Okay, first off let me say that I’m sorry you didn’t get to have a better relationship with your parents. That’s hard.
My parents did have expectations of me (and high ones), but they also never seemed to forget that I was a kid and was gonna make mistakes. I was very aware
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that if I fucked up there would be consequences, but those consequences were never indicative of less love. I knew my parents loved me even when I was punished or grounded (which made it harder to stay mad at them). My parents had an sort of open door policy—as long as I told
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the truth, they’d be in my corner when it came to problems outside of the home. Inside the home they were the arbiters of justice, but they were very transparent about their reasons for punishing me. It was never “you made me mad by doing x”, it was always “We need you to realize
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that outside in the world, the consequences for these actions would be much worse.”
From age 12-15 I really railed against my mom. I was miserable at school and mad at a lot of things that had nothing to do with my mother. But because I knew she’d always love me, I directed the
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anger towards her. As an adult she’s told me how hard those years were for her. Every time she turned around I found a new way to be nasty and mean. She knew it wasn’t really her I was mad at and I was exceedingly hard to deal with, so she got it and soldiered through.
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The best example of this was I begged my mom to go hang out at a friend’s. She was hesitant but let me go. I went and realized there were a lot of drugs and alcohol and boys. I was 14 and really nervous about it, so I called my mom, pretending I needed to mow my grandma’s lawn
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the next day. She got what I meant, picked me up & asked what was going on that I needed to leave, I lied and said I was just tired. She knew I was lying, but she didn’t push it. She remembers that as the moment she knew she was doing something right— that even though it was an
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“I told you so” moment, I called her anyway, bc I trusted that no matter how scared or mad I made her, that I knew she would help me when I was in danger or upset. It was a big moment for me, too, realizing the depth of love my mom had for me. I got really lucky.
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So I guess what I say is that even if you have good parents, GREAT parents, I think it’s still normal to kinda hate them as a teen. Teens are both adults and kids, both too old and too young for their age, and being a teen is miserable. Even if you have good parents you still
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probably want to rage against the machine, a bit.
Does this answer any of your questions? 😅
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yes thank you this is legit helpful! it’s cool to have what looks like a healthy model of setting clear rules, that’s always something i worry about with parenting 😅
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I think if someone were to hand you a baby today you’d already make a pretty good parent, honestly
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i hope so that’s v important to me
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