I guess this has been going on my whole life but the older I get the harder it is to deal with.
To preface this, I’ll say I’m not unintelligent. I’m absolutely no genius but still, I have 2 uni degrees that I did fairly well at, I’m active in a lot of community groups, I’m doing fine financially, etc. I’m not saying this to brag, just to make it clear that I’m not failing at life and that I’m fully capable of figuring things out for myself.
With that said, my mum says and does a lot of things that seem to convey that I have no idea what I’m doing. She points out such glaringly obvious things that I’m starting to get almost offended by it. As an example, I was making an origami crane and using a rectangular piece of coloured paper I’d found. She asked me “do you know how to make a square from a rectangle piece of paper?” She was completely serious. I can’t think of any more examples at the moment but this happens enough that my brother is getting frustrated too. Recently he was making dinner for friends and she warned him that boiling water from a kettle will be hot, and to not put knives in soapy dishwater where you can’t see them. He turns 27 this year.
Another thing is that I can’t count the number of times I’ve made a conscious choice on something only to have her imply I’ve forgotten something and should fix it. For example, I might choose not to wear earrings (which isn’t unusual), only to have her say “aren’t you going to wear earrings?” If I say I wasn’t, she’ll usually protest or take offence to it or say “but you look so nice with them!!” etc., until I give up and wear some. Other things include wearing a particular piece of jewellery, a particular jacket, etc. I know she’s probably trying to help, but I almost never forget things and she seems to think that’s what I’m constantly doing. It’s a small but frustrating thing to deal with because it happens so much - often now I just wear earrings to avoid having her say anything, and take them off when I leave the house.
Probably the most egregious thing she has done is to never let us be independent. I don’t know how to cook, how to clean, how to drive, or even how to do my own laundry. This does not just apply to me but to my older brothers too (28M and 26M). She never taught us any meaningful life skills, and instead has enabled us to be lazy for most of our lives (though I doubt she realises it). I think the most disgusting example of this is that my 28M brother moved out last year into a house with his fiancé after working at a high-paying job for probably 5 years, and for the first month he was there, he would drive an hour home every weekend so our mum could do his laundry. My 26M brother still lives at home and cooks once a month maybe, and never does laundry either (he works a full-time job).
What I see as an even greater error is that any attempt to learn any independent-living skills or show any desire of moving out is shunned. My mother quite clearly sees household management like laundry, cooking, cleaning etc., as “her roles”, and gets offended (!) and very critical if I try to learn anything. I’ve been a vegan for about a year and have a lot of recipes I’d like to try that I know my family wouldn’t necessarily enjoy. I’ve expressed the desire to cook my own dinner several times and each time her response has been a serious “don’t you want to be part of the family anymore?”
Finally, she definitely has abandonment issues :/ She’s expressed that she thinks of moving out before I’m married or 30 or whatever is akin to a total betrayal of my family. When I got my first boyfriend (I was 20), she came into my room sobbing at night because she was beyond terrified that I was abandoning her. It’s sad of course, but more often it just makes me mad because living here is frustrating but she’s burned it into my brain that if I moved out I wouldn’t really be welcome in the family.
It’s gotten to the point where I’m just mad at not being allowed to be independent and her always assuming I don’t know what I’m doing, and so i’m snapping quite a bit, and I’d really love to learn how to do that. How do I cope? Thanks for reading and sorry about the big rant :)
TL;DR: My mum frequently says things that imply I don’t know what I’m doing (like giving extremely obvious warnings), and has never let me or my older brothers build independent-living habits (like cooking or cleaning or laundry). I’m angry a lot now and I’d like to know how to cope with everything.
Submitted February 02, 2020 at 05:43AM by nervousyounghumans https://ift.tt/31gice6
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