My girlfriend's mom is a sniveling, screeching woman-baby.
So, girlfriend is the eldest of four siblings; one slightly younger brother who's living on his own and doing pretty well for himself at 23 (I think), and two much younger sisters at 15 and 11. We were over there yesterday to, in theory, celebrate 15's birthday.
In an effort to keep this reasonably short, tensions ended up rising and a topic of some disagreement popped up. This is unfortunate, because the mother's primary mode of argumentation is to just repeat herself in a louder voice.
All of her kids (barring the youngest, who was more involved with trying to sit on her own head) came out with counter-arguments because the mother was making some Olympic class leaps of logic. Naturally, the appropriate response to this is to say "Why are you all ganging up and attacking me? Don't you know how much I do to make you all happy? How do you think it makes me feel to hear my kids say that something I did wasn't the right thing?", yelling whatever mangled point she was making one last time at the highest volume yet, breaking into tears, and going off to lock herself in her bedroom.
When the room had settled a bit more and we managed to coax her back to the living room, she sniffed out this nugget: "I'm really looking forward to when one of you attains a higher education and starts to understand more about how the world works"
The rest of the evening was spent trying to calm her down (which is difficult when the person takes every statement as a personal attack) and sneak the occasional hug in to the birthday girl, who had opened up about a difficult subject (her encounter with depression) and gotten yelled at for daring to insinuate that the mother perhaps hadn't noticed how much she was hurting right away (which naturally means that the mother didn't do enough to fix it, meaning she didn't care about her own child, meaning that she's evil and horrible), and who had also started crying.
After we left (GF and I hitched a ride with the brother in his Tesla), the two eldest children commented on how much better the mom had gotten... Her outbursts during their formative years had apparently been far more severe.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14956012 times)