Ghost Leviathan posted:

A key thing with a lot of lovely parents is there's a point where they're just mad the kid isn't their cute little boy/girl anymore and resent them for growing up.

Clitch posted:

You're no longer a useful prop for the movie that is their life.

You think part of this phenomenon is a generation that made a successful child some kind of weird middle-class status symbol, and then hosed it up for their grandchildren?

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

i don't see much reason to suppose boomers' parents were meaningfully different in regards to viewing children as fancy dolls to break/throw away whenever they stop working right or you get bored of playing mommy, that poo poo goes back to Victorian times at least

Cerebral Mayhem posted:

This is a really good point to remember.

My mom wouldn't allow me or my siblings to fully close our bedroom doors, much less lock them. We would get yelled at if we did. She also snooped around whenever she felt like it.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

A key thing with a lot of lovely parents is there's a point where they're just mad the kid isn't their cute little boy/girl anymore and resent them for growing up.

GORDON posted:

THREE INCHES

Light Gun Man posted:

I know a person through other people etc that I am pretty sure has this as some sort of complex and it kicks in FAST, like they seems to stop caring about their multiple kids once they start talking, or something. Obviously I'm no psych and I don't know them that well but sometimes I just get that vibe of "I just want a baby forever" off of them. There are traumas that could be related to why but man that's a lovely thing to put your kids through.

SidneyIsTheKiller posted:

That person should really stick to pets, yeesh.

Light Gun Man posted:

They're bad at those too

Light Gun Man posted:

They're bad at those too

Light Gun Man posted:

I know a person through other people etc that I am pretty sure has this as some sort of complex and it kicks in FAST, like they seems to stop caring about their multiple kids once they start talking, or something. Obviously I'm no psych and I don't know them that well but sometimes I just get that vibe of "I just want a baby forever" off of them. There are traumas that could be related to why but man that's a lovely thing to put your kids through.

quote:

My daughter is a stranger to me. I know I raised her and she lived in my household for nineteen years. The thing is, as time goes on, the memories are fading. I have clear memories of my other children but not her. I interact with them on an almost daily basis. Without that continual connection I think the mind slowly lets go. I suppose I could pull out pictures and jumpstart my memory but it probably would only highlight the bad memories.

My guess is, as time goes on, it is the same for our estranged children.

quote:

I have watched some very interesting documentaries recently about children growing into adults and the effects of drugs use on them. The program provided good technical detail on how it effects the brain and resulting mental illness. There was one young man who was an honor student and athlete. He had taken some medication which ultimately changed his demeanor and ability to interact with other people. Dr. Phil has had programs showing brain scans and the effects of drugs. Literally turning accomplished young adults into terrifying individuals. It would only follow that the chemicals we eat everyday can have detrimental results varying per individual, changes to their personalities and whole outlook on life. I know my estranged daughter has tried some things. I don’t know how far she has gone but there is no doubt in my mind that it could easily be a factor.

quote:

I have told my 5 children, more then once, all about the day they were born. How happy and excited we were. Estranged children seem to forget it’s not just their birthday but also our day in bringing a new life into the world. As parents, we have equal stake in their birthday – the planning and preparations for the nursery, naming them, holding them close and cuddling them for the first time, those tiny feet and hands, talking to them, falling asleep with them in our arms. I remember all my children’s day of birth. I’m sure my estranged child doesn’t give me any thought on her birthday . I’m sure she doesn’t make any connection but she cannot take away that day of pure joy it was for me.

MasBrillante posted:

There Bias Two posted:

I think it has something to do with what the infant/toddler provides *them* versus actually having to attend to the physical and emotional needs of a more grown person. A toddler will idolize and shower their parent with attention.

Rockbear posted:

My parents started telling everyone who would listen in our small town that my brother is a "drug addict". My brother, who is 6'2" and built like a brick wall, smokes a couple of grams of weed per week that he buys legally at the local dispensary. Truly in the grips of soul-crushing drug addiction.

Dirt Road Junglist posted:

Anyway, when I moved out, she threatened to have her brother shoot me because I had my bandmate help me with heavy furniture, and after I was gone she kept my deposit and gloated about it on social media.

Every one of our mutual friends blocked her.

quote:

Dear Nillie,

Your post above is one that prompts my very post here. For a long time, I’ve read what others have written; I’ve read Sheri’s book. While specifics differ from writer to writer, we all share the bewilderment, pain and heartbreak that comes with estrangement from children/adults we thought we knew, or we did know once upon a time.

I haven’t posted because, like you, I’m not sure I qualify for membership in this awful club. Two of my sons are married. Both live hours away from me. Both are fathers to my grandchildren. For several years, our visiting was limited to a holiday visit or a summer one but phone calls and Skyping filled in the rest of the time. . The visits were like the ones you describe and only became even more tense and impossible (for me). In the last couple of years we haven’t seen one another, sons or grandchildren. Phone calls and computer visits w\the grandchildren tapered to a standstill.

But here’s the distressing part(for me). Both email, call on Mother’s Day,birthday and Christmas. While too many posters might not understand what I’m about to write, their contacts are distressing, invasive, and they open a wound that can’t heal over. The contacts (which I do not initiate) throw me into a pit of loss and are terribly unhealthy. They worry me about the emotional health of my sons because these behaviors don’t ‘fit’ with everything else.

Both sons have wives who do not communicate with me, despite every outreach I’ve made over years, whether in person or by mail. It helps me to consider that my sons are committed to their children and therefore their marriages. Long histories tell me that the wives are sewn at the hip to their families and, for only god knows the reason, I don’t fit in with their families or so they’ve decided. These are the decisions my sons have also made by being in their marriages.

So, I consider myself estranged. At the end of the day, not seeing my sons or grandchildren, is estrangement. Half estranged is estranged in my book. Your post suggests the same situation. By my definition, yes, you are also estranged. And I am so sad for you because I ‘get it.’

As Sheri so gently teaches, resolution is ultimately about us, not them. Keep reading, take what works, do what you must and be very patient with yourself. As you will read here, you’ll move ahead, trip back, but continue on your way to wellness. Baby steps, Nillie. None of us may ever be fully over this breach but we can be better and even best on most days! Take good care.

quote:

For quite some time, I’ve read posts about estrangement involving DILs or SILs and want to start a new thread about these relationships.

Adding a new ‘ingredient’ to any ‘recipe’ will either enhance the outcome or ruin the dish. We know this from years spent in our kitchens. When there’s something ‘wrong’ with whatever is added, too spicy, too cold, outdated, there can be little to do but start over again. Sometimes, the basic ingredients are unavailable and then the menu must be changed.

For whatever the histories, the reasons, the shortcomings or failures in the psyches or character of our estranged,married ‘children,’ adding a spouse to the mix can be, and often is, toxic. Yes, we can put the onus on the new family member, but our adult children bear responsibility too for pulling away or disappearing. Maybe the antidote to the poison in their households is withdrawal or alienation. Perhaps it’s a self-preserving decision. Maybe it’s the only way they can see to save their presence in their children’s lives. I’m offering thoughts, not excuses, none of which are healthy ones. Maybe it isn’t directly about us but we are collateral damage.

We see ourselves, as parents, as the ‘main course’ on an estrangement menu. I’m going to play devil’s advocate here and suggest we are side dishes. This point of view has been the only way I could come to terms, after 17 years, with the damages (bad meals?) in my life with two married sons and ultimately destructive DILs, the mothers of estranged GC.

How many of us had fractious relationships with difficult MILs? Mine was beyond difficult. BUT, she was never excluded, she was a mother/grandmother whose position was respected and it would never have occurred to me to isolate or dismiss her from our lives. If I could I’d write -never-in caps. I am not angling for sainthood here, just presenting a different point of view. The estrangement epidemic in our society tells me our ‘kids’ throw out the dishes and don’t/won’t prepare another one for the table. Why this prevails is attributable to so many ingredients in our world today and for experts to address, not me.

Of course, we Mothers in particular think (believe?) an estrangement is about us. It can be, of course, but more often than not in these marriages it can be about an ingredient in a child that has spoiled. When that’s mixed with another……we know the result.

Healing a wound that will never fully heal requires distance, perspective, new thinking and time. Too much time. It demands that we write new menus for our lives, never the ones we could make with our eyes closed. We will develop new and nurturing recipes, ones that feed us. We will always love those tried and true dishes but know we can’t eat them any longer and feel well.

Our EC who live with difficult, controlling, selfish, immature, neurotic, punishing or mentally ill spouses are living in a hell different than ours. Thinking about their reality, not ours, is a first step in taking care of ourselves, always while recognizing our own heartbreak, honoring our questions about who our child has become, considering the pressures we can’t really know about and acknowledging that we are powerless to change anyone other than ourselves. Only the two people in a marriage know it’s Truth despite the clues others can imagine.

Please don’t misread this as some intellectual exercise. Self-talk only goes so far. Even after 17 yrs of struggle, something in my heart’s ache can produce ‘food poisoning’ but now I can recover much more quickly.

We know we were good Mothers (and Fathers) who didn’t do anything to deserve what we wound up with ( or without). We must turn all the love, nurturing, support and caring we gave our children towards our own brokenness to mend the wound as best as we can. Being here is a beginning.

I hope this post hasn’t offended anyone but that it prompts some thoughtful cyber-dialogue having voices with other points of view.

MasBrillante posted:

Saint Drogo posted:

the odds that the people writing these whiny paragraphs say they can't stand victims and victimhood are 1:1.

crazy lady posted:

we all share the bewilderment

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

...are they imagining the one-year-old putting together and mailing this card on the DL without his parents' knowledge?

MasBrillante posted:

Going to manipulate people into calling me so they can’t CONTROL me with text message CRUMBS.

MasBrillante posted:

quote:

Hello to you all, I am new here and I’m thankful to have found this forum. I’m sure like a lot of you I was desperate for help when I googled what ever it was I googled, I don’t remember. But whatever it was it brought me here. Please forgive my punctuation when I share, as I am not that good at it. I have made a few attempts to try and introduce myself a couple of times but I have found it isn’t easy. I allow my feelings to get way ahead of myself and then realize I need to cut it shorter. At which point I start over. It is awfully hard. I’ll try to give just a brief description for now of what is going on with my ED. Actually…I don’t even know? I have been a mess all day because nobody has heard from her since Saturday when she talked to my sister. She had even sent me a text asking me to please tell her daughters (my granddaughters), that she loves them very much. This didn’t alarm me because we are all aware of the retaliation and hatefulness my ex-son-in-law is capable of even to my husband and I even though we supported him financially and emotionally during their divorce and custody. It matters nothing to him on how we’ve embraced him and supported him as well as our daughter through out their relationship, It seems even now as we tried to support our daughter this time around that somehow we always seem to get the kick me I’m stupid sign placed on our backs. And it hurts. Anyway, today I felt pretty close to a break down but here I am still kicking and trying to find out information about my daughter. I’m thinking of calling the police dept., just to do a welfare check on my granddaughters and I’m not sure what I’m going to do after that. Sitting around just waiting is driving me insane but I felt it might do me some good to share at least a little for now. I have so much I need to get out but it’s hard not to get carried away. Once I have a little more control over my emotions I may have a bit more control of my typing. HaHa

Thank you for listening

BadSamaritan posted:

As a ‘toxic DIL’ to one of these pieces of work, I’m more than happy to be a scapegoat for my partner’s carefully considered decision to never deal with his mother again. I’m willing to bet the partners of these estranged children are also mostly letting them decide how much contact they want with their crazy-rear end parents.

MasBrillante posted:

Ghost Leviathan posted:

The age varies, I've heard it can often happen around six or seven, or maybe more during puberty in my case, but can be a point where they just become another mouth to feed, or even considered 'grown up' now regardless of how much they've actually been prepared for it. I think a lot of parents just assume their kids have the same skills and autonomy that they did at the same age even if they've never had the opportunity to learn any of those things.

Was that post somewhere that went "The life story of everyone under 40; your parents getting mad at you for not knowing how to do things that they actively prevented you from learning."

Ebola Roulette posted:

This post was made on March 5, a Tuesday.

Don't mind me just harassing my daughter with welfare checks to punish her for not contacting me.

teen witch posted:

Did you take legal action on the whole threat and withholding deposit thing?

sweet geek swag posted:

She's afraid her daughter killed herself, as the last thing her daughter texted to her was to tell her kids she loves them. Now whether or not she has reason to believe that is anyones guess, but she seems legitimately worried.

quote:

This didn’t alarm me because we are all aware of the retaliation and hatefulness my ex-son-in-law is capable of even to my husband and I even though we supported him financially and emotionally during their divorce and custody.

quote:

Elpis started a thread where she talks about her daughters “out of body experience” and after 34 years of a wonderful relationship she suddenly had a “horrible unloved childhood”.

This struck me. Honestly it shook me. How many of us have been attacked and told how horrible our child’s life was with us yet we don’t remember any of this. We see that yes, we made mistakes but overall provided for them. How do they have such a skewed perception now as an adult yet as a child seemed happy and fulfilled?

Now, this is strictly my opinion and do not have sighted scientific backup for it but maybe common sense. When our children were children they had the developed mentality of the age they were. We dealt with them as we felt was “age appropriate”. I mean we lie to our kids every year when they are young telling them Santa is coming and use this lie to encourage good behavior. So technically we lied to our kids to manipulate them…… Right? But was that lie in anyway harmful to them? NO.

We also shield our children from the adult issues we face. No one is sitting their 5 year old down at the table with them as they stress over paying bills. No one sits the child in the room with them when they have a fight with their spouse. Well maybe some do but typically that is not the case.

When we are stressed about paying bills and the child runs in the room and wants us to look at their play dough creation for the 5th time and we are trying to save the house or not get the power shut off and we snap at them or act dismissive to their “creativity” and they have hurt feelings, later is this reason for them to say we were “dismissive of their needs”. The other 4 times we were very attentive to the play do creation but those times don’t register, it was when we gave them a “bad feeling” they remember.

So when they are adults, and they are looking at the past with “adult” perspective instead of the perspective of the age they were at the time the incident occurred, maybe they pull this crap out with now adult feelings instead of child perspective. They can’t see the reasoning behind the moment in time when we were shielding them from the realities of life and trying to allow them to be kids. Not exposing them to the harshness of the world yet. Letting them sit in the other room and play while we dealt with the harshness.

If they are feeling inadequate, if they are feeling that at 25 they haven’t achieved what today’s society says is “success’ or what their “friends” on social media have, well they have to blame someone for that. 18 years of their life at this point was spent under our “rule”. What we said was essentially law. We made the rules, we directed their ship. To them that is where the failure must of happened because the 7 years that they have been making decisions for themselves can’t possibly have anything to do with this perceived “failure”.

So they go looking for someone, anyone to blame for what they feel inadequate about. This is the mind of a child still at work. AM used the term “grown child” and I really like that much better. They have more experience and are much bigger but for some reason the maturity function didn’t kick in. But now they look back and say we lied and manipulated them (Santa) and we were dismissive of their feelings (Play dough) type crap when in reality the majority of the time we were honest with them (when it mattered) and we fawned over their every little project or good grade, giving encouragement and love. Those times didn’t “trigger” a feeling though. Why because that was the normal response. They only remember the “abnormal” feeling of hurt.

So when Elpis daughter whet for her “out of body experience” and she “got woke”, reality is she spent a few days talking to a master manipulator who took her money, made her feel good by insisting that nothing was her fault and told her to cut her family out. I am sure she was told she needed additional “sessions” to complete her “healing”. What she paid for was a sense of relief that it’s not her fault she feels like she does. She get’s to blame you.

I think this is the problem with a lot of kids today (not all there are PD disorders as well), nothing is their fault. They can’t possibly be the reason their lives are screwed up. You had to have done something to them as a child to make them like this. To make them so unhappy. To make them feel this way……. When in reality most people feel this way in your 20’s and sometimes into your 30’s depending on the choices you made the decade before. None of us know what we are doing as adults when we first leave home.
Wisdom comes with time. The problem today is, in my honest opinion, social media. Want to feel like poop look at facebook and see how great everyone else’s lives are (this of course is not true or reality in most cases).

quote:

I mean we lie to our kids every year when they are young telling them Santa is coming and use this lie to encourage good behavior. So technically we lied to our kids to manipulate them…… Right? But was that lie in anyway harmful to them? NO.

MasBrillante posted:

Ghost Leviathan posted:

The age varies, I've heard it can often happen around six or seven, or maybe more during puberty in my case, but can be a point where they just become another mouth to feed, or even considered 'grown up' now regardless of how much they've actually been prepared for it. I think a lot of parents just assume their kids have the same skills and autonomy that they did at the same age even if they've never had the opportunity to learn any of those things.

Was that post somewhere that went "The life story of everyone under 40; your parents getting mad at you for not knowing how to do things that they actively prevented you from learning."