I do not speak with my mother, nor my biological father, plus one of my sisters.
My mom had six kids, and has repeatedly told us that when we turn 18 we do not need a mother any longer. Guess she meant it, at least for my older sister and I. We are no longer a part of her family, and she preferrs that we not speak to our younger sibs, to avoid influencing them.
I have a son that my mother does not even know about, and it looks likely that she never will. Even if I did call and tell her, she would not be pleased, nor would she want or love him as her grandson, simply because he is mine. Sad sad woman she is.
My father I have spoken to on the phone and exchanged letters with a few times, but nothing in the last 4 years or so. Other than that, we have never met, and he is not a part of my life.
My stepmother and I don’t talk. She invited me to move into her home, so I did. I did not have a bed to sleep on or any furniture for the first 6 months that I lived there. She and my father spent every single weekend vacationing at the cottage, despite promises to help me move my things (I would have done it myself but I have no vehicle and renting a truck is beyond my means). They never invited me to come to the cottage with them.
As soon as I got a job that required spending 12 or more hours a day out of the house, she resented me not doing the same amount of chores that I had done when I was home all day.
When I accidentally left my personal belongings in a little-used part of the house (for about 6 hours), she threw them in the garbage because she didn’t like them.
Every time she saw me, she would make derogatory comments. The last time I saw her, she called me “ridiculous”.
I will not speak to her until I get a letter of apology from her. She behaved abominably, and terrorized me constantly. I made every effort I could to keep my belongings in my room, leave the common areas (kitchen, bathroom, etc.) exactly the way I found them, and replace out of my own pocket food that I ate and household items that I used.
She’s a total bitch. I don’t know how much longer I could have kept on living in that basement. For the last three months I was there I was so scared I would bathe myself in the laundry tub, because I didn’t want to risk seeing her in the upstairs hallway by the bathroom. I also stopped eating their food altogether.
This is such as sad thread. I have a brother that has cut most contact with the family. We might hear from him once a year. He says he loves us, but I sure don’t feel it.
I dunno if it’s a completely sad thread or not. The pain that people have inflicted on others is sad, but when I read about people making choices as to who they allow in their lives, well that makes me happy for them, that they’ve said NO to people who are destructive. I think it’s making that decision that’s so tough - when is it too much?
I was gonna write about my crazy mom, who’s an amazing mixed bag of kind, caring, funny, smart qualities and genuinely destructive and cruel behavior (including suicide attempts) - but we’re “on” right now, so I’ll save that rant for our next “off” spell.
However I don’t speak to my mother-in-law if I can help it, and apparently she’s not speaking to me or her son, either, since she just blew off his birthday yesterday. This despite the fact that we rescued her sorry ass twice in the last 6 years, once after she was released from the mental hospital following a breakdown and had no place to go, the second time after the friend on whom she’d been freeloading kicked her out. In both cases we provided transportation, housing, clothes and food, and saw to it that she got medical care. We get her propped up, but she won’t go any further on her own.
It would be easier to feel pity for her nutty behavior if she wasn’t such a vile person - when she gets mad at us, she sends back the gifts we’ve given, some recent and some from 15 years ago. She has nothing pleasant to say about anyone and in fact despises the human race (I keep hoping she’ll go be an environmental terrorist and live in one of those threatened redwoods for a while; good chance she’d fall out, but at least that would accomplish something). And then there was the time she was living in her truck, with two cats - this after she abandoned a paid-for house in order to live in the Grand Canyon.
The homeless program she’s in now gives her nice subsidized housing but she won’t deal w/her problems so they’ve threatened to kick her out. She appealed that on the grounds of “I should have just stayed out West and died.”
