Dealing with hate from your own family
My screwed up family and how I’m dealing with it.
Yesterday I read an article by Gillian Sisley where she discussed an article on Reddit that talked about a woman who refuses to let her ex-husband’s affair baby call her mama.
As I said on Gillian’s article, I understand the not wanting to be the girl’s mom and other than the ex, no one is asking her too. However, I question her saying “she wouldn’t be playing the role of mother to a child who wasn’t hers”. Did she mean just in this instance or is this a general statement?
This article got my attention for a couple of reasons. One, I was curious about the circumstances because it’s not every day you see a title like that. Second, it made me think of my own crazy combined family.
My father married my mother because he got her pregnant. Not because he loved her, but because he felt it was something he had to do as that’s how he was brought up (He was born in 1946). Abused her and me and then got pissy because she left him, taking me with her. He then brought a cop friend and his current girlfriend and took me from my then 17-year-old aunt and told her and the other family members that were there (my mother was at work) to take a lot of pictures because they were never going to see me again. And they didn’t, until I was 43 due to my father changing my name. He married the girlfriend that helped in the ‘kidnapping’ when I was 6 1/2 years old. She never fully accepted me as being her kid unless it benefitted her or made others feel sorry for her. She supposedly adopted me when I was 10, but I have no idea as I have yet to see the papers and proof that my father actually tried to find my birth mother. My stepmother’s family never accepted me and treated me like some alien that moved in, especially after my stepmother had my little sister when I was 11. Despite how everyone treated me, I treated my sister, AS my sister. I didn’t care that we have different mothers, she is still my sister. When she got older and I was home on leave from the Navy, she introduced me to her friends as her ‘half-sister’. Talk about being heartbroken. I think we’ve talked maybe twice since then. She is now about to turn 40 and I will be 51 in August. Regardless of how she feels, she will always be my baby sister.
Move forward to my first marriage. I was pregnant with my ex-boyfriend’s son when I met my first husband and despite the fact that it was glaringly apparent that my son wasn’t his, he allowed him to call him dad and as far as my first husband was concerned, my son was his son as well. No, this isn’t really the same thing as the woman in the article, but it is to a degree as our son is not his biological son.
My first husband and I then had our daughter. Despite my not marrying my son’s biological father, my son’s paternal grandparents accepted my daughter as a grandchild. Unfortunately, because my stepmother is a hypocrite, she constantly told my daughter that her brother’s grandparents were not her ‘real’ grandparents and she needed to stop calling them such. I asked her why she would tell my daughter that and she said ‘well they aren’t blood’. Which made me want to scream at her “neither are you!” I mean seriously? You aren’t her ‘blood’ grandmother, soooo why should she call you grandma? I did tell her to back off, but at the time I didn’t say anything else because I didn’t have the guts to go off on her.
So fast travel to February of this year. My biological mother died Feb 13, 2022. I went to see her younger sister (the one who was 17 when my father took me) for the first time since I was taken. As I was driving up to NY, I stopped in to see my stepmother and father. Something I now regret. I was, as usual, not treated like a daughter, but as just someone visiting. My father made it abundantly clear that he was not thrilled with me being there by practically rushing me out shortly after I got there. My stepmother brought up my mother’s family (knowing my father hated them) and asked how ‘this woman I was going to see was related’. Then asked if I knew how my uncle was doing (my uncle introduced my mother and father). I was like no one has any idea and I looked at my father and he’s like “I don’t know. I couldn't care less about that family.” ‘That family’…. The two of them act like I’m not part of ‘that family’.
To say the above comments hurt is an understatement. It was bad enough that my father showed me my entire life that he hated me because of who had me. Growing up, he told me and everyone that will listen that my mother was the abuser….that my mother was a bitch, a drug user, an alcoholic, AND that she left me alone when she would go out. On the contrary, that is not what happened. My aunts have told me that my mother wasn’t the best mother (who tf is?)but she was never abusive and I was always left with a family member or a neighbor if she had to go to work/go out/etc.
Dealing with all of this led me to be in a lot of abusive relationships until I met my current husband. It also led me to be an alcoholic and a crappy mother. However, meeting my current husband was literally a godsend. He helped me stop drinking, I stopped smoking, and I have done my best to try and fix things with my kids. It’s an up and down cycle, but I am at least trying. I just started therapy in Sept 2021 and it has helped a ton. I am still struggling with things, especially after the trip to see my ‘parents’ and the loss of my birth mother to a heart attack out of the blue.
What do you all think? Should blended families try to get along better or do you agree that only blood counts? Leave your comments below!
Thank you for reading my rambling. I will try to post something a bit more cheery next time~
