I'll go first: My mother actually never said anything really awful to me. She was more a neglectful than a mean parent.
She did call me a bitch, frequently, when I was in my early teens, which I felt keenly at the time. And when I was about eleven and having a melt-down (I'm high-functioning autistic, I think), she took a Polaroid picture of me so I would "see how ugly I looked." I'm still mad about that.
But she came out to Idaho (from New Orleans) when the kid was born to stay with me a week, and take care of the colicky kid. I'll always be grateful for that. And when I started writing novels, she always read my work, even the horrible early novels, and she told me that she knew I would get published, because I was too good not to.
My father (also a high-function autistic) was the mean one, though to be fair I don't know if he knew he was being mean. He constantly told me as an adolescent that I needed to lose weight; and when I got cancer, he told me that when life gave me lemons I should make lemonade. None of that was as bad as his own melt-downs, though, which manifested as screaming at all of us and beating us children frequently.
Oddly, after he got dementia, he became a really nice guy.
I suppose the best thing he ever said to me was that he didn't worry about me because I knew how to plan ahead and work toward a goal. Honestly, that made up for a lot.
What about y'all? Best and worst?
 |
| My mother at 80 |
1 comment:
Aw, Delegar, I’m so sorry that “bitch” and “ugly” seem “not really awful” to you.
I think the worst thing my mother said to me was “You’re grounded!” My sister hated that she often said that even when she didn’t like us that much, she still loved us. But that sounded fine to me.
The best things she said were things like, “did you try as hard as you could?” about disappointing grades, “girls are more mature than boys” about me never dating through high school, and other good reasons for whatever abnormal things I did. Also, she never called me a cry baby, just hugged me. Also, we were always welcome to move back home when we needed to. She was not perfect, but she was the perfect mom for me. And when later I learned she probably had undiagnosed clinical depression for a while and definitely had undiagnosed hypothyroidism, that made her awsomeness even more heroic. To not make you feel too jealous, I should point out that after school, I had to let her say whatever she was excited about first—she could never listen to me first. Then I could tell her about what I wanted to talk about.
The worst things my dad said to me were just being overly optimistic. “I’ll be there in 10 minutes.’ “I’m walking out the door right now.” Wait, the worst was probably, “I won’t be able to pay the parental part of your finances for your junior year in college, and I never paid my part for your sophomore year, either. (That worked out—I went to a closer, cheaper college my junior year and paid off my sophomore year and then went back for my senior year.) The best thing he said is he wanted us to be happy. He really was not judgmental at all about any non-criminal, not-mean ways we went about that.
Post a Comment