Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes.

My parents did the best they could and ALSO their best was abusive and neglectful. My parents hit, screamed at, manipulated blamed, ignored, scapegoated, and berated us throughout my childhood. I've spent most of my adult life trying to essentially construct a sense of self-worth from scratch because my parents convinced me I was an inherently bad person with no value or competence during the years when a human being normal develops their sense of self.

I get they did what the could with the tools available to them, which were terrible because they, too had horrible childhoods with abusive parents.

Interestingly, they both grew up in homes with alcoholism but they were not alcoholics and my mom actually does not drink at all. So they did learn something from their childhoods. I just wish they had ALSO learned not to hit their kids and that it was their job as the adults to take responsibility for their own emotions, instead of constantly blaming us for them or pushing them onto us.

I don't know. I guess it would be great to wake up one day with a sense of peace and acceptance about it all. I do have empathy for them. But yes, being a parent has highlighted for me in a very intimate way how harmful my parents were. Also my DH's parents. So much violence and dysfunction and trauma in our family. It's a huge weight on me. I often find myself parenting my child and myself at the same time. There is wonderful healing in that. It also feels so unfair -- I wish my parents had offered me the love, acceptance, patience, and calm that I now provide for my daughter. I'm happy for her and sad for myself, but also happy for myself to at least get to experience a functional family from this angle.

I think when you experience abuse and neglect as a child, and it never gets addressed or resolved for that child, you wind up mourning what the child version of you lost for the rest of your life. Like my parents, I think I've done my best with what was available to me, and fortunately I've found ways to make more and better available to me than they did. But I'll probably always be a little bit angry on behalf of my child self for how she was treated. It was wrong. My parents should have done better. Even if it seemed impossible to them at the time, they should have done better for that child.

This is so well said, and captures the conflicting emotions. Thank you.

This does capture it. For me, in addition, I’m resentful that I had no model for good parenting and was anxious and sometimes emotionally volatile with my own children when they were little. I learned to do much better with time and therapy, but it guts me that I didn’t give them what they needed and deserved as small, defenseless people. I did better than my mom, and I think my kids will do better than I did. But both the lost childhood and my incompetence are things I grieve and carry with me.

Anonymous wrote:Yes, I see how self-absorbed they were and what it cost me as a child who was vulnerable to predators.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes.

My parents did the best they could and ALSO their best was abusive and neglectful. My parents hit, screamed at, manipulated blamed, ignored, scapegoated, and berated us throughout my childhood. I've spent most of my adult life trying to essentially construct a sense of self-worth from scratch because my parents convinced me I was an inherently bad person with no value or competence during the years when a human being normal develops their sense of self.

I get they did what the could with the tools available to them, which were terrible because they, too had horrible childhoods with abusive parents.

Interestingly, they both grew up in homes with alcoholism but they were not alcoholics and my mom actually does not drink at all. So they did learn something from their childhoods. I just wish they had ALSO learned not to hit their kids and that it was their job as the adults to take responsibility for their own emotions, instead of constantly blaming us for them or pushing them onto us.

I don't know. I guess it would be great to wake up one day with a sense of peace and acceptance about it all. I do have empathy for them. But yes, being a parent has highlighted for me in a very intimate way how harmful my parents were. Also my DH's parents. So much violence and dysfunction and trauma in our family. It's a huge weight on me. I often find myself parenting my child and myself at the same time. There is wonderful healing in that. It also feels so unfair -- I wish my parents had offered me the love, acceptance, patience, and calm that I now provide for my daughter. I'm happy for her and sad for myself, but also happy for myself to at least get to experience a functional family from this angle.

I think when you experience abuse and neglect as a child, and it never gets addressed or resolved for that child, you wind up mourning what the child version of you lost for the rest of your life. Like my parents, I think I've done my best with what was available to me, and fortunately I've found ways to make more and better available to me than they did. But I'll probably always be a little bit angry on behalf of my child self for how she was treated. It was wrong. My parents should have done better. Even if it seemed impossible to them at the time, they should have done better for that child.

This is so well said, and captures the conflicting emotions. Thank you.

Anonymous wrote:Yes, I realized how bad of a mom my mom was.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Just the opposite.

I now have so much more compassion and understanding of what they were dealing with from the other side. Also I'm more forgiving of things that used to bother me now that I've experienced the challenges of being a parent.

In go in waves, “wow they didn’t have Amazon”, how did they do it?! To “Damn, they didn’t even enroll me in any activities that I liked”.

My mom hit me once when she got really mad at me when I was a kid. I got scary angry at my kid once and could have come close to hitting out of anger. I understood in that moment, I was not really that different from my mom in some ways. My dad spanked us and it's funny now but when we were growing up, I still remember the punishment and the vacant look in his eyes as he was padding us. He believed in keeping a little fear in his children and not sparing the "rod" so to speak. I don't spank my kids but have argued with them more and raised my voice a lot more because they aren't scared of me like I was with my parents. I honestly don't know what is "better". Either way you suffer, as a kid and parent!