So… what do YOUR parents do that really bugs you? Does it go beyond that to actually hurting your feelings?
Recently on Reddit, somebody asked the question:
And, for what it’s worth, if you’re a parent this is actually REALLY important reading for you. Because why not know what you SHOULDN’T do?
Let’s take a look…
1. Alright… let’s get into this…
Im 30, but i still resent a couple of things.
- I paid my own way through university, Dad told me i couldn’t afford to go away to school. I lived on basically nothing for all of university. 4 years later my step siblings both got a free ride to whatever school they wanted. (To be fair i think he feels bad about this, but it still gets me)
- Recently during covid he said he didn’t want to get together because of the illness. He’s been pretty sick over the last year so i didn’t blame him. Only to find out he had my sister and step siblings over half a dozen times. They just didn’t bother to invite me. That really rubbed me raw. ( i work at home, i was very low risk)
- general exclusion from anything going on, they never tell me anything, I’m always the last to find out. They constantly guilt me about not calling, but then when i do, we talk like 5 minutes.
- When my sister bought her house, my dad/step mom probably spent 100 hours working on helping her fix it up. When i bought my house i asked them to help me paint and they said it was to much work.
So yeah, that’s my list.
2. This poor woman!
Okay might need some background my dad is a pedo and my mum moved to another state and spent three years to get full custody of me and my stepdad is a mega neat freak.
There has been a lot of things that has happened but this one actually hurt my mother at the same time.
When my room or anything wasn’t up to his standard he would always call me a “lazy pig daughter of a pedo that will turn out just like him”.
He said this to me from the age of 6 and he actually never thought that he was doing anything wrong.
3. Grandma… depression is real!
I was raised by my grandma, so there’s that gap.
She thinks depression is a “disease of people which have no occupation” because she had to flee her country before the war and she’s just fine.
She isn’t, she just has a great coping mechanism.
4. You don’t owe her anything
One minute telling me I should talk about my feelings, me wanting to talk but knowing well not to ever talk about anything with her, telling her I don’t want to wear out her patience with my spiraling, her saying she won’t
Waking up early today and being screamed at for owing her my happiness. Worst part is she knows about it hurting me, she doesn’t care.
5. Not doing much for self confidence
Always “critiquing” my appearance which makes me have sh*t self confidence.
I was in a major A.T.V. accident a few months ago and I have some gnarly scars. She never fails to tell me how “disgusting” my scars are.
I work at her office and she will make me change clothes like 3-4 times before she “approves” how I look. And before hand I look fine.
I like to wear colored eyeliner because I think it looks cool and she’ll look at it and say “god you’re so weird” or call me a freak.
6. Well, that’s odd!
Called my mom on mother’s day to tell her happy M-day and that I loved her.
My nephew was there with his trio of kids in tow visiting. I’m 2400 miles away.
She was extremely dismissive and only responding with one-word responses while I’m trying to get her to interact and talk about how things are going back down there.
She ends up telling me, in an almost bored or GTFO way, “Why don’t you go visit your dad or something, I’ve gotta go.” and hangs up.
Month or so later, I go to visit my dad on Father’s Day and got a text from her. Not a happy F-day for me, but a ‘did you visit your dad?’
I confronted her about it and she seemed confused as to why I was agitated and forward with her. I’ve not spoken to her since.
7. Younger = better
I’m the eldest at my Dads house.
My little sister could literally get away with murder. When something’s broken, I always get blamed even if I’m not the one using it. When he’s disciplining me, he always overreacts. For example, when he thinks I’m on my phone too much when I’m actually just replying to someone, he takes my phone off me. And yet he doesn’t like me being rude to people when I don’t reply. I get blamed for a lot of stuff and sometimes when I make a minor mistake, he will scream and rant in my face. Now you may think this is me being over dramatic but can I just add, I have autism.
I have trouble with my emotions and that isn’t helped by him yelling at me or having a go at me every time I go round.
8. This is such a tricky balance
Treating your kid as a friend / confidant or using them as emotional support.
This essentially robs the kid of their childhood and forces them to be a parent to their own parent. I assure you, it’s not fun. The emotional damage is severe and long lasting. Wikipedia link below.
9. This one is a doozy!
I’m an adult now, but the level of hypocrisy my parents laid on us as teens was difficult to bear at times.
They would constantly instill this fear of “you don’t know what the real world is like, you won’t make it out there, you have no clue how this all works” but would not take the time to teach us about the “real world”. They held onto outdated values, such as “Just walk into any office and ask for a job” or “When you apply for school loans, ask for an interest-free one” as if we had options.
As a teen they would get angry and would threaten with “I pay for your cellphone and can take that away from you in an instant because you don’t do sh*t around this house” but when I began to ask how bills work and offered multiple times to pay my share (because I had a job), they would ignore it and say “We want to pay this for you”. I would constantly ask them to teach me about finances, how credit worked, how to repair stuff, etc. They would ignore it and say “don’t worry about that now” while there was this constant unspoken pressure of “the second you’re on your own you need to know everything before because you will literally die if you dont.” As an adult they don’t understand why I have so much anxiety and that I constantly worry about everything.
If we were in an emergency, like a sudden car repair, they would pay for it and say “Don’t worry about this, we got you, we’re here to help, no need to repay us”…. but then a month down the road we’d have an argument and Mom would yell “I paid for your car and can take it away from you…” when in fact the car was fully in my name and paid off. Accepting any sort of money or help from them was held over our heads, even though we were constantly told “Dont worry about this, it’s what we’re supposed to do”. Many times we had the money to cover ourselves, but they wanted to step in and save us. I now have a very hard time accepting money from even my husband because I have a fear that it’s going to come back at me.
They would constantly threaten to kick us out anytime we would counter or question their hypocrisy, and would throw my brother out the house but then 30 minutes later go hunt him down. At one point my brother had pre-packed a bag and was on his way to be picked up by a friends when they found him, and couldn’t understand why he had prepared for it. Over the years I had learned to have a “bug-out” bag ready to go and to be prepared to be kicked out in an instant. I also learned to read over documents to learn what actually WAS mine and to keep my finances and personal information out of their reach.
I don’t even want to begin to explain the hell they put me through when I came out as gay.
After years of processing it, I think they were just afraid of losing their babies. They wanted to shelter us but also teach us lessons at the same time, causing a lot of confusion and internal battles that I still face with today. I love them and they are good parents, but god that f**ked me up royally.
10. Who are these parents?!
As the internet became more accessible, i began to research more and more as I got older. I tried to ask my parents questions, but they either didn’t answer or gave an answer that seemed like i only had one option and “thats how the world works” as if everyone goes down the exact same path.
By 16, i was ready to move out. I later learned how sheltered and untaught i was. When i started college at 18, i gritted my teeth and tried to push thru living at home to save money bc i knew it was the responsible thing to do.
At 19, i got kicked out bc i forgot to take out the kitchen trash one night (i was required to take the kitchen trash out every night no matter how full it was. Mind u, it was only me, my mom, and my at the time 5 year old brother. The kitchen trashcan isn’t the only trashcan….we have bathroom n bedroom trashcans. Pretty much the kitchen trash was usually empty. Anyways, her argument was i needed to learn the lesson of responsibility. At 19 mom?? Im already responsible and can hold my own.) Anyways, i got kicked out and she told me i cant take anything she bought me. I was so proud of myself wen i was able to pack up half my room and 3/4 of my clothes BC I BOUGHT THEM MYSELF.
In 2 days she begged me to come home bc she didn’t feel like doing the daily and weekly chores (that id had been doing for 12 years) and she didn’t feel like watching her kid 24/7 (i raised him half the time SINCE I WAS 13. That isn’t an exaggeration). I was so self sufficient that i moved out completely comfortable wen i was kicked out. I was ready to be gone. SHE begged me to come home. I did, under 1 condition. That i would be able to move out that summer with ALL my stuff, not half. I moved out 2, going on 3 years ago and i dont regret it. My mom really clouded my mind. I never realized how free adults are.
11. We’re never immune from this
I’m not a kid anymore, and am happy to say that this sh*t is way behind me, but when I was around elementary school age my mother was dangerously obsessed with ‘boosting my immune system’. She had read a handful of popular science books that apparently were very light on the science part, and had made the conclusion that the immune system basically always works in accordance with the ‘whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’-principle. So she began to put little pieces of rotten food into my salad for example, and when I noticed and asked what the matter was, she said I should just shut up and eat.
I sometimes got a bit sick from this spoiled diet, but I wouldn’t complain now, had it stopped there. After I was hit with a rather bad case of the flu one winter, she got extremely worried and felt guilty that she hadn’t “done enough” to protect me. As soon as I was a bit better, she gave me a stinking leathery piece of meat and told me to eat it. I later found out it was the hind leg of decomposing rat she’d found in the attic… Things came to a head when I was 9, and she’d heard that a chickenpox infection was going around my school and she wouldn’t allow me to go, before I’d been properly “inoculated”. I spent about 3 days with her in my bedroom, she going out into the garden every few hours to gather random sh*t like mosses, weeds, crumbs of dirt and insect wings, which she would stick into a blender, heavily dilute and then inject into my arm.
When my father found out (I looked purple and cadaverous, by his account), he told her to stop this at once (he was, ironically, a lab technician who’d dropped out of medical school) and explained to her that putting rotten fruit into my food was sufficient to protect me from most types of infection. I moved out at the age of 16 and was glad to leave this insanity behind, though getting older, my views have changed somewhat, as it is strange how very rarely I get sick. Maybe my mom was onto something and just lacked the expertise to properly pull it off.
12. Be careful with these conversations…
My Mom’s family has a history of heart disease and because of that she’s always been overly cautious about weight etc. I have a build different to her and my sister who are both super skinny without having to put much effort into it. I grew up being fat shamed to the point that even a comment from her sets me off now and I thought I was fat and ugly for the longest time (I wasn’t, gained a little now though can’t lie).
She thinks her constant comments are to get me to care about my health but it made me very insecure in my mid to late teens.
Learn anything? I hope so. Because if some good can come out of this, then it’s time well spent.
Do you have a story like this? Want to share?
Let us know in the comments!
