So many of your stories are much too familiar. I was trained to be a virtual clone of my NF. I had to like what he did or I was wrong. Oddly enough, the most bizarre times are with my dear mother.
When I was summer camp the summer I turned 9, my mother decided to redecorate my room. In pink. I absolutely HATED pink -- I was a tomboy. My nice blue room was gone. My mother was so thrilled to show me my new pink room. Undoubtedly it's a room she would have loved as a girl, except she didn't understand I wasn't her. I knew better than to say I didn't like it. I'd get a lecture about how unappreciative I was and how she had spent so much time working for this special room for me. I was completely flabbergasted that my mother had absolutely no clue that her only kid hated pink.
The one that amazed me most, though, was when I was preg with my 2nd child. I was in the hospital for the third or fourth time with an extremely painful undetermined problem. My symptoms indicated needing to have my gallbladder removed, but every test came back saying it was just fine. Because all the tests looked good and I was in my 24th week, the surgeon didn't want to operate because of the risk of preterm labor. Since I couldn't keep down food so I was being kept in the hospital and fed through IV. My 1st child was 16 months old and ran away because he didn't know me when I got home from my first/second hospital stays. So...my mother called me in the hospital and I mistakenly tell her we think we might have found a solution that involves me being fed through IV at home until the baby's born. I'd checked it with a perinatologist, nutritionist, gastro doc, surgeon, ob/gyn, nurses and they all agreed it was doable. She went through the roof yelling at me that I must have my gallbladder removed, that I there was no reason to do anything else and that if I didn't I would likely die (btw, she has absolutely no medical training). She even told me that it was my duty to do so and questioned what kind of a mother I was. Then she hung up on me. I was stunned. Here I was pregnant, in the hospital, with all the female hormones going, facing 16 weeks more of unbearable pain, separated from my 16mo, with an unknown pregnancy complication, facing the possibility of needing an operation that might kill my baby, and she was yelling at me. And, this was my mother? The next time she called my 2nd child was 3 months old and she acted like nothing had happened.
