omg I want to slap the shit out of that kid.

My technique has been to divide the offending food into two clearly unequal portions, and then tell the kid to choose which one to eat. They think they’ve put one over on me by choosing the smaller one.

Woooowww that sounds so familiar. Do you also get the screaming, sobbing, telling you that YOU are “overreacting”? Whenever you calmly draw a boundary? It’s like how do you do that with a straight face??

That ... actually sounds a little like me. Yikes. I need to work on that.

It wasn’t nice, or productive, but it felt good.

Every time I think she’s finally gotten the point and I might want to talk to her ... she does something horrible again. She’s elevated “passive-aggressive” to an ART form.

My MIL is the only person in possibly the whole world who says “bless your heart” and actually means it, without any hint of shade. I think I could stab a dude and she’d say “Well, I am sure he deserved it and I really like that knife you used!”

You know what, I’m going in.

Most florists will give you a “toss bouquet” that’s smaller than your real bouquet.

I know what you mean. A lot of holidays have gotten harder for me since my dad died, and I felt like he was the buffer between me and my mom, even though they were divorced. Now that he’s not here, I really truly can’t handle her anymore without my dad.

Oh man, I posted that one too. I just read that last week and I keep going back and reading it again. It’s really amazing. My husband was reading it over my shoulder and kept pointing to things that sounded like my mother.

Oh man, I know what you mean. My brother cut her off decades ago. She can’t keep a relationship. I was “all she had”. It’s so hard to stand up and say “nope, you’re killing me” after she instilled such a massive sense of guilt in me.

My mother has this thing - it might be narcissism, but that doesn’t seem quite right - where if she doesn’t like something, it is stupid and she cannot comprehend how anyone could like that thing, and if they do they must be stupid as well. And she doesn’t like 99% of the things I like, and will happily tell me how…

I posted this in my other comment, but this site was amazing. I read half a dozen things on there that could have been my mom. http://www.issendai.com/psychology/est…

I’m not sure that’d be enough. My dad’s been dead almost two years and I still can’t quite process that he’s gone.

She’s going to really appreciate your support when she finally manages to make the break. Hearing my husband tell me “I always thought your mom was really not nice to you” was so validating. He didn’t want to tell me to cut her off, because like you said it’s not his place, but knowing that he thinks I did the right…

Yeah I’m sure he got the whole 40+ year history of my mother out of two paragraphs. I think I’ll listen to my husband who quite agrees that my mother is not nice to me. I’d dismiss it, but like 10 people replied to him while I was at the store.

I finally cut ties with my mother almost 2 years ago, after realizing that I felt pure panic whenever her number came up on my phone. The final straw was, when at my father’s funeral, she spotted my brother (who ALSO doesn’t speak to her, and hasn’t for 20 years now, imagine that) and started trying to get me to weigh…

I would very much like to come to your house and get drunk and tell you why my mother is nuts.