I guess I'll start with my childhood but I'll try to keep it brief. I was sexually molested when I was three yrs. old in my parent's grocery store by an old man that lived close by.
It was my first memory.
As far back as I can remember my mother was addicted to valium. She drank also, making a cocktail of the two. Both my parents were physically abusive to me but not my older sister. I often wore the bruises, bumps, whelps of "whippings". If I got the switch there was blood.
My parents were violent with each other also. I remember bloody handprints on the walls outside my bedroom, my parents shooting at each other or threatening to. Lots of broken furniture and glass.
Our father would disappear sometimes for weeks and my mother would go on binges when he did. I remember being brought home from a girlscout meeting to see my mother on a stretcher in a straightjacket and an ambulance parked in front of the house. She'd tried to shoot a neighbor but was too drunk/stoned to hold the rifle up long enough. My father was an alcoholic also but paled in comparison to my mother's more creative abuse.
My parents were verbally abusive toward me. There was never a doubt in my mind that I was the family idiot. My first grade teacher wrote on my report card that I was "one step from a genius". My family never stopped making fun of me for that comment. Never. They regularly picked at me for "making up words". Oh, they were real words, my parents and sister simply didn't know them so they would assume that the words were "fake".
I started out with going into a trance like state, difficulty concentrating and sleep walking while still very young.
The only real bright spot was when my sister got married when I was about 13. Her husband became a true brother to me. He was always kind and giving and was very good at running interference between me, my parents and my sister. This was my first experience of what a good man should be. He was decent to the core.
By the time I was a teenager I was battling raging insomnia, became very promiscuous and skipped school regularly. I never graduated high school even though I repeated my senior year a second time. I'd fallen in love with a boy who treated me terribly and continued to have strong feelings for him well into my marriage although I never saw him after school. I've since found out he's a drug addict and alcoholic.
At 18 my parents finally split up although they continued to see each other periodically and never ceased to stir trouble. When I was 18 I met my husband on a blind date. 2 months later I was pregnant. 2 mos. after that we were married.
My husband is timid, quiet and emotionally unavailable. I love him. We are just vastly different. We had a son who my family promptly urged me to give to my older sister, the golden child. I refused but it was very difficult to raise him. My family constantly intervened. Since my husband and I were extremely poor we had to turn to my family sometimes for food for the baby, diapers or medicine. For that reason they held court over everything I did, every move I made.
Six years later I became pregnant again and although we were on our feet by then, my family was very upset. Only my brother-in-law was happy and supportive. We had a girl but it was made clear though not said outright that she would not be held in the same loving regard as our son. The physical abuse toward me occassionally continue at this point, however it was much less. On the other hand the verbal abuse never ceased.
Over the years I've battled depression, anxiety, hopelessness, low self-esteem and insomnia. I've never kept a job for more than a year or so.
My father died in 2001, 23 days after suffering a stroke. At the time he'd had cirrhosis for about 5 years. One year later my brother-in-law was diagnosed with brain cancer. It was very traumatic for us all to watch him suffer. My mother died suddenly from a hemorrhagic stroke and after that my brother-in-law died.
There never seemed to be a time to be able to grieve. I felt like I was rolling from one illness, caretaking, death cycle straight into the next. Nor did I have time to deal with my relationship with those people and try to resolve that pain before the next pain hit.
After all the deaths my sister moved a man in with her who is an alcoholic, non-working, loud, mess of a person. The polar opposite of her husband but very similar to our parents and so I feel the misery has started all over again. She constantly berates me for not being more accepting of him and yet she always manages to play me by reminding me often that I'm her only family she has now.
In the mean time our son moved away a year ago. It has been devastating for me and I can't seem to move past it. Our daughter has reacted very negatively to all of the illnesses, death and her brother moving away just as she herself was graduating high school. She's become very secretive and dishonest.
My husband is completely emotionally disconnected and never has anything to say one way or the other and so here I am. Alone. Waiting for the next tragedy. I will be 45 years old on Wednesday and I have nothing to show for it but a lifetime of pain and constant struggle. I'm so tired and so lonely and the strangest thing is that I miss my family so much my whole body aches. It's become a mountain that sits on my shoulders and I can't move.
I'm so sorry for the pity party but I'm so glad I could find a place where hopefully it's okay to post this. I just had to put it out there into the universe once and for all.
Thank you if you got this far.
<edited: please do not post identifying details as all posts go onto search engines.>
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