I should first include a potential trigger warning: TW: mentions of childhood trauma, domestic violence mental illness, and drugs. Delete if not allowed.
As I am reluctant to talk about this with anybody else, I have been pondering the idea of coming to Reddit for advice since I have never done so, so here I am.
Anyways, so I have been seeing a guy for a couple of months now, as we matched on Tinder in January and officially started dating just under a month ago. I have always been told that if a guy tells his parents and friends about you that it’s a good sign that he likes you, so bear that in mind. With us becoming more serious, he began to tell his mom the things I thought he would keep between him and I, i.e. that I grew up without a mom because she was a criminal with a drug history and the court has issued a restraining order for me to my sister, as she has committed domestic violence acts towards my dad and I. My sister is also currently in jail awaiting psychiatric evaluation–something my mom has previously needed to be evaluated for in the criminal justice system, as she is a felon. Keeping all of this in mind, there is much more abuse I had to endure as a child, such as broken bones and homelessness.
Anyways, my (now) boyfriend has told his mom these traumas that I have told him, and it made his mother react in the following ways: she accused me of being a typical ‘broken girl/child’, has personally said that her son is ‘too good for me’, and every time we hang out, she basically speaks her mind and says “you need to get your life together and prioritize better”. This is not to imply that I am a sort of priority, but both he and I are going to school and we *just* started dating, we’re literally still in the ‘honeymoon’ phase, as one could say. What really got to me, however, was when she stated that she “needs to process her (my) trauma” as “this was going to be hard for her to adjust to.” This is when I called her a bitch to her son, not to her face, over the phone. I admit that I did get quite irritated in the moment, and apologized afterward, but I was just baffled by how she had the audacity to say all these things before officially meeting me, and made assumptions about me being broken. Of course, I thought about ending the relationship in addition to this, as I got mad at my current boyfriend and told him that this was a *need to know* basis, and I told him these things in confidence that he wouldn’t blab them to his parents, especially after he knew they were judgemental the first time he even talked about me. His dad stayed quiet in a conversation that he had with both of his parents, and that’s when my boyfriend told me that, according to his mom, his dad was “staying quiet because he’s too much of a pussy to say that he agrees with me (her)”.
All in all, I think not only is his mother a bully to me, but to her own goddamn family. What I want to know, however, is if I’m justified in my reaction. I believe that I have come a long way from when I was a kid and, of course, I am still battling my inner child PTSD, but I think it was wrong for her to say these things about me. I was supposed to go over for a potential dinner two days after I met his parents (which was only a couple of minutes, I should add), but after hearing these things, I declined to have dinner with them until she apologize for the outlandish assumptions she’s made about me. Even though I am still angry with her, I do feel remorseful about even thinking she was a bitch, let alone saying it out loud to her son over the phone. But as I posed the question, am I in the wrong, or is she being overly judgemental? I really would appreciate any feedback on this, as it has been eating me up inside for the past couple of weeks. Thank you!
1 comment
Yes, it’s totally unacceptable. You are simply using mental health as an excuse.