This will be the first time I'm ever sharing my story online. I have shared it with a few trusted individuals before, but only in bits and pieces because I feel extremely vulnerable and get emotional, which in turn makes extremely uncomfortable based on my past. But, I am trying to overcome my past, learn how it triggers me as an adult and learn how to have healthy emotions, so here goes. Sorry for the lengthy post.
When I was a baby, I was adopted by my maternal grandparents because my birth parents didn't want me, especially since my birth mom was only 15. Since I was so young, I grew up calling my biological mom and aunt my sisters, and my grandparents were mom and dad. My adoptive parents are fundamentalist Christians, and that has played a huge part in everything I have experienced. The first time I dealt with abuse was at the hand of my bio aunt's boyfriend and his family; this was when I was between the ages of 2 and 6. The memories of these encounters are broken, come to me in bits and pieces and have had direct impacts on my adult life. My bio aunt used to take me over to her bf's house, where she would leave me with his parents and his brother and she'd go out. The brother (who was an adult and also a state police officer) used to "hide me", everything from locking me in dark closets to putting me in an outside dog cage and leaving me there (literally going back in the house). No matter how much I'd cry he would be outside the door laughing and making fun of me for being a baby, and would only let me out when I stopped crying. After locking me up, he would "apologize" by painting my toe nails and finger nails and dressing me up in frilly dresses, while taking pictures of me. To this day I still hate frilly dresses and am not fond of nail polish or photos being taken of me. I was also sexually abused by the father; I have scattered memories of him being in his underwear while I was completely naked watching baseball in their family room. Its taken me a long time to fully process everything that happened in that house, and I know I have repressed a shit ton more of bad memories. Fast forward several years of them dating, and finally my adopted parents stopped letting me go over there. As an adult, when I have tried to ask why, they won't tell me other than "some bad stuff happened." When I ask if they ever pressed charges, I was told "God judges the wicked." My adoptive parents let my bio mom be a part of my life as much as she wanted to be; however that was short lived because when she would babysit me she typically was doing drugs with her boyfriend. One of the few memories I have of her, she was passed out on the floor, needles on the table and her shirtless, bloodshot-eyed boyfriend was trying to get me to come in the bedroom. I was 7. It wasn't until my adoptive parents had a falling out with her over money that she stopped watching me; I still don't know if her boyfriend abused me or not, as those memories are very repressed. I was never sent to school but instead homeschooled. Before I was 11, I was in a homeschool group and would socialize with kids around my age a few times a month. I never thought anything of this as a child, but as an adult I understand much better why I was kept out of the public. My adoptive parents were physically violent, and my adoptive father would often leave for several days after beating my mom. Often times I would try and get in the way, which would leave me with bruises from being hit, kicked or thrown into walls. I remember when I was 8 or 9, my mom picked me up and put me on the roof of his car to try and prevent him from leaving. Its only now as an adult I realize how little concern she had for my welfare, because he was the only one working and so if he left, she would no longer have an income. My safety (and her own) was second rate to money. During my "schooling," my adoptive mom would scrutinize everything I did, which would result in verbal abuse or beatings from poor homework results or "stupid questions." If I was working on art, and she felt it wasn't to her standards, she would make fun of me for being talentless, rip it up and make me do it over. In the same breath, the art she deemed presentable, she would give to people as gifts and brag to them about how she taught me to sketch or paint like that. It has taken me a long time as an adult to partake in art again, and because of this, I rarely want to show anyone any creative project I do for fear of being mocked. When I was 11, we went bankrupt. Instead of coping with it, my adoptive mom spiralled out of control and into this near fanatical state of "God fixes everything." She also started hearing God speak to her at this time, and apparently he commanded her that we needed to go to Wyoming. So we packed up everything and moved from Delaware to Wyoming, where we lived in a camper in a national forest for several months. During this time, my adoptive parents also shot our old dog instead of humanely putting him to sleep at a veterinary clinic and dumped our other dogs outside an animal shelter instead of finding them homes because according to my mom "God told her to do it." Things kept getting worse, my adoptive father couldn't find a job and his pension was running out, so they started taking the meager birthday and Christmas money I had saved up from my aunts and my grandparents, then my savings bonds, then my state quarter collection until I had nothing. We ended up moving to Kansas and living in a mobile home park in our camper, and dad finally got a job. I was around 12 at the time, and that was when my adoptive mother decided I was graduated from homeschooling because God told her I was an adult. Looking back on it, its because I was getting into more advanced math and she couldn't answer my questions anymore, and with the situation she most certainly could not send me to school. The beatings worsened as my adoptive father disliked his job more. I still tried to get in the way, which got me hurt more than once. The worst was when I tried to pull him away from her and he grabbed my arm, shoved my back against an open door and bent my arm around the edge. I couldn't move my arm for two days and was never taken for medical treatment. During that time I was also told by her I was faking and to stop crying like a baby every time I moved because I was "milking a fake injury for pity." As an adult, I've had to have intense physical therapy on that shoulder and still have pain in it on a regular basis. We moved into a trailer about 6 months later, and the violence never really stopped. When my adoptive dad would disappear for days after beating my mom, she became more violent and unstable. She tried to kill us both on one occasion, accelerating the car to 90 mph on the highway stating she was going to run into the first overpass pillar she saw. After a moment she stopped the car and hugged me, telling me God told her to spare my life just like he told Abraham to spare Isaac. This was around the same time I started developing panic attacks, for which I never received treatment because I was "being dramatic and faking by just breathing hard." The worse abuse happened when we were driving; my parents were fighting and my adoptive mom started making me get in the middle. I always hated doing it, but she usually would pull my hair until I said what she wanted to hear. When I finally said what she wanted me to say (calling my adoptive dad a name), he backhanded me with his fist, stopped the truck, grabbed me by the hair and neck and threw me on to the side of the interstate. He picked me up, threw me on to the ground again, grabbed his toolbox out of the back of the truck and started throwing tools at me. He threw his work backpack at me, which was full of tools but also had a spare shirt which was my only saving grace. Passerbys called the cops, and he took off running. I was laying on the side of the road, bruised, hands bloody from the gravel and barely able to stand. My mom didn't want to file a police report, but did anyway at the insistence of the officers. When I was taken to the hospital she lied and told them only my knee was hurt because "I fell on it" and that I was mostly just scared and scraped up from where I landed. We had to stay in a safe house for a few days. I became very quiet during this time and wouldn't even talk to the counselor at the safe house, because all I could think of was the fact that while my dad was beating me mercilessly, my mom was standing there screaming "you're going to kill her" over and over and over. Just standing there. Not trying to call the cops, not trying to stop him. Which to me, despite the fact that she herself beat me, verbally, mentally and emotionally abused me countless times before, was the ultimate betrayal in my 13 year old mind, because I had gotten in the way of him beating her senseless so many times and paid a heavy price more than once, which I now have a great deal of regret for ever thinking such things, but at the time it only fueled my resentment. To top it off, after the court date, which had earned him a restraining order, probation and mandatory anger management, she went and picked him up and brought him back home. When I asked her why, she simply replied, "he's our income. We'll starve without him and I'm certainly not getting a job to take care of your ungrateful ass." I tried to commit suicide within a week by slitting my throat with a razor knife. I didn't do it deep enough, so she wrapped it up with gauze and didn't take me to a hospital. Her justification was that Satan made me do it and I needed God to save me, so she would lock me in my room with nothing but my my bed and a bible. I slept a lot, which I now know was a sign of severe depression. As I got older, I became more and more closed off. My dad had stopped beating us for fear that I would call the cops, and also because I threatened him with a knife and told him if he ever touched one of us again I'd kill him in his sleep. He basically stopped talking to me, and my mom's verbal abuse increased. She would call me a parasite, told me I ruined her life and she wished she would have let my bio mom abort me. I had no friends, no where to go and mostly would just lock myself in my room, listen to music and write. When she realized my journals were written in a code she couldn't read, she beat me to make me give her the code, and when I didn't she shredded them all. I didn't write again until I was an adult, and even now its very infrequent but I'm slowly starting to do it more. When I was 15, my adoptive mom took me to Idaho for four months, living in a tent in a national forest because God told her the Apocalypse was coming and that was where we would be safe. It was some time later that I learned my grandmother (her mom) was dying. We didn't go to the funeral and didn't go back home until a Sherriff came and threatened to arrest her for child abuse and neglect, as it was starting to snow. On the way back, she made me drive from the Wyoming-Colorado state line back to eastern Kansas because "I needed the practice." I had been awake for 38 hours straight at that point and she wouldn't let me stop to nap despite the fact that she was sleeping in the passenger seat. To this day I don't know how I didn't get into a car accident. When I was around 17, I decided I wanted to be a nurse. I wanted to fix people so maybe they wouldn't have to go through what I did. When I talked with her about it, she told me I was the least caring person in the world, didn't have a compassionate bone in my body and couldn't nuture a flea. That hit me hard, and my depression got even worse for quite a while. I never got treatment for it because "therapy is for nutso people, you just need God." Needless to say, any bit of Christian faith had died a long time ago and I had started reading about paganism. When I finally moved out, I worked a dead end job for a long time. It took me until my mid twenties and years with a dedicated partner to try and get me to see my own self worth. I became a Wiccan and found peace in nature. I went to therapy and started learning to open up. I finally went to school, earned a GED and started taking classes. 4 years later, I graduated with honors from one of the best nursing schools in the country, landed a job within a week of graduation, became a clinical instructor in less than a year and recently won an award for excellence in compassionate nursing care. I realize that more than likely my adoptive mom has schizophrenia with command hallucinations that she has never received treatment for. Her only "friends" are employees at stores and restaurants that she gets overly attached to (i.e. buying them gifts for the holidays, giving them money). I understand why my bio mom and aunt were with abusers and turned to unhealthy coping mechanisms, because that is all they had seen growing up. I know the only reason I didn't get into drugs or worse was because I had no socialization as a teen, and even as a young adult my social skills were so poor it took everything I had in me just to say hi to someone. Because of the terrible money management skills my adoptive parents had (currently they have to see a personal banker to manage their funds because they spent so much they overdrafted more than the direct deposit could cover and bounced two mortgage payments; she still believes that someone is hacking the bank and stealing it), I have gone the exact opposite way, hate materialism and save money as much as I can. It has led to good things, and my partner and I are about to purchase our first home. I still try to have a relationship with my adoptive parents, but it is on my terms. It still hurts a bit when she wants to say everything I am today is because of her, but as I'm getting older I know its bullshit. She needs something to cling on to to make herself feel better and her life meaningful. She is bitter about the house we are buying and has tried to give me terrible financial advise that would ruin my credit. I brush these things off and understand she cannot celebrate my success (the house is in a great area, twice the size of theirs and much nicer) because it reminds her of their failures. Part of me wants to still speak with them because I am able to understand her derogatory comments and such are her lashing out from lack of control and her illness, but another part of me wants to never speak to or see them again, even if it means never seeing the rest of my family. My partner is supportive of me no matter what I choose, but I'm logically thinking of the future and really don't know that I want my kids to know them. I know that nobody can help me make a decision on this, but I would like input regarding this situation. Thanks in advance.
Submitted March 16, 2019 at 04:46PM by Sagacious_Warhorse https://ift.tt/2UFa1ns
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