#strict mother

[faeriesinthedell]

Being the daughter of a controlling mother is so weird, especially when your mother was a product of the same environment. It's like: I don't know how to say no because when I say no to you, nothing changes. I don't know how to assert myself without feeling like I'm being an inconvenience or that I'm risking making someone angry. I don't know how to suggest my opinion because I'm so used to defaulting to a people pleasing option that even when someone enthusiastically seeks my opinion, I still "read the room" the choose the option that will make everyone happy. I don't pursue many hobbies because I know you don't like messes and hobbies make mess. I leave projects half finished because I'm so used to having to throw everything in a drawer or otherwise "clean" it before your cleaning anxiety kicks in and we all have to clean the house for you. I listen to your stories about how you went on wild adventures as a teenager and hid things from your own mother, while I'm terrified of doing anything to disappoint you (not because you would punish me, but because I have such an aversion to upsetting people). I have almost no friends, I do nothing but work and go to college, and I sit at home online during all my free time because I'm not "allowed" to drive very far, and who really wants to hang out at the same 4 places with me?? You drove around town as a teen and left home at 18 and I'm almost 21 and not even allowed to drive half an hour to the next biggest town. No one wants to hang out with me because they know how you are and they know the only options are my house or the local fast food place, because I'm not allowed to drive further. You don't trust me to do things on my own but it's suddenly okay if I have a "chaperone" with me. You were skydiving at my age, but it's not "safe" for me to walk around the woods by myself. People offer to take me places out of pity but I decline because I'm almost positive that they don't really want my company, and they only offer because they must feel bad because I don't experience much.

You once explained to me that the reason you control everything and everyone (in your words) is because you had no control over your life when you were younger, so now you have this need to control everything. You don't realize that you're setting me up for the same position, or maybe you do realize but you can't stop yourself. I'm terrified that I'm going to do the same thing to my own daughters. I don't want this for them, and I don't want it for me.

When that little girl walked a few yards to her house after my grandma's funeral, my instinctual response was to panic and think "No! She can't do that!! She'll get hurt!!"

I didn't want to think that. It wasn't my thought, it was yours.

I love you so much, but I don't want to become you. I can't ever tell you this, because it would break you.

I'm the only daughter, the only child. I have to be good, I have to make you happy. I can't be independent because it won't make you happy, but I can't live my life with the independence level of an 8 year old. I see 12 year olds with more personal freedom than me. They're allowed to wander town as long as they keep in touch with their parents and they keep a level head. I'm not even allowed that, and I certainly wasn't at that age.

I do things that I don't want to in order to make people happy. I scold myself for having too many wants because I feel like it's selfish. It's selfish to write this. It's selfish to not want to be like you, because it would hurt you and that's wrong of me.

I can't ever tell you about any of this, because it would be the nail in the coffin for us. You think I hate you, and this would only confirm it for you. I don't hate you. I love you, but I hate the way you do some things. A person and their actions are two separate things.

You're so headstrong, and so am I, but only to you. It's funny. I defy you so much and make no headway, but I'm so submissive to everyone else to the point of putting on false personas to please a crowd. I think I defy and argue my side because if I don't, then I'd never have any opinion at all. I argue and fight because if I don't then that means my real thoughts are never voiced. You think I fight because I hate you, but I love you. You're my mother and I'm your daughter and I love you. I'm just really bad at showing it, I guess.

I won't control my daughters the way that I've been controlled.

[enchantingpeachfury]

😉

[witchyykitten]

[faaun]

last night i got home kind of tipsy and very much in tears and my mother told me the force you exert to keep someone in your life is proportional to the force with which they will leave your life. if you have to fight tooth and claw to keep them, their leaving will be just as hard, just as harsh, and just as definite.

[iindigoeyed]

i imagine felix explained to kagami that he was transmasc and she was like "you can do that? really?!" and then felix lent them his old binder and well, you get it.

bonus:

[tutlessss]

Are Ballora and Foxy still active inside Molten Freddy here?

My first au ask on here I am so honored =D Anyways, to answer your question, yes! Ballora and Foxy are still very alive and active! Freddy is the only one within the amalgamation that had enough strength to take over the whole body, but Ballora and Foxy are still able to control their own individual wires, taking the form of sentient eyeballs:

Due to their situation, they have lost a lot of their functions, the biggest one being the ability to properly communicate. They can only audibly produce static garble; a language that nobody but Molten (and by extension, Scrapbaby) can understand them in.

When it comes to their dynamics, they are a pretty tight group! Molten struggles being the supposed "leader" of the body and is prone to getting overwhelmed or stressed about it, and Ballora and Foxy always re-assure him he is doing a great job. Ballora acts as a mother and mentor to him and Foxy treats him like a younger brother. And unlike Molten, they are less afraid to stand up to Baby when she starts getting aggressive with them, telling her to essentially piss off. Overall the best sentient eyeballs you could ask for.

[smoozie]

Why is every Ever After High redesigner an Apple hater. I just wanna watch some interpretations of the plot and some cute new designs, I didn't come here to hear u complaing abt Apple for 30 minutes.

[scumvillainess]

also imo, if shen qingqiu were to ever become a parent (not that he would want to), he would definitely be the type of parent who would say “okay, and what happened to the other %?” any time his kid got less than a perfect score in school.

he would also be the type of parent who would say “does it look like i care about how so and so chooses to parent their child? you’re my kid, i only care about you!” in response to their kid saying “but so and so’s parents let them do this!” in an argument.

[bumblingbabooshka]

Illogical Musings From 'Pathways'

[faeriesinthedell]

I'm so sick of having this burden on me. I love my mom so much, and I know she thinks that I hate her, and every little argument we have probably cements that for her, and I hate it. I love her so much, but there's so much tension between us and I don't know how to fix it and I don't know if it can be fixed. It's the same way between her and my grandmother, and from what I understand, it was the same for my grandma and great-grandma. We're basically Ladybird and Marion on steroids, and it sucks, and I have no idea how to fix it

[iramerle]

Astarion and his family 😭

Everytime I think about this man I cry, like imagine he is in the city just walking around and his mother sees him and she remembers him thanks to the pictures but he doesn’t. She hugs him and cries saying ‘my little star’ and he is just so confused 😩😭😭

I might draw that…👀

[witchyykitten]

little miss will never be good enough for her mother

no matter how hard she tries

[audrinawf]

The Ideal Mother vs The Borderline Mother from the book “Understanding the Borderline Mother” by Christine Ann Lawson.

a gold standard for information on BPD mothers. a painful but eye opening book that single handedly healed a lot of my mother issues (not all of them) but this a must for anyone that’s never received the validation of growing up with an unwell mother.

[berbxii]

What do you think about Woodie being like a father figure for Walter? I love your art btw!! ^-^

I LOVEEEE THAT!! I love found family, it's one of my favourite tropes😭

(also when wilson is webber's father figure and maxwell wendy's)

also a lil drawing I did bc i noticed Ive never drawn woodie before

[anghraine]

Maybe it's just because I'm sleepy and my brain is tired and irritable, but I do wish fandom in general weren't so absolutely intent on casting all familial or quasi-familial relationships into some near approximation of US nuclear family idealization.

Acting as a caretaker for a child doesn't automatically make someone their "real parent" or "adopted parent" or "any parent at all" if the child doesn't see them that way. These caretaking relationships can be messy, begrudging, or essentially coercive (in both fiction and IRL, and in life, forcing children into situations where "they'll be taken care of" is often coercive and/or predatory).

And sometimes a caretaker adult, whether a natural parent, adoptive parent, some kind of guardian, or more amorphous caretaker, is ... bad, actually. It's understandable for the children they take care of (whether literal children or now-adult people who experienced it previously) to have had negative experiences they have complicated feelings about, to have complicated feelings about their caretakers that may not distill down to "real parents", to be capable of harsh criticism of their former caretakers, even if they love them.

Sometimes it is the simpler scenario where a child is adopted and it looks very much like a conventional "nuclear" relationship (though even then, the child can have more complex and inconvenient feelings than they're often supposed to have). But—okay, I may be biased from coming from a family that was licensed for foster care, which saw a lot of children essentially forced into foster care with varying complicated feelings about it that didn't always equate to "this person who looks after me is my mother"—even after a long time, sometimes.

And there's frequently a nasty pressure on children placed in "care" to either reach out to their birth or adoptive parents, or to wholly turn their backs on them and accept their current caretakers as the only parents who matter. But usually things are messier than that. You can care about a caretaker, you can respect and love them, and still not feel like you're their child. Or maybe you do! It just depends.

This can happen with siblings as well, especially when there's a big age difference—yeah, one of the siblings may be functionally filling the shoes of their parents as well as they can, but it doesn't necessarily make them actual parents in the eyes of their younger siblings (or themselves). It can, but doesn't have to. Or maybe it's something messier, like when the relationship is almost parental, but not quite, and the exact nature of the dynamic is hard to pin down.

There's also the case where the relationship may have been parental at one point, but one of the parties (usually the caretaker) burned bridges so badly that the child (often an adult at this point) cuts ties and doesn't deny that the caretaker filled a parental role back then, but wholly rejects it as any kind of current reality. This can happen with biological family, but also with looser caretaker relationships as well (esp the cultier ones).

I'm thinking of a lot of fandom examples of these kinds of indeterminate caretaker-child (or former child) relationships, where either we know or have good reason to believe the child doesn't regard a former caretaker as exactly the same as a parent, or we just don't know what the nature of the relationship is, and fandom will be absolutely insistent that the only possible way to read it is parent-child.

And also, sometimes there's nothing wrong with the caretaker relationship, but it's still not parent-child. It simply doesn't map onto this parental mold that fandom tries to box all adult-child caretaking relationships into, because family is more complicated than a single, very simplistic model allows.

[thiziri]

If Tim and Anne had kids of their own, who do you think would have been the strictest of them

I think you know who it would've been 😂