Anonymous wrote:Your parents don’t sound terrible to me, OP, and you chose to move far away from them so some of the emotional detachment that you feel is squarely on you.

Parents can be not terrible and still not good parents, or at least not the parents that someone needs.

Anonymous wrote:Your parents don’t sound terrible to me, OP, and you chose to move far away from them so some of the emotional detachment that you feel is squarely on you.

Firstly, moving away from parents geographically does not indicate a desire to be emotionally disconnected.

Secondly, OP is not saying her parents are terrible. She is expressing sadness and disappointment that they are not motivated to or capable of growing with her in terms of their relationship. Which is a loss.

Hope this clarifies things for you PP.

Your parents don’t sound terrible to me, OP, and you chose to move far away from them so some of the emotional detachment that you feel is squarely on you.

I’m almost 50 and my parents are in their upper 80’s and I am still struggling to accept that they are who they are and I cannot change it.

I went through a phase like this in my mid 30s when I realized that my own parents and in-laws had no interest in being as involved in their grandchildren's lives as their own parents were in mine and DHs.

That was a few years ago. I grieved my lost expectations and started creating a new life for our family without involving them unless they asked to be involved. We (DH and I and kids) are a lot happier. I'm not sure how they feel, but that's their problem.

You just have to accept your parents for who they are. Here is my suggestion — don’t call them and see how long it takes them to call you. With my dad, he can go months without calling me. So, that is about what he gets from me. He doesn’t need to have some deep relationship with my kid — he isn’t capable.

Anonymous wrote:I am 50 and it took me until five years ago to realize how messed up things were with my emotionally reactive, controlling mom (who still, by the way, treats me like I am a recalcitrant 13 year old). It's just really hard. Especially as you kids get older, you will realize even more what you are missing. It's a real loss.

The thing that is great about your situation is that you figured it out at 35. You can change generational patterns and raise your kids to be emotionally healthy. You can build the kinds of adult/child relationships that you didn't get to have. I am doing this now with my adult sons and it is really gratifying to make the transition from day to day parenting to a more mentoring, loving, respectful relationship. You have all of this to look forward to.

Therapy has really helped me process how messed up my mom's behavior has been, but I'll admit she still has the power to make me very sad and hurt. I try to protect myself by keeping her at an arm's length. It sounds like your parents are comfortable being distant from you, so that's good. Seeing your kids once or twice a year, they are unlikely to do real harm to your kids, especially if you manage it well, which is sounds like you are doing. I was still caught up in pleasing my parents at your stage and let them treat my kids poorly at times, which I very much regret.

Good luck to you. This is really hard stuff, but recognizing unhealthy patterns is the first and most important step in changing them.

OP here. I'm so sorry, PP and thank you for sharing. I have to give a lot of credit to our home daycare provider, who saw that my then-2-year-old was overreacting to really minor events and flagged it for us. We got her in parent-child therapy at age 4 and it's helped (both of us) immensely. Validating emotions and regulating responses is a big part of that therapy.

Anonymous wrote:I’m 39 and it’s the same w my parents. They have no emotional depth. They love me and they always provided for my physical needs but they didn’t give me much emotional support and I didn’t really realize that until I had my own kids. I’ve tried to have a deeper connection with my parents now as an adult but I don’t think it’s really possible. They just aren’t capable of emotionally supporting me.

I agree w PP’s advice to model the behavior you want to see, keep validating your own child’s emotions and talking about emotions w your kid, and limit time w your parents if it’s too draining for you. I have also found it helpful to form deeper relationships with others (my spouse, a few close friends, my siblings, my MIL, my best friend’s mom). Nothing replaces what I’m lacking from my own parents but I do have deeper ties to others than I probably would otherwise partially as a result of not getting that from my parents.

OP here. Thank you for this advice. I'm very open with my husband (that took a long time for me) and I've been really trying with some of my close friends. I really do find it difficult to share, since so much of my life was about keeping my emotions to myself. A lot of the time, I just feel like I'm complaining about trivial things.

OP, you get 2 chances to create a happy family: The family you are born into
The family you create

Focus on what you can control --- the family you create
They will suffer if you obsess on the family you were born into

I am 50 and it took me until five years ago to realize how messed up things were with my emotionally reactive, controlling mom (who still, by the way, treats me like I am a recalcitrant 13 year old). It's just really hard. Especially as you kids get older, you will realize even more what you are missing. It's a real loss.

The thing that is great about your situation is that you figured it out at 35. You can change generational patterns and raise your kids to be emotionally healthy. You can build the kinds of adult/child relationships that you didn't get to have. I am doing this now with my adult sons and it is really gratifying to make the transition from day to day parenting to a more mentoring, loving, respectful relationship. You have all of this to look forward to.

Therapy has really helped me process how messed up my mom's behavior has been, but I'll admit she still has the power to make me very sad and hurt. I try to protect myself by keeping her at an arm's length. It sounds like your parents are comfortable being distant from you, so that's good. Seeing your kids once or twice a year, they are unlikely to do real harm to your kids, especially if you manage it well, which is sounds like you are doing. I was still caught up in pleasing my parents at your stage and let them treat my kids poorly at times, which I very much regret.

Good luck to you. This is really hard stuff, but recognizing unhealthy patterns is the first and most important step in changing them.

OP once I accepted my parents for who they are, and not who I wanted them to be, I was able to have more peace. It also improved our relationship over time. Fighting with reality is exhausting and not productive.

Anonymous wrote:Model the behavior your want to see. See them less if they are draining. Stay loving, yet get emotional fulfillment from somewhere else.

OP here. Thank you. I have a wonderful, emotionally-expressive husband who is incredibly supportive. And my in-laws are wonderful too (I have other minor complaints about them, but emotional range is not one of them). My parents actually live pretty far away (about 11 hour drive) and we only see them in person once or twice a year. I'm always the one to initiate phone calls and I feel bad if I don't call regularly. This has become once every couple of weeks (sometimes every 3 weeks if I'm particularly busy), mostly so my kids can talk to them.

I’m 39 and it’s the same w my parents. They have no emotional depth. They love me and they always provided for my physical needs but they didn’t give me much emotional support and I didn’t really realize that until I had my own kids. I’ve tried to have a deeper connection with my parents now as an adult but I don’t think it’s really possible. They just aren’t capable of emotionally supporting me.

I agree w PP’s advice to model the behavior you want to see, keep validating your own child’s emotions and talking about emotions w your kid, and limit time w your parents if it’s too draining for you. I have also found it helpful to form deeper relationships with others (my spouse, a few close friends, my siblings, my MIL, my best friend’s mom). Nothing replaces what I’m lacking from my own parents but I do have deeper ties to others than I probably would otherwise partially as a result of not getting that from my parents.

Model the behavior your want to see. See them less if they are draining. Stay loving, yet get emotional fulfillment from somewhere else.

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.

TLDR: 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?