Moving past parents wrongs
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Anonymous
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There are so many threads about conflict between parents and their adult children. Many posters write that their own parents made mistakes, but they have been able to overlook them or move past them. Parents are only human, after all.
My question is this: what kinds of mistakes are people just moving past, or writing off as not a big deal? Does anyone have any examples? For example, my mom had a very hard time maintaining relationships with our extended family. She's just a generally unpleasant and self-important person. I don't think I could ever forgive her for the numerous family estrangements that she caused. Are other people forgiving these kinds of things, or is it more minor (ie my mom didn't let me sign up for after-school activities)? |
Anonymous
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I will never move past the stuff my mother did—but it is very, very bad.
She’s dead, and I’ve had plenty of therapy, and it seems that every day something reminds me of something she did and there is rage and grief. |
Anonymous
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Young adults today want an apology from their parents.
Their parents want a "thank you." Team Parents. |
Anonymous
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I’m sure the issues are serious. Most people can tolerate a lot, but abuse is very hard to deal with. I know maga causes estrangement, but that’s abusive in and of itself - to turn a blind eye to the abuse of our country and citizens.
It takes something major to cause estrangement, teamed with a failure to make amends or apologize for the wrong. |
Anonymous
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My mother has untreated anxiety and was neglected by her own family as a child. She was a hyper-controlling, psychologically and verbally abusive parent, who would lie to others to isolate me from my friends or other relatives. She would refuse all playdates, and offers of visits from my relatives. When I was an adult, visiting my home town, my aunt invited me over for Christmas, and my mother called her to say I was not available. It's only when I realized she had declined on my behalf that I called my aunt and say that of course I wanted to come. That sort of stuff, all the time.
As I explained on another thread, I have no respect for my mother. However, I know she loves me in her own unhealthy way, and I call her every Sunday. Anything I say can and will be used against me in a moment of stressed-out spite, so the message I convey is mostly that we're all doing well, and then I listen to her little life events. My asocial and uncommunicative father is very sick, and I have been calling more often to get medical updates from my mother. It is what it is. Just because I will never have a healthy, open, trusting relationship with my parents doesn't mean I can't have a relationship at all. At some level, the one we have serves our need for connection. It's too bad the connection isn't stronger, but... apparently we can't have that. |
Anonymous
My mom had a lot of family estrangements. She's also never been able to maintain a friendship, with most friends lasting just a couple of years before she explodes in drama and anger about something they did or some perceived slight. I've been subject to those same explosions and accusations, including 100% made up stuff that never happened. I think she has delusions. I've concluded that this is her issue, not mine. I have lots of friends and healthy relationships. I'm not distancing myself from my mom because of stuff she did decades ago, but because I can't manage to have a normal relationship with her now. My view is informed by the past, but if she was medicated or sought therapy and was more stable, I would drop some boundaries. But I can't live life with drama hanging over my head at all times. |
Anonymous
I will never thank my parents for beating me with a belt and my dad for leaving me to walk home one town over because he didn’t like something I said in the car. I was 10. You sure about “Team Parents” all the time? You sure about that? I guess you’re on the side of my childhood friend’s dad, who molested her and her younger sister. Wow. Team Parents, eh? Wow. |
Anonymous
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There are lots of things I could not move past:
In the 70s my Dad once dropped me off for a playdate on a Saturday with my new little best friend I met on the bus in 1st grade. Her single mom invited him in for coffee and he ended up sleeping with her while we were playing dolls. He told me never to tell my mom or they'd get divorced and I'd never see my mom again. He also got VERY weird with me being the oldest girl once my mom did leave him to be with her boss who eventually became my stepfather. My Mom: she became an opioid addict and attention seeker, she sabotaged a lot of my personal relationships. I think I already talked about how she called my sister's husband a "spic" and my husband was "the mick" and when I adopted a daughter from China she said "and we had the spic and the mick and now we have a chink" As an adult I couldn't get away from my Dad fast enough. I'm not even telling the worst parts. Do you all know what your dad's ***** ***** looks like? I do. They both told anyone they could get to listen to them that I was a crazy person. They were not my friends. I was their accessory. |
Anonymous
I'm an older adult. I don't want an apology from my parents. That damage was already done. I also don't want a thank you from my adult kids. They didn't get a choice in the decisions I made for them. They were what they were. Weird thing is, I was talking to one of my adult sons today who has a very workable relationship with his dad, whom I don't speak to. He has another wife. My son was saying Dad told me about the time I fell down the stairs and how it was all his fault. I had an entirely different memory of the same event. It was MY fault, I told him. Your dad didn't see it because of the way we were all standing. Only I saw you start to fall down the stairs because of the way we could view things. I'm not sure what his dad was doing, and he ended up alright tumbling down some basement stairs to the end because he was made of toddler rubber, but I don't know why his dad said it was all his fault. It was 100% mine |
Anonymous
| I didn’t have a great childhood but it was good enough. However, the abuse and cruelty is continuing and I’m done. Stop thinking we’re pissed at how we were raised. Some of us aren’t. And those abused as children deserve more than a “forgive them” it minimizes their pain. |
Anonymous
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My mom went through a phase of putting me in a headlock, prying open my jaw and pouring orange juice down my throat while I was crying each morning before school. Apparently our Vitamin C vitamins weren't enough and orange juice was the only solution in her mind. I don't know if it was a few weeks or few months, but she did this to both my brother and me, ensuring that neither of us ever voluntarily drank orange juice again. It's only in the last two years I've started liking mandarins and clementines.
For literally over two decades I asked her periodically (like every few years) why she did this. She always denied she did, so gaslighting was fun! Finally I asked my brother if I was making it up and he assured me it did happen. Then one day a few years before she died, we were sitting outside a museum, I asked again expecting no answer and she said, "I don't know. I guess I thought I was doing the right thing." This was all I needed. I never brought it up again with her. She was doing the best she could, was misguided, stubborn, and lost her way. I can understand all those things. So yeah, I moved past that once she acknowledged she did it. |
Anonymous
This is an extreme example. Many children are estranged for much less serious issues. |
Anonymous
I don't want an apology. I just want my parents to treat me in a reasonable fashion now, as an adult. I'm willing to let the past go, but I can't maintain a relationship where they continuously spew green slime at me. |
Anonymous
I doubt that. Most if not all are extreme like this. The parents don’t listen and wont acknowledge. |
Anonymous
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I would forgive most things if the overall tenor is one of love and care. My parents were from a different generation and some of the things they did are the stuff that some kids now consider "abuse" but was just normal parenting 50-100 years ago -- a category that could include things like occasional corporal punishment but also stuff like saying "you look like a streetwalker in that skirt" or "if you don't start working harder, you'll never amount to anything and don't expect me to support you" or expecting you to buy your own clothes from your savings or whatever.
Everyone says awful things sometimes. Everyone makes mistakes. Parents are human. And guidelines change. People used to tell parents that if they didn't spank misbehaving children, they were bad parents. The OJ mom above probably had been told that if she didn't get her kids to drink OJ, she was a bad mom. My own parents used to force us to eat all sorts of things that we didn't like -- because they were told it was really important for kids to eat meat and vegetables and if you didn't MAKE Them do it, you were a bad parent. I am sure my mother did not get any joy from sitting there forcing me to eat squash. In retrospect, knowing how tired she was from work and raising kids, and seeing how indulgent she is with her grandkids, she would never have done that sort of thing, except that everyone told her that it was totally essential to force a kid to eat her vegetables. I think all that is forgivable. |