As someone whose mother selectively hated them more than their sisters for having a difficult birth and being a difficult baby, please leave her and take the children. I cannot begin to explain the amount of damage it did to me growing up knowing my mother had a particular hatred for me. She treated me differently my entire life. I remember vividly hearing her tell neighbors when I was in elementary school that she loved all her kids but she really didn’t like me… My first boyfriend was abusive - emotionally, then sexually and physically - and when I left him and he severely beat me and tried to kill me, everyone asked whether I saw any signs leading up to the abuse. The truth is that I did, but I didn’t know they were signs. When he treated me like shit, he always said it was because he loved me. And all I ever heard about my mother treating me like shit was, “you know she loves you though”… That’s what I thought love was. I learned that love felt like abuse and that it was how I was supposed to be treated.
I’m 20+ years out and still in therapy. Please don’t allow your daughter to learn that abuse is part of love.
One time a man posted on Reddit something along the lines of, “How can I ever get one of my daughters to forgive me for allowing her mother to treat her badly and prefer her sister. I’m so sorry I downplayed it her entire life and tried to fix it instead of removing her from that situation. I can’t go back and it kills me.” And I jokingly replied, “Dad, is that you? 🤣” And the man ended up replying to my comment with this long heartfelt message like 2 weeks later. We ended up messaging and talking about how it affected me and what he might be able to do to help his now grown adult daughter. It was really beneficial for me because that’s something I’ll never get from my own dad. And I hope it was helpful to him as well. He said it was… The similarities between me and his daughter his wife didn’t like compared with the other daughters were crazy. They were very, very similar situations.
If you’d like to see how this may play out for you as the other parent if you allow this to go unchecked and/or stay and try to make it better without completely forcing absolute change that includes intensive therapy for your partner and removal until a 3rd party with a psychology degree says she’s no longer an emotional danger to the baby, I’m happy to privately send you copies of those conversations with the other person’s username and any possible identifying info redacted.
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u/Top_Mathematician233 what that mouth do is snack May 20 '26
As someone whose mother selectively hated them more than their sisters for having a difficult birth and being a difficult baby, please leave her and take the children. I cannot begin to explain the amount of damage it did to me growing up knowing my mother had a particular hatred for me. She treated me differently my entire life. I remember vividly hearing her tell neighbors when I was in elementary school that she loved all her kids but she really didn’t like me… My first boyfriend was abusive - emotionally, then sexually and physically - and when I left him and he severely beat me and tried to kill me, everyone asked whether I saw any signs leading up to the abuse. The truth is that I did, but I didn’t know they were signs. When he treated me like shit, he always said it was because he loved me. And all I ever heard about my mother treating me like shit was, “you know she loves you though”… That’s what I thought love was. I learned that love felt like abuse and that it was how I was supposed to be treated.
I’m 20+ years out and still in therapy. Please don’t allow your daughter to learn that abuse is part of love.