I Dislike my mother

I think I understand. My mother is similar to yours. She took care of our basic needs, but I felt like I grew up in a boarding house. I, too, believe she's the root of many of my problems connecting with others, etc. I don't feel she did anything wrong purposefully or maliciously, so what can I say -- she did the best she could.

"When you're dating someone a big part of discussion is family relations. do i admit this?" Your boundaries are only for you to decide, but now I won't disclose family problems until I'm comfortable doing so freely. Being honest and vulnerable is a good thing...with a trustworthy person. I just went through the trauma of a relationship with a disordered person, so I'm less than trusting right now.

I hope you won't have to stay with her too long. My mother and I get along fine as long as we maintain our distance, unfortunately. Not everyone has the Hallmark relationship with their mom. I eventually figured out it was better to accept the facts than to try to change her, so now I don't expect anything that she can't give me (although she does surprise me now and then!), and I'm not feeling chronically disappointed like I used to.

I hated my mom. As an adult, since I already hated my mom, I turned her into my scapegoat.

At the age of 40 I had a dream about screaming at my mother, who was pregnant in the dream, "Are you going to do to another child what you did to me?" I woke up enraged.

I called a therapist. We explored this for months. Some of my anger was legitimate. One day my therapist asked me, out of the blue, why I hated my mom. I said a few things and he kept repeating the question. Finally, I blurted out, "Don't' you understand, when I hate my mom I don't feel guilty about my own bad parenting."

This Freudian slip is the point of therapy.

I wrote my my a letter suggesting we forgive each other.

Months later on her death bed she took my hand and thanked me for my letter.

My work was done.

It's OK to hate a parent! I know that must sound horrible. But sometimes we assign way too much pardon to blood relatives. I don't care WHO you are in this world. Love needs to be earned. And if your mom never earned it, it's OK to not like her or hang around her.

I think we get so caught up in what society and culture tells us we should expect from parents. We long for the Hollywood version of the perfect, loving parent-child relationship. And yet, that's not what everyone has. That's not what you have. Set your own standards and expectations. Blood SHOULD BE thicker than water (according the Hollywood), but, sometimes it's not.

Lovely June, very good point. You can pick your friends but you can't choose your family. If you don't get along with a friend what do we do? We end it and move along. For me right now it will be loving from a distance once I get outta here.

I am now accepting & even thinking about perhaps going to therapy so I can move on with life now & have some closure.

Arianna, I have a colleague at work who was abandoned by her mom and I don't think she will ever have kids either. She mothers everyone @ work. I actually think she could be a great mom. a shame.

Susan after I saw your message last night i penned a letter to my daughter & had a heart to heart with her today after she read it. she's my mini me but we had a falling out earlier this year over her marriage at 22 & had rocky times earlier in life. I really thank you because it was a huge relief of guilt i had.

I really appreciate the feedback.

"Man's Search for Meaning" is a book that should be on everyone's 'must read' list. In brief, "Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory—known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")—holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful. "What man actually needs," Frankl writes, "is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task . . . the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him/her."

This book affected me deeply; there is no avoiding suffering in this world. Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, knew that on the deepest of levels. And yet -- he gleaned meaning even out of the worst of human conditions. No matter the journey, we have the capacity to 'search for meaning' -- this book is a gem.

HaveFaith

I also have had a long-term hatred of my mother. Although mine started when I was a teenager, well before I had become a parent myself. And, for sure I have done some stuffpy parenting myself, and focusing on her does indeed mean that I don't have to focus on me. She is an easy target.

But my mother did a lot to earn my hatred back then. And she is still an alcoholic who can't respond to anyone else's feelings or needs in a meaningful way. It's all about her. What I do notice happening in the last few weeks is that as I heal myself and continue on with the 12 steps and going to my CoDA group, the thought that she (and my father) are incapable of doing it any differently spontaneously pops into my head.

There is a lot of relief in me to actually feel and think this all by myself. I've tried to make myself forgive them and it doesn't work. The fact that that thought came by itself one day a week or so ago really felt good. I think I'm slow, but at least there is improvement. And when I think about the years I had to put up with her neglect, and try to make it seem like I was being cared for by this parent who actually appeared to resent nearly everything about me, it's pretty amazing that I can forgive her at all.

As long as I could remember, I had been angry with my mother both as a child and as an adult. Once I had a dream in which I was so angry at my mother that I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move. I opened my mouth to scream at her, and the words got stuck in my throat. Later in the dream I was talking to my father, and he told me that my mother was pregnant. I went into a rage. Then my mother appeared and I screamed at her, “You are going to do to another child what you did to me?” I was so angry I woke myself up.

I didn’t tell my therapist about the dream right away. Instead I went to my mother. I wanted to process my feelings about my childhood with her, so I asked her a lot of questions about what was going on in the family when I was young. Mom just stared at me. She didn’t want to talk about it. “I don’t remember,” she said. I was livid. Not only had she neglected me as a child, and exposed me to the parent who had abused her, now she was impending in my attempts to get better.

When I finally talked to my therapist about it, he said something interesting. He shrugged his shoulders and said sympathetically, “Oh, she couldn’t do it.” I stopped dead in my tracks when I realized that he didn’t say “she wouldn’t do it.” He said she “couldn’t do it.” What a difference a letter can make. I suddenly began looking at my mother in a brand-new light.

It took time, but eventually I changed my mind about my mother. A change in my feelings quickly followed. Then I started treating my mother differently. I changed. Our relationship changed.


Years ago, I wrote my mother a letter offering her my forgiveness. When she received the letter she cried (since I had asked her not to call me, my sister phoned to tell me). It was almost six months later that my mother went into the hospital for emergency surgery. As I sat by her bed in the recovery room she reached out and took my hand. Tears started streaming down her face and she said, “Susie, you will never know how much your letter meant to me. I love you so much.” I started crying too and we just sat there in silence the wounds healing and the peace settling into our hearts.
This was the beginning of my life-long attempt to let go of the past and forgive all the people who had harmed me. After mom, everyone else was a piece of cake. Interestingly enough, after forgiving my mom for her shortcomings, I also found it easier to forgive myself for the mistakes I had made with my own children.