I think I’ve hinted around about this story before, but I’ve never told it on SDMB. I’ve hardly ever told it IRL. But something in another thread brought it to mind. Mainly it’s about a standoff between my parents when I was in middle school, that I got the brunt of. But I think some background is necessary: three things that happened when I was in the third grade.
First, my dad gave me a task to do, that in retrospect he probably knew was beyond me. Naturally, I screwed it up, and got slapped repeatedly, in the head, with the hand that had a ring on it, while he roared with laughter. Then, the Christmas cookies. I misinterpreted the recipe, that’s all. It said, “Add the milk a little at a time,” and I thought that meant a tablespoon at a time. Also, it wasn’t ruined by any means; mom added the rest of the milk and the dough came together just fine. But that was in the midst of a screaming, shaming lecture, and when she started to wind down, she gave me an essay on morality to read. How to know when you’re doing the right thing. Okay…I misread a cookie recipe. I still don’t think that meant I was ripe for corruption.
Then the dollhouse I was building from a kit. I didn’t want wallpaper. My mom assumed I did. I didn’t want her to wheedle me into it, so I carried on with the project sans wallpaper. I figured once I got the walls put together, it would be too late, and she’d have to accept it. Unfortunately, it was when I got the walls put together that she first noticed the lack of wallpaper. And there was A Scene. In a very misguided attempt to calm her, I offered to put the wallpaper in, which worked out as well as you can imagine. I never finished the dollhouse, and this was seen as my epic fail.
Now skip ahead to when I’m 12/13 and in the seventh grade. Something goes wrong with the water heater. I think that’s what it was at first. So we don’t have hot water. Later, a lot of the time, the water was shut off entirely, and we couldn’t even flush the toilets. But the real problem is, my father refuses to do anything about this. Sound crazy? Well, what I didn’t know at the time was that first he was having an affair, then he had an affair baby. So that’s where his money was going (and his time). And he probably hoped if he let this problem fester, mom would initiate the divorce and he might not have to name his affair partner. I don’t know what my mom knew when, but I only found out when she told me, when I was 20.
My point is, though, it’s not like we were having a normal financial hardship, like being downsized or having a lot of medical bills, and we could have weathered it if we’d all pulled together. I promise you, I was not being a diva, expecting my parents to keep me in luxury while I lolled around buffing my nails. I was willing to fix the problem myself, but cripes, it was not a leaky faucet. I had no way to get to a hardware store on my own, I had very little money to buy what I might need, and this was the early '80s, so I could hardly google it, or pull up a video tutorial. Also, I never knew what the problem was, really. And remember what happened the other times when I made an error of judgment, let alone a mistake.
I did try to compensate, like boiling water to wash dishes in, but my mom blew up. This was supposed to be a strike, and I was interfering. I’m not kidding. She said to me, “Tell your father what your classmates are doing and saying to you, and he’ll feel sorry for you and fix the plumbing.” Oh, I told him. I also begged and pleaded and cried. I offered to give up my savings bonds to pay for the repairs. I threatened suicide. I threatened murder. Once I offered to suck his dick. Nothing made any difference. If he wasn’t laughing in my face, he was bellowing, “You’re gonna get NOTHING! Understand? NOTHING!”
And one day, there were no clean clothes, period. I told my mom, “If you don’t take me to the laundromat, I’m moving out.” I don’t know where I thought I was going to go, but she did take me to the laundromat. Now, to get there, we had to drive past a police station. On the way back, I wondered aloud, without looking at her, what would happen if I told the police what was happening at home. Without looking at me, my mom stated that if I ever even thought about getting police, or any outside authority, involved in our personal business, she would deny everything, and I would be one sorry spoiled brat.
And this was overall a very bad, dysfunctional, messed-up environment. At home, there was nothing but screaming and yelling, punctuated by frosty silence. At school I was bullied mercilessly, I was developing an eating disorder, and my grades were in the toilet. That last bit was the only thing my parents cared about. They threatened to have me committed if I didn’t pull my grades up. I said fine, since the mental hospital would have hot showers and laundry facilities. After a few rounds of that, they stopped making that threat. Of course: those places cost money.
So one day, I was taking a makeup test in Mrs. B’s classroom. After I handed in my paper, I asked if I could talk to her. Now, I don’t remember exactly what I told, but IIRC, she focused on my mom’s refusal to buy me any new clothes, even socks and underwear. Mrs. B was my parents’ age, maybe even a bit older, so she’d lived through both The Depression and The War. As such, she told me, probably meaning to be reassuring, about what it was like back then, we didn’t have this, we had to make do with that. And that would have been inspiring, if lack of hot water had been the only problem.
It was hard to explain this whole thing. It’s hard now. And since with Mrs. B, I approached her, she wasn’t trying to draw me out. I think she was primed to only listen for so long before going into the prepared speech about how what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. So I don’t think she quite grasped the fact that, unlike The Depression and The War, this was something my parents were doing on purpose, and that I was the only one in the school that it was happening to. Also, I could have done without the admonition “Don’t give your parents a hard time.”
Anyway, when I was in the eighth grade, and we were about to move, someone came in and fixed the plumbing. Too late to save my reputation/social life at school, of course. And I was supposed to move on, with no trust issues or any issues at all.
I’m putting this in the Pit just in case someone still doesn’t get it. Parents are not always right. Does anyone ever ask a victim of CSA, “Why did you just take it, why didn’t you tell someone, why didn’t you refuse to go down on your stepfather for lunch money?” You go along with it because they’re adults. They’re supposed to be looking out for you. They’re supposed to know best. There just aren’t many options for someone under sixteen. And, if it’s not outright beatings, it’s not sexual, and you’re not being held prisoner, who’s gonna believe that you really can’t live with it? Any other adult is likely to think that if a child/teen is unhappy, it’s because s/he’s being rebellious and disobedient, and once they come around to seeing it their parents’ way, or at least cooperating, they’ll realize how silly they were. No: sometimes it really is that bad.