Why Can't We Be More Like Our Mothers?

[Anonymous]

Perhaps if the OP hadn't started out as painting her parents and their lives as near perfect ( in large part because of her mother's larger than life acceptance of her husband's absence and later, alcoholism), while also claiming today's women are "whiny, entitled bitches" and " anti- husband," I might be moved by her shifting story about how well- adjusted they were.

[Anonymous]

Sorry dear, but all three of us children are quite well adjusted - and not one of us is a whiny, entitled bitch. We support and love our husbands and are thankful every single day for what they do to support our families.

I wish I could find the quotation my father used in eulogizing his father. It was something to the effect that mothers get all the credit while fathers are underrated. Yet, it was his father, always in the background, who was the strength and support for his children, as he was for us. I am not diminishing my mother's role. She did her part too. However, I think we as a society, and especially a good number of the posters on this group, bash the fathers of their children as "useless" or "uninvolved." Perhaps some are, but I bet most are doing the best they know how, just as you are.

[Anonymous]

P.S. My brother did divorce his whiny, entitled bitch of a wife after she threw a bottle at him b/c he left "a mess" in the kitchen. He got the kids!

[Anonymous]

OP has a daddy complex, clearly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Sorry dear, but all three of us children are quite well adjusted - and not one of us is a whiny, entitled bitch. We support and love our husbands and are thankful every single day for what they do to support our families.

I wish I could find the quotation my father used in eulogizing his father. It was something to the effect that mothers get all the credit while fathers are underrated. Yet, it was his father, always in the background, who was the strength and support for his children, as he was for us. I am not diminishing my mother's role. She did her part too. However, I think we as a society, and especially a good number of the posters on this group, bash the fathers of their children as "useless" or "uninvolved." Perhaps some are, but I bet most are doing the best they know how, just as you are.

I generally like you, OP, but it bothers me how much you generalize about people today. Some of us on this thread don't have anything like the experiences you describe - either uninvolved husbands or an earlier generation of women who never complained. I get that you love your parents and that you are probably missing your dad like hell today but it bothers me that somehow you're looking at your parents and thinking that it was an ideal situation that everyone should have experienced. Your family is your family and I very much appreciate your nuanced appreciation of them. But they're your family, not mine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:@20:42 My parents were not rich, but they did give us the things we they could afford. We all had part time jobs in HS and I worked through college. Thought my childhood was pretty typical for a white middle class kid growing up in the 70s and 80s. The rich kids in my HS all drove fancy sports cars to school. I used my parents Buick Century station wagon. My sister worked to buy her own Nissan Sentra. I was blessed to have the childhood I did, but not privileged!

Hon, being born white into middle class America is the very definition of being privileged. For Gods sake your parents had a disposable care they bequeathed upon you! Get out more. Get a clue!

[Anonymous]

Whatever happened to the American pioneer woman who could birth babies while crossing deserts and fighting off hostile Indians, put down a homestead on the prairie, help harvest the crops and raise the kids at the same time

Gee, OP, between your own story and your fantasy of pioneer life, sounds like you have the making of a very romanticized novel here.

but in fact, [i]pace Ree Drummond, pioneer life probably wasn't that rewarding. Many 'pioneer women' died in childbirth, or from TB or other diseases. others died young from overwork, poor medical care , etc. They spent most of their days caring for babies, washing, scrubbing, cooking. On mining camps they were subject to harrassment and rape. They probably didn't spent their days reading, exploring, or expanding their minds or teaching their children--esp girl children--about the world beyond 'the prairie.' They didn't vote. In some states they were not allowed to own property or remain financially independent in marriage (Spanish law, in the west, was less restrictive).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here, we suspect that my father suffered from some sort of PTSD as a result of his combat experiences and that he handled this well while flying - maybe it was his coping mechanism. The drink came on hard after that, and we kids were out of the house. My mother struggled for years with it - until the day my Dad died. She attended Al-Anon, and she has a hard time accepting that alcoholism is a disease. However, despite this, she misses my father every day. They shared a love of sports and football and it was a basis for conversations that she says are harder to have. Every morning before he left the house, my father would leave a cartoon or other article that struck him with a note for my mother to read when she got up. It is these little rituals that she misses. We do not know what demons my father wrestled with. As a younger man, he was involved in covert operations and the only thing he ever revealed about his experiences over Laos in 1968 - and this to my uncle - was that he went on a rescue mission and was too late, "they were all dead."

I remember two experiences with my father, one while he was alive and another after he died. I attended his Naval Academy class reunion with him in the late 80s, and met a classmate of his - a USMC veteran - whom my father saved in Vietnam. That man told me that if "it weren't for my father, I woudn't be here nor would my children."

After my father died, my mother received a condolence note from a classmate of my father. The gentleman had been flying a VO-67 observation mission over Laos in February 1968 when his aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crashed in the jungle. The writer noted that my father was the "pilot of the Jolly Green that plucked him out of the jungle in 1968." My mother has said my father was a different man when he returned from Vietnam. Perhaps it was the war that did get him in the end.

Very possible. They were also a much more hard drinking generation than subsequently, overall. I think we forget how soused they were, unless you watch Mad Men I guess. And we forget that Americans of those years were not emotionally articulate and into exploring subjective experiences in therapy or self help books by and large. They sucked it up and never spoke of it - and all sorts of things came out sideways in the way these 20th century generations lived.
Your dad sounds intense and fairly amazing despite his demons, adn your mom too.

What brings on this reflective mood for you, if you don't mind me asking? Auld lang syne?

[Anonymous]

I get what you're saying, OP. We all have mothers who are role models, and you've probably inspired a lot of us to re-think our tendency to criticize and/or take those role models for granted. Take my mother, who's a role model for any aspiring malignant narcissist. (Really, please: take her. Anyone.) Think how much misery you could learn to wreak in the lives of innocent, vulnerable people. The more innocent and vulnerable, the better. You'll find out how to commit a wide range of felonies so cleverly that you'll escape any legal penalties. She certainly has. What an apprenticeship to which anyone should aspire.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I read this forum and I think back to my own mother. She never did seem to whine or complain about the trials of being a wife and mothers. She took it all on without complete and did most things with aplomb. She was a military spouse who also had her own career, and could handle just about anything around the house and didn't need my father there to get it done. In fact, she spent two years home alone with two kids and held down a job while my father did two tours overseas in combat zones. She was grateful for every day she had with my father, and recognized that when he was not at home he was out earning the money that made virtually everything in our lives possible. When he left the service for civilian life but kept flying for the Air Force Reserve, she recognized that the weekends he was gone were paying for college for all three of us kids.

There seem to be so many people posting such hateful anti-husband things on these threads who do not really realize how good they have it. Whatever happened to the American pioneer woman who could birth babies while crossing deserts and fighting off hostile Indians, put down a homestead on the prairie, help harvest the crops and raise the kids at the same time. Have we all become a nation of whining, entitled bitches? Our foremothers would cringe.

Our foremothers would be quite happy that her babies would see their first birthdays and that her life expectancy would be over 52.

Good grief! Are you suffering a chromosomal mutation that has impaired your critical thinking?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How do you know she didn't occasionally vent to her friends or complain to your father?

NP

My mom and her friends talked about their husbands and vented all the time to each other.

OP just didn't have the slightest idea how her mother thought or felt.

[Anonymous]

OP is probably a grade-A narcissist, with this need to romanticize and aggrandize her ordinary family and its very typical-for-the-time experiences.

[Anonymous]

This whole thread is weird. No, I don't want to be more like my mother, or my father. Both have problems with alcohol. They are divorced. My mom didn't complain about various affairs which I only learned about later. That for sure doesn't make me want to be like her. The affairs and drinking seemed to be pretty common among the parents of my friends (upper-middle to upper class). Not a life I want AT ALL!

I have a great marriage (over 25 years). I wish my parents were more like us.

[Anonymous]

My mom has waited on my father hand and foot since they were married 50 years ago (when she was 20). The past 25-30 years she's done nothing but complain about him, though she won't do anything about it - just wants to complain to her kids.

She can be extremely narcissistic, controlling and passive aggressive as well.

There is no way I want to be more like her. I have learned from her mistakes and married a man who considers me an equal in the marriage and doesn't expect me to be his maid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP has a daddy complex, clearly.

+1 and her limited life experience has left her unable to put herself in anyone else's shoes. If only we all could be more like OP and her mother!