I wrote this for a group online about abusive mothers but shall copy/paste it here. In this group everybody wails about their mothers and how horrible they are but I never told my story there, yet. It’s pending approval by admin, who knows if they’ll even let this one through.
Probably not. This story has already been told here, but across several longer, detailed entries. This is just a summary of the whole mess.
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Trigger Warning: Pretty much everything. .
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TL,DR: The horror! The horror. Is this real life?
. My NM is blessedly gone now, but I am still suffering the repercussions of her actions and will continue to do so for the rest of my life. I am afraid that even if I only tell the highlights (lowlights?) of what I went through, each individual story will come across as absurd or unlikely, but the cumulative effect will be so OTT and ridiculous that I’ll be presumed an exaggerator if not a flat-out liar. I wish! But no, as absurd as it sounds, all of these things happened.
I don’t want to get too long winded so I will try to keep it as short and tidy (and emotionless) as possible.
Her first marriage failed and she came home to her parents’ house, baby in tow. She immediately got with the town stud/drunk and became pregnant, with me. Her dad was already mad about her having moved back in with a baby, so she could not admit to having been too foolish to use birth control… so she lied to my grandmother and grandfather and let them – and my sister – and me – believe that I was the result of a r*pe. It was 21 years before the truth came to light.
To further complicate things I was born with a severe bilateral cleft lip and palate, (in other words as bad and complicated as the defect gets), which apparently ruined everybody’s lives and made them resent me to varying degrees. I was brutally bullied at school and would come home in hysterics, so she took me to a kiddie shrinker and he put me on some awful psyche dr*ugs that rendered me zombified. My grades and hygiene slipped which caused the bullying to amplify. My grandma forced her to take me off of the dr*gs. I do not know what they were or if and how they contribute to my current health/mental problems.
NM was unequipped to deal with me or anything else; in and out of mental hospitals and on many zombifying dr*gs herself. She was too busy being depressed and m*nt*l and buying all the sympathy for herself that she could over her poor little cleft/r*pe baby to actually deal with the baby or to get the work that I needed done on my lip and palate, done.
My cleft was crudely corrected and I never received the follow up dental work and plastic surgery that could have made me less hideous. Not just then, but ever. I tried but as with all things, it went poorly. All the same at 14 years old I managed to get a p*do 21 year old boyfriend. She (42 at the time) married him and put me in foster care where I was m*lested, abused, and used as sl^ve labor on a horse ranch.
She told the court my grandmother abused me so that I couldn’t move in with my grandparents and be around wreck their good time. At that point my grandparents lived a mere half mile away. For reasons I never ever ever understood, my grandmother forgave NM for this.
We were Jerry Springer people years before there was a Jerry Springer Show.
NM was the logical choice to inherit grandma and grandpa’s house but didn’t take it when she found out it would create problems for her free ride funded by Uncle Govt. Or so she said, idk the details. Grandma (grandpa had since passed) told me when I was 20 that I would inherit the house. So, I never tried to acquire a house on my own. I was kind of busy having a tumultuous life, anyway.
More bad things happened and I moved to a coastal city on the other side of the country, literally as far away as I could get from NM without falling off of the continent. While I was away she tried to commit suic*de in her dining room (on Mother’s Day) but failed spectacularly and ended up all busted up and in an adult rehab center for half a year.
But before that? Oh get this – before that…
My grandmother wasn’t right in the head, neither was NM but NM somehow ended up with POA over my grandmother’s affairs. NM TOLD my grandmother that she intended to fly to Colorado, and walk into Mount Massive or Mount Albert and just keep walking until she succumbed to the elements, exhaustion, or starvation.
My grandmother said,
(can you believe this? Is this real life?)
“I’ll come with you!”
If their id!0t plan had succeeded, I would have gotten a phone call – “your NM is de*d. Not enough yet? So is your grandma. Still not enough yet?”
Is it ever?
I also would have found out then – when I was 35 – that my grandmother GAVE – not sold or willed but flat out GAVE the car, land and house that had been promised to me 15 years prior, to some neighbor man, “Pete”, whom she had known for less than a year. He was her son’s age and she had a gross, wet crush on him. Ew. All the same my mother, with POA, drove grandma and Pete in the car to the lawyer’s office that I live mere blocks from today and gave it all to him; garage, shed, barn, land, car, house and contents, free and clear, all of it, with the understanding that my grandmother could reside there for the rest of her life.
Obviously they didn’t tell Pete their plan. They thought they were going into the mountains to d*e. AFTER all of that was done my mother chickened out, told my grandma who had paid for the flights to CO that the ticket money was non-refundable (BS, she kept it) and carried on happily in her rented home of decades while Pete and Co. piled in on grandma. Pete was drove my grandmother like a sl^ve, making her cook and clean for him, two dogs and two kids. NM, comfortable in her own home miles away, did nothing to help grandma and would not let grandma move in with her even though it was all her fault.
Meanwhile things continued to go poorly for me. I ended up very ill, with low grade blood poisoning and a mouthful of rotting upper teeth courtesy of ongoing cleft complications (my lowers are fine), and worse, a tumor in my neck at the same time my thug landlord (a name well known and loved in that coastal city, unfortunately) illegally evicted me (he got busted by the city having 3 or 4 units in an area zoned for duplexes only). I was too sick to deal with any of it so I was forced to move back across the country to the area where my mother and grandmother resided. It was either that or go to a homeless shelter and somebody needed to take care of grandma – NM and Pete surely weren’t doing it.
I lived through getting the tumor cut out (on a Friday the 13th by a doctor named Jason) and I got my upper teeth out (no replacements to this day, no gumline to support dentures and can’t afford implants) and I took care of my grandmother in a rented apartment for the last 13 years, she passed last November from a glioblastoma brain tumor.
I had estranged NM (OBVIOUSLY) but grandma still had contact with her for years. Whenever I would ask why she gave my inheritance away she would get angry and blame NM and the POA, she refused to accept any blame.
Even as gone as she was my grandmother eventually realized that NM was a black-hearted poisonous monster and estranged her as well. In 2015 NM committed suic*de by deliberately freezing herself to death. Notes of intent and directions to call the cadaver school she was donated to were pinned to her clothes; it was no accident.
I have a myriad of problems and live alone on SSI. My grandmother and a paltry, almost negligible life insurance policy of a few thousand benefiting me and now SSI is going to revoke two months of payments off of me at 10%/month over a period of 20 months because of that, even though they forced me to “spend down” the money in order to stay on SSI. Ridiculous! It should just be for 10 months but they’re burning me double on the cruelest of technicalities – I got the check Nov. 30 so they consider it income for that month.
So now inflation is out of control and I’m going to lose 10% of my already dismally low income for 20 months instead of the proper 10 over ONE. LITTLE. DAY. and I’m living on my landlord’s mercy – if he raises my rent my life will be wrecked. Destroyed, even.
I should have a house and a car and property. Annual property taxes would be just over half of what I pay for rent in a year. I didn’t do anything wrong to deserve this. Pete wasn’t there with grandma at the end for the screaming and the hallucinations and the diapers. Neither was NM. It was me.
And now, all alone, I live in mortal fear of my (frankly barely tolerable now) quality of life becoming worse. Of being homeless… again. I already had two turns on that scene. I don’t deserve a third one.
Just rooming up with somebody isn’t as easy for me as it would be for many people. I have multiple chemical sensitivity disorder, just one more plague of my life, so any fragranced products make me ill. ANY. Maybe that’s a long term ill health effect of the kiddie shrinking pills? Who knows?
An attorney had told me back then that there was a chance at getting the house back if grandma would take a test proving she was unfit and didn’t understand what NM was doing – but she couldn’t tell them about their stupid failed suic*de plan and more, her pride wouldn’t let her. In the end, grandma’s petty pride and her promise to not oust NM’s suic*dal tendencies meant more to her than the safety and security of home ownership that she had promised me for years.
So, they’re all gone now, and still, I pay. And I pay. And I pay.
Even when it’s over, it’s not over.
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EDIT: The cover photo X-ray is me. But it’s old. All the top teeth are gone now. The nice metal neck staples courtesy of the tumor removal are there forever, however. So is the rest of the metal on top.
Skeletons, Boogie! 