Salvaging relationship with my parents

Hello, I’d appreciate some feedback here please. I’ve always had a difficult relationship with my parents, and now that I’m an adult and looking back on things, I believe that my parents failed me. To be honest, I have a lot of anger towards them and even though I’m trying to put this aside, I find it hard to have a positive relationship with them nowadays.

My wife and I are now talking about trying for a baby, and it’s entering into this parental state of mind that has brought back all these feelings and memories with my parents. I want to get along with them while they’re still around rather than having regrets when they’re gone. But I find it hard to put aside all the bad things that have happened. Importantly, they are also repeating a lot of these bad mistakes with my younger brother so it’s not a case of everything being in the past, the way they look after my little brother now echoes the problems I had when I was younger.

In order to help myself see things more clearly, I made a few points of the good and bad things my parents have done for me over the years.

Bad points:
- Firstly, they beat me physically when I was child. My mother would hit me with a hurley, pretty much at full force. My father would whip me with his leather belt. In fairness, they never aimed for the head, usually it was the legs and body.

- They fed me a terrible diet when I was younger. I ate chips and take-aways very regularly. I also gorged on sweets, chocolates and crisps with their permission. I ended up obesely overweight going into my teens. I was bullied because of this of course. I then developed diabetes which I believe was a direct result of my bad diet. I still suffer from this today and will have it for the rest of my life.

- The house was often very tense. There was lots of shouting and screaming over very small things. They would completely lose their temper and shout at me. One time my mother spat on me on purpose because she was angry at me. My father told me on at least two occasions that I was a mistake and he regretting having me.

- As part of this arguing, my parents sometimes fought over money. I recall an instance when my father decided to change jobs to a less stressful but lower-paid job. My mother had a meltdown when he told her, and she screamed the house down until late at night that we were now penniless and we would soon lose our home. As a child, I was terrified at hearing this. Around this period, whenever my mother bought me anything like new shoes for example, I would show them proudly to my father and the first thing he would do is turn to my mother and ask how much they cost, then rebuke her for spending money we didn’t have. This made me feel immensely guilty and I continued to feel that way anytime I got new clothes/presents.

- When I was a lad, my father promised several times to take me to several sporting events, like all-Ireland hurling finals and Ireland rugby games but never did. There was never a crushing moment when I was told I wasn’t going, just a gradual realization that as time went on it was unlikely to happen.

- When I was older, they wouldn’t give me any money for college. They said I had to learn to stand on my own two feet. They did used to give me the money for the bus fare every week however so I could come back at the weekend for my part-time job. I had to incur large amounts of debt to finance my studies. I managed to scrape through college financially and when finished I moved home with no money. I managed to get a part-time job that didn’t pay much. I told my parents I was going to try and save up money so I could move to Dublin, London or Canada and asked if I could live rent-free in the house so I could save up. They told me no way and if I didn’t pay rent they wouldn’t hesitate to throw me out on the street. When I did manage to get a job in London, they gave me €100 to help me make the new start. They also gave me €100 as a wedding gift years later. They didn’t offer to give me anything towards a deposit on a house, or money towards furniture when we bought our place. They weren’t on the breadline either, they were comfortable financially at various points, at other points not so comfortable but certainly never broke. In fairness, they did help me out financially twice which I mention below.

- Also on the topic of money, my mother asked me if I would get a loan out for her just to cover a short period of expenditure due to something unexpected. I said fine and didn’t ask questions. So I got the loan in the Credit union and handed the money over to her. She then took my credit union book and promised to pay back the money each week. Turned out she decided to just stop paying the money back after a short while and lied to me about this, telling me the loan was paid off. I only realized after the Credit Union called me on the phone and threatened to take me to court.

- I’ve had some difficult times and when my mother asked me why I was behaving erratically, I told her I was feeling suicidal. She then told me to go and hang myself or shut up about it.

- Even though I really wanted to learn but couldn’t afford lessons, they wouldn’t show me how to drive, they said they were too busy.

As I said, I still see them doing a bad job with my younger brother too. He’s 13 years old and is very overweight. He also seems neglected, he can’t tie his shoelaces, can’t use a knife and fork properly, can’t cycle a bike, he just eats junk and watches telly all the time. He doesn’t have a learning disability or anything. He sweats heavily and goes beetroot red if he has to walk for 20 minutes. My parents find this funny when they see his face red.

Of course I can’t focus exclusively on the bad points. There were plenty of good points that I have to acknowledge:
- Both parents helped me with homework when I was younger,
- My father turned up for all my hurling matches to cheer on me and the team.
- When I first moved to London I went with very little money. I underestimated how expensive things would be there and even though I lived very frugally, there were a couple of times when I got stuck and had to ask my parents for help. They sent me money for my rent straight away when I asked.
- One summer I had a job in the neighboring town and they used to give me a lifts to the job every day (a good 30 mins each way).
- My father got me a job on a building site one summer as his old school friend was a foreman there.
- I always used to get good birthday and xmas presents.
- I was taken lots of places as a child such as the seaside, etc

I’ve raised a lot of these issues with them in the past. They reject that they did anything wrong and tell me that I was uncontrollable as a child, and I should be grateful for everything they’ve done for me. I have to admit that I probably wasn’t the easiest of children. They believe that our family was pretty much a normal, regular one. They genuinely feel that they have done a good job as parents and made a lot of sacrifices for their children.

As I say, I’m not looking for sympathy or anything by posting this. What I want is to be able to move on and have a somewhat healthy relationship with them. When I’m back home however and I see how they neglect my brother all these negative feelings come flooding back. I told them politely that they need to help my brother more and they said they are making sure he eats healthier but in reality they don’t make much of an effort. They also place the blame on him for not being active calling him lazy. It seems like they will never change their ways to be honest.

So if anyone has been in a similar situation, I’d appreciate your advice.