While one of the most common joys of the holiday season is the opportunity to spend time with our families, the unfortunate truth is that not everybody finds this such a joyous prospect.
Indeed, it’s a near certainty that many of you can recall arguing with a relative now that Christmas has passed and there are a lot of families that consider these arguments the norm rather than the exception.
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But for some families, the signs of dysfunction are a little more subtle than screaming matches. And one woman who now describes her mother as a narcissist can identify one of those signs in her that she’s been dealing with since she was a child.
Be advised that the video featured in this article contains explicit language
On December 19, a fitness coach named Tijana Daly uploaded a TikTok in which she described all the presents her mom gave back to her over the years.
And in case you expected this to be something that started happening when Daly came of age, she gave the first gift she could recall her mother rejecting when she was 10 years old.
As she explained, she always loved ice skating with her dad and wondered why her mom never joined her. So she decided to get her mom her own skates.
However, the mom somehow caught wind of this in the days leading up to Christmas and told her in no uncertain terms that she didn’t like it.
As Daly said, “Needless to say, she opened it and literally passed the box right back to me.”
But while Daly identifies this as the most hurtful instance of her mother doing this, she had an arguably more extreme reaction to a gift Daly gave when she was 17.
Although she looks back on the set of lotions she got her as a cliché gift, she also knew her mom wasn’t picky about these products and she was getting her what she could afford at the time.
However, this didn’t stop her mom from leaving her present under the tree for a solid two weeks.
Why? Well, in the mom’s words, “I think you got me this to be mean to me. I think you got this for me as a joke.”
And yet, she still became angry when Daly said she would give it to her boyfriend at the time’s mother instead.
Despite how these early interactions went, Daly still came through with Christmas gifts for her mother over the years, but it seemed that none of them were ever good enough for her.
For instance, the Guess wallet we see peeking out behind her head? It was apparently too big despite being the size of a standard wallet.
And when she tried to hedge her bets and give her a gift card from a major department store chain, it always happened to be one that wasn’t convenient for her to get to.
As we can see in her full video, Daly eventually realized that giving her mom any gifts at all was a wasted effort.
But soon before this dawned on her, she tried to treat her parents to a weekend getaway to Niagara Falls.
That rejection seemed to mark the moment Daly gave up, but at least it meant she and her husband got to go on the trip instead.
