Mother dearest
was oppressive to say the least. I had no confidence at all to do anything on my own and this affects me to this day.

Amongst the stunts she pulled during my time at home:
- walked me to middle school on my first day- aged 9
- sent bus fare into class one rainy day with my dad - aged 14 (!!)
- sent me to bed every night at 800-830 up until the age of about 13-14, I was the only kid in school who had never watched a whole episode of The Bill!
- told my 6' 4 scary headmaster that he would not under any circumstance keep me after school - aged 13
- told the same head that if he ever even thought of caning me she would do the same to him then have him locked up for assault
- would only let me out of the house after I had asked permission and told her where I was going, who with and what time I would return, up until the age of about 19- I started work at 16 FFS.
- when my pregnant then-girlfriend wanted to stay over whilst they were away, she asked in all seriousness where I would be sleeping as she would obviously be using my bed. Note the word pregnant once more if you will.
- sent me a text message after she and my father split up and we were not on good terms, telling me she was my mother and I *would* do as she says - aged 29. I still recall the exact words nearly 8 years on: "I am your mother and you WILL".

My brother turned out a complete social leper. I've at least managed to move out, get a job, a family, a life- he's 32 and still at home, unemployed, literally no friends whatsoever apart from internet chatrooms, claiming disability allowance on grounds of mental problems.

I have tried to be the opposite with my daughter, she is confident and outgoing, fears nothing and is an absolute delight, I am so proud of her and she is going to have the chances and success I was never given the opportunity or encouragement to have. I'm not trying to lead my life through her, just give her everything I was never given.

The ironic thing is that she divorced my father on grounds of mental cruelty and accused him of stifling her and being a control freak.

No lols so far, so I will finish by saying she has better stubble than me, genuinely has to shave a few times a week and could be a first class circus bearded 'lady' if she didn't.

/bitter and resentful
(randomstupidname would really like this signature field to be bigge, Sat 12 Sep 2009, 0:45, 12 replies)

My Mum
was protective of one child, and not so much of the other.

Luckily for me I was the protected one.

So, thanks Sophie.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 23:37, 1 reply)

Protective Mum
I got a call from my mum once explaining that some cops had come around to her place looking for me with a search warrant. She said that might have been detectives because they weren't in uniform and that one had a big leather trench coat. She thought she'd better give me a call because they might be on the way to my flat. "Cheers mum". She never ever brought it up or inquired why the cops were after me. Protectiveness is not necessarily a bad thing in a mum.
( hismastersvice cunting flange-jammer, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 22:39, 1 reply)

Backfire!
I went to primary school with a little turd called Richard.
His mum spent practically every day in the headmaster's office complaining that a pupil/teacher/dinner lady/inanimate object had done/said/thought something bad to her little angel.

The little turd knew this and played upon it to get people in trouble, making up stuff and lying left right and centre. After a while all the staff got wise, got fed up of it and totally ignored any complaints made by the turd or his mum.

As soon as me and all the other kids realised this it was open season.
We could beat the crap out of him with almost total impunity, provided we weren't actually seen, and sometimes even if we were.

He moved schools, three times to my knowledge, and from what I heard the same thing happened at every school. With hindsight I feel quite sorry for him, his overprotective loony tune of a mother made him a victim.
(ElBastardo, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 22:14, 2 replies)

karma
my mum hit the roof when she found out i have smoked weed. I got the whole talking to about the perils of the devils lettuce and how it will fuck up your life blah blah blah.... Spewing anti-weed propaganda.

But being a photographer i owned a negative scanner. Cue me scanning and printing the half dozen photos of mum and dad suckin on bongs when they where in their 20's.

People. Destroy your negatives not just the prints of any incriminating evidence
(mediumformat likes cyan, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 20:54, Reply)

Foreign Office
I went for a job interview with the Foreign Office once. The interview lasted a whole day and I even had to sign the Official Secrets Act as part of the process (so I probably shouldn't be writing this!). It was for a very good job and I was gutted to get the rejection letter a week or so later.

However, I was absolutely mortified to find out a few days later that my mum had got hold of the rejection letter and had phoned them up demanding to know why they hadn't given her precious little boy a job! She berated them for their poor recruitment choices and apparently finished her little speech by indignantly telling them that it was "their loss" before slamming the phone down.

I was 27 at the time.
(Lionel Tiger, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 17:39, 6 replies)

Having made a
total balls of my A-levels, I didn't get in to my uni of choice and ended up going through clearing. I hadn't expected to fuck up quite so badly so hadn't really put much thought in to a back up plan, and in the end I simply applied to the old poly in the same city as my first choice. Got in fine, no problems etc. But I'd left it too late to get in to halls, so had to find somewhere to live.

The uni had rather kindly organised a massive list of private landlords and their properties, but again, having left it so late I was pretty much looking at the dregs when I got down there. Thats how I came to live in a house with a psychotic chinese lass and a bloke with an excessive fondness for Bolivian marching powder.

This guy was 26 and had been at uni for seven years. He'd never completed a course, either repeatedly failing years or changing his mind about the course and starting a new one. I can't imagine what role his penchant for little bags of white powder played in this...however I digress.

At the age of 26 his mother would:
1) Come down from London twice a month to tidy his room, and if she saw fit the communal areas of the house as well - once sparking a blazing row between her and the our mentalist female housemate for 'moving her knives'.
2) Take him to Tesco for his big shop whenever she came down, then put it all away, frequently moving or throwing away my food to do so. This is despite the fact that he lived mainly off takeaways paid for by
3) His stonking great allowance. He also had a credit card which she would pay off in full every month.
4) There were other things too; taking his laundry back to London, going with him to the GP because she didn't feel the doctor was taking him seriously, choosing which hairdresser he went to, etc etc...

Until one day in March sometime, I came home to discover the front door open, a police car outside and lots of shouting. Lots and lots. It seems that during a routine tidy and rummage round of his bedroom she'd found his stash; just over an eighth of weed and a couple of lines of coke. She'd rung the police and tried to demand an ambulance too, then tried to have him detained under the mental health act when - rather understandably - he had a massive go at her. When she started throwing things and screaming I scarpered and returned a few hours later. No sign of him. Weeks pass - still no sign of him. One day I come home to discover most of his stuff has gone. Then in June when I'm preparing to move out myself, I heard the door go and an unfamiliar male voice; he's back to clear out the rest of his stuff under Mummys watchful eye.
She'd locked him in his room 'for his own good' until he agreed to spend a couple of months in rehab. True, the guy was a dick but it really wasn't necessary. Needless to say, I never saw him again.
(berk, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 16:34, 4 replies)

Wheelchair bound
My wife used to be frinds with a girl, I think her name was Liz, when she was in primary/secondary school. Liz's mother was something a weirdo. Very deeply religious (That's usually where things start to go wrong), and something of an overbearing presence towads her daughter. Liz was in a wheelchair - I don't know what ailed her but it was a genetic condition she had suffered from since birth - so her mother would do everything for her, but not in a nice way - it was all done very begrudgingly, like she was letting her daughter know she was put out by it all.

She literally cut her dinner up for her, chose her clothes, friends and what she watched, read and listened to. Even though poor old Liz was perfectly capable of doing much of these tasks by herself. They lived in a horribly run down old farmhouse with no inside toilet - only a rickety old wooden outhouse at the bottom of an untended and overgrown garden. The house could only be reached by crossing a couple of fields as it had no driveway (remember - the daughter was wheelchair bound).

All of this was made worse by the fact that they weren't poor, not by any stretch of the imagination. Liz's mother got ample carer's allowance, as well having a not inconsiderable amount of money in the bank that was spent on clothes and a shiny car for herself.

There isn't really a happy ending to this story. I don't know what has become of Liz, neither does my wife. Apparently she got married but is still living under her mother's regime. We saw her in a chipshop once. With her mother and someone who must have been her husband, but my wife was too scared to say hello.

There you go.
( BlueHaze Chutney. All good., Fri 11 Sep 2009, 16:25, 1 reply)

My Parents are lovely.
Hello,
Everyone. My Parents
Let me type and
Post what I like on internet forums.

My parents do not read and edit
Everything I post to check that they are not portrayed in a bad light at all.
(langers, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 16:12, 4 replies)

Don't speak - ever. Just don't fucking speak !!!
The first girl who didn’t kick me out of bed the next morning muttering something like: “Urrggghh, you hideous freak! Fuck off!” or “Sorry I was really drunk, I though you were your mate,” was someone named Mel (Melanie, not Melvin – I performed a rigourous check of her undercarriage for excess cock n balls the first night we slept together and received a resounding negative response in the tranny-fucking department, thank fuck). Things were getting pretty serious between Mel and I, so I found myself invited round to her parents for tea and biscuits. And I was suddenly absolutely fucking terrified.

Mel had talked about her parents. They were liberals. Throwbacks to the 60’s when love was free, pills were cheap, and the music wasn’t quite as shit as it is now. I imagine Mel was conceived at an all night love-in somewhere. She was a scouser: for all I knew I could’ve been shagging the bastard love-child of John Lennon; she did look a bit like John Lennon, come to think of it. Only with tits. And I knew from speaking to Mel they were very open about everything, inculding sextalk with their dear daughter. That really freaked me out. Mel’s mum probably had a written report on her kitchen table about my shagging technique. It gave me the fucking willies.

So, we go round to her parents house. I’m sat perched on the edge of an armchair silently shitting myself as Mel’s mum and dad sit on the sofa opposite. We have tea. We have biscuits. Mel pops out for a minute and her mum asks me a question. I blink. I try and process the question. Doesn’t work. I gulp, blink, blink again. Then I start to reply:

“Oh, we started doing that a few weeks ago. Mel didn’t want to at first but I have to admit its something I always wanted to try, so we got really drunk one night and gave it a go. Don’t worry, I was very gentle. And we used lube. We took it nice and easy and eventually we managed to get the whole of me in,” I sipped my tea. I looked up and noticed Mel had come back into the room. She looked pretty fucking scared. I switched my gaze to her parents. Mel’s dad was sitting perfectly still, but his fists had clenched. Mel’s mum had put down her dainty little china teacup and her mouth had fallen open ever-so-slightly.

“What’s going on?” asked Mel, her voice quavering.

Mel’s mum responded: “I asked Spanky if he’d like to take you round the back,” she adjusted her skirt. “I thought he might like to see what your father’s done with the greenhouse and the rockery.”
( SpankyHanky, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 15:44, 7 replies)

My mother..
is too protective of me. she makes me run a hotel down the hill from our house. She watchs me from her window to make sure I'm doing what she wants.
oh wait mother is calling.


N.Bates



*taxi please*
(Leoninus "Never lick a fresh turd on a hot day.", Fri 11 Sep 2009, 15:32, Reply)

The Poo museum
I've only just remembered this.
I went to primary school in the Netherlands for a few years, meaning I am completely bilingual and got the best (and worst) of both cultures.
One week my teacher decided to have a school trip to an exhibition that was on in the local museum. It was all about poo, sort of like 'Oh, this is tiger poo, wow' and 'Ah amazing, this is how your poo mechanisms work' etc. Children love that kind of stuff, it's cool.

So the letter got sent out to the parents, telling them to pay 5 guilders (or whatever the cost was back then) and to make a packed lunch for their children, because this was an educational trip about poo.

Of course, my dad had to kick up a fuss about it. He isn't the calmest person at the best of times, so he threw one of his usual tantrums. He wrote a letter to the headmaster, then a few days before the trip met up with him. It's all a bit vague but I can remember him telling everyone what a scandal it was. My mum was fine with the whole thing and probably just went along with him because she knew it wouldn't be a big deal.
'You can't talk about poo, let alone go to a poo museum! What are they teaching you at this school? It's just rude.' Was basically his argument.

Anyway, he ended up coming with us (I think the headmaster asked him to) so that he could be sure that my delicate little mind wouldn't explode when I learned that poo is natural and that every living thing does it.
I think he quite enjoyed it actually.
(Lalalalou, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 15:24, 11 replies)

I had sex once
in a gym.
With a helicopter.
The rotor blades whirred gently as I plumbed the depths of the
tail crankshaft
with my
crankshaft.

Locked in so passionate an embrace,
the helicopter heaved,
strained,
moaned,
as I whispered,
sweet nothings into its
radio system.

Rushing,
thrusting,
faster,
harder,
faster,
her rotor spun,
faster,
faster,
breathless,
our climax was as precious and as exhilarating as it was perfectly synchronised.

Spent, we lay on the floor of the gym together and gasped for air,
furiously,
but sated.
I clothed myself and we ate corned beef
as the moonlight shone through the window.

I feared I would never see her again.

And yet, weeks later, I heard the familiar whirring of rotor blades.
A knock at my door.
She is pregnant.
It is mine.
It can only be mine.
I invite her in.
We open a tin of corned beef to celebrate this
beautiful occasion,

...you can see where this is going, can't you?
(LongJohnBaldry, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 15:23, 4 replies)

Not Guilty, m'Lud
My posting on the first page regarding the school that I went to and my parents brought back so memories where my parents turned out to be pretty decent guys and that the school was run by a bunch of sadists.

I had moved through the school and reached the grand old age of 11.

My teacher was a ginger haired git with a centre parting. Let’s call him Kenny.

Checking our work at his desk with us standing next to him he tells me to go through to the library next door.
I do and wait for a few minutes until he comes through and tells me to go down to the headmaster’s room.

After a while he comes down to the headmaster and they question me about how much money I get per day (6d – train fare), what I spent it on and to empty my pockets.

I’m then told to go back to class.
One of my pals told me that after he had sent me down to the head, he returned to the class and took my blazer in to the library which he then returned.
No-one knew what was going on and someone said that there had been some thefts of money.

After lunch I asked Kenny whether the incident was closed (which I thought was quite ballsy for an 11 year old) and he responded “Why? Do you have a guilty conscience?”
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” went the class much to my embarrassment.

That evening I told my parents that “something quite strange happened at school”.

The headmaster was duly summoned to explain the actions of Kenny.
It transpires that he smelt cigarette smoke on me.
My mum dropped me off every morning and she smoked in the car… so no surprise there.

It was pointed out that an illegal search had taken place and that I was being considered a thief by my peers. Needless to say, the school tried to blame my pal for suggesting that it was to do with money.

The very next day at school, Kenny enters the class and he then proceeds to apologise to me in front of all of my classmates. He also announced that there was absolutely no suggestion that I was pilfering money.

Yep… pretty good parents when all is said and done.
(bof, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 15:16, Reply)

I’m a helicopter parent
Or that’s what other parents think of me when I go chasing after my young uns when we go to kids parties in buildings with a play area.

The truth is that I would rather charge over the squishy shapes and go play in the ball pool than spend an hour listening to the other parents sit round and bullshit about whos kid is the best, what clubs they are in, how the kid can speak latin etc etc

My wife says I’m antisocial, I say I have the mental age of a 7 year old.
(mon bison powered by magnets, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 15:14, 14 replies)

Never helicoptered by ma and pa...
...alcoholic mother and abusive father.
But enough of that.

I'm currently re-reading the excellent book 'John Peel' by Mick Wall about the late and great iconic DJ.
Mr Peel's parents were much the same as mine (totally "non-helicopter" - more "submarine" really) and it seems to me that Johns' parental neglect caused John to fill the void in his life by discovering and totally immersing himself in other interests (music).
Perhaps we have Johns' parents lack of helicopter piloting skills to thank for giving us such a legendary icon?

Anyhoo, enough amateur armchair psychology...
My daughter was asking me what I was doing as I typed this and I told her the title of this QOTW.
"Oh, you're a helicopter parent daddy!" she told me.
"WTF?" thought I.
She then reminded me that I worked on the local emergency rescue helicopter a few years back.
Fair enough...
(emadex thinks the world will end on, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 15:10, Reply)

I remember
when I was about 9 years old, I stole a mojo (one of those penny sweets) from the newsagents. I was terrified that if my parents found out, they would tell a policeman and I'd get sent to prison!

So I blasted their heads off with a shotgun and buried them in the garden.
( browser still relating boring anecdotes into a void on, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 15:04, 6 replies)

Uni Buddy
I had a friend at Uni whos dad was in the Helicopter Unit for the South Wales Police Force.

His best story was when his dad found out he smoked because he saw him in a corner of the school playing field having a sly fag..... from 2000ft* whilst returning from a "mission" chasing some chavs in a stolen honda accord.

Maybe bullshit, but some time later, I questioned how his dad managed it, I'm hoping it was total coincidence that as they flew near the field he said "oo thats where my son goes to school, oo look that kid there with a distinctive coat looks a bit like him" rather than the police surveiling schools on a regular basis.



*I've no idea what height these things operate at, I needed a number, 2000 seemed good to me.

//edited for spelling
(cornishbob is going to hell on, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 14:50, 5 replies)

The First Time my Dad went on the internet....
Was at my house, about 5 years ago. He had never ever seen the web, (he has only just got a DVD Player), but he had a pc for typing letters and writing his book. however My super hilarious freind had been hovering around the pc as well earlier that day.

"Hi Dad"

"Right show me this Interweb thing you keep going on about"

"Ok click my name on the logon screen - password is xxxxxxxx"

"WHAT THE" my dad screams.

As a 19" version of Tub Girl is looking at him from the screen as my desktop background.

All I saw was said freind walking past the bay window waving.

Cunt.

My Dad now asks me to be careful and stay away from the "terrible shocking images" on the internet, as the police may find out.

Im 35.

:(
(hoogie Original Cunt Horse Author, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 14:49, 4 replies)

The ole' trouble n' strife...
I don't know if she's over-protective or just zealously adheres to guidelines, but when it says "Boil fresh water from the tap and allow to cool for 30 minutes" on the side of the baby formula tin, she always prepares it when EXACTLY 30 MINUTES HAVE PASSED. If 31 minutes have passed then she needs to start over. When I point out that the tin doesn't say "Allow to cool for EXACTLY 30 minutes AND NO LONGER!!!" then I'm just being difficult.
(mcnelson, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 14:36, 4 replies)

The bitter comes out better on a stolen guitar...
All of you people with over-protective parents; count yourselves lucky. Lucky that you had parents who actually gave a damn (granted, in their own ways) and didn't see you simply as a pawn in their strange, political games, to be picked up and cast away as they saw fit from one day to another. To be shut away in an empty room when they didn't need you around.

Yeah. That.

gonna go 'way now. Sorry for lack of funnies, but I will provide a length joke to lighten the mood.

Length? About sixteen years.
(EffinDoubt is breaking glass on, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 14:34, 7 replies)

My sister is going to be one of those
My sister is more than a little bit of an uptight control freak. Think Monica from Friends with a nice personality. She does get rather stressed when things don;t go to plan. Luckily her husband is the opposite. Unorganised but very relaxed. They compliment each other perfectly. She helps him keep everything in control and he helps her relax and stop stressing over every little thing that goes wrong. A perfect match.

But now they have a kid. Harry. an 11 month old little wonder. My sister has him under her complete control.

She has a daily rota which she stick to with military precision. (she had a go at my mum for letting him over sleep by 5 minutes)

She weened him off his dummy before he was 5 months old.

I dread to think what it will be like for him as he gets older. I can envision a life where he has to supply her with an itinerary of all his plans for every time he wants to go out. How long on each playground swing/slide/climbing frame he is going to spend. Where he;s going with his friends and when he will go somewhere else etc.

I wouldn't be surprised if she has him using a diary as soon as he can read and write.
( Crap Little Monkey Deathstar, so good they built it twice, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 14:33, 2 replies)

Reading these posts makes me realise how indifferent my parents are!
Having said that anybody I start dating - THEIR parents all of a sudden are annoyingly protective.

Maybe I look dodgy :S

...
(trippeh, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 14:18, Reply)

probably bindun
but there's nothing more overprotective than getting someone to lock your kid away under a bed to stop the really bad people getting her.


Is there Ms Matthews?
(magic the cat will someone please think of the kittens, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 14:17, Reply)

Student digs
One half of my parents actually fits this week's question particularly well, as my father is currently on the West Yorkshire Police Air Operations Unit, and if you're unfortunate enough to live in some of the shittier parts of the county, you've probably been disturbed at some point by his MD902 Explorer flying overhead on a chav hunt. On an unrelated note, he's built up a decent portfolio of student flats to help fund a comfortable retirement - not the greatest properties in the world, but in no way approaching health hazard status either. Unfortunately for him, when the Wakefield Express was doing a "special" feature on scumbag landlords and rip-off student housing, they somehow found out about his job and thought he'd make juicier reading than the real arseholes out there. Even though he wasn't charging particularly high rents, to avoid a media circus he met with the lead journalist, put his case across and mentioned that he was even going to slightly reduce them next year. Next Friday's paper had a page 4 story with the headline "Heli cop to pare rents".
(Vice Admiral Sir Charles Cockbrush KCB MBE DSO, who is finding it increasingly difficult to log into b3ta.com wants to duck your aunt and kick your puppy, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 14:04, 16 replies)

After reading through a lot of posts so far
it has made me realise how completely opposite my parents are. From a young age, I have been treated as quite independent. As I never really did anything wrong, I never got any grief. I always said where I was going when I went out and came in at a reasonable time. There were never any formal rules and so I never felt the need to rebel or push any boundaries. I never took advantage of their liberal attitudes but they were always there when I needed them and left me alone when I didn't.

Consequently they were more like great friends rather than parents and I was the envy of my friends who got plenty of grief off their parents. It's a method I've employed with my kids. I don't set strict ground rules and they don't take the piss.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 13:47, 2 replies)

my mam is ace
as long as we stay out of trouble and don't go to jail or get killed, she lets us do what we want.

shes funny, caring, and would kill us if we did anything wrong


Plus she reads B3ta so you know shes ace
(shhhh she might be reading this now)
(Leoninus "Never lick a fresh turd on a hot day.", Fri 11 Sep 2009, 13:33, Reply)

She doesn't know
Back when i was a wee nipper still in velcro shoes and patched jeans and hand-me-down clothing, my mum would always tell me to watch out for cars and don't speak to strangers. Im 25 now and i drink and smoke, had a good few years stint as a officer in the army, work in IT Maintenance and shag just about anything willing to go my way...well only of the female persuasion and she still phones me up every 3 days to tell me them same words. I thought being in the army would help me get away from all that but once the evils of internet emailing has got to her i was finished.
(EpeeDemic, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 13:26, 1 reply)

Could explain a lot.
Apologies for some of the length. And to my mother if she should ever come across this. I consider myself very lucky with my parents, there have been some times when I've thought, that's just wrong. You shouldn't even go there. But as I've got older, I've learnt to appreciate some of the reasons why someone can be fucked up.

My mother has had it worst than most I now know. She was born to a very upper class type background- but with upper crust particulars. Ie she was born to my grandfathers mistress. For reasons I may be able to go into later she was dumped in a drawer in a pub dresser because the owners were vague relatives.
She was later taken back by her father and (unwilling) 'step'mother who would never let her forget this. She was brought up during the war, with these parental figures dining literally with royalty and actors and generally doing the top level socialite thing- You should see some of the memorabillia I've inherited!- yet she was beaten and mentally tortured behind this facade. So that's most of the back story. She married my father so that she could go to the cinema and be allowed to watch till the end of the film. But from the day she was married and managed to leave this (now fatherless) family, she had to call her stepmother EVERY SINGLE DAY for at least an hour to hear all her woes and complaints. I remember this as a kid vividly, and the fallout if she for some reason couldn't call her was severe.
When my 'grandmother' got old and ill, my mother looked after her every day, 45 minutes away, whilst still looking after my dad and me and my two sisters, for many years. (She was a weird one my gran, I've never known a blood grandparent, so assumed having to clean the silver and do the garden was normal for a six year old to have to do.) But she was strong and never wavered from her beliefs. She was strong with her battle against illness too, and when she finally went (with a ghostly visit to me I'll never forget (one for another true ghost qotw)) my mother finally was free to live her own life. Almost in time too, as my father suffered from strokes soon after and needed over a decade of care himself. Guess who did all the work? Yup, my mum. So after his death, it's taken another ten years for her to finally find a sense of herself.
A couple of years ago, a letter arrived from a detective type agency. Her real mother, who she'd never even known who she was, had had a son. He had heard rumours of this earlier child and decided to find her. So now she's just coming to terms with the reality of why and so on of why her real mother had no input in her life whatsoever.

So, what's my point you may ask? Well, my mum has always been supportive, always been there, never asked for too much in return, after a life I can only imagine still has an incredible sense of humour and purpose in life. I can honestly say I doubt I could have turned out so balanced. There's a reason why parents do what they do, now I'm one myself I can understand the love behind wanting to look after someone that much, but I can see the detriment caused by overuse of that sentiment. I've never been helicoptered and I hope I'll never fall into that trap, but to those who have, take heart- believe it or not- they've usually got your best interests at heart. Even if they are misguided.

No apologies for lack of funnies. If you can find humour in life after a life like that as my mum can, you deserve a pat on the back.
( Blind Meach Cautiously optimistic, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 13:08, 3 replies)

Helicopter some times + abusive at other times = confusion
(Length warning)

My parents married young & I arrived 11 months later. Dad is pretty chilled – worked hard, became successful and is a happy chap if he regularly gets to have a beer, play golf etc. He was away a lot when I was a kid (which explains some of below). My mother was (and possibly still is) a completely hypocritical headcase with the mental stability of a bunch of frogs with Gulf War Syndrome.

As a kid there were the usual aspects that a lot of other people would have had to deal with; certain children I was told not to mix with, certain TV programmes were banned, some types of clothing weren’t allowed etc. Fine. Not a big deal.

However there were much more embarrassing times - mother goes storming in to berate teachers in full classrooms for giving me detentions I that I thoroughly deserved, not allowing me to attend school trips in case I hurt myself (how can you hurt yourself watching Macbeth at your local theatre?) not being allowed to be alone more than 100 yards from the house, not being allowed to have the BCG jab as “my son will never catch TB we are far too middle class” and many others that I won’t bore you with. It was 100% helicopter parenting.

The worst thing though was the confusion because when she wasn’t acting like that she was beating the fuck out of me and messing with my head. There were times when I had to be kept off school until bruising had faded, made to sleep in the garden shed overnight in the middle of February, locked in my bedroom with the window chained, told I was educationally subnormal, stupid (turns out my IQ is about 140), was a failure, she wished I’d never been born, making me scrub ink off my arm with a pumice stone until my arm resemble a raw steak, plus many further (some worse) examples. This type of thing occurred pretty much daily from the age of 3 until I left home at 17.

Once she even got a GP out to the house to try & have me sectioned for crying once she had kicked the shit out of me(I recall the GP saying something along the lines of if anyone in the house needed sectioning it was probably her).

So on one hand I was not allowed to do perfectly reasonable things, some times my mother would go completely OTT to “protect” me, some times she would defend me when I deserved punishment by others and some times she would batter the fuck out of me physically and psychologically (hence my username).

I am now 36 and through therapy (mainly TA but some CBT as well) I have lost the anger about it, although I have chosen not to have anything to do with my mother for the last 19 years. I recognise that some of it was due to her having mental health issues but you don’t really realise that when you’re 14 and having a glass bottle smashed in to the back of your head or when you’re being told “you should have been an abortion”.

I have no idea how much my father knew - I never told him at the time & wouldn't now (we get on & I don't want to upset him).

I’m posting this not for sympathy or any bollocks like that but because I know there are some people who think they should not have children themselves because of their own childhood (who think as their parents were crap that this would make them be a crap parent). It is logical but incorrect to think like this – your experiences might not make you a brilliant parent but it will definitely make you a different sort of parent to yours - so have kids if you want them. (I want them – I just need to find somebody willing to with me first).

This is badly written due to my hangover. Apologies for that and the lack of f/
(lkjshaglkasjdhglkhjz lkcvl; g;aodh;owih, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 13:02, 17 replies)