How are you with your kids?

Hi jona_free. I sometimes find that by giving the things I did not get, that in some strange way I actually have those things by giving them to others. I guess inside me I have the stuff that makes that possible. It is within me. And I overcame adversity.

Same here. I did pray about my first child and unlearning the negative thru my counseling. It got better from there. I wanted my kids to be able to be open and share their thoughts and feelings, while I grew into being an open, authentic mom. I wanted to break the generational curse.

I have a better relationship with my children than with my mother. This is largely because I still HAVE a relationship with my children, and none at all with my mother.

This is not to say I was a better parent. No, I screwed up big time. I made a lot of the same mistakes my mother made. The system was more active by the time I became a parent, though, so my children spent much of their childhood in foster care while I did not. My mother will see this as evidence that SHE is the superior parent, and has sometimes thrown it in my face. "At least my children didn't go to foster care." Which, of course, is one of the many reasons I ended contact. I bit my tongue to keep from answering, "Well, we should have!"

My mother believes that my children still want me around simply because they didn't grow up with me all along, and they're making up for lost time. I, on the other hand, supposedly *had* my mother around, so I never felt that deprivation, and that's why I had room for the resentment to grow.

Well, she's ignoring the facts that 1.) While my children spent a lot of time in foster care, I spent a lot of time in the custody of my grandparents. My mother *wasn't* always around. So there. And this was due to the fact that 2.) As mentioned, child protective services wasn't as active then. If a parent nowadays did the things my mother did, that parent would never see those children again.

My younger daughter explains the reason she forgives me and still wants contact. She said, "At least you own up to things." Yes, I admit I did it wrong. My mother, by contrast, denies everything and thinks I'm just being negative.