Anyone else realize they never got the typical teenage experiences of gradual independence that everyone else had?

r/

I was super, super isolated as a kid, looking back now 100% by their design (I also grew up undiagnosed neurodivergent, so making friends was hard for me already). There were all these rules about who I could hang out with, where I could hang out with them, how long/which days of the week I could hang out with them – like nmom had to call and “interview” parents of potential friends before we hung out to see if she approved of them, I could only do one activity with friends a week (otherwise I was “spending too much time with them”), if I had friends over we weren’t allowed to be in any room with a closed door, I didn’t get my license until a week before college and nmom later revealed it was because she thought I was hanging out with friends too much the summer before (we were just hanging out at each other’s houses and the pool maybe twice a week), I wasn’t allowed to get a job because I didn’t have a way to get there, I wasn’t allowed to have a cell phone until college and all Facebook DMs were heavily monitored, summers between school years (minus the one after senior year of high school because my friends with cars would insist on picking me up) were three months of complete isolation, and during college summers nmom would disappear with my car and all the other car keys in the house early in the morning and not come back till evening with an empty gas tank and then say things like “well it’s your car, so you fill it up” (which I couldn’t do because she had forced us to open a joint bank account when I was 17 and was literally stealing all the money I made at my college job).

These things continued until I finally could afford to move out at 22 and hearing my bf and other people talk about all the experiences of gaining gradual independence as teens and going out and having adventures with their friends as kids just always make me realize I have no idea what that was like. Like I even remember as a kid/teen, when nmom or eDad would take the scenic route home from somewhere, passing by all these houses with the lights on inside and thinking about how those people probably felt like their house was a home and were free to have lives and be themselves around their family and thinking I’d never escape mine and be happy (I am out now and in a good relationship). It’s just a completely different existence.

Comments

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  2. perfect_fifths Avatar

    Yup. My parents didn’t even teach me how to drive and when I got my permit they still didn’t help. So I didn’t learn to drive until late in life (32). But, it’s all good because I was able to get my own car off the bat and drove away from them hahaha