Ask Lemmy

My father controlling me up to the age of 18, and preventing me from doing anything I wanted at home or at school (it was a prison, not the regular "school is boring"). The result is that I did nothing at school because I had anxiety 24 hours a day.

When I became an adult, I didn't knew what money or taxes were, I didn't knew that I had to take showers (because homework is more important), and I didn't knew how to use toilet paper. I used to take a bath once every two weeks because why not instead of taking daily showers. It took me 10 years to learn basic stuff like cooking or washing my ass.

Now that he's old and dying, he wants me to listen to his advice and help him with his phone and computer. I don't answer to such demands. And I'm pretty sure that when he dies, I'll only be sad for my mother, not him.

Choosing to invite my Jan 6er uncle to family events knowing I would never break break with an insurrectionist traitor.

First, I stopped attending family events. Eventually went no contact. Now my happiest recent memory of my mom is when my daughter couldn't remember her name.

Despite countless requests to not, they sent me to a parochial school where I was physically and sexually abused.

During covid my dad would not wear a mask willingly.

It shattered my perception of him, that probably will not ever go back to what it was.

I'm gay but like, the kind that almost got murdered in the 90s for coming out in a rural high school (I know Judy Shepard well). Fast forward to my mom telling me she's conservative in every way "except she belongs to the log cabin republicans" and I just lost it. "God gave you a gay kid so you could realize everything else they're saying is a lie, too, but you're too stupid to get that."

And that's when I suddenly realized she had been outright abusive and manipulative my whole life, and it was just this idea of a perfect mom that clouded my vision on it. She weaponized her kids against our dad, his family, anyone she didn't like. Because she was too much of a victim to fight her own fights. Emotional incest. Lots of therapy fodder.

Does it count if it's the parent of my kid? When our daughter was around 1yo my ex-wife got mad at her for being too selfish. I found her pouting not wanting anything to do with our 1yo because she was "not nice to her". That really opened my eyes to her personality.

Sent me a registered letter requesting I reply in kind and explain why he should keep talking to me.

20 years later he had no regrets, saw nothing wrong with what he said and did. Thinks we should carry on from where left off. He is also now disappointed with me because I never told him I have another kid. He wanted nothing to do with my other two but I should run around seeking his approval.

It wasn't just one big thing (although there were plenty of those), it was death by 1000 cuts. In the end it was something relatively small. I asked her to remove me from her regular right-wing email blasts and she refused to do so. What kind of asshole refuses to do something so small for a complete stranger, much less a family member? A malignant narcissist asshole.

If you haven't read up on narcissistic family systems there's a lot of good content out there. Here's a short article.

My mom poured bleach into the enclosures of my brother's pet tarantulas when she was kicking him out over laundry or something.

He's a better person than i cause he still cares about her

• entering my flat multiple times without my consent/knowledge and not leaving when asked to (thanks for the 3h meltdown where I was completly locked inside my brain and couldnt do anything but repeat a few words over and over and rock back and forth on the couch, really liked that one)

• ignoring obvious signs of mental/neurological issues in their child (because somehow children cant have those??)

• treating our relationship as something transactional

• forcing me to do activities i really dont want to, trying to argue away my fears and thinking they "won" after i shut up

I might talk to them again if they write a letter apologizing for atleast something. I havent told them this and i realise that its kind of unfair to set a condition that the other party doesnt know about, but if they dont come to this conclusion themselves then it doesnt feel genuine to me. It really sucks because I have no other people to rely on (emotional and material) but it also kind of was like that before I stopped talking to them, because every favour needs to be repaid or might be used in an argument against me and every fear and concern is argued away.

edit: oh and i realise that some of this is my fault because i really am sometimes difficult to deal with and very stubborn and i try to take responsibility, but at the same time it often feels like I have to work with both of my hands tied behind my back and I wasnt given the tools as a child to do better.

She got drunk and was crying about her regret about not aborting me. She came from a larger family and wanted more kids than she ended up having, but my dad's personal limit was 2-3 kids — and kid number three was only to try for a daughter if kid number 2 ended up being another boy. Me being a girl meant that she could only have two kids, and the fact that I was pretty fucked up means that she felt like she'd "wasted" a kid on me, so to speak

I don't blame my mum for having these thoughts, as awful as they may be. At the time, I had not long since been diagnosed with autism, and my mental health was pretty awful too, which must've been a lot of stress for a parent to handle. What I do blame her for is being deeply depressed and having her teenage daughter be her primary (and basically only) emotional outlet.

Whilst I am theoretically open to having a relationship with her in future, if she ever got sober (though that seems unlikely I'd learn of her being sober, as I went No Contact with her years ago), I'll never be able to forget how much she hurt me. She wasn't the root cause of my mental health problems, but she certainly made them a hell of a lot worse. And given that she never remembered the stuff she said when she was this drunk, I'll never get the closure of a genuine apology.

What's especially tragic about my mum is that she's actually pretty well adjusted, considering the awful childhood she had. The main thing she wanted from life was to be a mum, and to do a better job than her own mum had. I do think she achieved that, and there are so many things that I feel appreciative of her for. Unfortunately, no amount of good can make up for the hurt that she caused when she'd get drunk and pile her grief onto me. Most of the time her drunken tears were far less hurtful, but it's still a heavy burden to put on an already struggling teenager.

It's a shame, because I think she could've been an incredible parent if she'd been able to get therapy in the few years after she moved out but before she fell pregnant.

Cheated on my mom with a vile woman who had vile children (most much older than me) Let her push my sister and I around and eventually away. Stood there and did nothing while her entire family belittled and emotionally abused my sister on a near daily basis and had the balls to ask us why we don't reach out to him. There is a lot but that's the tldr.

My father definitelty had narcissistic personality disorder, untreated of course because his culture downplays any sort of emotional introspection. He cheated on my mom and tried to justify it by claiming she wasn't satisfying his sexual needs, when in reality she was medically compromised, and couldn't physically reciprocate those needs all the time.

Not to say my mother was a saint, cause she had her own issues of emotional detachment at times where she could be comforting most of the time but cold if you said the wrong thing to her, to the point where she beat me one time because I claimed offhandedly to my sister that "mom hates me". She and my dad still used corporal punishment to keep us and our cousins in line.

But I still respected her more than my father cause she helped not only her family members, but my dad's family members as well, allowing his brother to stay with us for a while as he traveled to the US. She even helped my dad write his own dissertation while she was raising me and my sister. Not to mention she hosted both her parents and took care of them and helped them find jobs.

But my father decided to be one of the most depsicable human beings I know personally because when my grandfather on my mom's side died and we all traveled out of the country to arrange, organize and attend his funeral, he not only brought the woman he was fucking into the house, they apparently had sex all over the house, leaving used condoms in several spots, they slept in my mother's bed, and he took her to various tourist spots that my mom practically had to drag him to. And it gets worse: He used the excuse of attending the graduation of his daughter from his previous marriage to get out of attending my grandfather's funeral, and of course, he didn't go to that event either despite my half-sister mailing him an invite.

And that's not even getting into the shit he did before he met my mom.

Yes, it gets much talk in therapy.

I was broke and hungry in college. My mother had already told me not to ask her for money, but I called anyway, hoping maybe my gran could help. My mother screamed at me and hung up.

I didn't take action on this for another thirty years.

Showed me his dick multiple times.

Mine has turned every conversation into a political fight and now refuses to speak with me unless I accept their prejudices and medical quackery.

My mom and dad divorced soon after I was born because my mom had cheated on my dad and gotten pregnant with my little sister from her first husband. So I have the privilege of having an older brother and a younger sister that have the same dad and mom and me in the middle with a different dad and a different skin color.

Life was what it was, but then my dad, who was a huge Trump supporter and refused to mask up, got the 'rona and died from it. To this day I have no idea why my dad was a Trump supporter, Trump stood for everything that he personally hated, but for some reason just the delulu had gotten a hold of him.

His wife, my stepmom, put an obituary paper out and named my older brother and me but left my bastard younger sister off of it because my older brother had realized his dad was a piece of shit and asked my dad to be his dad in his place, which my dad agreed to while my younger sister had explicitly told my dad to forget that she exists, to fuck off, and to never speak to her again, to which my dad said, okay.

My mom called me up to bitch me out that my little sister was not included on my dad's death notice, and in the middle of bitching me out, told me she wishes she had divorced my dad sooner, and even though she didn't say it, she was implying that she wished she had divorced him before she had gotten pregnant with me.

I called her a cunt and blocked her completely for three and a half years, unblocked her to chew her out when I saw that even though I had her block she was sending me links to TikToks which I don't use TikTok to show me videos that say "I don't know what to say to you".

I am finally reaching the point where I can be rationally angry instead of irrationally angry when I think about it.

This is not the first time I've cut my mom out of my life. The first time was when I was 17 and I chose to be homeless for years rather than to enable her to enable her abusive husband to abuse me.

The only reason I ever opened the door again and allowed her back into my life was because my dad pleaded with me to do so.

So when she cursed his dead body, and implied that the child that she had with him should never have been born, despite the only reason she was in a position to do that was because the dead man had vouched for her, out of love, was fucking a bridge too far.

And I also have blocked my sister. She should be fucking ecstatic that my dad did precisely what she asked him to do.

My mother returned to Canada to visit her mother who was slowly dying of ALS. (Where I was born. We had moved to my fathers home country when I was 10, to see his side of the family and experience more of the world)

During her whole absence, my father cheated on her with various women, even taking me on a couple of his dates. When she got back and found out, she decided to leave permanently.

I (12m) was given the option of staying with either. I chose to go with her.

In the last week before I was to leave; he said he wanted to spend time with me and took me out to a couple 'fun tourist attractions'. A jet boat ride, a zipline, some random park. Each of these, he brought one of his girlfriends that he'd been cheating with (not the same one each time). We also went to at least one of their houses, as well as his weed dealers hidden under-house grow-op/party room thing. More focused on his dates than actually spending any time with me. Avoiding time with me had been a common theme throughout our lives/relationship.

I later learned he'd abused my older step-sister when she was much younger...

I've deliberately not spoken to him since. ~15 years later I sent him a couple old family videos I'd digitised (with my sister censored out of them), of when I was born and a few of the years immediately after. Mostly as a reminder of what he threw in the trash.

From what I've heard, he ended up homeless and jobless for quite a while and now lives with his mother.

boy that is a can of worms. my mom sorta spoiled the relationship with all her kids. Whats funny is she is really not that bad. If you have distance from her. My father in law was kinda the same and early on my wife and I bonded on how our parents were. Essentially there is a type of person where if they have any type of authority they are aweful but if you are completely out of their control then they are not all that bad.

My mom was similar. The worst thing that happened was I was assaulted by a stranger at age 4, I happily told her about it as part of my day, I had no idea anything bad happened because he told me he was a doctor. She understandibly lost her shit and that scared me, she started calling me stupid and how could I let this happen and on and on. As an autistic kid obsessed with being good, it completely shattered me. I was never able to trust her with anything ever again. One traumatic event broke the relationship in that way for good. Her narcissistic bullshit, like what you've described, is what broke the rest of it as well as gave me a good case of cPTSD.

Mine posted a hangman's noose on Facebook with reference to my old place of work. Basically calling for the lynching of everyone inside and all people like us.

There was a lot of other stuff besides but that was when I knew for sure the person I used to know was gone.