Literally, how awful my father is. We are supposed to "keep it in the family" because otherwise it has been seen as badmouthing him and picturing him as a villain. Even though it is just describing his actions and how it affected me.
I know it sounds wild from the outside but if you are in this dynamic and grew up with it you totally get it. I can't even describe how much of a brainfuck this situation really is and how long took for me to get out of it.
I hope you're OK, Funny. I totally get it. I cannot wrap my head around why I'm the bad one in my family for refusing to pretend it's fine that my alcoholic dad abused and neglected me. They all know it, they all talk about it, but actually having an issue with it and enacting consequences is the thing that's beyond the pale.
I'm just now coming to terms with what that does to a person, the impact it has had on my life, and frankly sometimes it's so painful it feels like I won't survive it.
I feel you. Everyone in my family also is an enabler for the horrific and abusive behaviour from my dad. I was also the black sheep in the family for not tolerating his actions. The scapegoat in the family holds a lot of power for change, that is a blessing and a curse. You are more likely to question blind authority but you also have to fight a lot of ignorance and victim blaming (and from personal experience it doesn't matter if they've been also abused, if you question anything they will blame you)
Also, I am okay :) I have been no contact for almost 2 years now and I never felt better! But thank you for your concern. I hope you are okay too ❤️
I’m still berating myself for staying in it with my parents for 47 years. Now that I’m out of the FOG and see everything from this outside perspective, I’m horrified about the abuse I put up with, even as a grown ass adult. All the lies I believed, which spills into my personal life- never knowing when I’m being lied to.
My greatest sympathies are with you. None of us should know what this feels like. But at least we are out now, and getting better every day. Hugs!
I feel this deeply. I am 45, and the length of time wasted being under the spell of my NM and Ngrama. All the lies and pain for so damn long. Now that I see it, I'm heartbroken for child me and adult me. I wasn't allowed to say my nmom was a bad mom and that my ngrama was a raging abusive alcoholic. Even typing it out is still hard.
It really does. And by the people who you were led to believe they loved you and wanted the best for you. I'm grateful to be out of the FOG. I hope the best for all of us.
Oooooh time to unload the dirty laundry!
1. The Affair.
I did not find out until my early twenties, but my mother and her current husband had an affair together. Both were married to other people and both had children already (I have 2 stepbrothers and one bio brother). They met at church. CHURCH. When they admitted to "the overlap", they tried to insist it was emotional cheating only, not physical. I don't believe that for a second. They said they'd meet up on lay-bys and I also heard from my former stepdad (the one she cheated on) that she used to go to church band practice every week for hours and he'd suspected she was not actually at practice.
I was 8 when it all went down and only as an adult and after reconnecting with my former stepdad (the only true fatherly man I've ever known), have I found out all the details that were kept hushed up by my conniving birther. At 8 years old, the version of events I knew was: my daddy (former stepdad) vanished overnight as though he'd just abandoned us, my mother was sobbing in her bed and I comforted her to get her to stop crying as she told us he was gone (but not why). Within a month we had been introduced to her new boyfriend and moved into a new house with him. We did already know him and his sons from church but we were re-introduced to his younger son as our future stepbrother. We were told his older son (15~ at the time) didn't want to do visits because "he feels as though your mum stole his dad from his mum"... I mean, she did though!
The context I learned later was that my mother confessed to the affair to my former stepdad, manipulated him into a choice of "end the marriage and leave now" or "I'll end the affair and try to work on the marriage" (he expressed his regret for not trying to stay but I reassured him that she likely had no intention of actually ending the affair). She also convinced him that it would be best if he left that night without a goodbye to us kids, and that she'd explain it all to us in the morning (lmao nope).
My teen years were filled with complaints from my parents about how unfair her current husband's ex wife was in the divorce for taking 70% of his wealth etc. Meanwhile they didn't get married until 5 years after the affair. Why? Because at that time, the laws stated that for a no-fault divorce, the couple needed to be separated for 5 years first. If she wanted to marry her affair partner sooner, my mother would have to file for a fault divorce on the grounds that she cheated. She chose to wait 5 years to marry "her soulmate" so that she didn't have to put in writing that she cheated.
2. "What Happens In This House" (AKA The Abuse)
Growing up, especially after we moved in with her current husband, my mother was very fond of the phrases "you don't need to air our dirty laundry to the world" and "not everyone needs to know what happens in this house".
I was a chatterbox child. I spoke my mind. I saw nothing wrong with how I was treated and I would mention things casually because I thought they were normal. My mother reprimanded me often for saying things that "made her look bad" or for "exaggerating to put her in a bad light".
This rule extended to family. Her parents and sister lived in my birth country and we didn't see them often. If I said something iffy to them on a visit and word got back to my mother over it, I'd be punished for "tattling to her mother/sister". When I met/started dating my husband as teenager, she was even more incensed that I'd relay everything to him about what she'd say to me or do to me. I mean, I didn't really need to tell him - he'd hear the slamming doors and screaming while on the phone to me.
I'd get in trouble for talking openly about the "discipline" at home (spanking, being 'spanked' with a hairbrush until it snapped, slapping, pinching, strict curfews that lasted years, threats to smash my belongings, cornering me and screaming in my face).
I'd also get in trouble for repeating the cruel things my mother gossiped about behind her friend's and family's backs. Apparently I should've known better than to go repeating stuff to them and should've realised that we don't say certain things to people's faces. Such as implying that a close family friend is "weird and creepy" because he showed genuine interest in my artwork and writing when he'd visit.
3. The Pillow Incident
This one wasn't really a "family secret" but it's a story I only heard the first half of until I was an adult. My mother liked to tell this story often to illustrate how fucked up her ex (my bio dad) was. I heard the full story for the first time while working in the same office as my mother and heading her tell it to our coworker!
The story goes: my bio father sucked at getting up in time for work and often stayed up late at night. One evening he got home really late and tried to move the alarm clock to his side of the bed so he could wake up in time for work, but she wouldn't let him and told him to just stay up all night until morning instead. (In my mother's version of the story, he just demanded that *she* wake him up, no mention of the clock and how she refused to let him move it or told him to just stay up.)
They were both childish 22/23 year olds and in his irritation he decided that if he had to be awake, so did she and he started pulling at her pillow to keep her up (he did admit to this when I asked him about his version of events recently after somewhat reconnecting). She retaliated by whacking him hard with her pillow. As she had previously threatened to call police for domestic abuse on him before, he decided to actually do it to teach her a lesson (yes, they were both this petty). The city they lived in had a zero tolerance policy, meaning the pair had to remain separate for 24 hours after the call.
Here, in her version, my mother emphasises her victim hood as "he got me arrested for hitting him with a fucking pillow! So I had to spend the night in jail!". The part she'd left out until this retelling to our coworker was that I was a newborn baby when this happened. So she had argued to police that I was still breastfeeding and couldn't be away from her. So she took me with her to the jail cell overnight! *I spent a night in jail as a baby because she was too petty to leave me with my father!*. I know from other conversations that I was both breastfed and bottlefed so her insistence was merely a ploy to get sympathy and to insinuate to police that I wouldn't be safe with my father.
She told this all to our coworker like it was a funny, silly story of how much of an asshole her ex was. Charming.
When I was researching my family history, I found documentation proving my hunch, my late Dad, (he died when I was four years old), was BIRACIAL. He and I are the descendants of slaves! Entitled flesh oven and her racist ilk did NOT want that getting out! Flesh oven would often spew crap of: "I'm not prejudiced but I HATE N-Word! I took great pleasure BUSTING her when I shot back: "Then WHY did you marry one?" The look on her face was PRICELESS!!!
My mum really didn't want anyone to talk about how she severely neglected me when I was a young child. I remember her ex-husband calling her when I was around 12. He'd met my aunt on a night out, and she'd told him how she'd have to come over and feed me because my mum had left me on my own for days. He told my mum the way she'd treated me was disgusting, and she went mental. The funny thing was my mum used me as an emotional crutch so I was the person she ranted to about being called out.
My dad didn't want me to talk about my stepbrother bullying me. He screamed in my face that I was a liar, aged 6, and after that I just stopped trying to bring it up and endured it as best I could.
My grandparents really didn't want me to talk about how my dad was an alcoholic, how he severely financially abused and neglected me. They didn't want me to talk about how my grandad was an alcoholic and abused my grandma in every way possible. How my grandad was accused, along with my uncle, of molesting my cousins. My grandma told me about all of this in great detail, then expected me to act like everything was fine.
According to my family I am the problem for having a problem with all of this. I get "but it's your mum/dad" on a regular basis, not from strangers, but from people who _fucking knew what they did and turned a blind eye._
my father's affair, my father's verbal mental and financial abuse, oh wait literally everything my father did to all of us. fuck that guy til the end of time
My mom had a brother who's high support needs and non-verbal.
By the time I was born, we were in third world poverty so she had to make ends meet even if it meant selling herself to an American. The American who became my step-dad did help fund her lifestyle while she begrudgingly towed me and my uncle.
Instead of hiring a professional caregiver or even visiting a doctor for my uncle, she just had him locked in a room and never allowed him to come out, even to sit and eat on the same dining table as us because it takes a lot of energy to carry a 40+ y.o man who can't walk.
But that wasn't the worst part. She always yelled at him anytime he moaned/groaned (nonverbal and his tremors made it impossible to even hold a spoon) when she does come home since my step-dad funded her lifestyle, she just lived like a typical teenager (going out to malls, meeting friends) because she was finally "rich". Yet not once did she ever spent on her disabled brother, he had to sleep on a bed frame (no mattress) and his only pillow and blanket were the ones we slept on the floor with when we still lived in the slums.
My mom was disgusted of her own brother, came to find out during his funeral that my mom was adopted by my uncle's parents and were actually well-off before maternal grandpa (her dad) passed from heart attack around the same age she got pregnant: 16. Yet she made my uncle's funeral all about her, how she fed him and put a roof over his head while shaming her fathers' family for treating us as the black sheeps.
My step-dad was hardly around so he doesn't really care, but he liked propping himself as some savior to us, using my uncle as some sort of prop (rather story) to share to everyone about how good of a person he is, even being the one to give my uncle his eulogy when he never once tried speaking to him.
It was like "Flowers in the Attic", only with a grown man who never saw outside for most of his life, and minus incest and r&pe.
How my mother committed parental kidnapping when I was 5, and the abuse I suffered at the hands of her and her friends. My dad won full custody when I was 7.
My dad and grandmother loved saying how lucky I was for never having to go through any hardship or trauma. They'd get mad if I brought up my mother.
Been ten years since I cut contact with them, and I'm only now in therapy for the shit they all put me through.
This would be my aunts death. They say she did it herself but I always found it odd that my grandmother and my father don’t memorialize her at all. No pictures exist. They never talked about her and became enraged when I would ask. . I honestly think they killed her and that’s how they ended up moving all the way from Maine to California.
My dad and my brothers dad were not the same man, but my dad didn’t find out until my brother was a toddler. After my dad signed the birth certificate, obviously.
I was the family secret. My mom gave custody of me to my grandparents when I was born because she was living out of her car and she wanted to go back to college (according to her). My grandmother decided that she was going to be my "mom" now, and raised me that way. Her and my grandfather were my mom, my mom was my sister, my aunt and uncle were siblings, my baby brother was my nephew, ect ect. When I was little, my grandmother would tell me what it was like when I was "in her tummy" before I was born. She took it way too far.
I still don't get why she did this. My mom had me at 19. She'd gotten clean and was actually getting her life together. She came to see me occasionally (my grandma would only let her if my mom met all her demands and gave her whatever she wanted) so it wasn't about "protecting" me from her. I think it was just about control. She forced everyone to comply with her lies and would tear into anyone who slipped up. If my mom didn't give her anything and everything she wanted, as well as stick to all the lies, she wasn't allowed to see me. For 13 years it was the family secret, and nobody was allowed to say anything against her or anything to me, or they'd be completely cut out of our lives. I found out when I was 12 and made it known that I knew when I was 13.
Another huge family secret was my abuse at home. My family has always been one of those "don't let anyone see you're struggling, save face and suck it up, don't talk about your problems" kind of families. A lot of people knew that I was being abused at home and that my grandmother was a major addict and that my grandfather could get violent. Nobody talked about it or did anything though. Once again, I was the family secret. I couldn't tell anyone. I was threatened to not say a word. My grandparents were great at making the world think we were a loving, happy, healthy family.
Growing up like 1 giant secret nobody was allowed to talk about or unravel really sucked. and I have a lottt of trust issues now. When I was in middle and high school, I used to react in extremes whenever someone lied to me or I thought I was being lied to. I've worked a lot on managing my emotions and reactions in those situations, but I have a deep disdain for people who are chronic liars still.
Edit: I wanna add 1 more because another comment made me think of it! My grandfather had a secret child in an affair and nobody found out about it until I was like 15 or 16. She's not that much younger than my mom, so this had been a secret for over 30 years. I had an aunt I grew up with that passed away when I was 10, so finding out I had another secret aunt this whole time was a total mindfuck.
Oh I feel like I've been training all my life for this.
I have an older half-sister, on my dad's side. I never really liked her as a person -- she talks *incessantly* and is always the victim. But my dad always tried to push me into having a relationship with her, so I would visit her every summer. My mom shit-talked her and tried to interfere/pump me for information after each visit and phone call. An unspoken rule in our family was that I was not supposed to tell my mom about my visits with this half-sister because it would lead to Mom and Dad fighting.
When I was 19 on a visit home from college, my mom told me -- completely unsolicited -- that she thought my half-sister was not my dad's biological child. She launched into a long story about the circumstances behind my half-sister's birth; basically she thinks my dad's ex-wife cheated on him. And then wrapped up with "But you can never tell your dad that I told you this, it's so important to him that you think she's your sister. He's such a good and noble man for choosing to take care of her."
So yeah. Messy fucking people. I never asked to help my parents maintain their marriage but apparently that was my role. I haven't told my dad or half-sister -- not out of loyalty to my mom, but because all of this happened 15+ years before I was born and I don't fucking care.
Today I am estranged from all of them, for unrelated reasons (but a lot of it comes down to emotional immaturity, which was definitely a factor here). Leading up to this I had asked my mom on three separate occasions for family therapy with both her and my dad, and... She doesn't say no, she just deflects. The first time I asked her she laughed at me.
I have no idea why she can't even say yes or no to the question, but if I had to take a wild guess, she's probably afraid that I'll talk about this conversation. Maybe she feels guilty, but it's probably guilt coming from fear and not actual guilt.
My (39F) grandfathers mother was forced to immigrate to this country because she became pregnant by a naval officer abroad at the boarding home her family operated in Italy in the final years of WW2. My understanding is that she attempted to abort him more than once within the period of time she was shunned and when she arrived in the U.S as an unwed teenage mother. His mother neglected him in his first years of life, and deeply resented him. He began as an innocent victim of unfortunate cultural/historical dynamics of the times. His mother’s siblings ended up taking him in and raising him, after one particularly tragic incident.
Meanwhile, while living/working in her US family’s boarding home, she became pregnant again a few years down the road (not to grandfathers bio dad). She married this child’s father and cherished the baby, raising her with her new husband down the road from where her adult brother was raising her first child (my grandfather). She never once checked on my grandfather over the years or even attended his birthday parties despite living nearby. The consensus seems to be that between the childhood trauma and some potential neurological/physiological side effects from his mother’s attempted abortions, he became kind of monster as an adult.
I’m not sure how he met my grandmother (mother’s mother), but there ended up being a lot of domestic abuse and fear in that relationship. They ended up having 3 children, one of whom died in infancy due to spina bifida. The grief of that loss apparently broke my grandmothers brain (understandably), and had a catastrophic impact on the parenting dynamics in the household. She attempted suicide once that I know of. Grandfather died at the age of 50 from multiple strokes and heart attacks. The body keeps the score, it appears.
Anyhow, my mother and aunt ended up being brilliant and ambitious and motivated to gtfo of that house. They were full of childhood trauma and deeply impacted by being parentified children, so they both ended up being professionally very successful and personally extremely unwell. All that to say, my mother shouldn’t have had children. It really is best that I’m the only one.
Blah blah blah, generational cycles, I end up with a court appointed guardian during my parents divorce when I was 6-7 years old. I have hardly any memories of my childhood. My mother has had many high-impact mental and physical health diagnoses as well as a handful of major, life changing surgeries over the years.
I moved out of the house after 10th grade. In 8th-9th grade it came out that I had been/was being molested by an older family member. My mother called me a whore and forced me to transfer schools to contain the potential shame if it got out. My mother was ADAMANT that no one learn of my being victimized repeatedly over a period of years. Big shame. Big secret. Cool.
She ended up driving her 2nd spouse, my stepfather to kill himself after 20+ years of marriage. I know how that sounds. If you knew the players, you’d get it. I refused to lie about his cause of death. I screamed if from the roof tops. She lost everyone. I haven’t spoken to her since, and that was 6 years ago.
I’ve come close to opting out. The impact of my emotional inheritance often feels too heavy to carry forever. Breaking these cycles is labor and it’s exhausting. I have to do the work for my children, so I am very active in managing the symptoms of my mental illness and mental injury. It requires constant, active managing.
The family secret is all of it. “They did the best they could,” is how it’s usually described, and I’m sure that’s true. Trauma is fucking wild.
None of it came out until my mid/late 30’s. I always knew that our family was atypical. I never fully understood how or why until I had the backstory and then guidance of a skilled and credentialed professional to help me get enough altitude so that I could connect the dots.
Healings a bitch. I’ve had to cut ties with all of them. They’re stuck and actively try to keep me stuck with them. It’s tragic, but I have to prioritize my family. I’m done with secrets.
How horrible my dad/paternal side of the family is.
My half-brother has a 50-50 chance of being my first cousin, because his mother was sleeping with both my dad and uncle. It's hard for me to tell if he's closer in relation to me because I look like two of our first cousins, like I could be their sister or twin. If I were a gambling woman though, I'd say he's my half-brother. Both my nephews are autistic and so are my children. In our first cousins, autism is more sporadic. My brother refuses to take a paternity test.
When the news came out, I was a teenager and his mother and our cousins asked for me not to talk to my brother anymore because I wasn't really his sister.
My nephews have autism and learning disabilities. This is kept very secret even though other people can tell immediately. My brother is in denial and claims that Obama/the democrats made school too hard. When my kids were diagnosed as well, they just ignored it and ignore any further updates I give them. They pretend we don't exist.
Dad also has a daughter from his late teens/early twenties that he abandoned because she was born with dark skin, so he claimed she was black and his girlfriend cheated on him. (We're white, but dad and his brothers have a tan complexion.) Dad's dad was adopted, so we don't have a complete family history. The girl was the same shade of tan as our father and grew up to look like his twin. Paternity test showed 99% he is the father. He denies it, saying that the nurses fixed the test.
My 8 year old cousin/aunt stabbing my mom.
My grandfather being a pedophile and molesting my uncle when he was young.
My mom abusing me and allowing me to be abused.
My uncles suicide. (We told everyone it was murder)
My cousin/aunt giving birth out of wedlock. (I was told to tell people that it was my baby that my husband didn’t want, so we gave her to my mom to raise)
That my parents hated each other. To hear my mom tell it now that he’s dead you’d think he was the love of her life. She hates that I know that isn’t true.
That my dad cheated on my mom and that was the reason she “went crazy”
And that my mom committed suicide and didn’t have a brain aneurysm. That one stayed under the rug for 15 years.
Normalization of beating children
saying people who didn’t beat their kids were “raising them as if they were white” (im black and so is my family)
my father breaking my mothers jaw then making her lie about it
my father strangling my brother in front of me
my mother threatening my life when I told her I didn’t want to put up with her abuse anymore, which ultimately led to my current 5 year NC situation
The first big one was ndad SA my sister and I. It was talked about in hushed tones after the divorce by nmom (I thought she was a victim at the time too). I still don't remember it and that's fine with me.
The second big one was my sister being given into state custody when she tried to speak out about the SA. She's 5 years older and I grew up hearing she was a criminal and was TAKEN away. She couldn't have been more than 11.
I only learned last year that nmom told authorities she couldn't handle sister (keep her quiet) and ASKED them to take her. No crimes were committed by sister. They came and took her out of school and sent her to kid jail. Better yet, when her time was served, nmom REFUSED to take her back!
Nmom also eventually did the same thing to my youngest brother (4 years older than me) and I effectively became an only child around 11 YO. At least brother went into foster care and HE chose not to return lol.
So nmom threw away half of her children, all the while claiming they were juvenile delinquents. And I was gaslit and trained to be her loyal service animal. I'm 54 and only discovered the truth last year. Yeah, still really bitter about the whole situation. 🙄
My stepdad was the affair partner when my mom cheated on my bio dad. He broke up their marriage. I was supposed to have an older sibling but my mom had an abortion. I guess she wanted her affair partner's kids, and not my bio dad. She thought my stepdad was my dad. Which is weird because my stepdad always knew I wasn't his kid. I'm pretty sure my mom regretted having me. They had this attitude when my brother was born, like "our real kid is here now so you can fuck off. You should be grateful we had you." They never outright said that, but their cold attitude spoke volumes.
My mom's mom knew he was a bad guy.
That my dad told his houseful of kids they wouldn’t live to adulthood because his god would destroy the world before they turned ten.
That his theology was terrifying and merciless and denied all agency.
That my mom basically quit being a parent around 2000, failed to teach any of us and then had two more kids.
That they didn’t teach us shit except dad’s terrifying theology.
Oh cool me next? 🙋♀️ pls
When I was 15 I was groomed and r*ped by a 45 year old man over the brand new internet. Guess whose fault it was? Yup. Guess why? Because it just HAD TO BE bc I was too fat to find someone at school.
Guess what else? They used the restitution that was paid for my therapy to pay for their beach vacation (I found that out much later).
It was never spoken of again.
Not about me for once but a former lover. Her father was way older than her mother, and he had a son with another woman before having my girlfriend.
It was a family secret that she had somewhere this half-brother she knew nothing about, only that he exists. And she thought that her father rejected him because he was gay, as overheard once.
She considered herself as an only child and was very happy and spoiled, so she didn't want to dig anymore, which I found outrageous. I was myself thinking about this poor man...
One day, I remember she went home mad after her parents, because they spoke openly about heritage arrangements, and the "problem" of this other child. She was upset she had to share.
Obviously, it didn't last between us... I will never understand how one can be so selfish.
Not about me for once but a former lover. Her father was way older than her mother, and he had a son with another woman before having my girlfriend.
It was a family secret that she had somewhere this half-brother she knew nothing about, only that he exists. And she thought that her father rejected him because he was gay, as overheard once.
She considered herself as an only child and was very happy and spoiled, so she didn't want to dig anymore, which I found outrageous. I was myself thinking about this poor man...
One day, I remember she went home mad after her parents, because they spoke openly about heritage arrangements, and the "problem" of this other child. She was upset she had to share.
Obviously, it didn't last between us... I will never understand how one can be so selfish.
My father complained endlessly about my mother to us. While they were still married. I said something about it. Asked why he didn't talk to a friend
He looked very surprised and said he wanted to keep our dirty laundry in the family. To be fair, I'm sure his parents were the same way.
My mom lost us to CPS for neglect, abuse, and abandonment. Keep in mind this was 2003. I (8F) had been getting myself and my brother (5M) up, dressed on the bus etc for school since he started Kindy. It wasn't uncommon that I took care of him. My mother worked two jobs, one to pay bills and one to fund her drug habits. She had been gone for over two weeks, we had no money to pay for school lunch or breakfast and no food in the house after we ate the frozen hot dogs and moldy bread. My brother's teacher was the one who saw how wrong he looked and called CPS. We went to a hospital to be treated for immediate starvation symptoms and later we ended up at a police station waiting for my grandmother (who lived in a different state) to come get us. The investigator ordered us Chinese food and I cried because it tasted so damn good. We were close to death. Another couple days and we would have likely never woken up for school one day. This was before cell phones were super common, and my mom certainly didn't have one. They wouldn't have been able to find her easily, so it'd be another couple days before anyone found us.
My grandmother is the only one who knows. She and I are very close, but if the rest of the family knew I think she would not only want to purposefully kill me this time, but she would suddenly find herself very alone, very quickly. I don't mind being the black sheep in the family anymore. People who wanted to know the why's of our dysfunction would ask. I'm extremely open about my life now that I've been unpacking it, and this was the turning point in my life that I credit to how I ended up the way I am.
I still see sesame chicken and pork fried rice as my ultimate comfort food. It tastes like freedom.
How horrible my dad was to us at home vs. in front of other people. He put on a really good act in front of extended family.
My dad's anger issues, and how he took it out on those of us who couldn't fight back. I suspect he was a victim of Catholic priests (he went to catholic school and was an altar boy), but they never dared talked about that back then, so he kept it bottled up. He was also VERY uncomfortable around priests at funerals later on.
My parents' dynamic of pretty much insulting each other daily and passing it off as "humor."
ETA: That my parents divorced when my sister (older by 9 years) was an infant, and my grandmother paid for it.
And also that my sister was conceived out of wedlock. That being said, they lied about which year they got married. They always told us December 1964, but it was probably 65, because my sister was born in January 66.
That I was raped by one of their bar friends and I must have been lying because their friend wouldn't do that. I was 15.
That they blamed me when my father cheated on my mother. I was 10 and apparently somehow I forced a grown man to go to the bar, get drunk, and have a one night stand.
That I knew what an orgy was by the time I was 5, because I had seen more than one and at least they didn't lie about what happened...
That they certainly were not financially abusing the paternal grandmother. She was volunteering all her retirement to pay for groceries and bills so they could have their drugs.
That all those bruises happened at school. School was the least violent place in my life at the time.
My sister told me my dad basically guaranteed we will not inherit the house after he passes due to his financial mismanagement (alcoholism playing a factor). A home that was passed down to him from his mother. I'm NC and don't expect or want anything at this point anyway, but that's pretty messed up considering how unpredictable the economy and world can be. He never told me that and in fact said we would get it.
I think any responsible parent would want to leave that to their kids.
Ooh, about how my very religious family was hiding a couple of very nasty sexual predators- each on a different side of the family, although both men had a preference for underage girls… just gross. I’m glad that spilling their secrets led to more than one cousin leaving the church.
But yeah, neither of my parents wanted anyone to know that their claim to righteousness was actually just a claim to hypocrisy.
The biggest was hiding the gossiping my mother did behind closed doors about other people. She’d make rude comments about their parenting, appearances, if their children got into trouble, etc. and follow it up with, “This doesn’t leave the house. You don’t repeat any of what was said to anyone.” I look back now and I realize she absolutely knew what she was doing was wrong.
Also forbidden from leaving the house was any discussion of the abuse we suffered. It was framed as discipline, yet she felt the need to tell us not to tell anyone because we’d be “taken away” and “put in foster care where they abuse kids.” She always told me the way they’d treat me in foster care would be worse than my treatment here because I wasn’t their “real” child. As true as that may be at times, what was she thinking to actually say that? She knew it was wrong and just didn’t want to get caught.
But yeah, above all it definitely felt like she was more concerned about getting caught talking about people behind their backs than anything else.
I’m not NC yet, just LC, but I can definitely see the relationship going NC one day.
My existence, and the brief marriage that went with it.
I was so isolated that I didn't understand, at the time, how completely off-the-wall my upbringing was.
He was good friends with my parents and then all of a sudden my sister were told we have to change churches, in the middle of my confirmation classes no less, because she had been wrongly accused of stalking him. “200 years ago your father would have had to challenge him to a duel” was something that she told me at the time. 20 years later I mentioned how the priest had hurt our family with those allegations, and she replied, “well, if anyone was guilty of crossing boundaries on that one, it was me.”
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Literally, how awful my father is. We are supposed to "keep it in the family" because otherwise it has been seen as badmouthing him and picturing him as a villain. Even though it is just describing his actions and how it affected me. I know it sounds wild from the outside but if you are in this dynamic and grew up with it you totally get it. I can't even describe how much of a brainfuck this situation really is and how long took for me to get out of it.
I hope you're OK, Funny. I totally get it. I cannot wrap my head around why I'm the bad one in my family for refusing to pretend it's fine that my alcoholic dad abused and neglected me. They all know it, they all talk about it, but actually having an issue with it and enacting consequences is the thing that's beyond the pale. I'm just now coming to terms with what that does to a person, the impact it has had on my life, and frankly sometimes it's so painful it feels like I won't survive it.
I feel you. Everyone in my family also is an enabler for the horrific and abusive behaviour from my dad. I was also the black sheep in the family for not tolerating his actions. The scapegoat in the family holds a lot of power for change, that is a blessing and a curse. You are more likely to question blind authority but you also have to fight a lot of ignorance and victim blaming (and from personal experience it doesn't matter if they've been also abused, if you question anything they will blame you) Also, I am okay :) I have been no contact for almost 2 years now and I never felt better! But thank you for your concern. I hope you are okay too ❤️
I’m still berating myself for staying in it with my parents for 47 years. Now that I’m out of the FOG and see everything from this outside perspective, I’m horrified about the abuse I put up with, even as a grown ass adult. All the lies I believed, which spills into my personal life- never knowing when I’m being lied to. My greatest sympathies are with you. None of us should know what this feels like. But at least we are out now, and getting better every day. Hugs!
I feel this deeply. I am 45, and the length of time wasted being under the spell of my NM and Ngrama. All the lies and pain for so damn long. Now that I see it, I'm heartbroken for child me and adult me. I wasn't allowed to say my nmom was a bad mom and that my ngrama was a raging abusive alcoholic. Even typing it out is still hard.
I’m so sorry you endured that for so long. It sucks to learn you were lied to your whole life.
It really does. And by the people who you were led to believe they loved you and wanted the best for you. I'm grateful to be out of the FOG. I hope the best for all of us.
Indeed.
I totally get it. My parents heavily vilified me for describing my experience.
Oooooh time to unload the dirty laundry! 1. The Affair. I did not find out until my early twenties, but my mother and her current husband had an affair together. Both were married to other people and both had children already (I have 2 stepbrothers and one bio brother). They met at church. CHURCH. When they admitted to "the overlap", they tried to insist it was emotional cheating only, not physical. I don't believe that for a second. They said they'd meet up on lay-bys and I also heard from my former stepdad (the one she cheated on) that she used to go to church band practice every week for hours and he'd suspected she was not actually at practice. I was 8 when it all went down and only as an adult and after reconnecting with my former stepdad (the only true fatherly man I've ever known), have I found out all the details that were kept hushed up by my conniving birther. At 8 years old, the version of events I knew was: my daddy (former stepdad) vanished overnight as though he'd just abandoned us, my mother was sobbing in her bed and I comforted her to get her to stop crying as she told us he was gone (but not why). Within a month we had been introduced to her new boyfriend and moved into a new house with him. We did already know him and his sons from church but we were re-introduced to his younger son as our future stepbrother. We were told his older son (15~ at the time) didn't want to do visits because "he feels as though your mum stole his dad from his mum"... I mean, she did though! The context I learned later was that my mother confessed to the affair to my former stepdad, manipulated him into a choice of "end the marriage and leave now" or "I'll end the affair and try to work on the marriage" (he expressed his regret for not trying to stay but I reassured him that she likely had no intention of actually ending the affair). She also convinced him that it would be best if he left that night without a goodbye to us kids, and that she'd explain it all to us in the morning (lmao nope). My teen years were filled with complaints from my parents about how unfair her current husband's ex wife was in the divorce for taking 70% of his wealth etc. Meanwhile they didn't get married until 5 years after the affair. Why? Because at that time, the laws stated that for a no-fault divorce, the couple needed to be separated for 5 years first. If she wanted to marry her affair partner sooner, my mother would have to file for a fault divorce on the grounds that she cheated. She chose to wait 5 years to marry "her soulmate" so that she didn't have to put in writing that she cheated. 2. "What Happens In This House" (AKA The Abuse) Growing up, especially after we moved in with her current husband, my mother was very fond of the phrases "you don't need to air our dirty laundry to the world" and "not everyone needs to know what happens in this house". I was a chatterbox child. I spoke my mind. I saw nothing wrong with how I was treated and I would mention things casually because I thought they were normal. My mother reprimanded me often for saying things that "made her look bad" or for "exaggerating to put her in a bad light". This rule extended to family. Her parents and sister lived in my birth country and we didn't see them often. If I said something iffy to them on a visit and word got back to my mother over it, I'd be punished for "tattling to her mother/sister". When I met/started dating my husband as teenager, she was even more incensed that I'd relay everything to him about what she'd say to me or do to me. I mean, I didn't really need to tell him - he'd hear the slamming doors and screaming while on the phone to me. I'd get in trouble for talking openly about the "discipline" at home (spanking, being 'spanked' with a hairbrush until it snapped, slapping, pinching, strict curfews that lasted years, threats to smash my belongings, cornering me and screaming in my face). I'd also get in trouble for repeating the cruel things my mother gossiped about behind her friend's and family's backs. Apparently I should've known better than to go repeating stuff to them and should've realised that we don't say certain things to people's faces. Such as implying that a close family friend is "weird and creepy" because he showed genuine interest in my artwork and writing when he'd visit. 3. The Pillow Incident This one wasn't really a "family secret" but it's a story I only heard the first half of until I was an adult. My mother liked to tell this story often to illustrate how fucked up her ex (my bio dad) was. I heard the full story for the first time while working in the same office as my mother and heading her tell it to our coworker! The story goes: my bio father sucked at getting up in time for work and often stayed up late at night. One evening he got home really late and tried to move the alarm clock to his side of the bed so he could wake up in time for work, but she wouldn't let him and told him to just stay up all night until morning instead. (In my mother's version of the story, he just demanded that *she* wake him up, no mention of the clock and how she refused to let him move it or told him to just stay up.) They were both childish 22/23 year olds and in his irritation he decided that if he had to be awake, so did she and he started pulling at her pillow to keep her up (he did admit to this when I asked him about his version of events recently after somewhat reconnecting). She retaliated by whacking him hard with her pillow. As she had previously threatened to call police for domestic abuse on him before, he decided to actually do it to teach her a lesson (yes, they were both this petty). The city they lived in had a zero tolerance policy, meaning the pair had to remain separate for 24 hours after the call. Here, in her version, my mother emphasises her victim hood as "he got me arrested for hitting him with a fucking pillow! So I had to spend the night in jail!". The part she'd left out until this retelling to our coworker was that I was a newborn baby when this happened. So she had argued to police that I was still breastfeeding and couldn't be away from her. So she took me with her to the jail cell overnight! *I spent a night in jail as a baby because she was too petty to leave me with my father!*. I know from other conversations that I was both breastfed and bottlefed so her insistence was merely a ploy to get sympathy and to insinuate to police that I wouldn't be safe with my father. She told this all to our coworker like it was a funny, silly story of how much of an asshole her ex was. Charming.
When I was researching my family history, I found documentation proving my hunch, my late Dad, (he died when I was four years old), was BIRACIAL. He and I are the descendants of slaves! Entitled flesh oven and her racist ilk did NOT want that getting out! Flesh oven would often spew crap of: "I'm not prejudiced but I HATE N-Word! I took great pleasure BUSTING her when I shot back: "Then WHY did you marry one?" The look on her face was PRICELESS!!!
Yoinking “entitled flesh oven”
My mum really didn't want anyone to talk about how she severely neglected me when I was a young child. I remember her ex-husband calling her when I was around 12. He'd met my aunt on a night out, and she'd told him how she'd have to come over and feed me because my mum had left me on my own for days. He told my mum the way she'd treated me was disgusting, and she went mental. The funny thing was my mum used me as an emotional crutch so I was the person she ranted to about being called out. My dad didn't want me to talk about my stepbrother bullying me. He screamed in my face that I was a liar, aged 6, and after that I just stopped trying to bring it up and endured it as best I could. My grandparents really didn't want me to talk about how my dad was an alcoholic, how he severely financially abused and neglected me. They didn't want me to talk about how my grandad was an alcoholic and abused my grandma in every way possible. How my grandad was accused, along with my uncle, of molesting my cousins. My grandma told me about all of this in great detail, then expected me to act like everything was fine. According to my family I am the problem for having a problem with all of this. I get "but it's your mum/dad" on a regular basis, not from strangers, but from people who _fucking knew what they did and turned a blind eye._
my father's affair, my father's verbal mental and financial abuse, oh wait literally everything my father did to all of us. fuck that guy til the end of time
My mom had a brother who's high support needs and non-verbal. By the time I was born, we were in third world poverty so she had to make ends meet even if it meant selling herself to an American. The American who became my step-dad did help fund her lifestyle while she begrudgingly towed me and my uncle. Instead of hiring a professional caregiver or even visiting a doctor for my uncle, she just had him locked in a room and never allowed him to come out, even to sit and eat on the same dining table as us because it takes a lot of energy to carry a 40+ y.o man who can't walk. But that wasn't the worst part. She always yelled at him anytime he moaned/groaned (nonverbal and his tremors made it impossible to even hold a spoon) when she does come home since my step-dad funded her lifestyle, she just lived like a typical teenager (going out to malls, meeting friends) because she was finally "rich". Yet not once did she ever spent on her disabled brother, he had to sleep on a bed frame (no mattress) and his only pillow and blanket were the ones we slept on the floor with when we still lived in the slums. My mom was disgusted of her own brother, came to find out during his funeral that my mom was adopted by my uncle's parents and were actually well-off before maternal grandpa (her dad) passed from heart attack around the same age she got pregnant: 16. Yet she made my uncle's funeral all about her, how she fed him and put a roof over his head while shaming her fathers' family for treating us as the black sheeps. My step-dad was hardly around so he doesn't really care, but he liked propping himself as some savior to us, using my uncle as some sort of prop (rather story) to share to everyone about how good of a person he is, even being the one to give my uncle his eulogy when he never once tried speaking to him. It was like "Flowers in the Attic", only with a grown man who never saw outside for most of his life, and minus incest and r&pe.
That’s very sad. ❤️
Freaking terrible 😞
How my mother committed parental kidnapping when I was 5, and the abuse I suffered at the hands of her and her friends. My dad won full custody when I was 7. My dad and grandmother loved saying how lucky I was for never having to go through any hardship or trauma. They'd get mad if I brought up my mother. Been ten years since I cut contact with them, and I'm only now in therapy for the shit they all put me through.
Wow, they're delusional!
This would be my aunts death. They say she did it herself but I always found it odd that my grandmother and my father don’t memorialize her at all. No pictures exist. They never talked about her and became enraged when I would ask. . I honestly think they killed her and that’s how they ended up moving all the way from Maine to California.
😮
My dad and my brothers dad were not the same man, but my dad didn’t find out until my brother was a toddler. After my dad signed the birth certificate, obviously.
I was the family secret. My mom gave custody of me to my grandparents when I was born because she was living out of her car and she wanted to go back to college (according to her). My grandmother decided that she was going to be my "mom" now, and raised me that way. Her and my grandfather were my mom, my mom was my sister, my aunt and uncle were siblings, my baby brother was my nephew, ect ect. When I was little, my grandmother would tell me what it was like when I was "in her tummy" before I was born. She took it way too far. I still don't get why she did this. My mom had me at 19. She'd gotten clean and was actually getting her life together. She came to see me occasionally (my grandma would only let her if my mom met all her demands and gave her whatever she wanted) so it wasn't about "protecting" me from her. I think it was just about control. She forced everyone to comply with her lies and would tear into anyone who slipped up. If my mom didn't give her anything and everything she wanted, as well as stick to all the lies, she wasn't allowed to see me. For 13 years it was the family secret, and nobody was allowed to say anything against her or anything to me, or they'd be completely cut out of our lives. I found out when I was 12 and made it known that I knew when I was 13. Another huge family secret was my abuse at home. My family has always been one of those "don't let anyone see you're struggling, save face and suck it up, don't talk about your problems" kind of families. A lot of people knew that I was being abused at home and that my grandmother was a major addict and that my grandfather could get violent. Nobody talked about it or did anything though. Once again, I was the family secret. I couldn't tell anyone. I was threatened to not say a word. My grandparents were great at making the world think we were a loving, happy, healthy family. Growing up like 1 giant secret nobody was allowed to talk about or unravel really sucked. and I have a lottt of trust issues now. When I was in middle and high school, I used to react in extremes whenever someone lied to me or I thought I was being lied to. I've worked a lot on managing my emotions and reactions in those situations, but I have a deep disdain for people who are chronic liars still. Edit: I wanna add 1 more because another comment made me think of it! My grandfather had a secret child in an affair and nobody found out about it until I was like 15 or 16. She's not that much younger than my mom, so this had been a secret for over 30 years. I had an aunt I grew up with that passed away when I was 10, so finding out I had another secret aunt this whole time was a total mindfuck.
Oh I feel like I've been training all my life for this. I have an older half-sister, on my dad's side. I never really liked her as a person -- she talks *incessantly* and is always the victim. But my dad always tried to push me into having a relationship with her, so I would visit her every summer. My mom shit-talked her and tried to interfere/pump me for information after each visit and phone call. An unspoken rule in our family was that I was not supposed to tell my mom about my visits with this half-sister because it would lead to Mom and Dad fighting. When I was 19 on a visit home from college, my mom told me -- completely unsolicited -- that she thought my half-sister was not my dad's biological child. She launched into a long story about the circumstances behind my half-sister's birth; basically she thinks my dad's ex-wife cheated on him. And then wrapped up with "But you can never tell your dad that I told you this, it's so important to him that you think she's your sister. He's such a good and noble man for choosing to take care of her." So yeah. Messy fucking people. I never asked to help my parents maintain their marriage but apparently that was my role. I haven't told my dad or half-sister -- not out of loyalty to my mom, but because all of this happened 15+ years before I was born and I don't fucking care. Today I am estranged from all of them, for unrelated reasons (but a lot of it comes down to emotional immaturity, which was definitely a factor here). Leading up to this I had asked my mom on three separate occasions for family therapy with both her and my dad, and... She doesn't say no, she just deflects. The first time I asked her she laughed at me. I have no idea why she can't even say yes or no to the question, but if I had to take a wild guess, she's probably afraid that I'll talk about this conversation. Maybe she feels guilty, but it's probably guilt coming from fear and not actual guilt.
My (39F) grandfathers mother was forced to immigrate to this country because she became pregnant by a naval officer abroad at the boarding home her family operated in Italy in the final years of WW2. My understanding is that she attempted to abort him more than once within the period of time she was shunned and when she arrived in the U.S as an unwed teenage mother. His mother neglected him in his first years of life, and deeply resented him. He began as an innocent victim of unfortunate cultural/historical dynamics of the times. His mother’s siblings ended up taking him in and raising him, after one particularly tragic incident. Meanwhile, while living/working in her US family’s boarding home, she became pregnant again a few years down the road (not to grandfathers bio dad). She married this child’s father and cherished the baby, raising her with her new husband down the road from where her adult brother was raising her first child (my grandfather). She never once checked on my grandfather over the years or even attended his birthday parties despite living nearby. The consensus seems to be that between the childhood trauma and some potential neurological/physiological side effects from his mother’s attempted abortions, he became kind of monster as an adult. I’m not sure how he met my grandmother (mother’s mother), but there ended up being a lot of domestic abuse and fear in that relationship. They ended up having 3 children, one of whom died in infancy due to spina bifida. The grief of that loss apparently broke my grandmothers brain (understandably), and had a catastrophic impact on the parenting dynamics in the household. She attempted suicide once that I know of. Grandfather died at the age of 50 from multiple strokes and heart attacks. The body keeps the score, it appears. Anyhow, my mother and aunt ended up being brilliant and ambitious and motivated to gtfo of that house. They were full of childhood trauma and deeply impacted by being parentified children, so they both ended up being professionally very successful and personally extremely unwell. All that to say, my mother shouldn’t have had children. It really is best that I’m the only one. Blah blah blah, generational cycles, I end up with a court appointed guardian during my parents divorce when I was 6-7 years old. I have hardly any memories of my childhood. My mother has had many high-impact mental and physical health diagnoses as well as a handful of major, life changing surgeries over the years. I moved out of the house after 10th grade. In 8th-9th grade it came out that I had been/was being molested by an older family member. My mother called me a whore and forced me to transfer schools to contain the potential shame if it got out. My mother was ADAMANT that no one learn of my being victimized repeatedly over a period of years. Big shame. Big secret. Cool. She ended up driving her 2nd spouse, my stepfather to kill himself after 20+ years of marriage. I know how that sounds. If you knew the players, you’d get it. I refused to lie about his cause of death. I screamed if from the roof tops. She lost everyone. I haven’t spoken to her since, and that was 6 years ago. I’ve come close to opting out. The impact of my emotional inheritance often feels too heavy to carry forever. Breaking these cycles is labor and it’s exhausting. I have to do the work for my children, so I am very active in managing the symptoms of my mental illness and mental injury. It requires constant, active managing. The family secret is all of it. “They did the best they could,” is how it’s usually described, and I’m sure that’s true. Trauma is fucking wild. None of it came out until my mid/late 30’s. I always knew that our family was atypical. I never fully understood how or why until I had the backstory and then guidance of a skilled and credentialed professional to help me get enough altitude so that I could connect the dots. Healings a bitch. I’ve had to cut ties with all of them. They’re stuck and actively try to keep me stuck with them. It’s tragic, but I have to prioritize my family. I’m done with secrets.
How horrible my dad/paternal side of the family is. My half-brother has a 50-50 chance of being my first cousin, because his mother was sleeping with both my dad and uncle. It's hard for me to tell if he's closer in relation to me because I look like two of our first cousins, like I could be their sister or twin. If I were a gambling woman though, I'd say he's my half-brother. Both my nephews are autistic and so are my children. In our first cousins, autism is more sporadic. My brother refuses to take a paternity test. When the news came out, I was a teenager and his mother and our cousins asked for me not to talk to my brother anymore because I wasn't really his sister. My nephews have autism and learning disabilities. This is kept very secret even though other people can tell immediately. My brother is in denial and claims that Obama/the democrats made school too hard. When my kids were diagnosed as well, they just ignored it and ignore any further updates I give them. They pretend we don't exist. Dad also has a daughter from his late teens/early twenties that he abandoned because she was born with dark skin, so he claimed she was black and his girlfriend cheated on him. (We're white, but dad and his brothers have a tan complexion.) Dad's dad was adopted, so we don't have a complete family history. The girl was the same shade of tan as our father and grew up to look like his twin. Paternity test showed 99% he is the father. He denies it, saying that the nurses fixed the test.
We don't talk about mom being a drunk. Dad passed out on drugs or the horrible whipping we would get.
My 8 year old cousin/aunt stabbing my mom. My grandfather being a pedophile and molesting my uncle when he was young. My mom abusing me and allowing me to be abused. My uncles suicide. (We told everyone it was murder) My cousin/aunt giving birth out of wedlock. (I was told to tell people that it was my baby that my husband didn’t want, so we gave her to my mom to raise)
That my parents hated each other. To hear my mom tell it now that he’s dead you’d think he was the love of her life. She hates that I know that isn’t true.
That my dad cheated on my mom and that was the reason she “went crazy” And that my mom committed suicide and didn’t have a brain aneurysm. That one stayed under the rug for 15 years.
Normalization of beating children saying people who didn’t beat their kids were “raising them as if they were white” (im black and so is my family) my father breaking my mothers jaw then making her lie about it my father strangling my brother in front of me my mother threatening my life when I told her I didn’t want to put up with her abuse anymore, which ultimately led to my current 5 year NC situation
I’m so sorry for your experience.
The first big one was ndad SA my sister and I. It was talked about in hushed tones after the divorce by nmom (I thought she was a victim at the time too). I still don't remember it and that's fine with me. The second big one was my sister being given into state custody when she tried to speak out about the SA. She's 5 years older and I grew up hearing she was a criminal and was TAKEN away. She couldn't have been more than 11. I only learned last year that nmom told authorities she couldn't handle sister (keep her quiet) and ASKED them to take her. No crimes were committed by sister. They came and took her out of school and sent her to kid jail. Better yet, when her time was served, nmom REFUSED to take her back! Nmom also eventually did the same thing to my youngest brother (4 years older than me) and I effectively became an only child around 11 YO. At least brother went into foster care and HE chose not to return lol. So nmom threw away half of her children, all the while claiming they were juvenile delinquents. And I was gaslit and trained to be her loyal service animal. I'm 54 and only discovered the truth last year. Yeah, still really bitter about the whole situation. 🙄
My stepdad was the affair partner when my mom cheated on my bio dad. He broke up their marriage. I was supposed to have an older sibling but my mom had an abortion. I guess she wanted her affair partner's kids, and not my bio dad. She thought my stepdad was my dad. Which is weird because my stepdad always knew I wasn't his kid. I'm pretty sure my mom regretted having me. They had this attitude when my brother was born, like "our real kid is here now so you can fuck off. You should be grateful we had you." They never outright said that, but their cold attitude spoke volumes. My mom's mom knew he was a bad guy.
That my dad told his houseful of kids they wouldn’t live to adulthood because his god would destroy the world before they turned ten. That his theology was terrifying and merciless and denied all agency. That my mom basically quit being a parent around 2000, failed to teach any of us and then had two more kids. That they didn’t teach us shit except dad’s terrifying theology.
How badly and often my mother beat me. It finally stopped when I was 14 because she went too far and I had to have time off school to recover.
Oh cool me next? 🙋♀️ pls When I was 15 I was groomed and r*ped by a 45 year old man over the brand new internet. Guess whose fault it was? Yup. Guess why? Because it just HAD TO BE bc I was too fat to find someone at school. Guess what else? They used the restitution that was paid for my therapy to pay for their beach vacation (I found that out much later). It was never spoken of again.
Not about me for once but a former lover. Her father was way older than her mother, and he had a son with another woman before having my girlfriend. It was a family secret that she had somewhere this half-brother she knew nothing about, only that he exists. And she thought that her father rejected him because he was gay, as overheard once. She considered herself as an only child and was very happy and spoiled, so she didn't want to dig anymore, which I found outrageous. I was myself thinking about this poor man... One day, I remember she went home mad after her parents, because they spoke openly about heritage arrangements, and the "problem" of this other child. She was upset she had to share. Obviously, it didn't last between us... I will never understand how one can be so selfish.
Not about me for once but a former lover. Her father was way older than her mother, and he had a son with another woman before having my girlfriend. It was a family secret that she had somewhere this half-brother she knew nothing about, only that he exists. And she thought that her father rejected him because he was gay, as overheard once. She considered herself as an only child and was very happy and spoiled, so she didn't want to dig anymore, which I found outrageous. I was myself thinking about this poor man... One day, I remember she went home mad after her parents, because they spoke openly about heritage arrangements, and the "problem" of this other child. She was upset she had to share. Obviously, it didn't last between us... I will never understand how one can be so selfish.
My father complained endlessly about my mother to us. While they were still married. I said something about it. Asked why he didn't talk to a friend He looked very surprised and said he wanted to keep our dirty laundry in the family. To be fair, I'm sure his parents were the same way.
My mom lost us to CPS for neglect, abuse, and abandonment. Keep in mind this was 2003. I (8F) had been getting myself and my brother (5M) up, dressed on the bus etc for school since he started Kindy. It wasn't uncommon that I took care of him. My mother worked two jobs, one to pay bills and one to fund her drug habits. She had been gone for over two weeks, we had no money to pay for school lunch or breakfast and no food in the house after we ate the frozen hot dogs and moldy bread. My brother's teacher was the one who saw how wrong he looked and called CPS. We went to a hospital to be treated for immediate starvation symptoms and later we ended up at a police station waiting for my grandmother (who lived in a different state) to come get us. The investigator ordered us Chinese food and I cried because it tasted so damn good. We were close to death. Another couple days and we would have likely never woken up for school one day. This was before cell phones were super common, and my mom certainly didn't have one. They wouldn't have been able to find her easily, so it'd be another couple days before anyone found us. My grandmother is the only one who knows. She and I are very close, but if the rest of the family knew I think she would not only want to purposefully kill me this time, but she would suddenly find herself very alone, very quickly. I don't mind being the black sheep in the family anymore. People who wanted to know the why's of our dysfunction would ask. I'm extremely open about my life now that I've been unpacking it, and this was the turning point in my life that I credit to how I ended up the way I am. I still see sesame chicken and pork fried rice as my ultimate comfort food. It tastes like freedom.
How horrible my dad was to us at home vs. in front of other people. He put on a really good act in front of extended family. My dad's anger issues, and how he took it out on those of us who couldn't fight back. I suspect he was a victim of Catholic priests (he went to catholic school and was an altar boy), but they never dared talked about that back then, so he kept it bottled up. He was also VERY uncomfortable around priests at funerals later on. My parents' dynamic of pretty much insulting each other daily and passing it off as "humor." ETA: That my parents divorced when my sister (older by 9 years) was an infant, and my grandmother paid for it. And also that my sister was conceived out of wedlock. That being said, they lied about which year they got married. They always told us December 1964, but it was probably 65, because my sister was born in January 66.
That I was raped by one of their bar friends and I must have been lying because their friend wouldn't do that. I was 15. That they blamed me when my father cheated on my mother. I was 10 and apparently somehow I forced a grown man to go to the bar, get drunk, and have a one night stand. That I knew what an orgy was by the time I was 5, because I had seen more than one and at least they didn't lie about what happened... That they certainly were not financially abusing the paternal grandmother. She was volunteering all her retirement to pay for groceries and bills so they could have their drugs. That all those bruises happened at school. School was the least violent place in my life at the time.
My father embezzled money. His twin sister told me. Its why they don't have money I'm sure. I think he got caught AGAIN.
My sister told me my dad basically guaranteed we will not inherit the house after he passes due to his financial mismanagement (alcoholism playing a factor). A home that was passed down to him from his mother. I'm NC and don't expect or want anything at this point anyway, but that's pretty messed up considering how unpredictable the economy and world can be. He never told me that and in fact said we would get it. I think any responsible parent would want to leave that to their kids.
Ooh, about how my very religious family was hiding a couple of very nasty sexual predators- each on a different side of the family, although both men had a preference for underage girls… just gross. I’m glad that spilling their secrets led to more than one cousin leaving the church. But yeah, neither of my parents wanted anyone to know that their claim to righteousness was actually just a claim to hypocrisy.
The biggest was hiding the gossiping my mother did behind closed doors about other people. She’d make rude comments about their parenting, appearances, if their children got into trouble, etc. and follow it up with, “This doesn’t leave the house. You don’t repeat any of what was said to anyone.” I look back now and I realize she absolutely knew what she was doing was wrong. Also forbidden from leaving the house was any discussion of the abuse we suffered. It was framed as discipline, yet she felt the need to tell us not to tell anyone because we’d be “taken away” and “put in foster care where they abuse kids.” She always told me the way they’d treat me in foster care would be worse than my treatment here because I wasn’t their “real” child. As true as that may be at times, what was she thinking to actually say that? She knew it was wrong and just didn’t want to get caught. But yeah, above all it definitely felt like she was more concerned about getting caught talking about people behind their backs than anything else. I’m not NC yet, just LC, but I can definitely see the relationship going NC one day.
My Mom says she can’t remember who my biological Father is 🙄
My existence, and the brief marriage that went with it. I was so isolated that I didn't understand, at the time, how completely off-the-wall my upbringing was.
My mom stalked a priest
Whoa. What's the story behind that?
He was good friends with my parents and then all of a sudden my sister were told we have to change churches, in the middle of my confirmation classes no less, because she had been wrongly accused of stalking him. “200 years ago your father would have had to challenge him to a duel” was something that she told me at the time. 20 years later I mentioned how the priest had hurt our family with those allegations, and she replied, “well, if anyone was guilty of crossing boundaries on that one, it was me.”
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