Reply to Is it normal not to love your elderly parent who is not abusive or mean?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Did he treat you badly as a child?  I don’t mean actual abuse but not great treatment?

I had few issues with my parents in my 20s and 30s, but once I had children I began to despise my mother. I think she was terrible and I find her behavior strange. She didn’t treat me well at all. I didn’t figure out any of this until I got older.

Because of how she treated me, I dislike her deep down and her presence triggers me. I feel awful about it. It makes me feel like a horrible person.

Here’s an example of her behavior. Every night she served a salad with a radish and would bully and yell at me until I ate the radish. This went on for years. Not a huge deal, really, but now that I have kids I think this is so odd. I was an adventurous healthy eater and one of the few things I disliked was a radish. But she didn’t care. I was going to eat that radish! I hadn’t thought about this in years or maybe ever, until I had kids and she started treating them similarly. I observed the tone of voice, the smug attitude and the way she seemed to get off on making a seven year old eat a certain food. Now I can’t stand her. Couldn’t she see how she was making the seven year old feel, and how she made me feel?  My entire childhood was like this and I am thankful there was no actual abuse, but I still dislike her.

But overall, she’s probably not that bad?

[/quote]

My mother beat me, called me names, berated me, belittled me. I was made to drop classes in high school because I wasn’t smart enough for her even though the school certainly thought otherwise. She used to make me act out scenarios to manipulate my father when they were getting divorced. She made me participate in very deep lies about having boyfriends to make him jealous. Years later (decades) she actually tried to make me complicit again by bringing up said fake boyfriend in my dad’s presence (they actually got back together. He has his own psychological issues!). Luckily I had already talked to him and he knew it was a lie. She once beat the hell out of me for losing a piece of paper with a prayer on it that she thought was going to bring him back like a spell or something. Turned out she’d misplaced it.

So yeah. Your mother making you eat a radish doesn’t sound so bad. [/quote]

We don't need to have our parents beating us and manipulating to oblivion to have dislike of them. Obviously the other poster whose mom made her eat radish and took pleasure in it (yes, it's a form of control) is not a good mom. We don't need to start comparing whose mom is worse. It's important not to do either to our own children: no form of manipulation and control is "good enough" to tolerate. [/quote]

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