Post by spearcarrier on Jul 19, 2022 9:21:45 GMT
Hello all, if you come through to see this.
I'm here having come from being estranged by my children and having to do the estranging from my parents. (It was real nasty.) It's been years now, and once I stopped crying I chose to walk away and keep living. The recent death of my parents opened up the wounds and put me back into a lot of the problems, so I've been hit in the face with the issues again. Circumstances keep aligning for me to have to look at things - which it's not healthy to dwell - and I realized something tonight.
Once upon a time if you looked up "why do my kids hate me" (how I learned the term parental estrangement) or simply "parental estrangement", you'd find places like this. You'd find articles talking about the growing phenomenon. Now when I try to find things - and I don't just mean on Google - you get a bunch of articles essentially blaming the parents. One article I saw early actually started in with how the author (supposedly a licensed counselor) always hears how parents excuse themselves by claiming they were good parents, etc. It's an automatic "if you kids are being jerks to you, it's all your fault" - which sort of reminds me on how some people in the school system and other areas I've had exposure to think of the parents. Us vs. Them you know.
The result is there's no help for parents or true awareness of the country's problem. And it's a growing epidemic.
I was actually surprised to find out there was a forum for parents who walked away like I did. In my case, it was the best thing for me - even if part of the walking away was orchestrated by my abusive ex. I'd have to put in a nutshell everything that happened over the years, truly, from my parents never having my back on my decisions to my ex telling the children a lot of lies. The kids actually thought I was the one who slept around and caused the divorce.(Not true. He had 8 girlfriends and married the last homewrecker - who I warned about him! - only to get a divorce a year later when he hit her in the eye.) He gave me my first black eye, but my mother told me our divorce was my fault because I apparently treated him like dirt. Through this the kids learned how to treat me, and I'm sure you know it wasn't good. I still remember this one time I was smiling, happy about being in love with someone, and my daughter got angry and offended that I was happy. She was nine.
The people around you, too, fall into it quite quickly. They assume you're abusive or rotten immediately if things aren't quite how they feel they should be, or there's something they think doesn't look right. My daughter's heel was scraped because she'd literally fought me when I was trying to treat a raging infection on her foot. She was six. I had to back off and let her win, but in her kicking at me she'd scraped her foot on the herb water pot. (Yes, she got that violent.) My so-called friends assumed I'd beat her. The looks they gave me.
Or when the school told my daughter was clearly addicted to drugs because I couldn't afford to get a tooth pulled and was having to take a lot of painkillers for a very dangerous tooth infection. (FYI, a tooth infection can kill you.) Or when a different school decided I was being abusive because my son lost his coat and I had to fix a coat up for him to wear. (The things they did to the kids every morning to prove abuse only for it to come up empty is pretty abusive in itself IMHO.) And my parents? Yelled at me over the phone when I asked for help. Some of us can't win for losing.
So when you learn to walk away from being the scapegoat you're suddenly the bad guy anyway. You'll always be the bad guy, no matter how good you try to be, and for some the justification of that first fake call to child welfare (in my case it was because my son threw a typical toddler tantrum in the bank and, as I watched him kick his little legs, I told a meddling old woman I was the one to handle him thank you very much - so she called child welfare and told them I was threatening to break my son in half. In that same month my husband's cousin, who I caught sexually abusing my son, called child welfare and told them some pretty crazy things... which it turns out was how he got away with abusing children in the family homes he was staying in. I wasn't the first victim. I wish my friend, who had also been victimized by him, had warned me of him.) Once you get that - they're technically called spite calls btw - you're even more doomed. So you don't dare act as a parent half the time. You can't. There's always someone out there who has no idea what's going on that's going to step in and fix it for "the sake of the child (bs)".
This isn't to say we've been perfect parents. There literally is no such thing. If you truly did your best, you were a d*** good parent.
Anyway I segued from my point, which is that clearly we need to reclaim our narrative. This constant blame game is yet another divisive tactic, and if you think about it there may be some relationships out there that could have healed if some jerk hadn't stepped in to tell everyone how wrong the one party is no matter what they do or did.
I read here that someone rented a house to their child, and that somehow was why their child hates them. No. NO! During a time that they needed to learn responsibility, they still gave their child a place to rest... and judging by the rest of the post, it sounds like nothing would have made that child happy. Yeah, business agreements like that rarely survive in a family situation. But if they'd said no and NOT rented it, the child STILL would have been unhappy. It's a no-win scenario, so the fact that they were willing to give their child a chance in a such a volatile situation means they were trying to be a good parent. Enough with the blaming!
My son had to wear a girl's coat. Oh no. I couldn't buy him a $200 coat to replace the one that was "lost" (but was recovered by the school when taking that away from him didn't work). Okay, so it was a girl's coat. *I made sure he was warm.*
Etc.
Anyway, hello all such as it is.
I'm here having come from being estranged by my children and having to do the estranging from my parents. (It was real nasty.) It's been years now, and once I stopped crying I chose to walk away and keep living. The recent death of my parents opened up the wounds and put me back into a lot of the problems, so I've been hit in the face with the issues again. Circumstances keep aligning for me to have to look at things - which it's not healthy to dwell - and I realized something tonight.
Once upon a time if you looked up "why do my kids hate me" (how I learned the term parental estrangement) or simply "parental estrangement", you'd find places like this. You'd find articles talking about the growing phenomenon. Now when I try to find things - and I don't just mean on Google - you get a bunch of articles essentially blaming the parents. One article I saw early actually started in with how the author (supposedly a licensed counselor) always hears how parents excuse themselves by claiming they were good parents, etc. It's an automatic "if you kids are being jerks to you, it's all your fault" - which sort of reminds me on how some people in the school system and other areas I've had exposure to think of the parents. Us vs. Them you know.
The result is there's no help for parents or true awareness of the country's problem. And it's a growing epidemic.
I was actually surprised to find out there was a forum for parents who walked away like I did. In my case, it was the best thing for me - even if part of the walking away was orchestrated by my abusive ex. I'd have to put in a nutshell everything that happened over the years, truly, from my parents never having my back on my decisions to my ex telling the children a lot of lies. The kids actually thought I was the one who slept around and caused the divorce.(Not true. He had 8 girlfriends and married the last homewrecker - who I warned about him! - only to get a divorce a year later when he hit her in the eye.) He gave me my first black eye, but my mother told me our divorce was my fault because I apparently treated him like dirt. Through this the kids learned how to treat me, and I'm sure you know it wasn't good. I still remember this one time I was smiling, happy about being in love with someone, and my daughter got angry and offended that I was happy. She was nine.
The people around you, too, fall into it quite quickly. They assume you're abusive or rotten immediately if things aren't quite how they feel they should be, or there's something they think doesn't look right. My daughter's heel was scraped because she'd literally fought me when I was trying to treat a raging infection on her foot. She was six. I had to back off and let her win, but in her kicking at me she'd scraped her foot on the herb water pot. (Yes, she got that violent.) My so-called friends assumed I'd beat her. The looks they gave me.
Or when the school told my daughter was clearly addicted to drugs because I couldn't afford to get a tooth pulled and was having to take a lot of painkillers for a very dangerous tooth infection. (FYI, a tooth infection can kill you.) Or when a different school decided I was being abusive because my son lost his coat and I had to fix a coat up for him to wear. (The things they did to the kids every morning to prove abuse only for it to come up empty is pretty abusive in itself IMHO.) And my parents? Yelled at me over the phone when I asked for help. Some of us can't win for losing.
So when you learn to walk away from being the scapegoat you're suddenly the bad guy anyway. You'll always be the bad guy, no matter how good you try to be, and for some the justification of that first fake call to child welfare (in my case it was because my son threw a typical toddler tantrum in the bank and, as I watched him kick his little legs, I told a meddling old woman I was the one to handle him thank you very much - so she called child welfare and told them I was threatening to break my son in half. In that same month my husband's cousin, who I caught sexually abusing my son, called child welfare and told them some pretty crazy things... which it turns out was how he got away with abusing children in the family homes he was staying in. I wasn't the first victim. I wish my friend, who had also been victimized by him, had warned me of him.) Once you get that - they're technically called spite calls btw - you're even more doomed. So you don't dare act as a parent half the time. You can't. There's always someone out there who has no idea what's going on that's going to step in and fix it for "the sake of the child (bs)".
This isn't to say we've been perfect parents. There literally is no such thing. If you truly did your best, you were a d*** good parent.
Anyway I segued from my point, which is that clearly we need to reclaim our narrative. This constant blame game is yet another divisive tactic, and if you think about it there may be some relationships out there that could have healed if some jerk hadn't stepped in to tell everyone how wrong the one party is no matter what they do or did.
I read here that someone rented a house to their child, and that somehow was why their child hates them. No. NO! During a time that they needed to learn responsibility, they still gave their child a place to rest... and judging by the rest of the post, it sounds like nothing would have made that child happy. Yeah, business agreements like that rarely survive in a family situation. But if they'd said no and NOT rented it, the child STILL would have been unhappy. It's a no-win scenario, so the fact that they were willing to give their child a chance in a such a volatile situation means they were trying to be a good parent. Enough with the blaming!
My son had to wear a girl's coat. Oh no. I couldn't buy him a $200 coat to replace the one that was "lost" (but was recovered by the school when taking that away from him didn't work). Okay, so it was a girl's coat. *I made sure he was warm.*
Etc.
Anyway, hello all such as it is.