1. “I grew up in an abusive home along with my older brother. The one thing our dad would do after a horrible episode was say he was leaving and never coming back because of ‘our shit’ — then he’d leave for hours or days at a time. He’d come back tearful, and my mom would later tell me that even at his worst she felt like they realistically couldn’t split up. She was afraid of him being our parent without her always there to make sure my brother and I were safe. But he left us when I was 14, and due to some BS, they didn’t divorce for years. My disabled mom and I were insanely poor, living off her minimum wage salary from the job she scrambled to get when my dad abruptly left us. He didn’t call me for over a year. I attempted suicide at age 17, and then he flew down the next day. He took me to lunch and said, ‘Okay, you have my attention’ (as if my entire life was about him in the end).”
“When I was 30, I randomly called my dad because I was upset (and for some reason I love him). I just had a fight with my partner of 10 years and wasn’t talking to my mom at the time, so I called him in a fit of weirdness.
I was loopy and said, ‘I wanna leave,’ and my dad said he’d come get me but if he did, that ‘damn well meant’ I couldn’t be with my partner anymore.
I said, ‘Dad, you haven’t always been very nice to me’ and he blew the fuck up. He screamed at me about how I’m the one who abandoned him, and would I have liked it if he’d killed himself instead? He threw the phone, I waited for 10 minutes, but the door in my heart closed.”
15. And: “I haven’t spoken to anyone in my family for five years. I came from a background of abuse, both physical as well as mental and emotional. My family put the ‘fun’ in dysfunctional. The final straw was around the holidays five years ago: I spent my weekend working on a gift for one of my brothers. He and his wife had a baby boy in late April, and for holiday cards they sent out pictures, so I had my mom get me pictures of my brother as a baby and convinced my sister-in-law to give me baby pictures of herself, too. I bought a frame that had three spots and put three pictures of their boy in the middle and three baby pictures of each of them on either side. When I gave my brother the gift, he was mad because we agreed at Thanksgiving that we weren’t doing gifts that year. Later, he and my other brother pointed and laughed at me, calling me spoiled because I’m the youngest child.”
“I didn’t say anything at the moment, but the next day, I called my mom and told her I was upset. She said it was my fault because I was jealous of him. After that, I did not call any of my siblings or my mom because I wanted to see if they would bother to contact me.
The only times I heard from them over the course of a year were my birthday, to help clean my mom’s house, and to make plans for the holidays. I decided if they couldn’t pick up the damn phone once to see how I was doing, I didn’t need to be a part of that.”
