Unloved grandparents: why we like to do without them

It's great when the grandparents take care of their grandchildren. Or?

When I pick up my child from kindergarten, I keep seeing grandparents picking up their grandchildren. When I shop with my children, I see grandparents who shop with their grandchildren. And even on vacation I see children with their grandparents. Sometimes I am scared, sometimes amused, but by no means jealous. Because that's not the case with us.

My parents are still alive, but they died for me and my child

That means my mother died for me, and there have been deep-seated reasons for that since childhood. There was always an argument with my mother. She argued with everyone. For a long time I didn't even know why I wasn't allowed to speak to this or that. My mother needed the argument, otherwise she was missing something.

My mother made me a victim of bullying

My mother was never happy and probably never wanted to see me happy. Beatings were common. I just had to look wrong or breathe, and she let go of all her frustration on me.

She chose my girlfriends for me, not me. When a girl with brown skin came into my class, I was not allowed to be friends with her. "Who knows where it comes from," she said. My mother has always been racist. This made me a victim of bullying. The highlight of the bullying was that my classmates stuffed my clothes in the trash can with the banana peels, used handkerchiefs and chewing gum during the physical education class. I was the student with the racist mother.

When I was 18 I started to rebel

I started to rebel when I was 18, because she could no longer control me. I enjoyed it, she was furious. I was away for days and nights and she didn't know where I was. But she couldn't harm me because I went to work on time every morning.

When one of my relationships broke, it pulled me down even more. Told me every day what a bad person I was and I was responsible for everything. A common thread that should run endlessly through my life? Not with me.

I felt unloved and not seen. My soul suffered and so I stopped eating. No one in my family noticed that I was getting less and less. I owe it to my old boss, a doctor, that I started eating again. He was the only one who knew what was wrong with me. He listened to me and caught me in conversation. Now, years later, I still have a tendency to stop eating in stressful situations.

I moved out shortly before my 24th birthday. There was radio silence for several months. Then I drove past my parents sporadically, for the sake of my father. The visits were paralyzing for me, but they calmed my conscience. You never know how long your parents will live.

I tried one last time during pregnancy to be close to her

I started again professionally. I finally got more confident, everything inside me grew and I could finally breathe freely. Again I had a boss who encouraged and supported me.

Then I met my husband and got pregnant. I was so full of harmony that I wanted to be close to my mother as a last try. I wanted to share her pregnancy with me. I wanted to share these wonderful moments with her. I wanted to have a mother and a grandma for my child. But it did not work.

In her eyes I did everything wrong as a mother

Here are my grossest violations, which she constantly accused me of:

  • The child could have been given a nicer name
  • I could have tried a normal birth (I had an emergency caesarean section!)
  • I dressed my child too warm / too cold.
  • Buckled in the wrong child seat in the wrong place in the car.
  • Nourished with the wrong food.
  • Completely wrongly brought up.

But my biggest mistake was that I didn't go back to work immediately. When I asked who would take care of my baby, the only question was, "Well, at least we don't!" I would never have allowed that.

When my daughter got scared of her, I put an end to it

The years struggled and there were two key moments that eventually led to the break. The first moment was when she told my husband a lie that should have separated us. But that didn't work, because my husband didn't give anything to her talk.

The second was that she provoked an argument at my daughter's birthday party, in which my daughter became so afraid of my mother that she hid in the garden. That was the final line for me that I should have drawn much earlier.

Never again will I allow my mother to cause fear in my child! Nobody could protect me from her, but I can protect my child from her. And that is exactly what I will continue to do.