Life

When I was really little my Mom left me with my Grandma and Grandpa so much I thought my Grandma was my Mom. I called her Mom and she would correct me, "No I'm not your Mom, I'm your Grandma." And once I was old enough to play by myself my Mom would always leave me by myself and she hardly ever interacted with me. Some people have fond memories of their Moms playing with them, or making lunch and eating together, or anything like that. I have memories of my Mom getting upset because I didn't get the bathroom spotlessly clean, or get all the laundry folded by myself fast enough. I remember being told to clean the kitchen and if I missed even one spoon I had to redo the whole kitchen. When I was about 6 is when my step-brother raped me, repeatedly over the course of several months. My father and grandfather had also molested me and done horrible things. My grandfather would walk around completely naked and force me to look at his penis. My Mom knew this sort of stuff was happening, and she knew Chris raped me, but for some reason she still let me go over there every other weekend. I remember having full-on panic attacks and complete breakdowns because I didn't want to go, but she'd make me. Chris raping me became a huge deal for many years, with people defending him, or saying he didn't rape me, or justifying what he did to me, or say that I'm making it all up. I have really clear, vivid memories of it, though. I went to a therapist about it for a while, but my Mom never wanted to put in the effort to take me. My Grandma would drive all the way out to make sure I made it to the sessions. I was really scared there and I remember the therapists getting frustrated because absolutely nothing they tried would get me to talk and tell them what happened. They could never get me to tell them how far he went and the full extent of what he did, and I never told them about what my Father and Grandfather did. I only ever talked to my Grandma about those things because she was the only person I ever felt comfortable talking to.

I remember how devastating it was when my brother was born with a rare disease and needed surgery right away. But my Mom didn't change even with him. She would leave him in his poopy diapers all day until my step-dad came home. Of course, then he would have to bathe Logan because he'd been sitting in poop all day. My Mom paid this girl we knew to come over and take care of Logan and play with me so she wouldn't have to. I remember my Mom sitting around doing nothing while Jenna played with us, and cleaned the house, and changed Logan's diapers, and made us food, and did everything to take care of us. Then when we moved to a bigger house across town. I was getting older. I was about 10ish. I had a horrible time when I had to switch schools. I was relentlessly bullied and made fun of. My Mom didn't care and sent me to school every day sobbing. I was horribly miserable.

Shortly after that is when things started to get really bad for me. I don't have many memories from those couple years, but there's enough that I do remember. I remember all the fighting between my father, grandfather, step-mom, and mom. My father was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and had then decided to go for a walk in a public park completely naked, with kids around (several different times). He, of course, was put in jail. My grandfather tried to defend my father and lied to my mother, to my Grandma, to my step-dad, and blatantly manipulated me. He would tell me things like "don't tell your mom about this or she'll never let you come see any of us ever again" or "if you love us at all you won't tell your mom about this" and a 12-year-old that's already really messed up and has extreme anxiety problems isn't gonna go tell her mom about that. I remember having horrible nightmares and night terrors, waking up screaming and crying at night. I didn't know how to handle any of what was going on, so I even had to wear a neck brace for a while because my neck was in excruciating pain from all the stress. (I carry all my stress in my neck and shoulders). I remember that was when I started to see that part of my family less and less. I know there was a lot more that happened that I don't know about or remember. After a while, I wasn't allowed to talk to my Father or see any of them anymore. It was hard because even though they were all truly horrible, psychotic, manipulative people, I still did love them. I remember crying a lot when I was finally completely cut off from them. Now that I'm grown up I do realize that I should have been cut off from them far before then. I started seeing a psychiatrist at that time, and I remember her asking questions like "do you get scared talking to people?" and "do you ever think about killing yourself?" About two years ago I found some of the printouts from the psychiatrist that she'd given my parents. They were all about depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide.

Even through all of this, she always ignored Logan and me. We had our office set up in the garage, and she would sit out there on the computer all day and night, passing it off as saying she was "working,” but really she was just on Facebook and scrolling through posts on Craigslist. She wouldn’t do anything else and would get irritated when we wanted anything from her. “You’re old enough to make yourself food! I’m busy. Leave me alone.”

I remember when I started homeschool. My Mom specifically went with this one school because they had teachers that would come to your house once a week, and you could get tutors for specific subjects, and it required very little on her part. She wanted me and my then-friend Jessica to do our schooling together (which turned out to be a bad idea). I had a good teacher my first year, but then for the second year, my teacher was a complete monster. She would compare me to Jessica and make fun of me and belittle me for not being as good in math as Jessica. And she would assign us more than 10 hours a day of work. It was ridiculous. I would get sick to my stomach before every teacher meeting because I was dreading it so much. Thankfully, Jessica's parents didn't accept this and fought to get us a better teacher. Once they started to make a fuss my Mom got on board and started to do the same, because she didn't want to look like a bad parent, and she cares more about what other people think of her than her own kid's well-being. We were then assigned a different teacher that was really great and she remained our teacher for the rest of our time in school until we graduated.

Once I started homeschool my parents became rigid about my schedule and chores. I had to get up every day at 8, with no exceptions. I was never allowed to have a day to sleep in, even when I would beg and plead with them. As soon as I woke up I had 2 hours to clean the kitchen, bathroom, and my bedroom. Of course, the kitchen took the longest. They never cleaned it at all, so it was always a huge mess from cooking and whatever else. Pots and pans would have food caked on and dishes would be piled high. And I had to gather all dishes from the rest of the house as well. I was then supposed to immediately get right to doing my homework, and I had to just keep going until I was done. There was no time limit or anything. Just keep going until all the work was done. Quite often (almost daily) my Mom would add more "chores" for me to do, things she should have been doing herself, but was too lazy to do. Heavy duty yard work like uprooting big bushes to move, cleaning out the entire garage by myself, cleaning HER bathroom, picking up the rotting apples under the apple tree, scrubbing the cement clean from the cherry stains from the cherry tree, moving cinder blocks, etc. When I was 12 is when I sprained my ankle while we were at Home Depot. My mom had just bought about 6 of the huge 10-gallon buckets of plaster, and when we got home she (knowing I had a sprained ankle) made me unload the car by myself.

Then when I was about 16, I wanted to get a job. I was really excited about it. My Mom set the rule that it had to be somewhere within walking distance because she wasn't going to drive me. She did help me one day go into a few stores to pick up paper applications, but she never helped/let me go turn them in. She always had an excuse for why she couldn't do anything to help me. And she wouldn't let me get my driver license until I had a job and could pay for insurance and gas by myself. So after several months of unsuccessfully trying to get her to help me get a job, I gave up. This was about the time her making up stories to everyone else about me got really noticeable to me. She would tell my step-dad that I was the one that was unwilling to put in the work to get a job, she would tell everyone how ungrateful I was, and she would talk about how I was just this unruly and terrible child. And everyone believed her. She would cry to my step-dad about how horrible and lazy I had been all day, and how I was so disrespectful, and I was this monster. So I would get in trouble even though everything she was saying was a lie and never happened. This continued for the rest of while I lived with them, and she still to this day does this to my brothers.

Once I turned 18 my step-dad started insisting that I needed to get a job. I started working hard to try to find a job, but I didn't have a car, and my Mom wouldn't drive me, and my Mom wouldn't ever let me go online for anything, so I had a really hard time. That was just a little before I started Regular Pioneering and when I started going to the Vietnamese congregation. I really was trying my best. After a while of not getting my Mom to help me in any way, I started just walking around town by myself, going store to store, trying to find a job. Several times I walked for 3 miles down the town's main street, going up one side and down the other (so, 6 miles total) passing out my resume and filling out applications, and then going back in over and over. I would walk to the library by myself and spend the whole day there doing online applications because my Mom wouldn't let me go online at home. I was trying everything I could think of to find a job, plus spending 70-80 hours a month in the field ministry, and going to double meetings, and trying to learn a new language. And I still had to do all sorts of "chores" around the house. And my Mom would still, every day, cry to my step-dad about how lazy and ungrateful and horrible I was, and he would believe her. So I would get in huge trouble for it. Eventually, because of my persistence, and help from my Aunt Linda, I finally got a job at Peet's. My Mom tried at first to pass it off like I got the job because of her, but that didn't get very far because everyone knew that she didn't do anything to help me at all. They had all seen me walking around by myself and doing all the work alone.

This was also right about the time my Mom had Eli. She was so devastated when she found out she was pregnant. She cried non-stop through her whole pregnancy. And once he was out she hardly spent time with him. She still to this day cries about having him and how unfair it is and how much she wishes she'd never had him. It really kills me because he gets the least affection and attention from her out of any of the three of us. I've never once heard her tell him "I love you." She's always shooing him away and trying to get him to leave her alone. When I still lived with them she would leave him with me every day, no matter what I was doing or had going on. I would walk into the living room for just a second and next thing I know she's disappeared without a word and it's just me and Eli. And, of course, I couldn't just leave the 10-month old by himself, so I'd be stuck there waiting for her to come back. And she'd never respond to me calling to her, and if I tried to bring him to her she'd tell me "No, don't bring him in here. Go take him back downstairs. I'm busy." And now that I'm not there Logan is the one that gets stuck watching him constantly. And any time we were at social gatherings I would have to be the one to keep track of Eli instead of getting to talk to my friends or anything, because she didn't care about keeping track of him, and I couldn't just let the baby run around and get into dangerous things and make messes at someone else's house.

My Mom also never supported me with my Regular Pioneering, or with my going to the Vietnamese congregation. My whole life growing up she always talked about how she just wanted me to Regular Pioneer, but once I started she treated it like I was doing it just to be a burden on her. She refused to ever help me get to the service meetings, or pick me up, or anything. She would just get mad at me because when I was there it meant she couldn't pass Eli off to me. And I was really excited to start going to Vietnamese, but she would never help me with any of that, or even bother meeting any of those friends. I tried and tried to get her to come even just for a few minutes to meet my new friends I was spending a lot of time with, but she never would. Our congregation met at the same kingdom hall as the Vietnamese congregation, and one night we were both there at the same time. I figured that would be a great time to get her to meet some of those friends. She made a huge deal about how much she didn't want to do that, but that she was going to be self-sacrificing and do it anyway. And then she was terrible once I got her over there. "She insisted that I had to come over here and meet you even though my baby son needs to get home because it's past his bedtime." I was really wanting to officially move over to that congregation too, but she wouldn't let me. It was really important to me though, so as soon as I could I made the decision to move over there regardless of her trying to stop me. And shortly after that is when I gave my first talk in Vietnamese. I really wanted my whole family to come, even if they just came for my part and then left, but only my step-dad and Logan came. My Mom wouldn't come. That really hurt.

My Mom always got mad when she had to pick me up from work. She would get pissed off if I wasn't in the car in less than 1 minute after the end time of my shift. She would threaten to make me walk home if I wasn't fast enough. She even got super angry when she saw me talking with my store manager when I was supposed to be off, instead of getting in the car.

She also never believed in giving me any privacy. She would go through my room, read everything on my phone (even though I bought and paid the bill for it all by myself, and was 20 and paid rent to live there). I had a computer that a friend gave me when they found out I didn't have one, and it had a password on it. She tried and tried to get on there to snoop through my stuff on there, but she didn't know my password. I had Minecraft on there and I let Logan go on there to play, so he knew my password, but he would never tell her what it was even when she would try to make him tell her because he thought her snooping was a violation of privacy and was rude. (He also always told me about when she would go through my stuff).

I was 19 when I finally went to my doctor about my depression. I had been trying for years to get my parents to believe and help me with it, but they always insisted I was making it up. I told them I was sure there was something wrong with my brain and I wasn’t thinking like a normal person. (The first time I felt suicidal I was 8, and I started burning myself when I was 12, and I always had extreme anxiety for as long as I could remember). I knew I wasn’t normal, but when I tried to tell them they said stuff like, “you aren’t doing stuff like spitting in the middle of the kingdom hall. Obviously, you’re completely normal. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re making this all up. You just want attention. Stop it.” They never believed me. Multiple diagnoses and 3 hospital stays later and my Mom still doesn’t believe me. She still thinks I’m making it all up for attention. I’m pretty sure my step-dad feels guilty now about not believing me all that time, though. That’s why I was so beyond upset when I found the printouts from the psychiatrist. She had tried to tell my parents that I was suffering from these things, and they wouldn’t believe her. I even remember them talking about how she must be making things up because she clearly didn’t know what she was talking about and was trying to force something on me just so she could get more money by giving me pills. (My parents never realized how much I paid attention to what they would say around me) Logan tells me that she still talks about how I’m making it up for attention.

My Mom is also one of the big reasons my husband and I got married when we did. Or even that we got married at all. We had been dating for 2 years and she decided she didn’t want us to be dating anymore. So she forced an ultimatum on me. If I was going to continue living with them I would only be allowed to have 1 one hour monitored conversation on the phone with him a week, and he could come over for dinner once a month, and that would be all the contact we could have, or I could move out. Jason was about to get a new job that was supposed to allow us to move out on our own, and I thought my Mom’s new rules were ridiculous, so I left. I moved in with my step-sister. (which turned out to be the worst possible decision I could have made. But that’s a different story.) So Jason got the job, we got married, and I moved in with him at his parent’s house. We were only supposed to be there a few months until we could save some money to get our own place, but almost 3 years later that still hasn’t happened. Logan later told me that once I left my Mom would talk about how she was so sure Jason and I would get a divorce and it would never last. She said I would come crawling back to her, telling her how right she was, and she wasn’t gonna let me move back in. To this day she still makes snide remarks about Jason whenever we’re around. She’s never liked him, from the first time she ever met him.