Your Parents

Sassycakes

Sassycakes

SF VIP
Location
Pennsylvania
I was wondering about how your parents treated you. In my dad's eyes, I was PERFECT. In my Mom's eyes, I was awful. when I was born she had already had my brother and sister and didn't want to have any more children. Since there was an 11yr age gap between my brother and my sister my Dad wanted to have another child so my sister would have someone near her age. So against my Mom's wishes, she got pregnant with me. I was never my Mom's favorite She thought I was ugly and my sister was BEAUTIFUL.(my sister is Beautiful
In my eyes my Dad was perfect and without his love for me, I wouldn't have been here.th2576_1030944178859_1383008485_300_zps6shszjei.JPG
 

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Interesting. My nearest sibling was 8 years older than me and I've often wondered if I was unintended. I 'lived on a different planet' to my parents and was hit frequently by both of them. Trying to please them never seemed to work, so I gave up trying.
I've done my best to not be like them, but in the words of Philip Larkin ...

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
 
I had a sister that was 4 years my senior, I lost her a few years ago. I also had a younger brother, but he died at birth. My mom and dad have both been dead for a while. They were married until my dad died and my mom never remarried.

I was very close to both my dad and mom. Mom was close to me throughout my life. Dad was pretty tough on me until I was married. He was the disciplinarian of our family, although I do recall my mom giving me a good whipping. Neither one of them spanked us very often and only when it was well deserved. Dad was a good teacher and he worked at teaching me things he thought I should know. Mom focused on helping me with school subjects, mostly teaching me to study and learn. She also taught me to cook and sew, as she did not want me to get married early because I did not know how to cook or sew...my wife appreciates that very much now...we got married very young!

I became much closer to my dad after I was married. I miss them both every day. They prepared me well for life, being married, and raising kids...

I hope I have passed that on to my three kids...so far so good!
 
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Sassycakes said:
I was wondering about how your parents treated you. In my dad's eyes, I was PERFECT. In my Mom's eyes, I was awful. when I was born she had already had my brother and sister and didn't want to have any more children. Since there was an 11yr age gap between my brother and my sister my Dad wanted to have another child so my sister would have someone near her age. So against my Mom's wishes, she got pregnant with me. I was never my Mom's favorite She thought I was ugly and my sister was BEAUTIFUL.(my sister is Beautiful
In my eyes my Dad was perfect and without his love for me, I wouldn't have been here.View attachment 295752
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I feel for you. My mother endured a similar childhood to yours the last of four children borne by woman who wanted no more after third was a boy, yet she named Mom after herself. In my maternal grandma's eyes that boy could do no wrong, nor was he asked to do chores from age 3 as all his sisters were, yet he never let my Mom forget she'd been unwanted.

As most can probably imagine, Mom grew up with a host of issues that complicated my childhood, teens and young adulthood.
 
I've talked about my parents before on threads where their nature/behaviors were relevant. But their parental styles and influence in brief, coincidently clear in mind because my son and i were talking about them yesterday as i drove him and grandson to Albuquerque bus station so they could head home.

Mom: Could be great fun but also could be a terror. From earliest memories i was aware of her neediness (for approval, love, validation) later realized it was because nothing she (or her sisters) did was ever good enough for their mother, tho they all were intelligent and had various talents. Mom had beautiful singing voice, skillful seamtress & cook, meticulous housekeeper. (She & my aunts were physically punished if they missed a single spot.) No wonder she always had to have a man at center of her life to feel 'ok'.

But her disciplining of my sisters and me was so inconsistent from one moment to the next. Totally dependent on her mood, what she laughed at one day, she might hit (usually spankings) you for the next. It was, however, so fairly distributed between the 4 of us i never suspected my siblings were her step children, till one of them said i wasn't their 'real' sister.

Dad on the other hand had set rules with well defined punishments and actually told us we could choose to break a rule, but he wouldn't tolerate complaints about the consequences. He had his own issues, long story there, But in general he was calm with us even when We erred. Yelled at eldest sister a few times. But she was a rebellious teen and as strong willed as him.
 
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Capt Lightning said:
Interesting. My nearest sibling was 8 years older than me and I've often wondered if I was unintended. I 'lived on a different planet' to my parents and was hit frequently by both of them. Trying to please them never seemed to work, so I gave up trying.
I've done my best to not be like them, but in the words of Philip Larkin ...

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
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I love that, Capt. I'm stealing that excerpt from Mr. Larkin's poem for my quotes journal. I wasn't aware of his work; thanks for introducing me to it! :)
 
I'm pretty sure I was unintended (and quite possibly unwanted); I was child #3 and child #2 (my sister) made it pretty clear I was unwanted, by her anyway. I'm an atheist (sometimes agnostic; depends on the mood I'm in) but when people who are religious or spiritual talk about how they can just feel god's (or whomever's) presence, I can remember a pervasive feeling most of my life of an omnipresent anger in the universe (my corner of it anyway). Looking back now, I think it was Sis's and my dad's ever-present anger since both were/are rageaholics and I also think some of it might be my own anger and being mistakenly brought into all that. Anyway, that anger just feels like it's everywhere all the time and nothing I've ever tried (prayer way back in the day included) has ever worked.
 
I had good parents. Were they perfect? No, nobody is.....but they were very good at being parents. There wasn't a lot of money but there was a lot of love and fun. We were provided everything we needed and a lot of what we wanted. My friends all wanted to live at our house. A lot of our friends did.

If there is a heaven, they're there still watching out for us.
 
I was the oldest, and had a great relationship with my dad til I was about 12, and mom dumped him. At that point, I became pretty much invisible except as built in babysitter and dishwasher. So much so, than the family once left on a 3 day vacation never realizing I had been left at home. The day I graduated high school I packed up and left home. I was 17 at the time.
 
I am the youngest of 6 from a couple marriages... but I was raised mostly as an only child. When I was little my 12 year old sister was my surrogate mother, then she was put in "the system" and I was alone. One brother was gone before I was born (I only met him once when he shipped out for Vietnam - I was 8) and the other half-siblings were with their mother in a different state. I didn't even know they existed til I was 16, so I really started out with just a sister and me. My mother wanted me when she was sober, and didn't when she was drunk - she was almost always drunk. She wanted to party and I was in her way. My father bailed when I was tiny and my step father was stuck in that bad place of, "Why don't you discipline him - leave my kid alone!" That marriage didn't last too long. From my youngest memories I was passed around from foster home to foster home, to relatives that didn't think they should have to deal, back to foster home - with a few stints at "home" with mom. She always told me I was the most important thing in her life. I was moved to the Texas part of the family at 16, and was passed around from brother to sister. Everybody told me they loved me - but nobody wanted me around. So I'm not sure what it's like to have real parents. I have a fantasy.
 
I am, for all purposes, an only child. When I was 5, my parents had another baby, but he only lived a few days. This was in 1957 and he had pyloric stenosis (Google that if you want to know) - today doctors probably could have saved him. I think it traumatized my parents because they never had anymore children and they became over-protective of me to the point they didn't allow me to play with other kids. I had to come right home from school and if played outside, my mom stood in a window and watched. Of course, that made me appear stuck-up to the other children and was bullied. My parents always made decisions for me. Then suddenly my mom was a widow and she became even more protective, then she passed, leaving an adult in age but a child in social skills.
All I can say is that my folks were dutiful, but seldom given to signs of overt affection.
 
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Dad was kind and loving but absent. Always working. Mom was borderline abusive. She didn't want me and didn't like me and this was made clear every day. Staying alive to reach teenage saved me. I was big enough to take of myself and independent with tons of friends and lots of options which made a huge difference in the dynamics of my relationship with my parents.
 
My mom and dad were okay. I had an older brother who I always seemed like I had to live up to his standards. He was always on the honor roll in school. Even though I got good grades my grades didn't match up to his. He became a successful Engineer and has a successful marriage, while myself although I loved my teaching job as as 1st grade teacher, it never matched up to what my brother did. My marriage also failed after a few years.

My brother was also the one that never seemed to get into trouble. Me on the other hand not so much. As a teen I was a girl who loved to party. That didn't help my grades much either.

My parents loved me and they would never say it, but their "Golden Child" was my older brother. My older brother even admits it.
 
@feywon I was sad to read your post and I wonder (not that it would matter) if your mother was a borderline personality disorder or at least some pretty heavy traits. The fear of abandonment, neediness, control and those labile moods are all signs. My mother could flip in a second over nothing.
 
Retired Monica said:
My mom and dad were okay. I had an older brother who I always seemed like I had to live up to his standards. He was always on the honor roll in school. Even though I got good grades my grades didn't match up to his. He became a successful Engineer and has a successful marriage, while myself although I loved my teaching job as as 1st grade teacher, it never matched up to what my brother did. My marriage also failed after a few years.

My brother was also the one that never seemed to get into trouble. Me on the other hand not so much. As a teen I was a girl who loved to party. That didn't help my grades much either.

My parents loved me and they would never say it, but their "Golden Child" was my older brother. My older brother even admits it.
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In all honesty I think every family has a golden child, but most would not admit it...

My sister 3 years younger was that child in the eyes of my abusive father .. not because she was a good child.. not because she was clever.. but because she looked just like him.. simply that, and because she did, she never got smacked, or beaten, despite the fact she was the meanest kid in town.. think Nellie Olsen morphing into Kathy Bates character Annie Wilkes.... she would invent things to tell my father , so she could watch me or my brother get a beating...
 
I was 7 before my first sibling, a boy, was born, 13 when my sister came along and 16 when my baby brother made his debut. Being an only child for 7 years certainly cramped my style when my 1st brother was born. My mother treated him like the Second Coming and attempted to make a slave out of me. Luckily, I was Daddy's Girl, so I was spared some of the nonsense. As I grew older, I handled those clashes myself and became the proverbial black sheep of the family. I never really got to know the younger ones, as we only saw one another on family holidays. Continues to this day, which is fine by me.
 
Remy said:
@feywon I was sad to read your post and I wonder (not that it would matter) if your mother was a borderline personality disorder or at least some pretty heavy traits. The fear of abandonment, neediness, control and those labile moods are all signs. My mother could flip in a second over nothing.
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Possibly, but what i know of her childhood explains a a lot of it for me. After my parents split up Mom and i went NJ where most of extended family from both sides lived. My maternal g'ma whom i'd only had brief contact with twice before that was living in TX with maternal uncle but i had fairly close contact with my two maternal aunts, tho more with the eldest sister. So i heard i got to hear stories about from my aunts' perspective not just Mom's.
 
I was an only child. After my parents had me, there would be no more. My mom couldn’t have another. They both died when I was 9. Being an only child has it good points and bad points. I don’t need to go into all that again.

I was spoiled, but when I did wrong, I was punished, but never whipped or given the belt like some of my friends. Sometimes, I was treated to good. On weekends, my dad always had something for him and I to do together.
 
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