Posted 28th August 2014 2835

I feel so sick of myself right now. I am always sad, depressed, or unhappy in general because of what I’ve done…the icon I chose for this post does not yet express a fraction of the helplessness and despair that I feel. If you’ll bother to read my story, then I’ll thank you beforehand for having the patience to put up with the sad, sad person I am right now.

First off I have two younger siblings. One who shares a father with me, the other who is my half-brother from my mom and my stepdad. The story goes back a few years before my brother was born. I was 7 and my younger sister was 5. Our family was a relatively successful one. Our mom and biological dad had successful jobs (mom was a CPA and restaurant owner, dad worked for a computer engineering company that gave him a 6 figure salary). But they were both were having tensions in their marriage. For reasons still unknown to me today (and I am 19), they divorced and went their separate ways. It was a very jarring experience for my sister and I; it did not help either that our maternal side of the family sided with our biological dad and pretty much “disowned” our mother. Both mom and dad made us feel as if we had to choose sides. And then our entire extended family just had to jump in the bandwagon and do that to us too.

We used to idolize our mother at that time. We thought she was perfect, #1, could never do any wrong…we thought dad and the others were being bullies, that the divorce was their fault, even though we never knew the details. So we sided with her when she found a new man. We even revered this new man more than our own father! However, subtle cues that her situation was not as stable as we would’ve liked popped up more than once, but were ignored by us; such as going to jail for civil stuff, something about insurance or whatever, that biological dad + maternal side of family had a hand in. Yes, I know, lots of dramatic stuff. Our stepdad also may have touched us inappropriately more than once…but we were too young to understand that, and it is a very fuzzy memory at the moment.

In all this chaos, our little brother was born. If anything he further cemented the belief that our “other side” of the family was evil. One of our aunts who denied his existence did not help us improve our opinion…and only pushed us further away from this conniving group of people who just loved to bully our poor mother. He was a lovable little boy. It is just unfortunate that, while he was growing up, he did not receive the proper care and attention most babies are due (probably bc mom went to jail several times when he was still young). When he turned one he became a picky eater. For some unknown reason, mom just let him stay at that and to this day, he has never been able to eat food like normal people can. He only eats chips, cereal, fries, the occasional pizza and pasta, but has never had a taste of meat or vegetables or even fruit that a kid should have eaten growing up.

She pretty much let his discipline slide, too, so he was very spoiled up until he was six years old. And get this; she never bothered to enroll him in a school, either. He stayed home as a homeschool student. And guess who took care of his teaching? Me and my sister. We too were pulled out of the school system to be homeschooled from an online school. So we were busy handling him and our studies. Should’ve known something was wrong then, too, because at around the same time we moved to a really rural area of the state. Our financial situation was not very good by then, because of all that legal stuff I mentioned before.

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