and they don't have any trauma from it. So much of it is individual. To answer your question on why our parents did certain things: there simply wasn't the same amount of knowledge back then as there is now. People didn't really understand how parenting impacts kids, and most of the advice given sucked pretty bad. There weren't good parenting books, podcasts, coaches, social media, etc. They really just didn't know and did they best they could with the advice they were given. When your pediatrician or the entire neighborhood is telling you to spank your kids, well, you're gonna spank them. |
Anonymous
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OP, I think about this a lot because I'm in a very similar situation to you. I think it's hard not to think about it because when you are working through your feelings of anger towards your parent(s) (for me it's both), it can be hard not to ask why they didn't have the same epiphany you and I did and do better with their own kids.
The short and easy answer is that they had fewer opportunities to make different choices. My parents had children young after being pressured into both marriage and kids by their families and society at large. My mom was only 19 when she had my oldest sibling, and she got pregnant before my parents married. Their families were Catholic, both had lost a parent already, so abortion was off the table. Who knows what their lives might have held if that had gone differently. They grew up in culturally conservative communities where child abuse was normalized and even encouraged as a form of discipline, no one talked about things like alcoholism, mental health, or healthy relationships. It's an unsatisfying answer because I do know other people who grew up in similar environments to my parents (and at the same time) and still figured it out and broke the chain. It's also unsatisfying because one of my parents still cannot, even now, look back on the choices he made as a father and acknowledge the harm it caused. Since those choices were unequivocally abuse, that's tough for me. It's also unsatisfying because even as I continue to maintain a relationship with my parents (largely on behalf of my child, like Bethany), they still sometimes engage in the same behaviors that have always been a problem. My mom still tries to turn me into her surrogate mom and therapist, she still tries to triangulate against each of her kids with the others. My dad remains narcissistic and selfish and incapable of recognizing that I, or my child, are independent people with our own needs, wants, and thoughts. So even now, long since their own abusive families have died or lost their power over them, and now that they live in communities full of discussions about mental health and healthy relationships, they aren't that different. It's hard. I don't have any answers. I maintain strong boundaries. I do my best, for myself, for my daughter, and with what I have left, for them. My parents are old and at some point, these relationships will be in the past tense and that might offer some additional emotional distance to help me make sense of it. Or not. Maybe it will always be a mystery. But it matters that you and I chose to be chain breakers. That's unequivocally true. We can only control our own behavior. |
Anonymous
| I think there's a fair number of people -- especially in GenZ -- addicted to the idea of having trauma. They're so dramatic. I've seen complete revisionist history. |
Anonymous
I'm going to answer the why. The answer is twofold. One, it was a different time. We were raised in an era of therapy. I remember in 9th grade watching two girls across our math classroom making plans and one shouted to the other "I can't Tuesday - I have therapy that day." And nobody blinked, let alone made fun or asked any questions. And that was in the 90's. The terms generational and intergenerational trauma were coined in the 1960's, but didn't make it into mainstream society's vocabulary until the late '90's-early 2000's. We could get self-help books in book stores, friends lent us theirs, there's no stigma of checking a self help book out from the library. Two, your mom may have been more traumatized than you are. That doesn't mean she was more abused than you but it affected her so much that she couldn't get over being a victim to keep her daughter from becoming a victim. Essentially, you are simply a stronger person than her in this area, and were able to separate yourself from your abuse and say "I don't want my child to deal with what I dealt with." This is a level of self-actualization that takes a lot of work. Maybe that work was you going to therapy or just you thinking about things in the shower, while working out, while falling asleep, etc. To ask why your mom didn't do better - think of fight, flight, freeze and fawn. I've NEVER been a freeze person. Maybe your mom was a freeze person, and she got stuck frozen in her fear and trauma and could never move towards fighting it. |
Anonymous
There's another thread? where? |
Anonymous
https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1303592.page |
Anonymous
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Thank you everyone for sharing your responses. They are really resonating with me and giving me things to think about. It's definitely not easy, especially as my mom is still a huge part of my life and I feel like there are still things happening that are very wrong (though she is trying to change, I'll give her that, but, you know- it's not enough).
I just want to say kudos to everyone who was thoughtful and strong and tries to do better for their kids. Hugs. - OP |