Yeah, I Know Pain

I grew up in a family where I wasn't important.  My parents were divorced and hated each other, I was the youngest (and only child by their coupling) so I got to hear messages directed at the other right before they were to drop me off/pick me up for the weekend or whatever.  I hated them and myself in through High School because I am gay and couldn't admit it because of them, so I turned to deadening the feelings with drugs. 

 

When I was 13 my mother told me that she had given up on me because my older sisters were too hard...she kept to her word on that.  At 16 she told me that if I didn't graduate high school she would drive her truck off a bridge because she couldn't feel like a failure.  My father worked constantly, even when it was his weekend to have me he worked.  When we spent time together I would ride around with him while he was working.  By then I was in my mid-teens and he was set in his ways.  We dispised each other.

After I came out my relationship with my father did I 180.  We both became more accepting and loving towards each other.  I'd see or talk to him every day.  We developed an amazing relationship.  He remarried and I loved his wife, and her son.  We all got along well, and even my Dad's other child (different mom), my sister, started showing up in the picture.  We were all very close, very emotionally aware, very kind and gentle and loving towards each other.  One night my Dad, Step-mom, Step-brother and I were sitting around their place watching "Fiddler on the Roof, singing along, having a "Leave it to Beaver" moment. The next day my Dad was electrocuted and died...probably instantly.  He was 52, I was 22. 

I remember seeing him dead in the hospital.  I remember eulogizing him at his funeral, I remember not knowing how to get through my life without him.  I remember hating the world because I'd had the perfect Dad, and I only got to have him for about 4 years.  I remember looking across his closed casket at my sister as we were the front two of six hefting his casket out the door of the cathedral that was so packed there were people huddled together beyond the door out to the street.  That stuff was painful.  The thing that ripped my heart out and smashed it to pieces was making his funeral arrangements.  Sitting in the room with funeral director and picking the flowers, insisting that we would not use their pall bearers, seeing what was left of my family have to unite when all we wanted to do was crawl in a cave and die.  I remember a break in the choices when the director walked out of the room.  I don't remember which of us started, but within seconds we were bawling.  I ended up on the floor in a corner rocking back and forther.  I remember feeling like someone had literally reached into my chest and ripped out my heart.  That was the hardest I've cried in my life, that was the most sorry for myself I've ever experienced...it was the most painful thing.

Within days of his death my real mother spread rumors throughout her side of the family that I had been left a hefty sum of money and that I was to be abhorred because I didn't set up college funds for my nephews and niece.  Then she told the family that I had given my inheritance to my step-mom and was left home and penniless.  She then called me up and harrassed me because we weren't having her other two children speak at the funeral.  She didn't show to the funeral.

The about three months later I remembered something I'd blocked out from childhood...I'd been physically abused by a babysitter...and my mother knew about it.  When I confronted her with it she tried to lay a guilt trip on me.

There have been a lot more minor things but nothing worth continuing to ramble on about.