I am a teenager in high school. Lately, I have been having an issue with my mom’s habit of oversharing. My mom talks on the phone with her friends and family a lot, and she often gives details about my life—sometimes embarrassing stories—without my permission. She has done this my whole life, and I have told her countless times that I do not like it, but she never listens. She says, “My friends already know all about me and they want to know about you.
This is also an issue of consent. As an adolescent, I experienced a trauma in which my consent was violated, so teaching consent is one of my top parenting priorities. One way parents can teach children of any age about consent is by respecting their boundaries, even in situations that may seem small or unimportant. The obvious example is bodily consent—letting children make their own rules about their bodies and never forcing them to give kisses, hugs, or be tickled when they’ve said no.
Every time I meet a new potential mom friend, they inevitably talk about how their parents are visiting, or how they were so much help when their baby was born, and I get really triggered, which strains my ability to relate to this new potential friend. Our baby was colicky and incredibly difficult for the first year, and I felt deeply lonely and in need of a mom-figure.
After I became a single parent when my son was 3, it sometimes felt like every other mother in the world was married, dividing the household and parenting work between two people while enjoying the relative financial ease of a double-income lifestyle. Sometimes, when my son was tired of hanging out with just me, and I couldn’t seem to chase down a playdate, I’d tell myself it was because everyone else was too busy enjoying their perfect two-parent families to text me back.