Mothers who constantly belittle/criticize their daughters, yet baby their sons

They see themselves in their daughters, and want the chance to avoid their own mistakes or faults.

Their sons are just their little boys who never grew up.

Chinese and Hindu mothers are like that, but I'd say Hindu moms are the worst.

My mother was a bitter woman who spent her life in an unhappy marriage. She deeply resented her daughters for being able to drink, party, and fuck around.

Because they think the daughters are rivals and the sons are fuckable.

r2 I once worked with a woman from India (she'd been in the US for 20+ years).

Anyway, we had a particularly annoying coworker in her early 20s. One day the Indian woman walked up to the annoying coworker and said completely deadpan, "Kelly, if you were my daughter, I would kill myself." And then walked away ...

Yet older women are always talking about their grown-up daughters.

R5 Kelly should've responded with, "If you were my mother, I'd let you."

[quote] Chinese and Hindu mothers are like that,

So are Italian and Jewish mothers.

R4 Ahem.

internalized misogyny

My grandmother (in her ‘80s) treats my attentive caring mother like a slave, while she lets her absentee abusive sons off the hook with praise. She’s a self-hating hag, and it’s a massive effort not to say that to her face every time she rings my Mum up or calls her over to the house for yet another imperious order. When I think of all the days I have had to grit my teeth to say something kindly reprimanding to the shrivelled prune without slapping the teeth out of her mouth and screaming at her to stop...

She’s also a covert racist & homophobe - the type who’s “fine with gays”, as long as they don’t dare to move in next door or come to her local village bake sales or have the audacity to call each other spousal nicknames or hold hands in public, and the type to pine for the days when she had ‘Negro’ houseboys to pick up after her shit.

I really want to get back at her, somehow, before she finally shuffles off.

I think mothers want to toughen up their daughters so they can withstand the world. And curry favor with their sons so they won’t be cast aside when they’re elderly ladies.

Before he died my dad told me, “your mother will never be happy for you. And she will always try to compete with you. Because that is who she is. Her life started out harder than yours did and she resents you for that.” I believe him.

All of the women in my family are like this. They see their daughter's as competition/sluts. When we were kids, my mom would accuse my sister of being pregnant and punch her in the stomach so that she would miscarry. My sister was only 12 when this started, and I'm absolutely sure she was not having sex.

Flip side - mothers who never "release" their sons. There's nothing worse than a Mama's boy. It can go hand with the the subject of this thread.

I wasn't babied, just left to be. My mother was MUCH harder on my sister - they're essentially the same person and their love/hate dynamic is off the charts. They bitch about each other to me and they're bitching about the same thing. My mom is scared of everything - and that really informed the belittling and criticizing.

Oh, my sister is now an academic, and when she started getting stuff published, speaking at conferences, etc. my mom made plans to submit stuff for publication and conference proposals, even though she never even finished college and has basically spent her entire adult life scamming welfare. When she finally got it into her head, that they only want stuff from people that have advanced degrees she complained about "gatekeeping."

Watch any episode of Lidia Bastianich's show where her daughter or son appear to see a perfect example of this.

So idea, OP

R12 that makes perfect sense. No bitchery, that is a very logical explanation.

The thing about competing with daughters makes sense too. They had to raise kids and wipe asses while women nowadays have a lot more control over their finances etc. Must make the old bitches bitter, but doesn’t make them easier to deal with.

One of my sisters has been very overweight since adolescence, been married 4 times, has 6 kids, and after a life of being a pain in the ass to everyone, turned herself around and is now possibly the best person I know. I look back and see how badly our slim, fashionable, professional mother treated her for being fat. My other sister, who is slim like our mother was, and treated like a princess by mom, is a nasty self-centered witch who will never change.

R4 is correct.

R14 &R16, your mama has mad issues!

R2 I think I agree, but I’ve noticed my Chinese-Americans friends and acquaintances are much much crazier and more unstable than my Indian-Americans female friends are acquaintances The latter are just mean and competitive. But the Chinese women seem genuinely messed up by their childhoods in a deeper way

My mother resented the fact that I was younger than her.

Freud.

I knew a mother who constantly criticized her son and acted like her daughters were perfect. Big Closet Dyke.

No one can accuse me of babying Christopher.

I always felt my mother was like this, (though nothing that compares to R14/16!!).

She was always good at making subtle digs, and expected me to do more chores than my three brothers. Part of that was her antiquated view of gender norms, I think.

She's softened with old age.

They’re reflecting the way the world treats men and women.

delusional

My mother has always competed with me. She befriends my friends, acts more like a sister than a mother, and is generally a drip. She has to think of herself as the belle of the ball, and is much more tolerant of men’s foibles than women’s. A lot of it is due to the mentality of her generation, although she pretends to be the same age as me!

I was at a wedding where the mother of the groom wore a white dress and cried hysterically. Her husband and daughter read her the riot act but nothing could stop her resting her head in the crook of her son’s neck and holding his hand in the pictures outside the church.

The groom didn’t notice anything was wrong The bride was very gracious and kept her mouth zipped.

R4 = Olivia Benson

My oldest male cousin was fawned over by the entire family, not just his mother. When he graduated from high school, he told everyone that he was gonna be a lawyer, and got into a third rate public university and everyone fawned over him for that. He was arrested on a drug charge during his first year and lost his financial aid. My grandparents, mom, aunts and uncles are all convinced that they weren't his drugs, that they belonged to a friend, and he was unfairly railroaded.

I did not kill my daughter!

Sometimes pint-sized harlots have to be kept in line.

I worked with a rather dim woman who often expressed frustration and bewilderment at her husband’s relationship with his mother.

He and his mother went on vacations together twice a year, to which the wife was explicitly not invited. Once, she brought a photo of her husband and mother to show us, taken on one of their vacations. They were on the beach, the milfy-looking mother in a bathing suit, draped over her son with her huge breasts pressed up against him.

This co-worker told us about the bizarre phone calls (her husband called his mother everyday and they talked for about an hour) where they’d coo at each other. He’d call her “kitty” and “my sweet, sweet muffin,” etc.

She’d try to talk to him about it and he’d become enraged and leave for a day or two, presumably to go to his mother’s house. She never outright asked if we thought he was screwing his mother, but that was clearly what she wanted to know. Everyone danced around it, but she once talked to be about it when it was just the two of us and I said yes, and that she probably needed to cut her losses.

I think she knew that, but wanted someone to validate her. She did end up divorcing him. He let her have the house and he moved in with his mother, unsurprisingly.

R39 People looking for validation gets a bad rap, but sometimes they really genuinely need it, like that lady.

My mother was sometimes inappropriate with me. She never crossed a line into abuse, but she was addicted to attention from men (all the woman in my family are), and wanted it from me too. Joke was on her, because I barely notice women. By the time I left for college, she mostly ignored me.

Women who see their daughters as competition tend to see all men as conquests, even their sons.

[quote] When I think of all the days I have had to grit my teeth to say something kindly reprimanding to the shrivelled prune without slapping the teeth out of her mouth and screaming at her to stop...

There's middle ground between "saying something kindly reprimanding" and slapping a grandmother. I would just say what is on my mind.

Are you clairvoyant R37?

1) Jealousy

2) Daughters are supposed to be members of the immediate family unless they're married - this is extremely old fashioned but still exists. That means unless they have "a life," they're at the beck and call of their parents. The boys, even if unmarried, are free to do as they want.

In my household, my mother was not only jealous of my older sister, she created a RIVALRY with her when she was a child. I think she was a rival for my father's attention. Sick stuff. This didn't repeat with the second girl child because she was/is as dumb as a rock and my father had lost interest in the children.

[quote]What the hell is that all about, anyway?

Pull up a chair.

What’s this now?

In reality, a daughter will end up doing more for her parents in old age than will a hetero son.

Another family story!

One of my aunt's (not the mom of the cousin above) was obsessed with having "a baby boy." Not her and her husband, just her. She married 3 times, and had kids with each, and every time said she said she wanted "a baby boy." She finally got him with baby #5.

She calls "my baby boy" too, or at least she did the last time I saw them when her "baby boy" was 17.

Not sure if it’s worse to get treated like some of the poor posters in here, or be totally smothered by a mother.

My mum is the worst smotherer. No matter what I do good or bad as the eldest child in the family I’m still her “baby girl”, and she calls me that at family reunions, in public etc., despite my asking her to stop. She constantly keeps tabs on where I’m going or what I’m doing with messages and calls, tries to take over things I’m doing “in case [I] hurt [myself]” or “something should happen”, ingratiated herself with my friends, and can’t seem to accept that I want to do things alone and unmonitored like date or take night classes or occasionally go out drinking. For context I’m 27 years old, not retarded, and have lived away from home before (to get a degree, no less, something she does not have). My mother afaik is not a repressed lesbian (believe me, my arsehole dad would let me know if she were), and has another younger daughter (my full sister) as well as several nephews & grand-nephews and a puppy at home she could be suffocating instead. I’ve sat her down to tell her this behaviour is no longer appropriate and that it’s ruining the good things about our relationship (and there are several good things), but she won’t listen and take it to heart properly.

Cunts

R45, get her a cat.

A man shall leave his mother and a woman leave her home

[quote]R45, get her a cat.

I agree, R47. My mom was a bit clingy, though not a horror story like many in this thread, and her getting a rescue cat she could focus all her attention on (and vice versa) took the pressure off me. Now we're all happier.

R15 I can relate to that all too well. Both the mom and sister being the same person, but not wanting to admit it thing and the mom being scared of everything part. I wish they could just get along and not both call me about stupid, petty things that don't matter.