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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think this has nothing to do with age. If one thinks of it, people who behave in this way have always done so. They're usually also people who don't have many friends (if any) and are socially awkward. They don't know how to have a two-way conversation. They usually also never figure out when their kids have grown up, have their own agency, and should be treated as peers rather than a 5-year-old. They talk AT people. They also think that their kids/grandkids HAVE to listen to them, no matter what (anybody unrelated to them has disappeared long ago). For some reason, there are a lot of women like this in our parents generation (boomers). My mom and MIL are like this. When I call my mom, she literally asks me why I'm not more interested in her life -- i.e. gossip about people I don't know. In her ideal, everybody should be interested in her and she should sit like a queen on a throne and be peppered with attention. It doesn't even occur to her to be interested in others. She doesn't know anything about me or my kids, nor my brother or his kids. Never been to any school plays or sports games. I once asked her why she's never been to brother's son's soccer games (he plays at a high level). She was surprised: what would I do there?! I had to chuckle recently when she thought that a "normal" involvement with this same teen was to offer to pay for his driving school so that then he'd be "obliged" (her words) to drive her around. He refused and she cannot understand why. [/quote]

I posted this before, but boomer women saw this behavior modelled by the women older than them. Grandma ruled the day and and everyone was just expected to suck it up. Grandma wasn't interested in what her daughter thought about anything or what she was doing (to be fair, daughter was likely greatly restricted in what she could do in mid-century America), and even less interested in the grandkids, but Grandma sure was interested in making sure she was the center of attention nd everyone listened to what she had to say. The daughters/moms were biding their time until it was their turn to be the family matriarch--and they could then act as their mothers did and everyone who bow to them. Our moms and MILs saw this and internalized it.

And then the world changed dramatically. Gen Xers and older Millennials had no intention of continuing these patterns. But our moms had waited (and waited and [i]waited[/i]!) for their time to come and they want their reward, gosh darn it.[/quote]

This is absolutely true. My mother even articulated it once to me after experiencing poor customer service. "I'm an old lady now and I expect people to be EXTRA accommodating to me. That's how things were when I was young. Old ladies were top of the heap." We bowed and scraped to my grandma when she came to our house! She got the best chair, slippers, we put on her favorite music, and I had to fetch her cocktail. I'll admit I don't do that for mom or MIL![/quote]

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