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Disillusioned with my parents
Mirabelle
Posts: 1,020 Wise Owl
Last night I'd been sitting with her at Palma airport waiting for our plane to go home to England when I saw a book left on a seat opposite us. I went and picked it up, then looked to see if the woman who had been reading it was nearby. Nope, she must have rushed off when her flight to Paris was called. I returned to her and showed her the book. "That looks interesting, Belle," she remarked. "Finders keepers and all that. You gonna read it?"
Attachment not found.
"Yeah, don't see why not," I smiled. And opened the book. From the first chapter I was hooked.
Throughout our flight, and during our journey home to collect music equipment and textbooks left behind, I felt compelled to read. Because since parting childhood, and pulling away from my parents, it occurred to me that they had done pitifully bugger all raising me after I commenced the tender age of 11. If they had realised how overwhelmed, anxious and totally lost and out of my depth I'd felt for such a long time to the present, they would have found this book, read it and started being the responsible parents I have always been wanting them to be. Instead, having started secondary school, my behaviour deteriorated into something that one of my aunts acerbically described as a 'teen zombie horror movie'. Indeed, and I had a fondness for the bottle though I never did drugs.
Did my adoptive mother and irascible aunts follow? No, they left me to become a tangled mess and it's been me who has had to pick up the pieces such as early motherhood, of anxiety, self-doubt and stress, and of having to deal with ghastly painful yukky periods, mood swings, rages, drunken nights from enduring a rough year of binge drinking at 14 after I'd lost my toddler to pneumonia. So where were my champagne guzzling, gin-soaked television broadcasting parents when I needed them so desperately? Living on a gravy train of privilege and indolence, that's what the lazy bastards did while hobnobbing with the Queen. Indeed, I am still asking the same to this day because the one who has had to mother me, has been me. And presently in my pain from juvenile idiopathic arthritis, it's been her. My beautiful girl who has been through the shredder herself has looked after me with such gentle care and devoted love. Similarly, she had to grow up on her own while her parents led hedonistic selfish lives, so she and I have become quite the package and wearing silver rings. :thumb:
Parents are supposed to expect an enormous amount from their teenage daughters. In an uncaring often dangerous world where we are bombarded with messages about how we should look, behave and succeed - is it selfish of us to expect more from them? In this book Untangled, the author Lisa Damour provides an accessible, detailed, comprehensive guide to parenting teenage girls. I'm halfway through the book now and how enlightening it's been! Maybe on our return home this week I should leave it for aunty Fiona to find. There again, if she did read it, she might realise that her mothering of me has been 17 years too late.
Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood is available as a Kindle edition for just £1.39 For parents of preteen to teenage children, this ought to be The Book Of The Year.
Attachment not found.
"Yeah, don't see why not," I smiled. And opened the book. From the first chapter I was hooked.
Throughout our flight, and during our journey home to collect music equipment and textbooks left behind, I felt compelled to read. Because since parting childhood, and pulling away from my parents, it occurred to me that they had done pitifully bugger all raising me after I commenced the tender age of 11. If they had realised how overwhelmed, anxious and totally lost and out of my depth I'd felt for such a long time to the present, they would have found this book, read it and started being the responsible parents I have always been wanting them to be. Instead, having started secondary school, my behaviour deteriorated into something that one of my aunts acerbically described as a 'teen zombie horror movie'. Indeed, and I had a fondness for the bottle though I never did drugs.
Did my adoptive mother and irascible aunts follow? No, they left me to become a tangled mess and it's been me who has had to pick up the pieces such as early motherhood, of anxiety, self-doubt and stress, and of having to deal with ghastly painful yukky periods, mood swings, rages, drunken nights from enduring a rough year of binge drinking at 14 after I'd lost my toddler to pneumonia. So where were my champagne guzzling, gin-soaked television broadcasting parents when I needed them so desperately? Living on a gravy train of privilege and indolence, that's what the lazy bastards did while hobnobbing with the Queen. Indeed, I am still asking the same to this day because the one who has had to mother me, has been me. And presently in my pain from juvenile idiopathic arthritis, it's been her. My beautiful girl who has been through the shredder herself has looked after me with such gentle care and devoted love. Similarly, she had to grow up on her own while her parents led hedonistic selfish lives, so she and I have become quite the package and wearing silver rings. :thumb:
Parents are supposed to expect an enormous amount from their teenage daughters. In an uncaring often dangerous world where we are bombarded with messages about how we should look, behave and succeed - is it selfish of us to expect more from them? In this book Untangled, the author Lisa Damour provides an accessible, detailed, comprehensive guide to parenting teenage girls. I'm halfway through the book now and how enlightening it's been! Maybe on our return home this week I should leave it for aunty Fiona to find. There again, if she did read it, she might realise that her mothering of me has been 17 years too late.
Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood is available as a Kindle edition for just £1.39 For parents of preteen to teenage children, this ought to be The Book Of The Year.
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Hello @Mochan
I finished the book. Such a marvellous read, it revealed how we girls grow, how we tick and this would have made parents' guidance of me so much easier, and for me I'd have been a lot happier and stayed at home.
If only my mother or aunts had read this book, they'd also have realised I need not have felt such a tangled mess and begun listening to me, and making good the relationship long gone sour. Instead of guiding me with love and understanding, they neglected me, failing miserably to detect why my little one's health was failing so rapidly. Had my parents offered guidance, little Harriet may have still been alive today. And maybe had they'd have prevented me from becoming so alienated, and might have prevented me from running away from home. On realising my parents were not ever going to help me deal with so much self-doubt and inner loathing, I would never have run away to London to sleep rough in the hope some good guy would find me, and take me home to a happier life. There was nothing there. Except a murderous drunken stepfather out to plough me, given the chance though he never got it.
By a stroke of good fortune, the guy I'd been begging money from at Paddingtom Station turned out to be a youth officer for Centrepoint. He took me back to the centre and found me shelter, then contacted my parents. When my aunt arrived (mother was off remission again), I told the youth officer that my stepfather had been hitting me. My aunt was aghast. She never knew, but then the silly cow never asked, and anyway, aunty had long alienated herself from me. And then she learnt that my stepfather used to throw me around the room and ram me against the walls screaming invective at me, my aunt cried. It was then that she and her wife finally realised why I liked sleeping under my bed every night - because it was safe under there, and why they'd often found me hidden in a wardrobe - did they realise the extent of my stepfather's brutality. I'd told the youth officer of flying around the room bumping against walls and the time I lashed out hitting my stepfather's median nerve to paralyse his arm so I could get away, and to my amazement that officer said he wasn't the least bit shocked having heard so many young people like me had to run away. Well, the night I ran away from home, I hit the s.o.b with the fireside poker and yeah, I suppose anyone would think I was a vicious little vixen but inside my troubled mind, I felt something called Integrity, but there was no way I was going to continue living with such a morons.
While I was away from home, stepfather died from cardiac arrest. Dropped dead - just like that. Hahaaa - what joy that he'd died! And that was the only reason why I came home. By then my effort to part with childhood was long gone, chased away by deliberately becoming pregnant. To have a child and bring it up was not going t be easy, but at lea st I felt I would have her to love and cherish even if nobody else loved us, I'd have Harriet.So no childhood anymore, and no singing into a hairbrush to Justin Bieber's songs for me. At 12 year's old I was already writing lyrics of my own. From that day on since stepfather was 6 feet under, life had become a little bit sweeter though mother was sick, so I became my aunt's ward, though I was reticent to show or let be seen any feelings.
I spent my early teenage years living in a grand mansion with a direct view of Windsor Castle. Irritating the hell out of the butler and housekeeper, I'd skateboard up and down the oak planked floors that inter-linked the 30 roomed stone walled Gothic horror. There I used to go on drinking binges though never did drugs. Picking locks soon became a sport. I used to question why locks should ever be used at all, thus making me all the more interested what lay behind locked doors.
Emotionally I remained a tangled mess, out of my head half the time in unrelenting grief for my little one and only having Mandy to look after. Despite her own feelings of worthlessness, it was my darling who put me back onto an even keel. Mandy took the bottles away and emptied their content into the lav. She threatened a punch in the mouth if I ever dared to raid the lounge drink's cabinet without first asking. As she and I grew together, so I became softer and more gentle, understanding even Mandy needed love and guidance, so this was how, down the years to the present time, she and I became inseparable. One day when the time feels right and we've grown up a bit more, we are getting married and having a family of our own. One thing is clear. Mandy and I will dote love and parential attention, of caring and of heartfelt kindness and have open hearts for our children so they can grow up in a happy home that neither of us ever knew.
One day, then.
I found What Your Mother Never Told You: A Teenage Girls Survival Guide by Richard Dudum and it was such an interesting read that I could hardly put the book down. Parents, particlarly mothers should buy this book. It would save them from getting upset and annoyed with themselves. It was an honest book, never sugar coating the truth and one every parent should read. Before leaving to go to Spain, I left the book on our aunt's bed. Hopefully on our return, Belle and I might begin seeing a new parent. :cool:
But I doubt our aunt will read the book. In fact, she's so mindlessly daft that she'll probably ditch it into the bin. :rolleyes: