u/Inevitable-Lab-3829

Its okay, all this stuff is not your responsibility. Your adoptive mother has loads of issues that nobody will consider or talk about​. Even 35 years later it's hard to admit my mother just wasn't​ very good at it. Alcoholism, sexual frustration, lack of intimacy, probably depression, and loads of other issues from growing up in a repressed, oppressive ​country. We'll never know the half of it because nobody talks. How was I supposed to know.

Your father is a lovely, civil man but he didn't stand up for you when it mattered, some weird sexual education things happened when I was younger, involving my mother and sister. He didn't have a clue what to do. He will stand up for you when you're 22 and get your first girlfriend. Thank you for that moment Dad​.

So, when you sometimes have to walk 4 miles home, from working at a niteclub at half 4 in the morning because you've no lift home, that's fine. I rang my mother and she told me to make my own way home. I did what I was told. When she gets angry because I'm not home until 5 or 6, that's her problem, not mine. I fucking walked home.

If I miss my lift in the morning, that's ok too. Daddy gets a bit annoyed leaving me in but he doesn't know. I didn't get home until 5 and didn't hear the clock going at half 7. I couldn't tell anybody anything.

You walked in on your mother with another man when you were 8, that's why you tell nobody anything. She asked you to tell nobody and you kept your end of the bargain. You don't have to do that for the rest of your life, 40 ​years is enough. When you are 13 and your 14 year old sister is bathing and drying you, and your mother is staring at your balls, or before that, your mother ordering you to strip, and pulls your underpants out of your hands, that isn't your fault. Her sexual frustration and weird behaviour is not my fault. Btw, it's okay to talk to girls and you don't have to wait until 22 to masterbate. Everybody does it.

Oh yeah, that severe acne you have, that's stress, worry, anxiety, lack of release. It's your body's way of releasing all this toxic shit.

That insecurity you always feel and responsibility to keep the family together? That was adult shit. You were 8 and walked in on something no kid should see. Stop taking responsibility for it.

You were stripped bare physically, mentally and emotionally, you just didn't know it at the time. You will endure things for the next 40 years of your life, even to the extent of being in a hospital bed, having a pulmonary embolism in your lung and thinking: "do not tell ​the doctor I'm in agony". I didn't when he asked twice. Thank you doctor for trusting your intuition.

You don't have to take on the woes of the world anymore. Last summer, when you worked in Dublin for the Summer and you realised your older brother​, biological and who you are staying with, is another chronic alcoholic, just like his mother, just leave it. Do not go back next Summer, it isn't your responsibility to look after him, he's 10 years older. He'll kick you out of the flat when you point out his alcoholism, you'll be homeless on the street. Luckily, a woman you know will take you in, she's lovely, but again alcohol is everywhere. You'll go back to your brother the Summer after that to get away, but​ that is no escape for you. You must have lived in 15 or 16 different places over those few years because he couldn't pay rent, drank everything.

That is probably a big part of why you end up homeless a couple of times, ​years later. The seriousness of that situation doesn't really hit home.

None of any off that is your responsibility. Go on and enjoy life. Find out what you want to do in life, ​don't do accountancy because it's the safest, most secure and boring thing to do, and it involves money, things i don't have in my teenage life. Find out what I really like and want to do, not what others expect.

BTW, work out your own fashion style, don't wear trousers and shirts because that's what your old brother and Dad wear. Find out what you feel comfortable and own it.

Just remembered going to a girlfriend's house and finding laughter, respect, doing nice things for each other, winding each other up, caring for each other, being comfortable in each others company, very, very strange.

She then visited my mother, ​and my girlfriend complimented me on my appearance: "he scrubs up well, doesn't he?" Stone cold silence from my mother, she just couldn't add anything nice, she'd have been about 70 at that stage.

I just found having a nice, "normal" girlfriend so weird. No drama, fights, hateful or snide comments. Didn't know what to do and ended up leaving her. I was pining after my son's mother, loads of drama, fights and mind fucking there!

Just something I'd pushed away, yet another thing to block out.

When my son's mother got pregnant she was only 19, obviously very mixed up and scared. I can clearly remember her saying to me that I could walk away, she would raise the baby herself, she didn't need me, stuff like that. Just a scared shitless 19 year old. i was 22.

But what I'd buried down was my gut reaction, I'd say even beyond that, it was something in my blood, my being, my core. I was not going to leave her, like my birth mother had been treated. I had no way of knowing her partner had walked out on her, and was nowhere to be seen in the letters and records I got access to last year. Just from reading bits that were starting to come out in the 90's about Irish mother and baby homes, I intuitively knew this was the same situation my birth mother had been in, and there was no way in hell I was going anywhere.

Even when I was 16 and being treated like shyte, I would go to bed and think of her, but again, its as if I knew something in my bones that I couldn't possibly know. That she must have been treated poorly too, and that life must have been very unfair for her too.