hi i'm vader and i make long posts about myself even though i have class at 8am
From a young age, I have had to deal with a TIGER MOM and an alcoholic father. I was taught my alphabet at 18 months, and could read by the time I was 3 years old. I knew addition and subtraction by age 5 and multiplication by the time I entered the first grade at 6. My parents pushed me to succeed and, at the beginning, it worked. I stopped doing what they wanted around 7, and it went downhill from there.
My father was supportive when I was younger, and my mother accepting and caring. There were some hiccups, like when my father tried teaching 3-year-old me how to box, or when my mother lost her shit that I threw up every time she gave me vegetables, but that was fine. I would not have objected to living in that household. That changed when my father was laid off. For a year and a half, all he did was sit around the house, drinking and looking for jobs. I had been spanked as a child, but never hit. That changed too. My mother became unhappy, and started to get bitchier and bitchier. She baked less. She treated me worse.
I was bullied a lot in school. It started to follow me home. It was pretty innocuous at first, just mild jabs like "soccerball head" from a buzzed dad, "dumbshit" from a frustrated mom. It got worse. They started yelling at each other constantly, "drunken failure," "dumb chink," etc were thrown around. They started calling me retarded when I did poorly on tests, and I was frequently hit.
I had "behavioral issues" in school and, rather than medicating me as the school recommended, I was sent to therapy. I was given a "star sheet" in school, and for each third of the day was given a star if I listened intently and behaved. I preferred to read Harry Potter and Calvin and Hobbes. I learned everything, but they couldn't accept that I wanted to read while I did so. If I got less than 2 stars, I would spend my afternoon locked in the dark basement until dinner. I cried at first, mostly from fear of imagined monsters, but eventually I accepted it and made the most of it. I brought down flashlights to read, etc.
My father eventually got back on his feet and got a job. It was a better one than before, but had a long commute. He didn't get home until after I was asleep and left before I awoke. It was like heaven. My mother was still consistently a bitch, who would forbid me from social interaction if I didn't do all of my homework. To be fair, I was only around 9 at this point and should have been doing it, but I did not WANT to.
My father got a better job, yadda yadda, and eventually was laid off again. Why? Part of it was the alcoholism he never shook. A shot in the morning that wore off before he got to work, sure, but going out to the bar in the middle of the day? He was competent, but when they needed to cut some people out, the drunk arab was first on the chopping block. It was a dark time for the family.
I was 12 when he was laid off again. I was a lot more defiant than when I was younger, but also a lot bigger. He hit me more often and harder. It was awful. My mother continually snipped away at my crumbling self-esteem. I decided I didn't want to be like my parents, ever. I buried myself deeper into reading things, lots of it Wikipedia, and eventually I found the internet.
My father stopped hitting me when I turned 18, and I rarely speak with him. He started trying to spend more "quality time" with me before I left for college, but the memories of every game turning into a shouting match and eventually a beating made me a little sour to the idea.
I don't talk to them much now. I leech their money, but I don't want to associate with them beyond that. I'm grateful on some level that they finance me, but I also want to be a writer and they have expressly told me they disapprove, and incessantly remind me of it. But it's better than it's been. My mother is, overall, a good mother who always packed me lunch and made sure my ass was wiped. She just happened to whittle away at my self-esteem.
As for you, it sounds like your parents are just normal parents. They don't passive-aggressively attack you for every single mistake you make until the end of time. They don't consistently deliver ultimatums to kick you out of the house. They don't hit you or belittle you or even try and stop you from having friends.
I skipped over a lot of nice stuff my mom did, and I'm not sure if I made it clear that my father did TRY to connect with me and do father/son stuff. It just never ended well. This might sound like a "wah wah my life is so bad" post, but I don't mean it to, and idk I figured it'd be ok to post about myself since that's my favorite thing to talk about and I don't really like talking about my problems irl...........................................................sry
