Stuff my mom said

I think this is the right forum for this, since it's about things my mom said that made me feel sad. She was dealing with her own hurt, and they say that hurt gets passed from one generation to the next, so I guess these are a few examples of that happening.

When I was a little kid having a meltdown on a family outing: "Why don't we go home, close all the doors and all the windows, and watch TV?"

When I was excited about buying my first clock radio: "You think you can go out and just buy whatever you want?"

When I was practicing guitar and it wasn't sounding very good: "You're never going to sound like Chet Atkins if you keep playing like that."

Hi HalfSwede; I can identify. I still think about (or ruminate, my first shrink's favorite word) over unkind comments one or the other parent said to me as a child. I have a whole list I could probably rattle off, and my sister does too.

I have tried to tell myself that, at the time, a parent might not realize just how hurtful a particular statement can be to a child, and just how long that hurt can linger.

And I think you're right; the hurt does get passed from one generation to the next. It's a tough cycle to break. I'm trying to break it with my own kids.

I have a dysfunctional mother. She didn't say cruel things like that to me, but she did yell at me a lot, sometimes over natural things a kid would do, not knowing there was anything wrong. And I've picked up bad behavior patterns from this--when I get scared or pressured, I can explode, much like my mother used to with me. I remember a time when my brother and I found a dead mouse or small rat. My brother wrapped the tail around the handlebars on my tricycle and put my little hand on top to hold our "treasure" while we took it home to show mom. Well, mom blew up at me, spanked me, and hauled me off to scrub my hand raw, to eliminate the "germs". This is one of my earliest memories--I must have been very young. How much better if she had just gently said, "It's not good to pick up dead things, they might have germs. Let's bury the mousie after we wash your hands."

Right. I can get either really angry or really sad. So there's got to be a third way, just step back from whatever the situation is, take a deep breath.

My mom was also very sad. Her parents never said anything nice to her. Her solution was to just bury herself in work, not talk about it. When I tried to tell her how I was feeling, she'd say, "You think you've got problems?" That was probably her way of saying she did, in fact, want to talk, but couldn't.

I'm sorry your mom hauled off on you like that.

So sorry HalfSwede! It's not fair that parents do these things. All the feelings you had sound like perfectly normal kid responses/feelings...your mom was the one with issues.

csc

Thank you, CSC. Good to hear from you. I am working on not blaming myself for what she said, and not even blaming her, really. I do wish she was still around so we might at least have the chance to talk about these things. She actually got a lot better when I got older.

I could list a thousand things that either my Mom or my Dad said to me when I was young that hurt me, or that I still think about today. And, throughout my teenage years, and even a bit past that, I blamed all of my faults on those words that my parents said to me. However, as a parent myself, I harken back to one thing my Dad said often when I was young: "that's SI," meaning self-inflicted. It is incredibly difficult to be a parent, knowing that you have almost total responsibility for the way a person grows up and who that person will be. But, parents are PEOPLE, too. Don't lose sight of the fact that even though these people are your parents, that they have hardships that they endure and that if in a bad moment they say something to you that doesn't follow the Sesame Street and PBS guidelines that parents today are expected to follow, cut them some slack. I'm not saying that there aren't bad parents out there, but MOST try very hard and are very aware of their responsibility. However they (we) are human, and should be forgiven for those moments when they (we) lose their cool or are otherwise distracted. This is not meant to downplay how you feel, just to offer some balance and to put a word in for us parents who know that they aren't perfect, that their parent's weren't perfect, and that our kids aren't going to be perfect, either.