Another chime here.

My mother often spoke of how vain, alcoholic, and verbally demeaning my Dad was. But she was right - He totally was. My beef with that though is that she shouldn't have sent me there to stay with him on weekends. Because in doing so, she enabled his abuse of me. She also didn't intervene when I reported to her that I was being abused.

My father (who remarried quickly) and his wife were extremely negative toward my mother and anything to do with her - Including all her family and her children from a previous marriage. I mean it was constant trash talking and putting them down. A lot of it was to get me to say bad things about her/them because he wanted to gain full custody of me (because in his mind, my mother was unfit to be a mother due to being bipolar)...

It was like an Inquisition (as I would later refer to it as). The two of them would have me sat down at the table while they questioned me and went down the list of the countless ways mom / anything connected to her was trash. (As an addendum I too was trash by association and for having half of my DNA come from her.) Other motives seemed to be for the pure enjoyment of being allegedly 'better than' everyone else...

Ironically, it was way off that he criticize mom. Aside from being unkind and inappropriate: he was no better, and in many ways much worse as a narcissistic and awful person. Same for his wife... All-in-all, one of the reasons I didn't really have a childhood is because they devoted so much energy to verbally-mentally-emotionally abusing me via my mother and as an entity partly from her. Yes, it was abuse. I know that now.

Thank you for sharing, OP. I'm sorry you went through what you did. I hope this message served its purpose in saying 'me too'.