u/G5100G

My mother really seemed to enjoy it when someone she knew would hold me up against them or hold me down while she watched.

At least I suppose she must have liked it, seeing as I can remember it happening at least twice.

I have no idea how old I was the first time, but not very. Im sure it was before 12, probably younger. She had this friend she'd always call my aunt. She wasn't.

I remember one night I walked into the kitchen where they were talking, I dont remember what about but it wasn't long after her friend grabbed me from behind and locked her arms up infront of me squeezing me up against her so I couldn't get loose. They said they were seeing if I was strong enough to get away from somebody.

I think the truth is my mother just liked watching me look desperate and helpless. They had never done that before and never did it after. I guess she just really wanted to play power games that night.

The second time happened when I was much older, I think 16, maybe 15. I was sitting on her bed with her when her boyfriend at the time came over and pinned me to the bed right next to her. They were both fat as hell, so there was no chance of me pushing me off. He started tickling me hard in the sides while I pushed against him. They acted like it was something cute and funny, but I know what that shit was to her.

It felt disgusting, and all I wanted after the fact was to beat the crap out of both of them. Sadly, deep down, the person I felt most disgusted with was myself for not being strong enough to stop it.

She always blamed me whenever her boyfriends left her, saying I was the one that had driven them away, so at the time it geninunely confused me why she would just sit there and watch something like that and even encourage it even if it was "just tickling".

But I think that's exactly what the point was. She was letting it happen, enforcing it to happen. So it was different. She couldn't control when her boyfriends left her, but she could control what happened to me. More than that, I think she wanted to know how much she could control him too.

There was even a third time where she did it herself in a way.

I was in my early teens, and she gifted me a box of coffee pods since I liked them. Later that same day, she asked me to share them with my brothers. Without waiting for me to respond, she immediately backed me up against the wall and pressed her body up against mine while she stared me down until I gave her the box.

I honest and truthfully wouldn't be at all surprised if the entire reason behind that gift was simply to manufacture that situation in the first place.

I really wish being around my grandparents wasn't so complicated

I mean, I have some good memories of them, like when I was little, but the older I get, the worse they make me feel

It's really hard. I still kinda like them while also hating them

Especially because I keep wondering the reasons behind the crap they did

Like, I wonder how malicious it was

Did they keep hiding all that shit because they were actually afraid of losing us or just because they didn't want to admit any of it was happening

And I dont have those answers, and I dont think Im ever gonna have them because how do u even ask that?

I know growing up, they always said they wouldn't call cps because they were worried they wouldn't be approved to take us in because of their age

But grandparents take custody of their grandkids in situations like that CONSTANTLY

It makes me wonder if the real reason is either cuz they knew that despite everything they still wouldnt be willing to kick my mom out and obviously if cps decides to remove us from her we cant stay where she is

Or they just outright wanted to keep it all hush-hush

I dont know what the answer is because the second they came back from Georgia, the first thing they did was fix up that hoarded destroyed hellhole they left us in no questions asked.

The punched in doors and walls, the trash all over the place, hell the dead animal that was in the garage for who knows how long nobody even knew about because of how bad it was.

How my bed was covered in bedbugs and fleas and had been for years.

They just went straight to erasing all of it like it never happened, and that doesn't feel like someone trying to protect someone else

How do you even begin to forgive someone who just stood there and watched you get dragged around by your hair?

Watched you get spat in the face?

How do you make peace with someone who stood and watched while you had to pick broken glass and food off of the floor while someone screamed over you and threatened to beat you to death before you were even nine?

The worst thing is I know somewhere deep inside of me that if they hadn't spent my whole time with them telling me they weren't gonna call the cops or cps, I probably would have.

If I hadn't believed what they said, I know deep down I would have called the cops years and years ago.

And if I had done that, maybe everything that came later wouldn't have happened. But I didn't, and it did happen.

What are you supposed to do when you realize the people you thought were your heroes were the ones keeping you trapped?

I forgot about this for the longest time, but after seeing a video around a woman purposefully inflicting injuries onto herself in order to blame said injuries on her husband, I was reminded of a very similar behavior my mother would inflict on me.

My mother always wanted to be the victim. She needed us to be reminded of how stressed we made her every day. So she started doing something horrific. Something psychotic. It stopped when we got older, but when I was little, probably anytime under 10 I'd say, she would find us when we were in our rooms. She would purposefully close the door and block it so you would be stuck with her in the room.

Then she would start bashing her head into the wall, the door, sometimes both. She would do it over, and over, and over, and over again, and she would make sure you had to watch. She would scream, sob, and cry about how badly she wanted to die. How we were ruining her life. How everyone was somehow against her as if the whole outside world was together on some big conspiracy to take her down. I always believed it was a deliberate lie she told, just another way to make us think she was just this helpless victim everyone hated.

But who knows. It takes a severely mentally unwell person to do those things in the first place. To purposefully force their small children to watch those things. So maybe some sick part of her really did believe it.