My life certainly hasn’t been the best like so many others out there. I didn’t suffer from an abusive spouse or untrustworthy friends. My main foe was my malicious mother.
It wasn’t really bad in the beginning of my life. We were a perfectly normal family. We didn’t have the best of situations. We lived in a trailer park and we didn’t have the most expensive goods out there but we weren’t poor and we were happy with where we were living.
Fast forward a few years and now I’m in junior high. My parents have divorced and they’ve both been dating other people. With the custody split, I would stay a week at my dads and then a week at my moms and so on and so on. My dad and his girlfriend were nice. We’d go out to places. We’d have fun. It was like my youthful years all over again. Though, it wasn’t all great. My mom had met a new guy and she started dating him. They got along in the beginning and I didn’t think that I was going to have it so hard with him. I mean he was the sergeant of the town’s police department. He acted nice around my sister and I. It didn’t seem like a big deal that he smoke and drank or that he and my mom fought a lot. I just thought that that was love and they’d get over it.
Three years later, I’m a junior in high school. I’m an emotional wreck and everyone knows it. I’ve picked up cutting and I became a recluse. Slowly over the years my mom and step dad had become more abusive to me and even more abusive towards themselves. I was a freak, a loner, loser, whatever you could think of I was called it. I never did anything bad. I’d go to school, do my homework, go to the gym, and then go to bed. Apparently that was too much for them.
I was the worst teen out there to them. I had a 4.5 GPA, I didn’t do drugs or alcohol, and I never stayed out later than I was supposed to yet I was still subject to their torment and abuse. My step dad in all his drunken vigor would get into an argument into my mother over the stupidest of things. I was costing them too much money. They needed to figure out how to make the freak cost less so they could buy their fancy new RV or go out with friends.
At first it wasn’t hard on me. I had a job. They made me start paying for my own school supplies. I sort of understood since they were apparently going through a hard time financially and I needed to support them. Then they started it up even more. Groceries? I had to pay for them. Rides? I had to pay them or take transit. Chores? All mine. They slowly pawned off all of their responsibilities onto me but I just took it all with only a little bit of remorse. After all, they did love me right?
They saw how I was weak. How I would be willing to do whatever they wanted me to do. I suffered from their increasingly hostile vituperation daily. If they had problems they were going to blame them on me and make me fix them.
As junior year progressed on I got more and more reminders of how I had totally screwed up their lives. I was the one that damaged the family. I was too much and I should have just left. I was forced through religious counseling because I was a sinner. I didn’t believe in Christianity like them so they tried so save me by forcing me to go to church with them. I would have to lie about my faith and praise Jesus. They made me lie to so many people. All those eyes I had deceived. I still wasn’t getting better and now my ever so loving mother had turned to intimidation to try to morph me into her shape.
She had always hit me when I was a kid. When she was with my dad it wasn’t so bad, but after the divorce I was her punching bag. If I stepped out of line once I was slapped and threatened. With my stepfather being the sergeant of the local police department, she convinced me that she could make my life a living hell if I didn’t do what she said. I was habitually threatened with how she was going to throw me down to the ground and bash my face into the floor if I didn’t comply. She had her way with me and I went along with no protest out of fear and desperation.
My cutting had taught me something. It taught me that of all my years of living my mother had never truly loved me. She may have had a faint love in the beginning but it had dissipated with time. She never liked the fact that I emulated my father. My father helped me and encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to do whereas my mother never agreed with him. I wasn’t her copy so I was never of value to her. I was the outcast child and forever would remain that way.
Never once was she proud of what I did. If I showed her my report card of straight A’s I was shunned away. I never meant anything to her. She simply held onto me to deprive me from my father. If she could rob him of custody of his child then she had won the battle.
I felt so trapped. So much abuse and hurt from her end. I could never please her. I was either harassed or harmed with anything I did. I simply had to conform to her wishes or else I would be put through a hell of torment and anguish. I shunned my friends. I hurt myself. I was suicidal. I needed a way out of her verbal abuse or else I was going to end up ending my life.
My day of salvation came finally when she found about my cutting. She was absolutely disgusted with me. No comfort. No help. Simply castigation for my depression. She was going to pull me from my school, isolate me from my friends, and move me away if I didn’t stop. I was a reject and the fact that I was desecrating myself annoyed her. She had given life to me. She had given me her blood and her genes and this was the way I was repaying her. By destroying what she given me. I was unappreciative and she was going to punish me for that.
I don’t know how I got the courage to say I hated her. A little voice pushed me and I let it out. Amidst my tears and blood I told her how exactly how I felt about her. I didn’t fear her anymore. I told her how she was the problematic one. I wasn’t going to take her abuse anymore. I packed up my things and left that night. A court battle ensued but my father and I won and I didn’t have to deal with her anymore.
I’ve grown from then and I don’t let her have her way with me anymore. I’m never going to repeat those years again. I hope this gives you some insight into how one feels when verbally abused and harassed and I thank you for taking the time to read this. I felt hopeless and alone but I scraped up the courage to leave her. If you are being abused, just leave the abuser. As hard as it may be get some help and just leave them. No one deserves to be treated with abuse. If you know someone being abused, save them. Help them and you’ll be saving them from a life of torment and pain.
