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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2026
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She got drunk and was crying about her regret about not aborting me. She came from a larger family and wanted more kids than she ended up having, but my dad's personal limit was 2-3 kids — and kid number three was only to try for a daughter if kid number 2 ended up being another boy. Me being a girl meant that she could only have two kids, and the fact that I was pretty fucked up means that she felt like she'd "wasted" a kid on me, so to speak
I don't blame my mum for having these thoughts, as awful as they may be. At the time, I had not long since been diagnosed with autism, and my mental health was pretty awful too, which must've been a lot of stress for a parent to handle. What I do blame her for is being deeply depressed and having her teenage daughter be her primary (and basically only) emotional outlet.
Whilst I am theoretically open to having a relationship with her in future, if she ever got sober (though that seems unlikely I'd learn of her being sober, as I went No Contact with her years ago), I'll never be able to forget how much she hurt me. She wasn't the root cause of my mental health problems, but she certainly made them a hell of a lot worse. And given that she never remembered the stuff she said when she was this drunk, I'll never get the closure of a genuine apology.
What's especially tragic about my mum is that she's actually pretty well adjusted, considering the awful childhood she had. The main thing she wanted from life was to be a mum, and to do a better job than her own mum had. I do think she achieved that, and there are so many things that I feel appreciative of her for. Unfortunately, no amount of good can make up for the hurt that she caused when she'd get drunk and pile her grief onto me. Most of the time her drunken tears were far less hurtful, but it's still a heavy burden to put on an already struggling teenager.
It's a shame, because I think she could've been an incredible parent if she'd been able to get therapy in the few years after she moved out but before she fell pregnant.
How fucking awful was her mom, if she achieved being better with how you were treated to emotional incest and bearing the brunt of drunken grief bombing.
It's weird because like my mom was a pretty terrible mom and yet because I know how evil my grandmother is like she actually did succeed at being a better mother than her own mother.
Just the bar was so low that going up three or four notches was still deeply in the bowels of hell.
Like the only thing that separates my mom from being a good mom was her own psychological issues stemming from having been raised by her mother.
If she had been able to find a good man and hold on to him to fill in the gap between what she had and what she lacked, she would have been a great mom.
For instance, my dad was a pretty good man. But he wasn't white, and so my grandparents conspired together to get my mom to separate from him and isolate her, which then led to her cheating on my dad and getting pregnant with my little sister, so she had to divorce my dad because of the shame of her own actions.
My dad was in the military and my mom got pregnant with me while they were stationed in Germany and my grandparents used the idea of me needing to be born in America to get her to come back to America.
His deployment didn't end until just before my first birthday. He got back and was immediately served divorce paperwork, and while the divorce was going on, my mom gave birth to my little sister, who is just slightly more than a year younger than me.
The really sad thing is, is my dad still loved her and probably would have figured out a way to make it work and to forgive her if she had tried, but she didn't try, she absolutely rejected him and he carried the emotional pain of that for the rest of his life.
When my mum was a child, when she wet the bed, she had her nose rubbed in it, like a dog.
Her step dad used to get her half siblings to restrain her arms as one of them beat her up.
When still a child herself, she was made responsible for the wellbeing of multiple of her very young siblings, necessitating her teaching her younger brother to help her shoplift food if they wanted to eat anything before their evening meal.
The thing is with my mum is that the good times were very good, and on average, she was still pretty decent — and that's with awful things like the emotional abusive dragging down that average. As much as I still feel hurt over what she put me through, I also feel a like of sympathy for her. She tried to be better than what she had, and whilst she did succeed in that, that says as much about the extremely low bad as it does about the good she achieved as a parent.