“It’s ok son. Don’t listen to her. Your mother is fucking insane.”
Who?
Some parents are just not woth the title.
I know my comment was low effort. I appreciate the supportive response anyway, even if it wasn’t that well deserved.
Thank you.
It’s deserved, everyone deserves love from their parents and when it’s not there it’s really jarring.
So from a complete stranger, a tiny bit of love and support <3
Any good memories of my Dad are overwritten by the child abuse. I would’ve been better off being raised by a single mother. Today is… complicated.
Solidarity. I can say that from the other side of that coin, it’s not always better… Divorced when I was 12, I told my mother “about fucking time” and got slapped.
My single mother later destroyed my teenage years and 20s. She died and it took 10 years for the financial fraud to fall away. I’m still working to escape damage from her extorting and manipulating me by threatening to accuse me of molesting my daughter with several of her friends willing to lie to police.
I hope you at least came away with positives to build with.
I’m so sorry, that sounds awful. I did get lucky in the sense that I had one good enough parent, which is honestly probably while I’m still alive and doing alright. I still talk to my Mom on a weekly basis. She had a lot of unwinding to do after her divorce. It’s tricky to get an abusive narcissist out of your head. They have a way of living there.
I hope you’re doing better! Your perseverance is admirable as hell.
Sometimes getting through adversity and hardship can make us into better, tougher, and more empathetic adults than we would’ve been if our childhoods had been easier. I hope that’s the case for you.
It’s tricky to get an abusive narcissist out of your head. They have a way of living there.
No joke! That’s been the worst!
I’m glad you still have her around, and the chance to share time without the negatives.
I am. My 21 year old daughter has been evidence that I’m doing something ok despite, and it’s amazing.
One of the most healing things so far has been the fact that I can look back and feel confident that I was right every time I thought “this feels like it is wrong and should be different”. My daughter still finds me regularly for spontaneous hugs and any time something needs fixing that she hadn’t figured out yet.
I hope you find a similar chance. It’s deserved.
When he grabbed me by the throat and pushed me up against a wall.
My dad, my brother(13) and I (16) were on a resort scuba dive (we borrow their gear, and get a ride on their boat, and follow their leader during the dive). Descending down a line, with my dad following the dive lead, then me, then my brother.
About 60 feet deep, I see my dad jerk suddenly, followed by a bunch of bubbles. I see him grab his octopus… Another spasm and more bubbles.
I watch as he swims down to the dive leader, and grabs his octopus, taking in and releasing a breath. He signals to dive lead he needs to surface. Dive lead grabs his octopus and replaced it with my dad’s original regulator… Another spasm, and he begins emergency surfacing. My brother and I follow. Dive lead has a Merry dive all alone.
At the surface, we find that the rubber bits on my dad’s equipment (regulator, and octopus) had deteriorated, and broken at depth. He had lungs full of water, and spent the next half hour barfing and coughing it up.
That’s about all I got, still brings me to tears twenty some odd years later to just think about it
I hope you all sued the resort.
That negligence nearly cost your dad his life.
It was in Mexico. No dice 😑. That being said, we didn’t have to pay for any of the dives, and they offered to buy dinner for him. He was ill for a day or two, so we didn’t get to exercise it
I had to look up what “octopus” means in terms of diving equipment to alleviate myself of a mental image of each of you diving with a little sea creature friend snuggled up on you, which for some reason you’d grab if distressed.
That would be nice, maybe this would work? Blavingad
Thank you. I was really confused and had to read it a couple of times. A first read made me think the dad started jerking off with an octopus and this went downhill.
He had a heart attack, best day of my life tbh, not only was he gone for a while, he stopped being a complete douchebag after he got out of the hospital
I remember when I was very young, maybe 3 or 4 so this would’ve been like 1975-6?, sitting in the truck with my dad waiting for something. A song came on the radio, and I looked over and realized that my dad was crying. It was the only time I’ve ever seen my dad cry, but when I asked him he didn’t try to hide or deny it, he just said ‘You’ll understand one day.’ I listened to that song over and over again for years as I grew up, and slowly understanding dawned and it really made me value my relationship with him (and with everyone, really), and made me realize that it’s okay to feel stuff even if society tells you that ‘real men don’t cry’ or whatever.
My dad was a dairy farmer. While I ended up in IT, a field he knew nothing about, he supported me the entire way. He did not understand my field of interest beyond the fact it was something I was interested in.
On the flip side, everything I know about machine nery maintenance and repair I have from him. In my current field (an odd mix of It, industrial robotics and heavy machinery… On ships), this background works well, as it gives me the diverse background needed for such a diverse work place.
I don’t think there are anyone else in the company who can do VLAN and LACP trunks AND troubleshoot misbehaving hydraulics.
I think farm life and the military have put me in much the same situation.
I’ve had a few" landmark moments" with my dad over the years. A lot of my experiences growing up with him were not positive. I think the most important thing I learned about him was that he wasn’t a bad person. He genuinely wanted to do the right thing. He was (and to some extent still is) a broken man who’s own father completely destroyed him. That realization made it easier for me to forgive him and work towards repairing our relationship.
The most important thing I learned from him was that anger is a cancer. If you can’t learn to let it go, it will metastasize. It rots you away from the inside out; physically, mentally, and spiritually. Robbing you of joy and cutting you off from the people you love while doing nothing to resolve the things you’re angry about.
I am extremely thankful that I learned that lesson at a relatively young age and before I had kids of my own. By the time my dad figured it out the damage was already done.
His misogyny.
I don’t have many happy memories of my father growing up. All he knew his entire life was hard work and he leaned into that, because his dad died when he was eleven. I am grateful to him for a few things he did that made a major impact on my life:
- He and my mom got my eyes fixed when I was four years old, before which I was legally blind.
- He put the first $1000 I ever saw in my hand to pay a college tuition bill so I wouldn’t have to quit.
- He made sure I had everything I needed growing up in terms of material needs.
But there are a wealth of shitty memories too. He was drunk for most of my childhood and adolescence and verbally abusive. There were times he’d show up to my baseball or soccer practices and games and beer cans would be falling out of his truck. (Never had an adult intervene there, though.)
Most annoyingly, he and my mom have “borrowed” my car for a year to work for DoorDash. They’re too old now to get jobs anywhere else and have to survive.
The best thing I can say about him now is that I know he regrets all of it. On the rare occasions I have him over he always has a gift of some sort. It’s usually something small, because they’re very poor. Last time it was a container of oatmeal. It’s his way of saying sorry, because his stoic, 1940’s and 1950’s upbringing produced a man who doesn’t know how to actually say he’s sorry.
I came out to him over christmas 2 years ago and that’s the last time he’s spoken to me. His last words to me before he read my letter were “Love you always”
I’ll be your dad, if you want. 🫂
He doesn’t deserve you.
Yeah it’s sad realizing my parent’s love really was conditional
This is the type of story I was expecting on Lemmy
To this day I still can’t tolerate the smell of cigarette smoke.
It killed him in the end, of course, but we’d lost contact for several years by then. I wouldn’t be surprised if it kills me too, even though I haven’t directly smoked a cigarette in my life; my lungs definitely accumulated enough crap over my childhood to kill several grown men; couldn’t breathe properly until I was an adult.
Him not being a part of my life for about 20 years. We’ve since reconciled to the point where we visit each other about twice a year and call every few months, but the relationship will always be a bit strained.
My dad constantly yelling at us. Telling us we were stupid and wouldn’t amount to anything.
One of my sisters turned out that way, and I blame him for it.
My other sister and myself are both college graduates.
She’s an engineer with a degree in math and engineering. I recently resigned from my geologist job to go back to school for biochemistry.
The reason it made such an impact on me is because I swore that my kid would never hear such talk from anyone in the family.
He just finished the 3rd grade at the top of his class in both math and reading.
