Did you ever feel your parents excepted you to be Perfect?

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I'm sorry I've posted on here so much I just feel you all understand me. And if you were not perfect you were punished or threatened to be punished? That's exactly how I feel.

My mother wished I was typical to take care of my older brother with LFA 24/7 when she and my father would have been dead, so in the first years of my life (until the age of 6, when I was diagnosed with ADD) she pressurized me to act like other children and sometimes I heard from her something like "you let me down" (but this happened very rarely, when she was overly stressed by my behaviour).
I love her very much, but serves her right that I am not typical even if I suffer because of my condition as well. After all she wanted me to be just to take care of my brother all my life and without a break after her death.

Except this, no, they never pressurized me to be perfect, they just would like me to get higher grades in school, study more and be less dumb socially.

I can relate to this on some level;


My brother also has autism, but with him it was diagnosed a lot earlier. So my parents always saw him as the "child that needs help" and me as the "one that will make it".

This has resulted into me being pretty much ignored in my requests for "special attention" throughout my life, while my brother at now age 28 still has -no- obligations in terms of helping around the house.

I've started to resent my parents over this, because besides it being unfair to me, it also doesn't help my brother develop by still being treated like a little baby that needs special pampering.

To give you an example of something that happens quite often; If my brother doesn't get "his share" of the cookies/candies/whatever he does like, he'll throw a tantrum about "everything has to be shared equally".. When I then ask him why I have to help cleaning the bathroom, do my own laundry, cook decent meals, etc, and he doesn't, so that he needs to shut up about "equality", he'll start screaming about "you're not my parents, so it's not up to you to talk to me about that", so when I then turn towards my parents, all they want is my brother to calm down, ignoring -my "equality" issue-.

The thing is, my parents believe my brother to be some kind of misunderstood friendly simpleton who gets in his own way more than anything else. But I know he's a devious egocentric bastard who intentionally pretends and lies about certain things just to make his own life "a little better".
To give you an example of that; We're both "night people", but I try to be as quiet as possible. My brother doesn't care and will make noise till the neighbours come complain to my parents. My parents -know- it's my brother but will still bring it as a "hey you -two- need to be more quiet at night". But what does my brother do at that point; He goes to the neighbours to apologize for -ME- making so much noise at night. Then when I learn about what he has done and get extremely pissed and want to go tell the neighbours the reality of the situation, I get threatened by my parents with being kicked out "if they learn I went and annoyed the neighbours with "our" problems".

And it's always like that, my brother always gets the last word/action, and whatever I do or want to do in reaction is me just being "angry" and "over-dramatic".

When I was a lot younger, the neighbors were always comment on how poorly behaved my brothers and I were right to mom's face. Mom's usual rejoinder: "My kids aren't perfect." However, after company would leave, mom would do a 180, and start beating the living day lights out of us for misbehaving.

I was never diagnosed with anything and was always the "good kid who's very shy but extremely intelligent and gifted". Everyone has always been more or less kind to me, but I have always felt like a huge letdown because they all had such high hopes for me as a small child. "She will be a scientist or a surgeon." "You are so smart and motivated, you will be so successful." Etc. But since no one ever seemed to notice anything off about me, no one projected that I would have all these fears, anxieties, and social issues to get in the way. (Which they seem to just believe are related to bratty teenager traits or something because they disregard AS as a valid possibility.) Plus I have no interest in science or medicine. So I'm just a big disappointment.

Posted so much? Don't sweat it, I think I'm a post or two ahead of you.

I don't know if I'd use the word "perfect," but I was always very much aware that I was not living up to the standards that they held and I always felt like I was nothing but a huge disappointment to them because I couldn't live up to their expectations.

When I was forced at the age of 7 to stand in a Little League field week after week and humiliate myself in front of an audience, participating in a game that I had neither the physical coordination nor the mental focus to competently negotiate, I was painfully aware that my parents were desperately attempting to turn me into the "normal" boy that they wanted, and that I could never be. They were determined that they could pound the edges off this square peg and make it fit into a round world. They were wrong.

When my sister came along and turned out to be more normal, a lot of the pressure came off and I was allowed to retreat to my room and be left alone with my music, books and sketch pads. But even as adults, I flailed and struggled year after year to keep my head above water, clumsily destroying both jobs and personal relationships, one after another, while my NT sibling sailed through a stable career, a stable marriage, finished college and lives a stereotypical Middle Class American magazine cover lifestyle.

Even if my family had never said anything at all, life itself pretty much rubbed my nose in failure.

if they did, i wouldve been diagnosed a lot sooner, although my parents did get frustrated when i couldn't learn as fast as my sister, most of the time they just saw my repetitive behaviour, my social awkwardness and my obsessions as special parts of me, both my parents have 2 or 3 big autism triats so a lot of what i do was just seen as " inherited" by them, but during middle school my specialness turned into a problem and my parents wanted to know what was wrong.

i guess everything i did when i was younger looked like playing or a temper tantrum or fussiness to my parents, they didnt bother asking what was wrong and just waited for me to grow out of it, which never happened.

I don't think Is ever expected to be perfect or else I would be punished for every mistake and accident I made. My mom did yell at me at times for my accidents like the time I was emptying the dishwasher and I thought I could carry a bunch of bowls at once stacked and I dropped them instead and they all broke and my mom yelled at me for it. I was about seven when it happened. Or the time when I was four I thought I could try pouring myself a bowl of cereal but I missed the bowl and made a big cereal pile next to it instead and my dad saw it and yelled at me for it. They made me feel bad every time I got yelled at for my accidents and I would think I was naughty for making a mistake. I realize now they were just accidents and they didn't make me a bad kid for having them. I didn't do it intentionally and they perhaps thought I did so they yelled at me for it. I didn't tell them I didn't mean to because of my limited communication. Then after a while whenever I would make a mistake, I would run from it and lie about it because I was scared of getting into trouble. Especially when my mother would start yelling and I knew if I confessed I was in trouble so I would pretend I didn't do it. I acted like I was being abused or something because I was afraid of punishments even though I never got beaten or starved or tortured for it. I was just given normal consequences or scolded. Mostly yelled at about it but it was still bad enough for me. It also got me learn to clean up after myself because I didn't want to get caught and get in trouble for it like if I spilled something, I would clean it up hoping Mom or Dad wouldn't see it. I still wouldn't say they were expecting me to be perfect. They probably thought I did all these things on purpose or else why would they yell at me for an accident or they were mad at me for doing something stupid or for not being careful and I misread their intentions because I thought I was in trouble for my accident. All it did was it taught me to lie and be dishonest whenever I would do something wrong and to me lying keeping you out of trouble was never true or else I wouldn't have been in trouble for what i did wrong after saying I did it. Perhaps I took it literal so I continued lying after seeing it wasn't true. I think it was my diagnoses that made it all easier because after that it made things a lot easier at home for me and it wasn't like this anymore so I stopped lying because I didn't have to lie anymore to keep out of trouble.

I also remember getting into trouble for not acting my age and I didn't even know how I was supposed to act. I also remember getting into trouble for getting upset because she would say I was screaming like a two year old or crying like a baby. I learned to hold in my feelings. I wonder if it was anxiety I was having back then and my mom didn't even know it so she just thought I was being immature and would scold me for it and send me to my room or time out and it never worked because it didn't stop me from doing it. I just learned to withdraw from situations if I am getting to frustrated with them and me holding in my feelings causes me problems by 6th grade because of years of bottling them up.

Last edited by League_Girl on 30 Dec 2013, 3:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Back when I was in elementary school and failing miserably at it. My parents endlessly harangued me that "you are so smart (I had a big vocabulary) you can do better than this. You're just not trying hard enough"; and encouraged me to improve by punishing me for any mistakes or failures. When I was 8 they put me in a private Lutheran school so I could be professionally motivated with even more punishment, humiliation and ridicule (amply provided by both faculty and students).
After I was diagnosed with cross dominance and got glasses and not nearly enough eye training I started to slowly improve my grades. My parents rewarded me by ignoring my progress and being constantly upset that my grades were not improving fast enough.

Nope.

They've wanted me to behave, be successful in whatever I choose to do, be productive, be happy etc.

But they've never set some sort of impossible standard of perfection that they expect me to meet. They've never said that they want any of us to become abc or xyz profession or they won't be happy with how we live our lives - nothing like that at all.

I suppose all of that is some of the reason so many of my/our friends growing up really liked my parents, aside from them being great hosts etc whenever people visited.