“Why won’t they thank us for the gifts they told us not to send?”
One of the things that perpetually boggles me is how members of estranged parents’ forums say their children have informed them that the relationship is over and they want no letters, calls, gifts, visits–no contact at all–and then the parents complain that their children haven’t thanked them for all the gifts they sent. Or they left a message about a relative who was in bad shape, and their children never acknowledged it. Or someone called their children because one of the parents was having a health crisis, and the children never called back, much less visited or offered to help out. Or they went to their child’s house, and their child wouldn’t even open the door. Or their child did open the door, and the torrent of verbal abuse the child heaped upon them was so vile that the parent was bedbound for days afterward from the shock. It’s like the parents think “no contact” means “I’m not coming around for dinner anymore, but sure, I’ll observe all the social niceties.”
An extended episode of this played out recently on a forum, and I wanted to go through it as an example of how deeply inground it is in the forum culture.
As a thumbnail background of the relationship between the member and her daughter, three years ago at Christmas the member posted this comment:
We are going to pop cards through door and leave presents on step, but am apprehensive, our son in law gave us police harassment warning 4 years ago and our local mp been brilliant trying to fight it for us, we managed to get permission to send cards and presents, but is enormously stressful, we never ever get an acknowledgment.
The member refers to the police harassment warning regularly, as in this comment from the current thread:
we spent first year or so fighting the police harassment warning that led to my arrest for delivering birthday present for e g d [estranged granddaughter].
Sent far too many lovley cards and letters every single one ignored,
Seven years of estrangement, opening with a year-long legal battle to get a restraining order that climaxed in the member’s arrest. This is where things stand.
The current incident began when the member learned through Facebook that her daughter was ill:
Oh dear will agony ever end found out today T [her estranged daughter] been seriously ill, not details so we feel like going over with some flowers, expect get rejected but is a gut instinct to trynreach out both upset poor Gra [her husband] worse than me.
The next day, after the attempted visit, she wrote,
Ladies no turning point, was horrendous, K [T’s husband] came door with little one and shut I and drew curtains. He would t Eve take the beautiful orchid from G.
A T Godfather [A, T’s godfather] was fantastic taking us and being so caring and supportive. He drove us To T Work and the locum was so kind telling us T off sick etc that I started to cry, Managed hold it together and walk off, then saw her car she was at dr she drove off Gra ran up to car I feel so desperately sorry for my caring lovely husband,
Then A took us to K parents, his dad was very short, told jsmT. NEarly died, I asked why no one thought to tell us he just glared and I said would he like it if was his daughter which point he shut door, he was goin job interview admittedly and his wife was t there.
Omg I feel In Bits my daughter I still love deeply could be dead and no one would have told me, I can’t put into words the deep sadness I feel it has really knocked us for 6 I left the orchid and flowers on step and we put a loving card through door but feel really is end of road now.
To recap: The member heard that her daughter was seriously ill, so she had her daughter’s godfather, a family friend, drive her and her husband to her daughter’s house. Her son-in-law came to the door carrying a child, refused the gifts, and closed the curtains so they couldn’t see in. The member, her husband, and the godfather went to the daughter’s workplace, where a replacement worker told them her daughter was off sick. Then they spotted her daughter’s car at the doctor’s office, and the member’s husband ran up to the car as the daughter drove away. The godfather drove them to the son-in-law’s parents’ house, where the member asked the daughter’s father-in-law why no one told her about her daughter’s illness, and whether he would like it if no one told him his daughter was ill. He shut the door in their faces. The member and her husband left the flowers on the front step (of the in-laws?) and put a card through the door slot, then went away.
The member’s focus is on satisfying her own concern about her daughter, and about her sadness at not being told her daughter was ill. She and her husband respond to this critical and stressful time in her daughter’s life by going to her house uninvited; going to her workplace uninvited; going to her in-laws’ house uninvited; and trying to chase her down as she leaves a doctor’s appointment.
The other members respond with love and support, and tell the member to take good care of herself, since she runs the risk of making herself sick from stress. (But not her daughter, apparently.) One member says, “How could anyone shut the door in your face with your daughter so Ill. it beggars belief.”
The member follows up:
Was sending lovely get well card and 2 notes I asked her to let us know how she is now as I give birth to her and do have feelings also said how would she feel if it was M ?
I very much doubt she will have common decency to respond would t be suprise dif she threw flowers and orchid away we left, I just do t know mydaughter anymore.
She sent her seriously ill daughter a card and two letters laden with guilt-ridden demands for information, and says her daughter probably won’t have the common decency to reply… to the people who responded to a no-contact request by going to her house, her job, her doctor’s office, and her in-laws’ house when she was sick. The member also complains that her daughter has changed so much that she doesn’t know her any more, and her daughter will probably throw out the gifts the member gave her… after she asked for no contact, and after her husband and father-in-law refused to take them.
The member finds her daughter’s posts on a support group:
Today went on t support group for her condition and read all her posts fled. Out so much and it broke my heart that she doesn’t want us anymore and is so ill.
Apparently started from knee op but took 6 days to diagnose hence the life death scenario. 25-30% don’t recover!
And then:
Sadly finding out sooo much T posting on support group almost daily and breaks my heart that her mum dad, brother and entire blood family and loving godparents are totally discarded.
She is still quite ill according to posts, recovery is slow from p.embolism,s as lungs damaged by scarring from what I gather, seems her husband is caring for children, we would have been delighted to help.
After the weekend:
Had lovely time With good friends over weekend but it is hard for them to know what hell to say is amazing how cruel and heartless T is, and her in laws.
The topic of conversation with her friends wasn’t her daughter’s life-threatening pulmonary embolism, it was how cruel her daughter and in-laws were about not resuming a relationship during her daughter’s life-threatening pulmonary embolism.
Another member shares the poster’s bewilderment:
I wonder, too, why AC don’t “give in” at dire times and let their parents back into their lives, at least a little. Is it stubbornness? I guess I don’t know, as I could never be this way. To me, no matter how great the rift with someone, you (general) soften in times of illness, and so forth (except maybe if there’s a history of abuse, but that’s not what we’re talking about). But I guess not everyone sees it that way.
Several members of an abuse survivor’s forum* were participating in the thread at the time, and were shocked by some of the member’s angrier comments. They pointed out that the member knew her daughter was reading the thread, so why would the member say such things when she wanted to reconcile with her daughter? Another member comes to the member’s defense:
Despite having reached out to her so many times, with cards, letters and small gifts for her and the children and getting absolutely nothing in return, they tried to be there for her again and again she’s failed to respond. [Member] has expressed her anger and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s angry because her ED could have died before they’d even found out she was ill; she’s angry because having tried so hard for so long, even in this potentially life threatening situation their ED still fails to respond, she’s angry because her ED’s f.i.l. treated them so coldly and I wouldn’t mind betting that what she’s angry about the most is that she couldn’t and can’t be there for the D she loves. If I’m wrong [Member] I know you’ll tell me so
.
So before throwing our hands up in horror, picking her posts apart and judging her, we should try and understand what a terrible time she and her DH have had.
…which is more or less the estranged parents’ consensus on the case.
The member continues to complain about her daughter’s ingratitude and cruelty, and the forum continues to console her. She continues to mention that her daughter and son-in-law fought for a year to have her legally restrained from contacting them, and the forum continues to tell her how sad and awful that is. She continues to complain that she’s sent her daughter all manner of gifts, cards, and phone calls without a response, and the forum continues to agree that it’s baffling that a woman who tried to legally bar her from contact isn’t happy to be pelted with goods and visits to her home, her job, her doctor’s office, and her in-laws’ house at a time when she’s struggling for her life.
After all, if the daughter had any empathy, she’d see how much she’s put her mother through.
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Reading through this, I was suddenly reminded of feminist posts on Nice Guys(TM). Particularly, that Nice Guys see relationships with women as transactions. I can’t remember the blog I read this, so I’m afraid I can’t give proper credit to who made this analogy, but to paraphrase: Nice Guys see women basically as slot machines, and after they input X number of “tokens” (favors, listening, gifts, whatever), the woman then “owes” them. Often sex, but sometimes it’s a date or general attention or a highly-fraught “friendship.”
And if a woman doesn’t happen to respond the way the Nice Guy feels she’s supposed to? Rage. Venom. Tantrums. The mask of Niceness disintegrates into vapor.
It’s the same relationship model and same mindset in the descriptions found in this post. “I sent X number of cards, X number of flower bouquets, etc., AND SO NOW YOU OWE ME.” But the slot machine’s broken and not given out any rewards for all that hard work. And you don’t really even think of what the slot machine feels or thinks or wants because, well, it’s just a slot machine after all.
It’s such a dehumanizing, objectifying way of looking at relationships with other human beings.
Jacob – this is a really good analogy. I was not familiar with “Nice Guy Syndrome” so I read up on it a bit & I think the mindset is quite similar. “I did A, B, and C for you growing up, so now you owe me X, Y, and Z”- completely missing the point, that is is not what you do for people that matters, but how they feel when they are with you.
If your adult children feel scared, belittled & emotionally drained when they spend time with you, it doesn’t matter that you paid their school tuition & drove them to ballet lessons twenty years ago, or that you bought them an expensive Christmas present now. They will hate spending time with you because it is really unpleasant, period.
“They will hate spending time with you because it is really unpleasant, period.”
This is why I think estranged parents focus on how their children “blame them for everything that’s wrong in their lives.” The ACs’ real message is, “You act like a jerk, which hurts me in these ways and had these serious consequences for me, and as a result I don’t want to be around you.” It’s too painful to hear “You act like a jerk, so I don’t want to be around you,” so parents focus on the past consequences, find reasons to make them the AC’s personal failings, and then complain that they’re being blamed for things that have nothing to do with them. Never mind that they’re still acting like jerks.
Glad you found it useful! Of course, I think a lot of estranged parents would disagree with the analogy, distinguishing between family relationships and romantic/other relationships, but I’m not a member of the Camp “Blood Is Thicker Than Water.”
Or worse, you know what the slot machine is supposed to feel/think/want, and are angry because it’s not feeling the right things. And its not your fault that it doesn’t feel the right way, you’re holding up your end of the deal, why is it okay for the slot machine to not do the right things? Why is your behavior not okay when you’re the one in the right?
Good point. I hadn’t made that parallel, but you’re right, it’s the same replacement of interaction with obligation. It’s role-based rather than person-based: The person in the role Man (or Parent) inputs their half of the script, and the person in the role Woman (or Child) is expected to output their half of the script. It doesn’t matter that the Woman or Child didn’t agree to the role or to that version of the script. There is no agreement and there is no versioning, there’s just input and the obligatory output. It’s a way to get the good parts of human interaction without doing all the fiddly delicate work of real interaction, and without running the risk of a rejection that reflects on your behavior.
“I wonder, too, why AC don’t “give in” at dire times and let their parents back into their lives, at least a little. Is it stubbornness?”
Holy shit. Ho-lee-sheet.
‘Why doesn’t the EC relax their guard at their most vulnerable and let their abuser take control of their life again?”
Because of course, estrangement is a constant act of the will, done *to* the parents, not *for* the mental wellbeing of the EC. It’s inflicted on the parents to get at them, so it’s only natural to expect that when they’re in danger they’ll come to re-evaluate their priorities and let down this petulant estrangement… to not do so is just being stubborn.
… Right? /s
Ah, that makes sense. Thank you. It’s still reminiscent of predator behaviour – picking the sick animal to hunt.
It’s scary how good you are at that. You’re exactly right.
In other thread several posters say that surely everyone wants their mums when they’re sick – and it’s like, well maybe they want a mother figure to look after them but I doubt the person they’re imagining in that role is the person who they’ve literally had to take out a restraining order against.
Projection, then? That’s possible too, and this might explicitly be the case in some circumstances. Thanks.
Amazing delusions these people have. Absolutely crazy thinking. You have it bang on with them thinking this sort of thing: “no contact is all very well dear, but let’s keep up the niceties as I still need you. I’ll be round on Tuesday for the grandkids.” Which seems to translate into “How dare you keep me from my grandkids! They NEED me.”
“I need them, therefore they need me.” Often combined with the delusion that because Granny cries every day because she can’t see them, they cry to see Granny. Also combined with the delusion that the grandparents can see the grandkids without the parents’ involvement, and that parents should be willing to let their kids skip off with people the parents can’t stand.
(Cue the protests: “But the parents know me! I’m the grandmother! They know I’d never hurt the children!” Yeah, no, think again. Has your child said you abuse him or her? No, I didn’t ask whether you abused your child, I asked whether your child says you abused them. You say yes? I know, I know, it’s all lies and so forth. But your child says you abused him or her. Your child believes you abuse children because your child believes you abused him or her when they were a child. Your child would be abusive if they let your grandchildren go with you, believing you’re prone to abusing children.
(Yes, yes, I know it’s all lies. But it’s lies your child believes. Your child can’t ethically act any other way, given what they believe.
(What’s that you say? They’re committing severe child and elder abuse by withholding your grandchildren? Nice diversion. Look, there’s no manual, they’re doing the best they can with what they’ve got.)
Holy shit, I read the title to this blog and wondered if maybe you were writing about my mom. I informed my parents that there would be no contact until certain terms were met which they refused to meet. So, no contact, right? Except they would still send me little messages for holidays, birthdays, etc, and then sent me some gift-cards for Christmas. I didn’t respond to any of this, so my mom of course built up all of her rage and then sent me a rambling, guilt-tripping message, demanding that I send thank you cards for their gifts and call her on her birthday and acknowledge the messages they send (along with trying to make trouble with my relationship with my grandmother). I lost my cool for the first time ever and called her and demanded to know what part of “no contact” she had failed to understand. Her response was basically “oh, well, I know you said no contact, but I figured that didn’t actually mean NO contact… like… that you’d still call on my birthday and stuff…”
AAAAGH
She is now blocked.
GAH. I was being snarky when I said “no contact” meant “I’ll observe the social niceties”–your mother actually said that? And meant it? I’ma go do a twitch dance in the corner for a while, then reread some threads about no contact with the idea in mind that the parents actually, consciously think their kids are going to keep contacting them when they say they won’t.
I’m glad your block is working. That’s a level of stress no one needs in their life.
Hi Issendai, thank you for this fascinating and incredibly insightful post. I am estranged from my own family, and my abusive mother often engaged in what I referred to as ‘gift-giving’ behaviours (I don’t have a background in psychology, so I don’t know if there’s a proper term for this). She seemed to do this for a variety of different reasons, and I’ve listed just a few of them below:
1. To stay in contact. Even saying that you don’t want a card or gift or returning it will be seen as contact, and contact = influence and control.
2. To justify contact, e.g. ‘but I HAVE to see you to give you this gift’.
3. To prove that she was a nice parent and never abused me. Genuine abusers never give their victims cards and gifts, do they?
4. Giving gifts or ‘helping out’ to back up a lie. For example, my mother went through a phase of buying me cleaning products. Some people might think that she was simply helping out, but I later found out that she had been spreading malicious lies about me, and telling everyone that ‘I was a dirty bitch who never cleaned my house’. Buying me cleaning products was her way of backing up this lie, i.e. she had to buy me cleaning products to force me to clean my house.
5. To give herself permission to abuse me, i.e. if I accepted a gift then she had the right to abuse me. That is what was owed.
6. Trying to give me gifts to ‘wipe the slate clean’. If I accepted the gift, then in her mind all was forgiven, she was a good mother, and the abuse had never happened. If the abuse had never happened, then she didn’t have to take responsibility for it.
7. As a form of control and denial of my rights, i.e. I was ALWAYS expected to obey my mother, put her first, and let her have her own way. This included being pressurized or forced by my family into seeing my mother (even when she’d been incredibly abusive) or accepting her gifts even though I didn’t want to. If I did ‘accept’ these gifts, then once again, the ‘slate was wiped clean’.
8. To portray herself as a victim and a martyr. After all, she had done this nice thing for me, but I still didn’t want the gift or hadn’t resumed contact. What kind of horrible daughter was I? In my mother’s own words, ‘A f***ing selfish hard-faced bitch’.
In my case, the sending of cards and gifts didn’t occur in isolation, and was part of a much wider pattern of abuse and stalking behaviour. And the tragic irony is that the very behaviour that my mother engaged in to try and resume a relationship with me, eventually led to me walking away from my entire past. This is something that she chose not to see, let alone accept – and yes, she does know what she’s done, even though that she always denied it!
One of the things you find all over the world, in almost every time and place, is that receiving a gift confers obligations BUT you can’t reject a gift on the grounds that you don’t want the obligations, because it’s a gift and therefore it confers no obligations. Your mother has raised gift-giving to a martial art. She’s not quite a black belt, because a true master would have prevented you from realizing her gift-giving was a problem, but that green belt of hers is looking mighty dark.
Thanks for replying, Issendai. I love your comment about my mother raising gift-giving to a martial art. So true! I’ve also taken a look at the ‘Out of the Fog’ website and forum – I think someone mentioned it on another thread on your site. It seems that many of my mother’s gift-giving behaviours are common to those with certain personality disorders. This makes a lot of sense, and is something I’ll continue to look into.
I think there is a LOT of overlap between estranged parents, and those with personality disorders. It would be interesting to know the degree of overlap.
I agree, LML. It would be interesting to know.
I briefly considered that my mother had a PD in the past, but the overuse of the term ‘narcissistic’ as opposed to ‘narcissistic personality order’, and overemphasis on NPD as opposed to other PDs put me off a little bit. My mother does have a lot of narcissistic traits, but I didn’t want to end up jumping on some kind of narcissistic bandwagon. Also, I’m not convinced that my mother is strictly NPD. Some of her behaviours could be seen as quite sinister, so I think that there might be something else going on.
What I like about the ‘Out of the Fog’ website is that it’s a very comprehensive site, and doesn’t just focus on NPD. When I get the time, I’ll work my way through it, and also keep reading Issendai’s posts on estranged parents forums. I’ve found them to be incredibly helpful.
BPD is similar to NPD and I suspect mine has BPD. She is depressed and ticks off all the boxes, even outside her interactions with her children.
Slightly OT
but: can you believe this?
I’m tempted to call fake because it’s so obtuse but why make this up there, and in such depth?
http://www.rejectedparents.net/forums/topic/estranged-daughter/
That mother and the mother in my post have something in common: When a tactic doesn’t work, they both react by doubling down. In the link you posted, the mother is so desperate to punish her daughter for choosing a controlling boyfriend that she cuts off all her daughter’s other options and more or less forces her daughter to move in with the guy and depend on him. Now she can’t conceive of why her daughter won’t leave him and come home. And no one calls her out on it.
It’s hard to say whether it’s a fake. Genuine estranged parents have said things even more obtuse, at greater length. The writer certainly has the tone down. And as for why someone would make it up, well, some people are sympathy vampires. My first response is that she’s probably real, though one can never rule out trolling. What interests me more is that the rest of the community–which is presumably composed mainly of real members–disagrees with her about her “karma” comment but sees nothing wrong with the rest of it. Some of them say things just as obtuse!
I hope it’s fake, just because my heart aches for that poor young woman who’s clearly in an abusive romantic relationship and is getting nothing but “well, you made your bed, and now you need to lie in it.” That utter lack of basic empathy, let alone anything approaching love, is disturbing.
The only thing that suggests potentially fake to me is the bit about the daughter’s therapist, just because it SO OBVIOUSLY REVEALS that the parents were and are abusive. However, the vague accusation of lying without specifying just what, exactly, the daughter was lying about (*cough* abuse from the parents *cough*), matches up with how other estranged parents talk about their estrangements, so … ugh, yeah, I think it’s real.
I’m so sad and so angry that these people basically served up their daughter to an abusive man on a silver platter, and they’re now BLAMING HER for being controlled and abused by this man.
“I will always love her but let me tell you what an intolerably horrible person she is.”
See, that’s the trouble: *being* a horrible and intolerable person is inextricably linked to not doing the things that the estranged parent wants them to do. They’d stop being so terrible the moment they begin obeying the EP again; all this digging for reasons that the adult child is bad is a punitive measure stemming from this weird binary in the EP’s thinking. If the child is a bad person then they can’t possibly be right on this issue, and if the parent is better than the child, then the parent is obviously in the right. But the child can become a less bad person and redeem themselves by stopping being so wrong on the issue of estrangement, which they have to be wrong about, because they’re a bad person.
It’s one big gross circular argument: going against the parent is a sign of being bad and, oh look, here’s all these reasons the parent just so happens to have proving that the child is a bad person, and since they’re a bad person they have to be wrong in going against their parent, because going against the parent is a sign that they’re bad…
Dizzy yet?
It’d take a clever troll to make this up:
” I mourn the loss of not only my daughter but now my grandchild. Even if she did come back, I know she would use the poor innocent child as a weapon against us. That is because my daughter is a spiteful and an unforgiving spoiled brat. I am grateful for the God given insight to have gone and taken her health insurance cards away from her before she got pregnant. My husband and I were in no way going to pay for her and her boyfriend to have a child. If you are an adult, then you have to make adult decisions and that includes paying for all your own medical costs.”
She’s wringing her hands over the suffering of a poor innocent baby while congratulating herself on PERSONALLY making damn sure that baby is born without the benefit of any prenatal or birth care. And the way she phrases it is just subtle enough, you can tell she doesn’t see any contradiction there at all.
Late to the party here, but “spoiled brat” is also interesting. I don’t think it’s possible for a child to raise themself to be a spoiled brat.
Also, if anybody else has trouble reading diatribes with absolutely no line breaks or weird line breaks, and you happen to use Chrome, I just discovered the extension Breakup. It reformats text to be much more readable.
Yeah, I went through decades of “gifts” being mailed and avalanches of snail mail that were promptly dumped unopened/unread in the trash. As advised by the Risk Assessment firm that performed the Forensic Review, unless the pattern changed I didn’t bother opening the mail. BUT! She did triumph over adversity and her ungrateful little brat of a (by this time very middle-aged, NC’d for a couple decades) daughter. She told everyone in my remote community via scribbling on the outside of the envelopes what a baaaaaddd daughter I was-my rural postal delivery people had all kinds of gallows humor over “Another Job Security Guarantee Oubreak thanks once again to TW’s crazy ass mother!” My trash was regularly pawed through by her PIs-I almost felt bad for them just standing out there going through the trash and retrieving among other fun stuff, used cat litter, (this cat’s poop was a Weapon of Mass Destruction/Biological Warfare,) the contents of a freezer from the garage that quit without notice and now contained a lot of stinking live wiggling stuff, fish entrails, a broken bottle of Doe In Heat (the dog couldn’t resist) and of course, opening and reading her snail mail if they needed any further info on their batshit “client.” My trash kept the employment rate inflated and bonus, was another couple of guy’s odiferous “treasure.” I was grateful when home shredders became available-Pinking sheers have their limits. Yes, I got Demand Notices for Thank You notes: The post office people offered to write a couple “just in case she’s tempted to go sane.” (Not gonna happen, guys.)
I guess when all else fails, they remain secure in their crystal-balling that “karma is gonna git them ACs.” (aka, Wishful Homicidal Thinking.) Their fascination with this concept somehow precludes them from considering NC is their “karma” for being really shitty parents who rightfully should have been behind bars-either in a jail or a zoo, I’m not fussy. I guess “karma” is selective and only works when they click their ruby red fulffy house slipper heels together-The one’s that coordinate with their red body suit sporting horns and a long tail. (Don’t forget the pitch fork.)
My late DH looked at me in near awe one day and said, “How did you turn out so NORMAL?” I told him it’s like getting to the Olympics-practice, practice, practice!
This is also something my in-laws did after we went no contact.
They used to get a family member to deliver gifts, which put everyone in an awkward position because we felt we couldn’t refuse to take them from someone else. They’d already been put in the awkward position of being asked to bring them, we felt bad about asking them to just take them back again.
Accepting the gifts felt wrong but getting a third party to return them felt just as bad. Often they gifts would just sit in a cupboard for months because we had no idea what to do with them. We didn’t want to accept them, we felt we couldn’t send them back without upset or drama, once we took unopened gifts to the charity shop with no idea what was inside.
When they gave us individual gifts I’d pass mine on to charity, and usually pass on the gifts they sent for our son as well. Because they would send him something but it would be clothes that were too small or toys that were for a much younger child.
Then they started sending a joint gift to all of us rather than separate gifts. One year it was a cooking set that contained ingredients they knew I was allergic to, another year it was a food hamper, again with food I can’t eat because of an allergy.
And then they started to bring gifts to the house themselves, just because they were passing. They rang my husband from the car and asked him to go outside, where they were waiting with bags of toys and food, and a letter conveniently tucked inside saying they wanted to start visiting and would be coming back the following day. That was followed by a string of text messages demanding photographs of our son, messages which got progressively more abusive as my husband ignored them.
So they went from “could we have a photo” to “we want a photo” to “we’re waiting for that photo send it now” to “your mother is crying, you’re selfish, after what we’ve just done for you, we deserve a photo, give us what we want.”
And at that point we told them (again) no more gifts. You can’t use gifts as an excuse to come to the house or to force us to give you something. They threatened to come straight back to our house that moment to have it out with us. We told them the bag of gifts would be on the pavement outside waiting for them. They didn’t come back.
At around the same time we found out they were complaining to other people about us. We were taking their gifts but refusing to see them. We were selfish enough to want presents but too mean to send anything back.
But a couple of months later they were sending my husband messages asking him to go and collect our Christmas presents from them. He said no. He said we’d already told them we didn’t want anything from them and we wouldn’t be accepting anything anymore.
So they arranged for another family member to bring them. She sent me a message to say she’d be bringing the gifts and so I told her we had already spoken to my in-laws and said we didn’t want them, so could she please not bring them.
That went as well as we had always worried it would go. She got upset, felt like she was stuck in the middle, and blamed us. She ended up threatening to show my in-laws my Facebook messages and accused me of refusing the presents without my husband’s knowledge. My relationship with her has never recovered from that time, we’re civil now, but not close.
We had already started to return mail from them unopened. The gifts have stopped now but I sometimes wonder if they are buying cards and presents and keeping them for our son so one day they can prove to him that they got him things they never sent because of us (or probably me) and hope he won’t remember all the times they turned up at our front door holding a present but screaming and shouting in anger and frightening him.
This is a big component in my decision to *not* RTS. When you’re dealing with this level of pathology, ANY CONTACT including Return to Sender is contact in their minds. Pick a course of action and stick with it-that’s key. So if you decide to RTS, look forward to spending your time frigging around with that response and it’s contact implications into the indefinite future. Be assured those RTS items will provide tangible “proof” of what a meanie you are. Just sayin’ for a whole bunch of reasons, I am not a fan of RTS. Throw it out, donate it to a shelter, a community pantry etc. but get rid of it.
When someone, anyone tells you they do not wish to have contact with you and you INSIST on “reaching out,” you’ve forfeited your right to bitch from your alleged moral high
ground when you pull back stumps.
Great post. I’ve realised at the grand old age of 39!, that my mother’s bland gifts were because she didn’t know me. Or the other gifts that she sends are really about her and wanting me to say thank you aren’t you a wonderful mother, despite me telling her not to send gifts. T
The irony in all of this, telling her not to do something and she will do it, but when I told her that I wouldn’t consider a relationship with her until she had at least 2 years talking to a therapist, she remarks back that she might see a hypnotherapist to offload her mind, (unspoken part was basically saying I’m not interested in seeking to speak to someone to repair our relationship.)