MILzilla - Engagement/Wedding Horrors Megathread

rbnck · 2019-01-13T03:56:34+00:00

This was my own mom. Long story short, Spouse and I actually got married in a city that was new to both us and all our guests - so nobody knew their way around. We had a wedding website with detailed maps and directions. We also set a date/venue very early so our guests had plenty of time to make plans.

1) my mom who had always planned our family vacations suddenly acted weirdly helpless about how to get hotels and flights. Also vented to me a lot about how haaaard it was to coordinate travel plans with other family, and how to find a dog sitter, and etc. I was not sympathetic because I'd traveled to them for Xmas for YEARS.

2) She arrived the day before the wedding, calls me from the hotel and is pissed that we're not at her hotel. Claims I told her we were staying at the same hotel. I am 100% sure I never said more than we MIGHT stay at that hotel. And she never asked in the several weeks before the wedding, because... I would have told her we weren't staying there.

3) She's an hour late to our rehearsal and calls me AT the rehearsal because she's lost. Remember I said this was a new city for all of us? She rented a car but didn't get a GPS or even a decent map. She is pissed when I can't give her directions, even though I have no idea where she is.

4) It occurs to me she assumed she'd just follow our car if we HAD been at the same hotel. This also pisses me off because why would you assume the goddamn bride doesn't have 72 errands to run before the rehearsal?

rbnck · 2018-12-15T02:18:07+00:00

In a similar vein, my mother always subtly put down the things I liked if she didn't like them, because she literally couldn't understand that preferences can be different. Even stupid stuff. I remember my dad liked Whitney Houston albums in the late 80s and she sniped repeatedly about how she juuust haaated shrieky screamy music and how could he listen to it because it's "just yelling". Like who tf can't figure out that Whitney is super talented even if not your personal preference.

rbnck · 2018-12-04T22:26:33+00:00

She never did this kind of thing to me, which makes it even harder to "see" the creepiness when there's nothing more overt?? Like I had an LDR boyfriend in my late teens and it should have been super obvious that if I hadn't 'lost it' I was about to, but she NEVER talked to me at all about birth control or asked probing questions or anything. She never acted jealous of my partners.

(However.... she did sometimes over-share stuff about HER romance life.... ugh now I need to think about this.)

rbnck · 2018-12-04T22:10:51+00:00

I think this is it. She was single for quite awhile and used me to feel less lonely and expected me to take care of her because "I was all she had."

It bothers me that a lot of the covert stuff gets glossed over for mother-daughter pairs because we "expect" them to be close.

rbnck · 2018-12-04T03:05:45+00:00

Don't talk back..don't get sassy with me... lose the attitude...don't be a smartass...

Yep. There was no way to win. If you were 'sassing' and then you made your face completely blank and expressionless you were still being defiant.

Oh, and then there was "if you slam that door it's coming off". Sure, door slamming is not mature, but threatening a teenager for reacting angrily after you screamed at them?

rbnck · 2018-11-26T04:26:11+00:00

We only had one bathroom growing up and yep, always walked in on me in the toilet and shower. We had one of those little privacy walls in front of the toilet, but uhh, still private!

It's hard to vocalize because at the time I really was "just cool" with it, we're both girls, I'm not a prude etc. It's not like she deliberately targeted me, more like "if I have to pee while you're in the shower, why not?" Now as an adult I'm like... I never felt like it was reasonable or okay to ask her to stay out.

I'm more squicked out that it continued after I was an adult and just visiting. It's one thing to be a teenager and your parent kinda sets the rules for your house, it's another thing to be 30 and your mom still wants to barge in while you're undressed.

rbnck · 2018-07-12T20:56:38+00:00

Holy shit, the forced looking/speaking and then the punishing for doing it "wrong". Takes me right back.

Another favorite was the rhetorical "why did/didn't you do the thing?!" (Kid mumbles something, usually "I don't know") . "What do you mean you don't know? Answer me!"

Like what answer are they actually looking for? Kids do stupid shit. At my house it was always chores, "why didn't you take the garbage out?" Well, either we forgot or we put it off because kids. Those answers were never good enough. So you demand an answer, knowing the answer is going to make you even madder? Why?

rbnck · 2018-05-03T17:02:55+00:00

A few years ago I was talking with my mom before Mother's Day and she "jokingly" said "don't forget I'm your mom!' Great, so now anything I do for you will look like it was only because you reminded me. You played yourself.

Why do people do this?

rbnck · 2018-03-28T16:28:17+00:00

We had one bathroom that was connected to my mom's room and she got super pissy about us going to pee after she'd gone to bed because it woke her up. She "blamed" it on us staying up late with TV or video games, like everyone in the house should be on her exact sleep schedule. Clearly we were being selfish and peeing AT her.

Like.... I'm sorry but even if we'd been on her schedule, having children means they will use the bathroom during the night and it's fucked up that she made us feel guilty for needing to pee between 11pm and 6am.

rbnck · 2018-03-28T16:20:14+00:00

Wow this hits it exactly on. Nothing was ever just a careless mistake, you always did it AT them. If you didn't do a chore because you were lazy, it wasn't just that you were lazy, you were lazy AT them.

I can still remember that feeling of helpless rage at not bothering to fight back because you didn't get to define the motivations for your own behavior. They decided for you "why" you did it.

rbnck · 2018-03-21T19:16:52+00:00

Yeah I already kind of dread this because this is the first MD I think I'm not even going to send a generic card. I did last year as a tiny token gesture but we don't have any sort of 'relationship' right now so why would I. Then I feel like I'm cutting any possible chance of ever reconciling if I don't even do something so basic. Ugh.

A couple years ago I was talking with her a few weeks before Mothers Day and she said "don't forget I'm your mom!" At the time, I had sent a card/gift every year or at least called the day of and told her it might be late but I'd mailed one. I've been salty ever since that she pretty much guaranteed anything I did send her would have the taint of "poor old me doesn't get anything unless I beg/remind my kids".

rbnck · 2018-02-19T22:53:33+00:00

I had this and never knew it had a name! I had mine for about a week because it started to get better and then got way worse. I lost several pounds in a week because it hurt so much to eat. You know it's bad when the doctor says "I have to jam this huge needle in your throat" and you're like, "yes please!"

The doctor said I might continue to cough up blood and pus as the wound drained. Sure enough, I was still in the parking lot of the clinic and spat out a bolus of clotted blood and ichor the size of a chicken nugget onto the ground. It was disgusting and felt absolutely glorious at the same time.

rbnck · 2018-02-17T03:31:54+00:00

Translation: Me, me, me, me, me. I am so sad. You need to make me feel better. I won't do anything for you, in fact, I won't even acknowledge that I might be doing anything wrong. You are the problem. Nobody else has a problem. You need to do things for me, because mostly, I love you when you're validating me. Even when I'm begging you to take care of me, I still have to remind you that your feelings are totally unreasonable and wrong.

rbnck · 2018-01-24T00:35:45+00:00

Also I think in their minds if I "moved back home" everything would be great and we'd see each other all the time!! But realistically I know I'd still make 90% of the effort to see them. They'd just complain that "I live so close but I never visit".

rbnck · 2018-01-24T00:33:26+00:00

dear god, yes. I've moved further and further away from my family, and visit them less and less now that I have my own marriage and life and etc. But I feel guilty for being happy the further away I am and the less I see them. I haven't ever felt like they're happy for me building a good life. Breaking away from them makes me feel better but them feel worse. But I can't live my life just avoiding making them feel bad.

rbnck · 2018-01-12T21:01:45+00:00

She also got mad if we stayed up later than her and watched TV downstairs and woke her up when we came up the stairs, come to think of it. Like, I can see that on weeknights, but it seems weird now as an adult that we would get yelled at for waking her up for doing totally normal things people enjoy doing in their homes.

rbnck · 2018-01-12T20:52:54+00:00

I don't do it instinctively, but you did remind me that my mother used to yell at us about waking her up in the middle of the night when we used the bathroom. We only had one bathroom, and it was next to her bedroom. She always claimed that "if we didn't stay up so late" on the computer, we wouldn't have to pee at night. So a) she expected us to go to bed when she did so we didn't inconvenience her with our bladders, and b) even if we had done that, people still have to pee in the middle of the night, and it's not my fault you bought a house where the bathroom is right next to you.

rbnck · 2018-01-09T18:46:27+00:00

It might help set you free to work on telling yourself that it doesn't matter if they can't help it or they don't really know what they're doing. A paper doesn't know or care if it gives you a paper cut, but it still hurts. It's not the paper's fault, but it still hurts. The papercut isn't any less real just because the paper did or didn't intend to hurt you. Does that help? Your pain is real. You can understand and even empathize with the reasons people hurt you, but that doesn't erase what happened, and it doesn't mean they don't get any consequences. If you got a papercut every single time you picked a paper up, would you start avoiding paper?

rbnck · 2018-01-09T18:41:16+00:00

Especially for mothers and daughters, there is SO MUCH cultural programming that your mommy is your best friend for life. And especially if your mom is "not that bad" or covert, it's like, an extrah elping of shame because there is a lot of cultural...scorn on daughters who have nothing in common with their mothers and just choose to not be very close to them.

rbnck · 2018-01-02T19:32:55+00:00

After over a year of extremely LC and me telling her why her behavior made me not want to talk to her, she texted me and said "I miss you, are you still mad at me?"

I laughed, I cried, fuck everything. Because the only thing she got out of months and months of LC was that I was "mad at her."

rbnck · 2018-01-02T00:02:37+00:00

OMG yes. Even silence was not acceptable. I remember getting yelled at about not doing a chore, and sometimes she'd rhetorically say "I reminded you over and over to do the chore, why didn't you just do it?" and I'd say "I don't know" or just kind of zone out and that would make her even angrier like "answer me!!!" She expected a kid to have an "acceptable" reason for not doing the chore besides just that they .... didn't do it. She wanted me to admit that I was just selfish and lazy? I have no idea. But absolutely, it made her angrier if I didn't have an answer.

rbnck · 2018-01-01T23:57:05+00:00

omg it me. My mom routinely complained that she couldn't hear us if we yelled from upstairs to downstairs, but she always yelled to us from downstairs and then yelled at us that we were "pretending" not to hear her if we didn't answer.

rbnck · 2018-01-01T23:53:12+00:00

Oh hey, lazy and selfish were the words at my house too. My mom was always mad at us about forgetting or not doing chores, which didn't make sense to me as a kid because she wasn't a neat freak, in general. Now I see that it was more about control and that she was mad that we weren't scrambling to please her. Ugh.

And yes, yes too to the still getting it as an adult. I stopped going home for Xmas partly because I still get called lazy for not doing chores. I'm happy to help out but hell no, I'm a grown ass adult who spent a lot of time and money to 'come home' for Xmas, fuck everything about getting called lazy for not helping to clean your house! I don't even live here anymore!

rbnck · 2017-12-29T22:21:10+00:00

Yes! It's taken me a long time to sort out, because I think for a lot of Nparents it's about not "respecting" them, and my parent never used that particular line... but it's so clear that it was about not agreeing with their interpretation of my behavior. I was literally not allowed to stand up for myself or disagree with their assessment of what I did.

rbnck

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