Quote:
Originally Posted by D217
That's cool, but I'm a child of divorce, and honestly I hated everyone that tried to date/marry both of my parents. All these years later, I'm still expected to grin and bear it.  |
I am also a child of divorce.
I hated my stepmother at first. But since I became a mature adult (I'd say past about 25 or so) I realized some things that got me to set that aside. And I didn't hate her because she was dating my father. I can't imagine caring what my parents do sexually or romantically, that is not my business. I hope they find happiness and healthy relationships is all. I can't imagine being mad at them for not loving each other or for wanting other people to love.
But my Stepmom came along and tried to impose the kind of "parenting structure" that she thought was proper on my feral 10 year old self. The message I had internalized was that adults were totally unreliable, childish and capricious people who could not be trusted to look after me or provide for my needs, so I had to look for ways to provide for myself. I was making my own food by the time I was 5 or 6. And by the point she came along, most of my strategy for interacting with my parents had become just...avoiding them as much as I possibly could. So imagine this woman comes along trying to tell me I had a five minute limit on showers, removing my door from my bedroom (she was obsessed with the idea I might be "touching myself" and determined to prevent that at all costs)...telling me I had to ask permission before getting anything to eat or drink from the kitchen including a glass of water, and often saying no just because I had to get used to only consuming what was given at mealtimes. Not letting me go out, demanding to know where I was all the time. Taking away my stuff and making me do chores, and do them again if they weren't done perfectly...
I hated her. I called her Hitler I hated her so much.
But you know what? She was 24 years old. I now have a son who is that age. He doesn't know his arse from his elbow. So here was this young woman, thrown into a situation with an older man who had rarely lifted a finger to do anything parental other than just yell when he was mad, and she was expected to wing it and figure it all out with my 10 year old self and my 2 year old brother. That poor woman. She was only doing what she thought was best. And I made her life hell for the handful of years until I went and lived with my Mom.
By that point though, my Mom was not the adult between the two of us, I was. She treated me not only more like a friend than a daughter, but like the cooler more attractive friend who could get away with being a jerk to her because she was just grateful if I let her hang around. I went goth and Satanist while I lived with her, and the man she ended up marrying was scared half to death of me. He believed I put a curse on him and sent bees after him. I was fine with that if it meant that he and his drinking buddies would stay away from me and leave me alone. They've been divorced a while now, and I guess he's going through the 12 steps or something, he sent me a friend request on Facebook maybe to apologize or whatever...I don't want to talk to him, so I ignored that. For a moment I was tempted to message him, "I don't want to talk to you. Leave me alone or I will send more bees!"
But I didn't hate him. My Mom's relationship choices are very "whatever" for me. And I have a lot of sympathy for my Stepmom and we get along OK these days even though she and my father have gone off the deep end with politics and we don't agree, so there are areas where we tread with care.
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