Anonymous wrote:OP, your 16 year old daughter fears that she will get cancer.
Your 16 year old daughter fears that you will abandon her due to your cancer.
Your 16 year old cannot cope with your cancer and hates that your cancer has dominated her life.
OP, cancer, not your daughter, is the enemy.
Coping with harsh realities affects individuals differently.
OP, you hate your cancer and you hate what cancer has done to your life, your marriage, and to your relationship with your daughter.
OP, the first step is to correctly identify the enemy, and the enemy is not your daughter.
You are making a lot of assumptions, PP. Sometimes (often, actually) - teens are just really, really hard on the parents. It’s common.
And unfortunately some personality disordered parents are just “really, really hard” on their kids. It’s common.
+10million.
Maybe because they were irreparably damaged by their own parents. In that way nobody is ever wrong, nobody asks to be born.
This is true, but someone comes along to break the chain. My mom was totally disorders. I made huge strides not to be and I am not. My mother criticized me for taking parenting classes, saying she didn’t “need” them. I responded “well, I think I do”. At the same time I was thinking ‘uh, yeah, you absolutely did need them! I had a terrible example and that is why I need them’. But I didn’t actually say what I thought. I have 2 kids through this stage, one in this stage, and one younger. I think I’m doing well. No, I would never say something as hurtful as OP did. I actually very much love my kids and they know it, even though and especially when we fight. No one has ever said they hate anyone in our house.
So when you were in remission from cancer did you not miss a beat?
You folks keep making apologies for a mother who said she hated her child and meant it. Totally messed up.
WHO HAS CANCER!
The kid is a fxxx up. A MEAN GIRL.
She's 16 and just spent the last few years watching her mom go through cancer, but okay I guess she's worthless because she did some very predictable teenage things.
DP. My siblings and I managed to get through our teenage years without ever ONCE telling either of our parents that we hated them, despite lots of arguments and drama.
I don’t think this is “predictable teenage” behavior. I think it is just plain awful behavior. Maybe this is a good learning moment for the kid, to learn that if you throw around phrases like “I hate you” you might hear it back someday. Yes, it is devastating to hear this from a parent, but maybe hearing it is the only way this girl will learn that words matter (even when she is the one saying them).
(FTR I absolutely think OP needs to apologize if she wants to maintain a relationship with her daughter. However, I am taken aback by the posters who seem to have concluded that the daughter is an innocent victim and OP is a horrible monster. They BOTH said it, and a 16 year old is absolutely old enough to be mature enough to know better.)
I mean, even little kids will say "I hate you" to their parents. It really is predictable behavior and is incredibly common. I don't get the pearl clutching about how people can't believe a 16 year old said this to her parent. So many kids say "I hate you" to their parents at some point or another that if you google "teenager said I hate you" you will get literally millions of results linking to article explaining to parents what to do in this situation.
Also, as many people have explained, this particular teen has had a very atypical adolescence, in that her mom has been struggling with cancer for the last several years. If you are familiar with the ACES test/score, having a family member with a serious illness is a major source of stress and trauma that can impact people into adulthood. So that's why many of us find it very unsurprising that this child had aggression and conflict issues, as these are very normal responses to the stress of watching a parent struggle with a life threatening illness in your tween/early teen years.
But anyway, the "I hate you"s don't cancel each other out because they mean different things. A parent and a child are not equal and don't have the same responsibilities or roles in their relationship. So even though they said the same thing, what OP did was worse. For a child to say "I hate you" to a parent is hurtful, yes. But it can also be a way of testing boundaries, getting attention (even negative attention can be better to a child than no attention), trying to provoke a conflict in an effort to address past issues that the parent views as settled, etc. Yes, it is immature. But a 16 year old is less mature than a 30 or 40 year old.
When a parent tells a child "I hate you" it means something else. Anger, rejection, burn out.
For a child, this behavior is a clumsy way of trying to force engagement. For a parent, it's a way to end engagement. That's why what OP said is worse than what her DD said. Her DD's comment was a cry for help. OP's comment was a way of saying "I will not help you."
Everyone is excusing the daughter for having had to endure her mother going through cancer, but no one is extending any grace to the mother who had to endure cancer!
I didn’t say they canceled each other out, and I am not arguing about which is worse. I am saying the daughter is not an innocent victim, she provoked her mother, got a response she wasn’t expecting, and now hopefully they can BOTH learn from it.
OP is the adult and the parent. She has a higher responsibility here. Cancer doesn’t give you free rein to be a sh!tty parent. Blaming your child for your cancer is the epitome of red flag parenting.
At no point did she blame her daughter for her cancer you illiterate doofus.
Party A having more responsibility does NOT mean Party B has ZERO responsibility.
I don’t know if anyone said the child has zero responsibility. In fact if you bothered to read that post you’d see it says the mom has ‘higher level’ not ‘all’ responsibility “you illiterate doofus”. Clearly the parent sets the tone for parenting decisions, and those decisions include saying she hates her own child.
If she feels so bad she should apologize.
If YOU had read the post you would understand that she feels bad not because she told her daughter she hates her, too (remember, this darling angel told her mom she hates her and mom responded in kind); she feels bad because she meant it. She feels bad because she is at the point in her relationship with her child where she legitimately hates her. We all know you’re not supposed to say it, but OP is under a lot of stress and she snapped. You know, like a real person.
So if anyone was interested in providing useful advice to OP it would involve how to not hate her daughter. Lashing out at her with all of your unresolved mommy issues isn’t helping her OR HER DAUGHTER. Some of you are using OP as a punching bag because you either have not gotten effective therapy to deal with your own sh!t, or you just haven’t grown TF up yet and are stuck in bratty entitled teenager mode.
Yet again you aren't even reading. No where in OP does it say that. You are projecting again.
Reread the OP again. It is you who is confused.
"yet I feel awful"
not "I feel bad because I meant it"
Gosh it must be difficult for you to get through the day when you make up constant conversations that never happened.
Oh boy. You must be one of the Americans who didn’t read a book last year.
You don't think its possible she fees bad because she verbalized it? Whether or not you hate your child, the biggest issue here is saying it to her. Quite interesting that you gloss over that entirely.
If she meant it why in the world would she feel bad she verbalized it? If she was asking everyone how she should punish her daughter for continuing to be rude to her you might have a point, yet she feels awful and you can’t fathom why.
You can still mean things and not want the person to know. You can realize how hurtful the words would be to hear out loud. At least most people with any sort of self awareness would.
Right so why is everyone heaping so much abuse on OP? She gets it. She knows. She knows she words are hurtful and it’s not right, it didn’t make her feel better to say it out loud. She feels awful for obvious reasons.
So why is apologizing to her daughter such a crazy suggestion? I’m not sure why op are jumping all over posters suggesting this. If she wants even a sliver of a chance at repairing their relationship she needs to own it, apologize, and do better moving forward. The longer she leaves this hanging in the air, the more damage it’s doing to her daughter and their relationship.
Anonymous wrote:OP, your 16 year old daughter fears that she will get cancer.
Your 16 year old daughter fears that you will abandon her due to your cancer.
Your 16 year old cannot cope with your cancer and hates that your cancer has dominated her life.
OP, cancer, not your daughter, is the enemy.
Coping with harsh realities affects individuals differently.
OP, you hate your cancer and you hate what cancer has done to your life, your marriage, and to your relationship with your daughter.
OP, the first step is to correctly identify the enemy, and the enemy is not your daughter.
You are making a lot of assumptions, PP. Sometimes (often, actually) - teens are just really, really hard on the parents. It’s common.
And unfortunately some personality disordered parents are just “really, really hard” on their kids. It’s common.
+10million.
Maybe because they were irreparably damaged by their own parents. In that way nobody is ever wrong, nobody asks to be born.
This is true, but someone comes along to break the chain. My mom was totally disorders. I made huge strides not to be and I am not. My mother criticized me for taking parenting classes, saying she didn’t “need” them. I responded “well, I think I do”. At the same time I was thinking ‘uh, yeah, you absolutely did need them! I had a terrible example and that is why I need them’. But I didn’t actually say what I thought. I have 2 kids through this stage, one in this stage, and one younger. I think I’m doing well. No, I would never say something as hurtful as OP did. I actually very much love my kids and they know it, even though and especially when we fight. No one has ever said they hate anyone in our house.
So when you were in remission from cancer did you not miss a beat?
You folks keep making apologies for a mother who said she hated her child and meant it. Totally messed up.
WHO HAS CANCER!
The kid is a fxxx up. A MEAN GIRL.
She's 16 and just spent the last few years watching her mom go through cancer, but okay I guess she's worthless because she did some very predictable teenage things.
DP. My siblings and I managed to get through our teenage years without ever ONCE telling either of our parents that we hated them, despite lots of arguments and drama.
I don’t think this is “predictable teenage” behavior. I think it is just plain awful behavior. Maybe this is a good learning moment for the kid, to learn that if you throw around phrases like “I hate you” you might hear it back someday. Yes, it is devastating to hear this from a parent, but maybe hearing it is the only way this girl will learn that words matter (even when she is the one saying them).
(FTR I absolutely think OP needs to apologize if she wants to maintain a relationship with her daughter. However, I am taken aback by the posters who seem to have concluded that the daughter is an innocent victim and OP is a horrible monster. They BOTH said it, and a 16 year old is absolutely old enough to be mature enough to know better.)
I mean, even little kids will say "I hate you" to their parents. It really is predictable behavior and is incredibly common. I don't get the pearl clutching about how people can't believe a 16 year old said this to her parent. So many kids say "I hate you" to their parents at some point or another that if you google "teenager said I hate you" you will get literally millions of results linking to article explaining to parents what to do in this situation.
Also, as many people have explained, this particular teen has had a very atypical adolescence, in that her mom has been struggling with cancer for the last several years. If you are familiar with the ACES test/score, having a family member with a serious illness is a major source of stress and trauma that can impact people into adulthood. So that's why many of us find it very unsurprising that this child had aggression and conflict issues, as these are very normal responses to the stress of watching a parent struggle with a life threatening illness in your tween/early teen years.
But anyway, the "I hate you"s don't cancel each other out because they mean different things. A parent and a child are not equal and don't have the same responsibilities or roles in their relationship. So even though they said the same thing, what OP did was worse. For a child to say "I hate you" to a parent is hurtful, yes. But it can also be a way of testing boundaries, getting attention (even negative attention can be better to a child than no attention), trying to provoke a conflict in an effort to address past issues that the parent views as settled, etc. Yes, it is immature. But a 16 year old is less mature than a 30 or 40 year old.
When a parent tells a child "I hate you" it means something else. Anger, rejection, burn out.
For a child, this behavior is a clumsy way of trying to force engagement. For a parent, it's a way to end engagement. That's why what OP said is worse than what her DD said. Her DD's comment was a cry for help. OP's comment was a way of saying "I will not help you."
Everyone is excusing the daughter for having had to endure her mother going through cancer, but no one is extending any grace to the mother who had to endure cancer!
I didn’t say they canceled each other out, and I am not arguing about which is worse. I am saying the daughter is not an innocent victim, she provoked her mother, got a response she wasn’t expecting, and now hopefully they can BOTH learn from it.
OP is the adult and the parent. She has a higher responsibility here. Cancer doesn’t give you free rein to be a sh!tty parent. Blaming your child for your cancer is the epitome of red flag parenting.
At no point did she blame her daughter for her cancer you illiterate doofus.
Party A having more responsibility does NOT mean Party B has ZERO responsibility.
I don’t know if anyone said the child has zero responsibility. In fact if you bothered to read that post you’d see it says the mom has ‘higher level’ not ‘all’ responsibility “you illiterate doofus”. Clearly the parent sets the tone for parenting decisions, and those decisions include saying she hates her own child.
If she feels so bad she should apologize.
If YOU had read the post you would understand that she feels bad not because she told her daughter she hates her, too (remember, this darling angel told her mom she hates her and mom responded in kind); she feels bad because she meant it. She feels bad because she is at the point in her relationship with her child where she legitimately hates her. We all know you’re not supposed to say it, but OP is under a lot of stress and she snapped. You know, like a real person.
So if anyone was interested in providing useful advice to OP it would involve how to not hate her daughter. Lashing out at her with all of your unresolved mommy issues isn’t helping her OR HER DAUGHTER. Some of you are using OP as a punching bag because you either have not gotten effective therapy to deal with your own sh!t, or you just haven’t grown TF up yet and are stuck in bratty entitled teenager mode.
Yet again you aren't even reading. No where in OP does it say that. You are projecting again.
Reread the OP again. It is you who is confused.
"yet I feel awful"
not "I feel bad because I meant it"
Gosh it must be difficult for you to get through the day when you make up constant conversations that never happened.
Oh boy. You must be one of the Americans who didn’t read a book last year.
You don't think its possible she fees bad because she verbalized it? Whether or not you hate your child, the biggest issue here is saying it to her. Quite interesting that you gloss over that entirely.
If she meant it why in the world would she feel bad she verbalized it? If she was asking everyone how she should punish her daughter for continuing to be rude to her you might have a point, yet she feels awful and you can’t fathom why.
You can still mean things and not want the person to know. You can realize how hurtful the words would be to hear out loud. At least most people with any sort of self awareness would.
Right so why is everyone heaping so much abuse on OP? She gets it. She knows. She knows she words are hurtful and it’s not right, it didn’t make her feel better to say it out loud. She feels awful for obvious reasons.
So why is apologizing to her daughter such a crazy suggestion? I’m not sure why op are jumping all over posters suggesting this. If she wants even a sliver of a chance at repairing their relationship she needs to own it, apologize, and do better moving forward. The longer she leaves this hanging in the air, the more damage it’s doing to her daughter and their relationship.
Nobody wants your advice when you start out calling them a shitty parent. Look back at the language used here and maybe it will make sense.
Anonymous wrote:OP, your 16 year old daughter fears that she will get cancer.
Your 16 year old daughter fears that you will abandon her due to your cancer.
Your 16 year old cannot cope with your cancer and hates that your cancer has dominated her life.
OP, cancer, not your daughter, is the enemy.
Coping with harsh realities affects individuals differently.
OP, you hate your cancer and you hate what cancer has done to your life, your marriage, and to your relationship with your daughter.
OP, the first step is to correctly identify the enemy, and the enemy is not your daughter.
You are making a lot of assumptions, PP. Sometimes (often, actually) - teens are just really, really hard on the parents. It’s common.
And unfortunately some personality disordered parents are just “really, really hard” on their kids. It’s common.
+10million.
Maybe because they were irreparably damaged by their own parents. In that way nobody is ever wrong, nobody asks to be born.
This is true, but someone comes along to break the chain. My mom was totally disorders. I made huge strides not to be and I am not. My mother criticized me for taking parenting classes, saying she didn’t “need” them. I responded “well, I think I do”. At the same time I was thinking ‘uh, yeah, you absolutely did need them! I had a terrible example and that is why I need them’. But I didn’t actually say what I thought. I have 2 kids through this stage, one in this stage, and one younger. I think I’m doing well. No, I would never say something as hurtful as OP did. I actually very much love my kids and they know it, even though and especially when we fight. No one has ever said they hate anyone in our house.
So when you were in remission from cancer did you not miss a beat?
You folks keep making apologies for a mother who said she hated her child and meant it. Totally messed up.
WHO HAS CANCER!
The kid is a fxxx up. A MEAN GIRL.
She's 16 and just spent the last few years watching her mom go through cancer, but okay I guess she's worthless because she did some very predictable teenage things.
DP. My siblings and I managed to get through our teenage years without ever ONCE telling either of our parents that we hated them, despite lots of arguments and drama.
I don’t think this is “predictable teenage” behavior. I think it is just plain awful behavior. Maybe this is a good learning moment for the kid, to learn that if you throw around phrases like “I hate you” you might hear it back someday. Yes, it is devastating to hear this from a parent, but maybe hearing it is the only way this girl will learn that words matter (even when she is the one saying them).
(FTR I absolutely think OP needs to apologize if she wants to maintain a relationship with her daughter. However, I am taken aback by the posters who seem to have concluded that the daughter is an innocent victim and OP is a horrible monster. They BOTH said it, and a 16 year old is absolutely old enough to be mature enough to know better.)
I mean, even little kids will say "I hate you" to their parents. It really is predictable behavior and is incredibly common. I don't get the pearl clutching about how people can't believe a 16 year old said this to her parent. So many kids say "I hate you" to their parents at some point or another that if you google "teenager said I hate you" you will get literally millions of results linking to article explaining to parents what to do in this situation.
Also, as many people have explained, this particular teen has had a very atypical adolescence, in that her mom has been struggling with cancer for the last several years. If you are familiar with the ACES test/score, having a family member with a serious illness is a major source of stress and trauma that can impact people into adulthood. So that's why many of us find it very unsurprising that this child had aggression and conflict issues, as these are very normal responses to the stress of watching a parent struggle with a life threatening illness in your tween/early teen years.
But anyway, the "I hate you"s don't cancel each other out because they mean different things. A parent and a child are not equal and don't have the same responsibilities or roles in their relationship. So even though they said the same thing, what OP did was worse. For a child to say "I hate you" to a parent is hurtful, yes. But it can also be a way of testing boundaries, getting attention (even negative attention can be better to a child than no attention), trying to provoke a conflict in an effort to address past issues that the parent views as settled, etc. Yes, it is immature. But a 16 year old is less mature than a 30 or 40 year old.
When a parent tells a child "I hate you" it means something else. Anger, rejection, burn out.
For a child, this behavior is a clumsy way of trying to force engagement. For a parent, it's a way to end engagement. That's why what OP said is worse than what her DD said. Her DD's comment was a cry for help. OP's comment was a way of saying "I will not help you."
Everyone is excusing the daughter for having had to endure her mother going through cancer, but no one is extending any grace to the mother who had to endure cancer!
I didn’t say they canceled each other out, and I am not arguing about which is worse. I am saying the daughter is not an innocent victim, she provoked her mother, got a response she wasn’t expecting, and now hopefully they can BOTH learn from it.
OP is the adult and the parent. She has a higher responsibility here. Cancer doesn’t give you free rein to be a sh!tty parent. Blaming your child for your cancer is the epitome of red flag parenting.
At no point did she blame her daughter for her cancer you illiterate doofus.
Party A having more responsibility does NOT mean Party B has ZERO responsibility.
I don’t know if anyone said the child has zero responsibility. In fact if you bothered to read that post you’d see it says the mom has ‘higher level’ not ‘all’ responsibility “you illiterate doofus”. Clearly the parent sets the tone for parenting decisions, and those decisions include saying she hates her own child.
If she feels so bad she should apologize.
If YOU had read the post you would understand that she feels bad not because she told her daughter she hates her, too (remember, this darling angel told her mom she hates her and mom responded in kind); she feels bad because she meant it. She feels bad because she is at the point in her relationship with her child where she legitimately hates her. We all know you’re not supposed to say it, but OP is under a lot of stress and she snapped. You know, like a real person.
So if anyone was interested in providing useful advice to OP it would involve how to not hate her daughter. Lashing out at her with all of your unresolved mommy issues isn’t helping her OR HER DAUGHTER. Some of you are using OP as a punching bag because you either have not gotten effective therapy to deal with your own sh!t, or you just haven’t grown TF up yet and are stuck in bratty entitled teenager mode.
Yet again you aren't even reading. No where in OP does it say that. You are projecting again.
Reread the OP again. It is you who is confused.
"yet I feel awful"
not "I feel bad because I meant it"
Gosh it must be difficult for you to get through the day when you make up constant conversations that never happened.
Oh boy. You must be one of the Americans who didn’t read a book last year.
You don't think its possible she fees bad because she verbalized it? Whether or not you hate your child, the biggest issue here is saying it to her. Quite interesting that you gloss over that entirely.
If she meant it why in the world would she feel bad she verbalized it? If she was asking everyone how she should punish her daughter for continuing to be rude to her you might have a point, yet she feels awful and you can’t fathom why.
You can still mean things and not want the person to know. You can realize how hurtful the words would be to hear out loud. At least most people with any sort of self awareness would.
Right so why is everyone heaping so much abuse on OP? She gets it. She knows. She knows she words are hurtful and it’s not right, it didn’t make her feel better to say it out loud. She feels awful for obvious reasons.
So why is apologizing to her daughter such a crazy suggestion? I’m not sure why op are jumping all over posters suggesting this. If she wants even a sliver of a chance at repairing their relationship she needs to own it, apologize, and do better moving forward. The longer she leaves this hanging in the air, the more damage it’s doing to her daughter and their relationship.
Nobody wants your advice when you start out calling them a shitty parent. Look back at the language used here and maybe it will make sense.
Many of the posts didnt say that. In fact, the post Im referencing is one that pp (or you) argued about having more responsibility = none for the other party. I said if she feels so bad she should apologize and was told that wasn't helpful advice, and the only helpful advice this pp would welcome was how not to hate your child.
Anonymous wrote:OP, your 16 year old daughter fears that she will get cancer.
Your 16 year old daughter fears that you will abandon her due to your cancer.
Your 16 year old cannot cope with your cancer and hates that your cancer has dominated her life.
OP, cancer, not your daughter, is the enemy.
Coping with harsh realities affects individuals differently.
OP, you hate your cancer and you hate what cancer has done to your life, your marriage, and to your relationship with your daughter.
OP, the first step is to correctly identify the enemy, and the enemy is not your daughter.
You are making a lot of assumptions, PP. Sometimes (often, actually) - teens are just really, really hard on the parents. It’s common.
And unfortunately some personality disordered parents are just “really, really hard” on their kids. It’s common.
+10million.
Maybe because they were irreparably damaged by their own parents. In that way nobody is ever wrong, nobody asks to be born.
This is true, but someone comes along to break the chain. My mom was totally disorders. I made huge strides not to be and I am not. My mother criticized me for taking parenting classes, saying she didn’t “need” them. I responded “well, I think I do”. At the same time I was thinking ‘uh, yeah, you absolutely did need them! I had a terrible example and that is why I need them’. But I didn’t actually say what I thought. I have 2 kids through this stage, one in this stage, and one younger. I think I’m doing well. No, I would never say something as hurtful as OP did. I actually very much love my kids and they know it, even though and especially when we fight. No one has ever said they hate anyone in our house.
So when you were in remission from cancer did you not miss a beat?
You folks keep making apologies for a mother who said she hated her child and meant it. Totally messed up.
WHO HAS CANCER!
The kid is a fxxx up. A MEAN GIRL.
She's 16 and just spent the last few years watching her mom go through cancer, but okay I guess she's worthless because she did some very predictable teenage things.
DP. My siblings and I managed to get through our teenage years without ever ONCE telling either of our parents that we hated them, despite lots of arguments and drama.
I don’t think this is “predictable teenage” behavior. I think it is just plain awful behavior. Maybe this is a good learning moment for the kid, to learn that if you throw around phrases like “I hate you” you might hear it back someday. Yes, it is devastating to hear this from a parent, but maybe hearing it is the only way this girl will learn that words matter (even when she is the one saying them).
(FTR I absolutely think OP needs to apologize if she wants to maintain a relationship with her daughter. However, I am taken aback by the posters who seem to have concluded that the daughter is an innocent victim and OP is a horrible monster. They BOTH said it, and a 16 year old is absolutely old enough to be mature enough to know better.)
I mean, even little kids will say "I hate you" to their parents. It really is predictable behavior and is incredibly common. I don't get the pearl clutching about how people can't believe a 16 year old said this to her parent. So many kids say "I hate you" to their parents at some point or another that if you google "teenager said I hate you" you will get literally millions of results linking to article explaining to parents what to do in this situation.
Also, as many people have explained, this particular teen has had a very atypical adolescence, in that her mom has been struggling with cancer for the last several years. If you are familiar with the ACES test/score, having a family member with a serious illness is a major source of stress and trauma that can impact people into adulthood. So that's why many of us find it very unsurprising that this child had aggression and conflict issues, as these are very normal responses to the stress of watching a parent struggle with a life threatening illness in your tween/early teen years.
But anyway, the "I hate you"s don't cancel each other out because they mean different things. A parent and a child are not equal and don't have the same responsibilities or roles in their relationship. So even though they said the same thing, what OP did was worse. For a child to say "I hate you" to a parent is hurtful, yes. But it can also be a way of testing boundaries, getting attention (even negative attention can be better to a child than no attention), trying to provoke a conflict in an effort to address past issues that the parent views as settled, etc. Yes, it is immature. But a 16 year old is less mature than a 30 or 40 year old.
When a parent tells a child "I hate you" it means something else. Anger, rejection, burn out.
For a child, this behavior is a clumsy way of trying to force engagement. For a parent, it's a way to end engagement. That's why what OP said is worse than what her DD said. Her DD's comment was a cry for help. OP's comment was a way of saying "I will not help you."
Everyone is excusing the daughter for having had to endure her mother going through cancer, but no one is extending any grace to the mother who had to endure cancer!
I didn’t say they canceled each other out, and I am not arguing about which is worse. I am saying the daughter is not an innocent victim, she provoked her mother, got a response she wasn’t expecting, and now hopefully they can BOTH learn from it.
OP is the adult and the parent. She has a higher responsibility here. Cancer doesn’t give you free rein to be a sh!tty parent. Blaming your child for your cancer is the epitome of red flag parenting.
At no point did she blame her daughter for her cancer you illiterate doofus.
Party A having more responsibility does NOT mean Party B has ZERO responsibility.
I don’t know if anyone said the child has zero responsibility. In fact if you bothered to read that post you’d see it says the mom has ‘higher level’ not ‘all’ responsibility “you illiterate doofus”. Clearly the parent sets the tone for parenting decisions, and those decisions include saying she hates her own child.
If she feels so bad she should apologize.
If YOU had read the post you would understand that she feels bad not because she told her daughter she hates her, too (remember, this darling angel told her mom she hates her and mom responded in kind); she feels bad because she meant it. She feels bad because she is at the point in her relationship with her child where she legitimately hates her. We all know you’re not supposed to say it, but OP is under a lot of stress and she snapped. You know, like a real person.
So if anyone was interested in providing useful advice to OP it would involve how to not hate her daughter. Lashing out at her with all of your unresolved mommy issues isn’t helping her OR HER DAUGHTER. Some of you are using OP as a punching bag because you either have not gotten effective therapy to deal with your own sh!t, or you just haven’t grown TF up yet and are stuck in bratty entitled teenager mode.
Yet again you aren't even reading. No where in OP does it say that. You are projecting again.
Reread the OP again. It is you who is confused.
"yet I feel awful"
not "I feel bad because I meant it"
Gosh it must be difficult for you to get through the day when you make up constant conversations that never happened.
Oh boy. You must be one of the Americans who didn’t read a book last year.
You don't think its possible she fees bad because she verbalized it? Whether or not you hate your child, the biggest issue here is saying it to her. Quite interesting that you gloss over that entirely.
If she meant it why in the world would she feel bad she verbalized it? If she was asking everyone how she should punish her daughter for continuing to be rude to her you might have a point, yet she feels awful and you can’t fathom why.
You can still mean things and not want the person to know. You can realize how hurtful the words would be to hear out loud. At least most people with any sort of self awareness would.
Right so why is everyone heaping so much abuse on OP? She gets it. She knows. She knows she words are hurtful and it’s not right, it didn’t make her feel better to say it out loud. She feels awful for obvious reasons.
So why is apologizing to her daughter such a crazy suggestion? I’m not sure why op are jumping all over posters suggesting this. If she wants even a sliver of a chance at repairing their relationship she needs to own it, apologize, and do better moving forward. The longer she leaves this hanging in the air, the more damage it’s doing to her daughter and their relationship.
Nobody wants your advice when you start out calling them a shitty parent. Look back at the language used here and maybe it will make sense.
Many of the posts didnt say that. In fact, the post Im referencing is one that pp (or you) argued about having more responsibility = none for the other party. I said if she feels so bad she should apologize and was told that wasn't helpful advice, and the only helpful advice this pp would welcome was how not to hate your child.
OP is not here waiting desperately for advice how to proceed. A lot of people derailed this thread and drove OP away. You're farting into the wind at this point.
Anonymous wrote:OP, your 16 year old daughter fears that she will get cancer.
Your 16 year old daughter fears that you will abandon her due to your cancer.
Your 16 year old cannot cope with your cancer and hates that your cancer has dominated her life.
OP, cancer, not your daughter, is the enemy.
Coping with harsh realities affects individuals differently.
OP, you hate your cancer and you hate what cancer has done to your life, your marriage, and to your relationship with your daughter.
OP, the first step is to correctly identify the enemy, and the enemy is not your daughter.
You are making a lot of assumptions, PP. Sometimes (often, actually) - teens are just really, really hard on the parents. It’s common.
And unfortunately some personality disordered parents are just “really, really hard” on their kids. It’s common.
+10million.
Maybe because they were irreparably damaged by their own parents. In that way nobody is ever wrong, nobody asks to be born.
This is true, but someone comes along to break the chain. My mom was totally disorders. I made huge strides not to be and I am not. My mother criticized me for taking parenting classes, saying she didn’t “need” them. I responded “well, I think I do”. At the same time I was thinking ‘uh, yeah, you absolutely did need them! I had a terrible example and that is why I need them’. But I didn’t actually say what I thought. I have 2 kids through this stage, one in this stage, and one younger. I think I’m doing well. No, I would never say something as hurtful as OP did. I actually very much love my kids and they know it, even though and especially when we fight. No one has ever said they hate anyone in our house.
So when you were in remission from cancer did you not miss a beat?
You folks keep making apologies for a mother who said she hated her child and meant it. Totally messed up.
WHO HAS CANCER!
The kid is a fxxx up. A MEAN GIRL.
She's 16 and just spent the last few years watching her mom go through cancer, but okay I guess she's worthless because she did some very predictable teenage things.
DP. My siblings and I managed to get through our teenage years without ever ONCE telling either of our parents that we hated them, despite lots of arguments and drama.
I don’t think this is “predictable teenage” behavior. I think it is just plain awful behavior. Maybe this is a good learning moment for the kid, to learn that if you throw around phrases like “I hate you” you might hear it back someday. Yes, it is devastating to hear this from a parent, but maybe hearing it is the only way this girl will learn that words matter (even when she is the one saying them).
(FTR I absolutely think OP needs to apologize if she wants to maintain a relationship with her daughter. However, I am taken aback by the posters who seem to have concluded that the daughter is an innocent victim and OP is a horrible monster. They BOTH said it, and a 16 year old is absolutely old enough to be mature enough to know better.)
I mean, even little kids will say "I hate you" to their parents. It really is predictable behavior and is incredibly common. I don't get the pearl clutching about how people can't believe a 16 year old said this to her parent. So many kids say "I hate you" to their parents at some point or another that if you google "teenager said I hate you" you will get literally millions of results linking to article explaining to parents what to do in this situation.
Also, as many people have explained, this particular teen has had a very atypical adolescence, in that her mom has been struggling with cancer for the last several years. If you are familiar with the ACES test/score, having a family member with a serious illness is a major source of stress and trauma that can impact people into adulthood. So that's why many of us find it very unsurprising that this child had aggression and conflict issues, as these are very normal responses to the stress of watching a parent struggle with a life threatening illness in your tween/early teen years.
But anyway, the "I hate you"s don't cancel each other out because they mean different things. A parent and a child are not equal and don't have the same responsibilities or roles in their relationship. So even though they said the same thing, what OP did was worse. For a child to say "I hate you" to a parent is hurtful, yes. But it can also be a way of testing boundaries, getting attention (even negative attention can be better to a child than no attention), trying to provoke a conflict in an effort to address past issues that the parent views as settled, etc. Yes, it is immature. But a 16 year old is less mature than a 30 or 40 year old.
When a parent tells a child "I hate you" it means something else. Anger, rejection, burn out.
For a child, this behavior is a clumsy way of trying to force engagement. For a parent, it's a way to end engagement. That's why what OP said is worse than what her DD said. Her DD's comment was a cry for help. OP's comment was a way of saying "I will not help you."
Everyone is excusing the daughter for having had to endure her mother going through cancer, but no one is extending any grace to the mother who had to endure cancer!
I didn’t say they canceled each other out, and I am not arguing about which is worse. I am saying the daughter is not an innocent victim, she provoked her mother, got a response she wasn’t expecting, and now hopefully they can BOTH learn from it.
OP is the adult and the parent. She has a higher responsibility here. Cancer doesn’t give you free rein to be a sh!tty parent. Blaming your child for your cancer is the epitome of red flag parenting.
At no point did she blame her daughter for her cancer you illiterate doofus.
Party A having more responsibility does NOT mean Party B has ZERO responsibility.
I don’t know if anyone said the child has zero responsibility. In fact if you bothered to read that post you’d see it says the mom has ‘higher level’ not ‘all’ responsibility “you illiterate doofus”. Clearly the parent sets the tone for parenting decisions, and those decisions include saying she hates her own child.
If she feels so bad she should apologize.
If YOU had read the post you would understand that she feels bad not because she told her daughter she hates her, too (remember, this darling angel told her mom she hates her and mom responded in kind); she feels bad because she meant it. She feels bad because she is at the point in her relationship with her child where she legitimately hates her. We all know you’re not supposed to say it, but OP is under a lot of stress and she snapped. You know, like a real person.
So if anyone was interested in providing useful advice to OP it would involve how to not hate her daughter. Lashing out at her with all of your unresolved mommy issues isn’t helping her OR HER DAUGHTER. Some of you are using OP as a punching bag because you either have not gotten effective therapy to deal with your own sh!t, or you just haven’t grown TF up yet and are stuck in bratty entitled teenager mode.
Yet again you aren't even reading. No where in OP does it say that. You are projecting again.
Reread the OP again. It is you who is confused.
"yet I feel awful"
not "I feel bad because I meant it"
Gosh it must be difficult for you to get through the day when you make up constant conversations that never happened.
Oh boy. You must be one of the Americans who didn’t read a book last year.
You don't think its possible she fees bad because she verbalized it? Whether or not you hate your child, the biggest issue here is saying it to her. Quite interesting that you gloss over that entirely.
If she meant it why in the world would she feel bad she verbalized it? If she was asking everyone how she should punish her daughter for continuing to be rude to her you might have a point, yet she feels awful and you can’t fathom why.
You can still mean things and not want the person to know. You can realize how hurtful the words would be to hear out loud. At least most people with any sort of self awareness would.
Right so why is everyone heaping so much abuse on OP? She gets it. She knows. She knows she words are hurtful and it’s not right, it didn’t make her feel better to say it out loud. She feels awful for obvious reasons.
So why is apologizing to her daughter such a crazy suggestion? I’m not sure why op are jumping all over posters suggesting this. If she wants even a sliver of a chance at repairing their relationship she needs to own it, apologize, and do better moving forward. The longer she leaves this hanging in the air, the more damage it’s doing to her daughter and their relationship.
Nobody wants your advice when you start out calling them a shitty parent. Look back at the language used here and maybe it will make sense.
Many of the posts didnt say that. In fact, the post Im referencing is one that pp (or you) argued about having more responsibility = none for the other party. I said if she feels so bad she should apologize and was told that wasn't helpful advice, and the only helpful advice this pp would welcome was how not to hate your child.
OP is not here waiting desperately for advice how to proceed. A lot of people derailed this thread and drove OP away. You're farting into the wind at this point.
Anonymous wrote:OP, your 16 year old daughter fears that she will get cancer.
Your 16 year old daughter fears that you will abandon her due to your cancer.
Your 16 year old cannot cope with your cancer and hates that your cancer has dominated her life.
OP, cancer, not your daughter, is the enemy.
Coping with harsh realities affects individuals differently.
OP, you hate your cancer and you hate what cancer has done to your life, your marriage, and to your relationship with your daughter.
OP, the first step is to correctly identify the enemy, and the enemy is not your daughter.
You are making a lot of assumptions, PP. Sometimes (often, actually) - teens are just really, really hard on the parents. It’s common.
And unfortunately some personality disordered parents are just “really, really hard” on their kids. It’s common.
+10million.
Maybe because they were irreparably damaged by their own parents. In that way nobody is ever wrong, nobody asks to be born.
This is true, but someone comes along to break the chain. My mom was totally disorders. I made huge strides not to be and I am not. My mother criticized me for taking parenting classes, saying she didn’t “need” them. I responded “well, I think I do”. At the same time I was thinking ‘uh, yeah, you absolutely did need them! I had a terrible example and that is why I need them’. But I didn’t actually say what I thought. I have 2 kids through this stage, one in this stage, and one younger. I think I’m doing well. No, I would never say something as hurtful as OP did. I actually very much love my kids and they know it, even though and especially when we fight. No one has ever said they hate anyone in our house.
So when you were in remission from cancer did you not miss a beat?
You folks keep making apologies for a mother who said she hated her child and meant it. Totally messed up.
WHO HAS CANCER!
The kid is a fxxx up. A MEAN GIRL.
She's 16 and just spent the last few years watching her mom go through cancer, but okay I guess she's worthless because she did some very predictable teenage things.
DP. My siblings and I managed to get through our teenage years without ever ONCE telling either of our parents that we hated them, despite lots of arguments and drama.
I don’t think this is “predictable teenage” behavior. I think it is just plain awful behavior. Maybe this is a good learning moment for the kid, to learn that if you throw around phrases like “I hate you” you might hear it back someday. Yes, it is devastating to hear this from a parent, but maybe hearing it is the only way this girl will learn that words matter (even when she is the one saying them).
(FTR I absolutely think OP needs to apologize if she wants to maintain a relationship with her daughter. However, I am taken aback by the posters who seem to have concluded that the daughter is an innocent victim and OP is a horrible monster. They BOTH said it, and a 16 year old is absolutely old enough to be mature enough to know better.)
I mean, even little kids will say "I hate you" to their parents. It really is predictable behavior and is incredibly common. I don't get the pearl clutching about how people can't believe a 16 year old said this to her parent. So many kids say "I hate you" to their parents at some point or another that if you google "teenager said I hate you" you will get literally millions of results linking to article explaining to parents what to do in this situation.
Also, as many people have explained, this particular teen has had a very atypical adolescence, in that her mom has been struggling with cancer for the last several years. If you are familiar with the ACES test/score, having a family member with a serious illness is a major source of stress and trauma that can impact people into adulthood. So that's why many of us find it very unsurprising that this child had aggression and conflict issues, as these are very normal responses to the stress of watching a parent struggle with a life threatening illness in your tween/early teen years.
But anyway, the "I hate you"s don't cancel each other out because they mean different things. A parent and a child are not equal and don't have the same responsibilities or roles in their relationship. So even though they said the same thing, what OP did was worse. For a child to say "I hate you" to a parent is hurtful, yes. But it can also be a way of testing boundaries, getting attention (even negative attention can be better to a child than no attention), trying to provoke a conflict in an effort to address past issues that the parent views as settled, etc. Yes, it is immature. But a 16 year old is less mature than a 30 or 40 year old.
When a parent tells a child "I hate you" it means something else. Anger, rejection, burn out.
For a child, this behavior is a clumsy way of trying to force engagement. For a parent, it's a way to end engagement. That's why what OP said is worse than what her DD said. Her DD's comment was a cry for help. OP's comment was a way of saying "I will not help you."
Everyone is excusing the daughter for having had to endure her mother going through cancer, but no one is extending any grace to the mother who had to endure cancer!
I didn’t say they canceled each other out, and I am not arguing about which is worse. I am saying the daughter is not an innocent victim, she provoked her mother, got a response she wasn’t expecting, and now hopefully they can BOTH learn from it.
OP is the adult and the parent. She has a higher responsibility here. Cancer doesn’t give you free rein to be a sh!tty parent. Blaming your child for your cancer is the epitome of red flag parenting.
At no point did she blame her daughter for her cancer you illiterate doofus.
Party A having more responsibility does NOT mean Party B has ZERO responsibility.
I don’t know if anyone said the child has zero responsibility. In fact if you bothered to read that post you’d see it says the mom has ‘higher level’ not ‘all’ responsibility “you illiterate doofus”. Clearly the parent sets the tone for parenting decisions, and those decisions include saying she hates her own child.
If she feels so bad she should apologize.
If YOU had read the post you would understand that she feels bad not because she told her daughter she hates her, too (remember, this darling angel told her mom she hates her and mom responded in kind); she feels bad because she meant it. She feels bad because she is at the point in her relationship with her child where she legitimately hates her. We all know you’re not supposed to say it, but OP is under a lot of stress and she snapped. You know, like a real person.
So if anyone was interested in providing useful advice to OP it would involve how to not hate her daughter. Lashing out at her with all of your unresolved mommy issues isn’t helping her OR HER DAUGHTER. Some of you are using OP as a punching bag because you either have not gotten effective therapy to deal with your own sh!t, or you just haven’t grown TF up yet and are stuck in bratty entitled teenager mode.
Yet again you aren't even reading. No where in OP does it say that. You are projecting again.
Reread the OP again. It is you who is confused.
"yet I feel awful"
not "I feel bad because I meant it"
Gosh it must be difficult for you to get through the day when you make up constant conversations that never happened.
Oh boy. You must be one of the Americans who didn’t read a book last year.
You don't think its possible she fees bad because she verbalized it? Whether or not you hate your child, the biggest issue here is saying it to her. Quite interesting that you gloss over that entirely.
If she meant it why in the world would she feel bad she verbalized it? If she was asking everyone how she should punish her daughter for continuing to be rude to her you might have a point, yet she feels awful and you can’t fathom why.
You can still mean things and not want the person to know. You can realize how hurtful the words would be to hear out loud. At least most people with any sort of self awareness would.
Right so why is everyone heaping so much abuse on OP? She gets it. She knows. She knows she words are hurtful and it’s not right, it didn’t make her feel better to say it out loud. She feels awful for obvious reasons.
So why is apologizing to her daughter such a crazy suggestion? I’m not sure why op are jumping all over posters suggesting this. If she wants even a sliver of a chance at repairing their relationship she needs to own it, apologize, and do better moving forward. The longer she leaves this hanging in the air, the more damage it’s doing to her daughter and their relationship.
Nobody wants your advice when you start out calling them a shitty parent. Look back at the language used here and maybe it will make sense.
Many of the posts didnt say that. In fact, the post Im referencing is one that pp (or you) argued about having more responsibility = none for the other party. I said if she feels so bad she should apologize and was told that wasn't helpful advice, and the only helpful advice this pp would welcome was how not to hate your child.
OP is not here waiting desperately for advice how to proceed. A lot of people derailed this thread and drove OP away. You're farting into the wind at this point.
Anonymous wrote:OP, your 16 year old daughter fears that she will get cancer.
Your 16 year old daughter fears that you will abandon her due to your cancer.
Your 16 year old cannot cope with your cancer and hates that your cancer has dominated her life.
OP, cancer, not your daughter, is the enemy.
Coping with harsh realities affects individuals differently.
OP, you hate your cancer and you hate what cancer has done to your life, your marriage, and to your relationship with your daughter.
OP, the first step is to correctly identify the enemy, and the enemy is not your daughter.
You are making a lot of assumptions, PP. Sometimes (often, actually) - teens are just really, really hard on the parents. It’s common.
And unfortunately some personality disordered parents are just “really, really hard” on their kids. It’s common.
+10million.
Maybe because they were irreparably damaged by their own parents. In that way nobody is ever wrong, nobody asks to be born.
This is true, but someone comes along to break the chain. My mom was totally disorders. I made huge strides not to be and I am not. My mother criticized me for taking parenting classes, saying she didn’t “need” them. I responded “well, I think I do”. At the same time I was thinking ‘uh, yeah, you absolutely did need them! I had a terrible example and that is why I need them’. But I didn’t actually say what I thought. I have 2 kids through this stage, one in this stage, and one younger. I think I’m doing well. No, I would never say something as hurtful as OP did. I actually very much love my kids and they know it, even though and especially when we fight. No one has ever said they hate anyone in our house.
So when you were in remission from cancer did you not miss a beat?
You folks keep making apologies for a mother who said she hated her child and meant it. Totally messed up.
WHO HAS CANCER!
The kid is a fxxx up. A MEAN GIRL.
She's 16 and just spent the last few years watching her mom go through cancer, but okay I guess she's worthless because she did some very predictable teenage things.
DP. My siblings and I managed to get through our teenage years without ever ONCE telling either of our parents that we hated them, despite lots of arguments and drama.
I don’t think this is “predictable teenage” behavior. I think it is just plain awful behavior. Maybe this is a good learning moment for the kid, to learn that if you throw around phrases like “I hate you” you might hear it back someday. Yes, it is devastating to hear this from a parent, but maybe hearing it is the only way this girl will learn that words matter (even when she is the one saying them).
(FTR I absolutely think OP needs to apologize if she wants to maintain a relationship with her daughter. However, I am taken aback by the posters who seem to have concluded that the daughter is an innocent victim and OP is a horrible monster. They BOTH said it, and a 16 year old is absolutely old enough to be mature enough to know better.)
I mean, even little kids will say "I hate you" to their parents. It really is predictable behavior and is incredibly common. I don't get the pearl clutching about how people can't believe a 16 year old said this to her parent. So many kids say "I hate you" to their parents at some point or another that if you google "teenager said I hate you" you will get literally millions of results linking to article explaining to parents what to do in this situation.
Also, as many people have explained, this particular teen has had a very atypical adolescence, in that her mom has been struggling with cancer for the last several years. If you are familiar with the ACES test/score, having a family member with a serious illness is a major source of stress and trauma that can impact people into adulthood. So that's why many of us find it very unsurprising that this child had aggression and conflict issues, as these are very normal responses to the stress of watching a parent struggle with a life threatening illness in your tween/early teen years.
But anyway, the "I hate you"s don't cancel each other out because they mean different things. A parent and a child are not equal and don't have the same responsibilities or roles in their relationship. So even though they said the same thing, what OP did was worse. For a child to say "I hate you" to a parent is hurtful, yes. But it can also be a way of testing boundaries, getting attention (even negative attention can be better to a child than no attention), trying to provoke a conflict in an effort to address past issues that the parent views as settled, etc. Yes, it is immature. But a 16 year old is less mature than a 30 or 40 year old.
When a parent tells a child "I hate you" it means something else. Anger, rejection, burn out.
For a child, this behavior is a clumsy way of trying to force engagement. For a parent, it's a way to end engagement. That's why what OP said is worse than what her DD said. Her DD's comment was a cry for help. OP's comment was a way of saying "I will not help you."
Everyone is excusing the daughter for having had to endure her mother going through cancer, but no one is extending any grace to the mother who had to endure cancer!
I didn’t say they canceled each other out, and I am not arguing about which is worse. I am saying the daughter is not an innocent victim, she provoked her mother, got a response she wasn’t expecting, and now hopefully they can BOTH learn from it.
OP is the adult and the parent. She has a higher responsibility here. Cancer doesn’t give you free rein to be a sh!tty parent. Blaming your child for your cancer is the epitome of red flag parenting.
At no point did she blame her daughter for her cancer you illiterate doofus.
Party A having more responsibility does NOT mean Party B has ZERO responsibility.
I don’t know if anyone said the child has zero responsibility. In fact if you bothered to read that post you’d see it says the mom has ‘higher level’ not ‘all’ responsibility “you illiterate doofus”. Clearly the parent sets the tone for parenting decisions, and those decisions include saying she hates her own child.
If she feels so bad she should apologize.
If YOU had read the post you would understand that she feels bad not because she told her daughter she hates her, too (remember, this darling angel told her mom she hates her and mom responded in kind); she feels bad because she meant it. She feels bad because she is at the point in her relationship with her child where she legitimately hates her. We all know you’re not supposed to say it, but OP is under a lot of stress and she snapped. You know, like a real person.
So if anyone was interested in providing useful advice to OP it would involve how to not hate her daughter. Lashing out at her with all of your unresolved mommy issues isn’t helping her OR HER DAUGHTER. Some of you are using OP as a punching bag because you either have not gotten effective therapy to deal with your own sh!t, or you just haven’t grown TF up yet and are stuck in bratty entitled teenager mode.
Yet again you aren't even reading. No where in OP does it say that. You are projecting again.
Reread the OP again. It is you who is confused.
"yet I feel awful"
not "I feel bad because I meant it"
Gosh it must be difficult for you to get through the day when you make up constant conversations that never happened.
Oh boy. You must be one of the Americans who didn’t read a book last year.
You don't think its possible she fees bad because she verbalized it? Whether or not you hate your child, the biggest issue here is saying it to her. Quite interesting that you gloss over that entirely.
If she meant it why in the world would she feel bad she verbalized it? If she was asking everyone how she should punish her daughter for continuing to be rude to her you might have a point, yet she feels awful and you can’t fathom why.
You can still mean things and not want the person to know. You can realize how hurtful the words would be to hear out loud. At least most people with any sort of self awareness would.
And some people can be pushed too far and snap. In fact i'd bet 99% of people either have or will do that at some point in their lifetimes. You "I was raised by a controlling abusive mother so I don't even raise my voice at my own DC" posters are wholly unbelievable.
Anonymous wrote:OP, your 16 year old daughter fears that she will get cancer.
Your 16 year old daughter fears that you will abandon her due to your cancer.
Your 16 year old cannot cope with your cancer and hates that your cancer has dominated her life.
OP, cancer, not your daughter, is the enemy.
Coping with harsh realities affects individuals differently.
OP, you hate your cancer and you hate what cancer has done to your life, your marriage, and to your relationship with your daughter.
OP, the first step is to correctly identify the enemy, and the enemy is not your daughter.
You are making a lot of assumptions, PP. Sometimes (often, actually) - teens are just really, really hard on the parents. It’s common.
And unfortunately some personality disordered parents are just “really, really hard” on their kids. It’s common.
+10million.
Maybe because they were irreparably damaged by their own parents. In that way nobody is ever wrong, nobody asks to be born.
This is true, but someone comes along to break the chain. My mom was totally disorders. I made huge strides not to be and I am not. My mother criticized me for taking parenting classes, saying she didn’t “need” them. I responded “well, I think I do”. At the same time I was thinking ‘uh, yeah, you absolutely did need them! I had a terrible example and that is why I need them’. But I didn’t actually say what I thought. I have 2 kids through this stage, one in this stage, and one younger. I think I’m doing well. No, I would never say something as hurtful as OP did. I actually very much love my kids and they know it, even though and especially when we fight. No one has ever said they hate anyone in our house.
So when you were in remission from cancer did you not miss a beat?
You folks keep making apologies for a mother who said she hated her child and meant it. Totally messed up.
WHO HAS CANCER!
The kid is a fxxx up. A MEAN GIRL.
She's 16 and just spent the last few years watching her mom go through cancer, but okay I guess she's worthless because she did some very predictable teenage things.
DP. My siblings and I managed to get through our teenage years without ever ONCE telling either of our parents that we hated them, despite lots of arguments and drama.
I don’t think this is “predictable teenage” behavior. I think it is just plain awful behavior. Maybe this is a good learning moment for the kid, to learn that if you throw around phrases like “I hate you” you might hear it back someday. Yes, it is devastating to hear this from a parent, but maybe hearing it is the only way this girl will learn that words matter (even when she is the one saying them).
(FTR I absolutely think OP needs to apologize if she wants to maintain a relationship with her daughter. However, I am taken aback by the posters who seem to have concluded that the daughter is an innocent victim and OP is a horrible monster. They BOTH said it, and a 16 year old is absolutely old enough to be mature enough to know better.)
I mean, even little kids will say "I hate you" to their parents. It really is predictable behavior and is incredibly common. I don't get the pearl clutching about how people can't believe a 16 year old said this to her parent. So many kids say "I hate you" to their parents at some point or another that if you google "teenager said I hate you" you will get literally millions of results linking to article explaining to parents what to do in this situation.
Also, as many people have explained, this particular teen has had a very atypical adolescence, in that her mom has been struggling with cancer for the last several years. If you are familiar with the ACES test/score, having a family member with a serious illness is a major source of stress and trauma that can impact people into adulthood. So that's why many of us find it very unsurprising that this child had aggression and conflict issues, as these are very normal responses to the stress of watching a parent struggle with a life threatening illness in your tween/early teen years.
But anyway, the "I hate you"s don't cancel each other out because they mean different things. A parent and a child are not equal and don't have the same responsibilities or roles in their relationship. So even though they said the same thing, what OP did was worse. For a child to say "I hate you" to a parent is hurtful, yes. But it can also be a way of testing boundaries, getting attention (even negative attention can be better to a child than no attention), trying to provoke a conflict in an effort to address past issues that the parent views as settled, etc. Yes, it is immature. But a 16 year old is less mature than a 30 or 40 year old.
When a parent tells a child "I hate you" it means something else. Anger, rejection, burn out.
For a child, this behavior is a clumsy way of trying to force engagement. For a parent, it's a way to end engagement. That's why what OP said is worse than what her DD said. Her DD's comment was a cry for help. OP's comment was a way of saying "I will not help you."
Everyone is excusing the daughter for having had to endure her mother going through cancer, but no one is extending any grace to the mother who had to endure cancer!
I didn’t say they canceled each other out, and I am not arguing about which is worse. I am saying the daughter is not an innocent victim, she provoked her mother, got a response she wasn’t expecting, and now hopefully they can BOTH learn from it.
OP is the adult and the parent. She has a higher responsibility here. Cancer doesn’t give you free rein to be a sh!tty parent. Blaming your child for your cancer is the epitome of red flag parenting.
At no point did she blame her daughter for her cancer you illiterate doofus.
Party A having more responsibility does NOT mean Party B has ZERO responsibility.
I don’t know if anyone said the child has zero responsibility. In fact if you bothered to read that post you’d see it says the mom has ‘higher level’ not ‘all’ responsibility “you illiterate doofus”. Clearly the parent sets the tone for parenting decisions, and those decisions include saying she hates her own child.
If she feels so bad she should apologize.
If YOU had read the post you would understand that she feels bad not because she told her daughter she hates her, too (remember, this darling angel told her mom she hates her and mom responded in kind); she feels bad because she meant it. She feels bad because she is at the point in her relationship with her child where she legitimately hates her. We all know you’re not supposed to say it, but OP is under a lot of stress and she snapped. You know, like a real person.
So if anyone was interested in providing useful advice to OP it would involve how to not hate her daughter. Lashing out at her with all of your unresolved mommy issues isn’t helping her OR HER DAUGHTER. Some of you are using OP as a punching bag because you either have not gotten effective therapy to deal with your own sh!t, or you just haven’t grown TF up yet and are stuck in bratty entitled teenager mode.
Yet again you aren't even reading. No where in OP does it say that. You are projecting again.
Reread the OP again. It is you who is confused.
"yet I feel awful"
not "I feel bad because I meant it"
Gosh it must be difficult for you to get through the day when you make up constant conversations that never happened.
Oh boy. You must be one of the Americans who didn’t read a book last year.
You don't think its possible she fees bad because she verbalized it? Whether or not you hate your child, the biggest issue here is saying it to her. Quite interesting that you gloss over that entirely.
If she meant it why in the world would she feel bad she verbalized it? If she was asking everyone how she should punish her daughter for continuing to be rude to her you might have a point, yet she feels awful and you can’t fathom why.
You can still mean things and not want the person to know. You can realize how hurtful the words would be to hear out loud. At least most people with any sort of self awareness would.
And some people can be pushed too far and snap. In fact i'd bet 99% of people either have or will do that at some point in their lifetimes. You "I was raised by a controlling abusive mother so I don't even raise my voice at my own DC" posters are wholly unbelievable.
Actually what a lot of us are saying is that it's not the "snapping" that is the major issue, it's the "I meant it" and refusal to be the bigger person and apologize.
Of course I, and I'm sure most people on here, have been pushed to the edge by our kids and said something hurtful or yelled at my kid. Of course! I am human. I am not a perfect parent by a long shot and never claimed to be.
But when I have done this, it is always like a wake up call "oh this is not the parent I want to be." And no matter what my kid did to provoke that behavior, I always ALWAYS go and apologize for my own behavior. I don't validate their behavior or say "oh it's okay." I go and say "look, I got upset and said something I should not have said. I am sorry. In the future what I need to do is take a break until I'm ready to speak to you calmly." And you know what, my kid respects me so much more when I do this. Because holding yourself accountable for your own behavior is one of the most mature things you can do, and shows real strength of character. It also demonstrates to a child who is not behaving well "oh, I can address bad prior behavior by being accountable and making better choices moving forward."
That's what a lot of us are trying to say. OP is stuck in these feelings of "I'm right and she's wrong" and "she made me do this" and "I'm the victim, she's an ungrateful brat." I might understand how a parent gets to feeling that way in specific situations, but it's not a productive mental space. OP needs to rise above all that, be the adult, apologize for her own behavior, and treat her daughter with the respect that she wants her daughter to have towards her. Show her daughter the path towards forgiveness and repairing their relationship. Her 16 year old is NOT going to find that path on her own. OP has to find it and bring her daughter along.
Or she can dig in, wait until DD turns 18, and enjoy having a bad relationship with her DD for the rest of her life. Or no relationship at all.
There is no solution to this problem that starts with OP doubling down on her feelings towards her daughter and waiting for her daughter to right this ship. Will not happen. Even if eventually the daughter finds her way to this understanding on her own, she will rightly view her mom as immature and someone to be managed at best, distanced from at worst, not someone who is her partner in building a meaningful relationship.
Anonymous wrote:OP, your 16 year old daughter fears that she will get cancer.
Your 16 year old daughter fears that you will abandon her due to your cancer.
Your 16 year old cannot cope with your cancer and hates that your cancer has dominated her life.
OP, cancer, not your daughter, is the enemy.
Coping with harsh realities affects individuals differently.
OP, you hate your cancer and you hate what cancer has done to your life, your marriage, and to your relationship with your daughter.
OP, the first step is to correctly identify the enemy, and the enemy is not your daughter.
You are making a lot of assumptions, PP. Sometimes (often, actually) - teens are just really, really hard on the parents. It’s common.
And unfortunately some personality disordered parents are just “really, really hard” on their kids. It’s common.
+10million.
Maybe because they were irreparably damaged by their own parents. In that way nobody is ever wrong, nobody asks to be born.
This is true, but someone comes along to break the chain. My mom was totally disorders. I made huge strides not to be and I am not. My mother criticized me for taking parenting classes, saying she didn’t “need” them. I responded “well, I think I do”. At the same time I was thinking ‘uh, yeah, you absolutely did need them! I had a terrible example and that is why I need them’. But I didn’t actually say what I thought. I have 2 kids through this stage, one in this stage, and one younger. I think I’m doing well. No, I would never say something as hurtful as OP did. I actually very much love my kids and they know it, even though and especially when we fight. No one has ever said they hate anyone in our house.
So when you were in remission from cancer did you not miss a beat?
You folks keep making apologies for a mother who said she hated her child and meant it. Totally messed up.
WHO HAS CANCER!
The kid is a fxxx up. A MEAN GIRL.
She's 16 and just spent the last few years watching her mom go through cancer, but okay I guess she's worthless because she did some very predictable teenage things.
DP. My siblings and I managed to get through our teenage years without ever ONCE telling either of our parents that we hated them, despite lots of arguments and drama.
I don’t think this is “predictable teenage” behavior. I think it is just plain awful behavior. Maybe this is a good learning moment for the kid, to learn that if you throw around phrases like “I hate you” you might hear it back someday. Yes, it is devastating to hear this from a parent, but maybe hearing it is the only way this girl will learn that words matter (even when she is the one saying them).
(FTR I absolutely think OP needs to apologize if she wants to maintain a relationship with her daughter. However, I am taken aback by the posters who seem to have concluded that the daughter is an innocent victim and OP is a horrible monster. They BOTH said it, and a 16 year old is absolutely old enough to be mature enough to know better.)
I mean, even little kids will say "I hate you" to their parents. It really is predictable behavior and is incredibly common. I don't get the pearl clutching about how people can't believe a 16 year old said this to her parent. So many kids say "I hate you" to their parents at some point or another that if you google "teenager said I hate you" you will get literally millions of results linking to article explaining to parents what to do in this situation.
Also, as many people have explained, this particular teen has had a very atypical adolescence, in that her mom has been struggling with cancer for the last several years. If you are familiar with the ACES test/score, having a family member with a serious illness is a major source of stress and trauma that can impact people into adulthood. So that's why many of us find it very unsurprising that this child had aggression and conflict issues, as these are very normal responses to the stress of watching a parent struggle with a life threatening illness in your tween/early teen years.
But anyway, the "I hate you"s don't cancel each other out because they mean different things. A parent and a child are not equal and don't have the same responsibilities or roles in their relationship. So even though they said the same thing, what OP did was worse. For a child to say "I hate you" to a parent is hurtful, yes. But it can also be a way of testing boundaries, getting attention (even negative attention can be better to a child than no attention), trying to provoke a conflict in an effort to address past issues that the parent views as settled, etc. Yes, it is immature. But a 16 year old is less mature than a 30 or 40 year old.
When a parent tells a child "I hate you" it means something else. Anger, rejection, burn out.
For a child, this behavior is a clumsy way of trying to force engagement. For a parent, it's a way to end engagement. That's why what OP said is worse than what her DD said. Her DD's comment was a cry for help. OP's comment was a way of saying "I will not help you."
Everyone is excusing the daughter for having had to endure her mother going through cancer, but no one is extending any grace to the mother who had to endure cancer!
I didn’t say they canceled each other out, and I am not arguing about which is worse. I am saying the daughter is not an innocent victim, she provoked her mother, got a response she wasn’t expecting, and now hopefully they can BOTH learn from it.
OP is the adult and the parent. She has a higher responsibility here. Cancer doesn’t give you free rein to be a sh!tty parent. Blaming your child for your cancer is the epitome of red flag parenting.
At no point did she blame her daughter for her cancer you illiterate doofus.
Party A having more responsibility does NOT mean Party B has ZERO responsibility.
I don’t know if anyone said the child has zero responsibility. In fact if you bothered to read that post you’d see it says the mom has ‘higher level’ not ‘all’ responsibility “you illiterate doofus”. Clearly the parent sets the tone for parenting decisions, and those decisions include saying she hates her own child.
If she feels so bad she should apologize.
If YOU had read the post you would understand that she feels bad not because she told her daughter she hates her, too (remember, this darling angel told her mom she hates her and mom responded in kind); she feels bad because she meant it. She feels bad because she is at the point in her relationship with her child where she legitimately hates her. We all know you’re not supposed to say it, but OP is under a lot of stress and she snapped. You know, like a real person.
So if anyone was interested in providing useful advice to OP it would involve how to not hate her daughter. Lashing out at her with all of your unresolved mommy issues isn’t helping her OR HER DAUGHTER. Some of you are using OP as a punching bag because you either have not gotten effective therapy to deal with your own sh!t, or you just haven’t grown TF up yet and are stuck in bratty entitled teenager mode.
Yet again you aren't even reading. No where in OP does it say that. You are projecting again.
Reread the OP again. It is you who is confused.
"yet I feel awful"
not "I feel bad because I meant it"
Gosh it must be difficult for you to get through the day when you make up constant conversations that never happened.
Oh boy. You must be one of the Americans who didn’t read a book last year.
You don't think its possible she fees bad because she verbalized it? Whether or not you hate your child, the biggest issue here is saying it to her. Quite interesting that you gloss over that entirely.
If she meant it why in the world would she feel bad she verbalized it? If she was asking everyone how she should punish her daughter for continuing to be rude to her you might have a point, yet she feels awful and you can’t fathom why.
You can still mean things and not want the person to know. You can realize how hurtful the words would be to hear out loud. At least most people with any sort of self awareness would.
Right so why is everyone heaping so much abuse on OP? She gets it. She knows. She knows she words are hurtful and it’s not right, it didn’t make her feel better to say it out loud. She feels awful for obvious reasons.
So why is apologizing to her daughter such a crazy suggestion? I’m not sure why op are jumping all over posters suggesting this. If she wants even a sliver of a chance at repairing their relationship she needs to own it, apologize, and do better moving forward. The longer she leaves this hanging in the air, the more damage it’s doing to her daughter and their relationship.
Nobody wants your advice when you start out calling them a shitty parent. Look back at the language used here and maybe it will make sense.
Many of the posts didnt say that. In fact, the post Im referencing is one that pp (or you) argued about having more responsibility = none for the other party. I said if she feels so bad she should apologize and was told that wasn't helpful advice, and the only helpful advice this pp would welcome was how not to hate your child.
OP is not here waiting desperately for advice how to proceed. A lot of people derailed this thread and drove OP away. You're farting into the wind at this point.
Anonymous wrote:OP, your 16 year old daughter fears that she will get cancer.
Your 16 year old daughter fears that you will abandon her due to your cancer.
Your 16 year old cannot cope with your cancer and hates that your cancer has dominated her life.
OP, cancer, not your daughter, is the enemy.
Coping with harsh realities affects individuals differently.
OP, you hate your cancer and you hate what cancer has done to your life, your marriage, and to your relationship with your daughter.
OP, the first step is to correctly identify the enemy, and the enemy is not your daughter.
You are making a lot of assumptions, PP. Sometimes (often, actually) - teens are just really, really hard on the parents. It’s common.
And unfortunately some personality disordered parents are just “really, really hard” on their kids. It’s common.
+10million.
Maybe because they were irreparably damaged by their own parents. In that way nobody is ever wrong, nobody asks to be born.
This is true, but someone comes along to break the chain. My mom was totally disorders. I made huge strides not to be and I am not. My mother criticized me for taking parenting classes, saying she didn’t “need” them. I responded “well, I think I do”. At the same time I was thinking ‘uh, yeah, you absolutely did need them! I had a terrible example and that is why I need them’. But I didn’t actually say what I thought. I have 2 kids through this stage, one in this stage, and one younger. I think I’m doing well. No, I would never say something as hurtful as OP did. I actually very much love my kids and they know it, even though and especially when we fight. No one has ever said they hate anyone in our house.
So when you were in remission from cancer did you not miss a beat?
You folks keep making apologies for a mother who said she hated her child and meant it. Totally messed up.
WHO HAS CANCER!
The kid is a fxxx up. A MEAN GIRL.
She's 16 and just spent the last few years watching her mom go through cancer, but okay I guess she's worthless because she did some very predictable teenage things.
DP. My siblings and I managed to get through our teenage years without ever ONCE telling either of our parents that we hated them, despite lots of arguments and drama.
I don’t think this is “predictable teenage” behavior. I think it is just plain awful behavior. Maybe this is a good learning moment for the kid, to learn that if you throw around phrases like “I hate you” you might hear it back someday. Yes, it is devastating to hear this from a parent, but maybe hearing it is the only way this girl will learn that words matter (even when she is the one saying them).
(FTR I absolutely think OP needs to apologize if she wants to maintain a relationship with her daughter. However, I am taken aback by the posters who seem to have concluded that the daughter is an innocent victim and OP is a horrible monster. They BOTH said it, and a 16 year old is absolutely old enough to be mature enough to know better.)
I mean, even little kids will say "I hate you" to their parents. It really is predictable behavior and is incredibly common. I don't get the pearl clutching about how people can't believe a 16 year old said this to her parent. So many kids say "I hate you" to their parents at some point or another that if you google "teenager said I hate you" you will get literally millions of results linking to article explaining to parents what to do in this situation.
Also, as many people have explained, this particular teen has had a very atypical adolescence, in that her mom has been struggling with cancer for the last several years. If you are familiar with the ACES test/score, having a family member with a serious illness is a major source of stress and trauma that can impact people into adulthood. So that's why many of us find it very unsurprising that this child had aggression and conflict issues, as these are very normal responses to the stress of watching a parent struggle with a life threatening illness in your tween/early teen years.
But anyway, the "I hate you"s don't cancel each other out because they mean different things. A parent and a child are not equal and don't have the same responsibilities or roles in their relationship. So even though they said the same thing, what OP did was worse. For a child to say "I hate you" to a parent is hurtful, yes. But it can also be a way of testing boundaries, getting attention (even negative attention can be better to a child than no attention), trying to provoke a conflict in an effort to address past issues that the parent views as settled, etc. Yes, it is immature. But a 16 year old is less mature than a 30 or 40 year old.
When a parent tells a child "I hate you" it means something else. Anger, rejection, burn out.
For a child, this behavior is a clumsy way of trying to force engagement. For a parent, it's a way to end engagement. That's why what OP said is worse than what her DD said. Her DD's comment was a cry for help. OP's comment was a way of saying "I will not help you."
Everyone is excusing the daughter for having had to endure her mother going through cancer, but no one is extending any grace to the mother who had to endure cancer!
I didn’t say they canceled each other out, and I am not arguing about which is worse. I am saying the daughter is not an innocent victim, she provoked her mother, got a response she wasn’t expecting, and now hopefully they can BOTH learn from it.
OP is the adult and the parent. She has a higher responsibility here. Cancer doesn’t give you free rein to be a sh!tty parent. Blaming your child for your cancer is the epitome of red flag parenting.
At no point did she blame her daughter for her cancer you illiterate doofus.
Party A having more responsibility does NOT mean Party B has ZERO responsibility.
I don’t know if anyone said the child has zero responsibility. In fact if you bothered to read that post you’d see it says the mom has ‘higher level’ not ‘all’ responsibility “you illiterate doofus”. Clearly the parent sets the tone for parenting decisions, and those decisions include saying she hates her own child.
If she feels so bad she should apologize.
If YOU had read the post you would understand that she feels bad not because she told her daughter she hates her, too (remember, this darling angel told her mom she hates her and mom responded in kind); she feels bad because she meant it. She feels bad because she is at the point in her relationship with her child where she legitimately hates her. We all know you’re not supposed to say it, but OP is under a lot of stress and she snapped. You know, like a real person.
So if anyone was interested in providing useful advice to OP it would involve how to not hate her daughter. Lashing out at her with all of your unresolved mommy issues isn’t helping her OR HER DAUGHTER. Some of you are using OP as a punching bag because you either have not gotten effective therapy to deal with your own sh!t, or you just haven’t grown TF up yet and are stuck in bratty entitled teenager mode.
Yet again you aren't even reading. No where in OP does it say that. You are projecting again.
Reread the OP again. It is you who is confused.
"yet I feel awful"
not "I feel bad because I meant it"
Gosh it must be difficult for you to get through the day when you make up constant conversations that never happened.
Oh boy. You must be one of the Americans who didn’t read a book last year.
You don't think its possible she fees bad because she verbalized it? Whether or not you hate your child, the biggest issue here is saying it to her. Quite interesting that you gloss over that entirely.
If she meant it why in the world would she feel bad she verbalized it? If she was asking everyone how she should punish her daughter for continuing to be rude to her you might have a point, yet she feels awful and you can’t fathom why.
You can still mean things and not want the person to know. You can realize how hurtful the words would be to hear out loud. At least most people with any sort of self awareness would.
And some people can be pushed too far and snap. In fact i'd bet 99% of people either have or will do that at some point in their lifetimes. You "I was raised by a controlling abusive mother so I don't even raise my voice at my own DC" posters are wholly unbelievable.
Actually what a lot of us are saying is that it's not the "snapping" that is the major issue, it's the "I meant it" and refusal to be the bigger person and apologize.
Of course I, and I'm sure most people on here, have been pushed to the edge by our kids and said something hurtful or yelled at my kid. Of course! I am human. I am not a perfect parent by a long shot and never claimed to be.
But when I have done this, it is always like a wake up call "oh this is not the parent I want to be." And no matter what my kid did to provoke that behavior, I always ALWAYS go and apologize for my own behavior. I don't validate their behavior or say "oh it's okay." I go and say "look, I got upset and said something I should not have said. I am sorry. In the future what I need to do is take a break until I'm ready to speak to you calmly." And you know what, my kid respects me so much more when I do this. Because holding yourself accountable for your own behavior is one of the most mature things you can do, and shows real strength of character. It also demonstrates to a child who is not behaving well "oh, I can address bad prior behavior by being accountable and making better choices moving forward."
That's what a lot of us are trying to say. OP is stuck in these feelings of "I'm right and she's wrong" and "she made me do this" and "I'm the victim, she's an ungrateful brat." I might understand how a parent gets to feeling that way in specific situations, but it's not a productive mental space. OP needs to rise above all that, be the adult, apologize for her own behavior, and treat her daughter with the respect that she wants her daughter to have towards her. Show her daughter the path towards forgiveness and repairing their relationship. Her 16 year old is NOT going to find that path on her own. OP has to find it and bring her daughter along.
Or she can dig in, wait until DD turns 18, and enjoy having a bad relationship with her DD for the rest of her life. Or no relationship at all.
There is no solution to this problem that starts with OP doubling down on her feelings towards her daughter and waiting for her daughter to right this ship. Will not happen. Even if eventually the daughter finds her way to this understanding on her own, she will rightly view her mom as immature and someone to be managed at best, distanced from at worst, not someone who is her partner in building a meaningful relationship.
Did OP ever come back to this thread and insist she refused to apologize?
Anonymous wrote:OP, your 16 year old daughter fears that she will get cancer.
Your 16 year old daughter fears that you will abandon her due to your cancer.
Your 16 year old cannot cope with your cancer and hates that your cancer has dominated her life.
OP, cancer, not your daughter, is the enemy.
Coping with harsh realities affects individuals differently.
OP, you hate your cancer and you hate what cancer has done to your life, your marriage, and to your relationship with your daughter.
OP, the first step is to correctly identify the enemy, and the enemy is not your daughter.
You are making a lot of assumptions, PP. Sometimes (often, actually) - teens are just really, really hard on the parents. It’s common.
And unfortunately some personality disordered parents are just “really, really hard” on their kids. It’s common.
+10million.
Maybe because they were irreparably damaged by their own parents. In that way nobody is ever wrong, nobody asks to be born.
This is true, but someone comes along to break the chain. My mom was totally disorders. I made huge strides not to be and I am not. My mother criticized me for taking parenting classes, saying she didn’t “need” them. I responded “well, I think I do”. At the same time I was thinking ‘uh, yeah, you absolutely did need them! I had a terrible example and that is why I need them’. But I didn’t actually say what I thought. I have 2 kids through this stage, one in this stage, and one younger. I think I’m doing well. No, I would never say something as hurtful as OP did. I actually very much love my kids and they know it, even though and especially when we fight. No one has ever said they hate anyone in our house.
So when you were in remission from cancer did you not miss a beat?
You folks keep making apologies for a mother who said she hated her child and meant it. Totally messed up.
WHO HAS CANCER!
The kid is a fxxx up. A MEAN GIRL.
She's 16 and just spent the last few years watching her mom go through cancer, but okay I guess she's worthless because she did some very predictable teenage things.
DP. My siblings and I managed to get through our teenage years without ever ONCE telling either of our parents that we hated them, despite lots of arguments and drama.
I don’t think this is “predictable teenage” behavior. I think it is just plain awful behavior. Maybe this is a good learning moment for the kid, to learn that if you throw around phrases like “I hate you” you might hear it back someday. Yes, it is devastating to hear this from a parent, but maybe hearing it is the only way this girl will learn that words matter (even when she is the one saying them).
(FTR I absolutely think OP needs to apologize if she wants to maintain a relationship with her daughter. However, I am taken aback by the posters who seem to have concluded that the daughter is an innocent victim and OP is a horrible monster. They BOTH said it, and a 16 year old is absolutely old enough to be mature enough to know better.)
I mean, even little kids will say "I hate you" to their parents. It really is predictable behavior and is incredibly common. I don't get the pearl clutching about how people can't believe a 16 year old said this to her parent. So many kids say "I hate you" to their parents at some point or another that if you google "teenager said I hate you" you will get literally millions of results linking to article explaining to parents what to do in this situation.
Also, as many people have explained, this particular teen has had a very atypical adolescence, in that her mom has been struggling with cancer for the last several years. If you are familiar with the ACES test/score, having a family member with a serious illness is a major source of stress and trauma that can impact people into adulthood. So that's why many of us find it very unsurprising that this child had aggression and conflict issues, as these are very normal responses to the stress of watching a parent struggle with a life threatening illness in your tween/early teen years.
But anyway, the "I hate you"s don't cancel each other out because they mean different things. A parent and a child are not equal and don't have the same responsibilities or roles in their relationship. So even though they said the same thing, what OP did was worse. For a child to say "I hate you" to a parent is hurtful, yes. But it can also be a way of testing boundaries, getting attention (even negative attention can be better to a child than no attention), trying to provoke a conflict in an effort to address past issues that the parent views as settled, etc. Yes, it is immature. But a 16 year old is less mature than a 30 or 40 year old.
When a parent tells a child "I hate you" it means something else. Anger, rejection, burn out.
For a child, this behavior is a clumsy way of trying to force engagement. For a parent, it's a way to end engagement. That's why what OP said is worse than what her DD said. Her DD's comment was a cry for help. OP's comment was a way of saying "I will not help you."
Everyone is excusing the daughter for having had to endure her mother going through cancer, but no one is extending any grace to the mother who had to endure cancer!
I didn’t say they canceled each other out, and I am not arguing about which is worse. I am saying the daughter is not an innocent victim, she provoked her mother, got a response she wasn’t expecting, and now hopefully they can BOTH learn from it.
OP is the adult and the parent. She has a higher responsibility here. Cancer doesn’t give you free rein to be a sh!tty parent. Blaming your child for your cancer is the epitome of red flag parenting.
At no point did she blame her daughter for her cancer you illiterate doofus.
Party A having more responsibility does NOT mean Party B has ZERO responsibility.
I don’t know if anyone said the child has zero responsibility. In fact if you bothered to read that post you’d see it says the mom has ‘higher level’ not ‘all’ responsibility “you illiterate doofus”. Clearly the parent sets the tone for parenting decisions, and those decisions include saying she hates her own child.
If she feels so bad she should apologize.
If YOU had read the post you would understand that she feels bad not because she told her daughter she hates her, too (remember, this darling angel told her mom she hates her and mom responded in kind); she feels bad because she meant it. She feels bad because she is at the point in her relationship with her child where she legitimately hates her. We all know you’re not supposed to say it, but OP is under a lot of stress and she snapped. You know, like a real person.
So if anyone was interested in providing useful advice to OP it would involve how to not hate her daughter. Lashing out at her with all of your unresolved mommy issues isn’t helping her OR HER DAUGHTER. Some of you are using OP as a punching bag because you either have not gotten effective therapy to deal with your own sh!t, or you just haven’t grown TF up yet and are stuck in bratty entitled teenager mode.
Yet again you aren't even reading. No where in OP does it say that. You are projecting again.
Reread the OP again. It is you who is confused.
"yet I feel awful"
not "I feel bad because I meant it"
Gosh it must be difficult for you to get through the day when you make up constant conversations that never happened.
Oh boy. You must be one of the Americans who didn’t read a book last year.
You don't think its possible she fees bad because she verbalized it? Whether or not you hate your child, the biggest issue here is saying it to her. Quite interesting that you gloss over that entirely.
If she meant it why in the world would she feel bad she verbalized it? If she was asking everyone how she should punish her daughter for continuing to be rude to her you might have a point, yet she feels awful and you can’t fathom why.
You can still mean things and not want the person to know. You can realize how hurtful the words would be to hear out loud. At least most people with any sort of self awareness would.
And some people can be pushed too far and snap. In fact i'd bet 99% of people either have or will do that at some point in their lifetimes. You "I was raised by a controlling abusive mother so I don't even raise my voice at my own DC" posters are wholly unbelievable.
Actually what a lot of us are saying is that it's not the "snapping" that is the major issue, it's the "I meant it" and refusal to be the bigger person and apologize.
Of course I, and I'm sure most people on here, have been pushed to the edge by our kids and said something hurtful or yelled at my kid. Of course! I am human. I am not a perfect parent by a long shot and never claimed to be.
But when I have done this, it is always like a wake up call "oh this is not the parent I want to be." And no matter what my kid did to provoke that behavior, I always ALWAYS go and apologize for my own behavior. I don't validate their behavior or say "oh it's okay." I go and say "look, I got upset and said something I should not have said. I am sorry. In the future what I need to do is take a break until I'm ready to speak to you calmly." And you know what, my kid respects me so much more when I do this. Because holding yourself accountable for your own behavior is one of the most mature things you can do, and shows real strength of character. It also demonstrates to a child who is not behaving well "oh, I can address bad prior behavior by being accountable and making better choices moving forward."
That's what a lot of us are trying to say. OP is stuck in these feelings of "I'm right and she's wrong" and "she made me do this" and "I'm the victim, she's an ungrateful brat." I might understand how a parent gets to feeling that way in specific situations, but it's not a productive mental space. OP needs to rise above all that, be the adult, apologize for her own behavior, and treat her daughter with the respect that she wants her daughter to have towards her. Show her daughter the path towards forgiveness and repairing their relationship. Her 16 year old is NOT going to find that path on her own. OP has to find it and bring her daughter along.
Or she can dig in, wait until DD turns 18, and enjoy having a bad relationship with her DD for the rest of her life. Or no relationship at all.
There is no solution to this problem that starts with OP doubling down on her feelings towards her daughter and waiting for her daughter to right this ship. Will not happen. Even if eventually the daughter finds her way to this understanding on her own, she will rightly view her mom as immature and someone to be managed at best, distanced from at worst, not someone who is her partner in building a meaningful relationship.
Did OP ever come back to this thread and insist she refused to apologize?
DP, I dont believe so, but many other posters arguing against it for some reason.
Anonymous wrote:OP, your 16 year old daughter fears that she will get cancer.
Your 16 year old daughter fears that you will abandon her due to your cancer.
Your 16 year old cannot cope with your cancer and hates that your cancer has dominated her life.
OP, cancer, not your daughter, is the enemy.
Coping with harsh realities affects individuals differently.
OP, you hate your cancer and you hate what cancer has done to your life, your marriage, and to your relationship with your daughter.
OP, the first step is to correctly identify the enemy, and the enemy is not your daughter.
You are making a lot of assumptions, PP. Sometimes (often, actually) - teens are just really, really hard on the parents. It’s common.
And unfortunately some personality disordered parents are just “really, really hard” on their kids. It’s common.
+10million.
Maybe because they were irreparably damaged by their own parents. In that way nobody is ever wrong, nobody asks to be born.
This is true, but someone comes along to break the chain. My mom was totally disorders. I made huge strides not to be and I am not. My mother criticized me for taking parenting classes, saying she didn’t “need” them. I responded “well, I think I do”. At the same time I was thinking ‘uh, yeah, you absolutely did need them! I had a terrible example and that is why I need them’. But I didn’t actually say what I thought. I have 2 kids through this stage, one in this stage, and one younger. I think I’m doing well. No, I would never say something as hurtful as OP did. I actually very much love my kids and they know it, even though and especially when we fight. No one has ever said they hate anyone in our house.
So when you were in remission from cancer did you not miss a beat?
You folks keep making apologies for a mother who said she hated her child and meant it. Totally messed up.
WHO HAS CANCER!
The kid is a fxxx up. A MEAN GIRL.
She's 16 and just spent the last few years watching her mom go through cancer, but okay I guess she's worthless because she did some very predictable teenage things.
DP. My siblings and I managed to get through our teenage years without ever ONCE telling either of our parents that we hated them, despite lots of arguments and drama.
I don’t think this is “predictable teenage” behavior. I think it is just plain awful behavior. Maybe this is a good learning moment for the kid, to learn that if you throw around phrases like “I hate you” you might hear it back someday. Yes, it is devastating to hear this from a parent, but maybe hearing it is the only way this girl will learn that words matter (even when she is the one saying them).
(FTR I absolutely think OP needs to apologize if she wants to maintain a relationship with her daughter. However, I am taken aback by the posters who seem to have concluded that the daughter is an innocent victim and OP is a horrible monster. They BOTH said it, and a 16 year old is absolutely old enough to be mature enough to know better.)
I mean, even little kids will say "I hate you" to their parents. It really is predictable behavior and is incredibly common. I don't get the pearl clutching about how people can't believe a 16 year old said this to her parent. So many kids say "I hate you" to their parents at some point or another that if you google "teenager said I hate you" you will get literally millions of results linking to article explaining to parents what to do in this situation.
Also, as many people have explained, this particular teen has had a very atypical adolescence, in that her mom has been struggling with cancer for the last several years. If you are familiar with the ACES test/score, having a family member with a serious illness is a major source of stress and trauma that can impact people into adulthood. So that's why many of us find it very unsurprising that this child had aggression and conflict issues, as these are very normal responses to the stress of watching a parent struggle with a life threatening illness in your tween/early teen years.
But anyway, the "I hate you"s don't cancel each other out because they mean different things. A parent and a child are not equal and don't have the same responsibilities or roles in their relationship. So even though they said the same thing, what OP did was worse. For a child to say "I hate you" to a parent is hurtful, yes. But it can also be a way of testing boundaries, getting attention (even negative attention can be better to a child than no attention), trying to provoke a conflict in an effort to address past issues that the parent views as settled, etc. Yes, it is immature. But a 16 year old is less mature than a 30 or 40 year old.
When a parent tells a child "I hate you" it means something else. Anger, rejection, burn out.
For a child, this behavior is a clumsy way of trying to force engagement. For a parent, it's a way to end engagement. That's why what OP said is worse than what her DD said. Her DD's comment was a cry for help. OP's comment was a way of saying "I will not help you."
Everyone is excusing the daughter for having had to endure her mother going through cancer, but no one is extending any grace to the mother who had to endure cancer!
I didn’t say they canceled each other out, and I am not arguing about which is worse. I am saying the daughter is not an innocent victim, she provoked her mother, got a response she wasn’t expecting, and now hopefully they can BOTH learn from it.
OP is the adult and the parent. She has a higher responsibility here. Cancer doesn’t give you free rein to be a sh!tty parent. Blaming your child for your cancer is the epitome of red flag parenting.
At no point did she blame her daughter for her cancer you illiterate doofus.
Party A having more responsibility does NOT mean Party B has ZERO responsibility.
I don’t know if anyone said the child has zero responsibility. In fact if you bothered to read that post you’d see it says the mom has ‘higher level’ not ‘all’ responsibility “you illiterate doofus”. Clearly the parent sets the tone for parenting decisions, and those decisions include saying she hates her own child.
If she feels so bad she should apologize.
If YOU had read the post you would understand that she feels bad not because she told her daughter she hates her, too (remember, this darling angel told her mom she hates her and mom responded in kind); she feels bad because she meant it. She feels bad because she is at the point in her relationship with her child where she legitimately hates her. We all know you’re not supposed to say it, but OP is under a lot of stress and she snapped. You know, like a real person.
So if anyone was interested in providing useful advice to OP it would involve how to not hate her daughter. Lashing out at her with all of your unresolved mommy issues isn’t helping her OR HER DAUGHTER. Some of you are using OP as a punching bag because you either have not gotten effective therapy to deal with your own sh!t, or you just haven’t grown TF up yet and are stuck in bratty entitled teenager mode.
Yet again you aren't even reading. No where in OP does it say that. You are projecting again.
Reread the OP again. It is you who is confused.
"yet I feel awful"
not "I feel bad because I meant it"
Gosh it must be difficult for you to get through the day when you make up constant conversations that never happened.
Oh boy. You must be one of the Americans who didn’t read a book last year.
You don't think its possible she fees bad because she verbalized it? Whether or not you hate your child, the biggest issue here is saying it to her. Quite interesting that you gloss over that entirely.
If she meant it why in the world would she feel bad she verbalized it? If she was asking everyone how she should punish her daughter for continuing to be rude to her you might have a point, yet she feels awful and you can’t fathom why.
You can still mean things and not want the person to know. You can realize how hurtful the words would be to hear out loud. At least most people with any sort of self awareness would.
And some people can be pushed too far and snap. In fact i'd bet 99% of people either have or will do that at some point in their lifetimes. You "I was raised by a controlling abusive mother so I don't even raise my voice at my own DC" posters are wholly unbelievable.
Actually what a lot of us are saying is that it's not the "snapping" that is the major issue, it's the "I meant it" and refusal to be the bigger person and apologize.
Of course I, and I'm sure most people on here, have been pushed to the edge by our kids and said something hurtful or yelled at my kid. Of course! I am human. I am not a perfect parent by a long shot and never claimed to be.
But when I have done this, it is always like a wake up call "oh this is not the parent I want to be." And no matter what my kid did to provoke that behavior, I always ALWAYS go and apologize for my own behavior. I don't validate their behavior or say "oh it's okay." I go and say "look, I got upset and said something I should not have said. I am sorry. In the future what I need to do is take a break until I'm ready to speak to you calmly." And you know what, my kid respects me so much more when I do this. Because holding yourself accountable for your own behavior is one of the most mature things you can do, and shows real strength of character. It also demonstrates to a child who is not behaving well "oh, I can address bad prior behavior by being accountable and making better choices moving forward."
That's what a lot of us are trying to say. OP is stuck in these feelings of "I'm right and she's wrong" and "she made me do this" and "I'm the victim, she's an ungrateful brat." I might understand how a parent gets to feeling that way in specific situations, but it's not a productive mental space. OP needs to rise above all that, be the adult, apologize for her own behavior, and treat her daughter with the respect that she wants her daughter to have towards her. Show her daughter the path towards forgiveness and repairing their relationship. Her 16 year old is NOT going to find that path on her own. OP has to find it and bring her daughter along.
Or she can dig in, wait until DD turns 18, and enjoy having a bad relationship with her DD for the rest of her life. Or no relationship at all.
There is no solution to this problem that starts with OP doubling down on her feelings towards her daughter and waiting for her daughter to right this ship. Will not happen. Even if eventually the daughter finds her way to this understanding on her own, she will rightly view her mom as immature and someone to be managed at best, distanced from at worst, not someone who is her partner in building a meaningful relationship.
Anonymous wrote:OP, your 16 year old daughter fears that she will get cancer.
Your 16 year old daughter fears that you will abandon her due to your cancer.
Your 16 year old cannot cope with your cancer and hates that your cancer has dominated her life.
OP, cancer, not your daughter, is the enemy.
Coping with harsh realities affects individuals differently.
OP, you hate your cancer and you hate what cancer has done to your life, your marriage, and to your relationship with your daughter.
OP, the first step is to correctly identify the enemy, and the enemy is not your daughter.
You are making a lot of assumptions, PP. Sometimes (often, actually) - teens are just really, really hard on the parents. It’s common.
And unfortunately some personality disordered parents are just “really, really hard” on their kids. It’s common.
+10million.
Maybe because they were irreparably damaged by their own parents. In that way nobody is ever wrong, nobody asks to be born.
This is true, but someone comes along to break the chain. My mom was totally disorders. I made huge strides not to be and I am not. My mother criticized me for taking parenting classes, saying she didn’t “need” them. I responded “well, I think I do”. At the same time I was thinking ‘uh, yeah, you absolutely did need them! I had a terrible example and that is why I need them’. But I didn’t actually say what I thought. I have 2 kids through this stage, one in this stage, and one younger. I think I’m doing well. No, I would never say something as hurtful as OP did. I actually very much love my kids and they know it, even though and especially when we fight. No one has ever said they hate anyone in our house.
So when you were in remission from cancer did you not miss a beat?
You folks keep making apologies for a mother who said she hated her child and meant it. Totally messed up.
WHO HAS CANCER!
The kid is a fxxx up. A MEAN GIRL.
She's 16 and just spent the last few years watching her mom go through cancer, but okay I guess she's worthless because she did some very predictable teenage things.
DP. My siblings and I managed to get through our teenage years without ever ONCE telling either of our parents that we hated them, despite lots of arguments and drama.
I don’t think this is “predictable teenage” behavior. I think it is just plain awful behavior. Maybe this is a good learning moment for the kid, to learn that if you throw around phrases like “I hate you” you might hear it back someday. Yes, it is devastating to hear this from a parent, but maybe hearing it is the only way this girl will learn that words matter (even when she is the one saying them).
(FTR I absolutely think OP needs to apologize if she wants to maintain a relationship with her daughter. However, I am taken aback by the posters who seem to have concluded that the daughter is an innocent victim and OP is a horrible monster. They BOTH said it, and a 16 year old is absolutely old enough to be mature enough to know better.)
I mean, even little kids will say "I hate you" to their parents. It really is predictable behavior and is incredibly common. I don't get the pearl clutching about how people can't believe a 16 year old said this to her parent. So many kids say "I hate you" to their parents at some point or another that if you google "teenager said I hate you" you will get literally millions of results linking to article explaining to parents what to do in this situation.
Also, as many people have explained, this particular teen has had a very atypical adolescence, in that her mom has been struggling with cancer for the last several years. If you are familiar with the ACES test/score, having a family member with a serious illness is a major source of stress and trauma that can impact people into adulthood. So that's why many of us find it very unsurprising that this child had aggression and conflict issues, as these are very normal responses to the stress of watching a parent struggle with a life threatening illness in your tween/early teen years.
But anyway, the "I hate you"s don't cancel each other out because they mean different things. A parent and a child are not equal and don't have the same responsibilities or roles in their relationship. So even though they said the same thing, what OP did was worse. For a child to say "I hate you" to a parent is hurtful, yes. But it can also be a way of testing boundaries, getting attention (even negative attention can be better to a child than no attention), trying to provoke a conflict in an effort to address past issues that the parent views as settled, etc. Yes, it is immature. But a 16 year old is less mature than a 30 or 40 year old.
When a parent tells a child "I hate you" it means something else. Anger, rejection, burn out.
For a child, this behavior is a clumsy way of trying to force engagement. For a parent, it's a way to end engagement. That's why what OP said is worse than what her DD said. Her DD's comment was a cry for help. OP's comment was a way of saying "I will not help you."
Everyone is excusing the daughter for having had to endure her mother going through cancer, but no one is extending any grace to the mother who had to endure cancer!
I didn’t say they canceled each other out, and I am not arguing about which is worse. I am saying the daughter is not an innocent victim, she provoked her mother, got a response she wasn’t expecting, and now hopefully they can BOTH learn from it.
OP is the adult and the parent. She has a higher responsibility here. Cancer doesn’t give you free rein to be a sh!tty parent. Blaming your child for your cancer is the epitome of red flag parenting.
At no point did she blame her daughter for her cancer you illiterate doofus.
Party A having more responsibility does NOT mean Party B has ZERO responsibility.
I don’t know if anyone said the child has zero responsibility. In fact if you bothered to read that post you’d see it says the mom has ‘higher level’ not ‘all’ responsibility “you illiterate doofus”. Clearly the parent sets the tone for parenting decisions, and those decisions include saying she hates her own child.
If she feels so bad she should apologize.
If YOU had read the post you would understand that she feels bad not because she told her daughter she hates her, too (remember, this darling angel told her mom she hates her and mom responded in kind); she feels bad because she meant it. She feels bad because she is at the point in her relationship with her child where she legitimately hates her. We all know you’re not supposed to say it, but OP is under a lot of stress and she snapped. You know, like a real person.
So if anyone was interested in providing useful advice to OP it would involve how to not hate her daughter. Lashing out at her with all of your unresolved mommy issues isn’t helping her OR HER DAUGHTER. Some of you are using OP as a punching bag because you either have not gotten effective therapy to deal with your own sh!t, or you just haven’t grown TF up yet and are stuck in bratty entitled teenager mode.
Yet again you aren't even reading. No where in OP does it say that. You are projecting again.
Reread the OP again. It is you who is confused.
"yet I feel awful"
not "I feel bad because I meant it"
Gosh it must be difficult for you to get through the day when you make up constant conversations that never happened.
Oh boy. You must be one of the Americans who didn’t read a book last year.
You don't think its possible she fees bad because she verbalized it? Whether or not you hate your child, the biggest issue here is saying it to her. Quite interesting that you gloss over that entirely.
If she meant it why in the world would she feel bad she verbalized it? If she was asking everyone how she should punish her daughter for continuing to be rude to her you might have a point, yet she feels awful and you can’t fathom why.
You can still mean things and not want the person to know. You can realize how hurtful the words would be to hear out loud. At least most people with any sort of self awareness would.
Right so why is everyone heaping so much abuse on OP? She gets it. She knows. She knows she words are hurtful and it’s not right, it didn’t make her feel better to say it out loud. She feels awful for obvious reasons.
So why is apologizing to her daughter such a crazy suggestion? I’m not sure why op are jumping all over posters suggesting this. If she wants even a sliver of a chance at repairing their relationship she needs to own it, apologize, and do better moving forward. The longer she leaves this hanging in the air, the more damage it’s doing to her daughter and their relationship.
Nobody wants your advice when you start out calling them a shitty parent. Look back at the language used here and maybe it will make sense.
Many of the posts didnt say that. In fact, the post Im referencing is one that pp (or you) argued about having more responsibility = none for the other party. I said if she feels so bad she should apologize and was told that wasn't helpful advice, and the only helpful advice this pp would welcome was how not to hate your child.
OP is not here waiting desperately for advice how to proceed. A lot of people derailed this thread and drove OP away. You're farting into the wind at this point.
The idiom is shouting into the wind.
You are sadly out of date, Doris.
Doris? The names you hurl as insults change daily, and you write yourself off by being so openly mean anyway so no one actually cares what you have to say, PP.
Anonymous wrote:OP, your 16 year old daughter fears that she will get cancer.
Your 16 year old daughter fears that you will abandon her due to your cancer.
Your 16 year old cannot cope with your cancer and hates that your cancer has dominated her life.
OP, cancer, not your daughter, is the enemy.
Coping with harsh realities affects individuals differently.
OP, you hate your cancer and you hate what cancer has done to your life, your marriage, and to your relationship with your daughter.
OP, the first step is to correctly identify the enemy, and the enemy is not your daughter.
You are making a lot of assumptions, PP. Sometimes (often, actually) - teens are just really, really hard on the parents. It’s common.
And unfortunately some personality disordered parents are just “really, really hard” on their kids. It’s common.
+10million.
Maybe because they were irreparably damaged by their own parents. In that way nobody is ever wrong, nobody asks to be born.
This is true, but someone comes along to break the chain. My mom was totally disorders. I made huge strides not to be and I am not. My mother criticized me for taking parenting classes, saying she didn’t “need” them. I responded “well, I think I do”. At the same time I was thinking ‘uh, yeah, you absolutely did need them! I had a terrible example and that is why I need them’. But I didn’t actually say what I thought. I have 2 kids through this stage, one in this stage, and one younger. I think I’m doing well. No, I would never say something as hurtful as OP did. I actually very much love my kids and they know it, even though and especially when we fight. No one has ever said they hate anyone in our house.
So when you were in remission from cancer did you not miss a beat?
You folks keep making apologies for a mother who said she hated her child and meant it. Totally messed up.
WHO HAS CANCER!
The kid is a fxxx up. A MEAN GIRL.
She's 16 and just spent the last few years watching her mom go through cancer, but okay I guess she's worthless because she did some very predictable teenage things.
DP. My siblings and I managed to get through our teenage years without ever ONCE telling either of our parents that we hated them, despite lots of arguments and drama.
I don’t think this is “predictable teenage” behavior. I think it is just plain awful behavior. Maybe this is a good learning moment for the kid, to learn that if you throw around phrases like “I hate you” you might hear it back someday. Yes, it is devastating to hear this from a parent, but maybe hearing it is the only way this girl will learn that words matter (even when she is the one saying them).
(FTR I absolutely think OP needs to apologize if she wants to maintain a relationship with her daughter. However, I am taken aback by the posters who seem to have concluded that the daughter is an innocent victim and OP is a horrible monster. They BOTH said it, and a 16 year old is absolutely old enough to be mature enough to know better.)
I mean, even little kids will say "I hate you" to their parents. It really is predictable behavior and is incredibly common. I don't get the pearl clutching about how people can't believe a 16 year old said this to her parent. So many kids say "I hate you" to their parents at some point or another that if you google "teenager said I hate you" you will get literally millions of results linking to article explaining to parents what to do in this situation.
Also, as many people have explained, this particular teen has had a very atypical adolescence, in that her mom has been struggling with cancer for the last several years. If you are familiar with the ACES test/score, having a family member with a serious illness is a major source of stress and trauma that can impact people into adulthood. So that's why many of us find it very unsurprising that this child had aggression and conflict issues, as these are very normal responses to the stress of watching a parent struggle with a life threatening illness in your tween/early teen years.
But anyway, the "I hate you"s don't cancel each other out because they mean different things. A parent and a child are not equal and don't have the same responsibilities or roles in their relationship. So even though they said the same thing, what OP did was worse. For a child to say "I hate you" to a parent is hurtful, yes. But it can also be a way of testing boundaries, getting attention (even negative attention can be better to a child than no attention), trying to provoke a conflict in an effort to address past issues that the parent views as settled, etc. Yes, it is immature. But a 16 year old is less mature than a 30 or 40 year old.
When a parent tells a child "I hate you" it means something else. Anger, rejection, burn out.
For a child, this behavior is a clumsy way of trying to force engagement. For a parent, it's a way to end engagement. That's why what OP said is worse than what her DD said. Her DD's comment was a cry for help. OP's comment was a way of saying "I will not help you."
Everyone is excusing the daughter for having had to endure her mother going through cancer, but no one is extending any grace to the mother who had to endure cancer!
I didn’t say they canceled each other out, and I am not arguing about which is worse. I am saying the daughter is not an innocent victim, she provoked her mother, got a response she wasn’t expecting, and now hopefully they can BOTH learn from it.
OP is the adult and the parent. She has a higher responsibility here. Cancer doesn’t give you free rein to be a sh!tty parent. Blaming your child for your cancer is the epitome of red flag parenting.
At no point did she blame her daughter for her cancer you illiterate doofus.
Party A having more responsibility does NOT mean Party B has ZERO responsibility.
I don’t know if anyone said the child has zero responsibility. In fact if you bothered to read that post you’d see it says the mom has ‘higher level’ not ‘all’ responsibility “you illiterate doofus”. Clearly the parent sets the tone for parenting decisions, and those decisions include saying she hates her own child.
If she feels so bad she should apologize.
If YOU had read the post you would understand that she feels bad not because she told her daughter she hates her, too (remember, this darling angel told her mom she hates her and mom responded in kind); she feels bad because she meant it. She feels bad because she is at the point in her relationship with her child where she legitimately hates her. We all know you’re not supposed to say it, but OP is under a lot of stress and she snapped. You know, like a real person.
So if anyone was interested in providing useful advice to OP it would involve how to not hate her daughter. Lashing out at her with all of your unresolved mommy issues isn’t helping her OR HER DAUGHTER. Some of you are using OP as a punching bag because you either have not gotten effective therapy to deal with your own sh!t, or you just haven’t grown TF up yet and are stuck in bratty entitled teenager mode.
Yet again you aren't even reading. No where in OP does it say that. You are projecting again.
Reread the OP again. It is you who is confused.
"yet I feel awful"
not "I feel bad because I meant it"
Gosh it must be difficult for you to get through the day when you make up constant conversations that never happened.
Oh boy. You must be one of the Americans who didn’t read a book last year.
You don't think its possible she fees bad because she verbalized it? Whether or not you hate your child, the biggest issue here is saying it to her. Quite interesting that you gloss over that entirely.
If she meant it why in the world would she feel bad she verbalized it? If she was asking everyone how she should punish her daughter for continuing to be rude to her you might have a point, yet she feels awful and you can’t fathom why.
You can still mean things and not want the person to know. You can realize how hurtful the words would be to hear out loud. At least most people with any sort of self awareness would.
And some people can be pushed too far and snap. In fact i'd bet 99% of people either have or will do that at some point in their lifetimes. You "I was raised by a controlling abusive mother so I don't even raise my voice at my own DC" posters are wholly unbelievable.
Actually what a lot of us are saying is that it's not the "snapping" that is the major issue, it's the "I meant it" and refusal to be the bigger person and apologize.
Of course I, and I'm sure most people on here, have been pushed to the edge by our kids and said something hurtful or yelled at my kid. Of course! I am human. I am not a perfect parent by a long shot and never claimed to be.
But when I have done this, it is always like a wake up call "oh this is not the parent I want to be." And no matter what my kid did to provoke that behavior, I always ALWAYS go and apologize for my own behavior. I don't validate their behavior or say "oh it's okay." I go and say "look, I got upset and said something I should not have said. I am sorry. In the future what I need to do is take a break until I'm ready to speak to you calmly." And you know what, my kid respects me so much more when I do this. Because holding yourself accountable for your own behavior is one of the most mature things you can do, and shows real strength of character. It also demonstrates to a child who is not behaving well "oh, I can address bad prior behavior by being accountable and making better choices moving forward."
That's what a lot of us are trying to say. OP is stuck in these feelings of "I'm right and she's wrong" and "she made me do this" and "I'm the victim, she's an ungrateful brat." I might understand how a parent gets to feeling that way in specific situations, but it's not a productive mental space. OP needs to rise above all that, be the adult, apologize for her own behavior, and treat her daughter with the respect that she wants her daughter to have towards her. Show her daughter the path towards forgiveness and repairing their relationship. Her 16 year old is NOT going to find that path on her own. OP has to find it and bring her daughter along.
Or she can dig in, wait until DD turns 18, and enjoy having a bad relationship with her DD for the rest of her life. Or no relationship at all.
There is no solution to this problem that starts with OP doubling down on her feelings towards her daughter and waiting for her daughter to right this ship. Will not happen. Even if eventually the daughter finds her way to this understanding on her own, she will rightly view her mom as immature and someone to be managed at best, distanced from at worst, not someone who is her partner in building a meaningful relationship.
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