She is in my head when I parent

[Sojourner17]

I decided to do a new thread because it's kind of a separate issue. 

Recently we have been dealing with bad attitudes towards siblings between our three little boys.  It's totally normal squabbling over who gets to watch their show on tv with an edge of leaning towards being unkind and rude between the three.  I intervene with saying that if there is fighting the TV will be off because how they treat each other is more important than watching a TV show. 

Now here's where my unpdm comes in.  As soon as I said that to my children (all under 9 years old) it was like I had a flashback of my mom being upset at me for telling her I am about to watch a movie with friends and need to let her go/will call another day.  This incident happened over 10 years ago before I even KNEW about PDs.  She reprimanded me and kept me on the phone intentionally for a half an hour longer. 
More recent history... she texted me asking if I could call on a Friday evening. Friday is family movie night cat our house.  I texted saying we were about to watch a movie and then would be putting the kids to bed afterward.  She was upset because a movie shouldn't be more important than talking to your mother.  I told her I would call the next day when I found time.

So the trigger is the "how you treat each other is more important than a TV show".

Ok.  So I have these flashes of memories in my mind and coming to mind when I'm parenting my boys.  I KNOW it's not the same thing. I KNOW I'm not doing the same thing to them as what my mom has done to me. I doubt myself and think am I doing the same thing? Yes... no... maybe? My boys are children.... It's my job to raise them and teach them how to treat others.  With my mom, in both cases I was an adult no longer living at home.   I have these memories that resurface and feelings of guilt and anxiety that raise their ugly head. 

It's all so triggering and frustrating having her words and how she has dealt with me come into my mind.  And yes... it shows that to her I am eternally a child and not a grown woman.

[moglow]

She knows these things, Sojourner, yet paints you as the bad guy over and over anyway. Think of how she treats you. I'm not saying retaliate, but I do see this as her taking advantage and putting you in a bad position without a whole lot of thought how it affects you. I think we do lead by example, all of us, even when we're not aware of it.

Setting and enforcing your boundaries will be the kindest thing you can do for yourself. It could be as simple as putting the phone on silent or do not disturb during family time or every night before their bedtime. You don't have to explain or discuss it, just do what gives you peace. You weren't available at 7pm when she called? Oh well, you'll call when you are. Or plan and set a time that does work. OR if it's that painful, just give yourself a danged break from all of her stuff - and refuse to apologize for it. You have a home and family to consider here too.

[Cat of the Canals]

I think the fact that both situations revolve around TV/movies/entertainment is clouding things. Because that's not what this is actually about.

The way I see it, you are trying to teach your sons to be respectful to one another even in the face of frustration/not getting their way. The lesson isn't about the TV at all, but about being decent human beings.

On the other hand, your mother demanding unfettered access to you on HER schedule is not about you "choosing" to watch a movie over her, especially not when you've promised to make yourself available to talk another time. This is about control.

In fact, I'd say your mother's behavior has more in common with that of your children than your behavior has with hers: She doesn't get her way, so she's going to complain and make you feel guilty. She might as well call you a poopyhead. 

[Sojourner17]

Lol!  Poopyhead!  That made me laugh so hard!  I could see my four year old calling me that... "mommy!  That's not fair!  You poopyhead!!".  To picture my unpdm saying it is just hilarious!!! 

It's amazing how this stuff can really get into your head and then when you write it down it just seems so ridiculous! 

I mean, in normal circumstances... if you aren't free to talk or if someone you want to talk with isn't free you just say "ok, some other time" and drop it, or if you really need to talk about something specific you arrange a time knowing that that time may even change.  But with pd stuff it's the snarky messages or tone and words and it doesn't end there.

This most recent time that it happened when I did call her back she made sure to tell me how bad she felt, how dad was ignoring her and watching tv too, so she went to the bedroom and cried. Then she told me dad redeemed himself as he came back to their bedroom and held her for a while.      

Even with what I just wrote... it's TMI.  I don't need to know that stuff.  But it's almost like any little slight in her mind is huge and emotional and she MUST ensure that I know this. 

It isn't about the tv, you are right, it's about control, and she is feeling whatever it is that she is feeling and she needs to dump it out on someone.  That someone used to be me a lot more than what it is now but I think perhaps this summer I let my guard down and so she's trying again. 

As to my parenting,  what is happening there is nowhere close to what goes on between my mom and I.  I think it was just the wording I used that triggered the anxiety and memories of the incidents with unpdm. 

[Leonor]

Hi Sojourner,

Oh I think you did great!

You know, even in non-dysfunctional families, we find ourselves repeating to our kids things we heard from our parents. Even those things that, as children, we swore we'd never say to our own kids.

In non-dysfunctional families, those moments become a source of mirth. If you're in the US, you might remember a series of commercials for a car insurance company in which there was a support group for adults who had turned into their parents. When it was time for one member to "share," he wondered why a fellow members had left the door to the room open. "Are we air conditioning the whole neighborhood?" 

The Huffington Post has "The Best Tweets from Parents" every week and I never miss it.

In a dysfunctional family, though, it gets all mixed up with trauma and instead of jokingly looking under the table or behind the curtains to find out where your mom is hiding, your brain mixes up the signals and you experience the fear and sadness all over again.

Besides, you are doing it differently. You're teaching your children about kindness and values.

That's better than me! When my 3 get into it, I usually wind up yelling at them, after which they all become best friends and allies because they're all "in trouble." It's just part of living in family.

[easterncappy]

I don't remember the exact context, but when I was a teenager, I remember my mom saying something like "don't have children, you wouldn't be a good mother". I think this was her response to me figuring out that one of her beloved "parenting practices" that she was really proud of wasn't healthy after all. She desperately tried to recreate her and her mother's toxic, enmeshed dynamic with me... while also being self-aware enough to move to another continent to get away from her mom... but not willing to admit that the problem was, in fact, the enmeshment. It always freaked me out and made me wonder if I'm being the same way but just wasn't realizing it.

So, I understand being worried that you'll do the same that your parents did. It'd be weird if you weren't worried about the kind of parent you are. I actually don't think PD parents worry about that sort of thing, I think they're only concerned with the appearance of being good parents.

Kids need rules. For someone who perhaps grew up with the more authoritative type of PD, it might feel wrong to enforce rules. I grew up with the "cool mom" type and rules feel very necessary to me as a result, I realized how much I missed out on by having no restrictions. But kids do need rules, they're figuring out how to be people and you want them to figure out how to be good people. Sometimes their feelings will get hurt and they'll get frustrated with you because of something you did to enforce fairness between siblings, but they need to figure out how to deal with those things. You're not doing it to get their attention or just to make them feel bad, you offer an actual parenting-related explanation, you take zero pleasure from their hurt feelings, etc. so that's why this is totally different. To be honest, when compared to what your mom said to you, the only similarity is the fact that movies were both somehow involved. But I get that this is triggering, there are certain topics and words that get me going too.

And even if you do mess up, which all parents do, it doesn't make you abusive. It probably gets confusing because in a confrontation with PD parents, the closest you get to admission of wrongdoing is "sometimes I made mistakes, I messed up, I'm not perfect, so what". Except, they're minimizing a pattern of abuse that they feel no actual remorse for. Things they actually mostly did on purpose. Things that were repeated over and over and over for years, with no apology, no changed behavior, nothing. They derived pleasure from mistreating us, it wasn't to teach us an actual age-appropriate lesson on how to be better people... if there was a "lesson", it was supposed to teach us to play into the system better.

So rest assured that you're very different than she was as a mom.