When Your Mom Wants You to Hate Your Dad
Some parents are unaware that their behavior will forever influence the lives of their children.
It took me many years to be able to love. I was not born this way. I was raised surrounded by negative feelings and grew up on traumas and toxicity. Two adults — my parents — hated each other and didn’t hesitate to make it clear for a two-year-old little girl.
Every summer I spent with my grandmother, she told me how much my dad deserved to be dead. “Hopefully he falls onto the train tracks and gets hit by a train!!” she told a six-year-old girl countless times, full of anger and grudge.
Nevertheless, I’m here to tell you that it is possible to heal from a harmful education. Let me explain to you my story.
My parents divorced when I was two.
For as long as I can remember, my parents only yelled and insulted each other. When I was six, they decided not to talk to each other again, and they assigned me, their six-year-old kid, the messenger’s role for their stupid letters.
Every weekend that I switched homes, I had to hand over to each of them their selfish letters. Each time felt like a pang of guilt as if I had written those words myself. They were two cowardly adults who used a kid to keep their ego intact.
I lived with my mom and could only see my Dad on some weekends. She was so overprotective of me that at some point I became addicted to her. I believed everything that came from her as if it were my religion — from her, and also from my grandmother. My grandmother also instilled in me feelings of hatred towards my Dad and created a kind of trauma in me. She wanted him dead. Just like that. Without regard. She used the same tone to talk about frying an egg, as to wish my dad was dead. For this reason, there was a little girl who came to normalize such brutal comments at a very young age. As I think about it, I get dizzy.
Both my mother and my grandmother raised me in negativity, martyrdom, intolerance, envy, jealousy, toxic competitiveness, fear. Unfortunately, I spent a lot of time with both of them.
As one of the consequences of all that, I became unsure of myself. My feelings were not valid. On Fridays when I had to go with Dad, I spent the day crying at school. I had chest pain because I didn’t want to go with him. I couldn’t control it. I had been brainwashed.
I was between four and seven years old, so I couldn’t explain at school what was happening to me. I couldn’t define it. I just cried, and cried, and suffered.
I lived a plot twist every single weekend that I visited my Dad. Life was beautiful and unforgettable when I was with him! My Dad was amazing!
We could talk about anything in the world, and he never lied to me. We wrote a journal of all the things we did together in the summer of 1994, day by day. Ironically, he would never say a bad word about anyone — not even about my mom, even if I snitched to my dad much of what she said about him.
Back at my mother’s house, I again had to listen to terrible stories about my Dad, mainly when I innocently explained the great weekend we had spent together.
Every night before I went to bed, my mom would tell me stories about him. None of them were pleasant. By the time I was 7, I knew tales about my Dad’s infidelities that no kid should have known. — how much better would have been to listen to children’s stories!
Needless to say, I was not a mentally stable child. My feelings turned into a ping pong match, they changed sides quickly and unexpectedly before I knew it. I swam every day in a sea of confusion.
I lived in a constant contradiction between the stories I heard and what I felt inside my heart. On the sly, I always had a good time with him, feeling confident, safe, cared for, and loved.
They labeled me as an immoral and unemphatic person and blamed me for loving my Dad. I came to believe that I was stupid, that my opinions were worthless — they invalidated all of them!
“Didn’t I tell you how much he made your mom suffer?” they said so that next time I’d think twice before saying a good word about my Dad.
I couldn’t say out loud that I loved my (evil) father because he was known to be a demon. So unconsciously, I ended up burying my feelings. They did it.
I grew up sad, uneducated, and problematic.
As years passed, I grew up as a hypersensitive person, weak, fearful, troubled, and insecure. It wasn’t pleasant to be with me, I was antisocial, the few friends I had would disappear without notice. I only felt safe in my bedroom, alone, with my books, or my music, or my obsessions.
I piled up complexes of inferiority, fears, disorders, addictions, obsessions, nightmares at night, and all sorts of panics. I was afraid to walk alone on the street or talk to strangers.
It was a nightmare. I spent my childhood going to therapies, they diagnosed many things to me, put labels on me of all kinds, even gave me medication.
At work, I had impostor syndrome half of my life and never felt like a qualified person, nor a grown-up woman, nor a good human.
Many years went by for me to become aware of the toxicity I grew up with and to start making baby steps in the right direction.
On the way to healing: when I was twenty, I left home.
In the beginning, I felt lost. It was hard to live on your own after 20 years of toxic overprotectiveness. However, as soon as I left liberated from those four walls my life started taking different directions.
I lived in different cities and met incredible people. London, Madrid, Munich, Berlin, each of them uniquely inspired me; it felt as if I lived inside different movie plots written, finally, by myself.
I spent years observing people around me and their vision of life, and, for the first time in my life, I started building up a picture of what I liked and what I didn’t as a human being, in those around me, and life. I finally felt legit to choose with care on which brick to step every day, who to count on, what to care for, and with who and in what to spend my energy.
I started loving people! I hadn’t seen the good in people until I forgave and respected myself first. Happiness transformed; now it lived deep inside me, not outside, nowhere else.
The more content I was, the more happiness I’d attract around me. Therapy, good friends, my dog. Without realizing it, I ended up trapped in a loop of good luck. Problems became more natural to face and bad vibes easier to get rid of, and life became easier for the ones around me and me.
This process became like a re-education of my whole self. By walking at a slower pace and living on appreciation, I learned what my family hadn’t taught me. It took me almost three decades, but it finally happened. How amazing is that?
I am over thirty now, and I love my Dad.
My father instilled in me to “always be honest, with yourself and others, no matter what.” — and this is, most probably, the closest to my religion.
The most challenging for me was understanding that it’s OK to say no; and also that it’s OK to leave behind negative and self-destructive people — which also means to be fully honest with yourself.
But I guess that if as a kid you were not even allowed to love your Dad — which is an immense contradiction for a child—, it might take time until you can look at a person in the eye and be able to say: “No, I don’t want this.” or “Yes, I love this person.”
When my Dad was going to be sixty years old, I wanted to do something special for him. I was living in Germany, and he was in Spain, but once I imagined in my mind a surprise party for his birthday, no one on earth could have stopped me from making it happen.
During an entire month of preparations in the distance, among other surprises, I brought back some friends from his childhood that he had lost track of and prepared the most emotional video ever seen.
Nothing has ever been more worth it. You can only see my face in the picture, but I will never forget my Dad’s, full of tears of joy. He cried and tried to describe how it feels to have such a genuine bond with his daughter, even if they took him apart from her love during the first years of her life.
What I want to say with all this is that the truth always comes to light.
Plot twist: a healed adult.
When I look back, I barely recognize myself.
I am now over thirty-five years old and I am also a mother. I am the mom of the greatest gift that life gave me. She is the happiest 18-month-old girl. Needless to say, we aim to raise the mentally healthiest living child after what I lived in my skin.
I can’t put into words how it feels to love a little human so much that you want to invest every glimpse of your energy in doing things for her to the best of your ability. With a strength that comes from your life experience, your traumas, your learning, your growth, the people you met along the way, the person you became.
Our goal is her happiness. Our medicine her love.
They say we are the average of all the people we surround ourselves with and spend our time with. Good vibes not only make the people around you happy, but they also make you end up surrounded by people who share the same vibes as you.
So I needed to put a barrier between my mother, my grandmother, and myself. I still have them on the phone, and I am still forced to listen to his negative vision of life and destructive comments, but luckily, today I face it as a healed adult.
I end this writing with tears in my eyes; this story moves the deepest feelings within me. Because she is my mom. And she is my daughter. And sadly or not, sometimes blood doesn’t mean a bond for life. Each person needs love and care; every relationship needs to be watered every day, cared for, and be two-way in good thoughts and connection. Love cannot be selfish, otherwise, it dies.
If my mom had cared about her baby more than keeping his ego bright and shiny, she would never have told me when I was seven that my dad slept with twelve women in one night, that condoms were disappearing from the night table, or that he deserved to die.
Please, don’t do that to your children.
