Dealing with my difficult mother

jackieblack

bouicca21 said:

any chance your adoptive father was also your biological one?

My first thought too

MrsStepford

I think the fact that my adoptive father knew my birth mother is enough to make my adoptive mother jealous. I was born exactly ten years after my father left Norfolk and seven years after my adoptive parents were married. So Pa would have had to have had an affair with my birth mother and travelled hundreds of miles to do it. Maybe, because she did admit to having an affair with one of my adoptive father's colleagues, she assumed he was the same ?

I got another email and a voice mail, from my adoptive mother, saying that she doesn't know what she's done to deserve this treatment ! I ignored both. It's getting easier to do now. 

olgadapolga

MrsStepford said:

I got another email and a voice mail, from my adoptive mother, saying that she doesn't know what she's done to deserve this treatment ! I ignored both. It's getting easier to do now. 

Her messages would be even easier to ignore if you just deleted them before reading/listening to them.

Personally, I would set my email up to recognise them as spam so you don't even need to see that she's sent a message and her number would be blocked on my phone. But that's me and I've always been a bit of an 'it's black and white" sort of person.

Sounds like you're coping well though, which is brilliant. It's a hard thing to do, I am very much aware  of that, having cut ties with all of my siblings. But I bet you feel so much more liberated now than you did a few months ago.

Cutting ties with my siblings was probably the best thing I ever did. They've tried a few times to get back into my life but have failed. I don't want them and never will, not after the way they treated me.

Keep it going, you're doing really well.

MrsStepford

I have her as spam but one slipped through. Can't block her calls on landline or cell. I have caller display so I don't answer, but I don't get a phone number tagged with message so I have to go through them all and delete. 

Families are very often the source of big grief. I think parents should have compulsory parenting classes. 

olgadapolga

MrsStepford said:

Families are very often the source of big grief. I think parents should have compulsory parenting classes. 

I used to work in healthcare and there were a lot of parents who needed educating about how to be a parent. Many of them loved their children, of that there was no doubt, they just had no idea about how to ensure that their children got a really good start in life or how to help them achieve anything.

Families can be soul-destroying. Not just parents, though, my siblings were (and are) really very unpleasant people who treated me badly from childhood until I cut them loose.

.My mum is, and always has been, fabulous. She doesn't like the way I've cut my siblings off but at least she largely respects my decision.

My dad was a complete so-and-so, it was always "his way or the highway" and if you didn't do what he wanted then he disregarded you, as a member of the family and as a person. He didn't love anyone, just saw them as possessions. Not a nice person, as I found out at the age of nineteen when I left home. Living with it, it was normal and I never questioned it until I left. My poor Mum, what she put up with for almost six decades, nobody really knows. I know more about the situation she was in than my siblings, who are in complete denial about it, but I only realised how dreadful my parents' marriage was during some parts of my healthcare training.

I wasn't sad when he died. The last thing he ever said to me was that he was going to hit me, just because I told him that he wasn't going to abuse Mum any more. I never saw or spoke to him again after that, partly through circumstances (he ended up in hospital and died shortly afterwards) and partly through choice (I didn't want to see him and I wasn't willing to catch Covid-19 by visiting him). My Mum tried to persuade me to visit him but I decided that he wasn't worth it. I don't regret that decision and I'd make the same choice again now. I don't think that I even cared that he'd died, other than relief for my Mum. That makes me sound like a dreadful person, but there it is. Others can judge me once they've experienced my life!

gettingtheresometime

olgadapolga said:

MrsStepford said:

Families are very often the source of big grief. I think parents should have compulsory parenting classes. 

I used to work in healthcare and there were a lot of parents who needed educating about how to be a parent. Many of them loved their children, of that there was no doubt, they just had no idea about how to ensure that their children got a really good start in life or how to help them achieve anything.

Families can be soul-destroying. Not just parents, though, my siblings were (and are) really very unpleasant people who treated me badly from childhood until I cut them loose.

.My mum is, and always has been, fabulous. She doesn't like the way I've cut my siblings off but at least she largely respects my decision.

My dad was a complete so-and-so, it was always "his way or the highway" and if you didn't do what he wanted then he disregarded you, as a member of the family and as a person. He didn't love anyone, just saw them as possessions. Not a nice person, as I found out at the age of nineteen when I left home. Living with it, it was normal and I never questioned it until I left. My poor Mum, what she put up with for almost six decades, nobody really knows. I know more about the situation she was in than my siblings, who are in complete denial about it, but I only realised how dreadful my parents' marriage was during some parts of my healthcare training.

I wasn't sad when he died. The last thing he ever said to me was that he was going to hit me, just because I told him that he wasn't going to abuse Mum any more. I never saw or spoke to him again after that, partly through circumstances (he ended up in hospital and died shortly afterwards) and partly through choice (I didn't want to see him and I wasn't willing to catch Covid-19 by visiting him). My Mum tried to persuade me to visit him but I decided that he wasn't worth it. I don't regret that decision and I'd make the same choice again now. I don't think that I even cared that he'd died, other than relief for my Mum. That makes me sound like a dreadful person, but there it is. Others can judge me once they've experienced my life!

I think it makes you a very honest person - alot of people would have done the 'dutiful daughter' thing and hated themselves for the hypocrisy.

MrsStepford

I'm so sorry you went through that @olgadapolga your father sounds a piece of work. 

olgadapolga

MrsStepford said:

I'm so sorry you went through that @olgadapolga your father sounds a piece of work. 

I count myself lucky that I got away from his domination at the age of 19, my poor Mum had six decades of it!  At least after I left, he couldn't control me the way in which he had previously. The last few years of his life were especially hard as her entire life was running around after him (he just became bed and chair bound) and she wouldn't accept help from any of her children.

Some people are just terrible humans and have no feelings/empathy for others.

julieelizabeth_2

Cut her out 

MrsStepford

Update: Someone with Private Caller has taken to calling me. I don't answer. I received an email from my mother this week, entitled Organic Food. I didn't open it, it went straight in the trash. 

I sent all the family tree stuff I had for my adoptive mother's family, to her first cousin in Scotland. I found him via Ancestry. His mother was the mistress and his father did divorce his wife, marry his mistress and have one child. My adoptive mother and her family gave Charles and wife 2 the cold shoulder and they didn't know about the child.

I put them all in touch and some of them have kept in touch with the son. I sent this genealogical stuff off with my address, email and note. Heard nothing back, now more than three weeks ago. 

 I was intending to email digital photos of my mother to him. Today I just went !!!!!! and started deleting them off Amazon Photos. I noticed that in very many of the photos, she is smiling, but the smile just doesn't meet her eyes. 

My brother transferred all her slides and photos onto disks and a lot from her parents too. I was flicking through them and saw a photo of myself with a bump on my forehead and a yellowing black eye. The story I was told, was that she fell down the stairs with me, just before my first birthday. I hadn't seen this photo before (and there are a LOT of photos) and I looked at the cake. Not one candle, but eight. I was totally freaked out. Not just because it shows that she lied, but because I don't remember anything about the incident.

Another photo, shows me sitting at her dressing table. She took the photo so that she wasn't reflected in the mirror. I was and I had a bump and bruise. I presume same one. I was definitely underweight, skinnier than I was in my first school photo. Who takes photos of their child with bruises ? I looked so sad in both of them, that I couldn't bear to keep them and they got deleted as well as every photo of her. 

I was a bit freaked out, I admit. 

I haven't seen her since Feb last year when she came for lunch, haven't spoken to her or emailed her since October last year. Now I don't have any photos of her on her own in online albums. I'm moving on.

A couple of years ago, she told me that she had sold her paternal grandmother's engagement ring (daft because she was the granddaughter of an earl and had a private income so better ring) and she gave me her mother's ring. It doesn't fit me. I loved my grandma, so I've kept it. I feel like I should have it couriered back now, what do you think ?