They started it

Looking back through my life and trying to figure out how and where to start my story has been really difficult for me to do. It would be easy to write out that my dad abandoned my brother and I and my mom completely ignored us unless there was an audience but that doesn’t go into depth and gives the flying monkeys something to use against me. They call it “making up stuff.”

Most of the time when I’m writing I feel like I have to be extremely detailed so that my “story” is believed by those who read it. I also feel like I need to be detailed so those who side with the abusers can have something else to think about even though they’ve been manipulated to think that I suffer from mental illness.

I spent a lot of my years angry at my dad because of his actions only to find out later after confronting him that brother and I were also collateral damage in his personal war against my maternal family.

My dad came from a pretty fucked up family, I heard stories about them my whole life. How crazy they were, how there was a pile of kids that all got separated and sent to live with other families. We were actually kept away from most of his relatives, except for our grandmother. She babysat us a lot when we lived near her, we saw her more than my dad or even my maternal grandmother. I know very few of my paternal relatives and they do not know who I am. I know most of my maternal relatives because most of them share the same last name and it’s unique. I can always assume if I see that last name it’s very possible they are a relation, it was a last name that I never had.

My mom came from an even more fucked up family than my dad. It’s hard to believe because as far back as I can remember I was often informed about how fucked up my dad’s family was. A half a dozen kids all separated to live with other families except for my dad, he got to stay with his mom. His own father was a cold, mean, navy seal that spoke very little. An extremely intimidating man who spoke the truth no matter how cold it came out of his mouth. Yet I rarely ever heard anything negative about my maternal family. Nothing. As far as I knew they were upstanding people who were well respected in town and well known and well off financially. I was always told they hated my dad because he was a nobody and he didn’t measure up to my great grandmothers standards beings how he came from a broken family and his father was nothing more than a truck driver.

Throughout my life my father was the only person to speak negatively about my great grandmother. She passed before I was born and my mom would tell me stories about how amazing her grandmother was and all these fun things they would do together. It didn’t occur to me until later in life that my mom never shared stories of any kind of relationship with her own mother. Her stories all revolved around her grandmother, spending weekends with her, riding her horse to town to visit her, driving her around, my mom lights up when she tells stories about how wonderful her grandmother was.

My dad gets angry and dark when she is brought up, he’s the only person who has anything negative to say about her. After asking him about her, he has all the rights to be angry, she did him wrong. She did her entire generational line wrong and my dad was the only one who noticed, but found it easier to walk away from the family he created than to try to bring light to it. Her choices and actions before my mom was born caused the destruction and devastation of the next 3 generations. My family was broken before it was created. It never stood a chance. My brother and I never had a chance because our parents were so close to the trauma and manipulation they would have never noticed it. My dad noticed it but was so blinded by my mom he thought we were safe with her. He never thought she’d hurt us even after finding out she did, a few times, he still left us with her.