I'm only sixteen, and I've had to put up with things that have made my therapist cringe when they hear it, but I'll give you the short version. Aunt gets breast cancer, gets better, goes home, gets it again, now on deathbed. Her husband got shot and killed in Brazil while doing volunteer work. Other aunt horribly abused by husband, relies on him financially, so can't leave him. Their kids are really messed up because of it; one is a dropout (well, they all are) who is now heavily involved with drugs. It's really sad, because he used to have big dreams. One is in his mid-twenties and has two children and no wife. Another of my cousins has had two failed marriages, and is currently dating some guy three times her age. Their last child is mentally sick, but fortunately not in a horribly bad way. My grandma is really sick, but nobody knows with what, and my grandpa is far too senile to care for her. You may think I'm far-removed from these issues, but I'm the youngest child in the family, so I get a lot of the attention, even though I don't want it. This forces me to be really closely involved in the family politics and the issues that they cause. The worst things, though, are directly affecting me.
My parents divorced when I was young. I currently live with my dad, but he is working four jobs just to barely scrape by. I myself work two jobs, both of which I started soon after turning sixteen. I do it so that my dad doesn't have to waste the bill money he earned on me. My mom, on the other hand, is the epitome of cruel. She is incredibly fundamentalist methodist, so she had incredibly strict rules for me when I lived with her; such as timing my showers to make sure I don't waste water (she made me pay part of her water bill when I was eight), swift punishment for anything I do that is "wrong" (she once grounded me for a month when I couldn't remember the exact date on which I took some english test in middle school), and I had objects thrown at me by her when she was angry about something I did. My dad finally got me away from her when he could afford it and after I failed at a suicide attempt (I'm no longer suicidal, so don't worry).
But after a huge storm of things that she did to me right before I left her for good, she denied that I was her family, and she called my, my dad, her own parents, her sister (abused aunt), my dad's family (sick grandma, aunt with cancer) horrible, awful things, eventually culminating in her calling me a "worthless piece of garbage" that she "never loved" and "was never her son" and things like that. I don't know how many of you have dealt with things like this before, but it took me a long time to get over the mental anguish of having you own mother, regardless of what she's done in the past, deny you as a human being. Mental pain is so much more greater than physical. It's been two years, and I'm not nearly over this, but at least I can start to repair my broken mentality. Thanks for actually reading this, it feels really nice to get this off my chest and tell someone else about it. Sorry for the wall of text.
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