What It's Like to Grow Up with Toxic Parents

Every year, Mother's Day rolls around and ever since I was a little kid, I resented it. From an early age, I'd say ever since kindergarten, I realized that my mom was a piece of shit.

There were 3 of us kids. I was the middle child. My father was self employed. He owned a landscaping business. My mother didn't work. She stayed home with us kids. My dad was always gone. He was either working or hunting so we had to deal with my mother a lot. She was hell.

I don't really have a positive memory of her. Since I was young, she was abusive. When my sister came along when I was 6 years old, I pretty much ended up raising her. I can remember learning how to make a bottle for her and changing her diaper. My mom was drunk all the time. If I close my eyes, I can smell the disgusting combination of her breath mixed with whiskey and GPC brand cigarettes. She was just not there. She spent most of her time, on the phone, looking out the window, chewing ice cubes and making me clean the house and take care of my little sister. I don't really have too many sober memories of her. She had an addiction to Sudafed pills in addition to being a raging alcoholic.

For a long time, us kids would dread her drinking. She was a mean drunk. She would drink a fifth of whiskey EASILY. She loved to pick fights with whoever was around, especially my dad and us kids. She was sloppy. She never made any effort to make herself presentable for anything, she never wore makeup or took care of her skin, never did anything to her hair. My father offered to buy her clothes but she always refused. She'd purposely wear clothes that made her look like trailer trash to embarrass us kids.

Having a mom that was an addict and abusive is something that I wouldn't wish on anyone. Me and my mom were never close. The one person that a child would expect to have unconditional love from is their mother and that's how it should be. It wasn't for me.

When I was around 12, I can remember it being a Saturday. My brother was waiting for his girlfriend at the time to come pick him up. That morning my parents and him were fighting. It was something to do with him leaving to go hang with his girlfriend. My mom was so drunk that day. She was so drunk that she went to take a piss outside on our deck and fell forward as she was urinating. At that precise time, my brother's girlfriend was almost to the house to pick him up and my brother was freaking out, on the verge of being completely mortified. He didn't want his girlfriend to see what a mess his mother was so him and my dad had to drag her inside to save my brother from the embarrassment.

My mom was so mad about that for some weird reason that she decided to call my dad's sister in law and say that my brother and father beat her. They did not. I was there and I saw the whole thing.

My mom had this crazy thing about making up scenarios and pretending to talk on the phone right in front of us kids and no one would be on the other end of the call.

A few years later, my mom got into a terrible accident and it made her addiction problem that much worse. She became addicted to pain pills like Oxycontin and antidepressants like Klonopin and other stuff I can't think of. At one point, my brother and I were so sick of her constant abuse we decided to cut up her cigarettes and pour her alcohol down the drain. She screamed bloody murder when we did that. That same day, she attempted to strangle me to death and tase me with a taser. The shitty part was, when we called the cops on our mom they wouldn't do anything. That wasn't the last time they failed us kids either.

My parents fought constantly. And the fights were intense. Almost every single fight they had resulted in something, usually a telephone or plate being smashed against the wall and all typically in front of us kids. Watching your parents fight like that all the time, as a child, it messes you up. I can remember seeing my peers parents together and how genuinely happy they were and how they would eat together as a family, and the parents would actually take an interest in their kids. I didn't have that. I couldn't relate to that. I couldn't relate to hearing other kids raving about their mom. What is that? I didn't know. Mother's Day would roll around and I'd dread it. I'd think about how much I hated my own mother and how I hoped I never look like her when I got older.

My parents eventually divorced. Thank god for that. Us kids were glad that they split, but unfortunately we were stuck living with my mom. She hid whiskey bottles all over her apartment and made me and my sister clean up after her all the time. She constantly called me degrading names and would threaten to tase me if I didn't do what she wanted. One time, CPS was coming over to interview her and we were instructed to clean up everything and she hid her taser and 20 knives she stole from my father under the couch cushions and told us to not say a word about it or we'd be taken to an orphanage and never seen again. When I was 17, I got the courage to leave and run to my dad's. I had him pick me up from school one day and I never looked back. She called the cops on my dad that day and I had to tell the officer I'm not going back.

When I had my first child at 18, somehow my mother found out and she called me 60x a day for a week leaving me hateful voicemails threatening to have my child taken away from me and prove in court that I was an unfit parent. She said she was going to prove I was a whore and unable to care for a baby and she was going to take my son from me. I tried to press harassment charges on her but the local police department refused to allow me to do such a thing because she was my mother. I've had my number changed several times over the years but somehow she always gets ahold of it.

In a way, having her as a mother has showed me how NOT to be. I've sort of made it my mission since I became a mother myself to not be like her but to give my kids everything i never had and more. Kind of overcompensating, but then again, I just want them to enjoy their childhood and not have to live in fear and anxiety like I did. Giving my kids the best of everything makes me breathe easy. I want my kids to be well taken care of and know they are loved, wanted and appreciated, as they should be. :)