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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Spending time with my mom is like being cross-examined. She asks question after question after question. When I ask about what's going on in her life, she gives one or two word answers. It feels less like a conversation and more like a demand that I entertain her.[/quote]

If she doesn’t later judge you on what you told her, like my late mother did, then she is discussing it in the strangest of contexts with people you don’t even know (like my dad does). I had no idea he did that, and he does it seemingly non judgmentally but I once received a butt call from him and he was discussing how small my apartment was with someone he barely knew. Mind you, the man was poor all his life and I shared a bedroom with my brother for the longest time. Now he is “upset” about my living conditions!
Anyway, I barely tell him anything and I avoid having him over. [/quote]

Are you me? These are my parents precisely. I learned a long time ago to be judicious about what I told them because they are so judgmental and will blab anything I tell them to literally anyone. They live in the small town where I grew up and they've said incredibly critical, personal things about me to random people who wind up being related to some friend from high school, and it will get back to me and it's embarrassing and unkind. So now I tell them very little and they complain about that, but it's the only way to keep them from gossiping about me.[/quote]

We don’t tell MIL 90% of the “real” stuff in our lives (the hard, imperfect, messiness; the health issues or job issues or whatever other normal life stuff) because she will tell everyone, be judgy, and claim she isn’t being judgy while also being casually racist/classist/etc. (her go-to is the “I can’t be homophobic/racist/etc because so-and-so in their circle is whatever) My sibling transitioned several years ago and we haven’t told MIL because she’s met my sibling exactly once (at our wedding) and has no right to get to say a single word about them. [/quote]

The first pp here. My mother was great at finding something to criticize even in the good things I told her. I’d tell her oh your grandson is reading chapter books (it was early for his age) and she’d complain it wasn’t the author she deemed worth of reading. [/quote]

I finally realized never to tell my mother anything at all. Just let her talk. Because if I give her anything it's like
"Mikey got 100% on his book report."
"What was the book?" "Redwall"
"I've never heard of that. Why do you make him read such junk? He wouldn't pick books like that if you didn't push them on him."
"What on earth are you talking about? You don't even know what it is."
"If I've never heard of it it must not be any good. You should be making sure he reads quality books. Your sister only gives good books to her kids."
Ready to hang up the phone at that point.[/quote]

NP. And same. Silly example but I once told my mom that my oldest had straight As for her first 3 quarters in middle school. My mom sighed and said (to my kid) well that's almost the whole year. It was only the end of 3rd quarter at the time. I knew better than to tell her that because she always turns a positive into a negative. Now we tell her nothing but my family uses "well, that's almost the whole year" all the time to crack us up.[/quote]

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