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#and she became big he only started literally USING her as a cash cow till this day he still profits over her name with such nerve
cbrosa-archived · 3 years
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mitch winehouse doesn't get called out enough for being a dreadful and phony father. he had a huge role on the whole downfall of amy too.
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dawnowar · 4 years
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So this school lunches thing got me thinking about the way my abusive stepmother treated me as a child.
Thats as much of a trigger warning as you’re getting cause I think its better to process things than avoid them...  I have time to write and this is on my mind this second. Writing is a huge part of how I process things... so here we go.
So i passed on a post cause our local school system is offering free lunches for any kids under 18, which is great. I’m a big proponent for school lunches because growing up my evil stepmother didnt feed me right. and I was a rich kid so i think there was a lot of expectation that i was being taken care of in a way that I was not.
My stepmothers whole thing.. my family’s whole thing.. was pretending we were a normal family. Presenting that way to the outside world. Even in our house there was a huge degree of this. Which made it worse for me because it was so easy for people to assume i was just a weird kid when the signs presented themselves to people who could have helped me.
Anyway since i grew up and especially after she died, so many people told me that of course they noticed things weren’t right and of course they said something and fought for me. I never knew that until recently. So as nice as it is to hear, it didn’t help me live through those 8 or so years she was in charge of me.
At home she fed me candy.  and ice cream. cupcakes, etc. and that’s all. Breakfast was one cup of hot cocoa with two packets of mix in there that was always like a clumpy syrup at the bottom of the cup. After school was candy until my dad got home and we would all sit at the table and pretend to eat a meal together. She would give me the tiniest portion of meat or any real food and then tell my dad how I “eat like a bird”. which is nonsense. He never questioned it any further than that. 
On weekends when I had to eat at home I was allowed noodles and butter, mac and cheese and not a lot else. just pasta. When I got older, I would actually sneak eggs and tuna when she wasnt home. I’m sure she noticed these things going missing but what was she gonna do after I ate it? 
She had a lot of rules on me for every single thing. That didn’t make any sense. Where i was allowed to go, where i was allowed to sit, who i was allowed to talk to.. and i just mean in the house on a regular day... I wasnt allowed to use the upstairs bathrooms at all, i had to use the guest bathroom downstairs and I wasn’t allowed to bathe or shower, but when I got older i started sneaking showers when she was gone as well. 
I’d hear the garage door close as she was leaving and I’d be showering and eating tuna and trying my best to cover up my tracks before she got back. 
All this started gradually... wasnt at once or anything so when it started i was like 8 give or take.. and we moved a couple of times so more rules were put in place as i was moved further away from the neighbors who looked after me. When i was 10 we moved to a different city where I knew no one and i was on my own. Inside my own home. I just had to deal with it till i grew up. But it got much worse before it got better. By the time i was around 14, i was dealing with growing up stuff.. by the time I was 16 she really couldn’t control me anymore, so stuff like what i ate or where I sat or if I showered... i just one day figured out that if i just do things she usually cant or wont stop me. 
She used to steal my things and i didn’t have a hairbrush for years. I wasnt allowed to bathe, or do my laundry and I didn’t have a hairbrush, so you can imagine I looked like Pig Pen from Charlie Brown. She told my teachers I liked being like that or something. One of my gym teachers humiliated me once by forcing me to stay after class and shower as if i was just gross and she was solving the problem. She just humiliated me on top of all i was suffering, so i didn’t look to teachers to help me. 
My evil stepmother was physically abusive to me as well but that was the easy part. She would just go into rages and take it out on me if i didn’t obey her nonsensical rules which were impossible to follow anyway. She would come and attack me while I was asleep any morning my father left for work early. Most mornings. A normal morning for me..... She would wake me up by dragging me out of bed by my hair, onto the floor, out of my room, into the hall, around the corner and down the stairs and leave me at the bottom of the stairs to start my morning routine getting dressed and ready for school. 
Then I watched cartoons in the TV room by myself and drank the chocolate sludge till it was time to get on the bus to go to school where all the kids hated me because i was gross and I spent all day getting teased and taunted till I came home and went back to the TV room where she would either bring me candy or come in an attack me and pull my hair out. I wouldn’t know which one she was coming in the room for until she was doing it. There was a lock on the door and I would lock her out when she was being violent but she had the lock removed. Lied to the locksmith and my dad and made them believe there was a reason to take the lock out, so I started locking myself in the bathroom.
By the time I was 16, I was a much more imposing figure she couldn’t control completely anymore. I was washing myself and i was dressing myself so i didn’t look so dorky and maybe people started liking me at school. I got super lucky that a girl actually became my friend at school. She was not only super-independent but she had a car so she could pick me up and drive me away and she had a job working at a laundromat so i was able to wash my clothes for free and spend time away from home and learn how to grow up into a person who could do something besides just stay alive. 
But clear up to the very end of high school school lunches were my main source of nutrition. My evil stepmother was letting me eat pizza by then too. For her, being fat was the worst possible thing I guess so she just tried her best to fatten me up feeding me only carbs while both her daughters grew up to become anorexic. 
The first day I was actually on my own ever.. I was in England and I had just slept off the jet lag in my new rented room that was just for me. I wasnt on any program or plan. I wasn’t at college, nobody was in charge of me...  i was just there. just me and this rented room and I woke up in the morning with nothing and realized i needed to feed myself. I went to McDonald’s and got a vanilla milkshake and realized i have no idea how to feed myself like a normal person. 
I had to start that day and figure every single thing out for myself via trial and error about how to be a person in the real world.
That woman only had control of me for 8 years of my life and then I went out into the world and became a real person after that. She didn’t break me or destroy me. She did, however, destroy my family.
Its my dad’s fault for letting her. I’ve always felt this way. He was the adult. He was the only one who could have stopped it but instead he spent his time pretending everything was OK. I didn’t know until recently that literally EVERYONE told him, so he was willfully ignorant. He sacrificed his own children for this facade of a relationship with this woman. I can’t explain why a person does that, but he left me and my brother to fend for ourselves.
Which we did and we are ok. 
I don’t care what happened to her or her daughters. She basically stole the life I should have had and gave it to her children, but from what little i know about them from the outside is that they had their own problems which seem much harder to get past than what I had to deal with. 
I don’t mourn the loss of that life i never had any more than I mourn the life that we pretended we were having that we never were. 
I only wish I’d known back then the enormous power I really had if i’d only just kept on telling everyone who would listen truth. If i had told everyone everything at every turn i would have saved myself. I didn’t know that at the time. I was just a kid and I gave up because i didn’t believe anyone was listening once my most trusted adult didn’t believe me. I suffered until I grew up and didn’t have to suffer anymore. 
I am an emotionally healthy adult for the most part. I’m not without scars. It’d be impossible to come out of that unscathed. I’m perpetually single because being alone is safe and comforting for me. Because when people come in, you don’t know if they’re going to attack you or give you candy but neither one of them is what you really need. 
I flailed around for a lot of years as an adult trying to figure out how to take care of myself. I finally got it right after my boyfriend in the late 90s dumped me and I wasn’t dealing well when my best friend died and everything just burned down around me and i had to rebuild everything from scratch slowly and methodically starting with cleaning my kitchen and i found the flylady.org who put me on the path to getting my house cleaning under control and then the rest of it followed. 
Now i actually clean other peoples houses for a living.
We always had housekeepers and those ladies were the best women to me ever in my life and I’m proud to see that I’ve followed in their footsteps. These are the women who cared for me. These are the women who were kind to me. These are the women who worked hard for what they had instead of marrying rich and stealing from their cash-cow’s children. 
I didnt get the evil stepmother until I was around 7 or 8 years old but i had plenty of great parenting, people who loved me, people who took great care of me and taught me to be smart before I got there. I believe this is how I survived. 
School lunches, other people’s good parents, and good role models on my TV. And Rock and Roll, which became a real source of empowerment, an outlet for stress, and a way for me to meet people who became friends as I got older. 
I love all the true crime stories of how abused children grow up and somewhere around puberty they rebel and their abuser can’t control them anymore. I think this is how so many of us get away. We become adults. Probably best you don’t kill your abuser, but there’s some part of that tragedy i can’t help but like when you find out people like Gypsy Rose Blanchard was suffering for so long so she did something about it. 
I never did shit. 
I grew up and got away and that’s good enough. This woman didn’t give a fuck about me and until i got away from her and my dad pretending everything was fine and her daughters going along with it all, I was never going to have my own real life... which i deserved to have. 
Glad i wasnt so trapped i felt like i had to kill her to get away. She was more than happy to let me go away so I was already gone years before i realized i didnt have to let her control any part of my life at all. 
Seems so dumb i still played along for so many years after I was grown and moved away. It’s just the way things were for so long i just kept doing it. 
Until one day my younger sister was getting married and she called me to ask me to be in the wedding and im like...... you dont even like me, why would you want me in your wedding? and she said she orig only wanted her sister but they needed more bridesmaids or something.. maybe that was other sisters wedding.. i cant remember but it was stupid and had nothing to do with me and i was not gonna put my life on hold and spend all this money to travel states away to pretend any of this mattered to me so that was it. 
It was over. Finally.  Totally over.  All I had to do was just not live like that anymore. 
and I did. I live however I want to now. 
So fast forward to present time and im in my early 50s and i get a call says the evil stepmother is dead and my dad is still alive but only barely. My first inclination is to scoop him up and go thank goodness thats over, but unfortunately i doubt he saw it that way. and instead it ended with me trying to contact him directly and not through my step-sister but it was impossible and disappointing since she was still trying to act like the middleman i didn’t ask for but not providing any useful information or assistance in communicating with him.  She wanted me to call him even though he can’t hear so a phone call was just going to be more of the pretending everything is fine I refuse to take part in anymore.
I wrote him a letter directly asking him to take his time and write me back but all i got back was more interference from her and more insistence that i call him. Which I never did..... because he can’t hear. so what’s the point. He died shortly after that and i knew almost nothing about what was happening or not happening at any point.  
So he’s gone now too. Buried with the wife and one of the sisters who committed suicide a few years back. Growing up in a family like this isn’t good for anyone even if you aren’t the target for the abuse. All three of them are gone and im not sorry im glad for it. 
Their dead bodies can lie in the ground pretending they were a good family and no one walking by them ever has to know the truth. That’s how they lived their lives and that’s how they’ll rest forever. 
I expect to have a lot of life left to live and i’m going to do it on my own terms and be kind to people and not value money or other people’s perceptions of me over everything. 
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