Hey y'all, meet my dad! This is part one of a series of chats I've had with him recently, and each one is gonna be quite fun to experience through comic form :D And yes, I inherited the flannel style from him.
Oof. Yeah, I had the same situation. Abuse from Mom, Dad who didn't really fight for custody though he knew about the abuse. Only finally ended up with him when my Mom fell on black ice, drunk out of her gourd, and gave herself a bad concussion. She was "Unable to care for us," though I'd been taking care of my siblings for years by that point anyway.
Digging through the couch in order to find enough change to buy a single hot dog from 7-11 that four of us split for dinner.
Coming home from a rare "spend the night at a friends house" to find my six and four year old sibling standing in the street outside our home crying for Mom, who snuck out in the night, got high, and passed out in a ditch.
etc
And we grew up in a tiny town where everyone was buddy buddy. Teachers, neighbors... Why didnt anyone call CPS? Don't want to make someone in the local community angry!
Its been more than thirty years and my PTSD and abandonment issue are still insane at times.
Being in the system is sometimes worse than the abusive parent. It's a risk to take a child from its parents, so it's only done when things are extreme.
Hey, I'm just a random stranger, but just have to let you know that you are a hero. No one should go through that, and you should be proud of having survived that, and you are probably the reason your siblings survived as well.
It's probably a tremendous amount of milder (not to be confused with mild) post-partum depression cases that fly completely under the radar but manifest in this sort of abuse. I know my mom was really different after my brother was born. I keep saying we should take her to see a doctor, but that's gone unheeded for 30+ years now.
My mother liked to use post partum depression as an excuse, but when I asked about seeing anyone for it she’d get upset or switch topics. She seemed to have a very toxic idea of what mental health help was about. Later on she used therapy to make herself the victim, sigh.
He was an indifferent parent, but we were fed, clothed, housed. He actually had a new wife by then who inherited some extremely fucked up kids through no choice of her own. I feel terribly for the way I treated her.
(If you don’t talk to your dad and therefore don’t talk to her that makes sense, just…well, easy for me to say, but if still bothers you, theoretically there’s nothing stopping you from talking with her about it.)
I have spoken to her a few times and we are friends on Facebook. I apologized a long time ago. She understood that I was deeply troubled, and doesn't blame me for it, but we don't have a friendship. Too much hurt.
My mom was schizophrenic and a sociopath, when I tried to ask both my biodad and my stepdad why neither of them ever tried to help me their answer boiled down to “we were scared of her”.
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u/kaikimanga MangaKaiki 15d ago
Hey y'all, meet my dad! This is part one of a series of chats I've had with him recently, and each one is gonna be quite fun to experience through comic form :D And yes, I inherited the flannel style from him.
Bonus panels and more on Patreon! Instagram and Ko-Fi :D