The earliest time I remember her talking about it, I think I was like 8 or 9 years old…
She kept talking about that when she had my older brother, and later me, and she told me being pregnant was hurting her back. And when she had me, whe told me about being worried about the authorities finding out about the 2nd pregnancy and lived those like 9 months in fear.
And she told me about about the C-Section that she had twice for both of me and my older brother, and that she said it hurts a lot.
And like, then she literally lift up her shirt and showed me where she was cut open and like… idk showing scars feel so weird… but I guess she treated it like a battle scar or something… idk…
I remember feeling so bad about it and I felt like I loved her more as a mother.
Then she kept like repeating it every so often and I’m just thinking like: hmm… is this some weird emotional manipulation thing? and it just gets very weird every time she talks about it, and it always ends with something like “I suffered so much for you, you need to ‘behave’ and listen to me” and “if I didn’t have you, I’d be much healthier”
Like I lost count how many times she’ve retold the story, like 20 times at least. I remember being told of it at least once a year. Like I’d talk about my birthday and talk and she’s like: “Oh yea that’s the day I went through so much pain to have you” and “you should take me to have tea/dimsum” (okay this part, it was sometimes said as a “joke”, I was a dependent, of course I couldn’t buy her anything lol)
So I felt so guilty every time I talk about birthday celebrations… cuz like I feel like I owe her or something.
Okay the key here is what you mean by “constantly”. Telling a story about something so life changing once a year hardly goes as “constantly” in my books.
What may come across as manipulative is you mentioning she’s trying to get you to do as she says or trying to get guilt or compassion from you. And this with a pinch of salt, because it’s very hard to tell from what you share here. I would have to become a fly on your wall for a long time to have my own opinion about it.
You tell me she’s telling you this every week and making reference to it every day, several times a day, and now that’s what I consider “constantly”. That she hardly has anything else to share about her past or that she somehow finds a way to spin everything to a framework of scarred pregnancy mother, or similar.
My own mother has told me about her pregnancies several times a year, I heard her stories so many times. Hundreds. Yet that was never the only story she had, and it was always brought up more or less naturally in conversation. The same happened with several other favorite anecdotes of her own past and me and my sister’s childhood. I would consider this aspect to be normal.
I never felt manipulated by her retelling of a story though. And I know she could manipulate pretty well. She also had a few topics she would constantly harass me about, yes, daily or nearly to a point. But retelling the past was not part of it, even though she did frequently.