Good. I know it hurts to cut ties with family, but I'm a firm believer that we have no obligation to subject ourselves to toxis people just because they're family. I hope that making this decision with finality helps you heal. I've seen it help other people I know who have shitty families.
Yeah. I'm a believer in divorce in all its forms. Not for nothing, understand... but my family's got a bad case of narcissistic golden-childing-and-scapegoating, and after 25 years of knowing that they didn't see me as kin and my "underdog" cousin getting everything they have to offer (she's now a landowner with a financially supportive girlfriend and doesn't need to do anything more than a little bit of light labor here or there--at 25, and has scheduled four different multi-week vacations so far this year, while I work 6 jobs in order to slowly move towards financial responsibility. "I understand that I'm really privileged in order to be able to do this!" she says. honey, you haven't worked a day in your life)... after all of that, I feel pretty vindicated.
I don't know. It's not something I want to do. I just feel like it's something that's already happened.
Yeah, I've had to deal with something like that. My younger sister is the super mega obviously favorite of my parent's 4 children.
I had a child at 21 when I was still living with them. And yes, my wife also. We had been friends online for 4 years when I convinced my parents to rescue her from impending homelessness, and she'd been living with us for 4 more years when this happened. We immediately offered to move out, even though we weren't ready. They convinced us to stay. We did our best to keep it low burden on everyone. The one sticking point was our sister had a dog that she didn't take care of. She wouldn't ever take it out, and this lead to a really filthy environment for our kid to be crawling around in. My parent's response was "Well if it's such a problem for you, then you take the dog out." I refused, in large part because I'd been building frustration and conflict with my parents over spoiling her rotten since she was 4. So they kicked us out. She held a celebration with her friends the night that was decided, and moved into our room a couple weeks later. And hung a giant princess crown symbol on the wall over her bed.
I mean I can't say that my parents don't support me, and they don't talk down to me or treat me like shit or anything. They help us out financially here and there, and we get them to watch the kids so we can go see a movie maybe once a month or something.
But compare... a few years later, my sister has a kid at age 16. My mom had at this point started working and going back to school again after being a homemaker for over 20 years, and it was the happiest I'd ever seen her in my life. She dropped out immediately to take care of my sister's kid for her. She has a kid and has hardly ever been inconvenienced by it. And they regularly pay for her and her friends to go on cruises and shit, when I've never been able to afford a traveling vacation in my life, and have never once been out of the country. And she also has two more dogs that she doesn't take care of. They asked my brothers if it was ok to bring more dogs into the house. They said no. They got the dogs anyway. And now my brothers are forced to take care of the dogs so she doesn't have to.
But my family is basically nuclear compared to a lot of people I know