Hellobee Boards

Honestly I still see my parents as infallible... I would be doing good if I can be half the parents they are!

I thought of them as normal people. They are divorced and never got a long. I saw them fight over things like visitation and child support. My mom also would also do things she wasn't supposed to and then ask me not to tell my dad (he had custody). I saw that they weren't perfect.

From a really young age I had this sense that my parents (my mother especially) were really making some big parenting mistakes. It made me feel really insecure and unhappy, honestly. And it made me really uninterested in bowing to their authority, ever, since I felt like they just sucked in these huge important ways. They were/are good people, but they had some really large unaddressed issues in their own lives that prevented them from parenting well in some really key areas.

I think that my mother is really aware of it, and now that she see me making really different parenting choices, we're struggling in our relationship. And now I'm terrified that my daughter will look back and have this long list of how I was a horrible parent. Even though I've made sure not to do all the things that my parents did, I still worry that I'll fail her in some other huge way.

I thought they knew the answer to everything and would protect us from anything bad forever. I had a big shock when my dad had an affair and my mum didn't have the strength to deal with it properly. 14 years after they separated they finally got divorced this year and it was ugly. So now I look at them both very differently, it's sad.

@sarac I don't think I could have written how I felt towards my parents as well as you just did. My parents were always breaking promises to me and weren't very good at hiding the fact that I wasn't the favorite child by a long shot. I don't have kids of my own yet, but my biggest fear is that they'll feel about me how I felt about my mom.

I've been able to accept it more now that I'm an adult and understand that they are just human. But growing up it sucked when everyone elses parents were superheroes deserving of their pedestals and mine weren't.

Pedestal until about age 9 and then I was on to them