UnforgivingAsh
New Here
Hello. Please, call me Ash.
I'm new to this, and I'm not quite sure where on the scale I fall or which thread to focus on because I have several issues that I can't quite place or understand.
In my personal experience, seeing my therapist does not help much because my memories are so fragmented, there isn't enough time in a session to address the whole story, and meds have only ever made me worse. Often I find the only way I find peace is by speaking with others who have experienced similar things and can relate instead of saying that I worry or obsess too much over things I cannot control.
I am only 23 but my problems stem from a full lifetime of problems which have been bottled and suppressed to the point where I no longer know what to work through or focus on. Despite the loss of memories, I've pieced together quite an extensive timeline of events so I apologize in advance that this post is quite long.
So I suppose I should start from the beginning. I don't remember a lot of things, and my grandmother often tries to reassure me that my childhood had happy moments too, she shows me pictures and tells me stories but I only ever get flashbacks of the negative. My grandparents took me in when I was 10 years old, under circumstances I will explain, and they were essentially my parents. My Mother and Grandfather both passed away when I was 18 and I often struggle because I don't have anyone to ask questions to truly understand where my problems started.
One of my earliest memories is of my step-father. My mother married him when I was two, she was only 20 as she was a young single mother, and they had a daughter shortly after (my sister, who I once hated but now am very close with). Their marriage lasted only three years, they were never divorced but were separated until the day my mother died.
My step-father was an emotionally abusive man. The first thing he ever taught me was not to ask questions, asking questions he didn't want to answer or he considered stupid always ended in me getting yelled at. And I don't just mean raised-voices, I mean thoroughly angry glutteral yelling, the sort that makes a young child cry. He would feed me things like fish eyeballs or beer because he thought my look of disgust was hilarious. I would spend the weekend with my grandparents, and when it was time to go home I would sob hysterically because I was afraid of him. I resented my sister for years because "Daddy didn't love me, but he treated her like an angel" and I had no idea at the time that he wasn't really my father. He treated my mother poorly and looking at pictures it was obvious she starved herself and worked very hard to make sure my sister and I could eat. Unfortunately this meant she survived on cigarettes and drank alcohol to dull the pain.
Eventually my mother had enough, she saw what he was doing to me and that was the last straw. She never thought much of herself, a man could do whatever they wanted with her but not with her children. With my grandparent's support she managed to leave him, they never divorced but she left. He demanded visiting rights with "his girls" and even took it to court to get those rights, until I was 6 years old and finally gathered the nerve to tell Mum that I didn't want to see him any more. He had a right to my sister, but not me, and in a sense I abandoned her because that's when he started mistreating her. He would punish her by dumping cold water on her to shut her up when she cried, and he would ignore her when she tried to talk to him.
Around this same time I met my real father. I was over the moon, I had a real dad who loved me! I had two more sisters and a brother! Life was great!
Little did I know that my father was an aggressive drunken jailbird and I would rarely see my other siblings. My father was and still is an incredibly charming person if you sit and talk with him, IF you can sit and talk with him. When he was around he was a good dad, but therein lies the problem... when he was around. He would disappear, he wouldn't call, and on his weekends to visit with me he often just wouldn't show up. It was only as I got older that I learned that most times when he didn't pick me up it was because he was serving time in jail. For driving drunk or without a license, for getting in to bar fights, destruction of property, possession of drugs and for domestic abuse, the list goes on.
From age 6 to 7 my mother lived with another boyfriend of hers, and I have only one memory of this time. My mother and this boyfriend had gotten in to a massive fight, so bad that my mother had hidden the knives in the laundry and I can't to this day say what really happened. I only remember a police officer coming in to the bedroom of my sister and I and telling us that we needed to go. They carried us out of the apartment in our nightgowns and blankets, the floor was covered with shattered glass and blood, and we were taken to a foster home for a week. I later found out that my mother had been admitted to a psychiatric unit for analysis and my Grandparents were the ones who tracked us down when she called them saying her kids had been taken away. We were not in foster care long, but the couple who took us in were very nice people. They clothed us and tried to make sure we were okay. The older gentleman taught me how to play chess because it helped me to focus, but mostly I spent my time reassuring my sister that everything would be okay. She had a stuffed dog, Wishbone from the tv show, and it had lost its nose so they helped her sew a button on as a new nose and it made her trust them.
After this we stayed with my grandparents for a short time, we went to school and we had friends and a normal life for about a year. During this time my mother was trying to get back on her feet. She had quit drinking, she had a full time job and was renting a house in the hopes that she could get her children back and have a normal life. All went well and she did regain custody of us, the first couple of months were great, it was girls night every night and she even tried taking us to church to do the 'right thing'. But then my own father came back in to the picture... he was out of jail and he was making promises to be a better man, my mother still loved him and dreamed of having a complete family so she took him in to help him get back on his feet.
This was one of her worst decisions ever. Shortly after he moved in with us the drinking started again with both of them. He would use my mother to pay for his alcohol, he even took out cash withdrawls at the grocery store so she wouldn't know he was stealing from her, and my mother being an addict just drank and didn't realize it was happening. Eventually they started fighting, almost every day, and I can distinctly recall one evening in particular. My sister, her friends and myself were sitting in the basement when we heard a loud thud from upstairs. I, being the oldest, went upstairs to investigate only to find my parents screaming and beating on eachother, my mother was thrown to the ground, she then got up and smashed a bottle over dad's head, they were both bruised and bloody. I don't remember what they were fighting about but dad noticed me and screamed at me to get back downstairs. I then had to go back down and explain to my sister's friends that it wasn't safe for them to leave yet. On another night shortly after they were fighting again, and all I can remember is sitting at the bannister upstairs holding my little sister and telling her everything would be okay while she cried and I held back tears for fear of scaring her. That Christmas was the same, and most weeks after as things got worse.
Ultimately we didn't even live with with Mum for a year before Children's Aid removed us from her custody again. This time though, we were separated. My grandparents had sold their house and were running a restaurant/resort in a small town 7 hours away in partnership with my aunt and uncle, they couldn't handle us both. My sister's grandparents from her dad's side were working full-time and didn't have the space for both of us either. I went with my grandparents and she went with hers. We saw each other maybe once or twice per year for the next 8 years, we didn't really get along so it was ultimately for the best, but when we were separated she screamed and cried for me because I was more of a mother to her than our Mum had been.
During my time with my grandparents things were okay, they did everything that they could to make up for everyone else's mistakes and they tried to make as much time for me as they could but it eventually became hard. Not one year after they took me in, my aunt and uncle abandoned us. They went in to this business with my grandparents but one morning we heard some commotion and went downstairs to find that there was a moving truck there. We didn't know why, Gran tried to ask my aunt (her daughter) what was going on but she simply turned her back and walked out the door, she abandoned her family without a word. We only heard from them when it was time to renew the business liquor license and they didn't want us to have it, they made it as hard as possible and we even had to shut down temporarily.
Another year passed, I attended a small school where I was in a class of 12 kids, most of which were cousins or had been friends since birth. It was a small town and as a result I was often the black sheep, I was pressured to steal alcohol from my grandparent's bar just to be accepted in to their group. I fell in with the "wrong crowd" because there was no other crowd to fall in with. They made me so depressed that I once considered suicide, I even mentioned it once and they egged me on, but ultimately I couldn't do that to my grandparents because they had already been through so much.
While I was living with them, my mother had gotten herself in to another bad relationship. This man was as old as my grandfather, scrawny as a beanpole, but he had money. He was the sort of man who couldn't function in the morning without a glass of wine, he would bring it to work in a sealed travel mug, and because of this my Mum stayed with him. He enabled her to indulge in her addictions, she could do whatever she wanted, but he had a history of domestic abuse and of course he eventually started hitting Mum. He would threaten to paint the walls with her cat who he despised and the alcohol made him unnaturally strong because there was no pain. One night they had gotten in to a fight, and from what I was told he had her in a headlock so she grabbed whatever was within reach on the coffee table and tried to beat him off with it. It was a broken paint scraper, it had a very sharp edge and because he was so thin it punctured right in to him. Mum said she thought he had just passed out from being drunk because there was no blood, but it turned out that he was dead. One of the punctures had done enough damage to stop his heart. My mother was originally charged with first degree murder, his blood alcohol level was so hogh that a man his size should have been unconscious, but he did have a history of alcoholism and abuse so the charges were eventually dropped to manslaughter. I was 13 years old when I was told that my mother had killed a man, I was the daughter of an alcoholic killer and an absent jailbird is what I thought at the time.
Fast forward three years, Mum had finished her sentence, she had completed AA and been to a therapist regularly and completed psych reviews. She even did schooling and got a degree in horticulture while she was in jail, we thought that she was finally going to have a future when she got out.
At first all went well, she was in a halfway house and they helped her to find a stable job gardening at a golf course nearby. She had friends who were there for her and she had met a decent man who seemed to care about her well-being. Until everything came crashing down... I was 17 at this point and we were on good terms. She had taken me to get my driver's license and we worked a small landscaping business together during the summer, all seemed great. I knew that her boyfriend smoked weed but it was never a problem, however I discovered that while he was doing this he had gotten her in to it... which led her straight back to the alcohol, weed waan't numbing enough.
I was visiting for a week when one night I found she had drank a whole bottle of wine. She didn't think she'd had enough, she said she wasn't drunk so she was going to go to the store for more. I knew rhis wasn't good so while she wasn't looking I took her keys. When she realized I took them she became furious, she grabbed me by the hand I held them in and twisted saying "I will break your fingers if you don't give me the keys little girl. I'm the mother here, you listen to me." and when I didn't give them up she twisted harder. My fingers didn't break but this is when she decided twisting wasn't enough, she grabbed me by the throat and she squeezed, she threatened me again and her boyfriend threw her off me but she had the keys... she was gone.
After this I immediately went back home, she called two days later sobbing and begging for forgiveness, she told me how much she loved me and that she was sorry for what she'd done but I couldn't trust her again. I couldn't talk to her after what she'd done to me, it wasn't until several months later at Christmas that I saw her again because my sister and grandparents asked me to as a gift to them, they wanted a family Christmas. I hugged her empty-hearted, I tried to smile, yet couldn't help but notice the glass of wine on the table. She still hadn't given it up even after all of that.
Some more time passes, now I'm 18 years old and it's Mother's day. Neither my sister or I had called her. She was still speaking to Gran so they had a video chat but Mum never heard from her children... the next day she had a few drinks and it wasn't enough so she drove to a bar where they turned her away for being drunk. She left in a hurry before the cops could come arrest her, she didn't even buckle her seatbelt, and just a few kilometers down the road she crashed in to a ditch, there were no others involved. She was propelled through the windshield and was dead on site, she never stood a chance. We recieved a call from her boyfriend at 1 in the morning sobbing, Mum was dead.
That following December Grandad also died. The only man in my life who had ever been there for me, my father figure and one of very few people I could rely on. He had multiple myeloma, a rare form of cancer that infects every part of the body, and I spent two weeks sitting by his bedside with my Gran watching him die. I skipped my college classes to be there and took an extra week following his death to help Gran sign cremation papers. I returned to classes just in time for exams and somehow still managed to pass, but I hadn't cried yet.
Now it's just me and Gran, she was very depressed and even had her own stint at drinking, but when she did she really only sat and watched her Cliff Richard vhs and cried herself to sleep. This strong woman who always did everything she could to help had crumbled... her husband was dead, her two youngest children were dead (son died in '96 from cancer) and her oldest daughter had abandoned us. I was all she had left, my sister lived far away and we had been disconnected for so long.
Fast forward another year and now I'M the one in an emotionally abusive relationship. The man I was with had a horrible temper, and I always said "It's fine, he never directs it at me." I made all the usual excuses that women do. It wasn't until I had graduated college and ended up on disability for anxiety and depression that I started to realize what was happening. Then one Christmas Eve my sister is visiting, she's 7l6 mo ths pregnant so I want to keep her away from too much stress. BF starts to become a problem at home so we go for a drive, the roads are wet and it's foggy and we ultimately end up in a car accident. The first one I had ever been in, my car was sideways in a ditch, I immediately got my sister out and we called 911. She checked out fine, baby was fine, neither of us had whiplash, I had a cut on my finger from broken glass. I had to call him to come and pick us up from the station though, and he was high as a kite. He never asked if we were okay, there was a fight in the car on our way home and when we made it back he ripped right in to me for crashing MY car. He then turned on my sister, started screaming at her, called her a disgusting wh*** and at this point I took her away to call and get her a ride home. Through this relationship I smoked weed to keep myself calm and essentially shove my head in the sand.
When my sister had her daughter I did my detox, I stayed with her for three weeks. When she went in to labour I coached her through it because it went so fast her planned coach didn't make it. I cut the umbilical cord and it was the most amazing (and in a way disgusting) thing I had ever experienced. I realized then that I couldn't smoke any more because it was a crutch and I needed to get the heck away from my bad relationship if I ever hoped to have a future.
My next relationship I thought was good, he was a decent guy and he seemed to care, but at the end of 1 year he had no commitment and it turned out that all I was to him was a sex toy. Someone to play with on the weekends and have on his arm like a trophy when we went to car shows. The moment I needed his help he was gone, I ended up in crippling debt trying to keep myself afloat. I felt stupid for never realizing that I was being used, it was right in front of me.
NOW I am in a healthy relationship with a wonderfully patient and understanding man who simply hugs me when I'm having a panic attack and does what he can to help. I have an awesome roomate who pulls his weight and also puts up with my mood swings. These two are my best friends and my support.
I have an incredibly strong bond with my little sister now, her daughter is almost 2 and I'm incredibly proud of her for doing it all on her own to keep her daughter from harm. That little girl and her mom are the brightest lights in my life.
Despite all of this and my current stability, I still can't "get over" the things that have happened. I've tried for a long time to forgive people for their actions and I can't, I still keep dwelling on them. I have a deep-rooted fear of yelling and conflict, I end up in tears even if it's someone across the room yelling at someone else and it doesn't involve me. I am psycially incapable of yelling or screaming, my voice just cuts out. I'm terrified because I'm starting to understand how my mother ended up where she is and how easy it could have been, or could be, me now that I'm older. I can't drink or smoke weed casually, I have an addictive personality and I cling to anything that makes me feel 'something' so I've learned the hard way not to even try, but I see how easy it is to fall. I'm terrified of ever having my own children because the last thing in the world I want is to cause a child to experience anything like I did, and I don't feel like I'm strong enough to do that. I'm constantly afraid that I'm standing on the line between success and failure and one simple step could send me tumbling down the same path. A simple argument has, at times, landed me in the hospital for an anxiety attack.
I don't really know what to make of my own experiences, there's a lot of hurt and resentment and I don't know how to let it all go. I know there are good memories in there somewhere, but I can't find them. I apologize for the novel, but I 100% appreciate anyone who can sit and read it all.
I'm new to this, and I'm not quite sure where on the scale I fall or which thread to focus on because I have several issues that I can't quite place or understand.
In my personal experience, seeing my therapist does not help much because my memories are so fragmented, there isn't enough time in a session to address the whole story, and meds have only ever made me worse. Often I find the only way I find peace is by speaking with others who have experienced similar things and can relate instead of saying that I worry or obsess too much over things I cannot control.
I am only 23 but my problems stem from a full lifetime of problems which have been bottled and suppressed to the point where I no longer know what to work through or focus on. Despite the loss of memories, I've pieced together quite an extensive timeline of events so I apologize in advance that this post is quite long.
So I suppose I should start from the beginning. I don't remember a lot of things, and my grandmother often tries to reassure me that my childhood had happy moments too, she shows me pictures and tells me stories but I only ever get flashbacks of the negative. My grandparents took me in when I was 10 years old, under circumstances I will explain, and they were essentially my parents. My Mother and Grandfather both passed away when I was 18 and I often struggle because I don't have anyone to ask questions to truly understand where my problems started.
One of my earliest memories is of my step-father. My mother married him when I was two, she was only 20 as she was a young single mother, and they had a daughter shortly after (my sister, who I once hated but now am very close with). Their marriage lasted only three years, they were never divorced but were separated until the day my mother died.
My step-father was an emotionally abusive man. The first thing he ever taught me was not to ask questions, asking questions he didn't want to answer or he considered stupid always ended in me getting yelled at. And I don't just mean raised-voices, I mean thoroughly angry glutteral yelling, the sort that makes a young child cry. He would feed me things like fish eyeballs or beer because he thought my look of disgust was hilarious. I would spend the weekend with my grandparents, and when it was time to go home I would sob hysterically because I was afraid of him. I resented my sister for years because "Daddy didn't love me, but he treated her like an angel" and I had no idea at the time that he wasn't really my father. He treated my mother poorly and looking at pictures it was obvious she starved herself and worked very hard to make sure my sister and I could eat. Unfortunately this meant she survived on cigarettes and drank alcohol to dull the pain.
Eventually my mother had enough, she saw what he was doing to me and that was the last straw. She never thought much of herself, a man could do whatever they wanted with her but not with her children. With my grandparent's support she managed to leave him, they never divorced but she left. He demanded visiting rights with "his girls" and even took it to court to get those rights, until I was 6 years old and finally gathered the nerve to tell Mum that I didn't want to see him any more. He had a right to my sister, but not me, and in a sense I abandoned her because that's when he started mistreating her. He would punish her by dumping cold water on her to shut her up when she cried, and he would ignore her when she tried to talk to him.
Around this same time I met my real father. I was over the moon, I had a real dad who loved me! I had two more sisters and a brother! Life was great!
Little did I know that my father was an aggressive drunken jailbird and I would rarely see my other siblings. My father was and still is an incredibly charming person if you sit and talk with him, IF you can sit and talk with him. When he was around he was a good dad, but therein lies the problem... when he was around. He would disappear, he wouldn't call, and on his weekends to visit with me he often just wouldn't show up. It was only as I got older that I learned that most times when he didn't pick me up it was because he was serving time in jail. For driving drunk or without a license, for getting in to bar fights, destruction of property, possession of drugs and for domestic abuse, the list goes on.
From age 6 to 7 my mother lived with another boyfriend of hers, and I have only one memory of this time. My mother and this boyfriend had gotten in to a massive fight, so bad that my mother had hidden the knives in the laundry and I can't to this day say what really happened. I only remember a police officer coming in to the bedroom of my sister and I and telling us that we needed to go. They carried us out of the apartment in our nightgowns and blankets, the floor was covered with shattered glass and blood, and we were taken to a foster home for a week. I later found out that my mother had been admitted to a psychiatric unit for analysis and my Grandparents were the ones who tracked us down when she called them saying her kids had been taken away. We were not in foster care long, but the couple who took us in were very nice people. They clothed us and tried to make sure we were okay. The older gentleman taught me how to play chess because it helped me to focus, but mostly I spent my time reassuring my sister that everything would be okay. She had a stuffed dog, Wishbone from the tv show, and it had lost its nose so they helped her sew a button on as a new nose and it made her trust them.
After this we stayed with my grandparents for a short time, we went to school and we had friends and a normal life for about a year. During this time my mother was trying to get back on her feet. She had quit drinking, she had a full time job and was renting a house in the hopes that she could get her children back and have a normal life. All went well and she did regain custody of us, the first couple of months were great, it was girls night every night and she even tried taking us to church to do the 'right thing'. But then my own father came back in to the picture... he was out of jail and he was making promises to be a better man, my mother still loved him and dreamed of having a complete family so she took him in to help him get back on his feet.
This was one of her worst decisions ever. Shortly after he moved in with us the drinking started again with both of them. He would use my mother to pay for his alcohol, he even took out cash withdrawls at the grocery store so she wouldn't know he was stealing from her, and my mother being an addict just drank and didn't realize it was happening. Eventually they started fighting, almost every day, and I can distinctly recall one evening in particular. My sister, her friends and myself were sitting in the basement when we heard a loud thud from upstairs. I, being the oldest, went upstairs to investigate only to find my parents screaming and beating on eachother, my mother was thrown to the ground, she then got up and smashed a bottle over dad's head, they were both bruised and bloody. I don't remember what they were fighting about but dad noticed me and screamed at me to get back downstairs. I then had to go back down and explain to my sister's friends that it wasn't safe for them to leave yet. On another night shortly after they were fighting again, and all I can remember is sitting at the bannister upstairs holding my little sister and telling her everything would be okay while she cried and I held back tears for fear of scaring her. That Christmas was the same, and most weeks after as things got worse.
Ultimately we didn't even live with with Mum for a year before Children's Aid removed us from her custody again. This time though, we were separated. My grandparents had sold their house and were running a restaurant/resort in a small town 7 hours away in partnership with my aunt and uncle, they couldn't handle us both. My sister's grandparents from her dad's side were working full-time and didn't have the space for both of us either. I went with my grandparents and she went with hers. We saw each other maybe once or twice per year for the next 8 years, we didn't really get along so it was ultimately for the best, but when we were separated she screamed and cried for me because I was more of a mother to her than our Mum had been.
During my time with my grandparents things were okay, they did everything that they could to make up for everyone else's mistakes and they tried to make as much time for me as they could but it eventually became hard. Not one year after they took me in, my aunt and uncle abandoned us. They went in to this business with my grandparents but one morning we heard some commotion and went downstairs to find that there was a moving truck there. We didn't know why, Gran tried to ask my aunt (her daughter) what was going on but she simply turned her back and walked out the door, she abandoned her family without a word. We only heard from them when it was time to renew the business liquor license and they didn't want us to have it, they made it as hard as possible and we even had to shut down temporarily.
Another year passed, I attended a small school where I was in a class of 12 kids, most of which were cousins or had been friends since birth. It was a small town and as a result I was often the black sheep, I was pressured to steal alcohol from my grandparent's bar just to be accepted in to their group. I fell in with the "wrong crowd" because there was no other crowd to fall in with. They made me so depressed that I once considered suicide, I even mentioned it once and they egged me on, but ultimately I couldn't do that to my grandparents because they had already been through so much.
While I was living with them, my mother had gotten herself in to another bad relationship. This man was as old as my grandfather, scrawny as a beanpole, but he had money. He was the sort of man who couldn't function in the morning without a glass of wine, he would bring it to work in a sealed travel mug, and because of this my Mum stayed with him. He enabled her to indulge in her addictions, she could do whatever she wanted, but he had a history of domestic abuse and of course he eventually started hitting Mum. He would threaten to paint the walls with her cat who he despised and the alcohol made him unnaturally strong because there was no pain. One night they had gotten in to a fight, and from what I was told he had her in a headlock so she grabbed whatever was within reach on the coffee table and tried to beat him off with it. It was a broken paint scraper, it had a very sharp edge and because he was so thin it punctured right in to him. Mum said she thought he had just passed out from being drunk because there was no blood, but it turned out that he was dead. One of the punctures had done enough damage to stop his heart. My mother was originally charged with first degree murder, his blood alcohol level was so hogh that a man his size should have been unconscious, but he did have a history of alcoholism and abuse so the charges were eventually dropped to manslaughter. I was 13 years old when I was told that my mother had killed a man, I was the daughter of an alcoholic killer and an absent jailbird is what I thought at the time.
Fast forward three years, Mum had finished her sentence, she had completed AA and been to a therapist regularly and completed psych reviews. She even did schooling and got a degree in horticulture while she was in jail, we thought that she was finally going to have a future when she got out.
At first all went well, she was in a halfway house and they helped her to find a stable job gardening at a golf course nearby. She had friends who were there for her and she had met a decent man who seemed to care about her well-being. Until everything came crashing down... I was 17 at this point and we were on good terms. She had taken me to get my driver's license and we worked a small landscaping business together during the summer, all seemed great. I knew that her boyfriend smoked weed but it was never a problem, however I discovered that while he was doing this he had gotten her in to it... which led her straight back to the alcohol, weed waan't numbing enough.
I was visiting for a week when one night I found she had drank a whole bottle of wine. She didn't think she'd had enough, she said she wasn't drunk so she was going to go to the store for more. I knew rhis wasn't good so while she wasn't looking I took her keys. When she realized I took them she became furious, she grabbed me by the hand I held them in and twisted saying "I will break your fingers if you don't give me the keys little girl. I'm the mother here, you listen to me." and when I didn't give them up she twisted harder. My fingers didn't break but this is when she decided twisting wasn't enough, she grabbed me by the throat and she squeezed, she threatened me again and her boyfriend threw her off me but she had the keys... she was gone.
After this I immediately went back home, she called two days later sobbing and begging for forgiveness, she told me how much she loved me and that she was sorry for what she'd done but I couldn't trust her again. I couldn't talk to her after what she'd done to me, it wasn't until several months later at Christmas that I saw her again because my sister and grandparents asked me to as a gift to them, they wanted a family Christmas. I hugged her empty-hearted, I tried to smile, yet couldn't help but notice the glass of wine on the table. She still hadn't given it up even after all of that.
Some more time passes, now I'm 18 years old and it's Mother's day. Neither my sister or I had called her. She was still speaking to Gran so they had a video chat but Mum never heard from her children... the next day she had a few drinks and it wasn't enough so she drove to a bar where they turned her away for being drunk. She left in a hurry before the cops could come arrest her, she didn't even buckle her seatbelt, and just a few kilometers down the road she crashed in to a ditch, there were no others involved. She was propelled through the windshield and was dead on site, she never stood a chance. We recieved a call from her boyfriend at 1 in the morning sobbing, Mum was dead.
That following December Grandad also died. The only man in my life who had ever been there for me, my father figure and one of very few people I could rely on. He had multiple myeloma, a rare form of cancer that infects every part of the body, and I spent two weeks sitting by his bedside with my Gran watching him die. I skipped my college classes to be there and took an extra week following his death to help Gran sign cremation papers. I returned to classes just in time for exams and somehow still managed to pass, but I hadn't cried yet.
Now it's just me and Gran, she was very depressed and even had her own stint at drinking, but when she did she really only sat and watched her Cliff Richard vhs and cried herself to sleep. This strong woman who always did everything she could to help had crumbled... her husband was dead, her two youngest children were dead (son died in '96 from cancer) and her oldest daughter had abandoned us. I was all she had left, my sister lived far away and we had been disconnected for so long.
Fast forward another year and now I'M the one in an emotionally abusive relationship. The man I was with had a horrible temper, and I always said "It's fine, he never directs it at me." I made all the usual excuses that women do. It wasn't until I had graduated college and ended up on disability for anxiety and depression that I started to realize what was happening. Then one Christmas Eve my sister is visiting, she's 7l6 mo ths pregnant so I want to keep her away from too much stress. BF starts to become a problem at home so we go for a drive, the roads are wet and it's foggy and we ultimately end up in a car accident. The first one I had ever been in, my car was sideways in a ditch, I immediately got my sister out and we called 911. She checked out fine, baby was fine, neither of us had whiplash, I had a cut on my finger from broken glass. I had to call him to come and pick us up from the station though, and he was high as a kite. He never asked if we were okay, there was a fight in the car on our way home and when we made it back he ripped right in to me for crashing MY car. He then turned on my sister, started screaming at her, called her a disgusting wh*** and at this point I took her away to call and get her a ride home. Through this relationship I smoked weed to keep myself calm and essentially shove my head in the sand.
When my sister had her daughter I did my detox, I stayed with her for three weeks. When she went in to labour I coached her through it because it went so fast her planned coach didn't make it. I cut the umbilical cord and it was the most amazing (and in a way disgusting) thing I had ever experienced. I realized then that I couldn't smoke any more because it was a crutch and I needed to get the heck away from my bad relationship if I ever hoped to have a future.
My next relationship I thought was good, he was a decent guy and he seemed to care, but at the end of 1 year he had no commitment and it turned out that all I was to him was a sex toy. Someone to play with on the weekends and have on his arm like a trophy when we went to car shows. The moment I needed his help he was gone, I ended up in crippling debt trying to keep myself afloat. I felt stupid for never realizing that I was being used, it was right in front of me.
NOW I am in a healthy relationship with a wonderfully patient and understanding man who simply hugs me when I'm having a panic attack and does what he can to help. I have an awesome roomate who pulls his weight and also puts up with my mood swings. These two are my best friends and my support.
I have an incredibly strong bond with my little sister now, her daughter is almost 2 and I'm incredibly proud of her for doing it all on her own to keep her daughter from harm. That little girl and her mom are the brightest lights in my life.
Despite all of this and my current stability, I still can't "get over" the things that have happened. I've tried for a long time to forgive people for their actions and I can't, I still keep dwelling on them. I have a deep-rooted fear of yelling and conflict, I end up in tears even if it's someone across the room yelling at someone else and it doesn't involve me. I am psycially incapable of yelling or screaming, my voice just cuts out. I'm terrified because I'm starting to understand how my mother ended up where she is and how easy it could have been, or could be, me now that I'm older. I can't drink or smoke weed casually, I have an addictive personality and I cling to anything that makes me feel 'something' so I've learned the hard way not to even try, but I see how easy it is to fall. I'm terrified of ever having my own children because the last thing in the world I want is to cause a child to experience anything like I did, and I don't feel like I'm strong enough to do that. I'm constantly afraid that I'm standing on the line between success and failure and one simple step could send me tumbling down the same path. A simple argument has, at times, landed me in the hospital for an anxiety attack.
I don't really know what to make of my own experiences, there's a lot of hurt and resentment and I don't know how to let it all go. I know there are good memories in there somewhere, but I can't find them. I apologize for the novel, but I 100% appreciate anyone who can sit and read it all.