Latest / Rachel Oates / This Estranged Mother Wrote A Book To Bully Her Daughter

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This Estranged Mother Wrote A Book To Bully Her Daughter · Rachel Oates

• 0:00
  Hey everyone, welcome back to a new video and today we're going
• 0:02
  to be talking about woman who have seen mentioned all over
• 0:04
  Reddit recently and that is Laura Wellington who also goes
• 0:07
  by the name Dormat Mom or Dormat Mom.
• 0:10
  But I'm not American so just sounds weird when I say that.
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  How many of you really good parents woke up 1 morning
• 0:18
  suddenly to realise that the majority of the problems you
• 0:23
  faced in coping with your ungrateful of adult kids is that
• 0:30
  you actually had raised a narcissist and you never even
• 0:35
  realised it. It never even occurred to you
• 0:38
  because you had no idea what that meant at the time.
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  No no no no no, you don't need to pay for your adult child's
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  health insurance. You have every right to take her
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  off. You're not going to hand her a
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  gift as she's kicking you out the door, my Lord.
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  Don't worry about whether what the impact will be on whether or
• 1:00
  not you eventually reconcile the convenient double standard that
• 1:05
  ungrateful adult kids put forth when it comes to money, love,
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  and their parents is rich. I've just filmed a shorter video
• 1:23
  than normal, which is it still took like an hour.
• 1:25
  But yeah, I asked recently over on Instagram, I've got two
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  really big videos that I've been working on recently that the
• 1:32
  scripts sold them for. There's this one on Doormat Mum
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  and one on Colleen Huevers Regretting You.
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  And I asked her on Instagram which one you prefer to see
• 1:39
  first. And this one went out in the
• 1:40
  end, which is why you're seeing it first.
• 1:42
  But if you like to get involved in more little photos like that
• 1:44
  or just see some of my personal photos and fun stuff like that,
• 1:47
  you can go for me over on Instagram at Rachel Oates with a
• 1:49
  0 if you want. But for now, let's get into
• 1:52
  doormat mum. And also thanks to everyone who
• 1:54
  voted for this. I'm a little limited with what
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  I'm filmed today with my camera battery, but we're going to get
• 1:59
  through as much of this as possible.
• 2:00
  And then I will hopefully film the next part another day.
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  So if I change clothes so make up halfway through, you know
• 2:05
  why? Or if I just look like I've been
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  for a nap in between, that's why.
• 2:09
  So Laura Wellington, doormat mum, is a woman with an
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  estranged adult daughter who has decided to make several social
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  media accounts and write a book about how awful and dreadful and
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  terrible her daughter apparently is.
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  She likes to tell everyone how she's the best mother in the
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  world and now she's doing everything she can to punish her
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  daughter for trying to just set a boundary with her.
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  She initially got quite big on TikTok and then followed up
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  making a Facebook group for other parents who well, it's
• 2:35
  meant to be for parents who are estranged from their kids.
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  But it's, it's all very bitter and very angry.
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  And it's basically just parents who hate their kids and blame
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  them for everything. And like I say, recently she has
• 2:45
  written a book called Doormat Mum No More, which we're going
• 2:48
  to be reviewing in some detail in this video.
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  The problem is, this is without a doubt one of the most boring
• 2:52
  books I've ever read. It is just one long, incoherent,
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  repetitive ramble from a place of anger and resentment and it's
• 3:00
  exhausting to read. It's not even like so bad it's
• 3:02
  funny, it's just bad. Making this video has been a
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  slog and I've been at it for like a month and a bit because
• 3:09
  the because the book is just so boring.
• 3:12
  But trying to create coherent, interesting content from it has
• 3:15
  been a challenge. Thing is though, her tick tock
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  content is the same as well, and we're also going to be looking
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  at a few of those videos as well.
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  I don't quite understand how she's garnered the audience that
• 3:24
  she has, but then again, I think it's because she's offering a
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  safe space for other angry people to feel angry and
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  justified in their anger too. And I think she also has a few
• 3:34
  hate watches, so I'm assuming that's where our audience comes
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  from. Angry people and hate watchers.
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  The Facebook group is the same as well.
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  It's just these parents sitting around talking angrily about how
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  awful their kids are, which of course couldn't possibly be
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  their fault because they're perfect parents and they've
• 3:49
  never done anything wrong. And they all ache each other on
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  to stay angry and wallow in their anger.
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  And it's all quite sad to see and it feels very much like an
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  unhealthy echo chamber in regards to estranged parents and
• 4:01
  kids. It's a really tough topic and
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  it's one that deserves to be handled with sensitivity.
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  In some ways I can relate to the kids side in that I definitely
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  had to set boundaries, my own parents and take steps back at
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  times, you know, in order to have time alone to heal and work
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  through stuff and also have time to kind of like repair that
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  relationship between US. And it's never linear.
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  It's always kind of back and forth of frustrations and upsets
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  and making up and repairing things and then taking some
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  steps back. And you know, it's, it's very up
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  and down. It's very complicated.
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  If you have a difficult relationship with your parents,
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  it's never going to be the same as someone else's relationship
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  with that. You know it.
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  Every case is completely unique and of course I feel for the
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  parents in those situations as well because, you know, unless
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  it's like a cut and dry case of them being incredibly abusive,
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  like, you know, there's never generally a bad bad guy.
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  It's just, it's tough. It's tough.
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  The problem with this though, is that it's very hard to have
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  sympathy for Laura, doormat mom, not necessarily because anything
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  she did to her kid in the past, but because of how she's
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  treating her now and her behaviour now.
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  In summary, her daughter tried to save her mum a trip across
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  the world. There were a few instances where
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  the mum was disrespectful as a daughter and rude.
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  The daughter set a boundary saying, you know what, maybe it
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  would be better if you didn't come to my wedding.
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  We'll come to you in America and have a second wedding party over
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  there that you can attend. And then the mum just, well,
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  here's the other thing. We don't know the exact reason
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  Laura had for setting this boundary.
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  The mother never tells us and claims she doesn't know herself,
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  but we can read into it a little bit with context clues, but we
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  still don't really know and we've not heard her side of
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  things. But in response to setting this,
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  this one boundary, Laura the mother had two choices here.
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  She could, one, respect her daughter's wishes, try to
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  understand where she was coming from, keep going to therapy as
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  her daughter asked her to, and start trying to improve her
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  relationship with her daughter while still giving her space
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  and, you know, just taking time to heal together.
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  Or two, she could turn to anger, call her daughter every name
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  under the sun, paint herself as an infallible St and try and
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  ruin her daughter's wedding by publicly releasing a book
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  insulting her for 180 pages on the same week as her wedding
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  doormat. Mum chose the second option and
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  that's why I find it very hard to have sympathy for her in this
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  situation. There's some things where I.
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  Do. Not necessarily understand where
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  she's like I have sympathy for her but I still think she's in
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  the wrong and she's done a lot more harm than she claims has
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  been done to her. Laura also uses her religious
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  beliefs often as a shield for a lot of criticism and she likes
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  to make the argument of like even if your kids hate you, it's
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  OK because you're doing what God wants and paraphrasing.
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  But you see it throughout her books and her TikTok, TikTok
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  content and so on. 1st up. I want to look a little bit at
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  Laura's past because it seems she's been making online content
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  for quite some time now, but this is the first time she's
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  really blown up and got a lot of attention.
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  She started off writing a series of children's books.
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  For example, my laptop was lonely and I wet the bed.
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  And then under the exact same pen name, author name.
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  As she wrote these children's books, she's also written adult
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  erotica. Like, be careful what you wish
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  for. Evie wished for an uncommon
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  love. What she got was otherworldly, a
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  man named Rick Remington. He'd open her eyes to much more
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  than a life of wealth and privilege.
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  He'd help her see a bond that crossed all boundaries when
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  facing the unimaginable, then find herself again as she
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  answered the very statement that set their time together in
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  motion. Be careful what you wish for.
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  That is so poorly written. But do you really think it's
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  sensible to be writing children's book and erotica
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  under the same name, under the same author account, where kids
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  can just stumble upon it? Because I don't.
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  She's also tried writing a bunch of self help books, for example
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  a diet book titled The Four-star Diet based upon the wisdom of
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  General Colin Powell and other ridiculously brilliant leaders.
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  And relationship advice books like this one with chapters like
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  Dick and Jane, are Not the Same. Whoever convinced women that
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  they are the same as men is a genius, and I say this
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  sarcastically. Men and women are not the same
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  and never will be so long as sex exists between us.
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  It may be inconvenient and unacceptable for some for
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  ideological reasons, but that does not make it any less true.
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  Men and women are different from our unique anatomies up to how
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  we use our up through how we use our brains, our hard drive, our
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  hard wiring is undeniably distinct, which will continue to
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  stymie all claims of absolute sameness, as well as
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  dramatically impact the manner in which both sexes approach
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  dating. But sorry I'm reading this, but
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  it's hilarious, right? You enjoy this.
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  For most women, dating as a means to an end, that end being
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  married in children. Speak for yourself, love.
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  For men, this may not be so. There are many Dicks out there
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  who are simply looking for a good time, which interpreted
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  means as many chains in their beds as physically possible on
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  the way to their particular end. College campuses, local bars and
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  dating websites are full of them, as are airports, shopping
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  malls, work environments and just about everywhere else, Jane
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  roams. None of this behaviour is new,
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  mind you, except for the fact that it seems more open and
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  widely tolerated than ever before.
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  Additionally, certain Jane's feel the need to mimic Dick's
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  unruly behaviour. Proof of the rest of the world
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  of just how grown up and closely similar.
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  Proof to the rest of the world of just how grown up and closely
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  similar to the opposite sex they are.
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  Those women who don't play along basically get tossed from the
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  sandbox, which is not nice and quite deserving of a trip to the
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  principal's office and a cautionary note home to the
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  parents, if you ask me. There's no doubt that we women
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  have complete control over whom we share our cookies with, but
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  to correlate that blatant satisfaction of basic primal
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  urges with that of some newfound awakening among women is rather
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  daft. Jane may play with dogs, but she
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  shouldn't strive to become one or lie down with all of them.
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  Nor should she adopt A1 size fits all policy when none of
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  what's included fits her overall, fits her persona or
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  overall life. It's just misogynistic nonsense
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  and it's so poorly red. Oh God.
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  I think this tells you a lot about who she is and how she
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  thinks. Bear that in mind going forward.
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  I could probably make a whole video about that book but I
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  really don't want to buy it. Today, the focus is on her
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  latest book which is titled Doormat Mum No more.
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  When good parents finally say enough to their ungrateful adult
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  children. First up, let's take a look at
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  the the Amazon listing because the description is quite
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  revealing in itself. This author is viral on TikTok
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  for igniting the conversation between good parents and their
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  ungrateful adult children. Thus, many adult controls are
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  leaving one star reviews here to crush the book and conversation,
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  resulting in even more reason that good parents should get it.
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  I think it might be a little more accurate to say this author
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  is viral on TikTok because people are shocked she is
• 10:52
  publicly shaming her daughter. But I think it's quite funny
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  that you have to be like, hey, if you see bad reviews, OK, it's
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  it's they're not real. They're not really just troll
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  like come on, if that's the first thing you have to say
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  about your book to sell it, not the best sign, is it?
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  Did you leap tall buildings in a single bound for your kids while
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  raising them? Love them, sacrifice for them,
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  support them, do whatever it took to be the best parent that
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  you could be, minus a few unremarkable mistakes no worse
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  than any other parent made? Did you attempt to give them the
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  world? And now that they're all grown
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  up, they behave as if they are completely ungrateful towards
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  you. They criticise your parenting of
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  them, demand that everything you gave them you owed, and insist
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  that nothing of what you did for them was good enough.
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  None of it warrants appreciation, a relationship, or
• 11:34
  even a visit. And you, tired of being a
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  doormat for them, have finally said enough yourself.
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  This book is for you. Calm down baby.
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  Sorry, Kyron is a week. Give me one second.
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  There's an epidemic going on in the United States where really
• 11:46
  good parents are coping with really ungrateful adult
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  children. No longer are they willing to
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  accept the shame, flame, or insane treatment that these kids
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  dish out. Thousands of good parents are
• 11:55
  banding together and speaking up regarding where the fault for
• 11:58
  this mania truly, truly lies, as well as what they are doing to
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  cope. If you are one of them, this
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  book is for you. Rambling nonsense, isn't it?
• 12:06
  Rambling nonsense, right? I'm taking the little one out.
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  Give me a second. OK?
• 12:09
  Hey everyone, I am back as just voice over me because, yeah,
• 12:12
  I've just been struggling on camera again and I need to get
• 12:15
  this video done. So OK, where were we?
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  We just read the little description of her book.
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  And I think it's quite funny because other than like a few
• 12:26
  extra personal stories in this book about her daughter and name
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  calling her daughter and a couple of quotes from people in
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  her Facebook group, she doesn't really say much else in this
• 12:34
  book that she hasn't already said in this book description.
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  Which I think just brings my point that this book did not
• 12:40
  have to be as long and boring as it is now.
• 12:43
  Usually when I review a book like this, if you've seen any of
• 12:45
  the other videos on my channel, you may know this.
• 12:47
  I tend to go through chapter by chapter and talk about it.
• 12:49
  But this book is so repetitive and dull that instead I've
• 12:53
  decided to kind of mix it up a little bit.
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  It's also very incoherent. It's very rambly.
• 12:59
  Things jump around, but not in like an interesting narrative
• 13:02
  kind of way, just in the like jumbled thoughts that haven't
• 13:06
  been planned out kind of way. And so instead, what I've done
• 13:09
  with this is I picked out a handful of passages I want to
• 13:11
  talk about and I've organised them into kind of themes.
• 13:14
  And we're going to be talking about them like that.
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  And I'm also going to bring in a couple of her TikTok videos as
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  well where they kind of exemplify similar points and
• 13:21
  talk about it like that. But before we do that and before
• 13:23
  we jump into, you know, splitting it up to be like this
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  section, this section and whatever, and we need to kind of
• 13:29
  understand the inciting incident which led to this book being
• 13:33
  written. And honestly, kind of seems a
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  little bit minor to me. We never really get a full
• 13:38
  explanation of what happened. I'm not sure Laura even fully
• 13:41
  understands or knows her herself.
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  I would kill to hear from the daughter's perspective and all
• 13:45
  this and see what she makes of it all, what she thinks happened
• 13:48
  like that would be. But obviously, you know that one
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  deserves her privacy. Privacy.
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  So we're not going to get it and we don't deserve it.
• 13:55
  But my point is, the story's just wild.
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  We're going to briefly go over it here and then go into more
• 13:59
  detail with it later on, so bear with me.
• 14:02
  Chapter 1. The moment I realised I'd
• 14:04
  finally had enough. I just can't anymore.
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  Those are the words overtook me, the ones I finally accepted,
• 14:09
  following the crushing disbelief that I felt upon hearing my
• 14:11
  youngest daughter tell me that I wouldn't be attending her
• 14:13
  wedding in Australia. I wasn't invited.
• 14:16
  I could hardly formulate a response.
• 14:18
  What was I supposed to say exactly?
• 14:20
  I was literally beside myself with shock.
• 14:22
  I mean, you literally weren't. But OK, I can't talk.
• 14:25
  I'm always using literally the wrong way for like, hyperbole.
• 14:29
  And to make things sound more dramatic.
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  I searched my thoughts, prodding them to make sense of this.
• 14:33
  Wasn't it no, mother week ago that the future groom arranged
• 14:36
  for a conversation with me in hopes of receiving my blessing
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  after only five months of knowing my daughter?
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  Or a month ago when my digital nomad of an adult child
• 14:44
  whatsapped me from Vietnam, distraught that the wedding
• 14:46
  dress, the one that had already been fitted, would ultimately
• 14:49
  need further alterations. She'd gone to say to me that
• 14:52
  she'd had me make the necessary adjustments had I not been
• 14:55
  currently sitting in our family home halfway around the world
• 14:58
  and me a competent seamstress. And her loving mother answered
• 15:01
  that I would gladly do it anyway.
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  OK, so from what I can piece together from this and the rest
• 15:05
  of the book, the youngest daughter was a bit more
• 15:07
  independent than her other siblings.
• 15:09
  And she also chose like a less traditional, I guess, like
• 15:13
  career path and lifestyle essentially.
• 15:15
  And the mother, Laura didn't like this and refused to help
• 15:18
  pay for some of her education when she can previously offers
• 15:21
  in the past. She's of like rescind rescinded
• 15:23
  that offer. And she basically said like, Oh
• 15:25
  well, I don't like my daughter's personality.
• 15:27
  I don't trust her personality, so I'm not going to pay for her
• 15:30
  to have an education. And so the daughter took a
• 15:33
  different path. She ended up travelling around
• 15:35
  the world and getting engaged to a man in Australia.
• 15:38
  She then told her mom that she was having two wedding parties,
• 15:41
  one in America, one in Australia, the first one being
• 15:44
  in Australia because that's where she lives now.
• 15:46
  So obviously that was going to be the main one.
• 15:48
  She told her mom that she didn't have to come to the Australia 1
• 15:50
  because you know, it's a hell of a long way to travel.
• 15:52
  The mom got really, really offended.
• 15:54
  This led to the daughter of her saying I can't cope with this,
• 15:57
  please don't come and hence the I just can't anymore line.
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  And then the mother stopped speaking to her.
• 16:03
  The daughter cancelled the America party all together.
• 16:05
  The mum set up this whole doormat mum thing online and
• 16:08
  decided to try and ruin her daughter's wedding by writing
• 16:10
  this book that we're reading right now which calls her
• 16:13
  daughter all the names you can think of.
• 16:15
  And she decided to release it in the same week as her daughter's
• 16:18
  wedding to teach her daughter a lesson.
• 16:22
  Yeah, it doesn't really feel like the daughter did very much,
• 16:26
  especially not enough to warrant everything the mother has gone
• 16:30
  on to do since and is continuing to do.
• 16:32
  There's clearly some missing, missing Regents here.
• 16:35
  Right? Which we're going to talk about
• 16:37
  in a second. We don't know exactly what led
• 16:39
  to the daughter uninviting the mother, but it was clearly
• 16:41
  something. Laura never tells us
• 16:43
  specifically why the daughter didn't want her there.
• 16:46
  She just spends 180 pages disparaging her decision and her
• 16:50
  daughter as a person instead of trying to understand it or her
• 16:53
  or rebuild the relationship at all.
• 16:55
  I'm not saying you always have to understand the reasons behind
• 16:58
  a person hurting you, but I think in this case, if it was a
• 17:01
  family member who just like suddenly out of nowhere turned
• 17:05
  on you, wouldn't you want to know?
• 17:06
  Why wouldn't you question it a bit more?
• 17:09
  Like even just to yourself, even in private?
• 17:11
  People who study estranged parents and children call this
• 17:15
  the missing missing reasons. And there's a great website
• 17:17
  about it that has done a lot of studies into it and also looked
• 17:19
  at a lot of online forums of estranged parents and the things
• 17:23
  they say online. And we're going to be referring
• 17:24
  to that a few times in this video.
• 17:26
  That website says members of estranged parents forums often
• 17:29
  say that their children never gave them any reasons for the
• 17:31
  estrangement, then turn around and reveal that their children
• 17:34
  did tell them why. But the reasons their children
• 17:36
  give, the infamous missing reasons are missing.
• 17:39
  So like I said, we'll be talking about this in a whole lot more
• 17:41
  detail later. I've got a whole section on it,
• 17:43
  but keep it in mind as we go forward.
• 17:45
  And like I said, she reveals at the end of this book, Laura
• 17:48
  does. I chose to release this book the
• 17:50
  week of her wedding in Australia.
• 17:51
  Oddly, the collision of these two events somehow made sense to
• 17:54
  me and brought me comfort. They're entangled anyway, no
• 17:57
  doubt one leading to the other and both signifying new
• 17:59
  beginnings. Mine now includes all of you.
• 18:03
  And this just feels cruel and unnecessary, doesn't it?
• 18:06
  Like clearly this book isn't actually about helping other
• 18:09
  estranged parents. It's about Laura trying to hurt
• 18:11
  her daughter. And I just find that absolutely
• 18:13
  awful. And I do think it needs calling
• 18:15
  out, you know? So let's look at the first
• 18:18
  category of content from this book and tick tock stuff that I
• 18:20
  pulled out, which I've titled I'm a Wonderful parent, the Best
• 18:24
  parent. So without the section, the rest
• 18:26
  of the book falls apart. Nothing else Laura says really
• 18:29
  matters if she doesn't first convince us that she's an
• 18:31
  amazing parent and the innocent victim in all this.
• 18:33
  I don't find her very convincing, but here we are.
• 18:36
  Let's take a look at what she has to say.
• 18:38
  Anyway, she opens the preface by saying this book isn't for them,
• 18:41
  it is for you. One of the many really good
• 18:44
  parents who have finally reached the point of saying enough to
• 18:47
  their ungrateful adult kids, those they've spent their year,
• 18:50
  those they spent years raising, and even more time tiptoeing
• 18:53
  around just to keep their relationships alive.
• 18:55
  There are many of us such parents.
• 18:57
  Despite the fact you wouldn't know it, society has done a
• 18:59
  dandy job of silencing and shaming us all into submission
• 19:02
  and hiding. But we've grown weary.
• 19:05
  We've grown weary of breaking our backs from all the
• 19:07
  pandering, capitulating, and pacifying it's taken to swallow
• 19:10
  our adult kids grand disrespect while they hold our hearts over
• 19:14
  our heads without care. We simply can't do it anymore.
• 19:17
  A few housekeeping notes to keep in mind.
• 19:19
  I write this book from the perspective of being a really
• 19:21
  good parent who has lived and practised what she's preached.
• 19:24
  Yes, my professional career has included being a politics,
• 19:27
  culture and parenting expert, writer and guest appearing on
• 19:31
  talk and news platforms like Doctor Phil, Primetime, Fox and
• 19:34
  Friends, The Sean Hannity Show, The Larry Elder Show, The Epoch
• 19:38
  Times, and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
• 19:40
  These aren't credentials that I care about.
• 19:44
  Like I no stop it. Do you forget that feeling where
• 19:47
  if a person has to consistently go around telling us that you're
• 19:50
  a really good parent despite the fact your actions literally show
• 19:53
  otherwise, then they might not actually be a good parent.
• 19:57
  Now, Laura has had it tough at times.
• 19:58
  No one can deny that she lost her husband and the father,
• 20:01
  father of her kids when she was just 35.
• 20:03
  And that has got to be difficult on anyone.
• 20:05
  And so she obviously gets a lot of my sympathy for that.
• 20:07
  And of course, everyone knows how hard a lot of single parents
• 20:09
  work and we should never ever diminish that.
• 20:12
  I guess it just rubbed me the wrong way a little bit that we
• 20:13
  have this situation now where one of her kids is saying, hey,
• 20:16
  I feel hurt by some of your behaviour.
• 20:18
  And her response is, well, you shouldn't.
• 20:19
  I was super mom and. And those are her exact words.
• 20:23
  She acknowledges at the time she's made mistakes, but she
• 20:26
  refuses to acknowledge that it's OK for her kids to be hurt by
• 20:29
  those mistakes. She's like, mistakes are normal.
• 20:32
  You know, you shouldn't have anything to say about it.
• 20:33
  Like me, me, me. And she gets mad at her kids for
• 20:36
  being hurt by her. It's it's wild, she writes.
• 20:41
  At certain points, onlookers would tell me that I had
• 20:42
  conquered being Super Mom. The appreciation I felt at those
• 20:45
  words dimmed in comparison to the strength and pride I took
• 20:48
  and see my resilient, steady family and comfortable life
• 20:50
  evolve. Everyone pitched in to make it
• 20:52
  so. As a result, my children became
• 20:54
  highly competent people at very young ages.
• 20:56
  Where once we were fragmented, we now worked as a team and we
• 20:59
  flourished. So onlookers said this about
• 21:01
  her, but apparently not her own children from what we know.
• 21:03
  So yeah, suffice to say, at 58, I experienced a rather
• 21:08
  unexpected awakening, not unlike so many other parents had
• 21:11
  already experienced. To put it simply, good parents
• 21:13
  can wind up with adult children who are simply ungrateful.
• 21:16
  And among the many that do are those who are neither at fault
• 21:19
  nor let off easy. Yet there are automatic, yet
• 21:22
  they are automatically assigned all of the blame for their adult
• 21:24
  kids toxic and unrelenting behaviour regardless, simply
• 21:28
  because society's agenda driven experts, culture warriors and
• 21:32
  those who feed on hate deem it so.
• 21:35
  And this is a big thing she comes back to a lot.
• 21:37
  She thinks that if a child says like, oh, you hurt me for this
• 21:40
  and this reason, it's because that child is too woke.
• 21:43
  They've been listening too much to to culture.
• 21:46
  They're just being snowflakes. There's a lot of really strong
• 21:49
  right wing rhetoric in this book.
• 21:52
  It's, oh, it's a lot. Laura likes to make the
• 21:55
  distinction that horrible parents do exist, but so do good
• 21:58
  parents, unjustly accused those who simply make normal mistakes
• 22:02
  and nothing more. This book is about them and for
• 22:04
  them to lift the veil on what so many good parents are going
• 22:07
  through with adult children who show little grace, no gratitude,
• 22:11
  doodles of self righteousness and a punch on for bullying.
• 22:14
  Not to mention elected or provoked estrangement when faced
• 22:17
  with boundaries that they just don't like.
• 22:19
  And a lot or rather her only examples of why she's the best
• 22:23
  parent ever and deserves the title of supermom are just
• 22:26
  because she did basic parenting things.
• 22:28
  You know, the basic things that you agreed to do when you decide
• 22:31
  to be a parent. You know she says I kiss Boo
• 22:33
  boos, turned frowns upside down and helped mend broken hearts
• 22:36
  gratefully, undoubtedly soothing your children's trouble.
• 22:39
  Troubles always fixed to hurts at the same time, theirs and
• 22:42
  yours. No phone calls or texts ever
• 22:44
  went unanswered. I drove her everywhere.
• 22:47
  I even orchestrated a makeup birthday party for her when her
• 22:49
  original plan suddenly went S. Suffice to say, I met my
• 22:52
  daughter at every conceivable turn of which I was aware, and I
• 22:56
  did so without earning the distasteful label of being a
• 22:58
  helicopter parent. I encouraged solid character,
• 23:00
  morals and values including hard work, independence, charity and
• 23:04
  resourcefulness. I rewarded these with trust and
• 23:06
  freedom. Then, when my daughter requested
• 23:08
  to attend an arts high school part time, I agreed to that too.
• 23:11
  Not an easy achievement to be accepted into the programme.
• 23:13
  I recognise this and ultimately decided so long as she kept her
• 23:16
  core grades up, I'd allow her to go.
• 23:18
  She did. And of course, I mean, I'm glad
• 23:20
  she did all this, but I think things like, you know, caring
• 23:24
  for your kids when and they're upset and sending them to a good
• 23:27
  school, is that not the bare minimum of what a parent is
• 23:30
  supposed to do? In the nicest way, this doesn't
• 23:33
  mean that she wasn't neglectful or hurtful, perhaps emotionally
• 23:37
  in other areas. You know, this feels a bit like,
• 23:41
  do you remember that YouTube Brooke Helts who was caught
• 23:44
  literally spitting on her dog and beating him on camera.
• 23:47
  It's horrible and this feels a bit like if her response to be
• 23:51
  called out for that was. But I still feed him every day.
• 23:54
  So like I don't get why you're calling me a bad pet owner.
• 23:56
  I don't get why he doesn't love me.
• 23:58
  It feels like that. It feels like there's maybe
• 24:00
  things that she did do that she's not acknowledging that
• 24:03
  hurt her kids. Or like, in some cases, she does
• 24:06
  kind of vaguely acknowledge, like we'll hear a story later of
• 24:09
  her body shaming her daughter and her daughter being upset
• 24:11
  ever and her being like, oh, I didn't even do anything wrong.
• 24:13
  There's cases where she's like, oh, yeah, of course I made
• 24:15
  mistakes, but they're just normal mistakes.
• 24:17
  Everyone does them, so I don't need to apologise for them.
• 24:20
  So yeah, it's interesting as well because in some of the
• 24:24
  passages where she's trying to paint herself as a perfect
• 24:27
  mother, she's actually showing how even early on in her
• 24:29
  daughter's life, her daughter was pulling away from her.
• 24:32
  And again, we have to ask why? She says.
• 24:34
  While the daughter was at uni, when she visited home, I bought
• 24:38
  tickets that made these returns possible and either picked her
• 24:41
  up from the airport myself or paid for a reliable car service
• 24:44
  to fetch her. She was then greeted with a warm
• 24:46
  welcome from me, along with a refrigerator full of her
• 24:48
  preferred cuisine, a clean room and a comfy bed.
• 24:50
  I crammed these preparations between both work and sleep.
• 24:53
  So important was it to me that she and she'd enjoy a comfy
• 24:56
  stay. During these trips, she'd spend
• 24:58
  a great deal of time with her high school friends, each one
• 25:00
  welcomed into our home and invited for dinner.
• 25:02
  More times than not, however, she she'd elect to remain at
• 25:04
  their homes with me, waiting patiently for her return.
• 25:07
  Refraining from taking these absences personally, I couldn't
• 25:10
  help but begin to wonder. She'd spend subsequent moments
• 25:12
  with her brothers and sisters. Invariably, the rest would fall
• 25:15
  to me. And I think this is just really
• 25:17
  normal for a young woman to want to spend the majority of her
• 25:19
  time with her friends, her siblings and then her parents.
• 25:22
  Like, I don't see anything wrong with the daughter's behaviour
• 25:25
  here. And I mean, at this point, the
• 25:26
  daughter is an adult, so it's not like the mum owes her a
• 25:29
  place to stay or nice food or anything like that.
• 25:31
  But I think if you're offering a guest a place to stay, which is
• 25:35
  what she's essentially doing with her adult daughter here,
• 25:37
  then this is just the polite thing to do.
• 25:39
  This is a normal thing to do. You get food in for them.
• 25:41
  You give them a clean room and a bed like that's, that's not
• 25:46
  going above and beyond, is it? So I, I don't know.
• 25:51
  And even that even when you have guests, the guests and or your
• 25:54
  children don't owe you all of their time.
• 25:58
  Like you have to accept a point where, like when your kids are
• 26:01
  adults, you're not going to be their first priority every
• 26:05
  single time. And that's normal.
• 26:07
  And that's okay. And again, let's look for those
• 26:09
  missing reasons here. Like let's say the daughter was
• 26:12
  intentionally pulling away from her mum and wanting to spend
• 26:15
  less time with her mum and more time with her friends and more
• 26:17
  time at the house. We should be asking why.
• 26:21
  Like without knowing that why, it's really hard to make a
• 26:23
  judgement either way. And The thing is like I do
• 26:25
  actually really relate to the daughter here because like back
• 26:27
  when I was at uni I basically stopped going back to my parents
• 26:30
  place after the first Christmas. Like I'd go back once a year for
• 26:34
  like 4 days around Christmas and then just head back home to be
• 26:37
  with my friends the rest of the time.
• 26:39
  And I have my own personal reasons for doing that.
• 26:41
  But you know what my parents didn't do?
• 26:43
  They didn't decide to hold a grudge about it for the next 10
• 26:45
  years and write a book calling me a selfish bitch instead.
• 26:49
  My mom in particular understood. And she gave me space and she
• 26:53
  respected my independence. And in doing that, she
• 26:56
  definitely allowed that space between us to like, kind of
• 27:00
  repair our relationship over time.
• 27:02
  And we're in a much, much better place now than like we've maybe
• 27:06
  ever been, which is fantastic. And I feel like Laura's not
• 27:10
  giving her daughter a chance to do that.
• 27:12
  If her daughter was holding some resentment towards her for
• 27:14
  whatever reason or was feeling hurt by her for whatever reason.
• 27:18
  And she was saying, I mean, maybe not verbally, but
• 27:20
  interaction. She was saying, I need space, I
• 27:22
  need time. Her mother not giving her that,
• 27:24
  punishing her for asking for that.
• 27:26
  And now holding this massive grudge and being like, I'm going
• 27:29
  to tell the whole world while you're a bitch on your wedding
• 27:32
  day. That's not going to do anything
• 27:34
  to repair the relationship. That's, oh, it's just making
• 27:37
  everything worse, isn't it? Laura goes on to write.
• 27:39
  I had taken the parenting of my children very seriously.
• 27:41
  I'd been responsible, I'd been there, I had done the work of
• 27:44
  many willingly and lovingly, devoid of any concern for
• 27:47
  myself, my health, my welfare. I'd always put my children 1st
• 27:50
  and all I've asked in return was for them to meet me halfway,
• 27:53
  lend a hand when asked, work to become the legacy of which their
• 27:56
  father would be proud. Respect me, don't lie, show an
• 28:00
  appropriate amount of gratitude, stay out of trouble, don't
• 28:02
  abandoned me in my old age and never put me in a nursing home.
• 28:05
  That's it. Is that all?
• 28:07
  Like, that massive long list? Is that all?
• 28:09
  If they ever came out loving me too, and I assume that they
• 28:11
  would, my life would be complete.
• 28:13
  There's nothing more that a good mother could want than to see
• 28:15
  her family thriving when under her wing and especially when
• 28:18
  flying. So.
• 28:19
  Except you don't allow your kids to fly.
• 28:21
  So sorry. Like, it's just a lot, isn't it?
• 28:24
  She really is asking so much of her kids, like, even that one
• 28:26
  line about, like, to become a legacy of which their father
• 28:29
  would be proud of. Like, that is a lot of pressure
• 28:32
  you're putting on your kids. A lot.
• 28:34
  Let's be honest. Yeah.
• 28:35
  The whole stuff about like don't abandoned in the meanwhile,
• 28:37
  never put me in a nursing home. It's like, I mean, it would be
• 28:39
  great if your kids didn't do that, but at the same time, like
• 28:42
  just because you chose to give birth to them, that doesn't mean
• 28:45
  they owe you that. Again, you are asking a hell of
• 28:49
  a lot. Like you're asking them to look
• 28:52
  after an entire human being and all of their needs when they
• 28:56
  didn't sign up for that. And while obviously it's
• 28:59
  wonderful when kids do do that for their parents, like it's not
• 29:02
  something that should be expected or forced upon them.
• 29:05
  Do you know what I mean? And this actually leads us on to
• 29:07
  the next section that we can talk about.
• 29:09
  And that's her high expectations for her kids in general and the
• 29:12
  idea that your kids always owe you something.
• 29:16
  Let's stop by taking a look at this clip from her TikTok
• 29:18
  account. Society has taught our adult
• 29:21
  kids from about the teenagers on that we should earn their
• 29:26
  respect. Let me say that again, we good
• 29:29
  parents should earn their respect.
• 29:33
  And then gravel ones in the bunch bought a hook line and
• 29:36
  snicker instead of they should earn our respect.
• 29:42
  See, they expect respect to come as easily as unconditional love
• 29:46
  does. But they're two different
• 29:48
  things. So if you want parents respect,
• 29:53
  it's simple. Earn it.
• 29:55
  She really keeps going back to this idea over and over in her
• 29:57
  book, this idea that kids owe you this and this and this and
• 30:01
  blah, blah. And when they don't want to do
• 30:02
  what she wants or they simply can't do what she wants, she
• 30:05
  blames, well, a whole bunch of stuff, really.
• 30:07
  And she says the kids are ungrateful, rude, bad people,
• 30:10
  narcissists. It's a bit.
• 30:12
  It's a big bad woke society which has turned them against
• 30:16
  her. The Bible wouldn't like this.
• 30:17
  Jesus wouldn't do this. I'm basically Jesus, look at me,
• 30:20
  I'm a martyr and so on. She goes on to write.
• 30:23
  No longer will we allow our ungrateful adult children to
• 30:26
  bank on our commitment to them nor our sacrifices for them.
• 30:29
  They need to pony up and show something in return.
• 30:31
  Respect to begin with. Loyalty, yes, and gratitude at a
• 30:35
  minimum. Is that really so much to ask?
• 30:37
  Well, it is if you've been mistreating them.
• 30:39
  But, you know, how do we know what's happened?
• 30:42
  He won't tell us. The notion that adult kids don't
• 30:44
  owe good parents anything, or that they don't owe good parents
• 30:47
  anything because they didn't ask to be born, is such a crock.
• 30:50
  Yes, they do. If the gift of birth alone
• 30:52
  doesn't oblige them, certainly the love and sacrifice extolled
• 30:55
  by good parents should. It's not the asking or even the
• 30:58
  process of being birthed that incites the owing, although few
• 31:02
  people would give, although few people give up the opportunity
• 31:05
  or their time on earth when pressed.
• 31:07
  It's everything else that comes after the fact that does.
• 31:10
  No one's parents asked to bring them into the world.
• 31:12
  But that didn't discharge generations of adult children
• 31:15
  from the obligations of being, of behaving gratefully and
• 31:18
  respectfully. You kick a gift horse in the
• 31:20
  mouth and then cry. I owe you nothing.
• 31:22
  That's what today's adult children want their claim to
• 31:24
  fame to be. Sounds more like bad character
• 31:27
  to me. Most certainly good parents are
• 31:29
  owed by their adult children and it is a reflection of the
• 31:32
  unhealthy mindset of the current day society and a broken godless
• 31:36
  culture that perpetuates the fallacy that they don't.
• 31:39
  It works against the preservation of the family unit
• 31:41
  as a whole and species survival at a baseline.
• 31:44
  I just could not disagree with this more.
• 31:47
  These kids didn't ask to be born, and you don't get to
• 31:50
  demand a whole bunch of stuff from them because you made the
• 31:53
  selfish choice to have kids. You chose to do that, and
• 31:57
  therefore you chose to accept the responsibilities that go
• 31:59
  along with it. There was no contract that these
• 32:02
  kids signed saying, yeah, absolutely, I'll do XY and Z in
• 32:05
  return. You know, I know, I know.
• 32:08
  It's entirely different because like, I'm not a parent, but I do
• 32:12
  have a dog. When I adopted Kyra, I didn't do
• 32:16
  that with the expectation that she would love me and do XY and
• 32:19
  Z for me. I made the choice to adopt her
• 32:21
  because I wanted to give her a better life, because I wanted to
• 32:25
  give her love and friendship and care.
• 32:29
  I didn't expect anything back. Like, of course you hope.
• 32:32
  You hope that she's going to love you too, but that's not
• 32:35
  something that you can expect or demand from another living
• 32:38
  being. You offer love and care and you
• 32:41
  provide a safe home because you want them to be happy and safe
• 32:45
  and healthy, not because you want them to make you feel that
• 32:49
  way in return. Relationships are not
• 32:52
  transactional and especially not relationships where one person
• 32:55
  is choosing to take care of a dependent.
• 32:58
  And that's what is happening when you have a child or you
• 33:02
  choose to adopt A pet. You know, those kinds of
• 33:06
  relationships especially should not be transactional because
• 33:09
  that's not healthy for anyone involved.
• 33:11
  Like, and of course, like at this point, Kyra does love me
• 33:14
  and she does care about me and she absolutely does provide me
• 33:16
  with so much emotional support when I need her.
• 33:19
  But that's because she chooses to.
• 33:20
  I'd never ask that of her or expect it of her.
• 33:24
  And I feel like it should be the same with kids.
• 33:27
  If you're only looking after them and providing apparent love
• 33:31
  so that they will and I quote, never put you in a nursing home,
• 33:34
  then you're not doing anything for them selflessly or really
• 33:37
  for their benefit, are you? And I can completely understand
• 33:40
  why the kids would be upset by that.
• 33:42
  She likes to bring in the Bible quite often to back up her
• 33:44
  thoughts. And here is her quoting another
• 33:46
  woman from her Facebook group in regards to that one.
• 33:49
  Mum said it this way. When the Bible says honour thy
• 33:51
  father and thy mother, nowhere does it say if they're worthy.
• 33:54
  My parents weren't easy but I always honoured them.
• 33:57
  All families have dysfunction and I.
• 34:00
  In another part of her book, she goes on to say any adult child
• 34:04
  who chooses to neither appreciate nor value nor obey
• 34:07
  nor care for the very parents who took care of her from the
• 34:11
  from top to toe growing up isn't just being totally ungrateful
• 34:15
  but committing an offence towards God.
• 34:17
  In my opinion, conceit and callousness draw a Direct Line
• 34:21
  to conviction and chaos when children fail to honour their
• 34:25
  parents. And the insult is even more
• 34:27
  arresting when these kids remain indebted and living under the
• 34:29
  same roofs as the parents of whom they don't see the need to
• 34:32
  honour. Instead of feeling exceedingly
• 34:34
  fortunate and grateful for all their parents have done for
• 34:36
  them, they walk around as if they own the conversation and
• 34:39
  the room, neither of which they actually earned, unlike those
• 34:42
  who actually do. And then they complain that it
• 34:44
  still isn't good enough. And I find it so interesting
• 34:47
  that she keeps talking about how kids are self absorbed and
• 34:49
  callous and conceited when that's exactly how she comes
• 34:51
  across in this book. Also, let's not gloss over the
• 34:55
  fact that she basically like just wrote that her daughter's
• 34:59
  going to hell. She's like, you know, you're
• 35:00
  committing, you're committing an offence towards God.
• 35:02
  Like that's basically saying I expect you to rot in hell.
• 35:05
  And I mean, obviously, like, I don't believe in heaven and
• 35:08
  hell, but she obviously does. And that's a really like when
• 35:11
  you believe that stuff that is not a nice thing to say to
• 35:14
  someone like especially not your own kid.
• 35:19
  And a society that makes it perfectly all right for children
• 35:20
  little or big not to owe their parents anything is inviting
• 35:23
  nihilism, disarray and extinction.
• 35:26
  OK, Yep, a little extreme, but if you say so that is what it is
• 35:30
  doing. You think it is by accident the
• 35:32
  replacement rates in so many first world countries, including
• 35:35
  our own, aren't being met currently.
• 35:37
  Or that people are popping pills to regulate their mood and cope
• 35:39
  with their spiralling mental health.
• 35:41
  Like it's going out of style. OK, slight side here, but this
• 35:44
  is something I've never understood, right?
• 35:45
  The mindset of like, Oh no, people now have access to
• 35:48
  medicine which benefits them and makes them healthier.
• 35:51
  Therefore the whole world's going to crap.
• 35:52
  Oh no, like no, people aren't taking more antidepressants now
• 35:57
  than before because there are more depressed people now.
• 36:00
  It's because people have better access to medicine, mental
• 36:04
  health support, There's less stigma around mental health
• 36:06
  issues. The fact that people are taking
• 36:08
  more antidepressants means that people are actually healthier
• 36:11
  and and doing better than before.
• 36:14
  You know, it's like, you know, the increase in diagnosis of
• 36:19
  autism is not because there's more autistic people than
• 36:21
  before, is because we're better at diagnosing it.
• 36:23
  That's what's happening now. It's not that there's more
• 36:26
  depressed people than before, It's that we're better at
• 36:28
  diagnosing it and treating it. That's it.
• 36:31
  It's a good thing, she goes on, for adult children are not
• 36:35
  devoid of accountability. Society, however, teaches them
• 36:37
  that they are, that they owe no one anything, not even their
• 36:40
  parents. It green lights them riding off
• 36:42
  into the sunset without looking back, so long as it makes them
• 36:45
  happy. Their personal happiness remains
• 36:47
  central to the world being completely right, and yet they
• 36:50
  are never happy. For this, parents get the blame
• 36:52
  too. It's enough to leave you bonkers
• 36:55
  when you realise that nothing you will ever do will ever make
• 36:58
  a difference to your ungrateful adult kids.
• 36:59
  You eventually refrain from trying, disillusionment finally
• 37:02
  sets in, and you ultimately refocus your efforts on more
• 37:05
  positive things. She even realised that she
• 37:08
  wouldn't have existed without me.
• 37:09
  I made sure that she was so well taken care of.
• 37:12
  Her behaviour is sickening. Words from a good mother who
• 37:14
  would finally hit her limit. A lot of people online through
• 37:19
  around this term accountability and I don't think many of them
• 37:21
  really know what it means. It's not not just like Laura
• 37:24
  here being like children don't have accountability these days.
• 37:27
  You see it with them men being like, oh, she's, you know, she
• 37:32
  is seeking trauma because she was raped.
• 37:35
  Women don't have accountability. Oh no, she made some mistakes
• 37:38
  and now she's changing her life. Women don't have accountability?
• 37:42
  Oh no she needs medical help for XY and Z issue.
• 37:45
  Women of no accountability. It's like you don't know what
• 37:49
  accountability means, do you? And like, especially in this
• 37:52
  context here with adult children, accountability and
• 37:55
  that sort of thing, right? No, I don't think kids should be
• 37:59
  held accountable for their parents happiness and well-being
• 38:02
  if they don't want to be. That is madness.
• 38:05
  And what sort of heartless parent doesn't want their child
• 38:07
  to be happy or is annoyed that their child cares about their
• 38:11
  own needs? That is wild to me.
• 38:13
  Like, I'm. I'm not normally one for being
• 38:16
  like, see, this thing happens in nature.
• 38:18
  And then all humans. I thought all humans must do it
• 38:20
  too. Yeah.
• 38:21
  But there are so many species of animals where the mothers will
• 38:25
  literally sacrifice themselves for their children.
• 38:27
  You know, female octopuses literally die caring for and
• 38:31
  hatching their babies. There's a spider called the
• 38:34
  Black lace Weaver who sits on the web while her babies hatch.
• 38:38
  And then the babies eat their little egg shells, and that's
• 38:40
  not enough energy to get them out of the world.
• 38:42
  So then she starts drumming on the strings of her web.
• 38:46
  And these vibrations basically tell the little ones exactly
• 38:48
  where she is and that it's time so that they can all come and
• 38:51
  swarm her and eat her. And then she basically gives her
• 38:55
  life for her babies, which now through eating their own mother,
• 38:58
  have enough energy to go out into the world by themselves and
• 39:02
  continue on the life cycle and, you know, be part of this big
• 39:06
  beautiful ecosystem. You know, Now, don't get me
• 39:11
  wrong. I'm not saying humans should
• 39:12
  allow their kids to eat them. Don't go around telling people
• 39:15
  I've said that. OK, not pro cannibalism here.
• 39:19
  But yeah. And I'm not even saying that
• 39:22
  like every human or parent should make big sacrifices for
• 39:26
  babies. I mean, like, I'm, I'm literally
• 39:28
  child free by choice. I know I don't have it in me to
• 39:30
  make those kinds of big sacrifices that kids need, so I
• 39:33
  choose not to do it. But what I am saying is that
• 39:36
  it's entirely natural, or it should be entirely natural, the
• 39:40
  kids. So for parents to want what's
• 39:43
  best for their kids and do whatever they can to help their
• 39:46
  kids go out into the world on their own and thrive on their
• 39:49
  own. So if you're the kind of person
• 39:52
  who doesn't want your kids to be happy and independent and
• 39:56
  thriving, then maybe that's something that you need to
• 39:59
  reassess in yourself instead of blaming your kids.
• 40:03
  Do you know what I mean? If you resent your children for
• 40:06
  being happy and independent, that's a you issue, you know
• 40:09
  what I'm saying? It is interesting too, because
• 40:11
  I've read a few books on family estrangement in preparation for
• 40:14
  this video, and there's, I think maybe one or two in particular
• 40:17
  I'm going to quoting in this video, But I'll leave some other
• 40:19
  links and recommendations down in the video description.
• 40:23
  One of them is called We Don't Talk Anymore, healing after
• 40:25
  parents and their adult children become estranged.
• 40:28
  And it's by Kathy McCoy and she writes, that the mothers are
• 40:32
  more likely to become estranged as a result of continuing
• 40:35
  demands for closeness or giving unsolicited advice.
• 40:39
  This kind of estrangement can spring from conflicting needs
• 40:41
  and perceptions about how much contact is too much, what advice
• 40:45
  can feel like criticism and what actions can feel intrusive.
• 40:49
  The mother may feel she's just being helpful.
• 40:51
  The daughter or even daughter-in-law may have a very
• 40:53
  different view. And this is something that we'll
• 40:56
  see coming up again later in that Laura has absolutely been
• 40:59
  giving her daughter this unsolicited advice and
• 41:02
  criticising her a lot for things.
• 41:04
  And Laura doesn't seem to realise that this is a bad thing
• 41:07
  because it's like one of these things.
• 41:09
  And I think it all stems back to this idea of like parents
• 41:12
  resenting their kids for being independent.
• 41:14
  At a certain point. You can absolutely give advice
• 41:17
  if it's requested and you know, it's good to be supportive of
• 41:20
  your kids, but there is absolutely a line where it just
• 41:25
  becomes unhealthy and unhelpful. And your kids may start
• 41:29
  resenting you for it. If you are being overly critical
• 41:32
  or, or anything like that and you're not, or you're giving
• 41:35
  unsolicited advice or, and you basically what it comes down to
• 41:39
  is the fact that you're not respecting their independence.
• 41:42
  And like I said, this book talks about how that's one of the big
• 41:44
  reasons for estrangement and so on.
• 41:45
  And yeah, OK, I think I'm rambling at this point.
• 41:49
  Okay, so now blaming her daughter for everything and
• 41:51
  painting the daughter as a villain in the cruellest way
• 41:53
  possible is something that Laura does throughout this entire
• 41:55
  book. And I think it's important that
• 41:57
  we look at that, and we will in a lot more detail in a few
• 41:59
  minutes. But first, I want to talk about
• 42:01
  the inciting incident in a little more detail, as I said
• 42:04
  earlier, and talk about those missing, missing reasons.
• 42:08
  So as I mentioned, this story is actually really difficult to
• 42:11
  piece together in this book because she tells it in little
• 42:13
  drips and drops, right? And it's all interspersed with
• 42:16
  rants about how society is too woke and her daughter's a bad
• 42:19
  person and she's like totally the best mom ever.
• 42:21
  And while we're drip fed this story slowly in a non linear
• 42:24
  fashion, it's also when you kind of start to unravel it.
• 42:28
  It's clear that we're missing a fair amount of information.
• 42:31
  I still have a hell of a lot of questions about what happened.
• 42:33
  So we've already established that the youngest daughter, who
• 42:36
  thankfully is never named in this, is getting married in
• 42:39
  Australia. Laura lives in America.
• 42:42
  So big, big, long distance there.
• 42:44
  As a compromise, the original plan was the daughter would have
• 42:48
  one party in Australia, one party in America.
• 42:51
  The daughter assumed the Australian party would be for
• 42:53
  the Australian family and friends and the American party
• 42:55
  would be for the American family and friends.
• 42:57
  Laura assumed that she would be going to both, but the daughter
• 43:00
  didn't. So here's where she starts
• 43:02
  complaining about how the initial conversation about all
• 43:06
  this, like it was a call from her daughter that woke her up at
• 43:09
  8:00 AM and she's just angry about that.
• 43:12
  I sat up and redialed. We video conferenced using
• 43:15
  WhatsApp as usual. I immediate immediately I
• 43:17
  learned of her wedding dress woes, including that the
• 43:19
  seamstress denying her any further alterations.
• 43:22
  I offered to make them for her, but she declined.
• 43:24
  Logistics. She said I understood.
• 43:27
  I took her at her word. Then, in a sudden turn of
• 43:29
  events, she blurted out. You know that I love you, right?
• 43:32
  Frankly, I was caught a bit off guard.
• 43:34
  I wondered where she was going with this perplexing question.
• 43:36
  I didn't have to wait long. She continued by saying that she
• 43:39
  recently began realising that she needed to do a better job of
• 43:41
  taking care of me, her mother. Needless to say, I was startled
• 43:45
  by her words. I hadn't expected them, nor such
• 43:47
  deep seated insight as this. Thoughts that she was finally
• 43:50
  maturing into the type of person that I'd worked so hard to
• 43:52
  cultivate flooded my head. At 25 years old she seemed to be
• 43:55
  waking up and I naturally contributed to some of and I
• 43:58
  naturally contributed some of this development to the young
• 44:00
  man she was now in love with. So it sounds to me like the
• 44:03
  daughter here was trying to open a conversation with her mum to
• 44:05
  maybe eventually set some boundaries while still reigning
• 44:08
  remaining respectful and it's clear that she does still care
• 44:11
  about her mum. I see absolutely nothing wrong
• 44:14
  here. OK, so Laura goes on and she
• 44:15
  says her future fiance had told her about his and my
• 44:18
  conversation and in that the part where I noted that I would
• 44:22
  be showing up in Australia for then nuptials, knowing that I
• 44:25
  would be hosting a second gathering to celebrate the happy
• 44:27
  event at home as well. She had not anticipated me
• 44:29
  attending the ceremony there too.
• 44:31
  A three-step marital plan in place.
• 44:33
  At least two of those plans would include family and
• 44:35
  friends. I concluded that even if her
• 44:37
  wedding ceremony bumped up against the head of another one
• 44:39
  of my children's weddings now, I wouldn't miss it for anything.
• 44:42
  I vowed to figure it out. That said, it began to appear to
• 44:45
  me however, that there might not be anything to figure out.
• 44:47
  As the conversation unfolded, it led me to conclude that she
• 44:50
  didn't want me in Australia among the other guests.
• 44:52
  So at this point of the story, the daughter has absolutely not
• 44:55
  uninvited her from the wedding. She's just genuinely concerned
• 44:58
  about her mother travelling literally the entire way across
• 45:01
  the globe. Like correct me if I'm wrong,
• 45:04
  but there are few longer journeys than from America to
• 45:07
  Australia, right? It's, it's one of the longest,
• 45:09
  it's one of the furthest distances you can go in one go.
• 45:13
  It's, you know, and her mother is a lot older.
• 45:16
  You know, she's worried about her taking on too much.
• 45:18
  I kind of think her like, like she says it here.
• 45:22
  She'd not anticipated me attending the ceremony in
• 45:25
  Australia. You know, that sounds to me like
• 45:27
  she's just thinking kind of like practically, she's trying to be
• 45:30
  thoughtful. And Laura's just reading into it
• 45:32
  and assigning malice where there was none.
• 45:34
  The daughter at this point doesn't say or and has never
• 45:37
  said I don't want you there. The mother says it LED her to
• 45:41
  conclude that she didn't want me there, which are very, very
• 45:44
  different things. And Laura spends the whole book
• 45:47
  portraying as the first thing. And I mean, let's, let's be
• 45:50
  honest, right? A wedding and a party is like a
• 45:52
  huge thing. If on top of that, you have the
• 45:55
  logistics of having to sort out your obviously quite needy
• 45:58
  mother, travelling halfway across the world, giving her
• 46:01
  somewhere to stay, looking after the whole time, it just adds
• 46:04
  another layer of burdens. So I can see why the daughter
• 46:07
  would be like, hey, you don't need to come over here, we'll
• 46:09
  come to you. Because it's a lot less work and
• 46:12
  stress in some ways, right? But of course, Laura does not
• 46:15
  see it this way. She writes that the call
• 46:16
  concluded shortly thereafter. And when it did, I drew a huge
• 46:19
  breath. The idea that she had to think
• 46:21
  about whether or not I would be allowed to attend her wedding in
• 46:23
  Australia was gob stopping. I didn't even know what to say,
• 46:26
  know how to shake the thought from my head.
• 46:28
  This, as another important celebration looms just hours
• 46:32
  away. I commit to quelling these
• 46:33
  disruptive thoughts for the moment, trusting that my
• 46:35
  daughter would ultimately come to her senses, possibly blame
• 46:38
  her insanity on her nervousness over the impending proposal.
• 46:41
  I might even receive these obscenely infrequent 2 little
• 46:44
  words. I'm sorry, I thought to myself,
• 46:47
  that's how much I trusted my daughter and the bond I thought
• 46:49
  we shared. So the daughter's like, hey,
• 46:51
  this is like a massive kind of change of plans to what I
• 46:55
  thought would happen. Give me some time to think about
• 46:57
  it. You know, I, I need some time to
• 46:59
  figure out to see if I have like the time emotional capacity for
• 47:03
  all the work this involves. Like, you know, it's going to
• 47:05
  mean some like changes to the wedding and the schedule.
• 47:06
  Like, and she she's thinking this stuff through, which I
• 47:09
  think is completely reasonable. And Laura's like, Oh my God,
• 47:11
  this is the ultimate betrayal. And this right here, what you've
• 47:15
  just read is what sparked this whole book, several social media
• 47:19
  accounts and all the as we're going to see horrible name
• 47:23
  calling of the daughter and just crazy stuff.
• 47:27
  Ridiculous. Just just this, this is the big
• 47:30
  terrible crime. So at this point the daughter's
• 47:34
  still trying to include her mum in bits of wedding prep and
• 47:36
  asked her opinion on some stuff like you know, hey here are some
• 47:40
  wedding dress options Mum, what do you think?
• 47:42
  Which do you like? And instead of the mother being
• 47:46
  supportive she she just gives her so much judgement.
• 47:50
  My youngest daughter sent me photos with a few wedding
• 47:51
  dresses that she chose to try on during a stop in her travels.
• 47:54
  I thought the designs she opted for were a bit too revealing,
• 47:56
  thinking that her two brothers as well as her fiance's parents
• 47:59
  and brothers would be in attendance on the day.
• 48:02
  As her choices challenged my personal comfort level, I felt
• 48:06
  it would be even worse for those noted above.
• 48:08
  So I told her and explained my reasoning behind it as
• 48:11
  sensitively as possible. It was my opinion, the same one
• 48:14
  that I thought she'd been asking for.
• 48:16
  I can attest to the fact that my words were not well received.
• 48:19
  Instead of taking them in the spirit with which they came, My
• 48:22
  daughter responded angrily. I've received multiple bullet
• 48:24
  texts which accuse me of calling her fat, something which I would
• 48:27
  never do and have never done. Not in my entire life as a
• 48:31
  mother, have I ever ridiculed my daughter's appearance, nor my
• 48:35
  sons for that matter. Well, except in this
• 48:37
  conversation. Clearly that type of
• 48:39
  conversation wasn't part of our family culture.
• 48:41
  One would have to be completely out of touch not to realise how
• 48:44
  detrimental such actions could be, especially when raising
• 48:46
  girls. And yet I suddenly found myself
• 48:48
  at the centre of being accused of exactly that.
• 48:51
  Even worse, the more I refused to agree that my intentions
• 48:54
  hadn't matched her interpretation, the more livid
• 48:56
  she became. Shocking, right?
• 48:59
  I continued to refuse to agree nonetheless leading to further
• 49:03
  bulleted texts, a period of silence between US and the
• 49:05
  lecture as to how I should have handled the situation better.
• 49:08
  I decided that it was one of those moments I simply needed to
• 49:11
  let go of, despite how condescending her tone had been.
• 49:15
  As I mentioned before, we pick our battles as parents, and
• 49:18
  obviously I'd hit an unexpected nerve.
• 49:20
  I deliberately took note of it. Then, during a subsequent
• 49:23
  conversation, I reminded her of my position historically on such
• 49:27
  things. I didn't apologise for calling
• 49:30
  her fat. That would have been extremely
• 49:32
  disingenuous of me to do as those words had never crossed my
• 49:35
  mind nor even my lips. What I did do instead was take
• 49:38
  responsibility for what I'd actually said and left her to
• 49:41
  contend with what she heard that was hers to work out in her
• 49:45
  head. So she feels that your words
• 49:48
  hurt her and that you were shaming her and her body.
• 49:51
  But you're like no no I wasn't. I was just shaming your taste
• 49:54
  and calling her essentially trashy and saying she needs to
• 49:56
  be more modest because of her brothers.
• 50:01
  Sorry but what? So I was like how does she not
• 50:03
  see how messed up things like her choices challenged my
• 50:07
  personal comfort level? Like does she not see how messed
• 50:11
  up that is? Like this is her dress, her
• 50:13
  body, her wedding, her choice. She shouldn't need to think
• 50:17
  about your comfort or her brother's comfort when choosing
• 50:20
  her own clothes. So the daughter clearly
• 50:23
  expressed that she was upset by this and the mother was like no
• 50:25
  no no, you're wrong for being upset.
• 50:27
  I'm not going to apologise. And then after this, the
• 50:30
  daughter's like, well, OK, I need to, like, take a step back
• 50:32
  a little bit. And the mother starts bombarding
• 50:34
  her with phone calls and texts and emails and not only about,
• 50:39
  like, why you're ignoring me, but like, so I'm going to be at
• 50:41
  the wedding. Am I coming to the wedding?
• 50:43
  I'm coming to the wedding, Definitely coming to the
• 50:44
  wedding. Just on and on and on.
• 50:46
  And apparently, when the daughter finally replies, there
• 50:50
  was noticeable discomfort in her body language and a serious
• 50:53
  expression on her face. Like, yeah, you don't think
• 50:57
  that's how she was? Small token sued.
• 50:59
  And then she told me of her decision not to include me on
• 51:01
  the guest list of the attendees at her wedding in Australia.
• 51:04
  She couldn't even sit and debate the issue for more than a week.
• 51:06
  That was hard to overlook. Like, clearly with the way she's
• 51:09
  handling it, this wasn't an easy decision for her.
• 51:12
  She's not doing it to be cruel. She's just trying to do it to,
• 51:15
  at this point, I think, look after herself.
• 51:16
  She's setting a boundary to protect herself.
• 51:19
  And I don't see anything wrong with that.
• 51:22
  Her mother is clearly causing stress in multiple areas, even
• 51:25
  when she's not even in the same country as her, and the daughter
• 51:27
  has had to make a difficult choice.
• 51:29
  Laura, though, still doesn't understand why she's decided
• 51:32
  this. She writes.
• 51:33
  I remained completely in the dark, grappling for even an
• 51:36
  inkling of anything, anything that could explain this,
• 51:40
  especially as it seemed like she had no problem with me hosting
• 51:42
  the celebration she'd asked me to do back home after the fact.
• 51:45
  That was fine. This was not.
• 51:47
  And of this was very, very wrong.
• 51:51
  It was then I decided that I didn't need any more answers
• 51:53
  than the ones I'd already gotten, what I actually needed,
• 51:56
  but it has so weirdly written and was to figure out what it
• 51:59
  was that I actually needed, including how I was going to
• 52:04
  come to digest the enormous kick in the bum that I'd just been
• 52:07
  given and move on. I'm so Laura has a choice at
• 52:11
  this point. Like I say, she could give a
• 52:13
  thought, some time, some space, respect her boundaries and try
• 52:16
  and repair the relationship. Instead she's like, you know
• 52:19
  what? No, I'm going to get some
• 52:21
  revenge. She could have been like, hey,
• 52:23
  take all the time you need. I'm upset by this, but I love
• 52:26
  you and support you. I'll put all my effort into
• 52:28
  making the America party brilliant for you.
• 52:31
  But instead she's like, no. When I woke up the next morning
• 52:34
  following the fears of sleep that I actually got, I did so
• 52:37
  with one thing on my mind. I simply had to withdraw my
• 52:40
  blessing. I felt as if I'd been robbed of
• 52:42
  it, that I'd been unknowingly lured into some kind of warp
• 52:45
  charade where my blessing actually mattered.
• 52:48
  But me, well, I did not now. My blessing remained entangled
• 52:52
  in this ridiculous ruse and I needed to cut it loose.
• 52:55
  Truthfully, how could they expect otherwise?
• 52:57
  Their behaviour wasn't short of astounding, and I wouldn't allow
• 53:00
  this very sacred gift that I alone could give to be sullied.
• 53:03
  There was just too much meaning attached to it, including that
• 53:06
  of the continued respect and honour that I held from my late
• 53:08
  husband. In their recklessness, they had
• 53:11
  offended him too. She put so many random,
• 53:14
  excessive commas in here, I thought.
• 53:15
  I overused commas but this is a lot.
• 53:19
  The entire escapade was completely intolerable and it
• 53:22
  wouldn't be allowed to stand. So like I said, she's like, I'm
• 53:25
  taking back my blessing and using your dead dad to shame
• 53:28
  you. It's petty, it's hurtful, it's
• 53:29
  mean. And also she's like Oh my God,
• 53:32
  they're going to be so heartbroken without my blessing.
• 53:34
  It's the worst. Like she really thinks a lot of
• 53:36
  herself come on because of this behaviour and other behaviour
• 53:40
  towards the door in law. Sorry towards her daughter.
• 53:43
  The future son-in-law blocks her on Facebook because he's like
• 53:47
  wow, OK, this isn't appropriate, don't want this in my life
• 53:50
  blocked. And this just gets her even
• 53:54
  angrier. Laura says nothing good would
• 53:56
  come of it. Just as no reply.
• 53:57
  I'd come in response to my most recent Facebook note, as had
• 54:00
  been anticipated. Not even a single word in which
• 54:03
  to hang their hat on just in case there was ever a
• 54:05
  reconciliation. I wasn't even worth that to
• 54:08
  them. Or should I say my daughter?
• 54:10
  Shortly thereafter, my future son-in-law would block me from
• 54:12
  his Facebook page altogether, but not before I caught a
• 54:15
  glimpse of their exotic Mediterranean engagement through
• 54:17
  photos that he shared. As that trip had been mentioned
• 54:20
  to me as a possibility, I peeked to see if it had been everything
• 54:23
  the two of them hoped it would be.
• 54:24
  When it seemed that it had, I turned my attention back my own
• 54:26
  life and let them live theirs too.
• 54:28
  I took his blocking of me as a sign of their displeasure with
• 54:31
  my decision. He was also sending a stern
• 54:33
  message to me denoting where his loyalty lied.
• 54:35
  It was exactly as he should have done, and I didn't fault him for
• 54:38
  it. I actually liked him even more
• 54:39
  as a result. I also felt a little sorry for
• 54:41
  him too, somehow not realising that if she could treat her own
• 54:44
  mother and the rest of her family this way, she could treat
• 54:47
  him this way as well down the line, and probably would.
• 54:50
  It's something he'd unfortunately learn.
• 54:52
  So this line about like, denoting where his loyalties
• 54:55
  lie, like, well, yeah, he should be loyal to his fiance slash
• 54:58
  wife, not to his mother-in-law who he's never even met.
• 55:01
  If my parents upset me, I'd expect a partner of mine to be
• 55:05
  on my side too. I think.
• 55:07
  I think that's normal. The last paragraph that was so
• 55:10
  done confusing because like, assuming she'll because she's
• 55:13
  assuming that her daughter will betray her husband because she
• 55:17
  set a boundary with her mother. It's insane.
• 55:21
  This woman really does think so little of her daughter and it's
• 55:24
  kind of heartbreaking to see. So from this tiny bit of
• 55:27
  information we get about Laura and the relationship with her
• 55:30
  daughter, again, we don't know any detail.
• 55:33
  We don't know specifics, but from what we do know, Laura is
• 55:36
  very much trying to paint it as her daughter's the villain.
• 55:38
  But I think from as an outsider looking in, we can see that I
• 55:41
  think it's quite easy to understand how things could have
• 55:43
  got this far. And the daughter's actions are
• 55:48
  entirely consistent with a child who child who has been
• 55:51
  emotionally hurt by their parents over and over and is
• 55:54
  finally pulling away. You know, Laura is writing this
• 55:57
  to villainize her daughter, not realising how bad it makes her
• 56:00
  look, not the daughter. And as we mentioned earlier,
• 56:03
  Laura seems oblivious to the fact that her daughter may be
• 56:05
  hurting. Like she doesn't see it as a
• 56:07
  possibility that she could have done anything wrong here.
• 56:10
  Instead, she's like, well, if you're hurting, it's your fault.
• 56:12
  It's not me. I didn't do anything.
• 56:14
  I have nothing to apologise for. Stop it.
• 56:16
  You know she places all the blame on the daughter and acts
• 56:19
  like the daughter's purposely trying to be malicious towards
• 56:21
  her instead of just being like a woman trying to protect herself.
• 56:25
  She flat out refuses to even hear her daughter out or anyone
• 56:28
  defending her. I can hear the critics screaming
• 56:31
  now. There are two sides to every
• 56:32
  story. In an effort to discredit me,
• 56:35
  they'd present my situation in a way that resembled my daughter
• 56:37
  and I standing in opposite corners of a ring, fully gloves
• 56:40
  fully laced up. That's hardly the case.
• 56:43
  The truth of the matter is there aren't two sides to every story.
• 56:46
  This is one story and an innumerable number of
• 56:49
  experiences within it. The fact that your adult child's
• 56:51
  experience was different from your own doesn't make hers right
• 56:54
  and yours wrong. And if she insists that it does
• 56:56
  and hangs the continuation of your relationship on your
• 56:58
  agreement, my advice would be to wish her and her experience a
• 57:01
  happy life together and bon voyage one minute.
• 57:05
  Everything between you and your daughter is fine.
• 57:07
  Nothing out of the ordinary has happened.
• 57:09
  Your communication and relationship are status quo.
• 57:12
  But then of nowhere, that's it. You are suddenly cut off from
• 57:14
  her. No word, no reason, absolutely
• 57:17
  zilch. She simply removes herself from
• 57:19
  your life and expects you to respect her wishes and expects
• 57:22
  you to respect her wishes. It's an extremely cruel thing to
• 57:25
  do to parents and it would be quite understandable with
• 57:27
  parents who suffered this, never spoke to their adult children
• 57:29
  again by choice. I don't recommend it, but I
• 57:32
  definitely understand it. So Kathy McCoy talks about kids
• 57:35
  who distance themselves from their parents.
• 57:37
  And she says maybe you put distance between yourself and
• 57:39
  your parents because being close is just too painful.
• 57:42
  They have expectations that have little to do with the person you
• 57:44
  are and what you want for yourself.
• 57:46
  There are clashes over beliefs and traditions that have
• 57:48
  diverged over the years. There's criticism that, though
• 57:51
  your parents insisted it's been with love, threatens to
• 57:54
  undermine your confidence at close range.
• 57:56
  I think this is what we're seeing in the case here with
• 57:59
  Laura and her daughter. Kathy goes on to write that for
• 58:01
  many, estrangement isn't a sudden event, but a process that
• 58:05
  takes place over time. It may be gradual loosening of
• 58:07
  ties as a result of life choices and events.
• 58:10
  It may have started with a specific conflict that led to
• 58:12
  angry silences and subsequently to an emotional chasm that took
• 58:15
  on a life its own. Or it may have evolved from an
• 58:17
  erosion of intimacy and goodwill as the adult child has struggled
• 58:20
  for independence and the parent or parents have struggled to
• 58:23
  maintain close ties. It may have started with new
• 58:26
  alliances or with divergent views of a shared past.
• 58:29
  So you can see here the experts in family estrangement
• 58:32
  acknowledge that on the side of the hurt, party estrangement is
• 58:35
  a gradual process with lots of little things building up.
• 58:38
  But the sometimes the one doing the hurting is oblivious to it
• 58:41
  all. And that's why it can come as a
• 58:42
  shock that it happened. That's why Laura's like, Oh my
• 58:46
  God, such a shock. One day it was fine and then the
• 58:48
  next it wasn't. Whereas for the daughter, it was
• 58:50
  probably like, no, this was lots of little events building up to
• 58:54
  hurt her over time. This wasn't a shocking, Oh my
• 58:57
  God, suddenly it's done a thing for the daughter.
• 58:59
  This was gradual. And Kathy goes on to say that a
• 59:04
  recent study of estranged parents and children found that
• 59:06
  parents tended to blame the estrangement on sources outside
• 59:09
  of themselves, such as relationships they find
• 59:11
  objectionable. Adult children tended to
• 59:13
  attribute estrangement to the personal characteristics or
• 59:15
  behaviour of their parents, such as toxic behaviour or feeling
• 59:19
  unaccepted or unsupported. Sorry, Kara's making her back in
• 59:22
  the background. It feels like this is so, yeah,
• 59:27
  it feels like this is exactly what we're seeing in Laura.
• 59:30
  She refuses to acknowledge that her behaviour may have played a
• 59:32
  part in this and instead blames her daughter, her son-in-law,
• 59:35
  society in general, lack of really like everything other
• 59:38
  than herself. She can't even see that she may
• 59:42
  have played even a small part in this.
• 59:43
  She's like, no, couldn't, couldn't possibly be me at all.
• 59:46
  And it's interesting because Laura does kind of try and
• 59:48
  address this a little bit. She says that of course, her and
• 59:50
  other parents have asked for reasons, but the children just
• 59:54
  poor communicators and don't tell them.
• 59:56
  It's not that they're not willing to listen or understand,
• 59:59
  it's it's the children at fault again.
• 1:00:02
  Others consider parenting the most thankless job in the world.
• 1:00:04
  For too many parents, that is how they they see it, having
• 1:00:07
  been tossed to the curb, walked over, diminished, blamed,
• 1:00:09
  betrayed and used by their old children.
• 1:00:11
  And all the while they never truly understood the why behind
• 1:00:14
  any of it. This is where critics will
• 1:00:16
  scream, did these parents even ask?
• 1:00:18
  Or did these parents ever ask in the right way?
• 1:00:20
  Seriously, do you think that parents have done everything
• 1:00:22
  under the sun for their adult children?
• 1:00:24
  Wouldn't think to ask why and if need be, reframed the question
• 1:00:27
  in a myriad of ways in order to get a full answer.
• 1:00:30
  They probably did many times over.
• 1:00:31
  The sole burden doesn't fall only on them.
• 1:00:33
  Shouldn't the adult children be pushing resolution along too if
• 1:00:36
  in fact they actually wanted a relationship with their parents?
• 1:00:39
  They are adults after all. Reality speaks.
• 1:00:42
  Asking doesn't reality. That's such a weird we're
• 1:00:45
  phrasing it OK. Reality speaks.
• 1:00:48
  Asking doesn't always result in telling.
• 1:00:50
  Plenty of good parents complain about their unanswered efforts
• 1:00:52
  in this regard, as if the continued cycle is preferred by
• 1:00:55
  these adult children. Others point out that their
• 1:00:58
  adult child's Y never stops changing.
• 1:01:01
  It's the responsibility of the communicator to ensure that the
• 1:01:04
  listener fully grasps what is being said.
• 1:01:06
  Disagree, but OK if the listener doesn't understand.
• 1:01:09
  The onus is on the communicator to continue to try to explain it
• 1:01:12
  until the listener achieves clarity.
• 1:01:14
  Adult children might not like that truth because it places
• 1:01:17
  accountability directly on their shoulders, but it doesn't make
• 1:01:20
  it any less true. Problem is, evidence suggests
• 1:01:23
  that this is typical of parents of estranged children, and that
• 1:01:26
  often even when they are given a reason, they choose to ignore
• 1:01:29
  it. I mentioned earlier about the
• 1:01:31
  missing, missing reasons and like I said, there's a whole
• 1:01:33
  website where a study has been done into this specifically
• 1:01:35
  looking at estranged parents online and their communications
• 1:01:40
  with each other like on forums and social media and that sort
• 1:01:43
  of thing. The website says, and I
• 1:01:45
  mentioned this earlier, but it's important so I'm going to read
• 1:01:47
  it to you again. Members of estranged parents
• 1:01:49
  forums often say their children never gave them any reason for
• 1:01:52
  the estrangement, then turn around and reveal that their
• 1:01:55
  children did tell them why, but their but the reasons that their
• 1:01:58
  children give. The infamous missing reasons are
• 1:02:01
  missing, the website goes on to say.
• 1:02:04
  In the same vein, members who confront their estranged
• 1:02:06
  children, reporting that their children screamed at them or
• 1:02:09
  used such foul language that I was shocked.
• 1:02:12
  But don't repeat anything their child said.
• 1:02:14
  When members do say what the allegations were, they
• 1:02:17
  paraphrase heavily, choosing the most trivial offences and
• 1:02:20
  trimming away all context. It's rare for a member of an
• 1:02:23
  estrangement forum to say why their child says they're
• 1:02:27
  estranged. Members prefer to give their own
• 1:02:29
  explanations, parental alienation for example, or
• 1:02:32
  jealousy of the child's spouse, or they summarise the child's
• 1:02:35
  words as a bunch of lies or allocations of abuse.
• 1:02:39
  Most of the members are also desperate for their child to
• 1:02:41
  tell them their reasons. And this is exactly what we've
• 1:02:44
  seen from Laura again and again throughout this book, and we're
• 1:02:47
  going to continue to see as we read more and more.
• 1:02:49
  There's a few direct quotes from her daughter here and there, but
• 1:02:52
  overall, she skims over a lot of what the daughter actually said,
• 1:02:55
  paraphrases. So we never get any definitive
• 1:02:57
  answers about why the daughter chose to set these boundaries
• 1:03:00
  that she did. There's another example of this
• 1:03:02
  at the start of Chapter 3, which is titled Contemplating the How
• 1:03:06
  of It. Laura writes.
• 1:03:07
  Understandably, I would spend many hours over the next few
• 1:03:09
  weeks reviewing my decision to take a step back from my own
• 1:03:12
  daughter. The fact is, it was
• 1:03:13
  inconceivable to me that she hadn't wanted me at her wedding.
• 1:03:16
  At the same time, I just couldn't imagine what crossed
• 1:03:18
  her fiance and our future in law's minds when she told them
• 1:03:20
  the news. Oh, would I have been a family
• 1:03:22
  on the wall for that conversation or the many others
• 1:03:25
  that might have followed? I could only conclude that
• 1:03:27
  they'd been fed a version of my daughter's life paltry by
• 1:03:30
  comparison, with me portrayed as only God knows what.
• 1:03:34
  How could I think otherwise? And yet I was confident that
• 1:03:36
  given the opportunity to meet me, especially his parents,
• 1:03:39
  reconciling her words against the actual person would have
• 1:03:42
  been difficult to do. That truth alone could have been
• 1:03:45
  the single reason that I've been banned, I thought to myself.
• 1:03:47
  I wasn't without my suspicions. At the same time, speculation
• 1:03:50
  would change nothing, which included my love for my
• 1:03:53
  daughter. I'd always adored her.
• 1:03:55
  She was a miracle child, born moments before the official
• 1:03:58
  diagnosis of her father's cancer.
• 1:04:00
  I took that as a sign that God had really wanted her here in my
• 1:04:04
  arms. You know, I haven't really
• 1:04:05
  thought about that last bit before, but now I'm wondering if
• 1:04:07
  like the mother holds some sort of special resentment for her
• 1:04:10
  daughter because that close timing crazy.
• 1:04:13
  Anyway, I just find it so interesting and a bit scary that
• 1:04:15
  she's so focused on painting her daughter as this evil master
• 1:04:18
  manipulator who, you know, it couldn't possibly be that she's
• 1:04:23
  genuinely hurt by something her mother's done.
• 1:04:25
  It has to be that she's a master manipulator who is lying to her
• 1:04:29
  new family and tricking them. And she's she's planned all this
• 1:04:32
  out and now she's banning her mother to hurt her mother and to
• 1:04:35
  stop her lies being found out. No, how is that more likely than
• 1:04:40
  just, hey, you did something that hurt your daughter like
• 1:04:44
  wild again, going back to the website that talks about this
• 1:04:48
  kind of estrangement stuff and there's a section like, why did
• 1:04:51
  they do it? So their children's words can't
• 1:04:53
  reflect badly on them is the obvious reason.
• 1:04:55
  And this is in regards to like, why do they skip over these
• 1:05:00
  reasons? Why do they not dive into them?
• 1:05:01
  Why do they not listen? Why they not repeat them to
• 1:05:03
  others and so on. So their children's words can't
• 1:05:08
  reflect badly, badly on them is the obvious reason.
• 1:05:10
  Members who have aired their children's grievances outside
• 1:05:13
  the endlessly enabling warmth of estranged parents forums have
• 1:05:16
  been stung by people who took their children's sides.
• 1:05:18
  And they've learned not to give their opponent opponents
• 1:05:21
  ammunition, which is kind of what we're seeing with dormant
• 1:05:24
  mom on TikTok, you know? But it runs deeper than that.
• 1:05:28
  Many members truly can't remember what their children
• 1:05:30
  said. Anything tinged with negative
• 1:05:32
  emotion, anything that makes them feel bad about themselves,
• 1:05:35
  shocks them so deeply that they block it out.
• 1:05:37
  They really can't remember anything but screaming.
• 1:05:40
  Their emotional amnesia shapes their entire lives, pushing them
• 1:05:42
  to associate only with people who won't criticise them,
• 1:05:46
  training their families to shelter them from blows so
• 1:05:48
  thoroughly that the softest protest feels like a fist to the
• 1:05:51
  face. But it ruins even deeper than
• 1:05:53
  that. Posts in estranged parents
• 1:05:55
  forums are vague. Members recount stories with the
• 1:05:58
  fewest possible details, the least possible context, which is
• 1:06:01
  what we're seeing with Laura's book.
• 1:06:03
  They don't recreate entire scenes, repeat entire
• 1:06:05
  conversations, given type text, text exchanges.
• 1:06:09
  They paraphrase hours of conversation away.
• 1:06:12
  The only element they describe in detail is their own grief or
• 1:06:16
  range. Not only the members.
• 1:06:17
  Press on For more information. This is what we see in Laura's
• 1:06:20
  book. When denial runs that deep.
• 1:06:22
  One avoidance is that in ground a person can't be separated from
• 1:06:26
  it anymore, though they could be separated from their bones.
• 1:06:29
  The denial part of this is especially so important to
• 1:06:31
  remember here when Laura goes on to write in her book.
• 1:06:34
  Now, what happens if their Y has been clearly communicated to you
• 1:06:37
  and you agree that that you were at fault?
• 1:06:39
  Then you have some mending to do.
• 1:06:41
  However, if their Y just doesn't add up or falls into the
• 1:06:44
  category of designer trauma, fashionable and frivolous, you
• 1:06:49
  just need to put that to bed. You shouldn't be forced to agree
• 1:06:52
  to an accusation that is absolutely wrong in your eyes
• 1:06:54
  simply to pacify your daughter. That's lying to the two of you
• 1:06:58
  and my friend. You will live to regret it.
• 1:07:01
  So she acknowledges that some parents can mess up but refuses
• 1:07:06
  to see that this could possibly be her.
• 1:07:08
  And she refuses to believe that any of the parents in her
• 1:07:10
  Facebook group could possibly be like this either.
• 1:07:13
  It's the amount of denial is just wild.
• 1:07:17
  It really, really is. And it's something that I spoke
• 1:07:21
  about in other videos. But like, you don't get to
• 1:07:23
  decide whether you've hurt someone or not.
• 1:07:26
  That's up to the person who's been hurt.
• 1:07:28
  You know, like I, I've spoken before.
• 1:07:30
  I, I've had like moments in my past where like I've made a bad
• 1:07:34
  joke, like trying to fit in with a group or something and like
• 1:07:36
  it's landed the wrong way because I didn't really
• 1:07:38
  understand the social situation and where I was like trying to
• 1:07:45
  be like part of the group and fit in.
• 1:07:47
  And I was like, oh, I thought this is how friends interacted.
• 1:07:50
  But really it's gone to hurt that person.
• 1:07:53
  Like that's not on the person for taking offence.
• 1:07:57
  The problem was with me, even though my intention wasn't to
• 1:08:01
  hurt their feelings, it did, and that required an apology.
• 1:08:04
  You know, it's something that people just have to learn if if
• 1:08:09
  you actually care about other people's feelings, you know?
• 1:08:13
  Laura's first instinct in replying to people though, is to
• 1:08:15
  tell them that, you know, as parents, they can't possibly at
• 1:08:18
  fault. It can't possibly be at fault.
• 1:08:20
  It must be the kid, it must be society, it must be anyone but
• 1:08:23
  the parent. You know, and I keep saying
• 1:08:25
  this, but let's look at some solid examples and let's move on
• 1:08:28
  to the section of this I've titled My Daughter is the
• 1:08:31
  Villain. So let's start with some vague
• 1:08:33
  TikTok videos which are trying to convince other parents that
• 1:08:36
  their kids are the problem. And look at some of the things
• 1:08:39
  she said shares about her own daughter.
• 1:08:41
  How many of you really good parents woke up 1 morning
• 1:08:46
  suddenly to realise that the majority of the problems you
• 1:08:53
  faced in coping with you were ungrateful of adult kids is that
• 1:09:03
  you actually had raised a narcissist and you never even
• 1:09:10
  realised it. It never even occurred to you
• 1:09:15
  because you had no idea what that meant at the time.
• 1:09:23
  And now you do. You're not alone.
• 1:09:29
  It's stunning. I decided not to hang up one of
• 1:09:32
  my adult child stockings this year.
• 1:09:35
  Yeah, I still did them, and I decided not to hang hers up.
• 1:09:40
  Not because I'm warning the adult child whose behaviour
• 1:09:45
  resulted in our estrangement. I'm mourning the adult child who
• 1:09:49
  I thought she was, and it's just too hard.
• 1:09:54
  Good parents fall into the situation of estrangement too.
• 1:09:58
  And it's not that they did anything wrong.
• 1:10:00
  It's the fault of their narcissistic victimhood
• 1:10:04
  mentality, kids. And yet you're also ready to
• 1:10:09
  jump on the bandwagon of the child and shame parents who
• 1:10:14
  don't deserve it. That's so incredibly wrong.
• 1:10:18
  The reality is, if you really understood the full story, you
• 1:10:24
  might just change your mind. So don't be so ready to come in
• 1:10:29
  for the rescue, because you might be saving the wrong
• 1:10:33
  person. Every single point in these is
• 1:10:35
  laying the blame on someone else.
• 1:10:37
  She never admits hey maybe I messed up, maybe there's
• 1:10:39
  something I should have apologised for.
• 1:10:41
  It's only ever. My only mistake was not
• 1:10:43
  realising how terrible and evil she is.
• 1:10:46
  Oh boohoo. And if she ever does admit to
• 1:10:49
  making mistakes, she's like, oh they were just normal ones that
• 1:10:52
  everyone makes, I don't need to apologise for them.
• 1:10:55
  And it's like, come on, like, take some responsibility.
• 1:10:58
  After the daughter finally made her choice to not invite her
• 1:11:02
  mother to the wedding, apparently she said the words.
• 1:11:05
  I didn't think you'd be happy, but I figured since you're
• 1:11:07
  seeing a therapist now, you could work out with her.
• 1:11:10
  Laura uses this to paint her as a massive villain.
• 1:11:14
  The brazenness of her comment added insult to injury.
• 1:11:17
  I couldn't believe my ears. And yet there was no way around
• 1:11:20
  it. She had said those words so
• 1:11:23
  unsympathetically, to boot. It left me searching my
• 1:11:26
  daughter's eyes in hopes that there remained even a glimmer of
• 1:11:29
  the person I thought I'd known still inside.
• 1:11:32
  She behaved like a stranger to me now.
• 1:11:34
  I couldn't get over it. Surely the eyes looking back at
• 1:11:37
  me couldn't be hers, I thought to myself.
• 1:11:39
  I was stunned by the possibility, as well as the
• 1:11:42
  notion that I could have misconstrued who my daughter
• 1:11:45
  actually was so completely. It feels over the top and
• 1:11:51
  dramatic, like you're describing a woman here who just said, hey,
• 1:11:54
  you know what, maybe you could talk through this with your
• 1:11:58
  therapist. Like you're not describing
• 1:12:01
  somebody just kicked a puppy or commit a genocide.
• 1:12:03
  You know, she said maybe talk to your therapist.
• 1:12:06
  Wild. I also feel like from the
• 1:12:08
  daughter's perspective, if I read that my mum had been not
• 1:12:12
  only saying this about me publicly, but charging people to
• 1:12:16
  read this that she was saying about me, I, I feel like, no,
• 1:12:19
  never again, never speaking to you again.
• 1:12:21
  That's it, we're done. And she then goes on to talk
• 1:12:24
  about how her daughter is evil, but it's not her fault because
• 1:12:26
  she was just born wrong. It wasn't that, you know, she
• 1:12:29
  was a bad parent and caused this.
• 1:12:31
  No, she was born wrong. It's nature, not nurture.
• 1:12:34
  Of course, it was once believed that human beings were born into
• 1:12:38
  this world as blank slates. In other words, who our children
• 1:12:40
  became was largely in the hands of parents.
• 1:12:42
  If parents screwed up, they simply reaped what they had sown
• 1:12:45
  in their adult children. That thinking changed, however.
• 1:12:48
  Science now. This is so wild and science now
• 1:12:51
  believes that infants come into this world already pre
• 1:12:54
  programmed to a certain extent. In fact, according to Russell A
• 1:12:58
  Barkley, an American neuropsychologist, I don't know
• 1:13:01
  why. Neil is a neurophysicist,
• 1:13:04
  neuropsychologist, and internationally reliant expert
• 1:13:06
  in ADHD slash ADD. Babies are born with 400
• 1:13:10
  psychological traits already formed within them.
• 1:13:12
  Those are traits pulled from the child's entire family tree
• 1:13:15
  selectively and massively combined to make them into a one
• 1:13:18
  of kind individual that they are upon birth.
• 1:13:21
  And she acts like the nature versus nature argument has just
• 1:13:25
  been like, yeah, we've got a conclusion.
• 1:13:26
  This is it. This is fact.
• 1:13:28
  It's all nature. That's not true.
• 1:13:30
  She's completely misrepresenting the situation here.
• 1:13:33
  And this expert here specifically was talking about
• 1:13:37
  neurodivergency, which is kind of different to just like, oh,
• 1:13:42
  is your child going to be well behaved or not?
• 1:13:44
  It anyway it gets it gets Wilder.
• 1:13:49
  I described this recent revelation as God's nature to
• 1:13:53
  parents nurture. He leaves his fingerprints on
• 1:13:56
  these babies and then we get to raise them or shepherd them, as
• 1:14:00
  Berkeley quite likes to call it. What that also means, however,
• 1:14:03
  is that parents only have so much control over who their kids
• 1:14:06
  turn out to be. This includes how their
• 1:14:09
  parenting styles are received by each individual child.
• 1:14:12
  Let's face it, if you've raised children to an extent, it
• 1:14:14
  doesn't take long for you to realise just how different
• 1:14:16
  babies can be from one another. Even within the same family, no
• 1:14:19
  two kids are exactly alike. Yeah, that's fine.
• 1:14:22
  Ish. Doctor Richard A Friedman, a
• 1:14:25
  professor of clinical psychiatry and director of the
• 1:14:27
  Psychopharmacology clinic at Vale Wheel Vale Cornell Medical
• 1:14:33
  College in New York, wrote a wildly interesting column called
• 1:14:37
  Accepting That Good Parents May Plant Bad Seeds for the New York
• 1:14:39
  Times in 2010. In it, he shared that there were
• 1:14:42
  instances where loving, conscientious, dedicated parents
• 1:14:45
  had surprisingly raised unkind, uncaring, unsympathetic kids.
• 1:14:50
  Even though you wouldn't think this could be possible, he went
• 1:14:53
  on to confirm that the good parent toxic child phenomenon in
• 1:14:57
  arguably existed. He didn't, however, remove all
• 1:14:59
  accountability from parents in every case, which is fine.
• 1:15:04
  This makes sense. I mean, look at people like, oh,
• 1:15:08
  God, actually, I don't know enough true crime stuff to,
• 1:15:10
  like, name people, but there's a lot of, like, murderers and
• 1:15:16
  people who hurt people and someone who had good parents who
• 1:15:21
  ended up still doing horrible things.
• 1:15:22
  That is absolutely a thing. But the fact here is like,
• 1:15:27
  that's not what we're talking about.
• 1:15:28
  In Laura's book. She's talking about her daughter
• 1:15:32
  saying, hey, maybe, maybe only come to one of my two wedding
• 1:15:36
  parties. Yeah.
• 1:15:38
  And, And in response to that, her mother implies in a book
• 1:15:44
  that she is unkind, uncaring, unsympathetic.
• 1:15:48
  Like she calls her a toxic child.
• 1:15:51
  Like, it's crazy. It's absolutely crazy.
• 1:15:57
  Laura then goes on to write and say maybe I've been utterly
• 1:16:00
  duped and she actually hated me deep down.
• 1:16:02
  After years of manipulating my heart, she had finally decided
• 1:16:05
  to break it. It remains a mystery.
• 1:16:08
  And I think it's like, I'm not saying kids can't be wrong.
• 1:16:11
  Kids can't treat their parents badly.
• 1:16:12
  They absolutely can and they do. I'm just saying in this case,
• 1:16:15
  we've not seen a single bit of evidence that the daughter is
• 1:16:18
  anything but a hurt child trying to set a boundary for her own
• 1:16:21
  well-being. There's no evidence of her being
• 1:16:23
  cruel or selfish or unkind or, you know, manipulative or
• 1:16:26
  whatever is that Laura tries to paint her as.
• 1:16:29
  Don't worry though, Laura covers this too, because she decides
• 1:16:33
  that if it's not her daughter who is at fault and evil, then
• 1:16:36
  it must be her new husband's fault because he's poisoning the
• 1:16:38
  daughter against her mother, obviously.
• 1:16:41
  Apparently she really liked him at first, but only after asking
• 1:16:46
  him a bunch of intrusive questions.
• 1:16:48
  The main question that I needed to ask my potential new
• 1:16:50
  son-in-law was whether or not he truly thought that he knew my
• 1:16:52
  daughter well enough to marry her.
• 1:16:54
  It had been such a short period of time for them both, I worried
• 1:16:57
  that neither had the appropriate insight into each other for such
• 1:16:59
  an important next step. That said, I also reminded
• 1:17:02
  myself that it wasn't my call. In the end it was my concern,
• 1:17:05
  however, and remained that way as this answer was the least
• 1:17:09
  reassuring of all his responses. He still had a lot to discover
• 1:17:12
  about my daughter, I knew. At the same time, I really liked
• 1:17:14
  him overall. Sounds great, lovely.
• 1:17:17
  However, this quickly changes. Plenty of good parents have
• 1:17:20
  described situations where they're adult kids and they
• 1:17:23
  shared a great relationship, only for it to suddenly go awry.
• 1:17:26
  The catalyst? Someone new walked into their
• 1:17:28
  adult child's life and changed everything.
• 1:17:31
  That happens, especially if your adult child became involved with
• 1:17:34
  a toxic person, especially a narcissist.
• 1:17:38
  Your adult child's mind is no longer her own.
• 1:17:40
  It is occupied. Occupied by two, and one wants
• 1:17:43
  all the space in it, leaving no space for you.
• 1:17:46
  So a lot of books and experts on estrangement do say that
• 1:17:51
  actually, you know, it's right, getting a new partner or
• 1:17:54
  something like that can be a catalyst for estrangement.
• 1:17:56
  But that's only because usually it means the hurt party finally
• 1:18:01
  understands like what real love and support feels like.
• 1:18:04
  And they're like, oh crap, OK. And they finally realise how
• 1:18:07
  harmful the other relationship would, say, a parent was, you
• 1:18:11
  know, or maybe having the partner means they finally have
• 1:18:13
  a support network behind them to cut off.
• 1:18:16
  The people have been hurt. You know, there's, there's lots
• 1:18:17
  of reasons for it. But no, In Laura's mind,
• 1:18:20
  apparently this means that her daughter's new partner is
• 1:18:22
  poisoning her and changing her and not just offering her much
• 1:18:26
  needed love and support. I guess it's clear that a lot of
• 1:18:29
  this seems fueled by jealousy, even if Laura outright denies
• 1:18:32
  that. You know, he was delighted that
• 1:18:34
  my daughter loved his family too.
• 1:18:35
  He said this particular remark led to a story about the recent
• 1:18:38
  Christmas they all spent together.
• 1:18:39
  As was explained to me, my daughter seemed absolutely
• 1:18:42
  floored by the picture perfect festivities encompassing the
• 1:18:44
  day. So much so, in fact, that he
• 1:18:46
  grew ever more smitten. The tale made me very happy, but
• 1:18:49
  it also left me somewhat perplexed.
• 1:18:51
  Something about my daughter's seemingly dramatic response
• 1:18:53
  didn't add up. It was just too extreme in light
• 1:18:56
  of all that I knew about our own holidays over the years,
• 1:18:58
  especially Christmas. The magnitude of her reaction as
• 1:19:01
  described to me resembled that of someone who hadn't been so
• 1:19:04
  lovingly and generously cared for.
• 1:19:06
  In my opinion. I couldn't make sense of it and
• 1:19:08
  even attempted to place the onus of my boot Waldman on jealousy.
• 1:19:11
  Mine perhaps, especially knowing that my daughter has forgotten a
• 1:19:15
  Christmas with her own family to remain in Australia with him and
• 1:19:17
  his. She conveyed to me at the time
• 1:19:19
  that as a result of me long no longer agreeing to play for her,
• 1:19:23
  as a result of me no longer agreeing to pay for her flights
• 1:19:25
  home, she'd stay put. She stated that it wasn't worth
• 1:19:27
  coming home when she had to come back again in a year for her
• 1:19:30
  sister's wedding. She'd rather use her funds to
• 1:19:32
  resume solo travelling instead. So Laura can't possibly
• 1:19:37
  understand that her daughter may have been happy somewhere else
• 1:19:40
  and want to do something else, and maybe your Christmases
• 1:19:42
  weren't as happy as you thought they were.
• 1:19:44
  She's like, no, see, she must be manipulative and lying.
• 1:19:47
  It can't possibly be that I didn't provide as good a life
• 1:19:51
  for her as I thought I did. Anyway, let's take a look at
• 1:19:54
  Laura's response to all of this. Because as I briefly mentioned
• 1:19:57
  here, she didn't just take a step back and give her daughter
• 1:19:59
  space to heal. She decided that she needed to
• 1:20:02
  punish her daughter and encourages other parents do the
• 1:20:04
  same with their kids. I'm titling this section.
• 1:20:07
  I'm separating myself. Or maybe it should be.
• 1:20:11
  I'm punishing you. First up, she wants credit for
• 1:20:14
  not being angry and violent when her daughter tried to
• 1:20:16
  respectfully set a boundary. I didn't yell, I didn't scream,
• 1:20:20
  I didn't lash out at her. I simply stumbled through the
• 1:20:23
  obvious goodbye, then wished her well and hung up.
• 1:20:26
  I didn't know what to do after that either.
• 1:20:27
  I no longer had any desire for dinner.
• 1:20:31
  OK, great, good start. And if this is all you've done,
• 1:20:33
  I've been congratulating you for handling it maturely.
• 1:20:35
  But no two decisions made-up my only response.
• 1:20:39
  The first was that I needed to take a sabbatical from my
• 1:20:41
  daughter so that I could lick my wounds and figure out some
• 1:20:43
  things. It occurred to me that doing so
• 1:20:45
  might not even cause a hiccup in my daughter's life, despite how
• 1:20:48
  unnatural it felt to me. Ultimately, that made no
• 1:20:51
  difference. I needed this now.
• 1:20:53
  My health and welfare had to take precedence, a position I'd
• 1:20:56
  never taken before, and it came to my kids.
• 1:20:58
  I'd never put myself ahead of them.
• 1:20:59
  It was foreign for me to do. Second, I would no longer rise
• 1:21:02
  the occasion on her behalf. Johnny on the spot.
• 1:21:05
  Mum would suddenly disappear with her doormat, and with her
• 1:21:08
  doormat, Mum would go too. The duo had resulted in me being
• 1:21:11
  taken for granted. So yeah, taking a step back and
• 1:21:14
  giving her space is fine, brilliant.
• 1:21:15
  We'd love that. However, and then being like,
• 1:21:17
  and now I'm going to refuse to do anything for you, to punish
• 1:21:20
  you. But it's not giving her space.
• 1:21:22
  It's just wanting to her to be hurt.
• 1:21:25
  And and also notice how she's like, you know, my health and
• 1:21:29
  welfare had to take precedence. Absolutely fine, Great.
• 1:21:32
  Yes, you look after yourself. But she spends the whole book
• 1:21:35
  condemning her daughter for doing the same thing.
• 1:21:38
  Crazy. Anyway, and The thing is like
• 1:21:40
  when she's like, you know, I no longer rise the occasion.
• 1:21:42
  She's not just talking about like, oh, I know.
• 1:21:44
  I stopped buying her luxury items or something like that.
• 1:21:48
  It's more, it's crazy. It's more like this.
• 1:21:51
  Shortly after I initiated my needed break from my daughter,
• 1:21:54
  she found that she needed me again, at least momentarily.
• 1:21:56
  The irony was staggering. She needed my help in accessing
• 1:22:00
  particular paperwork in order to legally tie the knot.
• 1:22:06
  Her Vagabond lifestyle, coupled with her decision to marry and
• 1:22:10
  take up residence in Australia, required me to lift a finger on
• 1:22:14
  her behalf. Not that she couldn't get around
• 1:22:16
  by involvement if necessary. I was confident that she could,
• 1:22:20
  but my help would have made it a whole lot easier and convenient
• 1:22:22
  for her. This time, however, I'd learned
• 1:22:25
  my lesson. The deaf ears she left me with
• 1:22:27
  were the same ones that had heard her plight.
• 1:22:30
  I remained unavailable. Not out of spite it was, nor
• 1:22:33
  because doing so is easy for me it was it wasn't.
• 1:22:37
  I refused to respond out of self respect as well as the desire to
• 1:22:40
  give my daughter exactly what she'd been asking for all along.
• 1:22:43
  Whether or not she'd known it, she'd wanted out of my life, as
• 1:22:46
  demonstrated by A1 sided relationship that I could no
• 1:22:48
  longer uphold. It simply gotten too heavy.
• 1:22:51
  So I let her sit with both and removed myself from hers
• 1:22:54
  entirely. So her daughter's not asking for
• 1:22:57
  the world. She's not asking for her mum to
• 1:22:59
  go out for a way for her or like do anything particularly.
• 1:23:02
  She she just needs access to legal documents, which you as
• 1:23:05
  her mother have. And you're like, Nope, gonna
• 1:23:09
  withhold them to punish you and call your names publicly at the
• 1:23:11
  same time. Like this is so reminiscent of
• 1:23:14
  Ruby Frankie withholding her daughter's legal documents to
• 1:23:17
  punish her too. Like this isn't setting a
• 1:23:19
  boundary, it's abusive. And oh, actually, you know, at
• 1:23:22
  this one, I feel like I should have this in here.
• 1:23:25
  But at least somewhere in the video, Laura seems to think that
• 1:23:28
  if we're not parents ourselves, then we're all terrible people
• 1:23:31
  and we don't get a say in this. So I decided to speak to a
• 1:23:34
  parent who's actually been in a similar situation to Laura, my
• 1:23:37
  own mum. So now my mum and dad are quite
• 1:23:40
  old now they are. My mum's coming up to 70, my
• 1:23:43
  dad's 7475, something like that. They're quite old, bless them.
• 1:23:48
  And they weren't at my sister's wedding, actually either of her
• 1:23:52
  weddings because my sister decided to get married abroad
• 1:23:56
  and first one was in New York, second one was in Gibraltar.
• 1:24:00
  I was at both of them. It was wonderful, sobbed like a
• 1:24:02
  baby, especially the second time.
• 1:24:06
  And it was, it was really, really lovely.
• 1:24:08
  But my sister is my sister, but my parents don't have passports
• 1:24:11
  and they're quite old, so they, they couldn't go.
• 1:24:13
  So do you know what happened? Instead I sent them a tonne of
• 1:24:18
  photos of the day. I got a bunch of lovely prints
• 1:24:20
  done and sent them to my parents.
• 1:24:22
  My mum wished her well, sent her love, hope she had a great day.
• 1:24:26
  My mum was very, very supportive.
• 1:24:29
  And my mum didn't start a bunch of social media accounts calling
• 1:24:34
  her names and saying she was evil and going to hell.
• 1:24:39
  Wild isn't it? I actually explained this whole
• 1:24:42
  situation to my mum and told her about Laura and the doormat mum
• 1:24:44
  thing. And I was like, jokingly, I was
• 1:24:47
  like, hey, you ever considered doing this?
• 1:24:49
  And to quote her, she said no way would I ever think of doing
• 1:24:52
  that. How could anyone even
• 1:24:54
  contemplate doing it? So there you go.
• 1:24:57
  That's from a mother who has been in the same place as Laura
• 1:25:02
  Wild. I know.
• 1:25:03
  And you know, you know what happens when you actually
• 1:25:06
  support your children, your daughters in these things, even
• 1:25:09
  when you know, you're not physically at the wedding, It
• 1:25:12
  means your daughters support you too.
• 1:25:15
  Like my sister's been taking my mom and surgeon's wife, Karen.
• 1:25:19
  Actually, they've both been driving my mom to all her
• 1:25:20
  hospital appointments recently. I'm looking after her and like
• 1:25:23
  doing all that stuff, not because my mom expects it and
• 1:25:25
  demands it, but because they actually care about her and want
• 1:25:28
  to help her out and care about her health.
• 1:25:31
  That's what happens when you support your kids.
• 1:25:33
  They want to help you. Like it's you don't get to
• 1:25:36
  demand that from your kids. But when you treat them with
• 1:25:39
  respect, you get it. Oh, sorry.
• 1:25:42
  Anyway. And so anyway, Laura, where were
• 1:25:46
  we? And yeah, so her daughter
• 1:25:48
  initiated A boundary about one particular event, and Laura
• 1:25:51
  instead blew this up into my daughter is terrible and
• 1:25:53
  abusive. And now this saying enough is in
• 1:25:56
  your right, just as it's in your right to finally stop giving a
• 1:25:59
  crap about the why behind your child's experience.
• 1:26:02
  That broken record has to end sometime, and so does the ACT of
• 1:26:05
  perpetually trying to win your daughter over.
• 1:26:07
  Let her stay stuck. If she wants to stay stuck, you
• 1:26:09
  don't need to. One mom said it like this.
• 1:26:11
  The door is closed. Putting up with being abused by
• 1:26:14
  a person I gave birth to is over the top.
• 1:26:17
  I can't make this any better. I don't fault her if her
• 1:26:20
  intentions weren't met honourably.
• 1:26:21
  Communication without comprehension isn't
• 1:26:23
  communication at all. You can't squeeze blood from a
• 1:26:25
  stone and the levels of hypocrisy here are just insane.
• 1:26:29
  It's not OK for kids to set a boundary, but it's OK for
• 1:26:32
  parents to be like, I'm going to go out of my way to hurt you and
• 1:26:35
  I'm not just cutting you off but refusing to do anything,
• 1:26:37
  including inconveniencing you, withholding legal documents and
• 1:26:42
  publicly shaming you and blah blah blah.
• 1:26:44
  Also, notice how Laura has no problem with these parents
• 1:26:48
  saying that their kids are abusing them.
• 1:26:50
  It's abuse, it's abuse, it's abuse.
• 1:26:52
  But the minute a kid says, hey, I, I was abused by my parents,
• 1:26:55
  she just completely diminishes it.
• 1:26:58
  She laughs at it, she downplays it.
• 1:27:01
  It's horrible. We will.
• 1:27:03
  Yeah. We'll get to that in a second.
• 1:27:04
  It's coming from the next section.
• 1:27:06
  But first, there's several Tik Toks about Laura calling kids
• 1:27:09
  setting basic boundaries abuse. If you are giving your
• 1:27:15
  ungrateful adult kids more of a runway to treat you poorly than
• 1:27:21
  any other person alive, you need to stop that because you already
• 1:27:26
  gave them all of your love and support while raising them.
• 1:27:32
  That doesn't come with more of a runway.
• 1:27:36
  That comes with less moms. You have to stop apologising to
• 1:27:42
  your estranged kids. You do.
• 1:27:46
  Here's the deal. Just because they are
• 1:27:48
  experienced in the story of your lives together they term
• 1:27:56
  horrible doesn't invalidate. And if the only way that you can
• 1:28:04
  have a relationship with these kids is by acknowledging that
• 1:28:11
  their experience is the only one in the room, let them go because
• 1:28:25
  you still have an experience to live.
• 1:28:30
  They'll find the truth in time. Just let them go.
• 1:28:41
  So in summary, don't try and mend relationships with your
• 1:28:43
  kids. Don't do anything nice for.
• 1:28:44
  Them actively punish them and make life harder for them and
• 1:28:48
  call setting boundaries abuse. Got it again, more hypocrisy
• 1:28:52
  here. Doctor Wayne W Dyer was an
• 1:28:55
  American self help author and motivational speaker.
• 1:28:58
  He passed away in 2015. The body of work he left behind
• 1:29:00
  is renowned. With it are several quotes which
• 1:29:03
  he's quite famous for saying. One of my favourites is there
• 1:29:06
  are no justified resentments. In other words, stop blaming
• 1:29:09
  others. Start looking at your own
• 1:29:11
  accountability and contribution to the continuation of the
• 1:29:14
  issues at hand and the enduring conflict as well as feelings
• 1:29:17
  that go with it. Many parents complain that that
• 1:29:20
  is exactly what their old children don't do, and in fact
• 1:29:23
  never do. It's crazy, isn't it?
• 1:29:26
  Like, yeah, great advice I get, except she's not talking about
• 1:29:30
  herself here. She's talking about her kids.
• 1:29:32
  She's like, kids don't hold resentment, kids stop blaming
• 1:29:35
  others, kids take accountability for yourself, blah blah blah,
• 1:29:38
  everything's on you. But then she refuses to do any
• 1:29:43
  of that herself. It's oh God it's so sad.
• 1:29:47
  Choosing blame and resentment over forgiveness and
• 1:29:50
  understanding is a choice of which adult children can't
• 1:29:53
  reassign ownership. This is especially true if the
• 1:29:56
  parents have committed to doing everything in their power to
• 1:29:59
  move forward with their adult kids, including apologise,
• 1:30:02
  therapy, and working together to achieve a relationship where
• 1:30:04
  both can comfortably coexist. The lack of loyalty and
• 1:30:07
  cascading disloyalty is enormous among adult children.
• 1:30:11
  They hold on to their resentments and provide no way
• 1:30:14
  to atone or start fresh. At the same time, they expect
• 1:30:17
  their parents to forgive and forget on demand just because
• 1:30:19
  they love them. So if a parent messes up, kids
• 1:30:22
  aren't allowed to be resentful and must forgive them.
• 1:30:24
  But if a child sets a boundary, it's OK for parents to hold
• 1:30:26
  resentment and never forget. That's what I'm hearing we do in
• 1:30:30
  quotation marks, still love our adult children, even even among
• 1:30:34
  all the wounds that they never gave us.
• 1:30:36
  But that doesn't invalidate the unjustified behaviour that they
• 1:30:39
  refuse to take take responsibility for.
• 1:30:42
  Nor does it mean that we have to continue to be receptive to it.
• 1:30:45
  One mum shared her frustration this way.
• 1:30:47
  The double standard is flooring. They vomit their feelings and
• 1:30:51
  complaints but refuse to hear ours stating that they aren't
• 1:30:54
  responsible. It's always about them.
• 1:30:56
  This is literally what Laura's been doing for the entire book.
• 1:31:00
  Oh, I just cannot. There's a lot more of this to
• 1:31:04
  where she's just like blaming the kids for everything and
• 1:31:07
  never accepting that parents can do anything wrong.
• 1:31:09
  And in this next section, which I titled gatekeeping trauma, she
• 1:31:13
  begins to you missed it. Gatekeep trauma and abuse and
• 1:31:16
  downplay when kids describe something as abusive.
• 1:31:20
  Right. She claims that while abusive
• 1:31:23
  parents can exist, it only happens under her definition of
• 1:31:26
  abuse and the most adult kids who claim they're abused are
• 1:31:29
  just making it up. It is vile.
• 1:31:32
  Here's a couple of TikTok clips for you and then I'm going to go
• 1:31:34
  straight to reading a passage from her book.
• 1:31:37
  There's the difference between accountability.
• 1:31:40
  And coercive control. The first makes you a good
• 1:31:44
  parent, the second places you at the centre of emotional
• 1:31:49
  manipulation. Know the difference when dealing
• 1:31:54
  with your adult kids, even if they don't or simply don't want
• 1:32:02
  you to. There is never any good reason
• 1:32:06
  to abuse a child, or anyone else for that matter.
• 1:32:09
  At the same time, I charge that in certain cases, society has
• 1:32:14
  taught young adults that what is actually discipline is abuse.
• 1:32:21
  I'd also charge that there is a pink tote young adult trend
• 1:32:26
  going on where young adults abuse their parents.
• 1:32:32
  That is why this Doormat Mom No More TikTok group and the
• 1:32:37
  Doormat Mom No More Facebook group has grown so
• 1:32:41
  exponentially, so quickly. Good parents are forced to
• 1:32:44
  endure vicious comments such as you've done.
• 1:32:47
  Effed. Up if your kid wants nothing to
• 1:32:48
  do with you or adult kids are more capable of identifying a
• 1:32:51
  beast today as they are better educated to the signs.
• 1:32:54
  Really. So ready others to cast stones
• 1:32:57
  at glass houses. And yet, just taking those two
• 1:32:59
  remarks into account, the hypocrisy is stunning.
• 1:33:02
  In the first case, adult children are deemed so bad that
• 1:33:04
  they must remove themselves from their parents lives.
• 1:33:07
  At the same time, they have the immense soundness of mind and
• 1:33:09
  educational acumen to be able to identify the situation around
• 1:33:12
  them better than their own parents and call it abuse.
• 1:33:15
  Which isn't exactly as it seems. These adult children are having
• 1:33:18
  their cake and eating it too. That simply makes no good sense
• 1:33:22
  as it infers that patients can be trusted to diagnose other
• 1:33:25
  patients accurately, when in fact they shouldn't be trusted
• 1:33:28
  to diagnose crap based on their lack of credentials and
• 1:33:31
  experience and use and youth. Sorry I'm checking up my words.
• 1:33:35
  I'm very angry. This is victim blaming nonsense.
• 1:33:40
  The idea that like, well, if you're well enough to identify
• 1:33:42
  that you're being abused and need to get away from it, then
• 1:33:44
  it can't be real abuse is so damn dangerous.
• 1:33:49
  Terrifying. And it's parts of the book like
• 1:33:52
  this where her responses are so aggressive and angry and there's
• 1:33:56
  so much swearing. Like, you might have seen it in
• 1:33:58
  a couple of parts. And there's more parts like this
• 1:34:00
  where she's like, genuinely aggressive and angry.
• 1:34:02
  And yeah, it's, it's a bit like, you know, when you get those men
• 1:34:06
  who are like, well, not all that.
• 1:34:08
  Not all men are violent. How dare you talk about men
• 1:34:10
  being violent? I'm not angry or aggressive.
• 1:34:12
  I'll show you. And they shout that angrily and
• 1:34:14
  aggressively, you know, feels like that.
• 1:34:17
  Here's another tickle clip for you.
• 1:34:19
  So you literally live selflessly for years.
• 1:34:22
  On end for people that you created and love more than life
• 1:34:26
  itself. And you do so because you want
• 1:34:29
  them to be happy, to have everything that they need and
• 1:34:34
  could ever dream on. You even leap tall buildings in
• 1:34:39
  a single bound to make that happen.
• 1:34:44
  And in the end, they come back and tell you that you did it all
• 1:34:49
  wrong, that instead of leaping tall buildings in a single down,
• 1:34:54
  you should have swam under them and had you.
• 1:34:59
  They will now be dealing with all this trauma, and they know
• 1:35:05
  you're the source of it because fictitious people around them
• 1:35:11
  tell them that you are and they believe them and that someday
• 1:35:16
  they're going to do better than you.
• 1:35:21
  That sound familiar? Yeah.
• 1:35:23
  Mocking trauma is never a good move, and it's usually.
• 1:35:26
  A sign you may be in the wrong. It only gets worse too.
• 1:35:29
  Listen to these bits. So he or she goes on a rant
• 1:35:32
  about how if the parent has good memories from their children's
• 1:35:34
  childhood, but the child has bad memories, then the child's
• 1:35:37
  memories must be false and they're at fault.
• 1:35:41
  How do they not remember good memories, and why a good
• 1:35:43
  parent's the only ones who do? I've been told the phenomenon is
• 1:35:45
  called cognitive bias towards negative memory recall.
• 1:35:48
  In short, the brain remembers the bad of the good.
• 1:35:51
  That seems to be happening for certain, and in droves.
• 1:35:53
  It's terribly sad because so much of the joy returned to good
• 1:35:56
  parents by these incredible experiences came from knowing
• 1:35:59
  that our children were grinning from ear to ear throughout them.
• 1:36:02
  Yeah, people tend to notice the bad stuff more than the good
• 1:36:04
  stuff because it hurts more. This isn't surprising.
• 1:36:07
  It's like, have you seen that terrible like screenshot meme
• 1:36:10
  thing that goes round online of this man texting woman being
• 1:36:13
  like, I love you, I love you, I love you, you're a bitch.
• 1:36:15
  I love you, I love you, I love you.
• 1:36:16
  And then when she's like, excuse me, what He's like.
• 1:36:18
  See, women always focus on the negative.
• 1:36:21
  It's like, well, yeah, because Ted 10 good memories don't erase
• 1:36:26
  actual trauma and pain. Sometimes all it takes is 1 bad
• 1:36:29
  experience to sell the whole thing.
• 1:36:31
  That's a very normal part of like the human exit.
• 1:36:34
  It's exactly how abusive partners get you with the well I
• 1:36:36
  only hit you once. Think of all the fun we've had
• 1:36:38
  together. I know because I've heard and
• 1:36:41
  fallen for that time and time again.
• 1:36:43
  When in reality no, once is enough and it does outweigh the
• 1:36:46
  fun. Like again, it's victim blaming
• 1:36:49
  nonsense. This, this boy had been like oh
• 1:36:51
  you know just because they had a couple of bad memories.
• 1:36:53
  Think about all the good ones, about all the fun we had.
• 1:36:55
  It doesn't work that way. It doesn't.
• 1:36:58
  And yeah, so she gets worse too and thinks that these adult
• 1:37:01
  children are having false memories out of convenience.
• 1:37:05
  Awful for her to say this stuff. I can't believe it.
• 1:37:08
  As I already mentioned, false memories aren't fantasy.
• 1:37:10
  They can occur arising from suggestion, perception,
• 1:37:13
  misinformation, misattributation.
• 1:37:16
  I will add 1. Convenience boggles good parents
• 1:37:18
  minds when they hear the reinterpretation of some of
• 1:37:20
  those stories. One room shared.
• 1:37:22
  My daughter couldn't come up with a single good memory when I
• 1:37:24
  asked her. Not one.
• 1:37:26
  We had plenty. Another mom described walking on
• 1:37:28
  egg shells throughout her adult children's teenage years.
• 1:37:31
  Because I've been drilled into her head that 100 compliments
• 1:37:34
  would be overshadowed by 1 criticism.
• 1:37:36
  That seems to be accurate. Talking about criticism, good
• 1:37:39
  parents feel savage remarks when their adult children reinvent or
• 1:37:42
  can't remember any good times whatsoever.
• 1:37:44
  The common theme seems to be that the bad times were so
• 1:37:47
  devastating that they squash the good ones or raise the good from
• 1:37:50
  existence altogether. Can you understand how hurtful
• 1:37:53
  that can be for a parent who worked 2 jobs to provide her
• 1:37:55
  child with ballet lessons only to have this redefined as
• 1:37:58
  manipulative or totally inconsequential?
• 1:38:01
  It isn't difficult to understand why plenty of parents regret
• 1:38:03
  having been so good to their adult children growing up.
• 1:38:06
  The notion that none of it mattered speaks of wasted lives.
• 1:38:09
  Nothing isn't traumatic to them enough.
• 1:38:12
  It seems to be accurately seems to accurately portray how so
• 1:38:15
  many ungrateful adult children are viewed by parents.
• 1:38:19
  It makes them question why they even tried when they could have
• 1:38:21
  saved themselves, struggle, time and money or applied it to
• 1:38:25
  something or someone who would have actually appreciated their
• 1:38:27
  caring in the end. Again, it gets it gets worse too
• 1:38:31
  when she starts talking about stuff like this.
• 1:38:32
  Mass formation psychosis is not a recognisable psychiatric term
• 1:38:37
  to describe delusional group think.
• 1:38:38
  However, it is a cultural term being used to describe it today,
• 1:38:43
  and there is a lot of it going around I must say, including
• 1:38:46
  with regards to this issue. In the case of adult children,
• 1:38:49
  it seems that society has deluded them into thinking
• 1:38:52
  they're that they're allowed to have feelings and express them,
• 1:38:55
  but good parents are not. No matter how many buttons these
• 1:38:58
  adult children push, good parents emotions and actions
• 1:39:01
  should remain in check. After all, they're the parents,
• 1:39:04
  right? This is also the part of the
• 1:39:07
  book where she starts lashing out and swearing at haters or
• 1:39:10
  trolls who are basically anyone who criticises her or points out
• 1:39:13
  where she might be wrong. She says yeah, this happens all
• 1:39:16
  the time. Well, that as well as criticisms
• 1:39:18
  from self-righteous know it alls who somehow believe that parents
• 1:39:22
  haven't gone to great lengths to understand and validate their
• 1:39:24
  adult children's emotions, experiences, issues and opinions
• 1:39:28
  only to find out that it still wasn't enough.
• 1:39:31
  Like this brainiac. And she quotes someone from her
• 1:39:34
  Facebook page or maybe tick tock comments.
• 1:39:36
  Maybe your kid wouldn't have dropped you if you stopped to
• 1:39:39
  listen. You sound like a narcissist.
• 1:39:40
  Figure it out much? Undoubtedly I did.
• 1:39:43
  I figured out exactly why this validation, expectation, and
• 1:39:46
  talking point has gotten so out of hand.
• 1:39:48
  Comments like the one above assume the worst of good
• 1:39:50
  parents, confirming this in the eyes of adult children and
• 1:39:54
  making it even easier for them to choose not to grow up.
• 1:39:56
  They do quite a disservice to families.
• 1:39:59
  She starts calling everyone trolls.
• 1:40:00
  Personally, having been in the public eye for quite some time,
• 1:40:02
  I'm unbothered by their negativity.
• 1:40:04
  I realised that challenging the status quo always has its
• 1:40:07
  hurdles. More so, no one understands my
• 1:40:09
  unique circumstances better than me and given where I sit wasting
• 1:40:13
  time entertaining or turning myself inside out over
• 1:40:15
  strangers, crass comments that assume the worst is exactly
• 1:40:18
  that, a waste of time. This is especially true when
• 1:40:22
  examples such as this one define their credibility.
• 1:40:25
  My birth giver would love you. You'd sound just alike.
• 1:40:28
  Birth giver. There's a wokeism if I ever
• 1:40:31
  heard one. I'd prefer to be considered a
• 1:40:33
  pariah then become part of the same illness that has affected
• 1:40:36
  our adult children to the point of calling their mothers birth
• 1:40:39
  givers. How disrespectful and
• 1:40:41
  ungrateful. If that means I remain
• 1:40:43
  misunderstood, so be it. It's wild.
• 1:40:47
  The irony of this being that she is more than happy for parents
• 1:40:51
  to call their kids spawn. Like she's responded to a bunch
• 1:40:55
  of comments of women doing that. She's quoted women doing that,
• 1:40:58
  she's mentioned it in videos she's replied to.
• 1:41:00
  I said replied to comments like so dehumanising name calling is
• 1:41:04
  fine in One Direction but not the other.
• 1:41:06
  OK, got you. And then of course she brings
• 1:41:08
  religion into the mix too. Right back in the introduction
• 1:41:11
  to her book, she said. In addition, you may find that
• 1:41:13
  God is mentioned in a variety of ways throughout.
• 1:41:15
  I am a Christian and I wield my pen accordingly.
• 1:41:18
  As a Christian, I realised I should forgive my daughter but
• 1:41:20
  do it today. I couldn't.
• 1:41:22
  I was just too hurt. It was a conflict that added to
• 1:41:25
  the intense sorrow that I'd already been feeling.
• 1:41:27
  Thankfully, when I'd look for a therapist, I'd found one who
• 1:41:29
  shared my love for the Lord. She goes on to say that parents
• 1:41:32
  only need to be good enough for their kids and that that's
• 1:41:35
  enough for their kids to love them unconditionally, wait on
• 1:41:37
  them hand and foot as they get older, and that the kids
• 1:41:40
  shouldn't complain about it because good enough is enough,
• 1:41:43
  she writes. One could even argue that if God
• 1:41:45
  wanted us to do better than good enough, He would have equipped
• 1:41:47
  us with the ability to make it happen.
• 1:41:49
  His perfect seems to be our good enough.
• 1:41:52
  The woke mob may quibble with this while foisting their own
• 1:41:56
  standards and practises on parents today, but that is just
• 1:42:00
  another attempt to eliminate God from His place in the dynamic.
• 1:42:03
  They want everyone to believe they know better when they
• 1:42:04
  actually know nothing. Destroying the parent child
• 1:42:07
  relationship while strengthening strengthening the societal child
• 1:42:11
  relationship additional. Additionally, kids are being
• 1:42:13
  groomed to believe that they are their parents peers even before
• 1:42:16
  they hit puberty. Let's not throw around big words
• 1:42:20
  like grooming. Please stop.
• 1:42:21
  It absolutely undermines the seriousness of them.
• 1:42:26
  Enormous influences such as entertainment and education are
• 1:42:28
  notorious for teaching children that what they learn outside the
• 1:42:31
  home is right and inside the home is wrong.
• 1:42:34
  In other words, stay close to your kids before the devil
• 1:42:36
  steals them away. It takes but a minute for him to
• 1:42:39
  do so, and once he has them, it's tough to get them back, I
• 1:42:42
  assure you. At the same time, no one will
• 1:42:44
  ever love your children more than a good mother and father.
• 1:42:46
  It is a biological and sacred link that can neither be
• 1:42:49
  eclipsed nor duplicated. Fall through it.
• 1:42:52
  Life emerges. Protecting them at all costs is
• 1:42:54
  in our DNA. You can't say that about any
• 1:42:56
  other bond. And yet you're happy to publicly
• 1:42:59
  shame your daughter and insult her repeatedly?
• 1:43:02
  Do you really think that is protecting her at all costs?
• 1:43:05
  If the love you are apparently showing for your daughter is the
• 1:43:09
  most love anyone will ever receive from anyone ever, then I
• 1:43:12
  don't think I want love at all. Because this is horrifying to
• 1:43:16
  write. Something is going on outside of
• 1:43:17
  parents never feeling the real illness being suffered comes
• 1:43:19
  from the lack of God in many young adults lives.
• 1:43:22
  Until they invite Him into their souls, they will never feel
• 1:43:24
  well, mentally or otherwise because they are missing the
• 1:43:27
  pertinent nourishment that only He can provide.
• 1:43:29
  That said, parents shouldn't tolerate abuse from their adult
• 1:43:32
  kids, nor remove accountability or responsibility simply because
• 1:43:35
  they refuse to believe or would rather pop a pill than truly
• 1:43:38
  heal. And if it's not like a God,
• 1:43:40
  that's the problem apparently that society is just too easy
• 1:43:43
  for these damn kids, so they're just making up problems for
• 1:43:46
  fundsies. Apparently.
• 1:43:47
  First of all, countries have lost their way as as a result of
• 1:43:50
  years of life being too damn good for them.
• 1:43:53
  When people have it too good, they assign happiness to all the
• 1:43:56
  wrong things. Society makes it so evil takes
• 1:43:59
  the helm. It births the saying people who
• 1:44:01
  have the most are generally the least happy.
• 1:44:03
  And yet the prevalence of this insanity in our society
• 1:44:05
  currently is enormous. This mum shared her perspective
• 1:44:08
  of just how prevalent. They're running out of things to
• 1:44:11
  whine about, so instead they make up BS to have something.
• 1:44:14
  The victim mentality is all over the Internet.
• 1:44:16
  Another cease tolerating this lunacy as part of family life in
• 1:44:19
  the United States. She said it only happens in the
• 1:44:22
  US. Other countries don't have this
• 1:44:23
  problem, just us. And then she compares herself to
• 1:44:26
  Jesus quote in the Bible. Remember, if the world hates
• 1:44:29
  you, understand that it hated me first.
• 1:44:32
  In other words, you're in good company.
• 1:44:33
  Hold tight to that perspective. It will help you while the
• 1:44:36
  trolls are picking the flesh from your bones.
• 1:44:38
  In another place. She complaints about how if a
• 1:44:40
  kid calls out their parent for an outdated idea, like saying
• 1:44:43
  something racist or homophobic, then that child is just trying
• 1:44:46
  to make their parents into a clone of them.
• 1:44:48
  Absolutely crazy. Adult children don't have the
• 1:44:50
  right to ask their parents to change or conform to their way
• 1:44:53
  of thinking, and yet society continues to pound into their
• 1:44:55
  heads they do. These adult kids want their
• 1:44:58
  parents to obtain the same sick validation from the wrong places
• 1:45:00
  that they are. Someone needs to tell them that
• 1:45:03
  their parents are actually allowed to be who they were
• 1:45:04
  designed to be by God, of which no other approval or validation
• 1:45:08
  is needed. These adult kids would do well
• 1:45:10
  to follow suit. They'd finally feel whole.
• 1:45:13
  Frankly, it becomes tiring, draining, and destructive.
• 1:45:16
  Destructive to have to constantly battle, feeling fit
• 1:45:19
  being fixed to have to constantly battle being fixed.
• 1:45:22
  At the same time, refusing to come around or capitulate
• 1:45:25
  doesn't make you a terrible person or a bad person.
• 1:45:27
  It makes you you. And you have every right to stay
• 1:45:30
  you, despite what your adult children think.
• 1:45:33
  Talk about breaking down communication and making it less
• 1:45:35
  and less palatable to be in the same room or around their adult
• 1:45:38
  children at all. Who exactly is the victim when
• 1:45:41
  adult children attack their parents for being themselves and
• 1:45:43
  not copies of them? And yet if you turn the entire
• 1:45:46
  scenario around, these adult children would be the first ones
• 1:45:49
  to claim that their parents were abusing them.
• 1:45:52
  When parents are constantly being criticised and made to
• 1:45:54
  feel small and stupid by their adult children, it makes any
• 1:45:57
  time they spend together unsatisfying and draining.
• 1:46:00
  It really cuts to the bone and hurts.
• 1:46:02
  Is it any wonder so many good parents begin to back away from
• 1:46:04
  engaging? Oh, God, this book is
• 1:46:06
  exhausting. That is pretty much the end of
• 1:46:09
  what I have to say about it. It's definitely a lot.
• 1:46:12
  It is too much. I found this whole book
• 1:46:14
  completely and utterly exhausting.
• 1:46:16
  But before we go, I just want to take a quick look at a couple of
• 1:46:18
  the reviews of this book because they're quite funny.
• 1:46:21
  And these are one star reviews, which Laura claims are just
• 1:46:24
  trolls. These are, Yep, verified
• 1:46:27
  purchases are people who have read the book, reviewed the
• 1:46:30
  book, not just from the new, not just from the United States
• 1:46:33
  either, like she says, one person from the UK, one person
• 1:46:36
  from Australia. So people around the world are
• 1:46:38
  are all criticising her but she's just like no trolls trolls
• 1:46:42
  trolls this person says. Are you a parent who stomps
• 1:46:45
  Olivia adult children's boundaries?
• 1:46:47
  Do you define the word respect as because I'm your mum and
• 1:46:50
  older than you and you have to respect me despite me not
• 1:46:52
  listening to you, disrespecting you and your boundaries and
• 1:46:54
  upsetting you? Do you not take no for an
• 1:46:56
  answer? Can you not take responsibility
• 1:46:58
  for your actions? Are you an accomplished
• 1:46:59
  gaslighter who twists things to play the victim?
• 1:47:01
  Do you believe that because your child gave birth, you're
• 1:47:03
  automatically entitled to take over the parental role and
• 1:47:06
  override any decisions made by the child's actual parents?
• 1:47:08
  If all of the above sound familiar, then this is the book
• 1:47:11
  for you. If you need validation in
• 1:47:12
  playing the victim, then this is the book for you.
• 1:47:14
  If you want someone to tell you it's OK to bully your own kids,
• 1:47:17
  then you're on the right, This is the book for you.
• 1:47:21
  I'd love to hear her children's perspectives as the author
• 1:47:23
  sounds like she cannot cope with her offspring being able to
• 1:47:26
  think for themselves instead of just obediently bowing down to
• 1:47:28
  her. Another review said Doormat Mom
• 1:47:31
  No More promises empowerment but instead delivers a toxic
• 1:47:34
  consenting guide that insults its readers while promoting a
• 1:47:37
  selfish, disconnected approach to parenting and life.
• 1:47:39
  Rather than offering practical advice.
• 1:47:41
  The book is a thinly veiled manifesto of resentment, rife
• 1:47:44
  with outdated stereotypes and questionable tough love
• 1:47:46
  strategies that do more harm than good.
• 1:47:48
  It doesn't empower readers to make healthier choices, it
• 1:47:51
  encourages them to adopt an unbalanced a title perspective
• 1:47:53
  that priorities their own convenience of a meaningful
• 1:47:56
  relationships. And finally, one review from
• 1:47:58
  Australia said this book contains red flag after red flag
• 1:48:01
  and then just offers quotes from the book as examples.
• 1:48:05
  Like, how can she say these people are trolling when they're
• 1:48:07
  just quoting her words back to her?
• 1:48:08
  Crazy. But yeah, there you go.
• 1:48:11
  That's, that's all I have to say on this.
• 1:48:12
  I am quite tired now. This.
• 1:48:15
  Yeah, it's been honestly at this point nearly two months I've
• 1:48:18
  been working on this video, so I'm a little tired, but you
• 1:48:22
  know, I'm glad it's out. I'm glad it's done.
• 1:48:24
  Well, I say I'm glad I've still got to edit this, but if you're
• 1:48:26
  watching this and I'm glad it's out.
• 1:48:29
  But yeah, thank you so much for watching today.
• 1:48:30
  I appreciate you guys a lot. I hope you're OK with the voice
• 1:48:32
  over for honestly most of this, but it's just a little easier
• 1:48:36
  for me to get through things at the minute if I'm not on camera.
• 1:48:39
  I'm still having ups and down. I'm having more UPS at the
• 1:48:40
  minute, which is good. I did actually really enjoy
• 1:48:43
  filming the last video about the Rebecca Goodwin situation.
• 1:48:48
  I don't know, that's the first time I've enjoyed filming in
• 1:48:51
  absolutely months, so that was nice.
• 1:48:53
  And filming the first part of this was quite nice as well, but
• 1:48:57
  I just got very tired after that.
• 1:48:59
  I've got my call in Hoover Video to film still.
• 1:49:01
  I'm reviewing her book Regretting You, which I regret
• 1:49:04
  reading. Terrible.
• 1:49:06
  I'm really, really terrible. I have so many things to say
• 1:49:09
  about that. I'm going to try and get on
• 1:49:10
  camera for that one. So we'll see how that goes.
• 1:49:12
  But yeah, for now, thank you so much for watching today.
• 1:49:14
  If you're new here, make sure you subscribe.
• 1:49:16
  If you've been around a while, please check you're still
• 1:49:18
  subscribed. And if you'd like to follow me
• 1:49:20
  over on Patreon, you can do. I post all sorts of like little
• 1:49:24
  photos and bits on there. I've got some extra videos on
• 1:49:26
  there and like behind the scenes stuff and yeah, it's just just
• 1:49:30
  quite fun actually. I also have channel memberships
• 1:49:33
  which I don't really push very much.
• 1:49:34
  They're just kind of there, but they're actually really cute
• 1:49:36
  because you get these like little special like emojis and
• 1:49:39
  stuff that you can use in like chats if a video premieres or
• 1:49:42
  like in comments, you get these cute little badges next to your
• 1:49:44
  name which are really cute. And I've got a few extra videos
• 1:49:47
  for members. I post some extra photos and
• 1:49:50
  little posts and stuff over on the members community tab.
• 1:49:53
  And I've also started doing this really fun thing where I do a
• 1:49:56
  little trivia questions for members, which is just for I, I
• 1:49:59
  love trivia. I love quizzes.
• 1:50:01
  And so I have started doing that over my members tab as well.
• 1:50:04
  So if you remember, please go check that out.
• 1:50:05
  It'll be fun. You guys are quite smart.
• 1:50:08
  I am appreciating seeing all your answers so far, which is
• 1:50:11
  really fun. But yeah, I just thought I'd
• 1:50:13
  give that a little shout out. Shout out that words.
• 1:50:16
  Words are hard. I'm so tired, it is nearly
• 1:50:18
  midnight here so I'm going to go, but thank you so much for
• 1:50:21
  watching. I appreciate you guys and I will
• 1:50:23
  see you again soon. Bye.