Wondering if my experience is familiar to anyone here. My father was an alcoholic, mainly binge drinking on weekends and sometimes during the work week. He had a pretty controlling personality even when not drinking, and my mother never stood up to him. My whole childhood and teen years were spent walking on eggshells. You just never knew what kind of mood he would be in or if he'd be drinking.

My mother was pretty much emotionally absent, and don't remember her ever being really involved in what we were experiencing. The drinking was the proverbial elephant in the room--never spoken of at all. There was no physical abuse, but definitely emotional with a lot of yelling, and they yelled at each other, too. I have one sister, close in age, but we rarely talked about it with each other.

My father eventually quit drinking when I was 25 and married, but it was literally never spoken of after that. You'd think we had an Ozzie and Harriet childhood to hear my parents reminisce. He died almost 10 years ago, and in those last 15 years he enjoyed being a grandfather to my and my sisters children, warm and cuddly to them. My kids think he was the greatest grandfather and have nothing but good memories of him. I had a really hard time with his death because I felt that we had a lot of unresolved issues, and I never felt close to him at all.

My mom is still the same, we see her fairly often but everything is very surface--no talking about the past or anything, and have never felt emotionally close to her, which is very sad, and it really strikes me when seeing the difference between my relationships with my own children and my relationship with my mother. I feel that I was never really "mothered" at all, if that makes sense.

All in all, I'm very blessed, and am married to an incredible man that loves me so much, and we have children, with whom I feel very connected most of the time, yet I still feel like I'm holding something back. It's as if I'm afraid to get too intimate emotionally with anyone. This has gotten better over the last couple of years, and am sorry to say that it took me over 25 years of marriage to really feel emotionally intimate with my husband.

Anyway, I'm rambling, but just found this place and wanted to know if anyone could relate and if so, what has helped you to grow and heal past the anger (I still occ feel that way toward my mother for putting up with my father and not getting us out of there) and the feelings of never being parented properly--which sounds strange as a 50 year old, but it still hits me sometimes, especially when I see friends that are very doting and close to their elderly parents, and those parents are very interested in their adult child's lives.