“After Holding A Dying Friend, His Mother Said…”
“One of my friends held a friend of his while he died, after he had been hit by a car. My friend’s mom, upon learning of this, then proceeded to say ‘That’ll teach you kids to do your nartcotics and stuff. You deserve this.’ This accident happened at work, no substances were involved. Our friend was in shock, and almost lost it when his mom said this. It was messed up.”
“I Grew Up As A Guest In My Own Home…”
“During a rather stressful moment in her life, my mom told me that I needed to watch my butt and keep my bags packed because if I ever came between her and my step-dad that I would be ‘s* outta luck.’ I think I was around 11 or 12 then (she soon started this trend of taking out all of her frustrations on me by telling me what was ‘wrong with me). This was a year or two after my biological father told her he really had no desire to continue any kind of visitation. I grew up as a guest in my own home, always ready to leave or get kicked out, not sure where I would go. I hope it is no mystery to her that my emotional connection to my family is casual at best. That experience has influenced me to not have children of my own, but to adopt. I look forward to giving a young person a safe place and forever home. I think I can do a better job of that than my parents.”
“I Have Moderate Full-Body Psoriasis…One time My Mom Told Me…”
“I have mild/moderate full-body plaque psoriasis, and although it’s getting better, it’s still not to the point where I want to display my body to the public. My family had planned an outing to go to a waterpark. I planned to wear a T-shirt and shorts over my swimsuit (still pushing it), but I don’t care too much about what people have to say about something out of my control. My mom started hinting that I shouldn’t go, and eventually blurted out something about not wanting to be seen with me and how she would be embarrassed by people staring — not that she’d feel bad for me, that she’s be embarrassed for herself. My mom has said and done a lot of rude stuff to me, but this took the cake. I went anyway and stayed the heck away from her. I had a good time with my awesome sister and niece.”
“I Was My Mom’s Slave For My Entire Life, And She Used To Say…”
“I was my mom’s slave for my entire life (cooking, cleaning, babysitting, pulling A+ grades in all my classes, never getting in trouble, etc.) I wasn’t allowed to have friends. Wasn’t allowed to go anywhere. This was because I had to babysit every day after school so she could drink. Sometimes I wasn’t allowed to eat, even if I cooked, and I had to ask to get a drink until I moved out (now I have an eating disorder). I was only allowed to shower after everyone else was done. I got a new toothbrush once a year, which led to bad brushing habits (4 years later and I still can’t convince myself I can get a new one if I want it). I loved to read but wasn’t allowed to if it would get in the way of cooking or cleaning. Sometimes she would lock me in my room, no drink no bathroom (locked from the outside). After all of this, I heard my mom talking on the phone one morning to her friend. She said she wished she never had me. This wasn’t just once or twice either. She said it so much that I started believing I shouldn’t have been born, cried over it every night for 5+ years until my dad realized it and stuck me in therapy. Same woman who pushed me down the stairs a few years earlier.
I got the heck out of there.
Haven’t spoken with her in almost three years.”
“20 Years Ago And I Still Can’t Forgive Her”
“When I was violated in my early teens, it took me months to tell my parents. Things were, of course, strange and sad for quite some time. One afternoon, when I was home alone, I sat in my big bath towel in the living room to watch the end of a tv show before I got dressed. My mom came home and promptly said, ‘You know, maybe if you didn’t show your body off like you are now, you wouldn’t have been violated.’ 20 years ago and I still can’t forgive her.
“I Was Recovering From An Eating Disorder And My Dad Told Me…”
“I was recovering from an eating disorder and had some serious body image issues. I was 5’4″ and at the time was 107 pounds. My dad, who is about 280, told me that I needed to start doing some sit ups, because it looked like I was developing a gut. Looking back, he is probably a big part of why I had such body image issues in the first place.”
“She Ignores My Chronic Diseases…”
“My mom always had a problem with accepting anything negative in reality and things at face value no matter the amount of proof. It’s like she purposely does and goes the opposite way to spite people including her children. I could be puking blood with stab wounds and she would not believe this was happening and tell me I was imagining things.
The frustrating thing is how she can act normal when meeting new people or when under scrutiny from someone with authority to call her out on her lousiness. However, without fail, she will lose her ‘new’ friends due to her crazy perspectives and inability to focus on the topic.
This killed the family and any chance at adapting to a normal productive life. I’m suffering from several chronic diseases and my sibling is mentally handicapped due to a car accident. She hasn’t to this day accepted this reality and instead becomes angry or demanding about why I can’t do things every other normal person does. She has always been like this, including the death of my addict father due to her not wanting to accept reality and suggest treatment. It’s deeply troubling and I spend every day wanting to die.”
“I Was Out For A Movie. My Mom Called Me Raging Because…”
“My mom and I don’t have the best relationship, but there’s a line with insults and I’ll never forget what she said to me when I was 14. I was out for a movie with my then-boyfriend, and at 8 pm, she calls me raging because I wasn’t home. I said I was on the way home and that I was sorry for being home past dinner. Her reply Was: ‘I hope you get violated on your way home by the construction workers around our area.’ This doesn’t include the times she’s asked me ‘What time are you working the streets, and which street are you working tonight?’ as I would prepare to head out with friends for a night out at the age of 18.”
“I Was Their Only Biological Child, Yet I Wasn’t Good Enough…”
“I lived in a pretty…different I guess would be the right word…family. My parents were both teachers, extremely conservative, very religious, and they loved children and I was their first and only biological child. They loved me and cared for me, but they wanted to have more children. Unfortunately, they were not able to have any due to complications. They decided the best way to get more children was to adopt. I was super game for this and so we started the process. When I was five, we adopted my first brother. He was eight months old and had been the son of an addict. We worried about developmental issues, but hoped for the best.
A couple years after adopting him, everything was going great so we went in for another. He was the son of a 14-year-old victim, and due to her loathing at having a child and her substance use, he came out pretty banged up too. We got him when he was eight hours old. We worried about developmental problems with him as well, since the previous had started to show signs of pretty severe ADD and ADHD, but once again we hoped for the best.
Things went well for the next six years or so, but the only problem was my mother wanted daughters. So through an extremely long and complicated series of events, they adopted a sibling group of 4 girls and a boy, ranging from 6 months to 4 years old. And then another daughter after that, this one being older than me (I wasn’t too thrilled about that).
Finally, they decided we had enough kids and that we would be happy. Well, ALL of the children had severe mental disabilities from their previous parents. Most range from Bipolar, to ADD/ADHD, to being mildly slow. As I grew older, more and more responsibility was put on me to take care of them. Suddenly, as if my parents hadn’t thought it all through, we were out of money and they both had to work more. Eventually, it became as if the children were mine. I loved my siblings, but after years of almost all day being under my watch, I became less of a sibling to them and more of a parent/babysitter. They treated me differently, and when I voiced these concerns to my parents they blew me off. When I reached my upper teens, my older sister left to be with her birth family where she promptly OD’d and died. The birth family fought to make us pay for the funeral but then demanded to be present. We footed the bill and luckily none of them were allowed in, but it still messed up my parents.
I thought, as horrible as this may sound, that this could be my lucky break. I hoped that finally my parents would see that they needed to spend more time with their children and that maybe I could become a sibling again. No. I was wrong. Instead, all it did was make them go to church more. They became zealots, going more and more and giving away more and more of the money we so desperately needed to the church.
Finally, I hit 18. I had had enough of the family that didn’t appreciate me, took me for granted, and had alienated me from my siblings so I headed away for college. They didn’t like the fact that they were losing their live-in babysitter. They tried everything they could to mess me up, from sending in my records late to threatening to not help me with a loan. They gave me $0 to help pay for everything, but I expected that.
While in college, I was able to work and save money and propose to my girlfriend of 2.5 years (with permission from her parents before I proposed) and I thought that this would help me. Maybe if I could show my responsibility they would actually care about me. Instead, they told me I was stupid for loving someone and for trying to get married, even though they had been married earlier in their lives than I had even proposed. I decided I had enough of them and just ignored them all for a few months.
Well, it’s been about a year since I proposed and I have a new job. I had been working for my college and that didn’t make me very much money. I was strapped for cash, my fiancée was going to school with me, and we were pretty broke. In an attempt to save money, we looked into apartments that we could live in together, instead of paying roughly $4000 per quarter to have two dorms. We found one and moved in with each other. I had talked to my parents about it beforehand and told them why we wanted to. They agreed that I needed to save money and thought it would work.
We moved in together, and my parents asked me to babysit for them while out of town. I did. When they got home, I was talking to my dad about how I wasn’t making enough money and that I didn’t know how I was going to pay all my bills. He said that it sucked that I wasn’t making any money, but unfortunately, due to my decisions, I was going to have to start paying for car insurance (the ONE thing they helped me with) and that I had 30 days to find my own insurance before they dropped me.
I was floored, but he wasn’t done. He went on to tell me how he had no hopes for anything I did in the future because I was a huge disappointment for not marrying my fiancée before we moved in together (because we totally had the money for a wedding when we were broke). He also told me that both of my parents were going to try to take the children to church more so that hopefully, they didn’t turn out like me. He continued to tell me how much of a failure I was for about an hour or two and how I had ruined their family until I finally said ‘Ok’ and walked out.
Since then I haven’t really talked to them. They, to this day, send me stuff about how I should go to church more and see the error of my ways, and because THEY were married before they moved in together, have decided that I am a terrible child and that they hope I don’t ruin the other kids. I’m done dealing with them.”
“My Dad Told Me He Wouldn’t Acknowledge My Disease Until…”
“I have cystic fibrosis pretty severely and when I was young, 8 or 9 years old, my dad told me that he wouldn’t acknowledge my disease until he buried me In the ground. I don’t tell him when I go to the hospital anymore. On a related note my sister told me that all anyone in the family expects from me is to die. This was when I asked her if I should go to college.”
“I Get My Revenge Once A Year With Passive-Aggressive Mother’s Day Cards”
“I came home crying one day in the third grade after being called fat for the first time and asked my mom if I was. Her response: ‘You’re fine, but if you lost ten pounds you’d be really pretty.’ I was promptly put on a series of fad diets. Fast forward past several years of passive aggressive comments/criticisms/fad diets, my school contacted my parents concerned I was bulimic. Mom’s response, ‘Why would you do that? If you want to lose weight, just stop eating like your sister (sister has anorexic tendencies). You’re just wasting money. Why don’t you buy a pair of jeans two sizes smaller than you are now and just hang them near the refrigerator instead?’ Later on, she mentioned, ‘If I could just put your face on your sister’s body, I’d have one perfect daughter.’ The kicker: Mom’s a nurse. But this is the same woman who, on the day of my graduation from a respectable university with a dual BA degree, said, ‘Now you can get to work on a degree that’s actually worth something.’ Best gem of advice: ‘Don’t make the same mistakes I made; don’t get married and never have kids.’ Still hear that one at least once a month. But I get my revenge once a year with a passive-aggressive Mother’s Day card.”
“My Mother Tells Me I’m A Disappointment And Failure In Her Eyes Because…”
“I dropped out of a University against my parent’s wishes to go to an automotive tech school. When I graduated, I didn’t even get a congratulations from my mother, all I got was ‘So are you going back to school now?’ That was seven months ago. Since then she tells me that I am a disappointment and failure in her eyes, several times a week.”
“I Just Have To Stick It Out And Be The Best Boyfriend I Can Be…”
“I was at lunch with my girlfriend and her parents one afternoon, the day after she was in a pageant that was very set up (contestants had connections with the judges, money being a major influence). Needless to say, being the small town girl she was, she didn’t have those same connections and ended up not even placing. Back to lunch though, girlfriend says ‘I’m just angry with pageants right now. Especially after last night.’ Her mom then looked up from her phone (yes, her mom is on her phone at the lunch table) and says ‘Oh what’s the matter? Are you jealous of them?’ Needless to say…I noped to myself while girlfriend’s dad and mom bickered the rest of lunch about that little comment.
Her parents say things like this all the time to her, and it really frustrates me. For instance, another time, her mom said that ‘[My Girlfriend] eats too much and needs to slow down on food.’ Her dad then told her ‘Yeah, it looks like your shirt is going to bust at the seams.’ My girlfriend is in numerous pageants throughout the year, so she has never been above a size 8, if that. Her parents criticize and chastise her, so I have to go clean up their handiwork. I just have to stick it out and be the best pageant boyfriend I can be…which sucks most of the time.”
“In The Midst Of All The Embarrassing Police Questions, My Mom Told Me…”
“A neighbor violated me and a couple other girls in the neighborhood. It went on for a long time, and I didn’t realize other girls were involved until one girl’s parents came over and had a meeting with my parents. When they left, my parents said I wasn’t to go near that part of the street, but they couldn’t tell me why. I told them I already knew why, and told them what had been happening. In the midst of all the embarrassing police questions and doctor visits, my mom told me, ‘I really hope you’re not lying, because I’m losing one of my closest friends because of you.'”
“In The Car Going Home, Out Of The Blue My Mom Blurted Out…”
“We were in the car going home. Out of the blue, my mom blurted out ‘You’re not pretty, you know? So you better work harder and study harder! Otherwise, how are you going to accomplish anything?'”
“I Felt Like I Finally Found A Potential Career. My Parents Told Me…”
“I’m working QA in a video game studio right now, and for the first time in my 26 years of life I feel like I’ve found a potential for a career. I could see myself moving on up in the industry, and I’m truly happy to go to work every day. We’re nearing the end of this project, and just a couple days ago HR pulled a few of us aside and said we were being requested to stay on for the next project. I’m the only one on the team currently with no industry experience beyond this one stint, so I was beyond enthused to hear that not only was I requested, but that I was so good that they wanted me back. I was so excited that I mentioned this to the parents while eating dinner, for sure expecting some kind of encouragement and/or validation that I’d finally found my niche in life. What do I get? ‘That’s all well and good, but are you seriously happy with the job? You’re being paid just as much as someone straight out of high school (actually more like twice as much); how are you possibly happy with that?’ Freaking Asian parents, man. And they wonder why I have no desire to talk to them about anything concerning my life.”
“My Mom Implied I Was Lying About…”
“When I finally told my mom about being abused, I thought I saw something in her eyes that hinted at her not believing me. I thought I was just being nervous. About four days later she came to me with a story about how she used to lie to get attention as a kid. She then said ‘You know, just because I grew out of lying for attention by the time I was about 10, doesn’t mean.. you know.. everyone does.’ She was obviously talking about the abuse. I teared up a bit, because I mean, who wouldn’t. Your mom is denying a traumatic event that you haven’t told anyone but her about. I ended up just leaving. She also promised not to tell anyone. My brother, his fiancée, my dad, my mom’s boyfriend, my aunts and uncles, all my grandparents, and all my brother’s friends knew just a day after I told her.”
A Simple Mistake Ruined A Relationship
“My parents adopted me through an open adoption, meaning I have open communication with my birth mother and birth grandmother. Each year they would send me a gift and card with updates about their lives and questions for me every Christmas and birthday. One Christmas, I was going out with friends but came into the house to grab my wallet and saw a big box in the kitchen that my parents were obviously discussing. I figured I would find out at Christmas what was in the box. Christmas came and went and nothing I received and nothing we gave seemed to be big enough to fit in that mysterious box. Even more strange, this was the first year in 15 years that my birth mother had not sent me a gift. I kept asking both my parents about the box and my present from my birth mother and they pretended like they had no clue what box I was talking about and reassured me my present should be coming soon. Months later, and after many days of me sobbing and telling them I thought my birthmother didn’t love me anymore and had moved on, my dad broke down and told me the truth. Apparently, the mystery box contained Christmas gifts that seemed too young for me and were addressed to the daughter of one of my birthmother’s friends. She just made a mistake while shipping gifts. My birth mother and I have not talked since (I assume because she thought she sent me a gift and I never responded). I finally wrote to her a few years later but she didn’t write me back. Part of me can never forgive my mother for letting me go on all that time breaking down over what I thought was the rejection by my birthmother when all she had to do was tell me there was an honest mistake when shipping packages.”
It All Worked Out In The End For The Self-Starter Plumber
“My roommate was never the smartest kid at school, but he scraped through. With his life savings, he trained to be a plumber and passed all of his exams, all under his own steam. He then worked a lousy job for a year to save up for some tools and equipment to start his very own plumbing business. He finally bought an old van and filled it with old but decent power tools. He had the van stickered up in his own business name and number and parked it outside his house with PRIDE. He invited his parents out to show them his new van with his logo and name/number etc. He had transformed the van and made it look very professional, clean, and respectable. They said, ‘If you think you’re parking a van outside our house, you have another thing coming. We don’t want to be associated with that.’ He left and applied for the best room he could afford THAT day after a massive row with his parents about how they were never happy with anything he achieved. He now lives with me and we are very close friends. He’s even done the plumbing in my bathroom free of charge (I let him have a month’s free rent in return).”
“I Was Going Through A Punk Phase And My Mom…”
“I suppose this isn’t really terrible, but it hurt at the time. I went shopping with my mother, around age 13, during a punk phase (brightly dyed hair, sloppy eyeliner, the usual). She makes eye contact with a colleague from her current job and as the woman walks towards us, my mother grabbed the back of my head and shoved me into the center of a circular rack of clothes so her coworker wouldn’t see me.”