Ask Lemmy

I had moved away a few years and my mother was homeless due to her own choices and lack of effort to do anything. My wife and I were in town visiting her family, and we decided to take my mother out to dinner. During the meal she was (rightly) complaining about the perils of being homeless and having to watch out for the pigs. I suggested that she look into getting into some government housing. You know her response?

"I don't want to be the light in he dark."

If you're as confused as I pretended I was, she means she didn't want to live with/around black people. Which was really fucking surprising to me, considering we had lived with, around, and had been friends with all kinds of POC growing up (as you you tend to do in poor and mixed neighborhoods and when you have to rent out rooms to get by). That level of racism was rather surprising, but she had become toxic as fuck in the years before I moved, so it shouldn't have been.

I was talking to my father about the war in Palestine (my family and I are Jewish so its not unusual). I said "hey maybe peace is a better way of combatting terrorism", he responded that concentration camps should be built to combat terrorism and strip the Palestinians of their culture and identity.

Parent told me I shouldn't hold it against my older sibling who abused me when I was younger because the older sibling also remembered my birthday and got me toys when I was younger

My Dad's gone totally off the rails conspiracy theory nutty.

Fake moon landings, fluoride in the water is mind control, vaccines cause autism and maybe microchips and mind control again, foreign people are simultaneously lazy stealing benefits and stealing all the jobs, my god the racism. He fell into an echo chamber during COVID and hasn't come out again.

The best one was when I was telling him as a healthcare professional on the front lines watching patients and colleagues die that COVID was serious and we should take any opportunity to avoid it and make it better, he told me it was just flu and all fake news.

Yeah I don't talk to my parents much anymore.

I'll forgive you if you come back to God. My crime was finally standing up to her abuse and her insane religious bullshit (at 16) and moving out (at 18). Conditional love, just like Jesus preached lol

I told my mom I'm suicidal, she told me she regretting giving birth to me for "being ungrateful", and now I'm even more suicidal and perhaps even a little homicidal.

My mother did the slitty eyed gesture and said that there were too many chi*ks here, in the car part for a large asian grocery store in the local chinatown that she had chosen to go to, to buy asian food. Yes other people heard and saw what she did, including asians. This was more than twenty years ago so not linked to the current rise of more overt racism.

"We shouldnt have accepted east germany. They just get out money." And that its their fault for getting a dictatorship

"I hit and abused you because i was overwhealmed because of you" (i have adhd and autism)

We dont talk. She doesnt understand why.

My relationship with them was already in very thin ice due to repeated trust issues over the years, but what finally sealed it was my coming out to my dad and his response being "it's all because of this woke generation". Coming from someone who I thought had a very left leaning stance, therapy over the following years made me realize just how shitty and homophobic they really were. Turns out I'm probably more bi than gay (also ace), but it still stands.

As they got more and more out there on pre-MAGA conservative media, the unhinged hits just kept on coming. But probably the most unhinged was their belief that "90 percent of Black males are in a gang." Sad.

I was pregnant as the oldest daughter- three month later my sister told us she's pregnant too. My mother (having a boyfriend of my age at that time): "Oh wouldn't it be fun if I get pregnant too now?"

I couldn't believe what I heard (she is an abusive parent, only 2 of her 9 children contact her at all now, the other have gone non-contact)

My mother used to call me a son of a bitch until I one day replied "I know".

Or

"I don't believe in god because of the things He has done to me, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't believe in Him"

She also talked about her "schizo friend" quite a lot, as if the events were recent, even though there was no chance she had seen the person in over a decade.

We don't speak anymore.

I was like always told to respect them before beating me and telling me how much of a dumb, useless piece of shit I am and that I should be thankfull they did not abandone me and decided to put up with such an eyesore.

I guess they never heard that you have to actually earn the respect and now wonder why I won't call them more than once a week.

Reading through this I totally get why the world is the way it is.

Most people are actually really fucking dumb.

My mother telling me I should not think that she makes any money with me. (Backstory: Was living with her, dad paid ~~alimony~~ child support). I was baffled, because even when I lowkey suspected that, it was not even a relevant thing for our conversation at this time.

A few years later, when I wanted to move out for studying it was suddendly a problem, because she could not make the full payments for her house without the ~~alimony~~ child supprt from my dad. So I stayed.

Some more years down the line I finally wanted to move out, as I had a full time job in sight and wanted to live with my boyfriend. I was in my mid-twenties. Basically the conversation was the same as before, she could not pay for her house without me. She could not answer my question how she thought this would work out. Was she expecting me to live with her until she paid for the house? Because this would be up until my forties, maybe longer. The house is not big enough for two families, so it was never an option for me and my bf to move in. Of course I moved out.

My parents are good people, but my mom doesn’t know anything about technology. There was an incident where something was wrong with her computer. I had to go over and fix it. She said she couldn’t get the screen to come on no matter how much she moved the mouse.

The mouse was unplugged, cord hanging off behind the desk.

She said the mouse had somehow popped itself out and asked if there was one that couldn’t do that.

'Gravity is caused by the rotation of the earth'

apparently that's what they taught back when she was a kid

But how even?!

"Dinner's only a couple of hours away. Why don't you wait?"

Because I had just finished a sponsored fast for charity and hadn't eaten for two days.

There's too many.

Off the top of my head, a fav dark one might be their serious quoting the Bible to me about how any child that isn't respectful or submissive should be killed.

Some fucked interpretation of Deuteronomy about stoning a child in public or something.

My dad once said he never hit me as a kid. I was like "bro what world are you living in?"

After my mother passed, I spent more time with my father than before, just because I thought it was the right thing to do (and my siblings really did not care that much). I realized why I did not have a lot if contact before, he us a classic toxic boomer narcissist.

Spending more time with him did not mean that we grieved my mother's loss as a family, it was just him monopolizing the grief and needing an audience wallow in self pity. I had no say in any aspect of the funeral, he did not listen to anything I said, he never even once asked how I was, and when I talked about stuff from my life (because someone else asked), he started talking over me, making the conversation about him again. Classic narcissist parent playbook.

At some point i was fed up, and told him as much, which of course did not go over well. Complete disbelief, he acted as if I had insulted him, yelling, accusations of being ungrateful, all the bells and whistles. Not a single thought that this behaviour might have been wrong. I just left and cut contact. After a week or so he wrote me what I think was meant as an apology. What he "apologized" for was that because of his greatness, he was always the center of attention which of course emphasized my insignificance, which he can see made me feel bad. It was so grotesque that I burst out in manic laughter, my wife was seriously worried.

The good thing about this, it made me slowly unwrap what I now realize is a lot of childhood drama (which I thought was normal), and understand why my siblings basically don't want anything to do with him. Still struggling to take the step to seek professional therapy (which I know I need), but I already feel better starting to understand that how my father treated me was not because I am worthless, but because he was a really bad dad.

My step dad believes that the history of the physical world is as his mother explained it to him 70 years ago.

"I love you, but I don't always like you"

Cool. Thanks. Feels just amazing.

I remember talking about how the sun is relatively small compared to how big stars can get. Then my dad said “wait, the sun isn’t a star…” He basically thought the sun’s technical term was “a sun” and that stars are actually as tiny as they appear to us in the sky.

I don't remember if my parents have said something crazy. Maybe the time mom told me not to stir the tea a certain way because the clanking offended the spirits. Asked her about it years later and said she didn't say that. Lol

"Cults do like to cut off and distance their members from outsiders and their families" In the same email that he was threating to block me for suggesting his quoting of a Nazi might be a bad thing.

Close second: "Trump (married to a woman) is misogynist" but also "I (British), married to a Malay, can't be racist because I'm married to a Malay".

Honourable mention: "I don't like the word 'Islamophobia' or your Newspeak". My guy, Newspeak was famous for doing something to the dictionary, and it wasn't adding words to describe more concepts.

Anyway, he blocked me... Like cultists do. All quotes are paraphrased, I CBA digging through the emails.

Basically anything full on Cult of Personality for Trump plus steadily increasing levels of fundamentalism Christianity. Holidays have been getting.......tense to say the least.