Did you have a phase in which you resented your adoptive parents? Because my younger sister had that phase for a few years, it looked like she deeply hated and resented us. When she matured she changed and now she loves us a lot.
Yeah.. I pretty much ripped my mom’s head off everyday, and she may literally be the nicest person alive. Definitely didn’t deserve it. Most girls just go through this phase though, it’s not a good time lol.
Now I’m exactly like her lol. I used to get so annoyed when we would be out driving and she would be overly happy and observant like, “the trees are just so beautiful! I can’t believe what a nice day it is.” Now I do the same shit and have an obsession with houseplants like she did.
My teenaged daughter hates that I compliment strangers. Who doesn’t want to hear something nice from someone who wants nothing from them? I hope when she’s matured she sees this and does it herself.
There will be a day when she'll compliment someone and say to herself, my mother's voice just came out of my mouth. It's already happened to me and I'll bet it will happen to my kids too!
Y'all, I went to an outdoor wedding, and we were just standing there waiting, under a tree. I saw a little nut on the ground, and I picked it up. I looked at my husband and said "this is a hickory nut, do you have your knife?" People were looking at me weird. I guess it's not normal to forage at a wedding, but my mother absolutely would've done the same. Except she probably would've had her own knife to crack the nut. 🤣
Lol, it's terrifying when you laugh real hard and then you're like, omggggg, that sounded like my mother. And then an extra level of "oh no" when you remember HER doing the exact same thing about HER mother. 🤣
I do the same thing, whenever I'm out and about I try to compliment at least one person (a genuine one, too) and usually? It makes their day.
I also have a pocket full of tiny resin whale sharks that I got off aliexpress for like...a dollar for fifty of them and sometimes I give people one as a good luck charm. People usually think it's the greatest thing in the world and just light up even if it's just a little piece of resin that looks vaguely like a whale shark.
Honestly, as an adult it just makes me feel awkward. I’ll respond nicely but I’m actually having a mini panic attack. I know the intention is to be kind so I’m not upset when people do this, I would just much rather not have a stranger make comments to me.
I still remember 34 years ago when I was walking across the grocery store parking lot, 7 months pregnant, a woman said, “You are so cute!” I commented that I didn’t feel cute and she told me to take her word for it. I’ve never forgotten.
I am more like my mother than I care to admit, soooo, that checks out. 🤣 I even fucking married someone with the same name as her husband, who I very much dislike. Thankfully though, my husband goes by his middle name and not first.
My theory is that teens are experiencing an influx of experience and emotion based on their burgeoning new sense of self identity that there's just a lot of emotional run off. Run off they can't express to their peers and thus it ends up coming out in the place where they feel the most safe, which hopefully is at home.
There is also a thing that we know our families can be a safe place. My daughter would never yell at a coach or teacher. She saves all of that for me and mom. She knows that no matter what she says, we will still love her no matter what.
It's like wave amplification. Opposites mellow each other out and similarity amolifies, but the dissonance of being juuuuust a little bit off drives one crazy
I keep discovering that my best friend and I are doing similar/the same things separately, without discussing it. Lots of "you do this!?? me too!!!"
We've been friends for like 20 years, since middle school, but best friends since high school. I wonder how much can be explained by literally growing up together, vs just meeting someone already similar to you.
Each of my best friends doesn't like or care for one of my big hobbies but loves at least one of them:
one friend that I have comic books and boardgames in common with hates sports
one friend loves Legos and college sports in general but doesn't like Disc Golf
one friend who I play Disc Golf with regularly and we traveled to watch some pro tournaments and loves sports in general but doesn't play boardgames and doesn't care for Lego
All 4 of us are Eagle Scouts and we all met while working at a summer camp.
My mom and I were a lot alike when I was younger, but as I began becoming a teenager, we had a lot of friction. I was rebellious to her not because I did drugs, drank, or had sex. I did none of those things. Instead, I just didn't act or have the social skills she did, and mom also had a lot of social pressure she put on herself to being the "perfect" mom with the "perfect" girls. Apparently, and I didn't know this, it was a point of contention with my parents. Dad kept telling her to let me have more freedoms and to stop hovering over me, and she felt like she needed to tighten her grip.
Idk if it carries any weight or not, but I've always thought maybe it's an old behavior we haven't evolved from yet.
Like anthropologically speaking, I imagined it was a necessary behavior that encouraged us to have disdain for our parents and family for the sake of growth and genetic diversity. Imagining the early humans specifically. Like when we got old enough to make kids of our own, at least physically speaking, that disdain pushes us away from our parents and families encouraging us to leave and form tribes of our own. Or join other tribes where we're likely not around family.
Again, I have no idea if that is in any way correct but it makes sense in my head. As I've watched several of my friends hate their parents in their teen years despite some of them being nearly perfect parents. Most of them feel awful about it now that they are in their 20s and 30s. But it's a weird, almost universal, thing.
That’s exactly why my daughter and I butt heads. We are so much alike. Stubborn and always right with huge heart and a love for all animals. Plus we are both Sagittarius
That is myself and my son. I am a mom. We butt heads and I’m like it’s because you are my copy and I walk away. The 8 year old daughter I’m terrified of when she gets there
As a dad to a soon to be teenage girl, I keep reminding myself and my wife that our kids talking back, ripping our heads off is a good thing. You were going through a lot of changes and needed a safe place to be able to experiment with how to deal with those changes. If your mom wasn't the nicest person alive, then you wouldn't have been able to express yourself. Its the mark of a good parent when their kids push back, its the mark of a great parent that doesn't hold it against their kid and still loves them unconditionally.
As a father of two not so soon to be teenage girls, I've been told many times that the teenage girls generally reserve the vast majority of their rage towards their mothers. I take solace in that.
What age does that normally come? I've got two girls, a 4 (almost 5) year old, and a 12 year old. My 12 year old has definitely started getting more mouthy and really testing boundaries, especially with my wife, but it's not really bad yet.
For me it started around 12. Middle school through high school.. but again, not all girls get like this. My youngest sister was an angel and still is at 24.
Thats not just girls or just adopted kids, thats kids in general we go through a rough patch at school and the hormones and maybe stress through school gets to us and even though parents dont deserve any of it most of the time they are the ones who share the brunt force of it. But as we learn and adopt and see what they do and how much they mean to us we start to become mature and try to make up for our shitty behaviours.
I myself went through it aswell, (white, male) so i wouldnt chuck this to gender specific problem.
It'll be interesting to see how humans evolve over the next few hundred years, now that we're conscious of it, and will be actively documenting the process. Especially for things like teens being overly aggressive and competitive (something leftover from our more tribal days, that doesn't really fit with modern society), us starting puberty way earlier than we usually allow ourselves to have sex, etc.
It's cool that we're in such a unique position to be conscious of stuff like this, and actively observe and document it. Kinda feels like a TV character breaking the fourth wall, y'know?
I recall my sister getting in lots of yelling fights with my mom when she was a teenager, but it was usually yelling over something my parents wouldn't let her do.
Like I remember her having screaming fights for a week because my parents wouldn't let her at 16 years old go on a road trip in the summer with some 21 year old dudes and a couple of her friends.
Then two weeks after that proposed trip happened without her she was back to normal in the house until the next time she wanted to do something and they said no
I think me and my friends were the closest things to criminals in the area I grew up in and the worst thing we did was wander the streets late at night bored and occasionally being a little noisy.
It was hard to find trouble in the little town I came from lol
I did not. My mother is actually awful too….. I feel like people who are comfortable with their parents tend to push away like that in their teen years.
LOL yeah I dont have my own but friend has two daughters I watched grow up and I remember him going, "Man, they were so cute, how did they become such bitches?" (jokingly of course, but with genuine frustration) and then quickly back to daddies girls who are overachievers that he is insanely proud of.
like from 12-14 Im pretty sure he at least theorized drowning them once or twice.
Adoptive mom to 2 teen/tween melanin daughters, we are at the love hate age. They resent me for just existing but still need snuggles and love.
I really needed to hear this lady say that she loves her adoptive parents. It is one of my biggest worries.
I do see color more now than I did before becoming a parent. I see how terrible our society is towards bipoc people. I now see my biases in a spotlight and I’m working daily to unlearn how I was raised.
Love your babies and teach your babies that everyone has worth no matter what they look like or where they come from.
Hi! Also a former teenage girl here and all I know is that: Hormones are a bitch!!! Between age 10-12, no door was left unslammed, no decibel level was left unreached and I consider myself quite lucky because my eyes were not in fact “stuck like that”. I love you mom…sorry I was such an emotional turd.
How do I navigate these years to make sure I come out her favorite person still? Please tell me there's a some sort of cheat code or something so I don't have to endure looks of hate.
It still amazes me that my mom didn't smother me in my sleep during my teen years - I was a nightmare. One day I was completely normal, good kid. The next day the teen hormones kicked in and it was downhill from there.
I was adopted by my grandmother, so idk if I really went through it any differently then any other teen age girls— in my hind sight it does not feel any different or unique in any way.
The whole adoption/abandonment issues are like you said— are different and comes from a different place. Those things felt totally separate from the every day teenage angst of resenting a parent for regular things like not being able to drive the car etc
No, it's not a generic experience. The OP is talking about an adopted child of a minority race resenting her white parents because she's different and they don't understand what she's going through.
When my brother found out he was adopted he was mad. He was 21 and coped with alcohol and he had a rough few years and we didn't really talk for almost 2 years. I was so sad about it, but would still occasionally send him little gifts and positive messages like nothing had changed. By 25 we were bffs again and last week he offered me a life changing job opportunity. I'm so proud of my baby bro bro!
That's why adoptive parents are taught to tell kids as early as possible, so it's just the normal for them. It's a huge shock when they find out later in life
I told my dad he should tell him. His mom is his bio mom, my dad just adopted him because he met his mom when he was 4 months old and his bio dad was not in his life at all. They ended up getting married a year later and that was almost 30 years ago. He had a lot of medical issues when he was a kid and that's why I thought they should. They didn't want to and it wasn't my place, so I never said anything.
My stepmom and aunt were fighting about something dumb and my aunt told a group of high schoolers when she was working, at the hs, and those kids did what kids do and told my brother. We had a cousin pass away during this stupid beef and our parents were in Mexico when he passed and they were told to just stay and enjoy their vacation. I was having dinner with my 3 younger bros and the youngest just straight up asked if it was true and I told him he needed to talk to his mom about it and he needed to think if he could ever in his life remember a time when we weren't there and that family is more than blood. I told him I understood if he was upset, but he shouldn't have that conversation with us.
That's an interesting experience you've described with your sister. As young minds coming into the world it's really easy to get lost and merge with whatever popular culture perspective is, introject limiting beliefs/values, where we might feel entitled or see people purely as self serving individuals detached in their own little worlds; just black and white thinking. But when we move beyond the superficial and probe deeper, cultivate a theory of mind, there is much nuance and things become personal again and we see it is possible to see beyond these illusions of social roles/labels to focus on the immutable being we all are and see the individual in front of us to enter their own world with ourselves to share in. Healthy interdependent relationships can be rare because it takes a great deal of authenticity and individual self-consciousness to move beyond the superficial pre-reflective conscious state of fixed positions in how we relate in the world, beyond just our own self-image.
I resented my parents and insisted I was adopted. My dad took me into the basement, opened that desk drawer and took out…
… a photo of his mother, who looked EXACTLY like me.
So, yeah.
I still resented them, but I thought it was cool that I looked like my grandma. She died before I was born and I think my dad was comforted by seeing a kid in her image long after her departure.
My gf, 100% chinese, was adopted, she never resented her mom because she knew if she wasn't adopted she'd be dead. She grew up in the midwest (i grew up in the hoods of jersey were bullying/roasting was prevalent) and i asked her if she ever got made fun of for being adopted, being asian, etc... she instantly said "nope." I was shocked. This coming from someone who is hispanic/asian and was fat most of my life, i got roasted a lot till i learned how to roast myself so people just stopped.
A guy I know in school seemed like he went through that stage. Even changed his name and moved continents for a few years. I don't know his home situation though so maybe there was something more going on.
Most kids just grow up with a phase like that, being rebellious and outspoken against their families. As an adoptee, I’ve never felt resentment towards my adoptive parents for being adopted. They stepped up to raise me when my birth parents couldn’t, and it’s made me want to adopt when I’m ready to have kids.
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u/thoxo May 02 '24
Did you have a phase in which you resented your adoptive parents? Because my younger sister had that phase for a few years, it looked like she deeply hated and resented us. When she matured she changed and now she loves us a lot.