Reply to Getting over the fact that your parent-child relationship will never be more?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm 35 and, while my parents have always been loving and caring parents, neither one of them knew how to create an emotionally supportive home. The range of emotions they were/are comfortable with is: happy, angry, or sad for five minutes at a time (this only applied to my mom and only when my dad wasn't home). It often made me feel like I was crazy for feeling emotional in other ways (upset, depressed, anxious), because my parents didn't seem to feel that way.

I see them treat my daughter (their granddaughter) with the same dismissive language about her own emotions. She was upset about one of her toys breaking recently and my dad said, "Don't be sad; I want you to be happy all the time." I had to pull her aside and validate her feelings. Another time, my dad wrote all over a picture she'd drawn (he thought it was scrap paper, despite watching her draw it earlier in the day) and she got really upset about it. He never apologized and just said, "I thought it was scrap paper. Here I'll get you another piece of paper" without any acknowledgement that he'd been wrong and hurt her feelings. It's so much easier for me to see it happening to my daughter than I could see it when it was happening to me.

[b]TLDR[/b]: Lately, I've realized that my relationship with my parents is never going to mature into that of a parent with their adult child, partially because they don't have the emotional range to share with me that way and partially because they will always treat me like I'm still a kid (they do this to my younger brother too, but he's at least on their emotional wavelength and it doesn't seem to bother him as much, though it drives his wife nuts). I find myself struggling all of the sudden with the fact that our relationship is just always going to be surface-level and emotionally draining for me, even though they love me. I had always held out hope that I would eventually mature into a person they could treat as an "adult child" - maybe when I moved out on my own after college, or got my first job, or got married, or had a more established career, or had kids myself. But no, none of those milestones has made a difference. They are who they are and they're not going to change. Has anyone gone through this? Does anyone have advice for letting go of the dream of a better/deeper relationship?[/quote]

I could have written this, OP. I minimize time with my parents. I don’t give them much access to my kids. I’m sorry. It sucks. We get to do better with our kids. [/quote]

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