A bit of long read, but I have to put this somewhere and I frankly don't have the resources for therapy. It's so painful and confusing and horrible to experience this, and I just want to better understand and be able to digest this terrible thing inside so I can move on with my life.
My parents divorced when I was a kid, and my brother and I lived with my dad growing up. My mom is an alchoholic who left to go into recovery, but fell off the wagon several years later and now just lives as an increasingly functional alcoholic, similar to the path her mom took. Today, despite hefty shortcomings as a mom to her four kids (my brother and I have two half sisters, both of whom are still growing up and certainly have their own wounds from a tough childhood), she clearly loves three of them. She and I have almost no relationship, and she's visibly walled off from me.
Since I was 14 or 15, it's been like pulling teeth to get her to call me, while she kept raising my little sisters and kept in regular touch with my older brother. She would go over a year without talking to me, and often my brother was like an intermediary between us. It makes me so angry to even write it, but for example on my 15th birthday my brother called me and handed the phone to her after going like a year without hearing from her for a heartfelt "happy birthday and I'm sorry it's been so long", and things like this happened every so often until I graduated from high school.
After high school we became increasingly distant. What was frustrating during that time is that my uncle and grandma (her side) would often call me encouraging me to bury the hatchet, to give her a call, to reduce the distance between us. I later learned that my mom had given them the impression that I was angry with her for the divorce when I was a small child, hence our estrangement, and never mentioned her cutting off contact with me with no explanation when I was a teenager or subsequent minimal participation/interest in my life. My uncle only learned the truth recently because I told him, and I think my grandma died still thinking that I was just a bitter guy who was angry at his mom for getting a divorce, and that one-directional anger was the reason for our distance. The thought makes me very angry and sad, that she would lie to her family, painting me in a bad light to protect herself from the embarrassment of having cut me off emotionally.
A big part of this pain has to do with my brother, especially the juxtapositions in their relationships. My brother while growing up was unusually cruel and abusive towards me. Though not really in his nature to be a cruel guy, it was how he dealt with mental health issues and a lot of stress at home with the divorce and my dad putting a lot of pressure on him and offloading plenty of negative energy too. Though quite a bit older (7 years), he was a kid too for much of this time, but he did do a lot of damage to me and was in a uniquely powerful position to do so.
He would watch me on most weekends while my dad worked, at least one night a weekend and often both days, which I'm sure he resented but he handled it by abusing me emotionally, physically, and sexually. Despite this, I worshiped him. I thought he was a coolest guy in the world, and he had pretty much complete control over me. What I said, what I did. With a big age difference, he was like a demigod to me. He always did well with girls and would constantly tell me how I was too short to ever do well with them ( I was a small kid and turned out pretty small as an adult as well, around 5'7, which isn't tiny but pretty much makes me the smallest man in my family).
My brother is very likeable, particularly when you first meet him, and whenever I'm around him I feel like I still sit in his shadow, his little brother, which is his go-to phrase when introducing me or referencing me. He says it lovingly I guess, and I think others take it that way, but I resent it so much, and I feel people deferring to him as a leader, viewing him as someone they want to be friends with, or want to fuck, or see again, or whatever, and me as just his little brother. This is a feeling that I only get with him and a small number of other male friends that trigger this complex, but it comes from him.
In addition to my mom who most certainly does, my sisters both visibly prefer my older brother as well. It just makes me feel so angry, jealous, hurt, and vengeful that he enjoys all this attention and unconditional love from people, no matter how much he fucks up, and he did so much terrible shit to me as a kid, told me so many things he shouldn't have. He'd beat me most days, especially when he watched me, pushed me into dog shit, grab my little prepubescent package, squeezing my balls and making me beg him to stop, made me look at porn when I was like 8 years old, made me keep so many secrets from my dad and from people at school.
He enjoys female love and attention and validation constantly, and perhaps is a little addicted to it, but he receives it! Meanwhile my mom seems to have just lopped me off from her life like a tumor so many years ago, never really explaining why me, specifically. It's worth noting that I have an incredible girlfriend and really have done quite well with women since high school, while my brother has tended toward crazy women and unhealthy relationships, but of course I still have this complex, and women do certainly prefer my gregarious, big, handsome, brother when meeting us.
The few times I've recently summoned the courage to ask my mom why she cut me off, I've always gotten bland, generic answers about guilt that really don't explain it. One time while drunk she hinted at being angry at me during that time, and said that nothing was the same after briefly living with her when I was 12, but I couldn't get anything else from her.
My mom, my brother, and my height all weigh so heavily on me and are very related to one another. To some extent I blame him and my mom for the fact I'm the shortest person in my family, due to the abuse and neglect and effect it could have had on my growth. Even if I'm not that small, I blame being shorter for others, including and especially my mom, viewing me as less worthy of love. I struggle so much with hating both my mom and my brother. I think I could forgive my brother if I didn't watch him also receive so much more love, especially from my mom and that whole side of the family.
As I get older, these ideas are fucking me up more and more. Of course it's hard to condense 27 years of twisted relationships into an admittedly long-winded post, so I can provide any additional context needed. I just wanted somewhere to write this, to just see it and let it be. It breaks my heart that my mom never cared to let me be a part of her life, never seemed to want to be a part of mine. Never knew who teachers or friends or love interests were, while I grew up watching her be so interested in all of my brothers gf's, even to this day, hiding in bushes to his embarrassment to spy on him while he socialized, worrying over a job interview he had or whether his mental health was ok. So visibly invested in him while she completely removed herself from on my end. I don't understand it and it tortures me.
TLDR: my mom inexplicably has seemed not to love me as much as her other kids, or at all, and the weight of this and how it bleeds into my other relationships, particularly with my brother, is starting to destroy me from the inside.
Submitted December 05, 2021 at 11:34PM by bellcurveblues https://ift.tt/3rDQ4kn
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