If their family members were to ever know what they really thought, all heck would break loose. Families would be annihilated, and there would be far too many hurt feelings to resolve any time soon. Seriously, these family members have no idea what is going on right under their noses! Content has been edited for clarity.
A Slippery Slope With A Surprise Ending
“I’ll never tell my parents that I was a regular smoker from age fifteen to age twenty-three. I was one of those kids in high school and at parties. It started as a social thing, but once I got to university it became a crutch, like a coping mechanism for stress. It really wasn’t healthy to have such a reliance on it, and I knew that and thought about it pretty much every time I had one. I just let it go on for way too long.The thing is that, while at university, my taste for smokes completely shifted from having fun and enjoying myself with people to this escape from loneliness and stress, and that’s what I started to associate the feeling with. I rarely, if ever, smoked while I was wasted at a party. I hate the feeling of instant nausea it would give me. When I would go home for reading week or the holidays or even summer break, I had no problem not smoking for pretty much the entire time. I had pretty much zero cravings during these periods. So, after I graduated and moved back home to start my career, I just stopped. I would like to say I made an effort, but it really wasn’t too difficult to stop for good. It was more of just an, ‘Okay, let’s not do that anymore,’ and starting to actively avoid it. The last smoke I have ever had was the day of my last exam, in April of last year. I really don’t miss it, and the smell makes me gag now.
My dad was a smoker as well in college, so I don’t think he would be too upset, maybe disappointed that I didn’t ‘learn from his mistakes’ or something along those lines. My mom, however, would probably hang me by my ankles and mount it over the fireplace. She despises smokers and always tells me about it. She hates how they’re ruining their lives and making the rest of the world smell because they can’t control their habits. She regularly told me if I was ever caught smoking that she would kick my butt. That’s hyperbole, I was never abused as a child, and she was just trying to get a point across. I know now this probably stems from my mom and my grandpa’s strained relationship. They disagreed on a lot of stuff in this world. And I think that resentment for each other caused mom to resent smoking in and of itself, since it’s something he did so much. He passed very suddenly about twenty years ago from a brain aneurysm, so there was never any opportunity to make amends, and I can only assume these feelings have never truly been able to be resolved. And that probably bled into how mom was a parent to me.”
Her Never-Ending Nightmare
“My mom is an absolute nightmare. She has at least one undiagnosed mental health disorder, and my sisters and I (being completely unqualified to make a diagnosis and relying solely on Google) suspect some combo of bipolar depression mixed with a personality disorder. Anyway, growing up with her as a mother was rough. We didn’t really know it at the time because it was our normal, but she was extremely difficult to live with. She provided for all of our needs and sometimes went above and beyond, but it always felt like it came with strings attached. Like yeah, we got more for Christmas than we asked for, but you bet she would hold it over our heads for a year. Anyway some fun highlights from my childhood include:
-Telling us (multiple times) while we were driving that she would like to wrap her car (with us inside) around a tree
-Her catch phrase is, ‘Life sucks and then you die.’
-She would take every chance available to complain about my dad in front of us, and in some way mildly turned us against him. It was even weirder because he’s a genuinely nice guy who is super loyal to her, and they’re still married.
-As a young girl (like nine), she would tell me that one day I would be fat like her, and that I couldn’t wear specific types of clothes because they made me look fat. I was a normal weight for my age.
-She would make us clean our rooms, then get visibly upset if we tried to discard specific things. Then she would get mad our rooms were a mess. Lather, rinse, repeat.
-She would feed us McDonald’s multiple times a day and multiple times a week, in order to play monopoly or collect specific toys. If she didn’t get the toy she wanted, she made my sisters and I go up and ask for a different one.
-When she found out I hooked up with my boyfriend (now husband), she melted down in the middle of a Wendy’s and refused to talk to me for four months
-Every time she went shopping, she would leave the purchases in the car and sneak them in, so my dad didn’t know and made us lie about it for her.
-She never snuggled or was demonstrative of her love
Now that I’m an adult with a family of my own, I am absolutely terrified of becoming her, and I still struggle with interactions and how she is with my own children. It puts a strain on my marriage too, because my husband didn’t grow up giving her passes for her bad behavior and doesn’t understand why I still let her get away with it, and he’s got a valid point, but my sisters and I just do it because we don’t want the drama. Some of her most recent antics include:
-Asking to keep my boys overnight, then texting me the whole time how difficult of a time she was having, and then making my sister come over to help
-She will steal pictures of my kids off of Facebook and print them out to hang at work. I would send her the pictures if she asked. She has multiple bulletin boards of pictures making it seem like she’s grandma of the year. All she wants though is the title and attention, she doesn’t like spending time with my kids outside of the novelty of seeing them.
-I’ve got two boys and I’m done having kids, but she keeps saying weird gross stuff about making another sibling for my kids, even though she barely spends time with the kids I have.
-She openly resents my husband for no reason, other than I prefer spending time with my own family over her
-She buys my kids massive amounts of stuff. It’s usually junky toys that end up breaking immediately. She does it because she thinks that by giving them one hundred gifts they’ll love her more than anyone, but what they would really like is quality time.
-I asked her not to take my kids to McDonald’s. She took them twice in a day and laughed in my face.
I have depression, and during one particularly difficult time while I was reaching out for help, she threatened to call CPS on me. My kids were fine and being taken care of, I had my husband for support, and I was just asking for a little extra help. I cut her off for like six months, and she acted like I was the bad guy.
-She’ll buy stuff randomly for my kids just so I’ll feel indebted to her.
We have confronted her a few times about getting professional help for her, but she refuses. Then sometimes she’ll call or text us that she has driven two hours away, and that she hopes she crashes or drives her car off a bridge. Long story short, she is a very stressful personality to deal with, and outside of the gentle confrontation, I can’t tell her just how unhappy she makes my life. I’m almost thirty-two and I live in constant fear of becoming her. I secretly think of how much of a relief it will be when she’s gone. I know it makes me an awful person, but wouldn’t be so nice to just be done with the drama I’ve lived with my whole life?!”
A Positive Light At The End Of A Nasty Tunnel
“I am a lawyer for the child welfare system, focusing on child abuse and neglect, as well as foster care. My parents assume that I merely have an altruistic nature. While that is not untrue, much of my early interest in this field came from growing up with my mom’s bipolar symptoms. I didn’t get placed into foster care, but I learned that Child Protective Services investigated my family once I was old enough to work for them. To er frank, I didn’t have it too bad as far as neglect goes. In my twenty years of working in child welfare, I have seen much, much worse. But what my siblings and I went through was on par with what a lot of kids separated from their parents experience. My mom grew up with addict parents, and there was a lot of childhood neglect that she just assumed was completely normal for a parent to perform. We were unsupervised from an early age. We would hide from my mom when she was manic, and we would have to do all of the adult chores when she was feeling low. Now my dad’s attitude was merely to teach us how to stab people if needed. I believe that if my dad had left us, we would have been taken out of that house. If my sisters and I weren’t such a strong tag team, it would have been so much worse. It got to the point where we all determined plans and back-up plans if we needed to run away from home. This sent me on an early trajectory of solving whatever problems lay ahead of me, or finding someone who could. I think the advantage that I have over other lawyers in my field is that I truly know the kids I work with. In many ways, I used to be them, and now I do my best to support them however I can.”
Laying Out The Abhorrent Evidence
“This is an open letter to my mom and dad:
I’m truly unhappy. I hate my life so much. You’re not making it easier on me. You never see me as a person with wants and needs and ambition, just someone that’ll work for you. You want someone to care for my siblings, go to their parent-teacher-meetings, clean, drive you around, and be your translator. It’s fine, I’ve decided to give up on living to be able to support you, and I don’t expect any thank you’s, but please, at least don’t tell me I’m not doing anything for you. I gave up so much for you. I’m just in my early twenties, but I’m burning out. I have decided to not have kids or maybe to never be in a proper relationship. It doesn’t feel like I have the mental capacity for either option. I’m a little bummed about it, because since I can remember, I’ve always wanted to adopt two kids. That’s how I saw myself, but at this point I’m not sure I can care for another person. I don’t love you guys, and you know that. There’s resentment from my past. I will never forget the days you beat us up and told us how little you thought of us. I remember the belt, I remember the hot water, and I remember the beatings in the shower or the additional beatings because we cried. I was ready to give up that resentment, to move on, because both of you are trying right now. You’re trying to change, but it’s too late. You’re still not seeing the extent of suffering you cause me and my siblings. I’m not happy, and if I ever decided to live my life fully, you would probably disown me, beat me, or actually kill me. You don’t care about me or about the things I’ve done for you or given up for you. You only care about what others think of you, even if it costs all our happiness. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to continue like this. I need out. Also one more thing, you remember me wetting myself so often as a kid? Turns out, it was probably because of trauma. My cousin used me back then. That might have been it. But I never told you, or I would have just been beaten up more for peeing myself. I’m still here, still going to be here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still thankful for many other things, but I’m just so unhappy and exhausted.”
Cruelty Was Their Only Solution
“I will always be furious at my parents for not seeking out medical help for me when I was a child and teenager. I am on the autism spectrum, and I also have ADHD, bipolar depression, constant muscular tics, and extreme anxiety. There were so many signs from me. I would have these involuntary throat tics and head movements. I would experience extreme mood swings. I would burst into tears for seemingly no reason. I also had an inability to focus. Every single school report card I received mentioned how I needed to learn how to focus. I mean how much more should a parent need before they think to themselves to take their kid to a doctor?! I started to seek help from a neurologist when I was twenty-two. Then I went to a psychologist, and then a psychiatrist, and finally I had my proper diagnosis at age thirty-three. I started taking prescribed medications, which was such a pivotal moment for me. I could think clearly and didn’t feel so sad all of the time, what a plot twist! I had been on a downward spiral prior to that, and I was picking up speed. My parents’ attitude to any sort of mental illness was to pretend that it didn’t exist. They would just tell me things like, ‘You’re just feeling sorry for yourself,’ or, ‘You’ve got to harden up!’
Now I have two sons who are ten and twelve. One of them has autism, and the other one had ADHD and extreme anxiety. Being a parent to them is a constant reminder of how much better my first three decades of life could have ben if my parents had actually tried to help me and had taken me to a doctor. On a more positive note, I am a pretty good dad to my sons, because I know exactly what they are going through and can easily relate. All’s well that ends well, but I just cannot let go of that inner rage towards my own parents, because they didn’t even try!”
They Couldn’t Be Farther Apart
So I am gay, nonbinary, and an atheist. My parents are insane, religious, and insanely religious. My parents are insane, religious, and insanely religious. Fortunately for them, they’re just sane enough (and wealthy enough) to mask it, so they (and our family) come off as normal. But they’re not. Leading up to the U.S. legalization of gay marriage, my mom told us, in public on the streets of a major city, that higher rates of addiction are God’s punishment for gay people defying his will. My dad openly makes sounds of disgust when he sees gay representation on TV. I don’t know if they think my brother is gay or trans, but they’ve tried to find a way to send him to conversion therapy, despite it being illegal in our state. They definitely don’t think being nonbinary is real, but if they did, it would be a mental illness to them. I won’t say anything about it to them. As for my atheism, my traumatic experiences with the church in part caused me to lose faith. But my dad explicitly calls himself a Christian conservative and thinks the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is a good guide for his vote. He thinks there is no morality without God, so I would be a monster to him. As for my mom, one time we were talking about my roommates for living off-campus. I pretend to be involved with a Christian student group (which was a condition of going to college), so she demanded to know why I wasn’t living with other Christians. I replied that I didn’t think being a Christian automatically made someone a better roommate, and she went nuts. She asked me if I even believed in Jesus and said nonbelievers would always treat me worse. If being my authentic self and loving myself unconditionally makes me an immoral, unnatural lunatic in their eyes, then so be it!”
Is There Any Hope For This Family?
“I have lost so much respect for my mom. I lover her and she is pretty amazing though. She raised five kids while working and going to school. She is a doctor now, and I am so proud of everything she has done! Unfortunately, I am getting divorced, and my mom doesn’t agree, even though she has been divorced three times. When I told her I was getting divorced, her top concerns were as follows: What about your in-laws? I like them! What about Thanksgiving and Christmas! I won’t stop talking to your ex or those in-laws!
At no point then or in the following months did she ask about how I was doing or how my kids were. She asked about my ex a few times, and each time she would guilt trip me hard over him. I talked to my counselor about her. I explained that I was just so ticked off at her ad couldn’t explain why. The counselor peeled it back pretty quickly. My mom is a narcissist and had border line personality disorder. She didn’t react the way I expect her to, because I didn’t make it about her. Thinking about it and what the counselor said, I got more and more upset with my mom. Yeah she went to school and worked and did all this inspiring stuff. But I started raising my siblings at eleven cause she had her stuff to do. There was no babysitter besides me! The more I thought about it, the less things were about us or for us. They were always for her, which is fine, you should do things for yourself, but not at the expense of your kids. She judges me because I don’t make my life choices about her. We have only spoken a few times in the last six months. I have no idea how this issue will be resolved.”
The Stress Took Over Her Life
“I am so worried about becoming my parents. From a young age, my dad has been pretty anti-emotion, but my mom was very encouraging. They were stark opposites in terms of parenting styles, and it really messed me up. They divorced, so I go back and forth between houses to see then. I dread going to my dad’s house, usually because I always end up getting screamed at for something. I usually just break down crying. After I turned ten, it was like the childhood magic faded away and something broke inside of me. I couldn’t control my emotions anymore from then on, and I still can’t. Unfortunately, my mom is very controlling in certain aspects of her life and lets her anxiety control her. It is very hard to handle. IN addition, my need to achieve straight A’s in school has destroyed my capacity to live without stressing myself out. I barely have any free time to spend with friends. This need has completely taken over my life. My parents used to tell me that my grades were great, and it was totally fine if I didn’t get perfect scores. But now my mother will make a face if I get even an 80 on a super hard test. I have raised the bar for so long that if I hit below it even once, I feel immensely guilty. It has gotten to the point where I think I am losing some of my hair because I am so stressed due to school.
Finally, quarantine has only made everything worse. I met up with my boyfriend recently. Yes, we did not social distance, but both of us had been especially safe. I think my mom would completely disown me if she ever found out about it. My mom is exceptionally careful qith quarantine, but my dad is much more relaxed, and my stepsister basically doesn’t social distance with anyone. I just want some peace and quiet away from this family. And I could also use a really good therapist.”
How To Explain His Major Life Change?
“My parents will never know that I actually want to be a teacher. For context, I was always viewed as the ‘successful’ child, as opposed to my brothers and sisters. My oldest brother dropped out of high school, and my oldest sister has two kids at age nineteen and immediately got married. My older brother isn;t going to college, and he is constantly moving from job to job, asking to borrow $20 about every week for whatever reason. My younger siblings are still in elementary school, so their future is unknown. Ad for me, I have always gotten straight A’s and strived to attend a good college. In reality, I had no idea what i wanted to major in, but my dad told me about how accountants make good money. He would always mention the fancy houses that accountants live in when we would drive by them. Well after my first year in college, I realized I hated accounting. It seemed like nothing but an endless struggle to reach a higher status, and it really didn’t seem like the job that was meant for me.
Back in high school, I had a caring teacher who wrote each of us a heartfelt letter for our graduation. He changed my life so much for the better, but seeing him always gave me the thought that I could be a teacher. Now that I’ve taken a year off of college due to quarantine, I have been thinking more and more about making this switch. The thing is that my parents, especially my dad, went out of their way to ensure that I would take a high-paying job and be rich. The only thing that’s stopping me from telling them is because I’m sure, like many others, you’ve heard the jokes and claims about teachers being underpaid and how it’s a career you’ve gotta actually love doing to get the best out of it. How am I supposed to tell my parents that their son, who strived for high expectations and chose to attend a pricey college, is choosing to ditch the career that would secure a decent future for him? How could I tell them I’m choosing a job I’d enjoy but would struggle with paying not only for me, but for the huge amount of debt I’m gonna be collecting due to teachers being underpaid. I know that it’ll end with my dad arguing with me. My parents are amazing, they’ve given me everything I could ask for, which is also why I don’t want to tell them. To me, it would feel like promising such a nice gift for their birthday, just to go up and spit in their face instead. I don’t know, this whole quarantine thing has really turned my college plans upside down.”
The Highest Threat Level
“This is the first Christmas that I will not be spending with my family, so my parents have been shipping my girlfriend and I a bunch of packages. The other day our doorbell rings, and my girlfriend goes out and see an older woman in a baseball cap getting in her car and driving off. ON our doorstep is a Christmas popcorn tin in a grocery store plastic bag. It was not addressed to anyone, and there was no label indicating who it was from. It has a plastic seal around the top, but it looks pretty old and not super tight. My girlfriend works in law enforcement, so her immediate reaction was that it was either poisoned or a bomb! We ended up erring on the side of it not being a bomb, so we opened it in the garage. It turned out to be full of popcorn and nothing else. We were still suspicious, so we chucked out the popcorn and saved the tin. I notice in fine print on the inside of the lid the name of the company it’s from, so I give them a call. It’s a small local business, and I end up chatting with the lady who delivered it. Apparently she thought she was told to deliver it anonymously. It turns out my mom had sent me popcorn, and this lady asked her if she should say who it’s from, and after not getting a reply in a a few hours, decided to deliver an unmarked tin in a plastic bag. My mom has been having a hard time with all these restrictions and me not visiting, so telling her I threw out her gift because the lady who delivered it was stupid would make her feel awful. So now my girlfriend and I must say that the popcorn was delicious and take that lie to our grave. Right? Who thinks it’s a good idea to just leave unmarked food on a doorstep? Watch, this was just a setup so I’ll lower my guard when my enemies leave a bomb in the next popcorn tin.”
It Took Something Drastic To Reveal Her True Nature
“I won’t ever tell my dad that he is a burden. It would probably result in him taking his own life. I was ‘granted’ legal guardianship of him when I was in my early twenties, when my mom and sisters split from the picture. It’s a young age to take something like that on. No one your age understands. There are little to no resources to know what you are supposed to do next. It’s been a very difficult run. He is finally in a safe place, but it’s still a lot to do taking care of all his financials, on top of trying to live my own life. The rest of our family believes he should have just been abandoned, but I could never have done that. Despite the awful things he has done, it isn’t who I am. Growing up, my dad was physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive to all of us kids growing up. He contributed to an unsafe situation that allowed a few of us girls to be horribly abused. He has a host of mental and cognitive health problems. I actually left home before I finished high school, and I had no intent on having a relationship with him until he had no one else. The finances will always be especially hard. My dad gets a monthly cash allowance, and I handle everything else. The medical bills are the worst though, a new one comes in the mail every single day. So much time is wasted trying not to get things sent to collections. He is on disability, but Medicare in the U.S. doesn’t cover a lot. To those who have any kind of psychiatric, cognitive, or physical disorders, please know that it does not make you automatically a burden to those who love you. There is so much more to my father’s story that has led to this point. It can be hard to love someone, but that doesn’t mean that I will give up.”
Her Entire Life Plans Were Destroyed
“My parents have no idea how scared I am to have brain surgery in a few months, as well as how angry I am that this has happened to me. I know how stressed and worried they are already, and I don’t want to add to it. I had never really gotten headaches before, but about two weeks ago, I woke up with a horrible headache. Pain killers didn’t really do much of anything for it. I was on the sixth day of my migraines, and things were just getting worse and worse. I couldn’t keep anything down, I couldn’t sleep, and I could barely open my eyes. For context, I had been on the combined birth control pill for about five years, so when my mom took me to the hospital, they were looking for a very specific kind of clot called a CVST, which in rare cases can be caused by the combined pill. When they did the CT scan looking for the presence of that clot, they happened to find a cluster of blood clots, but they also discovered the tumor. Turns out I have a rare type of benign tumor, known as craniopharyngioma, along with a cluster of CVST clots. I can’t have surgery on the tumor yet because of the clots, since I am taking blood thinners to resolve them. Of course, this will only work if the tumor remains stable and doesn’t show any signs of getting any bigger. My tumor sits right above my pituitary gland, so the biggest risk for me is my hormone production and my vision. Things are definitely easier when found earlier on, which is the case with me. My doctors believe all the issues I’ve been having are from blood clots that I also have, and that they just stumbled upon the tumor.I know my situation could be so much worse, and I’m so thankful to be in a country with free health care, it just came at such a bad time for me. I’m only 19 and was just trying to start a career and saving for a house with my boyfriend, and now everything has to be put on hold for this. It sounds selfish, but I’m just so angry about all my plans that this has stuffed up.”