Do you and your parents get along?

lephty wrote:

i was a momma's boy all my life. never had a great relationship with my dad. i can forgive my dad a bit since i think he was afraid of getting close to another son after his first son of another marriage died of cancer when i was not yet a year old. from what i understand, that really changed him. my dad passed in july of this year from lung cancer and it was kind of a weird feeling. now i didn't hate him or really love him. we did some fun things while growing up, but in his last year my other brother and i discovered he was living a lie of poverty to support his gambling addiction which really put additional strain on our relationship. he was gambling away more than $2500 a month! almost more than i make a month in net pay he was wasting and had ZERO savings. in fact, he would call my well to do uncle for loans to pay bills and such since he had his gambling problem well hidden.

my parents split when i was 12ish but they really should have split years earlier. when my mother told me, she sat me down to have a "serious talk" and when she told me, all i said was "its about time". this is why i HATE it when i hear people say "we are staying together for the kids"- who do you think you are fooling? 1 brother went to rehab a few different times for drugs and alcohol and apparently is doing quite well now but is socially retarded since he spent his teens to early twenties high as a kite from "pretty much everything but needles" according to him. other brother has a form of cerebral paulsey but he is considered "functional". his right side is mainly affected and some brain function... though sometimes i would think all brain function. now don't get me wrong, i have plenty of sympathy for disabled people, but growing up with one, i was really unaware of his disability until my early teens so i never really saw it. his story is great too... he was an on again off again ANGRY drunk. constant arguing and mishaps. somehow, girls find him attractive and he has 2 kids that my mother has custody of. one of them is slightly emotionally troubled, the other i hope will be fine.

so my mother finds some guy that she says she loves but EVERYBODY else hates. now this is not a "stepson hate" kind of thing. there is not a single person in my family tree that can stand the guy. he is a jerk to her and to the kids she has custody of and he was a jerk to me. so i left it all behind without really saying goodbye in may of 2006. my last piece of mail i got was Avocado which was EXTREMELY fitting with some of the songs lyrics. i could not take anymore of my mothers bad decisions. i left a note on my bed detailing my issues with the household and packed everything up and moved into my apartment. i was rarely ever home so she didn't even find the note for a few days after i was gone.

i think my mother tried too hard to be my friend and let me do whatever since i was a good kid and for the most part stayed out of trouble. sounds great right? well i think i needed more parenting and structure than i got.

since i moved out, i've lost 100lbs and feel better emotionally. no more anticipation of "what am i going to walk in to today when i get home". i miss my mom and we've tried to restart relationships a few different times, but eventually contact stops for no real reason. i really don't think things will ever be the same between us.

fortunately i do have 1 mostly normal brother and some cousins that i like to keep close to me. this is my life in a nutshell~