Mother/Daughter Estrangement

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Hi, I'm wondering how many females here perceive their relationship to their mother to be estranged (distant/hostile/etc)? And, if so, do you also experience unsatisfactory relations to all females in general? Personally speaking, I have a poor relationship with my mother and happen to feel more comfortable around males than females. Am interested in the correlation between the two - - Thanks for anything you'd like to share.

I live over 500 miles away from my mother. I don't talk to her as much as I used to. We're not estranged or anything or mad at each other. I just don't want her to treat me like a child over the phone, telling me how to live my life. Next time I will just tell her it's my life and I will live it however I want it. Last time we spoke, it was a week before Thanksgiving. It was about what we were doing for Thanksgiving. They just stayed home and my uncle went to their house and I went to my aunt's and uncle's for it. But overall our relationship is good even though she will still try and treat me like a child. I don't know if she is doing this because I'm her daughter or because of my condition and she wants whats best for me or it could be both. I wonder how she treats my brothers like if she tells them how to live their lives? I know she was with my little brother and he was 18 then and he was going though depression in his first year of college, withdrawing from people, grades slipping. But now he goes to school part time, lives with room mates and works at Safeway. I don't know if he is still depressed. He has been taking meds for it since high school or middle school.

I avoid my mother 95% of the time. When I was growing up I was miserable and the little light at the end of the tunnel was that one day I could move out and be far far away from her. My mother didn't do anything horrific to me, just the "normal" motherly chronic negativity and anxiety and hypercriticalness. But I'm not putting up with her crap, I'm not even going to try to change her or fight with her, she had 17-18 years to give me more than enough psychological damage, I refuse to subject myself to such toxicity. Being negative and disrespectful is the only way she can fathom interacting with me, she does not acknowledge that I have thoughts and feelings of my own so there is no basis for interacting with her that is not damaging.

I don't particularly like to hang around males, but with a group of females there's that extra unpleasant biting edge. With guys you can just be all business or pleasure, just do stuff instead of talking, but chicks always want to dwell on depressing boring crap, or worst of all, scrutinize how you dress, groom yourself etc. Hanging out with females they always want you to conform to their ridiculous standards, but with a group of guys there isn't that pressure. In a group women get into the most intimate and personal subjects, and I don't mind getting personal sometimes, but on top of that they are also very judgemental about these personal and intimate issues, so there's no way I want to get into it. I also notice that females often completely misinterpret what I'm saying. Often times I modulate my voice in an odd way so they try to read meaning into that instead of taking my words literally. Or they just take it personally if I am stressed out in a social situation and interpret that as "she hates me".

I know my family, especially the females since that's the ones I spent all my time around, (I just had sisters and my father was hardly around), have made me prejudice against females especially of my ethnic group. If I'm at work and I hear some chicks walk by my cubicle speaking in the same language and accent my family uses I freeze up with fear, I'm primed to expect to get attacked and criticized, or with middle-aged mother-type women in general.

But let's not make this some guys are better than girls discussion. Guys are awful too, usually us aspie chicks end up hanging out with easy-going nerdy guys who tone-down their act further when there is a female around. In my observations guys in groups are backstabbing, gossipy, insecure, overcompetitive, and like to endlessly dwell on boring topics.

my mother is NT and has the mindset that there is only one way to think - hers. most of the time she totally ignores the fact that i'm an aspie, preferring to act like i am perfectly "normal" and like i perceive the world the sam way she does. so, yeah, i'd say our relationship is relatively hostile most of the time. the two of us in the same room is basically a time bomb.

and on the hanging out with more males that females? my friends are about even number-wise, though it is easier for me to be myself around my guy friends.

My mom and I get along great .. over the phone. I've learned to except her for was she is a crazied clean freak who thinks she can still tell me what do to down to who to vote for. The phine is wonderful because I can always fake some sort of reason to hang-up if I need to but mostly I remind her I'm a grown woman who will do as she pleases and if she's not ok with that please keep it to herself . Then I change the subject and we move on. This is easier to do now at 32 then it was when I was 19 then I only spoke to her once a month max not it's almost daliy. I think it's easy now because I'm able too see that my mother isn't a fully funtioning adult due the abuse she suffered as a child and deal with her on that level. I don't no how ever speak to her mother because she is and extremly abusive person, who now in her old age likes telling me over and over how what was done to my mother was normal for that time < it was not normal for anytime>.
My friends are both male and female it depends on what I want to talk about or do at the time who I'm spending time with at any given time. It sounds like a line from a bad movie but my husband is my very best friend.

My and my mother got along GREAT...up until when I turned 9 years old.
Our relationship got worse and worse through my teen years.
Her way is the only way, according to her. Anything that deviates from her line of thinking is completely wrong.

She was verbally and physically abusive, and then she would "conveniently forget" the whole abusive episodes that she displayed.

I escaped from that hostile environment as soon as I turned 18. I rarely call her, because it is such a chore having to listen to her negativity and her ridicule of every single aspect of my life.

In fact, I don't even love her. She is pretty much a stranger to me.

My mother and I have always had a distant and hostile relationship. That relationship grew worse as I entered in my teen years. Alot of the problems stem from my mothers snobbish attitude and my ability to not judge others based upon income and material items that they have or do not have. My mom also denies that I am an Aspie. She prefers to believe that what is "wrong" with me can can be fixed with medication. Shocking part she is a nurse and knows that Autism runs in the family. I was always treated as the dirty secret, something that ignored would go away.

I do think that the strained relationship has influenced my friendships with other females. I am closer to males and always have stayed away from females as friends.

I'm estranged from my mother, and frankly it's a great relief.

My mother is also one of those who thinks everyone should think/feel/live as she does (even though she's always been miserable and negative). She tended to take it personally when I differed from her in any way (must suck for her to have a daughter who has more in common with the other side of the family).

In high school, I went to an all girl's Catholic school and actually found a small group of females among them who weren't obsessed with clothes, hair, makeup, etc. and actually made friends there. Since then, I haven't really bonded with many (in person) females at all.

I'm working toward estrangement.
I'm still partially financially dependent on my parents (more specifically, my father, as mom doesn't work), and I try to be civil mostly because I don't like making my dad's life suck. When mom isn't happy, no one is.

That said, more and more often when she has a fit and stops communicating with me (I live about 90 miles away), I leave it at that. Went seven, stress-free months like that last year. She missed my graduation from vocational school, but I didn't really miss her. My ex's mom came instead, and she had pride and tears, etc. Mom probably would have been okay but waiting for me to say I'm going back to get my BA - no.

Went another two months not talking to her because of a Facebook picture (I AM NOT KIDDING). Got screwed into communicating with her because she fell down a flight of stairs on T-giving and fractured her pubic bone. I'd like to be an evil b***h like her, but I'm not so I ended up saying 'yes' when dad asked if I'd like to say hi when she was in the hospital.

I am /dying/ for the day when my friend and I finally are able to move out of this apt, where we can support ourselves, and good riddance.

I love my mom. We fight all the time, but they are always short clashes, and don't change that we love each other.
I moved in with her recently with my baby and husband. It's working mostly fine.

It took along time for my mother and I to come to terms. Basically her moving half way across the country was the terms. I love her, we aren't estranged but I can't take more than small doses of her. She does drive me nuts, she's also of the mind set that her thinking is the only way to think, and she also doesn't accept that I'm different, my mom has a way of living in "denial-land". Spending more than a week in person with her sets me off because of her nit picking and back handed compliments constantly and taking every opportunity to play the martyr. She also is constantly on me about religion, hers, she's catholic and recently within the past 5 years started going to church in a major way, I refer to her as a 'born again Catholic' she's almost fanatical about it and refuses to accept that I have long ago turned my back on "The Church" So she's also always preaching to me and sending me religious books, which drives me nuts.

So the phone is the best way to keep in touch with her and not go insane, yet still be the good daughter. There are days I hate being an only child tho, because there's no sibling to pawn her off on.

I was mostly estranged from my mother, until she got cancer. Then, I would force myself to phone her and talk for awhile (ever so often.) She had Borderline issues, and was hellish to me, growing up. Everything was about her, and there was no room for compassion or nurturing of her children, with the exception of her favorites. I wasn't one of them. In many ways, she was childlike, easily aroused to jealousy and competitiveness with her children. When she died, I grieved both for her, and the mother that I never had.

I'm estranged from my mother. She didn't take my coming out very well, and she's openly hostile towards me. She always used to use my Aspie traits as a way of getting a dig at me when we argued, which really hurt. To be honest, I can't stand her nowadays. She always drove the rest of the family to dislike me.

In terms of real friendships, mine are.. A few (mostly aspie/dyspraxic) girls, one NT girl, a nongendered person, and a few guys. So it depends, really.

My mother was, I'm, pretty sure, a narcissist. Everything, for her, was about appearance. As her daughter, I was supposed to be an extension of her and think, behave, and especially, look, exactly like her. As it happened, I take after my dad's side of the family (who are dark and sturdily built, and mother hated that I wasn't a fair, 'dainty' child), but mother was happy as long as she could dress me up and show me off to people as her little dolly. Trouble was, when I got into my teens I was up to my nose in books, not at all into sitting around prettifying myself like she thought I should be, and she took it out on me with a constant stream of verbal abuse. Basically, from that time onwards, she seems to have decided that I was 'wrong' and needed fixing, and that the way to fix me was to hurt me as much as possible, not just by the constant criticism of my appearance but by pointedly ignoring and playing down anything else I did with my life. This behavior of hers continued long after I was an adult.

I married young to get away from her, made the mistake of moving back after my divorce (that was the point at which she smugly said 'I never thought you'd marry, you were going to live with me and be my old-age companion' ), and, when I met my second husband and we had the choice of him moving down near her or me moving up near his family, it was no contest. For some years, I saw as little of her as possible, only going back because the rest of my family were in the area. When her health deteriorated, she tried to emotionally blackmail me into becoming her carer, but I knew that if I did that, it was goodbye to the confidence I'd attempted to salvage over the years.

She died just under a year ago, and my only regret is that I put up with her toxicity for so many years. I spent a lot of time desperately trying to be the 'right' kind of daughter to please someone who, basically, was incapable of being pleased. I think I'd have had a much easier life if I'd seriously broken contact with her a lot earlier.

As for female friends...no, I haven't had many. My mother had lots of 'friends'. but she was forever making snarky comments about them behind their backs, and I got the impression she didn't like other women very much. (She had a sister she didn't get on with; she claimed my aunt was nasty and jealous, but to be honest, I got on fine with her and it seemed my mother was always the one making the comparisons.) The female friends I've had tend to have been, unsurprisingly, the girls who were a bit more 'alternative' and 'weird' and not so much into conventional girl stuff. I still feel incredibly uncomfortable around the sort of women who sit around discussing so-and-so's diet, hair and whatever...for obvious reasons.

I am very close to my mother. We fight do fight alot, though, but I love her very much.

I am just about done with my mother, reaching the point of realizing the hopelessness of the relationship. Glad some of you do have good relationships with your own.