‘My mum was awful to me – now she’s a loving grandma. I resent her for it’

There are around 19.9 million families in the UK, and about two-thirds of people in the UK will become grandparents during their lifetime. Yet, although both tasks involve raising children, parenting and grandparenting are in many ways fundamentally different experiences, with the latter tending to be more time-limited, straightforward, joyful, and less stressful and demanding. There are lots of parents who for all sorts of reasons struggled with parenthood, and may have let their children down – but they now dote on their grandchildren. So what’s it like when you feel that your parents weren’t great at parenting, but they’re excellent at grandparenting? Kellie*, a 43-year-old NHS worker from Dorset, had a difficult childhood, and never knew her mother was capable of the warmth she’s since shown her grandchildren. She tells The i Paper about her experience of reconciling these two, very different, versions of the woman who brought her up. My mum is a brilliant grandma to my two children (five and eight). She has endless patience for them, she’ll play the same game with them a million times, do hide and seek for hours in various cupboards around our house, she gets down on the floor and pretends to be animals with them. Lots of messy crafts, and baking. She doesn’t mind when the flour goes all over her kitchen, and they drop the eggs, she just laughs and wipes it up. She is really warm and loving towards them. Mum will come round once a week or so, or we might drop into hers and she’ll give the kids home-made biscuits and settle down with them on the settee, and they’ll tell her about school, and what they’ve been up to. It makes my heart melt to see them all cosied up like that, and I am overjoyed they get this great relationship with their gran. I love this most of the time. What a special thing it is. But watching this is also really complicated. It’s taken me some time to get used to it, and even now I still get these painful “what the f***” moments of sadness about how she is such a loving gran to my kids, but wasn’t a very loving mum to me. I remember her being really angry with me and my two siblings a lot of the time; she was impatient and I felt like I was making her life worse a lot of the time. Shorts I have a handful of nice childhood memories of being with mum, but barely any. Mum was critical of me about my looks, my weight, everything, and she guilt-tripped me lots. I didn’t like being around her, and I was often scared of her, too. You never quite knew what you were going to get, and that feeling has never totally left me – I’m always a bit on edge. Mum smacked us sometimes, not always when we’d even done something very naughty, even. She was cold, and distant. She would lose her temper, in this rageful way. Chuck plates at the wall, smash bowls on the floor. My dad was barely around, and if he was, they would yell and scream at each other. He said things that I now understand, as an adult, were verbal abuse. She had to do everything around the house, and I don’t think he contributed much financially. I think their relationship was seriously turbulent and unhappy, and then they had three kids (why!), and the money stress on top of it. Once I moved out, and was working and renting my own place, I rang my mum sometimes and would drop in to see her every so often, but I felt really free no longer being in her space. We didn’t really have a closeness, I felt duty towards her but not any real warmth. When I was first pregnant, though, I remember thinking, “I already love this baby so much even though it’s not been born, how on earth could she have treated us so coldly?” Then when the baby was a couple of weeks old, and I was in this bubble of obsessive love, I felt so emotional and angry about my childhood. I didn’t understand how anyone could make their children scared of them. I wondered how I’d ever be able to allow her to be in my life, now that I was a parent myself. I was worried she’d be critical or unkind to these babies, too. Then, as time went on, and she’d drop by, I saw how much she bonded with my baby. I didn’t want the guilt and burden of making her miserable as she aged, and so I decided to give her a chance at being a grandma. I decided to try and look forward. I think often about her own awful relationship with her parents, and the rubbish childhood she had, and the fact that she grew up in poverty, and then had no money to bring us up with either. She had barely any education, either, which I think kept her trapped. I do judge the choices she made and sometimes I resent her a lot, but I also know that being angry with her forever and dwelling too much on the past isn’t healthy. I have a good life, a supportive and kind partner, and two amazing children. She’s definitely done me damage, but I’m day-to-day a happy person who has perspective. My mum had a tough life, and she didn’t have much support or an evolved partner – and definitely no therapy! – to help her with that. At the same time, I can’t lie – it is honestly very, very weird to see her hug the kids and tell them she loves them. The joy she expresses when she sees them is like a different world to what I remember about my childhood. I don’t always feel relaxed with her even now, and it’s not as if we have our own really close, two-peas-in-a-pod sort of mother-and-daughter bond. I wouldn’t tell her my deepest feelings or worries, but I am glad she’s in my life and is able to give my children this grandparental relationship. I never had any relationship with her mum, because they were essentially estranged. It was all really awful and sad. My husband thinks my mum is almost using our kids as a sort of second chance to get it right. He might be right. In her late 50s, she remarried a nice guy (thank god) and he’s been good for her. That, combined with me having my first child, seems to have made her so much softer towards her family. She’s now in her 60s. She still has a bit of a temper, but not towards the children, and she seems to control it really well. I am shocked by how much she’s changed. I’ve heard people say their parents mellowed with age, but never imagined how someone like my mum could basically transform into a cuddly gran. I have never worked harder at anything than making sure I give my children the nice childhood I didn’t have. I know I can’t be a perfect parent and there’ll be loads I do wrong, but I hope my kids never fear me, or feel unsafe around me. I shower them (maybe drown them!?) in love. I do think they’re happy children, and yes I get annoyed with them like any parent, but I never raise my voice unless it’s about safety, and I would never, ever smack them. So that’s something positive from all this. My mum and I don’t discuss what she was like as a parent, but she did tell me about a year after I had my first baby, that I was a better mum than she ever was. I didn’t say much at the time but when I was alone, I burst into tears at that. I’d not had much praise from her before so this felt huge. Also, I took it as a bit of an admission that she failed us in some way… in a very roundabout way. Just her saying that really helped with the resentment I felt towards her. Sometimes I wonder about bringing things up, but then I think of the kids. My children love her so much and they assume we get on really well. I don’t want to cause a fall out and then for it to affect them. Maybe it’s a bit repressed but I sort of need to keep a lid on it. Maybe one day I’ll tell them more about my childhood, but not until they’re older and it is less likely to colour their opinion of her. For now, I want to preserve their innocence, and to give them the chance of having this lovely time with their gran for as long as possible. Even though it does hurt me at times, it seems worth the effort. *Names have been changed to protect privacy