My 8 y/o blonde crush from down the street taught me how to tongue kiss when I was like 6. It wasn’t until recently that I wondered who had taught her.. 💀
My dad would threaten to put me in “Military School” whenever he would get mad at me when I was like 5-8 years old. Like put me away in boarding school where I would be alone for a long time. One time he even put me in the car and just started driving and I screamed and cried and pleaded until he turned around after a long time. I think that’s why I’m incredibly scared of doing anything wrong now and am a huge people pleaser.
Being 4, sent into a convenience store with a note to buy my mom’s Lark cigarettes, then using the car lighter to start one. As in… putting the filter up to my lips, taking the lit lighter out, and inhaling a puff or two to get it started before handing it to her as she drove.
She couldn’t go inside because she had to stay in the car with my 2 year old brother and was 8 months pregnant.
When my grandma died I was 15 and the baby is the family. She died in her own bed in her bedroom. There was such an influx of relatives over her last 48 hours that the house ran out of room, including blowup mattresses, couches, etc. My uncle down the street similarly ran out of room.
The one unoccupied room was Grandma’s bedroom. So the grownups decided that I’d get to sleep in there and I was so young it definitely wouldn’t impact me at all even though the thought of sleeping on her bed in the room where she died was unthinkable to them.
I love telling this story and seeing people’s faces. It’s so terrible it’s hilarious.
my mom was really big on “always telling me the truth” and that sounds like a good/harmless thing, but when there are no boundaries and heavy, difficult, painful, scary information is shared with a four year old without age-appropriate modifications or protections…yikes.
My ex’s parents made his 8 year old brother pack a suitcase, put him in the car, drove him to a group home house for troubled youth, and forced him out of the car. They only revealed the bluff when he started sobbing so loudly people around took notice. They told this story at every Christmas.
My sister and I would be seen, not heard; not want anything to eat or drink when offered while visiting others. And all parents wanting their kids to be like us. Realized later, this was trauma. We were minimizing ourselves (wants, needs, thoughts), because we felt we were a burden at home.
I grew up in a rural community with nothing to do. For entertainment, when we’d see ambulances or smoke or anything similar, my mom would put us in the car to go investigate. I remember being very young ambulance chasers. It seemed exciting when I was little. Now, I’m like, WTH? Thank goodness we never saw anything overly traumatic. I wouldn’t expose my kid to such things.
Being left in a car for hours while my dad went and did/bought drugs.
Nothing bad ever happened but when I slip up and casually mention it to people they treat me like I was kept in a cage. Instantly makes me remember that it isn’t a normal a thing to happen and was probably more dangerous than I perceived it to be.
My mom used to hold my brother and I down and tickle us until we cried and begged her to stop. She said “you’re laughing so you must like it”. As a kid, her being my mom made it hard for me to stand up for myself. Now, anytime someone tickles me I just shut down or start crying or yelling after I catch my breath. That was a fun conversation with my boyfriend.
when i was little i would listen to music on the radio. i laid on my stomach on the floor of my room and would stare at a small ball and day dream for HOURS at a time. i thought it was normal and i was just poor and bored. apparently i was mal adaptive daydreaming and dissociating from my traumatic life with formerly homeless & druggie parents. 🙃
Taking care of my three year old sibling all alone (feeding, bathing, naps) when I was 8 years old, while my parents were out working and making ends meet
Being praised for my skinny body or adults commenting on it as if I wasn’t a young/prepubescent kid. You can imagine the lasting effects as my body changed over the decades and trying to accept myself for not being the same size as a skinny child.
At the age of 8, I was cooking pancakes and eggs, changing diapers, and babysitting the baby for hours a day. Nah, i was raising myself and my brother, like my sister did for me.
Seeing one parent for an hour between work and the bar.
Seeing the other every other weekend.
Buying smokes at 7 years old for the women in the neighborhood.
Passing a beer to the driver because it’s ok if it’s only three.
Sitting on the floor of the cargo van because standing was dangerous.
The deadbolts on the door used a key for both sides.
When as a little kid, I asked my dad for permission to do something that he didn’t want to say yes to, he’d instead pretend it was my mom asking, not me, and threaten to beat her up for asking. It was his way of letting me know it was a no.
I remember my brother crying because he got a bad grade and my dad threatened to hit my mom as if she was the one that got the bad mark.
My dad actually uses it as an example for why such actions were necessary (my brother never got a low mark ever again).
I would pretend to record my older brother and mother fighting. Like a movie, i could replay it again and again as a way of getting back at my brother (it doesn’t make sense, I know).
Turns out that was actually a form of disassociating and removing myself from the verbal abuse I was witnessing.
My dad was a long haul trucker and my mom worked at a bar. When my dad was on the road and my mom had to work nights she would put my sister and I (about 6 and 7) in our pajamas with some toys and snacks and lock us in the car in the bar parking lot for her shift. Then she’d drive home and cary us sleeping to bed. We would have to get ourselves up and to school in the morning because she’d be sleeping after work.
When I was a kid my dad told me and both my siblings a story called The Grasshopper and The Ant. It’s apparently a fable from somewhere but no one else seems to know it when I mention the story.
The simplest, fastest, retelling is that the grasshopper and ant lived in the same part of the forest. All summer the grasshopper played his fiddle and enjoyed the sun. Meanwhile the ant worked as hard as he could all summer to put food and firewood up for winter. He told the grasshopper over and over, if you don’t do something now, you’ll starve and freeze! But the grasshopper didn’t worry. Then came winter. And the ant was all warm and snug in his hidey hole with plenty of food only to hear a terrible knocking on the door. He opened it to find the grasshopper, standing in the snow, half frozen. The grasshopper begged for a place to stay and food for the winter. The any was right, he was dying outside. The ant reluctantly agreed he could spend the winter and the grasshopper fiddled their winter away
My father always ended this story by looking us right in the eye and going “and you’re the ant.” (In my case. He told my older sibling they were the grasshopper and to this day one of their online bios reads “always the grasshopper never the ant”.)
Looking back I cannot imagine why he would have told any of his kids that they were doomed to always need the charity of others to figure their life out. Or that they would always be stuck taking in/fixing things for other people. Because whoo boy did 7 year old me take that damn story to heart.
Our house didn’t have power sometimes or basic utilities because we were dead broke so my mom would make games out of it and say we were camping sorta. Of course naive me wouldn’t understand what was going on but yeah we weren’t just eating ramen noodles in the dark for fun. Oddly thought it was really the only times I had a normal bond with my mom as she was quite abusive, something about the situation just made her calm.
When I was eight or nine my older male cousins would send me into the convenience store with money to buy whatever they wanted because the guy at the counter would always give me free stuff if I was alone. Dude got arrested for being a child predator a few years into my teens. I’m lucky I never took him up on his offer of “checking the back for more snacks” with him.
Had a garage refrigerator full of canned soda in nearly every brand and flavor, with no limitations or restrictions on how many I could have. Needless to say, I hated water for much of my life and still struggle to drink it without adding flavoring. Proud to say, I haven’t had a single soda in 3 years!
My mom had breast cancer when I was pretty young and I thought it was a normal life stage. Once I was drawing pictures of myself throughout my life and I drew myself in grade school, then in college, then when I got my first job, when I got married, had kids, had breast cancer, retired, had grandkids, etc. Like each of those things were normal milestones.
I was fighting with my sister in the backseat of the car. Mom pulled over, made me get out, and drove away. I was all alone under a highway underpass for about 10 minutes until they came back. I suppose I was 9 years old. I do not trust my mom at all to this day, and I have some abandonment issues.
Whenever we had family dinners, my sibling and I (up until we were roughly age 13) were told to go sit under the dinner table while the adults ate. We were only allowed back out after my grandfather knocked on the table 3 times in a row.
My mom took me to Disneyland when I was 10. She would buy me the best ticket package (yes, it was a long time ago), give me some food money, and tell me where she would pick me up that night and what time. Then I would spend the entire day at Disneyland on my own.
Over the years, I picked up the ability to numb out, space out, and forget things. Which apparently is a trauma response. What’s my trauma? Who knows? I was too busy numbing out and forgetting!
Edit: Holy smokes. A lot of us have the ability to numb out and forget.
When I was a kid, my mom and I lived with my grandparents
for a year. I had discovered adult videos and “responded” to
them as most do in my room. One night, I heard my grandpa’s footsteps go from upstairs, to downstairs outside my bedroom. He slowly creaked my door open. He looked at me with a chilling expression and said flatly, “I know what you do at night.” And then he closed my door and walked back upstairs. It really creeped me out at the time. There were lots of ways I read into it, and I even disclosed what I thought to a family member at one point, but they said it was nothing. I didn’t realize how thin the walls are at their house until much later, so I thought maybe that was his way of scaring me into stopping. Things seem normal between he and I today and for the past years. But I still find it offputting, not knowing what he was trying to achieve with that interaction. He’s said some other strange things to me in the past, but I chalked it up to me overthinking
My mom constantly cleaning. Once I watched her give her friend a cup of coffee. She turned and wiped the counter, then took the coffee cup, emptied it, washed it and put it away. The friend never even got to take a sip. She swept, mopped, and vacuumed daily, even checked under beds for dust. Realized years later that it was a sign of my dad’s abuse. He was awful.
As a child I would have to call the local bar, ask for my father, and then ask him to come home. I thought I was being a helpful kid and telling Daddy how I missed him but in reality I was used as a way to guilt my dad into coming home
My dad used to drive us to church on Sundays and all of us kids would pile in the back of his pickup truck. Sometimes, for fun, he’d cut through the “bunny field” on the way, and we’d watch dozens and dozens of rabbits spring out of the way from the sides of the truck and we’d laugh and shout for him to go faster. Took me years to realize we were killing hundreds of rabbits, crushing entire nests of little babies, and the mothers keeping them safe and warm were just barely escaping. So many animals were probably left to suffer slow and painful deaths because we thought it was entertaining to watch them desperately flee for their lives.
My parents telling us to pack a bag so we could go to the orphanage bc of our behavior. We’d pack and they’d drive around town while we cried and begged to go home. This was a regular occurrence.
We had a highway in our backyard and whenever there was an accident, my father would get the flashlight and take me and we’d go to investigate. One time there was a motorcycle accident and I saw the helmet. Then I saw the body. But it had no head. It was in the helmet. I was about 10 years old. Obviously at 63, I still never forget it.
Getting hit by my dad for what, looking back, was symptoms of my ADHD. I thought it sucked back then too but I thought it was normal. Yeah well apparently that’s abuse
As a child my mother would get angry at me for not grooming myself properly and not cleaning up around the house.
Meanwhile she never taught me how to do any personal grooming, cleaning, or chores. She just expected me to somehow magically figure it out on my own, and would get angry if I didn’t do something or did it wrong.
Me and my sister having to leave the bedroom door open as we got changed because my Dad would get “upset”. My “mother” would tell us we made him feel like a stranger in his own home….yeah he was an abusive pedophile
My best friend’s step-dad would always sniff her underwear before putting it in the washing machine. She wouldn’t do it to her brothers’ undergarments. I was about 9-10 years old when I saw that.
My mom led me to believe through a large portion of childhood that we had cameras and listening devices in our home. I had previously been temporarily taken away by CPS and she had my little ass convinced I was gonna be ripped out of my bed in the middle of the night for not going to sleep on time or anything as simple as that. I believe it heavily influenced how I felt about myself, and still struggle at nearly 30 to believe that I’m allowed to take up space/make a little noise and nothing bad will happen as a result.
My dad used to call me _____-erella, like Cinderella but my real name for the first half.
He thought it was the funniest joke because I wasn’t actually his daughter, he had adopted me when I was 2 and he never loved me like his “real” daughters, so I was the (literally) red-headed step child no one wanted. He started calling me that after a big fight when I was 8, where he yelled at me that I wasn’t even his, I was adopted. After that he just thought was such a funny joke and he told it to everyone that came to our house and then explained the entire thing every time. it wasn’t until years later that I realized none of the other adults laughed with him.
I also think he completely missed the point of Cinderella
When I was 8 years old, in the 80’s, I ran across the street one night to ask a neighbor how to scramble an egg because I was hungry. I had to do this because my dad and step mother were gone for the weekend in another state on a road trip, and my 12 year old stepsister who was suposed to watch me left to her friends house and I was alone.
Often left to my own devices, Often family never locked any doors or windows, parents were drug dealers. All was “normal” to me back then.
Not being able to have any say in how i dressed or anything regarding my appearance, back then my family had absolute control over how i looked and only recently I found out they were trying to make me look as unappealing as possible
My mum is obsessed with puppies, kittens and babies to an extent. As a child, it was normal for us to have two or three dogs and cats at once, and being the oldest child, I was expected to look after them and train them. Then, every year or so, she would wait for my sister and I to go to school, and would sell the dogs and cats to someone else. A new puppy or kitten would be there when we got home, and if we ever mentioned the other animals, she would say, “this is your dog / cat now, talk about this one”. And then the whole cycle would start again. I was so attached to the dogs in particular, and always wondered what happened to them.
I didn’t realise this was so harmful to me until she did it again last month, and wanted my young son to be excited about her new puppy. I surprised myself with the strength of my response… She’s still avoiding speaking to me and I’m not mad about it.
In kindergarten we got a substitute teacher who announced that she would be staying as our teacher for the rest of the year. She was a really nice lady and I liked her more anyway, so yay!
Found out years later my actual teacher was out because she was getting investigated to see if she’d failed her duties as a mandated reporter (a girl in my class was apparently being abused by her father). They must’ve found it in her favor because she was back for the next school year and several more afterwards until she retired.
My father wasn’t around much for the first 10 years of my life so after my mom passed I went to live with him and his new family. Our bonding ritual became me learning how to make him his afterwork drink: a perfect Manhattan with a twist of lemon. It took me about a week to get all the measurements right and about a year and a half before my stepmother realized what I had been doing. I was grounded for 6 months because I should’ve known better than to play with alcohol.
my dad acted like a kid himself. everything was always hilarious. but he could flip like a switch, too. his tantrums were legendary. sometimes he’d just leave, or take my sister and i somewhere and never pick us up. spontaneous trips were common, whether it was a middle-of-the-night drive or a trip to another state. i’m full of insane stories that were some of my happiest. as an adult, im learning that he had BPD and was unmedicated. it’s a mind fuck to look back on your happiest memories and realize there’s now a taint to them. the worst is when i’m telling what i think is a funny little anecdote to people and they give me looks of pity. sorry if im trauma dumping lol
After I had my son I put on over 12kg in less than 2 weeks.
Turns out my thyroid completely died.
Along with other health issues and extreme PPD I was not in a good place.
My mum and aunty’s all laughed and said things like “welcome to the [fat] club” & “we told you this would happen and you wouldn’t be skinny forever”
The constant comments about how skinny I was and how “one day you’ll be fat like us” destroyed me growing up and then I was mocked when it came to fruition.
It’s taken me years to loose the weight and recover from PPD. I’m still working on a healthy relationship with my body.
I got hurt a lot as a kid. I figured all kids were rough and tumble and got into fights.
Turns out, I grew up in a very racist town. Other kids weren’t afraid to go way over the top with weapons and violence. And the police didn’t seem to be above hurting a child.
Detached retina, bone scarring all through my face, torn cartilage in my ear, broken nose, all of my front teeth are chipped. Burn scars, skull fractures, many broken bones.
I didn’t realize other people didn’t have that experience growing up. I guess I was in denial but I figured these things just happen.
The one that I genuinely had no idea wasn’t normal was that my parents used to make fun of me and mock me when I would cry, they would imitate me and tell me I looked ugly and sounded stupid when I cried, I casually mentioned this to my husband in a joking manner and he was so pained by it he had to stop what he was doing to hug me.
My mom never allowed me to have junk food at home. When I was around 10 my parents got divorced and she started going on dates. On her date nights, she would let me have a bag of chips but only if I at them in my closet while she left for her date. I have since realized that she couldn’t afford a babysitter. She knew I would be fine by myself but she didnt want her date to know that she was leaving her young child home alone during the date. I was told I could leave the closet when I finished the bag of chips. And then I was home alone and I watched TV or played Sims or something. Never thought much on this until I told this story to a friend years later and he looked at me with the WTF face lol
When I was 13ish, my parents were kicking out my brother from his room in order to rent out the basement, I told him he could have my room and I moved into the hallway walk in closet. I was really proud about this at the time, but in hindsight, the fact my family just let me move into a room that basically just fit my bed and nothing else was a signifier of a lot more problems. I still have difficulty with feeling obligated to sacrifice myself.
Groundings meant I couldn’t leave my room. My siblings couldn’t talk to me. I couldn’t be part of any family functions. (Birthdays, graduation, restaurant outings with the grandparents.) And I couldn’t eat meals with anyone else. Books became my escape. I was questioned every time I left my room to use the bathroom or to get a glass of water. Sometimes my groundings included a chore. Like the dishes or cleaning the bathrooms. And looking back? The punishments never fit the crimes. I never was out past curfew. Hell I was never out. I had mediocre grades. But I wasn’t a terrible student. When I tried going to a dance with my boyfriend, my parents insisted that I was trying to go and have sex with him. And continued to guilt trip me into telling them everything that happened during said dance or I’d be grounded. It made me very sneaky with my text conversations. When I heard how my other friends had groundings, I was a little upset. And I swear I won’t do that to my own kids.
My mom used to give me the silent treatment whenever she was mad at me. Like, for days on end. Even if I was “right” I’d still have to apologize or she’d keep ignoring me. I didn’t realize until I hit my twenties or thirties that most moms don’t do that. I have borderline personality disorder now, go figure lol.
When I was 15, in high school, I took a “Media Studies” class basically cos the teacher was chill and we could just goof off for a class.
Anyway, there was this time when the teacher pulled me aside and gave me an Andy Warhol film to watch. Like the literal VHS tape. I can’t remember what it was called but from memory it looked very 70s. Anyway the opening scene is literally a dude, hanging dong, clearly sexually assaulting a woman on a couch.
I have never moved so fast in my life. My parents were in the next room, somehow didn’t see or hear anything, and I just ripped out the tape, put it back in my school bag.
Next day I gave the tape to a friend and said something like “Mr M gave this to me, it’s uhhh kinda weird”. A few days later the teacher came up to me, SUPER pissed that I gave that movie to another student. I don’t recall anything verbatim but he was saying things like “it was only meant for me” “I shouldn’t have shown that to the other student” etc.
It wasn’t til I’d left school that I realised just how fucked up that is. Really didn’t linger too much on my mind as a teenager but yeeeeeeeesh
Not me, but my younger brother: when he was maybe 9-10, he misbehaved too many times and my mom told him to pack everything he owned. He wasn’t allowed to pack clothes or food because our mom owned all that.
So he packed anything he’d ever bought with pocket money or won at arcade games and got in the car. My mom drove to the nearest county road and told him to get out and have a nice life. My (extremely naive, possibly on the spectrum) little brother had a full breakdown, promising he’d be good from then on.
Once my mom was satisfied with how much he’d cried, she shut the door and took us home. She thinks it’s a hilarious anecdote; I’m waiting to see if it comes up at his wedding this summer.
When I was around 14, I was having an early coffee in the local park with my dad. As one of the waiters was coming over to bring the drinks (I hadn’t met this one before), he said to my dad “ahh so this must be your mistress?”
We laughed it off as a slightly weird, off-hand joke and my father explained that I was his daughter, after which the man apologised. Found the interaction a little bit weird but thought not much of it.
Fast forward 4 years, and it turns out my dad has spent 15 years cheating on my mum with not only several relationships and affairs, but seeing hundreds, maybe even thousands of escorts and prostitutes. He was quite close with that one waiter, and apparently sometimes brought the women to the cafe with him. Some of them were only a few years older than me. That’s why the waiter had assumed I was one of them!
When I fell asleep in the car on rides home, my parents would just leave me in the car. I have vivid memories of waking up so hot and sweaty and have difficulties uncliping the seat belt because it was too hot to the touch.
As a kid, our neighbors had kids around the same age as us, but a couple years older. Every other month these two kids had a new pet. A dog, a cat, an entire aquarium, hamsters, hedgehogs, etc. they would always show us the new pet, every couple months. My sister and I asked, “wow your house is full of animals!” And they looked at us kinda blank. Turns out these animals were all DYING after a couple months, weeks in some cases. Family moved away when we were like 12. Just saw that one of them was convicted for murdering his pregnant girlfriend a couple years ago.
I had to go to summer school one year (7th gr). The school was across town. I walked alone on the first day. There was a girl I knew who lived not too far from me, she showed me how to “hitchhike.” Some days she didn’t go to school, and I’d hitchhike alone. All those who gave us rides were men, and only once, when we were together, did someone say something off kilter. He pulled up to the school, and as we reached for the door handles, he said, “Do you know what a pimp is?” I said, “No”. My friend, who was in the front seat, said, “Yes.” He held out a $100 bill and offered it to us saying think about all the clothes and shoes we could buy. We both declined and thanked him for the ride. We exited the car and went to class. WHEW! When I look back, it was 1968, we were blessed. A time when we walked everywhere.
The lack of memories, speaks volumes. I have very few memories, yet so many people (family, friends etc.), have so many of me. And they often hold me in high regard and with love. I literally have no idea what they are talking about, and it can hurt feelings, because they remember those memories so fondly. It’s a blank for me. I now don’t talk to anyone. An abyss on my own.
My parents implemented a ‘do over’ once. This was around when I was 13. We’d been getting into tons fights, they threatened to kick me out all the time, regularly told me what a bitch I was, and had piled punishments and chores up to a year out. Mind you this was all for struggling through the abuse they put me through and not being able to manage very high expectations (especially when I hadn’t been taught how to do a lot.) They’d get mad at me for ‘not thinking critically’ and scream at me and berate me for hours without allowing me to sit, go to the bathroom, or stop looking at them. They’d would also make sure to make me repeat what they’d just told me so they could be sure the nasty things they said sunk in. After that, I’d usually be sent to my room for the day/night and have all my privileges removed. No electronics, no art, no reading. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I just had to stare at a wall. It wasn’t bad for only a day or two but it ended up being a common punishment for me. At one point, they banned me from checking out books from my school library (and started doing bag checks every day after school to make sure I wasn’t sneaking books in), put all the books I owned up into the attic in boxes, threw my computer into the rain, took all my notebooks, read my diary, and made me write sentences all day every day for weeks. Usually it was really unnecessarily wordy ways of saying ‘I won’t disobey; I’ll ask you for everything, and I’m sorry’. If I wasn’t doing that, I was staring at a wall. This went on for years.
Now with the context out the way, onto the do over. The purpose of the do over was to get rid of all my punishments, pretend nothing bad had ever happened, and to just try to be a happy family.
At first I was so excited. The idea of a do-over felt good. Not constantly being on punishment and having my parents being nice to me was so nice… It backfired spectacularly within a few days of course because they immediately got angry at me again for forgetting a chore. They didn’t even scream at me that time. Just made this face and told me how disappointed they were in me for messing this up, and how I’ll never get a do over again because I didn’t deserve it.
After that, it was back to punishments, back to screaming, back to the threats of being kicked out and abandoned to my grandma (who molested me at a young age).
For years, I was so angry and upset with myself for ruining a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity to not be a screwup’. That feelings never gone away, and I only realized when I was 22 how fucked up it was.
As in he made six figures (in the 90’s) and was always out at dinners, functions, VIP boxes at sports drinking expensive wine and champagne. This progressed to him downing bottles of expensive wine alone at night.
Him and my mum separated and he left her with nothing, as a single mum with 3 kids. I slept on the floor of my grans spare bedroom with no mattress for a while, as my mum and little sisters had the bed.
She eventually got a council house (government housing).
Food banks weren’t really a thing back then, at least I’d never heard of them, and my mum used to skip meals so we could eat whilst he was living it up.
So from when I was 12 – 16 I would skip the train fare to his on a Saturday when he was at a VIP box for football or Rugby, use my key to his house and steal food from his house. I’d load my bag up with food, bring it back to my mums house and put it in the cupboard without telling her.
Deepdown she must’ve known, that this food kept randomly appearing in her house, but I’ve never told her.
I’ve mentioned this to people before as a funny story, usually previous partners when they’ve asked why me and my dad don’t get on, before I realised how fucked up it was, and they look at me like that’s not funny that’s horrible. So I don’t mention it anymore.
The rare times I did spent with my dad it usually ended up with him passed out on the couch drunk, and me having to be the adult – turn the lights and TV off, put his wine bottle and glass away, etc.
She eventually had the courage to divorce him and go to the CSA (a government agency that force people to pay child support in the UK). I had aged out by then as I was over 18, but she got a couple of thousand a month of him for my sisters if I recall. He was furious that he had to pay it.
He passed away not so long ago, due to liver disease.
I’ll be honest, the thing that hurt the most was he got himself together when I was an adult – stopped drinking, became a better person, and was an incredible grandfather to my little niece. Spent every penny he had on her. She absolutely adored him.
And I hated myself for being jealous of her, that she got to have that as her grandfather whilst I just had a drunk alcoholic who left me sleeping on a floor.
Comments
Lawn darts
Spending a weekend home alone before I was 10
Put on covering clothes, your family is coming over
The moldy fridge, constant clutter, leaking roof and decaying floor. It didn’t phase me as a kid but looking back.. it was bad.
My 8 y/o blonde crush from down the street taught me how to tongue kiss when I was like 6. It wasn’t until recently that I wondered who had taught her.. 💀
When I was really young I was really lonely and my parents response to that was “I was lonely when I was your age too” and not much else
and then when I thought I was finally making friends it was this incredibly messed up hypersexual kid who got expelled from school like 3 months later
my mom was in and out of prison when i was a young child & my family tried to tell me she would go away “bc she was sick”
My dad would threaten to put me in “Military School” whenever he would get mad at me when I was like 5-8 years old. Like put me away in boarding school where I would be alone for a long time. One time he even put me in the car and just started driving and I screamed and cried and pleaded until he turned around after a long time. I think that’s why I’m incredibly scared of doing anything wrong now and am a huge people pleaser.
Being 4, sent into a convenience store with a note to buy my mom’s Lark cigarettes, then using the car lighter to start one. As in… putting the filter up to my lips, taking the lit lighter out, and inhaling a puff or two to get it started before handing it to her as she drove.
She couldn’t go inside because she had to stay in the car with my 2 year old brother and was 8 months pregnant.
Yes. 4 years old. GenXer…
When my grandma died I was 15 and the baby is the family. She died in her own bed in her bedroom. There was such an influx of relatives over her last 48 hours that the house ran out of room, including blowup mattresses, couches, etc. My uncle down the street similarly ran out of room.
The one unoccupied room was Grandma’s bedroom. So the grownups decided that I’d get to sleep in there and I was so young it definitely wouldn’t impact me at all even though the thought of sleeping on her bed in the room where she died was unthinkable to them.
I love telling this story and seeing people’s faces. It’s so terrible it’s hilarious.
my mom was really big on “always telling me the truth” and that sounds like a good/harmless thing, but when there are no boundaries and heavy, difficult, painful, scary information is shared with a four year old without age-appropriate modifications or protections…yikes.
My ex’s parents made his 8 year old brother pack a suitcase, put him in the car, drove him to a group home house for troubled youth, and forced him out of the car. They only revealed the bluff when he started sobbing so loudly people around took notice. They told this story at every Christmas.
My sister and I would be seen, not heard; not want anything to eat or drink when offered while visiting others. And all parents wanting their kids to be like us. Realized later, this was trauma. We were minimizing ourselves (wants, needs, thoughts), because we felt we were a burden at home.
I grew up in a rural community with nothing to do. For entertainment, when we’d see ambulances or smoke or anything similar, my mom would put us in the car to go investigate. I remember being very young ambulance chasers. It seemed exciting when I was little. Now, I’m like, WTH? Thank goodness we never saw anything overly traumatic. I wouldn’t expose my kid to such things.
Being left in a car for hours while my dad went and did/bought drugs.
Nothing bad ever happened but when I slip up and casually mention it to people they treat me like I was kept in a cage. Instantly makes me remember that it isn’t a normal a thing to happen and was probably more dangerous than I perceived it to be.
The constant array of empty beer cans and boxes of wine that cluttered the kitchen counters. Looking back at old photos is a bit of a shock.
My mom used to hold my brother and I down and tickle us until we cried and begged her to stop. She said “you’re laughing so you must like it”. As a kid, her being my mom made it hard for me to stand up for myself. Now, anytime someone tickles me I just shut down or start crying or yelling after I catch my breath. That was a fun conversation with my boyfriend.
when i was little i would listen to music on the radio. i laid on my stomach on the floor of my room and would stare at a small ball and day dream for HOURS at a time. i thought it was normal and i was just poor and bored. apparently i was mal adaptive daydreaming and dissociating from my traumatic life with formerly homeless & druggie parents. 🙃
Taking care of my three year old sibling all alone (feeding, bathing, naps) when I was 8 years old, while my parents were out working and making ends meet
Being praised for my skinny body or adults commenting on it as if I wasn’t a young/prepubescent kid. You can imagine the lasting effects as my body changed over the decades and trying to accept myself for not being the same size as a skinny child.
At the age of 8, I was cooking pancakes and eggs, changing diapers, and babysitting the baby for hours a day. Nah, i was raising myself and my brother, like my sister did for me.
Seeing one parent for an hour between work and the bar.
Seeing the other every other weekend.
Buying smokes at 7 years old for the women in the neighborhood.
Passing a beer to the driver because it’s ok if it’s only three.
Sitting on the floor of the cargo van because standing was dangerous.
The deadbolts on the door used a key for both sides.
Spending a lot of time in the cemeteries because they were safer than being home.
When as a little kid, I asked my dad for permission to do something that he didn’t want to say yes to, he’d instead pretend it was my mom asking, not me, and threaten to beat her up for asking. It was his way of letting me know it was a no.
I remember my brother crying because he got a bad grade and my dad threatened to hit my mom as if she was the one that got the bad mark.
My dad actually uses it as an example for why such actions were necessary (my brother never got a low mark ever again).
My step dad basically bullying my mother. Thought that’s how relationships work for years. Husbands abuse their Wives, felt like the way of the world.
Still can’t wrap my head around it and I’m 36
I would pretend to record my older brother and mother fighting. Like a movie, i could replay it again and again as a way of getting back at my brother (it doesn’t make sense, I know).
Turns out that was actually a form of disassociating and removing myself from the verbal abuse I was witnessing.
My dad was a long haul trucker and my mom worked at a bar. When my dad was on the road and my mom had to work nights she would put my sister and I (about 6 and 7) in our pajamas with some toys and snacks and lock us in the car in the bar parking lot for her shift. Then she’d drive home and cary us sleeping to bed. We would have to get ourselves up and to school in the morning because she’d be sleeping after work.
When I was a kid my dad told me and both my siblings a story called The Grasshopper and The Ant. It’s apparently a fable from somewhere but no one else seems to know it when I mention the story.
The simplest, fastest, retelling is that the grasshopper and ant lived in the same part of the forest. All summer the grasshopper played his fiddle and enjoyed the sun. Meanwhile the ant worked as hard as he could all summer to put food and firewood up for winter. He told the grasshopper over and over, if you don’t do something now, you’ll starve and freeze! But the grasshopper didn’t worry. Then came winter. And the ant was all warm and snug in his hidey hole with plenty of food only to hear a terrible knocking on the door. He opened it to find the grasshopper, standing in the snow, half frozen. The grasshopper begged for a place to stay and food for the winter. The any was right, he was dying outside. The ant reluctantly agreed he could spend the winter and the grasshopper fiddled their winter away
My father always ended this story by looking us right in the eye and going “and you’re the ant.” (In my case. He told my older sibling they were the grasshopper and to this day one of their online bios reads “always the grasshopper never the ant”.)
Looking back I cannot imagine why he would have told any of his kids that they were doomed to always need the charity of others to figure their life out. Or that they would always be stuck taking in/fixing things for other people. Because whoo boy did 7 year old me take that damn story to heart.
I had a baby raccoon called coonie! He was my best friend!
Our house didn’t have power sometimes or basic utilities because we were dead broke so my mom would make games out of it and say we were camping sorta. Of course naive me wouldn’t understand what was going on but yeah we weren’t just eating ramen noodles in the dark for fun. Oddly thought it was really the only times I had a normal bond with my mom as she was quite abusive, something about the situation just made her calm.
When I was eight or nine my older male cousins would send me into the convenience store with money to buy whatever they wanted because the guy at the counter would always give me free stuff if I was alone. Dude got arrested for being a child predator a few years into my teens. I’m lucky I never took him up on his offer of “checking the back for more snacks” with him.
Had a garage refrigerator full of canned soda in nearly every brand and flavor, with no limitations or restrictions on how many I could have. Needless to say, I hated water for much of my life and still struggle to drink it without adding flavoring. Proud to say, I haven’t had a single soda in 3 years!
My mom had breast cancer when I was pretty young and I thought it was a normal life stage. Once I was drawing pictures of myself throughout my life and I drew myself in grade school, then in college, then when I got my first job, when I got married, had kids, had breast cancer, retired, had grandkids, etc. Like each of those things were normal milestones.
I was fighting with my sister in the backseat of the car. Mom pulled over, made me get out, and drove away. I was all alone under a highway underpass for about 10 minutes until they came back. I suppose I was 9 years old. I do not trust my mom at all to this day, and I have some abandonment issues.
Whenever we had family dinners, my sibling and I (up until we were roughly age 13) were told to go sit under the dinner table while the adults ate. We were only allowed back out after my grandfather knocked on the table 3 times in a row.
My mom took me to Disneyland when I was 10. She would buy me the best ticket package (yes, it was a long time ago), give me some food money, and tell me where she would pick me up that night and what time. Then I would spend the entire day at Disneyland on my own.
My brother and I would pick up used chewing gum from the sidewalk and chew it in the eighties.
I told our older sister a month ago, and she about barfed.
Being told “Go ahead and call the cops. I’ll beat your ass before they get here, then they can gladly take me to jail.”
I used to live way out in the boonies as a kid… I’d be dead before they ever got there.
EDIT: I am SO SORRY for all the traumatic childhood memories this is bringing up!!! Case and point though 😐
Over the years, I picked up the ability to numb out, space out, and forget things. Which apparently is a trauma response. What’s my trauma? Who knows? I was too busy numbing out and forgetting!
Edit: Holy smokes. A lot of us have the ability to numb out and forget.
When I was a kid, my mom and I lived with my grandparents
for a year. I had discovered adult videos and “responded” to
them as most do in my room. One night, I heard my grandpa’s footsteps go from upstairs, to downstairs outside my bedroom. He slowly creaked my door open. He looked at me with a chilling expression and said flatly, “I know what you do at night.” And then he closed my door and walked back upstairs. It really creeped me out at the time. There were lots of ways I read into it, and I even disclosed what I thought to a family member at one point, but they said it was nothing. I didn’t realize how thin the walls are at their house until much later, so I thought maybe that was his way of scaring me into stopping. Things seem normal between he and I today and for the past years. But I still find it offputting, not knowing what he was trying to achieve with that interaction. He’s said some other strange things to me in the past, but I chalked it up to me overthinking
My mom constantly cleaning. Once I watched her give her friend a cup of coffee. She turned and wiped the counter, then took the coffee cup, emptied it, washed it and put it away. The friend never even got to take a sip. She swept, mopped, and vacuumed daily, even checked under beds for dust. Realized years later that it was a sign of my dad’s abuse. He was awful.
Being told that I was so mature for my age … Especially by older men
When my uncle would give me a ride and he would let me hold the steering wheel in his pickup truck so he could open another beer.
As a child I would have to call the local bar, ask for my father, and then ask him to come home. I thought I was being a helpful kid and telling Daddy how I missed him but in reality I was used as a way to guilt my dad into coming home
My dad used to drive us to church on Sundays and all of us kids would pile in the back of his pickup truck. Sometimes, for fun, he’d cut through the “bunny field” on the way, and we’d watch dozens and dozens of rabbits spring out of the way from the sides of the truck and we’d laugh and shout for him to go faster. Took me years to realize we were killing hundreds of rabbits, crushing entire nests of little babies, and the mothers keeping them safe and warm were just barely escaping. So many animals were probably left to suffer slow and painful deaths because we thought it was entertaining to watch them desperately flee for their lives.
My parents telling us to pack a bag so we could go to the orphanage bc of our behavior. We’d pack and they’d drive around town while we cried and begged to go home. This was a regular occurrence.
We had a highway in our backyard and whenever there was an accident, my father would get the flashlight and take me and we’d go to investigate. One time there was a motorcycle accident and I saw the helmet. Then I saw the body. But it had no head. It was in the helmet. I was about 10 years old. Obviously at 63, I still never forget it.
Getting hit by my dad for what, looking back, was symptoms of my ADHD. I thought it sucked back then too but I thought it was normal. Yeah well apparently that’s abuse
As a child my mother would get angry at me for not grooming myself properly and not cleaning up around the house.
Meanwhile she never taught me how to do any personal grooming, cleaning, or chores. She just expected me to somehow magically figure it out on my own, and would get angry if I didn’t do something or did it wrong.
Me and my sister having to leave the bedroom door open as we got changed because my Dad would get “upset”. My “mother” would tell us we made him feel like a stranger in his own home….yeah he was an abusive pedophile
My mom insisting that I should feel comfortable walking around the house naked because if I can’t it means I’m ashamed of my body.
My best friend’s step-dad would always sniff her underwear before putting it in the washing machine. She wouldn’t do it to her brothers’ undergarments. I was about 9-10 years old when I saw that.
My mom led me to believe through a large portion of childhood that we had cameras and listening devices in our home. I had previously been temporarily taken away by CPS and she had my little ass convinced I was gonna be ripped out of my bed in the middle of the night for not going to sleep on time or anything as simple as that. I believe it heavily influenced how I felt about myself, and still struggle at nearly 30 to believe that I’m allowed to take up space/make a little noise and nothing bad will happen as a result.
My dad used to call me _____-erella, like Cinderella but my real name for the first half.
He thought it was the funniest joke because I wasn’t actually his daughter, he had adopted me when I was 2 and he never loved me like his “real” daughters, so I was the (literally) red-headed step child no one wanted. He started calling me that after a big fight when I was 8, where he yelled at me that I wasn’t even his, I was adopted. After that he just thought was such a funny joke and he told it to everyone that came to our house and then explained the entire thing every time. it wasn’t until years later that I realized none of the other adults laughed with him.
I also think he completely missed the point of Cinderella
When I was 8 years old, in the 80’s, I ran across the street one night to ask a neighbor how to scramble an egg because I was hungry. I had to do this because my dad and step mother were gone for the weekend in another state on a road trip, and my 12 year old stepsister who was suposed to watch me left to her friends house and I was alone.
Often left to my own devices, Often family never locked any doors or windows, parents were drug dealers. All was “normal” to me back then.
Not being able to have any say in how i dressed or anything regarding my appearance, back then my family had absolute control over how i looked and only recently I found out they were trying to make me look as unappealing as possible
My mum is obsessed with puppies, kittens and babies to an extent. As a child, it was normal for us to have two or three dogs and cats at once, and being the oldest child, I was expected to look after them and train them. Then, every year or so, she would wait for my sister and I to go to school, and would sell the dogs and cats to someone else. A new puppy or kitten would be there when we got home, and if we ever mentioned the other animals, she would say, “this is your dog / cat now, talk about this one”. And then the whole cycle would start again. I was so attached to the dogs in particular, and always wondered what happened to them.
I didn’t realise this was so harmful to me until she did it again last month, and wanted my young son to be excited about her new puppy. I surprised myself with the strength of my response… She’s still avoiding speaking to me and I’m not mad about it.
I used to tear strips of paper off old paperback books we had lying around when I was super hungry and there was nothing to eat in the house.
In kindergarten we got a substitute teacher who announced that she would be staying as our teacher for the rest of the year. She was a really nice lady and I liked her more anyway, so yay!
Found out years later my actual teacher was out because she was getting investigated to see if she’d failed her duties as a mandated reporter (a girl in my class was apparently being abused by her father). They must’ve found it in her favor because she was back for the next school year and several more afterwards until she retired.
My father wasn’t around much for the first 10 years of my life so after my mom passed I went to live with him and his new family. Our bonding ritual became me learning how to make him his afterwork drink: a perfect Manhattan with a twist of lemon. It took me about a week to get all the measurements right and about a year and a half before my stepmother realized what I had been doing. I was grounded for 6 months because I should’ve known better than to play with alcohol.
my dad acted like a kid himself. everything was always hilarious. but he could flip like a switch, too. his tantrums were legendary. sometimes he’d just leave, or take my sister and i somewhere and never pick us up. spontaneous trips were common, whether it was a middle-of-the-night drive or a trip to another state. i’m full of insane stories that were some of my happiest. as an adult, im learning that he had BPD and was unmedicated. it’s a mind fuck to look back on your happiest memories and realize there’s now a taint to them. the worst is when i’m telling what i think is a funny little anecdote to people and they give me looks of pity. sorry if im trauma dumping lol
After I had my son I put on over 12kg in less than 2 weeks.
Turns out my thyroid completely died.
Along with other health issues and extreme PPD I was not in a good place.
My mum and aunty’s all laughed and said things like “welcome to the [fat] club” & “we told you this would happen and you wouldn’t be skinny forever”
The constant comments about how skinny I was and how “one day you’ll be fat like us” destroyed me growing up and then I was mocked when it came to fruition.
It’s taken me years to loose the weight and recover from PPD. I’m still working on a healthy relationship with my body.
I got hurt a lot as a kid. I figured all kids were rough and tumble and got into fights.
Turns out, I grew up in a very racist town. Other kids weren’t afraid to go way over the top with weapons and violence. And the police didn’t seem to be above hurting a child.
Detached retina, bone scarring all through my face, torn cartilage in my ear, broken nose, all of my front teeth are chipped. Burn scars, skull fractures, many broken bones.
I didn’t realize other people didn’t have that experience growing up. I guess I was in denial but I figured these things just happen.
The one that I genuinely had no idea wasn’t normal was that my parents used to make fun of me and mock me when I would cry, they would imitate me and tell me I looked ugly and sounded stupid when I cried, I casually mentioned this to my husband in a joking manner and he was so pained by it he had to stop what he was doing to hug me.
My mom never allowed me to have junk food at home. When I was around 10 my parents got divorced and she started going on dates. On her date nights, she would let me have a bag of chips but only if I at them in my closet while she left for her date. I have since realized that she couldn’t afford a babysitter. She knew I would be fine by myself but she didnt want her date to know that she was leaving her young child home alone during the date. I was told I could leave the closet when I finished the bag of chips. And then I was home alone and I watched TV or played Sims or something. Never thought much on this until I told this story to a friend years later and he looked at me with the WTF face lol
When I was 13ish, my parents were kicking out my brother from his room in order to rent out the basement, I told him he could have my room and I moved into the hallway walk in closet. I was really proud about this at the time, but in hindsight, the fact my family just let me move into a room that basically just fit my bed and nothing else was a signifier of a lot more problems. I still have difficulty with feeling obligated to sacrifice myself.
Groundings meant I couldn’t leave my room. My siblings couldn’t talk to me. I couldn’t be part of any family functions. (Birthdays, graduation, restaurant outings with the grandparents.) And I couldn’t eat meals with anyone else. Books became my escape. I was questioned every time I left my room to use the bathroom or to get a glass of water. Sometimes my groundings included a chore. Like the dishes or cleaning the bathrooms. And looking back? The punishments never fit the crimes. I never was out past curfew. Hell I was never out. I had mediocre grades. But I wasn’t a terrible student. When I tried going to a dance with my boyfriend, my parents insisted that I was trying to go and have sex with him. And continued to guilt trip me into telling them everything that happened during said dance or I’d be grounded. It made me very sneaky with my text conversations. When I heard how my other friends had groundings, I was a little upset. And I swear I won’t do that to my own kids.
My mom used to give me the silent treatment whenever she was mad at me. Like, for days on end. Even if I was “right” I’d still have to apologize or she’d keep ignoring me. I didn’t realize until I hit my twenties or thirties that most moms don’t do that. I have borderline personality disorder now, go figure lol.
Being told you have birthing hips when you’re 10.
When I was 15, in high school, I took a “Media Studies” class basically cos the teacher was chill and we could just goof off for a class.
Anyway, there was this time when the teacher pulled me aside and gave me an Andy Warhol film to watch. Like the literal VHS tape. I can’t remember what it was called but from memory it looked very 70s. Anyway the opening scene is literally a dude, hanging dong, clearly sexually assaulting a woman on a couch.
I have never moved so fast in my life. My parents were in the next room, somehow didn’t see or hear anything, and I just ripped out the tape, put it back in my school bag.
Next day I gave the tape to a friend and said something like “Mr M gave this to me, it’s uhhh kinda weird”. A few days later the teacher came up to me, SUPER pissed that I gave that movie to another student. I don’t recall anything verbatim but he was saying things like “it was only meant for me” “I shouldn’t have shown that to the other student” etc.
It wasn’t til I’d left school that I realised just how fucked up that is. Really didn’t linger too much on my mind as a teenager but yeeeeeeeesh
Not me, but my younger brother: when he was maybe 9-10, he misbehaved too many times and my mom told him to pack everything he owned. He wasn’t allowed to pack clothes or food because our mom owned all that.
So he packed anything he’d ever bought with pocket money or won at arcade games and got in the car. My mom drove to the nearest county road and told him to get out and have a nice life. My (extremely naive, possibly on the spectrum) little brother had a full breakdown, promising he’d be good from then on.
Once my mom was satisfied with how much he’d cried, she shut the door and took us home. She thinks it’s a hilarious anecdote; I’m waiting to see if it comes up at his wedding this summer.
When I was around 14, I was having an early coffee in the local park with my dad. As one of the waiters was coming over to bring the drinks (I hadn’t met this one before), he said to my dad “ahh so this must be your mistress?”
We laughed it off as a slightly weird, off-hand joke and my father explained that I was his daughter, after which the man apologised. Found the interaction a little bit weird but thought not much of it.
Fast forward 4 years, and it turns out my dad has spent 15 years cheating on my mum with not only several relationships and affairs, but seeing hundreds, maybe even thousands of escorts and prostitutes. He was quite close with that one waiter, and apparently sometimes brought the women to the cafe with him. Some of them were only a few years older than me. That’s why the waiter had assumed I was one of them!
I thought my drunk grandpa was just playing chase but in hindsight he was drunk out of his mind trying to beat our ass.
When I fell asleep in the car on rides home, my parents would just leave me in the car. I have vivid memories of waking up so hot and sweaty and have difficulties uncliping the seat belt because it was too hot to the touch.
As a kid, our neighbors had kids around the same age as us, but a couple years older. Every other month these two kids had a new pet. A dog, a cat, an entire aquarium, hamsters, hedgehogs, etc. they would always show us the new pet, every couple months. My sister and I asked, “wow your house is full of animals!” And they looked at us kinda blank. Turns out these animals were all DYING after a couple months, weeks in some cases. Family moved away when we were like 12. Just saw that one of them was convicted for murdering his pregnant girlfriend a couple years ago.
I had to go to summer school one year (7th gr). The school was across town. I walked alone on the first day. There was a girl I knew who lived not too far from me, she showed me how to “hitchhike.” Some days she didn’t go to school, and I’d hitchhike alone. All those who gave us rides were men, and only once, when we were together, did someone say something off kilter. He pulled up to the school, and as we reached for the door handles, he said, “Do you know what a pimp is?” I said, “No”. My friend, who was in the front seat, said, “Yes.” He held out a $100 bill and offered it to us saying think about all the clothes and shoes we could buy. We both declined and thanked him for the ride. We exited the car and went to class. WHEW! When I look back, it was 1968, we were blessed. A time when we walked everywhere.
The lack of memories, speaks volumes. I have very few memories, yet so many people (family, friends etc.), have so many of me. And they often hold me in high regard and with love. I literally have no idea what they are talking about, and it can hurt feelings, because they remember those memories so fondly. It’s a blank for me. I now don’t talk to anyone. An abyss on my own.
Eleven- year-old me desperately trying to act as a marriage counselor for my parents.
My parents implemented a ‘do over’ once. This was around when I was 13. We’d been getting into tons fights, they threatened to kick me out all the time, regularly told me what a bitch I was, and had piled punishments and chores up to a year out. Mind you this was all for struggling through the abuse they put me through and not being able to manage very high expectations (especially when I hadn’t been taught how to do a lot.) They’d get mad at me for ‘not thinking critically’ and scream at me and berate me for hours without allowing me to sit, go to the bathroom, or stop looking at them. They’d would also make sure to make me repeat what they’d just told me so they could be sure the nasty things they said sunk in. After that, I’d usually be sent to my room for the day/night and have all my privileges removed. No electronics, no art, no reading. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I just had to stare at a wall. It wasn’t bad for only a day or two but it ended up being a common punishment for me. At one point, they banned me from checking out books from my school library (and started doing bag checks every day after school to make sure I wasn’t sneaking books in), put all the books I owned up into the attic in boxes, threw my computer into the rain, took all my notebooks, read my diary, and made me write sentences all day every day for weeks. Usually it was really unnecessarily wordy ways of saying ‘I won’t disobey; I’ll ask you for everything, and I’m sorry’. If I wasn’t doing that, I was staring at a wall. This went on for years.
Now with the context out the way, onto the do over. The purpose of the do over was to get rid of all my punishments, pretend nothing bad had ever happened, and to just try to be a happy family.
At first I was so excited. The idea of a do-over felt good. Not constantly being on punishment and having my parents being nice to me was so nice… It backfired spectacularly within a few days of course because they immediately got angry at me again for forgetting a chore. They didn’t even scream at me that time. Just made this face and told me how disappointed they were in me for messing this up, and how I’ll never get a do over again because I didn’t deserve it.
After that, it was back to punishments, back to screaming, back to the threats of being kicked out and abandoned to my grandma (who molested me at a young age).
For years, I was so angry and upset with myself for ruining a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity to not be a screwup’. That feelings never gone away, and I only realized when I was 22 how fucked up it was.
Sorry for the length and intensity of my comment.
My dad was a socially acceptable alcoholic.
As in he made six figures (in the 90’s) and was always out at dinners, functions, VIP boxes at sports drinking expensive wine and champagne. This progressed to him downing bottles of expensive wine alone at night.
Him and my mum separated and he left her with nothing, as a single mum with 3 kids. I slept on the floor of my grans spare bedroom with no mattress for a while, as my mum and little sisters had the bed.
She eventually got a council house (government housing).
Food banks weren’t really a thing back then, at least I’d never heard of them, and my mum used to skip meals so we could eat whilst he was living it up.
So from when I was 12 – 16 I would skip the train fare to his on a Saturday when he was at a VIP box for football or Rugby, use my key to his house and steal food from his house. I’d load my bag up with food, bring it back to my mums house and put it in the cupboard without telling her.
Deepdown she must’ve known, that this food kept randomly appearing in her house, but I’ve never told her.
I’ve mentioned this to people before as a funny story, usually previous partners when they’ve asked why me and my dad don’t get on, before I realised how fucked up it was, and they look at me like that’s not funny that’s horrible. So I don’t mention it anymore.
The rare times I did spent with my dad it usually ended up with him passed out on the couch drunk, and me having to be the adult – turn the lights and TV off, put his wine bottle and glass away, etc.
She eventually had the courage to divorce him and go to the CSA (a government agency that force people to pay child support in the UK). I had aged out by then as I was over 18, but she got a couple of thousand a month of him for my sisters if I recall. He was furious that he had to pay it.
He passed away not so long ago, due to liver disease.
I’ll be honest, the thing that hurt the most was he got himself together when I was an adult – stopped drinking, became a better person, and was an incredible grandfather to my little niece. Spent every penny he had on her. She absolutely adored him.
And I hated myself for being jealous of her, that she got to have that as her grandfather whilst I just had a drunk alcoholic who left me sleeping on a floor.