When did you discover your Mother/Father were not perfect?

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Carjack1

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As I am coming closer to Mama(The Catholic Church) I am discovering that my Mother (who I looked up to and tried to emulate most of my life is not perfect). I am discovering her pro-death views are wrong, she has taken Communion and has never been to confession :eek:, and basically stated that the Catholic Church needs to get with the program because they are losing the young. I feel so disappointed and question why she ever called herself Catholic and baptized me in this faith(which was the best thing she ever did, even though she probably isn’t aware of it). Did anybody ever feel this disappointment and if they did, how did you deal with it?
 
Though for different reasons, I to am discovering my parents were not perfect. I’m spending hour long sessions with a professional every week talking about how they were not perfect. Give yourself time to adjust to it. It’s definately a process. You can’t change your feelings aobut/for someone that quick that you’ve been that close to for that long, you just can’t. Also, something I’ve learned to do is just simply not touch on subjects with my parents that I know are going to result in confrontation and hurt feelings, particularly those in which I know I can’t chage the opposing parties thoughts or feelings. Try to just appreciate what you do have with your mother and focus on the good aspects of your relationship. Religion and faith are deeply personal matters, and as one grows older one may discover that ones parents do not feel the same about them. You can’t force your mother to embrace the Catholic faith, so try to just love her for who she is and where she’s at, not only because she’s your mother but because she is an imperfect child of God just like you.
 
Carjack1 said:
As I am coming closer to Mama(The Catholic Church) I am discovering that my Mother (who I looked up to and tried to emulate most of my life is not perfect). I am discovering her pro-death views are wrong, she has taken Communion and has never been to confession :eek:, and basically stated that the Catholic Church needs to get with the program because they are losing the young. I feel so disappointed and question why she ever called herself Catholic and baptized me in this faith(which was the best thing she ever did, even though she probably isn’t aware of it). Did anybody ever feel this disappointment and if they did, how did you deal with it?
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What are her “pro-death” views?
 
I think we have to remind ourselves that our parents are humans, and that sometimes the exact personality trait that allowed them to be so good at one aspect of raising us may be just the personality trait that allowed them to be not so good in other ways.

As far as how parents practiced their faith - maybe they just didn’t know and their ability to know the truth was clouded with the secular culture of the times. I can’t even believe raising someone from the sixties through the eighties - which is when my Mom raised us.

I for one am soooo thankful for all the materials that are available to us now - all the books for teens, video series, speakers, etc. that my Mom didn’t have access to.
 
I can’t recall a time when I did consider my parents were perfect. Strong, powerful, knew lots of things but not perfect.

Also I knew from an early age that my parents had different views on something important (like politics) and some things were not to be discussed (like religion and politics) were not to be discussed outside the house.

Suspect this could also have been affected by being an only child (get more attention from parents) and also by the fact that my mother (inappropriately) used me as a confidant about what was wrong with her marriage and my father.

So, carjack, though I never had to face what you have had to face I did have to confront that my mother told me things that a child should never had been told. I did so by accepting that she was a troubled soul who dealt with her problems inappropriately but who did not intend any damage.
 
well nothing as drastic as carjacks story, but i guess i first figured it out when i was in 5th grade walked in on my parents doing their taxes did the math in my head and pointed out 2 errors. as a joke they told me to stay and help and i caught 2 more math mistakes by the time they were done.
 
When I had my first baby and didn’t have a clue what I was doing. It was then that I realized that my Mom didn’t have a clue either and we all just bumbled along and did the best we could with what we had:)

Actually on a serious note it was when I was 13 when she made a huge mistake by yelling at me when she should have asked me what happened and then held me in her arms and cried with me.😦
 
I remember in 7th grade my mom was being viciously verbally abusive to me. She actually told me during her tirade (screamed actually) that lots of kids runaway why don’t you? So I rode my bike a mile and half to my best friend’s house in the rain. After I got there I was still very upset and sat and talked with my friend’s mom for a bit. She eventually called my mom to let her know I was there and my mom concocted a completely false story that we had an argument because I refused to clean the bathroom. She said I threw a tube of toothpaste under the sink and left. None of that happened. We weren’t even arguing about the bathroom.

I realized long before that she wasn’t perfect. This wasn’t the first verbal tirade she went on but the fact that she would make up a completely false story to cover herself and make me look bad really shocked me.

Really I never felt my parents were perfect but thought they were generally good people with pretty good moral standards. Having my mom lie about me really changed how I looked at her. Unfortunately it wasn’t the last time she made false accusations against me.

How did I deal with it? At 12 there wasn’t much I could do. I did learn not to trust the stories she tells, like when she rants to me about my dad and their arguments. I know she’s twisted the facts enough times ranting to my dad enough times about me especially when I was teen that I take her version with a huge grain of salt.

She also makes up false “witnesses” or false stories about people agreeing with her and taking her side. I used to call her out on it because she say “So and so said this” and didn’t sound like the way that person speaks or something they would say. I pretty much gave up on that because she goes ballistic when you call her out on her nonsense.

My mom also has not been to confession in at least 30 years and always goes to communion. You can’t really address these things with my mother without her going off. I do talk about going to confession with my mom -as in “we went to confession last Sunday”. There’s also times when she rides with us to Mass and we (my husband, daughter and myself) go to confession while she waits in the vestibule. She seems to be leaning towards going more and more but makes a lot of excuses. “I can’t confess to a man” “I can go in those boxes” (she is claustrophobic), “the priest is too young”. ect. I think she’s just scared to go, but I’m hoping someday soon she’ll find the courage.
 
My father,God love him, wore his faults plainly enough that it didn’t take me long to figure that one out. Now I wish he was here because as an adult it is evident that my own lack of perfection in many ways mimics his.

My mother had me fooled into thinking she was perfect until one day when I was about 7. My father had purchased for himself his 3rd used car of the week, and my mother was rightly questioning his thinking on this matter. She was fairly calm and trying to talk to him about the fact that our family needed that money to pay for tuition, food, shelter, etc… and he wasn’t listening. She finally broke down and said, “Doug, this is Bull -.” 28 years later I still have never heard her say another piece of profanity. But, it was a quick lesson that even mothers make mistakes.
 
While I can’t claim my parents have any other really major flaws that I’m aware of, I think my first clue was that Mum and Dad never could agree on what my sister’s birthday was.

It took brother-in-law to come along when the poor girl was about 12 and suggest the obvious solution - get a copy of her birth certificate (parents had lost their copy) and check. 😊

I don’t mean a difference of a day or two either, more like Mum thought she was three weeks later than she actually was (funny, wasn’t she the one who, like, gave birth to my sister?) To this day we have no idea where got her date from. 🤷
 
La-la-la-la (covering my ears!) I can’t hear you!! My mom is perfect:thumbsup:.

Hopefully, we all do the best we can. I’m sure there are things my kids will think we did “wrong” and they’ll do differently.

My son already told me he’ll NEVER homeschool his kids. “Homeschooled kids are weird.” Nevermind that he is one and he married one :p. (And that the guys in boot camp thought he was smart, cool and got along with everyone.)
 
Thank you for your stories, I know I am not perfect either. (This is the understatement of the millenium) lol. I know how some kids(even grown adults) feel toward their parents. The moment that they realize that their parents are not perfect, it is a big moment. I had my moment a little later than most “children” 😊 I was like KCT lalalalala, don’t talk about my mama.
 
I, like many, thought my parents weren’t perfect pretty early on. Maybe age 3? Seriously! But that isn’t really mindblowing to me. What is, is when I became a parent myself, I realized how hard it is to be a good ( not even perfect ) parent. It is VERY hard. I learned that a lot of us do our very best to raise our kids. Many parents don’t honestly know better.

A lot of Catholics think the way your mother does. Many are not instructed properly. I wonder if she would join you in even just one of the RCIA classes?
 
Honestly, I think I first realized my parents were not perfect when I was about 11 and they told us they were getting a divorce. Before that point I honestly saw no flaw in them, and I thought their relationship, them, and our family was perfect. It was totally bizarre news to me, and from then on things went totally downhill.
 
His_Ruby said:
Honestly, I think I first realized my parents were not perfect when I was about 11 and they told us they were getting a divorce. Before that point I honestly saw no flaw in them, and I thought their relationship, them, and our family was perfect. It was totally bizarre news to me, and from then on things went totally downhill.
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sorry to hear that:console:
 
Carjack1 said:
As I am coming closer to Mama(The Catholic Church) I am discovering that my Mother (who I looked up to and tried to emulate most of my life is not perfect). I am discovering her pro-death views are wrong, she has taken Communion and has never been to confession :eek:, and basically stated that the Catholic Church needs to get with the program because they are losing the young. I feel so disappointed and question why she ever called herself Catholic and baptized me in this faith(which was the best thing she ever did, even though she probably isn’t aware of it). Did anybody ever feel this disappointment and if they did, how did you deal with it?
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If you are truly getting close to the Church again then you should realize that no one is perfect!

We strive our entire life to be more Christlike but we will never BE perfect by any streatch. Your mother is only human, she did the best she can and frankly, like most other Catholic’s her age, was probably given misinformation at different points in her life that have effected her beliefs.

One of the most devout mothers I know, one of my friends mom’s, has never used NFP but rather birth control her whole life and I believe later had a tubal. Why? Because when she got upset in the 70s about the Church’s teachings, multiple Priest’s told her that it really wasn’t wrong nor a mortal sin. So she lived her life in a devout manner, ignorant to this teaching because she took the word of her Priest. She taught this to her daughter as well, is it right for her daughter to get mad at her because she followed the advice of her Priests?

I know many Catholic’s in my Parish who are in the 50s who are loving “Why Catholic” for that very reason. Even though they went to Catholic School etc… they never learned why we believe some of what we believe etc…

Don’t be too hard on your mom, she did what she believed she had to do, she Baptized you and raised you in the Church to at least some degree. Rather than being disappointed or angry that some of her views aren’t exactly like that the Church teaches - forgive her and pray for her.

Joe
 
As far as the faith goes…

I was pretty angry in my mid twenties when I realized how poorly I had been taught the faith.

I’ve heard my parents say many times how much they regret that they weren’t more diligent in this area. They thought if they took us to Mass and ccd and all the sacramental prep programs, everything would be fine.

nope:nope:

That’s one of the reasons we homeschool. My kids will know their catechism!!!

I’m sure that I’m screwing up in some way though. My poor kids…
 
jwashu said:
If you are truly getting close to the Church again then you should realize that no one is perfect!:blush:Your point is taken

We strive our entire life to be more Christlike but we will never BE perfect by any streatch. Your mother is only human, she did the best she can and frankly, like most other Catholic’s her age, was probably given misinformation at different points in her life that have effected her beliefs.

One of the most devout mothers I know, one of my friends mom’s, has never used NFP but rather birth control her whole life and I believe later had a tubal. Why? Because when she got upset in the 70s about the Church’s teachings, multiple Priest’s told her that it really wasn’t wrong nor a mortal sin. So she lived her life in a devout manner, ignorant to this teaching because she took the word of her Priest. She taught this to her daughter as well, is it right for her daughter to get mad at her because she followed the advice of her Priests?

I know many Catholic’s in my Parish who are in the 50s who are loving “Why Catholic” for that very reason. Even though they went to Catholic School etc… they never learned why we believe some of what we believe etc…

Don’t be too hard on your mom, I’m not. She is my mother and she will always have my respect.she did what she believed she had to do, she Baptized you and raised you in the Church to at least some degree. Rather than being disappointed or angry that some of her views aren’t exactly like that the Church teaches - forgive her and pray for her.Thank you for your advice

Joe
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You are in the same boat as I about being poorly catechized. I give parents a:thumbsup: It’s hard.
leonie said:
As far as the faith goes…

I was pretty angry in my mid twenties when I realized how poorly I had been taught the faith.

I’ve heard my parents say many times how much they regret that they weren’t more diligent in this area. They thought if they took us to Mass and ccd and all the sacramental prep programs, everything would be fine.

nope:nope:

That’s one of the reasons we homeschool. My kids will know their catechism!!!

I’m sure that I’m screwing up in some way though. My poor kids…
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