I realized every time my mom worked in the evenings it was always a great day for me.

Also we were brought up Catholic, BUT also to love accept queer and trans people (and I’m 50 so back then trans people weren’t really part of the conversation hardly at all), but also my brother is gay, and when it became clear that was a fact, my mother launched an underground campaign to try and pretend he wasn’t, including inviting a beard date for him to go with on my destination wedding.

Finally realized how absolutely nasty and manipulative she is, and how she just regards me as a reflection of her. I can’t be around her because I feel like she’s constantly scrutinizing every inch of me and criticizing my appearance, because that’s what she values and nothing else, and how she likes to drop bombs into the middle of family gatherings just to get negative attention, like deciding to make fun of my father over a chubby girl he had dated 40 years before, which my spouse honestly came close to clocking her in the teeth for.

Borderlines are nasty the older and more entrenched and untreated they are, they get really malignant behaviour. Just last fall my aunt who she is mostly estranged from had surgery for bowel cancer, which she didn’t share with her since she drinks drama like it’s her poisonous life blood, and yet despite this she got her friend who works in the OR to tell her the date and time, showed up at the last minute while she was waiting on a stretcher to go in for surgery, shoved her face in my aunt’s face and yelled “HI!”, and immediately my aunt was rolled down to the OR, and never visited or did anything else. The whole point was to let my aunt know she KNEW and that my aunt couldn’t keep it from her. She violated her confidentiality and I’m pursuing it through the hospital privacy office…

I saw two of my friends joking with their father and realised they weren’t afraid of him.

Remember my dad spilling strong acid ruining the living room which I later found out was intended for my mom.

To this day I can’t help but cringe when people equate middle eastern issues to western issues. This shit is not even the same planet - the whole region is like a century behind at least despite all the money and development and is fundamentally a failed culture.

Finding the Trump coins while helping her move. She’s asking me for money after sending hers to a racist conman.

That, and teaching my young daughter the N-word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was bemoaning the lack of action on global warming, and how all of civilization was at risk if we didn’t take action now, and my boomer mom replied,

“Why should I care? I’ll be dead by then!” 😞

When it was a younger sibling getting the beatings. When it was targeted a me, I always justified it thinking I must have done something to deserve it. But watching the attention turn to the younger, I realized there was nothing us kids could do to be “good enough”.

When I got to know my gf’s mom and realized I didn’t have massive levels of stress and anxiety around her like I do with my mom.

Father was a systematically abusive pig.

Mother allowed it to happen for far too long.

I cut contact after finding out the latter was on the mailing list for the Nazi Regime of America. (Republicans, Students for ‘Life’ etc.)

My father worked as an environmental engineer for an oil company cleaning up oil spills and messes. He wanted a certain quality of life, so we only ever lived in southern or messed up states. Texas, Missouri and 7 years in Utah. Going to elementary school with the racist bigot Mormons was hell. Long story short he is a Neo-Liberal Boomer that helped the oil industry with his efficiency and diligence cover up issues and increase profits. A money hawk and penny-pincher, who wouldn’t move to blue states because of higher prices, believing in American Exceptionalism, and has zero regrets working for a company that helped destroy the world. I admit he’s not the worst by a long shot. But I would have preferred being broke and poor in another country and him not working for mankind’s enemies.

When I was in college and everyone was talking about where they grew up, and I realized I only remembered bits and pieces of growing up, and those were always when my parents weren’t around. Some online searching later and a talk with a therapist, and I don’t talk with my parents anymore. It’s better that way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The constant and direct praise of fascism. His words showing me his fascist keychain “I am a fascist”.

Don’t worry he is suffering, I’m destroying his life piece by piece. :)

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

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

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