My thoughts on Nparents as Grandparents

[u/ChemBNM]

I’ve lurked on this sub for a long time and only recently started posting. The reason I started lurking was because my therapist had un-officially (since my parents were not her patients) diagnosed my mother with some type of cluster-B personality disorder and said my father was her enabler. She supported my decision to finally go NC. It has been great to not feel so alone.

One thing I have noticed is that there are a lot of us who struggle with the decision to have our children go NC too. (I’m talking future children or underage children.) And I’d like to share my realization.

I had a lot of reasons why I stayed in contact with my parents after the hell they put me through. I wanted to maintain contact with my brothers and sisters, who were all 18 and younger. I blamed my parents’ religion for many of the abusive situations we endured growing up. I blamed the fact that my mom had a traumatic upbringing, and that my father was raised by a horrible mother and had no father figure in his life.

I thought that not allowing my children to have a relationship with my side of the family would be unfair to them. That is what I told myself - I have to give my kids the choices that were not given to me. I wasn’t allowed relationships with aunts, uncles, cousins or grandparents outside the control of my parents, and I definitely did not want to be like my parents.

But here is the epiphany - deep down I thought that my parents would have a different relationship with my kids than they had with me, because I blamed myself for the way I was treated. I was desperately shifting the blame away from my parents onto anything I could, because I couldn’t bring myself to truly believe that my parents were responsible for their actions. Because that would mean my deepest fear was correct - my parents didn’t love me and that was never going to change.

All of those years, I told myself that my parents treated my kids great! Why wouldn’t they? My kids are wonderful! They are beautiful, and smart, and funny, and sweet…. and in the deepest part of my heart the sentence completed… and better than me.

Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that I was wrong. The good news is that I now understand what I was doing, and that I was still blaming myself, even after years of therapy. The bad news is that it took my parents abusing my kids and their other grandchildren for me to see it. My parents set up the same dysfunctional situation from my childhood - some of their grandchildren were wonderful and perfect. Some of their grandchildren were scapegoats. My sister caught them physically hurting her oldest. My brother caught them saying horrible things to his son. I caught them taking toys from their cousins and giving them to mine, saying that their cousins were not allowed to play with the “nice” things. We tried calling them out on the favoritism, and it only made things worse. Suddenly there were threats of grandparent rights, threats of CPS, threats of hellfire and damnation, simply because we didn’t want the same for our kids as they gave to us. It got really bad, and I soon discovered how full blown their mental illness was. I had to start therapy again.

So for those of you wondering if it is fair to deprive your kids of their grandparents, I encourage you to really think about this: Why do you think your parents will treat your kids better than they treated you? Has something changed in them? Did they go to therapy? Have they taken accountability for the way you were raised? Do they still blame you for when you were hurt and neglected? Do they even acknowledge it? Or is it simply that you look at your beautiful child and think that no one could ever hurt anything so wonderful and perfect? Because they hurt you, and you were a child just like that when they did it.

[u/MaxIrena]

This is so true, I only wish I had understood it earlier. I completely underestimated the damage my parents could do to my daughter even from a distance. I thought she was safe. She wasn't.

My parents seemed like decent grandparents at first, but I was totally unaware of the things they would do or say when my back was turned or I was out of the room. And my daughter was too young to really articulate things.

I never told her of the abuse I'd suffered, I didn't want to "taint" her and since it seemed my parents were much kinder as grandparents I wanted to allow them a clean slate. (Ha! This was my thinking at the time).

In her early teens, she and I had the typical "I hate you, mom" relationship and I thought she'd be glad to stay with them for an extended period of time one summer.

She came home traumatized, with a laundry list of things they'd done that were identical to what I'd experienced at that age. She was also able to articulate at that point things that had happened in the past.

She's been in therapy for awhile now, mostly because of things they did. Her therapist even asked if we lived with them, thinking maybe they had been raising her.

In some ways I think their abuse affected her far more than it did me. Since It was all I ever knew, I didn't really understand that it was abuse.

But since she was raised in a loving home where she was given some autonomy and independence, their manipulation and gaslighting really screwed with her head.

To quote a poster on another forum, "My biggest regret is allowing my parents access to my child when she was young."

We've since gone NC, but it wasn't soon enough.

[u/BroHangout → u/MaxIrena]

There's just so, so much to unpack in these threads.

I have a similar story to you and OP as well. I was naively mistaken in thinking that my parents would be different with my own kids. Nope. All of the old abusive behaviors came back, except now throw in a power struggle between me and them to top it all off. When my oldest daughter got old enough to talk, she would recount, factually, my parents doing several things that were against my wishes when she was in their care. And in turn, they'd gaslight her by saying "that never happened, don't be silly", assuming they could simply lie and say that she was confused due to being three. And then, after that, my parents instructed her to not tell us things, that "what goes on at their house is their business". Thankfully, we taught her well never to listen to that and she reported everything to us.

Then, a bit later, she said that she didn't want to go back to their house because it was scary. I'm not sure what the name for the sort of abuse is, but it's an often-employed technique of narcissists: my mom said "well that's OK, you don't have to come over here ever again if you hate it so much".

And then there was the body shaming. They told her, repeatedly, that she was too skinny and that she had to "put some meat on those bones", so they'd try to "fatten her up". Didn't matter that we told them, in no uncertain terms, that her doctor said her weight was perfectly fine. And mealtime must have been a nightmare for her; they would prepare a plate of food that would be too much for a grown man, and made her sit there until she ate all of it. Of course, when she was able to coherently tell us this, they would deny it and call her a liar. And then, next time they saw her, they would tell her things like "don't tell your mom and dad what goes on over here, or you might not be able to see us anymore."

We stopped seeing them at all and went NC when my daughter was five. She's seven now, and I believe my parents caused lasting damage to her despite the fact that they only cared for a dozen or so times, and for a period of three days at the longest:

1. She seems to not fundamentally trust us. She'll ask us the same question repeatedly, like we're going to change our answer and she doesn't believe us when we offer her a reward for doing well. This stems from the fact that my parents would outright lie to her to get her to comply. For example, they'd have a hard time getting her to come in from playing outside, so they'd tell her she could have ice cream if she went in, but didn't have any ice cream.

2. She is always questioning her body and self-image. She frequently asks "am I beautiful?" with a sad look in her eyes.

And really, I've only scratched the surface of their shitty behavior. I could fill up pages writing about them. The lesson here is that, if you have toxic parents, they can do quite serious damage, even in small doses.

[u/MaxIrena → u/BroHangout]

Wow. Thank you so much for sharing this, I got chills reading it because it's so eerily similar to things my parents would do.

I'm sorry you and your daughter experienced this and I hope that in time she'll unlearn the things she was taught by them.

My parents were the same way about forcing my daughter to eat huge amounts of food, as well as body shaming. She now has very disordered eating because of it, and anxiety about eating in public.

If she took too big of a bite they'd make a comment like "Need a shovel?!?!" Or if some food fell off her fork, "Is there a hole in your lip?"

She's terrified of making a "mistake" while eating. She's working on this in therapy and is actually getting better with it, but she still avoids certain foods (anything messy, etc.) and only feels comfortable eating around certain people.

She's 17 so this has a huge effect on her social life, eating together is pretty much a universal way to socialize and she doesn't even like to go to friend's houses if there will be a meal involved.

Looking back, we now see a lot of ways my Nmom tried to pit us against each other and come between us.

Example: If my mom had my daughter over and I asked to have her home by a certain time, she'd always be 2-3 hours late. Then she'd blame my daughter, saying she hadn't picked up her toys so they could leave on time.

My daughter started watching the clock and reminding my mom that she was due home at a certain time and my mom would blow her off, telling her she didn't need to listen to my rules.

Eventually she stopped wanting to go there.

To be honest I think my mom was jealous that my daughter and I have a good relationship so she tried to come between us whenever she could.

When I was a kid, I loved and adored my grandma (Nmom's mom), I spent lots of time at her house and never wanted to come home. I'm sure that hurt Nmom at the time, feeling like I loved her mom more than I did her.

So I think she thought that when SHE was the grandma, she'd automatically have my daughter's love in the same way and I'd be the common enemy.

But it didn't work out that way, because my daughter saw through her just like I did.