not to like my mother?

I don't know how old your children are, Charlotta, but mine left home when they were 18 as well, and have only lived at home for short periods since.

However, we are still really close, emotionally, if not geographically, and my elder daughter can't wait for us to move closer to her.

I think that the fewer demands one makes on one's children the better, because they will feel better about meeting the few that are left. The reality is that you only get from your children what they are prepared to give - the only difference is whether they give it willingly or begrudgingly.

Incidentally, I am sorry you lost your mother when you were still young, but in a way, it is unfortunate if a parent is still around when you are old yourself.

Looking after grandchildren can be tiring when you get older, but they usually have parents to assume the major responsibility. Whilst looking after an old person is also tiring, but they never go away, and there is no-one else to take the responsibility.

Also, it struck me the other day that I no longer have a mother - she has long since stopped acting like a mother - now she is more like the child, only, unlike a real child, she will get "younger" not older!

Someone said that only after the death of the mother does a daughter really feel free. In my case my mother died when I was 26 and the first thing I did was to have a gas fire put in the house. Mum liked the old open fire. I remember that feeling of never more having to wonder what she would say or feel about anything I did. Six months later, real grieving set in. My new found freedom had stalled and I missed having someone who cared what I did if only to criticise it.

I became a mother later and have always tried to give my children the feeling that they should do what they feel is right, saw that they left home from 18 + and now wonder if I have kept myself too distant from them. Any how they seem to like it that way.
I don't think it is unreasonable to dislike your mother. Some parents are awful. You see that a lot as a teacher.

Do ignore your mother Barrow and continue to be of support to your husband. Sending best wishes and thoughts from me too.

We all know that we become more selfish as we age but I think some of the mothers mentioned here sure take the biscuit. It makes me realise that I was quite lucky with mine and the same goes for my mother in law I suppose!

Sending best wishes to you and your husband Barrow

All good wishes. I am really sorry that you have so much to worry about. Your mother doesn't deserve you.

Many thanks for all your kind thoughts and wishes.

My brother knows that I no longer let my mothers comments get to me and in better times we even laugh about them!

My husband is continuing to confound the doctors by getting a little stronger every day. When he was in hospital the doctors told me they had never known anyone survive an attack to their system that he suffered. They told me a week ago that he could go at any time. They then changed it to "it won't be long".

This morning he announced the bed the hospital had provided was uncomfortable and he was going upstairs to our bed. He climbed the stairs slowly with me behind him terrified he was going to fall. He is now happily dozing in the middle of the bed!! I have always known I was married to a special man but even I am finding his attitude to his illness truly amazing.

Oh Barrow of course your time and energy must be with your husband now. If your mother doesn't like it she can lump it!
There really should be a 'bunch of flowers' icon on here for situations like this, big hugs in lieu.

My thoughts are with you Barrow.

In short, don't let her bully you.

Barrow, ignore your mother, please! You have more important things to do than pander to her selfishness. If she were my mother and she pestered me by email at this point, I'd delete her messages without reading them. I would also tell my brother that I don't want to hear any more of her snide remarks.

Heartfelt good wishes for you and your husband.

Barrow, this must be so very hard for you at the moment - regardless of thoughlessness/selfishness from your mother. Thinking about you.

Just an update on my Mothers selfishness - my husband has terminal cancer, I have just spent the last week in hospital with him, never leaving his side as the Doctors thought he could go at any time. He confounded them all by surviving and I now have him at home, albeit much weaker and I think not for long. I regularly email my brother with updates so my Mother is fully aware of all this. This morning I had an email from my brother saying that Mum is complaining because I haven't written to her. When he pointed out to her that I had a lot on my plate at the moment her reply was "well how long does it take to write a letter".

I am an only child, unfortunately, so I can expect no help there, but I have also told my daughters to tell me if I ever get like my mother.

Jangran, my mother also fell out with her sister so when my aunt helped me to make the dress I got married in back in the seventies, mother complained that she was 'surprised' I hadn't asked her instead. Actually, I didn't ask my aunt to help, I just asked if I could use her sewing machine while I was visiting her. She showed an interest and was able to advise me about some little details because she was a sewer herself. My mother, although she could and did sew a bit, always hated it. Nuff said! Mothers like that have a way of twisting things.

I won't be going the extra mile and I've already told all my four siblings not to expect it. As it happens, three of them are in a better position, financially, geographically or with regard to other family commitments, to help out more easily if and when it is needed. She likes them better too, and has different expectatiions of them (I'm the oldest girl), but we all find her difficult.

I've told my daughters to tell me if I ever get like her.

Thanks, all. Baggy is right - my mother is not going to change. The point is managing to accept that. Mother also has a repertoire of "jokes", Grossi, which I too, it seems, am foolish to take seriously. A variation on that is that I should always understand what she means, no matter what she says, whilst at the same time everything I say she is entitled to take literally.

But the difficulty is, I know she is not, and never has been, in my league when it came to argument. I feel guilty at trying to argue rationally with her because I know she can never win an argument against me, so I can't really blame her for resorting to unfair tactics.

Harrigran - many thanks. Oddly enough, I too had an aunt to whom I was very close and whom I like to think I supported in her last years, although I was a very young mother at the time, and trying to come to terms with that. My mother hated that aunt (her sister-in-law) and, despite the fact that my aunt died almost forty years ago, often does recall, with great bitterness, every presumed slight, and every instance when I (apparently, I was unaware of it at the time) favoured my aunt.

I am not going the extra mile either, Harrigran. It is a relief to know that at least one person was in the same situation. I hope you don't feel guilty.

Makes very sad reading. Mothers should love us and we should love them... in an ideal world. It was a different generation and they were not as demonstrative as we are.
I once overheard my mother talking to someone at my aunt's funeral, they had asked which woman was her daughter and she pointed at me and said "her but you wouldn't think so". I was only guity of having supported my childless aunt, in the last year of her life, when she was seriously ill. I was named after this aunt and we were very close but my mother did not like it. My mother also did not speak to her sisters for 10 years because of a misunderstanding at her mother's funeral. I could never treat my family like that and bend over backwards not to upset anyone.
In the last years of my mother's life I did what I had to, I would like to say I went the extra mile but it would be untrue.

Your mother's tactics sound a lot like my mother's Jangran.

She was sent to boarding school at the age of five, so "of course, she didn't know how to be a good mother".

She also pretends that all the horrible things she says are said "with a twinkle in her eye", implying that only a stupid person (like me) would find them hurtful.

Self-centred emotional blackmail, jangran. She isn't going to change anything.

The point, unfortunately, is that my mother is 85. She does not suffer from dementia, but she has never been a person to empathise with others.

I have tried to tell her how I feel, but she has a number of tactics to respond to that one:

a. She insists that she does love me - how could I think otherwise? I am a terrible daughter even to think of such things.
b. She accuses herself of being a terrible mother. Well, she wasn't terrible, just not very good, so I am therefore sidetracked into telling her she wasn't that bad, and the discussion then turns towards her feelings again. Anyway, wouldn't it be awful to think (I think when she uses that tactic), at an age when it is far too late, that you were an awful parent?
c. She gets angry, and scolds me for my behaviour when she is so old and ill.
d. (worst of all) she gets distressed and says she doesn't like it when I get "angry" with her - I am upsetting her, and it isn't fair at her age when she has so much troubling her. I feel guilty.

Whichever tactic she adopts (sometimes she uses a mixture), it always ends up with her feelings being considered and discussed, not mine. So far as I can recollect, it has always been like that.

And I end up feeling like the adult that must master her feelings, whilst my mother becomes the child whose feelings must be considered. And after all, I do have a good life, whilst my mother does not, and I should be able to put up with the hassle.

An interesting question, by the way, when is an adult no longer an adult? And can we consider our aged relatives still to be adults, especially when they behave like children?

Never underestimate the power of the weak against the strong!

Jangran and Barrow its interesting isn't it that we all have the need to be loved by our parents. My 88 year old mother had awful parents, to this day it still bothers her. It was very obvious to all of us, even cousins that my mother was totally left out and treated badly in her family. I only liked my paternal grandfather, the others were mean and nasty, especially my maternal grandmother. My grandmother lost her own mother at 16 years of age, I wonder if that affected her, she turned out to be a lousy mother to my mother and a horrible grandmother to me and my younger siblings. Yet she had other children especially her son that could do no wrong. She even left my grandfather for awhile and took her oldest child with her, her son. She left her daughters, barely more than babies behind.
Jangran I hope that you stick up for yourself and say how you feel to your mother. Don't feel obliged to be walked on. At least you have daughters that you have a good relationship with, it makes it all worthwhile.

Barrow, if I were you, I'd have given up long ago! And I wouldn't feel guilty about it. Good grief!

My mother complained that I didn't write to her often enough when I was working in Thailand. I told her that her sister, my aunt, had replied to the letters I did write so, naturally, I then wrote to her again. Correspondence is two-way.

If my mother had been so rude as to phone me at unreasonable times "just to chat", I would have first asked her not to and then, if she persisted, unplugged the phone or changed my number.

Nobody has to put up with that level of rudeness from another adult.

My Mother lives in Australia and still manages to nag me long distance. I gave up trying to please here several years ago as it was just making me ill. She would insist I ring her every week, one day I was talking to her and it was obvious she had put the phone down - my Brother (who she lived with and who is her blue eyed boy - just as well I like him!!) picked up the phone and when I asked what had happened he said she had decided to put the phone down whilst she unwrapped a sweet! Other times she would just not say anything no matter how hard I tried to make conversation. Another of her tricks was to ring me at 6.00 a.m. on a Sunday morning (I had a full time very stressful job at the time) and when I remonstrated with her she just said "I'm up so why shouldn't you be" conveniently forgetting that when it is early morning here it is early evening in Australia!

I finally put a stop to all that when I told her I wasn't going to ring her just to hear her breathing at me.

She also insisted on getting a letter every week - I now write once a month. Am I being mean? No I don't think so. She has never once praised me and once when I won a prize at school I wanted to show it to a relative who had called to visit only for her to say she had given it away to the girl next door! I must have been about 9 at the time.

Thanks, absentgrana. What you say is quite true, but as you say, we cannot control our feelings. I do feel that I have a responsibility of care towards my mother, but I should feel better if I thought she appreciated me!

I should also feel happier if mother did not make me feel like an outcast in my own family - that is, by constantly letting it show how much more she cares about my husband and my daughters.

As to not feeling responsibility towards her - that is not an option. Partly because she expects it; partly because society expects it and partly because I need to feel that I am acting at least "properly".

I agree that I want my mother, even now, to love and appreciate me, and that it is not going to happen. I used to feel the same about my father, and when he died I remember thinking that now he never would, so in a way I tried to work harder with my mother. But it made no difference, and I suppose that some time in the not so distant future, it will be too late with her as well.

Don't get me wrong, though. My daughters are quite different, and we do have a great relationship.

How we feel about people – mothers or anyone – is pretty much beyond our control. Emotion is something that just wells up, be it love or hate, liking or disliking. How we choose to behave is very much under our control and that is true even – or perhaps, especially – for the daughters of badly behaved mothers. If you feel that you have a responsibility of care towards an elderly mother you don't love and who doesn't seem to love you, that's fine and your choice. Bear in mind, though, that you cannot then complain about her ingratitude because you knew about that before you started. If you don't feel that you have that responsibility because of a lack of mutual love, then there is no reason to feel guilty. I think the root of the unhappiness is that everyone wants to be loved by their mum and it's probably particularly hard for those who have been loving mothers themselves to feel that, even now, their own mothers don't love, like or appreciate them.

Yes, I can relate to this thread too.

My mother, now aged 85, is difficult.

She has numerous health problems, none of them life-threatening, but she has been complaining about them for the last forty years!

That is basically all she talks about, except when she decides to stick the knife into one of her existing acquaintances or dead relations (mainly in-laws).

I understood that she didn't have a particularly great life, but she seems to resent the fact that I do. She doesn't criticise me openly, but it always seems to be there underneath. She likes my husband, adores my children, but simply does not like me.

To make it worse, she will never admit that - in fact, she will never admit anything that would make her look less than perfect - she has always been like that.

Of course, now I am the primary carer - I see her at least twice a week; my daughters hardly ever, and they will not visit her at all unless I am there. But they are excused on the grounds that they live further away. They never 'phone her either, and I don't blame them. I think that maybe their time with elderly parents will come, and in the meantime, they should enjoy their own families. But still, mother has the best granddaughters in the world, according to her.

When I was small, she always worked, and my grandmother (hardly a cuddly type!) looked after me. Mother told me that they did not have any more children because my grandmother said she would not look after them. So I am an only child. I wish I had a sibling to take some of the responsibility/blame or whatever.

To cap it all, we seem to have virtually nothing in common. I have always been interested in the world outside; local and national politics and so on. My mother has never been interested in anything outside her own narrow circle and "what the neighbours think". That meant that she hardly ever supported me when I was growing up and getting myself into trouble from time to time.

Yet now, I am supposed to be paying her back for all the care I had from her, and she frequently compares me to her friends' children, who all take far more care and pay far more attention to their mothers than I do - apparently.

I have a lovely life apart from this, but the situation does get me down sometimes, to the extent of needing anti-depressants to recover.