Strange way of picking fights, anybody else get this?
One of my mother’s favorite tactics is if a misunderstanding happens about something mundane (and I’m not even angry) she makes it about me disagreeing with her on everything or being some kind of argumentative contrarian with an “attitude”. She’ll sometimes throw in an anecdote about how she tried to get me diagnosed as oppositional defiant as a child, something she’s brought up several times but I suspect it’s BS considering I was the most meek child ever, my report cards in elementary school note how quiet I was lol. It’s really hard to describe because it’s over such mundane things.
Another kind of related variation is if I describe something I’d like to do, she gets this smug pursed lip expression and says how she told me to do that first and I totally blew her off. This conversation, if it even did happen to begin with, could have been a mutual “I’d like to do that” thing but I didn’t have the capacity at the time, or like 10 years ago, but in any case I don’t word these things like “I just discovered this thing for the very first time and nobody else did”, more like, “I’d like to do X more”.
Posted Sep 12, 2026, 2:30 AM UTC