Physical & Emotional Abuse Support Group

I guess this could be put in the emotional abuse category.

I suffer from infertility and anxiety, i am a very emotional person, although i think i have become stronger as i have got older.

I have a boyfriend, he's not perfect and got brought up with a different lifestyle to me, but i love him and he says he loves me as well, that should be all that matters. He works full time and has a very good record of saving, my mum is the opposite, she's 60 and is only working part time but she is up to her eyeballs in debt. Her car crapped out on her and she couldn't afford a new one, so my boyfriend came to the rescue and had lent her money for another one of her choice. He paid cash and told her to pay him back whatever she can afford, interest free. She also had a huge credit card bill which she got 14 or so years ago and hadn't been able to afford to pay it off, so the interest kept getting higher and higher, it came to over $5000 so my boyfriend once again stepped in, got a mastercard with a lower interest rate under his name and paid off her credit card bill for her, she is paying it back on the minimum amount every month.
He recently bought a house and now has a mortgage to pay off so of course he is very careful as to what he spends from now on as he is now the one in thousands of debt.

My mum constantly puts him down, when he's not here she is going off at me about how tight he is with money and she is always comparing him to my dad - her ex husband. My dad isn't perfect, he had an affair for about 3 years and ended up divorcing my mum and marrying the woman he was having an affair with.
When my boyfriend is around here, he might watch the history channel on tv as that is what he is interested in, my mum then criticizes him for watching it and tells him it is boring and he has no life. He has remained calm 99% of the time when she's gone off at him, constantly putting him down. I have to say that i do agree with some of the things that she says, but some things are just best left unsaid. you can't change a person so it's just best to take their bad points with their good. I get it in my ear everyday from her, always having something to criticize him for, whether it would be the way he pats the cat, to how many potatoes he ate with his last meal. i don't know how much more of this i can take before i snap. I have told her not to talk about him like that, but then she has to criticize me for sticking up for him.
She's not using him at all for his money, it might come across that way, but he's always been the one to offer to help her out. I think it's just her.

Putting that aside, as i mentioned i have infertility issues, my niece recently had a baby boy so i love to see him as much as i can, which at the moment is only about once or twice a month, he was born in September. i don't drive so the only time i get around there is with my mum. I have been babysitting kids for 13 years, but every time i hold my nephew, my mum has to criticize everything i do and it really gets to me. The worse thing about it is she says it in front of the baby's mum which makes her stare at me thinking i'm doing something wrong. Then she takes him off me and gives the baby to someone else to hold, it's like she's scared i'm going to run off with him or something, or maybe she thinks i don't know what im doing with him.. who knows.

The other day i got asked if i could look after him for a couple of hours as my niece knows how much i love babies and it helps me with my anxiety and i guess fertility issues as well. I was really looking forward to it, i am studying to become a photographer so i thought i would get some nice studio like pictures of him while i had the opportunity.
It was really warm outside, probably around 25 or 26 Celsius so i thought i'd take him outside to get some photos, my mum didn't say anything negative about me! I was surprised, but it was good, i knew it wouldn't be long before she found something to pick at, i brought him inside and ran a bath for him.. and there it started!! the water was very shallow so he could lie in there and have a splash around, she started criticizing almost everything i had done. I got annoyed and told her to go away and said she's always putting me down no matter what i do. She went quiet and didn't say another bad word about me.

Tonight, i was feeling upset about falling out with my best friend, then my mum starts going on about how i had the baby lying on the grass outside and all the negative factors about it. I kept saying he was fine, he had a bath afterwards, the grass was dry and he wasnt down there for long. Then she brought up the fact i didn't have his head lying on a cloth in the bath, and how it could have hurt his head - again, he was fine, he was all smiles and no complaints, so i dont know why she had to bring that up, it was last night i gave him the bath, not tonight. it's like she couldn't wait to bring up those negative points to me.
Tonight wasn't the night to do it, but i let it go.

It might sound as though it's just my mum being a negative person but shes not like that to anyone else, my sister has done things far worse than me, but my mum just laughs it off and tells me off if i make a comment about it, anyone else can do something wrong but again, my mum doesn't care,

i think this is emotional abuse as she just seems to pick on almost everything i do. I can't move out of home yet as because of a few health issues im unable to work full time so i can't afford to live anywhere else. i need to learn to stick up for myself a little more but i'm scared of what the consequences of that would be. I remember when i was much younger, my mum used to put me down and i would end up getting in a really bad mood and slamming doors because of it. I think she is the reason why i'm such an emotional person, i also have a low self esteem so i think that is all part of it.

I'd love to be able to talk to someone about it, but at the same time i'm always scared about what they would think of her.

She does have her good points as well, everybody does. But i just wish she would say something positive to me for once instead of always putting me down..
Posted on 11/08/09, 09:11 am