Skip Navigation
49 comments

  • It took a long time for me. I knew they did mean things but when you are raised like that it seems normal. The real breaking point is when I realized my mother was abusing my autistic son the same way she had me. They both died last year and I didn't go to either funeral. My dad would often get in my face and scream at me while my mother would destroy anything I loved. If she gave me a present in a few years it would be gone. She would have and would be "saving it" for me. I have nothing from my childhood. I don't have my class ring 'she bought' because I would just lose it was always the excuse. My dad was little different. I had a heart attack and got behind on my house payments. My dad 'helped' me out buy taking over the loan. When I signed both him and the POS bank guy told me it was just them adding him to the loan but it was them cutting me out. I could go on and on but the first sentence is your answer. I would like to add they were physically abusive up until I was fourteen. At that point I was absurdly strong for my age due to being my dads 'slow gaited mule' in his scrap business. He never passed up a chance to tell me I wasn't good enough. I just wish I would have realized how badly they feared me after I picked something up that few could and put it in the back of a truck. I did this because he was having a full meltdown and I was scared of him.

  • Around the time my kids were graduating from highschool, she always made it seem like being a mom was this monumental task that no reasonable person could ever do well, just unbearably difficult so to cope you’d need to scream at and emotionally abuse your children or you’d never survive. There are two modes of mothering, ignoring your child or screaming at your child. My mom kept me fairly isolated and wouldn’t drive me anywhere despite living in along distance to nothing but other houses mostly filled with older couples so I never really got to see how “normal” families work or how other kids interacted with their parents, if I ever did manage to get an invite to a new friends house or an after school activity was forbidden from participating. Raising kids though, wow, such an incredible eye opener to just how easy kids are to love, how easy it is to raise children when you’re a sane and consistent parent. Motherhood isn’t inherently a screaming match between you and a child who never asked to be there that you hate because of their mere existence. Sure not everyone is cut out to be a mom, of course, but to present abuse as both normal and justified is evil. I don’t care how bad she had it as a kid, she was obligated to protect me from that just like I was obligated to protect my kids from the things she did to me. She was an early childhood education teacher and I’ve come to realize it’s because anyone over the age of ~4 is too much of a human being for her to handle, she only wants completely subservient, physically small children around because she can dominate them and any other social interaction that she’s not dominating the other person is intolerable to her. She’s a pathetic person truly

  • Mom always thought she was a good person and not racist. The cracks started to show when she'd express options on Facebook, like that sure, black people go to jail for much longer that white people for the same crimes, but it's their fault for being criminals.

    Lots of little things like that. I started therapy in my late 20s for anger management. A couple months in, my parents and brother came from out of state to visit. It was a Bad Time. My mom and brother kept needling me constantly. They mocked my opinions. They told me I was wrong about local facts. They asked a local for directions then mocked him for having a Boston accent. In Boston.

    The several-day visit ended with me driving them back to their hotel room and my mom telling me the whole trip had been a waste, we were probably the sort of family that should only see each other at funerals, preferably hers.

    Poor dad was hard of hearing, so missed a lot of what was said. He apologized for any part he played in it.

    A few years later in December 2020, my mom brought COVID home from what she described as a mandatory work Christmas breakfast potluck. My dad caught it from her and spent a month in hospital. I don't know how mandatory that potluck could have been, tbh--she retired a few months later after my dad died. She was all shocked Pikachu that my dad, who was known to be immunocompromised, could die from COVID.

    She also lamented to me, the week before he died, that dating as a widow sucks. Either you date too soon and everyone thinks it's inappropriate OR you don't and everyone thinks you're sad. (Not saying she shouldn't have thought ahead to her widowhood, but don't say these things to your kid.)

    Anyways, she sucks and is blocked on my phone. She could email if she cared. My dad was the Good Parent and he had his warts, but he at least tried to relate to me and explain things instead of just assuming I could read minds.

  • Messy story, I'll do my best to lay it out in a reasonable way:

    For my mom and stepdad, it was the kidnapping tied with lifetime of neglect and abuse.

    And I call it kidnapping because that's what it was, even though there wasn't really a good law against it, because basically they moved, they did not tell my dad or my dad's side of the family where they had moved to, or leave any contact information.

    From the time I was 6 until I was 13 and I went behind my back and tracked down my grandmother, I had no contact with that side of my family.

    Then my mom had the gall to go after my dad for unpaid child support during the seven years where he could not track me down or locate me and spent countless sleepless nights worrying about me, wondering where I was.

    As for my dad, he was actually a pretty decent person, but he was also very much a Disney dad. I did not get an awful lot of interaction with him in my childhood, (thanks to said kidnapping), but even once we reconnected when I was a teenager his job and my mom made it so that he basically didn't see me but maybe once a year, if that, until I was an adult.

    Despite my hatred of my mother, once I was an adult I had cut her off and hadn't seen her for four or five years and my dad said, you only get one mother. I'd really appreciate it if you still spent time with her and saw her.

    So I put my hatred to the side and tried to reconnect with my mom, which wasn't good, but was manageable until my dad died from Covid, and my mom sent me a slew of angry text messages over why my younger half sister, her bastard daughter, whom she conceived by cheating on my father, which was the impetus for their divorce in the first place, wasn't included in my father's memorial page which was made by my stepmom who had been my stepmom for like 30 years.

    I cussed her the fuck out and I haven't talked to her since.

    I blocked her ability to text message me, because I don't want to fucking talk to her, so she has gone out of her way to get new phone numbers, to occasionally message me and send me TikToks about how she doesn't know what to say to me (apparently, she's never heard of the concept of an apology or admitting you're wrong when your actions have hurt somebody), and to send me Amazon gift cards for my birthday when I don't fucking shop at Amazon because they're a shit tier company.

  • Dad's always been a selfish shit of a person. Growing up with it, it was just how he was so I sort of accepted it, or was conditioned to it. Drug dealer, spouse beater, thief, bully, tantrum thrower, no sense of patience, road rager. About two years ago he finally wanted to get on the internet, which can be a struggle for older novices. He had kept his head in the sand about it his entire life. But while at his place helping setup the laptop, pc and router I'd organised to get him started he had a full blown tantrum for about 15minutes because I wasn't explaining everything to him, eg what dns is, not beginner stuff.

    I've done about ten years jiu-jitsu. I could see he wanted to have a bigger tantrum but realised that I was a grown man who could take him in an altercation. Mind you he's a coward, he can't fight and always relied on his size 6'10" to intimidate people rather than any skill. Your average man can beat your average woman, for a giant man it poses little challenge.

    Growing up he encouraged me to be a thief, bully, drug dealer and welfare leech. It took me some time to work out I didn't want those things for myself. Fuck that guy. Haven't spoken to him in a few years now. Looking forward to a call from the authorities that he's passed, I expect through his own hubris.

  • It was when they whole heartedly supported Trump. Then they bitched about existence level "DEI" things.

    • Same. There were other things in the past that I look back on and think "hmm that was not great of a decision", but yeah Trump support is a dealbreaker. That makes you officially "not a good person."

  • They voted for an orange hellscape and consume CCP/MAGA propaganda; after them proving themselves to be incapable of solving/managing my aspergers/ADHD and isolating themselves from the rest of the school community.

  • My parents are pretty good people other than being die hard conservatives. I understand there might be irony in that statement. Their real problem is they are just not politically educated and think repubs are the lesser of 2 evils. They have never been trumpers though…

49 comments