My Messed-Up Childhood

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I have something serious to post about.

CONTENT WARNING: Abuse, addiction, death

Last night, my phone vibrated, and at first I thought it was just another notification about bus delays, but then it vibrated more, and I saw that my Mum was calling me. I hadn't expected to hear from her so soon after the night before. Anyway, I answered it, and she sounded sad, so I said "What's wrong?"

"Your Stepdad died".

I was quite shocked. I couldn't believe it. Then she said he died on 30th January, which I got confused by, until I realised she was talking about my first Stepfather, not my current one who isn't the healthiest and is dealing with losing his own father recently so that's why I thought he was the one that died, but no. That softened it a bit. Mum apologised for the miscommunication there.

It's still bad for my younger siblings, though, since he was their Dad, and for his own Dad who's still alive. It's given us mixed feelings. On the one hand, his loss is sad, especially since he didn't really do anything to help himself and his alcoholism and just descended further and further towards death. But on the other, he made mine and my sibling's childhood so awful, and my Mum was depressed for years over it (I don't know if she's forgiven herself for letting him treat us the way he did for so long).

I was quite an awful teenager, and it's because my life was awful. People made fun of me at school, and most of the teachers thought my meltdowns and outbursts were just me being rude when I didn't mean to be rude or hurt anyone's feelings. But I still preferred that to being at home, where my former Stepfather never let us have any fun unless he was drunk, would slap us if he thought we did something wrong (with my oldest brother getting the worst of it), and shouted at us a lot, and called us names. The worst part was, because my Mum let it go on for so long, I thought it was normal. I thought he was just a strict parent. I didn't realise that no one should treat their kids like that. It shouldn't have been a surprise when my Mum told me she was going to ask him to leave and get divorced, but it was.

I don't like using my awful childhood as an excuse for how awful of a teenager I was, though. But I really was selfish because I just wanted to be comfortable, and my lack of friends made me clingy and needy and demanding towards people, especially an online friend who I was basically a cyberbully towards because they weren't always online for me to talk to in the limited computer time I had (another thing to blame my former Stepfather for) and the other online people were in earlier time zones so they were still at school. A healthy-minded person would have found other websites with other things to do, but again, I barely had any friends so I fixated on people too much. It took being on the receiving end of an even clingier person who was much worse to me to make me fully realise the error of my ways, but that's a whole other story.

So now the biggest reason for my messed-up childhood is gone. But I can't even say I'm relieved, he hasn't been able to hurt me anymore in years. I'm more concerned about how it affects everyone else.

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