Her Mother Has Always Relentlessly Bullied Her About Her Weight, And Now She Is Seeking Advice On How To Finally Make Her Mom Understand How The Comments Affect Her Self-Esteem
According to this twenty-one-year-old woman, her mother and father were always great parents while she grew up. They sacrificed a lot to give both her and her brother the best life they could, and her parents were always physically there whenever she needed anything.
But, no parent is ever perfect– and her mother has been a consistent bully about her weight for her entire life.
Ever since she can remember, both she and her brother have been overweight. Her mother, on the other hand, has always been skinny– even though her mom tries to claim that she was once chubby in her teen years.
Her lowest weight was right around her eighteenth birthday, but in the years since, her weight has fluctuated up and down.
And after she started working a year ago, she began eating unhealthily due to a lack of prepared meals and also not working out due to exhaustion.
“So, it [her weight] has been steadily going up, and I say I am more overweight now than I was ever before. I am not a monstrous size, but it’s obvious I’m heavily overweight,” she explained.
Now, she completely understands that if she does not lose weight, she is endangering her health and her life.
However, she honestly has no clue where to start– such as how to change her diet, cook for herself, and find time to exercise.
Most importantly, though, she cannot find the motivation to change her habits and believes it is largely her mom’s fault.
Apparently, her mother will not stop bringing up her weight and going about the topic in extremely inappropriate and hurtful ways.
Her mother is blunt, judgemental, and says things that she believes stem from her mother’s “mean girl” reputation.
It all began when she and her brother were eleven years old, and her mother put them both on a diet.
They remained on the diet for two years and then tapered off. Still, her mother never stopped making comments to the both of them about their size.
The comments ranged from citing health issues to claiming that “no one wants to date a fat person.” And now, she believes that both she and her brother have rock-bottom self-esteem because they were constantly degraded while growing up.
“My mother claimed she doesn’t remember this and only remembers bringing up health issues to us. It was not just health issues,” she vented.
Plus, as she has gotten older, her mother’s judgy comments have only increased in rudeness and frequency.
For instance, her mother now refers to her as “fat” in every conversation they have– which happens at least once every day.
Her mother also constantly tracks what she eats, comments on her food at every meal, and never fails to tell her that if she keeps “eating so much,” she will die.
Her mother also makes remarks about her stretch marks and even gasps dramatically whenever a stretch mark is visible. Then, her mother tells her to “look at how she is destroying her body.”
On top of all that, if she ever slips or trips, her mother blames her lack of balance on her figure. And in terms of her dating life, her mother always acts shocked whenever she reveals she has a date and claims she completes certain tasks “like a fat person.”
So, as you can imagine, she is repeatedly hurt and upset by her mother’s relentless bullying. Whenever she actually expresses her upset, though, her mother just laughs and calls her dramatic or actually gets angry herself– which, of course, only escalates the situation.
And bizarrely, her mother only ever shows remorse if she is pushed to tears by her mother’s comments. Then, her mother will apologize and hug her but go right back to bullying her a few weeks later.
Most recently, though, one more incident upset her beyond belief. While she was having a playful discussion about her future wedding, she noted how she would probably like a dry reception since she doesn’t want hammered guests at the event.
Well, her mother argued back and forth about it and claimed no one would want to attend a dry wedding– since, apparently, her mother and the rest of her family are big drinkers.
And after hearing that, she ended up pointing out how her mother was always so negative– which apparently flipped a switch in her mother’s brain and led her mother to start making more comments about her weight.
First, her mother said that her wedding plans did not matter since she would have to find a man first. But, when she revealed that she actually was seeing someone, her mother implied that she “could not possibly be dating anyone because of her size.”
Obviously, that stung, and she ended up telling her mother that she no longer wanted to talk since her feelings were hurt. Somehow, though, her mother ended up turning the situation around and claiming that she hurt her mother by making her mom “watch as they eat themselves to death.”
And at that moment, she finally snapped and freaked out on her mother.
“I yelled in her face that she was not a victim here. There are no victims here, and if anything, I am the victim of an eating disorder,” she recalled.
“I said she sounded like a narcissist by trying to pity herself in this situation.”
And ever since that final incident, she has been at a complete loss about how to finally make her mother see the sting of her words.
Apparently, she has tried practically everything already. She has sat her mother down and tried to have a heart-to-heart conversation about how much the bullying affects her.
But, during that conversation, her mother actually just apologized for not “putting a stop to her weight gain” when she was younger rather than taking responsibility for all of the rude remarks.
She has also tried shutting down and not responding to her mother when she begins to bully her. Or, she tells her mother to leave her alone. Unfortunately, though, neither of these tactics ever worked.
And finally, her last ditch effort was showing her mother a clip from a television show where a younger girl had a parent that acted just like her own mother.
The show apparently ended with a lesson about how the parent was wrong, but her mother never understood the similarity.
In fact, her mother just claimed that the little girl actress in the show was not overweight, and she was. So, the “situation was not the same.”
Anyway, now, the only thing that she can think of to get her mother off her back is to actually insult her mother. That way, her mother can feel first-hand how bad the sting really feels.
Honestly, though, she claims that her mother is a beautiful woman– so there is not much to comment on.
Plus, she does not want to stoop to her mother’s level and be immature about the situation.
Still, she is desperate to find a solution to her problem– since she genuinely believes that the reason she cannot motivate herself to lose weight is that her mother is always damaging her self-esteem.
“I hate myself and the way I look, so I don’t care to take care of myself. And I completely blame her for my self-esteem issues, considering I was literally never bullied by anyone for my weight except her. And the issue is one my brother shares, as well,” she reflected.
So until she is financially equipped to move out of her mother’s house, she is looking for any advice on how to finally make her mother understand how all of the comments and remarks affect her.
Have you ever had a parent treat you this way? Why do you think her mother has never seen the error of her ways? Do you think there is anything else she can do to make her mother realize that she is a bully? If so, what?
You can read the original post on Reddit here.
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