I am 48 years old and for forty years, I allowed my mother to rule my life. When I was a kid, she had a fierce temper and I got scared. I resolved at an early age to avoid her wrath, and since I am a pretty smart person I was generally able to do that by anticipating what she wanted and making sure that was done. Or if I was doing something different from what she wanted, making sure that she didn’t know. I was successful at this but there was a huge price for me to pay and that was I was living my life around her values and goals because I was scared of living my life around my values and goals.
When I turned forty, that changed. I turned forty during Y2K, and that was kind of a psychological marker for everyone who uses the western calendar and for me personally. All of a sudden I could not live my life around her. I couldn’t constantly obey her voice in my head that would immediately make judgment on what I was doing–this is good, that is bad.
I started changing and this was the most painful thing I have done in my life. It meant that I had very little contact with my mother for five years in order for me to break my own habits. She has no insight into how she controls other people (three out of three children have bad relationships with her and yet she thinks she is the biggest expert on child raising there is). So, I could not get her to acknowledge any of her part in why things were as they were.
She got really sick last year and I went and saw her for the first time in five years. God gave me the grace to be able to minister to her needs without letting her into my life the way I used to. It has to be God because I was otherwise incapable of doing this myself.
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Yes, my mother is the same way. She claims to have been a very good mother and expert of child rearing yet it’s sad to see that neither of her offspring can stand her for more than a few minutes. I do not trust her with my own young child and insist that either I or my wife supervise any interraction. We live hundreds of miles away, maybe see her once or twice a year, and have resorted to various techniques to cope with her. Mine was and still is pornography and depictions of aggression against women, the last 20 or so years. It’s consumed my life and I wish it didn’t, but I don’t know how to get out of this pit I fell into when I was 14 or younger. My father had no backbone to her in the family, which allowed her to walk allover us, to get away with very odd behaviors and antics- nearly all contrived to draw attention upon herself. She’s one of the most jealous people I’ve ever known, and I’ve had to live in her shadow my whole life and be a trophy prize she parades around to make herself feel good. I’m absolutely socially inept around women and distrustful of women, while all the while lusting for them in my mind. Along the way, the little boy in me never matured into a man. I wonder why I push myself so hard, am so critical on myself, have multiple graduate degrees in different fields, and yet continue to study toward even higher education when I’m sure I have enough. I often visualize the future date of her funeral and wonder if that’s when I’ll be liberated from the internal shackles she has me in. The only positive that comes from this struggle is a critical awareness of how I choose to raise my own children. Despite my vices, I take great pride in being a better father than my father was to me and than his father was to him, and great pride in having a wife who is a better mother to my child than my mother was to me. Unlike me, my child is a very happy child in a loving environment. I wonder if anyone else has similar problems as I do and would love to find a support group for this sort of problem. I just don’t know how to resolve it.