does your mother really annoy you

What a good thing you found your birth mother before it was too late Henetha .Sorry you are 'haunted ' by your history, but I imagine most teenagers would have difficulty dealing with the discovery of their true circumstances , particularly if they were afraid of their adoptive parent.

Thank you Atqui. It was horrendous at the time, but I now realise that my history is far from unique and others have suffered much worse than me. But I can never quite escape from the guilt and the pain....

Since I have become an annoying mother myself I have a certain amount of sympathy for them. I only have one child, a daughter. She only has one child, a daughter. My grand-daughter (14) is my daughter's whole life. My daughter was my whole life. I think mothers of grown up children can feel lost and abandoned when their children see them as a 'duty'. This can manifest itself in the 'you never bother with me/us' attitude but they are hurt. They are still our children whatever their age, the bond is still the same but becomes more and more one-sided.

I think it's because my (and my sisters') relationship with my mother is so awkward that it has helped us to have far better relationships with our own children. I know that many people say that children inherit their parenting skills from their parents, but we had wonderful grandparents and aunts and saw that our mother was the odd one out. She felt trapped by us. It's only now that she's older that she has mellowed somewhat. The cynic in me thinks that it's because she knows that she will need our help before too long. Her means of annoying us come from her trying to rewrite history. She will say 'I wasn't such a bad mother, was I?' And we will say 'Yes!'. Then she will embark on a totally fictitious list of things she did, for the benefit of our stepfather.

The other thing that gets to all of us is that our presents are never quite right. We do love her in our own way, we accept her (mostly) for who she is, but she is never satisfied. She even makes notes about our gifts so that we don't get it wrong next time. I'm just grateful that people remember me. I have started to send her selections, so that at least one gift should please her. Then if she says 'Thank you for the book' I know that she didn't like the chocolates and the scarf!

Oh dear Jane she does sound a very difficult woman

My mother was an out and out snob. When she eventually went into a care home she wouldn't associate with others as they ' weren't her kind' she even refused to speak to the local GP's parents who were in the same home as they were Indian.
She never forgave my father for dying at age 54 as it meant she was no longer 'the doctors wife'
She was an extremely selfish and demanding woman who never gave a penny away or left a tip for a waitress.

On the other side of the coin I feel abandoned by my daughter...she rarely visits or keeps in touch ....if i ring she cuts me short on the phone saying she's busy...I feel her family are so wrapped up in their own lives they haven't got time for me and this has caused a serious rift and there doesn't seem to be a relationship anymore...on facebook I see the family posts on get togethers etc and im never included it makes me feel redundant as a mother and a grandmother now my grandchildren are adults! Thank god for my friends!!!

Jenty - I think there are a lot of mums in that same boat.

My Mum is called 'Duchess' in her home Galen and the staff bob a curtsey to her as they enter her room. My Mum would always leave a tip as 'they work so hard for so little!'

I think the one thing I have learnt from my Mum is to be unlike her!

Of course Mum irritates me at times, I am human. No doubt I irritate my two offspring as well, but hey ho. I will be irritated today as she has an appointment at the eye clinic at 5.30pm and we will have the usual discussion as to whether the wheel chair is necessary. She can walk perhaps 100 yds on a good day and certainly not up hill or stairs. The clinic is miles away through the hospital corridors. So she will resist the wheel chair and I will tut and moan until she gives in!! Then she keeps saying oh dear I am such a nuisance etc etc. and I get more and more tutty!!

My mum was also a terrible snob. She went into ecstasies when she (wrongly) thought that our neighbour was related to an earl! And the relative she boasted about was the aunt who married a lord and who rarely had much to do with her own family.

When my mother-in-law and father-in-law were courting and first married, she used to make him walk behind her! They had absolutely nothing, they used to lodge in the back room of a relative's house for quite a number of years after they were married. Not sure where she got her ideas from

'Ladies first' I think. Many men women of that generation seemed to translate it as always being at the front.

I get on really well with my own daughter, but reading this, I wonder if it will last. She often says that she wishes that we could live closer, but maybe it's better if seeing us is a treat rather than a chore. I don't need to see even my best friend once a week, let alone anyone else.

My grandmother complained to me once that she didn't see anyone more often. I asked her how often reasonable visits would be, to her. She said once a month. I then reminded her that I was working full-time, we lived two hours away, I had another grandmother, I had a father in one town, a mother in another, three sisters in yet others, a mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law all of whom expected the same amounts of visits as everyone else. Not to mention lots of good friends and a social life. With the best will in the world I couldn't have managed more than one visit to her every three months, which was what she was getting.

Did she understand Janerowena?

I think jenty and katyk speak for "the other side of the coin" which we can all empathise with- namely feeling squeezed out and marginalised from our DDs ' lives and when we think back - were we guilty of the same thing? I think this is why maisiegreen 's post hit a nerve. It seems a mother's place is always in the wrong and I fully accept that many of you have tried desperately to please difficult mothers or have suffered at their hands. But what was described just sounded like a somewhat needy old lady feeling starved of affection. And why is it (nearly) always mothers who get theflak?

I see. Yes, I have occasionally felt squeezed out, but have to accept that DD's MiL lives nearer and does a hell of a lot for her, for which I am extremely grateful. I don't think I ever squeezed my mother out - she was more likely to squeeze us out. We would find out that she had visited our towns and hadn't bothered to contact us.

We all expect more of our mothers, don't we. We forget that they have had troubles and feelings of their own. Once we were the centre of their lives (or not) and then all of a sudden they want paying back with time and attention that we find it hard to provide.

When DD left home at 21, she hugged me and said she loved me so much, I would always have a home with her once she had made her fortune and she hoped that one day we would be able to live together again and when I was a little old lady she would look after me. I thanked her for the thought and said I hoped she would never have to look after me.

Two years later and pregnant she moved in with her MiL while they waited for their home together. I thought they got on extremely well when I visited, but a year later she told me that much as she loved me, she was never ever going to share her home with another woman again, no matter how nice she was, because the strain of biting her tongue in case she said something wrong was just too much! MiL on the other hand told me how much she missed DD! So maybe MiL and I shall just have to live together.

My mother's not alive anymore and I must admit to guiltily feeling relieved when she died. Not that I didn't love her, I did hugely, but she was a master of emotional blackmail and I never felt that I did what she expected either with my life or with things like presents, visits etc.
Now that I'm older I can see that she was driven by insecurity and loneliness and was probably depressed a lot of the time. She probably needed counselling but if it had been available, she probably wouldn't have known how to access or accept it anyway.
Having children of my own, I can see how it's possible to feel that you have given them more of your time, patience and love than they could ever imagine and to feel resentful if they don't, in some sense, repay that in kind. Young people these days have so many advantages and possibilities (I know they also have debts and worries, but so did we!) and I can see now how the parental generation might have also felt hard done by having survived WWII and having to live through a bleak 1950s.
However, on a one-to-one basis, I wonder if it's worth looking at a few books on techniques of assertiveness, the books by Anne Dickson used to be beacons. I wouldn't for a moment pretend that it's ever easy to deal with emotional blackmail but a few hints and tips about how to be clear where you stand and kindly but firmly maintaining that stance might make you feel better.
That said, I think I was a coward and simply avoided when I could and I'd probably do that now if she was alive. You have my sympathy.

annie Anne Dickson's book 'A Woman in Your Own Right' changed my life and I made sure my DDs read it too.

Don't you think that it's inevitable that we all love our own children more than they love us? I'm not saying that they don't, but when they become parents themselves, then all that love and cherishing that they have received gets passed down to the next generation. If we've done our job well, then that is a validation of how we were as parents and I suppose we can look at that and place all those generational relationships into context.

I find that a very comforting thought MiceElf. I suppose it's a version of 'you can't put an old head on young shoulders'. How often do we hear people lamenting that they wish they'd been kinder and more understanding of their parents and/or that they'd asked them more about their lives because once their dead it's too late!

MiceElf - that's a nice way of putting it.

miceElf Yes that is exactly what I think and is right that it is so. We must look after the next generation, our children are precious and so it goes generation after generation. That is not to say that we don't owe our parents our love, respect and loyalty, albeit somewhat difficult at times. I have found it particularly difficult with my late father who didn't seem to really like me, - all his devotion was centred on my sister. But we survived it - sort of!!!

I remember my mother moaning about me and her saying she was going to send me to boarding school because I was a nuisance. I never knew what I had done to annoy her because I was such a shy little thing. I remember being smacked a lot by my mother but not what I did to deserve it.
When I was older mother turned into Hyacinth Bucket and enjoyed throwing soirees so I was allowed to leave the house so I wasn't cluttering up the place.

Harri

Harri