Posted by HArley on March 30, 2001 at 20:54:23:
In Reply to: Parents posted by Elizabeth on March 29, 2001 at 00:54:33:
> Everyone likes to complain about (or occasionally praise) their parents. What types were your parents and what did they do right or wrong as a result? (Don't forget to include your type!)
My mother is 1w2, I am 8w7, my father is a 1.
I've spent my whle life listening to my parents talking to me through gritted teeth - "Why can't you just behave? Why can't you just be nice? Why can't you just be normal?"
They are simple, suburban people and they are proud of it. Their life would feel like death to me. My mother is so unhappy in her life and yet constantly tries to force me to be more like her. I am sure she married and had children for no better reason than, "That's what people do, dear!" In fact she even took the step of adopting when she found she couldn't have children. She has never recovered from not being "normal" enough to have children of her own. She has no philosophy of parenting whatsoever.
My father worked for a large multinational all his working life and swallowed every cup of sick they handed him. My mother stands in the background and plays the violin. He spends his life working in the garden or watching TV and doesn't seem to be connected with his life in any way.
He is really passive but has a nasty streak a mile wide when he is forced to be social (like, at the dinner table, for instance), and loves to cause family arguments as his way of controlling communication (he is deaf, so this is the only way he can be the alpha male). Raises really nasty, hurtful topics and then laughs when p[eople storm off and start slamming doors. Then accuses us all of being overly dramatic.
They are only together because they are incapable of coming up with a better idea.
We moved around all the time when we were kids, and my mother was so busy dealing with her own torment and anger that she did nothing to help her kids deal with the trauma of being uprooted every two years.
She has no respect for privacy and takes a perverted overinterest in my brother's and my sex lives (not together, you understand!!!!). I know for a fact hers is shit. But hey, she dated him for 8 years before they got married, but never let him touch her downstairs because she was "good". And again she tells me I should be more like her.
They hid within their suburban home and kept the shutters down all their lives and know fuck all about life on the outside. I can't turn to them for sensible advice because they don't even understand what I do for a living. Any problems I have, my mother starts trying to find someone to blame. Any success I have, my father launches into a lecture about how "Now is not the time to rest on your laurels, now is the time to set your next goal."
I was sent to my mother's old school in a major attempt to make me grow up to be just like her. I rebelled - I thought the nuns had taken an easy way out of life. Imagine living in a convent, having all your meals prepared for you, all your decisions made for you. Why bother to be alive? I had no respect for them and still laugh when I see stories in the paper such as one that appeared a few weeks ago about someone mugging a nun - as if they should be excepted from the reality of life because of the depth of their sacrifice. The Lord works in mysterious ways, Sisters - oh yeah, and the traffic code applies to you too (ever noticed how nuns are such bad drivers????).
Anyway, I am the first-born and my brother is mildly disabled, so all the pressure to achieve was placed on me, while my brother was smothered (to his disadvantage - if denial wasn;t such a heavy aspect of my mother's parenting style, he might actually be employable now. My heart bleeds for him - he is such a nice person and deserves a much better life.).
So, basically, I don't have a lot of good things to say bout my parents other than that I am glad they live in another state. I have met my biological mother (a 7) and I am so glad to know her - I can see where lots of my fire comes from , and I am happy to own it. She still has a go at me about some of my worst behaviour, but I can take it from her because I respect her intelligence and her character. Sometimes I feel neglected because she forgets to ring when she says she will, but at 50, she is still a party girl, and God Bless her for that. I live in hope of getting it together as well as she has.
I do want to be a parent some day, and relate to what heatherb says in her post below. I think I'd be really good at it, and I think it would be good for me. But the conditions all need to be right for me to make such a big leap. I think being a parent is the most important job that we ever get to do. Just wish my parents felt the same way!