I'm using a throwaway account for this, to keep reddit a safe feeling for myself.
This is the first time I've really spent much time on this sub, I've seen it a few times and read a few things. Usually to little dings of, well this isn't exactly like my home life but I can identify similar feelings. I have been somewhat reluctant to talk openly about this stuff with anyone (until this past year, a great friend of mine has let me vent to her on many occasions and always comes from a non-judgemental place, just letting me talk) save for some talk with my younger brother when he would spiral out. I don't even really know where to begin. I apologize if it isn't formatted the way it should be and this will likely be wordy.
I'll be 32 in march, male, heterosexual (though, Ryan Reynolds could challenge my claim :D ), mixed race background but because of my family and skin tone raised white. - I note this because minor racial things can mess with society and family issues. Beyond this, I don't think it applies too much to my personal situation. I am also convinced that I have some mental disorder - it doesn't keep me from functioning on my own, so far as I can tell - but I show typical signs of a form of autism, maybe on the level of what used to be classified as Aspergers. This part will play a role in my relationship with my mother and source of a lot of anger now when I think about it. My family in general is low/mid middle class family, with my mom's parents doing the most in buying some land in Co and putting a house on it. My mother is more of the keep up with the jones's type, overpriced car/clothes/home for her income level. She's always been this way and my suspicions is that she wrecked her company doing this when I was a kid.
Father1: Some basics, my biological father bailed out before I was born 2 months after my mom and him married. I later found out from him (at the my age of 19) that he hightailed it to Georgia or something. He would have been 21 at the time, my mother was 19. -- When I was 19 they got remarried, that last for a year-ish before the divorced and he left with one of my half sister's (a previous relationship of his, 8 years after having me)
Father2: My mother remarried when I was 5 to my stepdad, who because my bio-father never signed the birth-cert gave up rights to me and my stepfather adopted me. He was 21 around then my mother being 24/25. Supposedly, as my mom had said once or twice him and I used to be close but at one point we had moved to Georgia ourselves for about 6 months (This was before they got married, I think, honestly this is reaching back to my toddler years). After that I never bonded with him again after, I suppose. The earliest true memories I have of him are predominately fear, fear that I was in trouble for something anytime I saw him, and eventually to where I felt a strong desire not wanting to spend anytime around/with him. When I was 14 he and my mother divorced - eventual fallout after they killed their business through mismanagement of funds some years prior. The only thing that kept them together was falling into near cultish levels of involvement with christianity in churches and "schools".
Mother: My mother, it's a very confusing thing for me. She was never physically abusive, that I can recall as in hitting me, though I would see her slap my step-dad in the back of the head at times. She was neglectful though, highly. I don't recall her being verbally abusive or emotionally but she was manipulative like her mother. She neglected my mental health, physical health (predominately dental), emotional health, and education. She's very much a person of if it isn't in her face, disrupting her sense of 'peace', or something to yell at she doesn't talk to you or really leave you feeling you exist.
Grandmother: She has good qualities, and recognized that in her opinion I was being treated poorly. She's the typical southern type of grandma, cooks, bakes, made things yadda - the biggest issues with her I have is that she's very emotionally manipulative, yells/screams, calls names, talks shit about others, almost always focused at my grandfather and would (and still does) do this with me around as a child, phrasing everything as if she was talking to me about him while yelling. A pattern of putting me in the middle of fights that my mother carried over. (She comes from an abusive family both physically/sexually/emotionally/mentally)
Grandfather: My grandfather wasn't really capable of teaching me what it meant to stand up for yourself, he had an abusive father and married someone who beat him down emotionally and mentally just as much. She left him once, and that likely would have been the healthiest thing for him but he took her back once she realized she couldn't take care of herself at all. He also has never been able to be himself, I discovered he is Bisexual last year when I walked in on him with his porn. Later we went out to eat just ourselves and talked to him about it, and told him if he needed anyone to talk to and feel accepted I was there for him. He thanked me, though he mostly seemed deeply ashamed of himself. It worked out because he had just found out that I smoke weed (in Colorado where it is legal), at the immediate time it was helping me through a chest injury at the gym but now I've found it helps with my anxiety and lets me cut through depression to think and become introspective. A practice I NEVER had before and something he's told me he never tried to do for himself. Thinking why he does something etc. That being said he always would let me vent to him, he taught me about art, and books, and the outdoors, told me stories and would listen to me, I always felt like he enjoyed being around me for just the sake of me being me. I always belonged when I was around him. --- Currently I live on his property 42acres in rural Co (the closest town has not one traffic light, downtown is a gas station, grocery, and post office) in a converted dollhouse for his son's daughter into a bedroom/office 10x10x10 with a 10ft deck. It's small but it has allowed me to become introspective.
My current financial plan, savings/budget puts me on track to buy a car and move to an apartment two towns away before the end of the year, which includes an emergency savings in addition. I still run my publishing business and have been growing that well.
So with a little bit of info on them I should go from there, some of this will likely seem chaotic in the way it is written, but I'll try to keep it flowing. I am being open as much as possible about everything so feel free to ask questions.When I first started to notice things about myself it came years after a divorce. I had married a few years after college in Colorado to someone I'd known since I was 16. I was far too young and not ready to be married, I knew nothing about myself. When I reflect on my choice now, I believe it was because I was lonesome and was willing to overlook a lot of problems we had (both in myself, and her) because I have always, always, always wanted someone to be with. Someone to be my best friend, to experience life together, and because my father bailed out on me and my mom's marriage I would never do that. I would stick out anything and work on it, because 'bad' men left and bailed out. So when before we married I found out she was texting a guy in another state she had done so with in a previous relationship, I was pissed but after half a day and coming back to her apartment and she was crying I decided to work it out. It wasn't long before she turned it around on me as being the bad guy, I mean by that night when we went out to eat all she could do was put blame on me for looking at her phone. Now, I think it was wrong, I crossed a privacy line and I understood that so I took on the blame. I never brought it up other then to say I didn't want her to keep him as a facebook friend and to get rid of his number (once we separated I found texts on a later phone that took place a year and a half before, she was still texting him, him calling her his mistress etc). During us getting things towards a marriage I didn't have much money, in fact I had debt from secondary schooling I did for IT work and my car note, some credit debt from clothes when I was 18. Stuff that was super irresponsible for me to take on and then ignore taking care of. Running away from problems, particularly financial is something my mother does a lot of and I think was where I learned the trait. I'm not sure, but it is something I've worked very hard at not being my go to choice (though internally I'm often screaming at myself to run from problem). The financials were a problem, and because I felt a drive to make things feel and seem normal, and that as the 'man' I was supposed to make everything happen and come together without issue or concern on my wife's part. This came from what my mom would at length complain about either of my father's to me and religious upbringing the pushed the ideology. Before the wedding, months before, I started getting letters for debts, and this naturally upset my wife at the time. Rightfully so, I would have been in her shoes about it. What was also going on at this time was that she was still talking to this guy, the guy before me occasionally on the phone, still had some of his shirts and would wear them, that really bothered me, i would even offer to buy the same shirt and it would be mine at least, because to me it was a romantic thing for an SO to wear something of mine. And she was having her best friend come over, a girl, and having make out sessions at our townhome while I was at work. I came home for lunch one day and she was over with her, and I recall my wife bitching about me coming home, like there was something wrong with me coming home. Said I was trying to catch her in something. By time we get married she's pushed it enough that we are now in a 'poly' relationship with all the benefits being for her. I didn't want it, but I felt like it was the only thing i could agree to, to keep my relationship together. It was an excuse for her to play around with her bestfriend and that was it. Fast forward to separation, I was smoking cigs(extremely far from what I'd thought of them my whole life till then) to halt panic/anxiety attacks and we were then in an apartment and living in separate rooms. I would have done anything to fix it, I got into therapy because I felt like I had destroyed the whole thing with my debt and trying to keep it paid while simultaneously working on a relationship with someone who wrote out a 20+ point list of all the kinds of ways I wasn't her ideal husband. I would want to at least talk and work on things at home but i worked nights/she days and she was never home around me. She later told me she was just sleeping around with people in the apartment complex. During this time my grandparents (including my grandfather, which hurt more than anyone else) refused to let me us a spare bed they had because I was trying to fix things, and because she was bisexual. Which they found out because my exwife told my sister, who told my mother, who went on to tell her parents. I cracked, I couldn't handle going to work, I couldn't go home. I was suicidal, to the point that for two hours I had a gun to my head. My world had come apart, I had no idea what to do, how to function, down was up and up was down. I felt like a shell of a person, I felt like my mind had collapsed in on itself. After the night with the gun I went to work and gave my notice of leaving. Called my mom and asked to drive to Texas and stay there till I figured out what to do. She said ok. My childhood best friend even gave me cash so I could make the trip - anything that couldn't fit into my 2000 mustang was thrown away, gave to my ex, or sold and cash given to her. She was flipping out about her own finances, me leaving, and my insurance cancelled because I was leaving. Her mom called me at one point to yell at me about it, but at that point I didn't have much to say other than "that sucks".
Once in Texas I spent the next year in a spare bedroom, only leaving the bed to use the bathroom or eat, occasional cigarette (I am now a year free of those/nic all together). So much so that the bamboo sheets that were on the bed went from light tan to a dark tan outline of where I'd be. I'd mostly stay on reddit, watch tv, or play games that would let the world fall away around me. When I reflect on this time, I can only describe it as how I imagine shell shock can be thought of in the far off stare but in my mind I wasn't letting anything go on. It was just empty. During this time my mom's only concern was trying to get me into her MLM bullshit with ACN and would become increasingly angry because I hadn't found work yet. I should have been working already, for self-care reasons, to feel productive would have done me a world of good. But at the time and for the 6 years I would be in Texas I felt like my mind had regressed so much that I felt incapable of doing things. I did work, by second year I was waiting tables, then some legal work for a court reporting company, back to tables and writing (had my first published stuff while waiting tables), eventually left the restaurant when I got on with Fedex and continued to grow my own business. I chose to leave Fedex (some for mental reasons, was routinely getting input overload and the anxiety/frustration of failing my standards) because my work had taken off that it was impacting the ability for it to grow with the time I spent at Fedex (which, btw, great company to work for, IF you work Express). Anyhow, during this time my mother would constantly put me between her and my brother (similar to how she treated me with my fathers). She ignored all the signs of me struggling to cope with reality of my situation. And unless she wanted to yell about my brother leaving something dirty, or that she didn't have enough money (because she bought expensive cars and blew money) for this that and the other, or that she couldn't date anyone because me and my brother lived there, or dumping some kittens on me that she found while at work - leaving me to bottle-feed one, keep them feed and monitored while they had an uncontrolled flea population, worms constantly making their way out, no shots, no check ups, and then when I would talk to her about taking them to get checked out she would shrug it off (at this point I was broke, I had left the job in court reporting (it was a small company with huge contract and the mismanagement and zero clear instructions was more than I was able to keep up with and maintain a sense of acceptable reliability in my mind but also I was feeling that same constant stress level from the failed marriage in the job). Anyway, I do my best with what I have and can afford. After the 5th day of the kittens being there the littlest one doesn't move after their nap. He wasn't gone, but couldn't close his eyes, gasped for breath every few seconds and his arms and legs were stiff. I had no idea what to do, I panicked, took him to my mom to show her the jet black stool coming from him and his condition. Asked to take him to the vet, she shrugged it off and went back to her paper work in bed. So I sat in the spare room with him, watering his eyes a little bit, wetting his lips and tongue with an eye dropper. I just wanted to give him at least some comfort... and i just held him till he went. I'm not sure I'm really over that in of itself, I've kept my feelings back on just that one occasion because of how guilty I feel I couldn't do more.
Some time later, after some issues with dealing with thoughts of my past marriage and worried about work, and money I was talking to my mom in her bedroom when i said I think there must be something wrong with me mentally. That I needed to be examined just so I could understand why I felt so drastically, monstrously, in-able to think and feel clear about myself as I once did before my marriage. She offhanded remarked, "oh, yeah, I've always suspected that." Like it was nothing. When I questioned her about it and asked her why she never followed up (since she's a fucking medical professional - occupational therapist, so was my adopting father with Hospice, his father plastic surgeon, and his mother a psychologist). Her response was, I wanted you to be normal. She like everything else, she ignored it. It has been 3 years since she said this and a year and a half that I've been out of her house and in Colorado again. In the past year I've been focused on looking back on my life and trying to understand myself. I never felt like I was allowed to be upset with adults/family around me. I always have looked at myself being wrong by default. I constantly sought to make my mom, stepfather happy because i didn't want fighting and yelling, I carried this over into my life by being a people pleaser at my own expense while believing no matter what I did I was still not good enough. The constant theme with my mother has been to blame everyone around her for problems of her finances and unhappiness. With one side she claims she wanted her house to be a place of peace/love but in the other she was fast to remind you that YOU were nothing compared to her because she was the one working. Even though I was working 5/6ths of the time I had been there. Buying Christmas gifts for my brother and putting her name on them. Listening to him when he had problems. Trying to figure out how to even deal with what I'd lost, which was the thing that I most wanted in all the world, to have a loving happy family of my own. And a lot of this was still locked in the subconscious till I left and felt it was ok to be upset at someone else. Everyone (excluding my grandfather) has blamed everyone else for their problems, most often the victim at the time of whatever they were yelling or shitting on them about. I never felt like I had the right to even think that my mom was/had been in the wrong. I still have a very very hard time with deciding between that I wasn't responsible for most of the problems in my family just by being an out of wedlock child. There are memories of my mother I don't like going back to, one in particular is of me at an age of somewhere between 17-23 I DON'T remember when it happened but I remember it very clearly as it made me super uncomfortable. She had me get on the couch and spoon her. Other things I recall have been her walking around the house in a tiny robe with nothing underneath so soon as she moved she was exposing different parts of herself. She would also talk about things like, I hope your little brother doesn't have a small dick, your dad was fine but your stepdad was meh (this convo happened in the parking lot of Barnes and Noble) or other inappropriate things of that nature.
My stepdad - this will be shorter as he isn't in my life at all at this point and I'm completely fine with that. Once he and my mom divorced I had it later told to me by her that he complained to the judge that he was going to have to pay child support for a kid that wasn't his. I didn't often go with my siblings to see him once I was 15, and by 16 I left after that year of school to attend a christian college in Colorado. He never bothered to call or talk to me after that. We spoke some when i moved back post divorce but he just wanted me to work for his new wife's business at min wage under the table as a cleaning job. Also told me not to tell anyone there I was his son. I stayed there for about an hour and half and left, never went back. --- One of the significant things about him was that he was equally neglectful, he would let me at 5 run around the apartment complex unattended. This led to me being molested by an older boy (8-10yr old I guess), to which I did not understand was going on at the time. He would also start fights with me just because, one I recall was my other sister was learning about the Wright Brothers, and I knew the flight time and distance (because my grandfather, the sole safe person in my life, had been a pilot and talked about them at great length to me) so when I exclaimed in excitement I knew the answer to myself he went on battering me about how I didn't and was just lying. This was typical.
My bio father and I talked and hung out for a few years, I even did odd jobs for him with his pool cleaning business. I was 23 at this time and we really hadn't ever spent much time together other than one summer when I was 19 and came home because him and my mom remarried. By the time I left to go back to Colorado I had told her she needed to separate as he was abusive verbally, and cruelly, I later learned some of the shit he put my little brother through and I don't think I can let go of as I've become older and understood. He left before I left for Colorado this most recent time, abruptly more or less, gave me a big set of tools and made a big deal about it father to son thing. Something that touched a deep part of what I'd wanted to have growing up. He later came back for a short trip, said he needed everything he gave me back (didn't ask or anything, just that he was taking it) packed it up and left having said yeah we will do dinner then didn't call me till the next day and on the other side of Houston that he was gone. After that I snapped and he became the first person I realized I just didn't care about what happened to. I didn't wish anything Ill on him, just stopped caring all together. It was like a light being turned off. He would never be what I wanted as a father, and knew I would never get back what I lost out on in childhood at the age of 29 or beyond.
My grandmother, its gotten worse with her but I've also reached the point after a final attempt in a long and emotional conversation that turned into a shouting bit on my part because she's used to controlling all conversation with her by yelling. So I shouted her down (which filled me with emotions of fear and uncertainty) just so she would be quite while trying to talk to her about the seriousness. I was tired of coming over to their place and 9/10 she was yelling at my grandfather over something like, he spent too long while he was running errands she wanted, or that he hadn't cut the dog's nails when she thought he should (because he's busy nearly every day working outside on their property, chickens, greenhouse, cutting wood, compost, working on one of 3 cars, or some other project she's thought up for him). I just snapped, and not in a violent way at all, the things I was talking about or yelling about was how stupid it was or her to be angry and mean and yelling all the time. That with 30 years left at best her options are either workout how to be friends with each other and work on the problems together or keep on just yelling and bitching and being upset like she had been about everything my whole time of knowing her. Who wants to willingly spend the rest of their life pissed off and shitty the whole time? She wasn't going to leave him, she is entirely unable to care for herself. Her whole thing was just, nothing is going to ever change, and from that moment on for me I just stopped caring about what bothered her or not. I don't wish anything I'll on her, at all, but anything else i just don't care at all anymore. It makes me feel like I'm a terrible person. She does nice things like I said, but I'd rather have grown up on just a cheese sandwich and no shoes around her and my grandfather and feel like we could have just talked about anything and enjoyed company. But for her, she's hellbent on telling everyone how wrong they are, how they need to be HER revelation of christianity, and any little thing thats outside of what she thinks aught to be, she rains hell down on with her mouth. All the toys, gifts, food, or money CAN NOT make up for being a shitty person.
There's still a ton I haven't talked about, mostly more details in things inside me that I hated but have never spoken about or felt like I had the right to complain, or be upset about. That all the problems in my family that I see are related back to my failures and how I must have added too much pressure to everyone around in the family by simply being born. That I must be a gigantic idiot because I'm sure I have something off in my head, I feel so behind, and it's taking so long for me to have the emotional maturity to even face my problems and then think about how I got onto the path of my problems. When I think about it I'm just so angry, angry that all this was going on and by all of them I feel so neglected and unprotected. I feel like they failed to teach me how to handle life even in the basic sense and I'm trying to fix all these patterns that I don't want to repeat. I feel like I'll never be able to have a full family of my own for fear I'm so far behind and inadequate and maybe not ever able to understand my own damage because of how damaged I could be. I don't wish any of them to get hurt, I still wish that somehow I'm just wrong and severally broken and it would be healthy to be around them but the more I've become introspective the more and more I can identify my anxiety. I got a text from my mom today about her wanting something and immediately my heart was in my thought and I wanted to cling onto my jeans waiting for the shit to hit the fan. I just want to be a whole person, I just want to be able to be whole and meet someone who I can enjoy life with that accepts me as myself. I worry I'll never be able to accomplish any of it, that I'll never make enough money or that I'll always second, third, and forth guess every choice I make because I've had no training in confidence of myself. It's just so exhausting. I know I've made progress. I know that this kind of process is often painful on the rode to healing. But even now, writing all this out for the first time in my life, I still am not even sure I'm not wrong and just unable to see the trees through the forest. That I'm so damaged that I'm wrong about the things that happened and I shouldn't complain because so many worse things have happened to so many others, even my childhood best friend. He had so many healthy and family problems that I felt like I couldn't have anything to be worried about. I just need someone to tell me that it can be different, that it can be better than this.
TL:DR - Abandonment issues, neglected child, some sexual abuse outside family and from mother, religious indoctrination, emotional and mental abuse. -- In spite of which I still don't know if I am in the wrong to not want to be around family members or if I can even understand what happened to me as I likely have a mental disability my mother refused to deal with so I could "be normal".
Submitted January 23, 2019 at 08:18AM by throwawayable88 http://bit.ly/2S7hmho
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