Hi, /r/relationships,
I’m [22F] the oldest daughter of three, one of which is my half-sister [6F] on my father’s [46M] side with his now-wife [34F]. I have a younger brother [16M] from both my parents.
First, a bit of context on my family’s past:
For years, I’ve had a really strained relationship with my dad. He used to abuse of my family, especially my mother [45F], whom he used to beat, starve, and constantly cheat on. He didn’t allow her to have her own finances because he was constantly monitoring everything she did, he even coerced her into leaving her job as a schoolteacher to come work with him in his company as an executive manager (because my dad can’t do shit when it comes to dealing with finances and computers). She had a stroke when my brother was born which caused her to gain some weight, being immobile for three months will do that, and so she was a disgusting cow to my dad and she deserved to suffer.
After years of abuse, my mom opened up to a lawyer and started consulting with him (for free, mind you, because the lawyer was very sympathetic of the situation). My dad proceeded to beat my mom like never before and he threated to kill her in front of me and my brother, I was about thirteen at the time and I stood up to him, which left me with a black eye for two weeks. She stopped going to that lawyer.
Now, my dad was never really around. He would sometimes come home, sometimes he’d be drunk, other times he’d be angry and smell like perfume, and sometimes he just wouldn’t bother coming home for weeks. We got behind on a lot of bills and our refrigerator was repossessed, for six months we ate canned food and whatever my grandmother could muster up on the weekends at her house (she lived about 45 minutes away), but she wasn’t great on money-terms either, being an elderly woman with health issues.
When I was 15, my dad’s mother passed away. He loved that woman more than anything and he went back home for about three months because he was in mourning and needed his family. Four months after that, my mom’s father passed away due to a health complication and that’s when my dad dropped a bomb on my mother. First of all, he blamed her for their issues, saying it was her fault for gaining so much weight, for being sad all the time, for managing his company and not giving him privacy, etc. and then he filed for divorce. Mom doesn’t sign the papers for a few months, given that she was consulting her lawyer and going to therapy, but my dad starts parading his new girlfriend who was nine months pregnant when we met her. Simple math will tell you she got pregnant before the divorce papers were even filed. It was all a very ugly debacle.
I stopped talking to my dad, started drinking and smoking, stopped eating, but always excelled in school. I told myself one thing I need to do is get good grades and get the fuck out of my house. I suffered from malnutrition and developed sickle-cell anemia at 16 and my hair started falling out. His new girlfriend started insulting me constantly, like saying (IN FRONT of me) that I looked like a drug-addict and that I was probably sucking dick around high school to get money for my useless mother. Now, I already had no love for this woman, and her insults weren’t helping.
When I was 17, about to graduate (early, thanks to my academic excellence), my dad put up our house on an online rental site. One day, some people just came to our house saying they had paid a large deposit and threatened to call the cops on us if we didn’t leave THEIR home. My mom got scared, she was tired of all this shit, the people looked a bit unhinged even, so we packed up our clothes (what little we even had), and drove up to my grandma’s house. She had a spare room from when my mom was little, so we all squatted there. I had to start taking a one-hour commuter bus with my brother to go to school every day from then on, it would drop us off near my best friend’s house and we’d walk with her. It was exhausting, to say the least.
Meanwhile, my dad was building a pool in his new house, got a $5,000 dog for my baby sister, he and his girlfriend got new cars, and who knows what other luxuries they were basking in. My mother was struggling with two part-time jobs, a barely-functional old car, and we all slept in the same room. I got a great scholarship to Engineering school, but had to find a part-time job to pay for my housing and food, since it was three hours away. So, I got a part-time job. Whatever money I had leftover, I’d wire over to my mom, and whatever was left of THAT, I’d spend on cigarettes. I had become pretty unhinged at this point and the only thing I needed was to do well in school and graduate with a good job.
It’s been a long time since then, but my mom is a bit more stable (emotionally), but definitely not financially. She even started blaming me for a lot of things that happened to her, though I don’t understand what I had to do with anything, but she’s gotten really nasty towards me and now our relationship is pretty strained. We also can’t afford a good lawyer and she’s struggling with the alimony he gives her every month, which is just a $500 check for both kids. He is able to give that little amount because he actually lies on all his tax returns, since a lot of what his business does is slightly illegal and he gets tons of money from it. Again, this is a man that owns two cars, built a summer home by the beach, and travels about four times a year with his now-wife and her family. He spent over $70,000 on a big, extravagant wedding with her recently and my baby sister is going to a very expensive private school.
In the past, I’ve tried to be friendly with him in order to convince him to help us a bit, and sometimes it does work. He got me a used car, albeit broken-down and not very reliable, and sometimes he’ll put in a few hundred bucks in my bank account, which I wire to my mom directly. I want to be honest though, I hate doing this. My brother and my dad get along super well, but then again, my brother didn’t really SEE all the abuse as I did, and my dad genuinely likes spending time with him (“it’s a guys’ thing”), but with me, it’s quite strained because he knows I could call him out on his bullshit any minute (which I do) and I would call the cops on him if he ever laid a hand on me again.
Yesterday, I was talking to my baby sister over the phone and she slipped up and told me something I wasn’t supposed to know: they’re house-hunting today and they’re planning for another baby. I told myself, why the fuck does he need another house? He has a luxury apartment and a summer home by the beach. WHY another house? I have half a mind to call him up and ask him if it’s for my mom, sarcastically, because she has been almost begging for him to give her more monthly alimony so we can get a small apartment. It’s hell for me and my brother to have to share a room with mom! No privacy, we constantly fight because it’s tense, my brother won’t develop any good social skills, and he’s depressed! I fucking hate all this!
I want to fucking call the cops on him and use whatever money I can muster up to pay for a good lawyer and have him pay up for all these years of bullshit. I’m graduating this year and I have a few job offers lined up, but I cannot leave to build my career in any kind of peace of mind knowing that my mom and my brother will be in this situation! What can I even do? I still have a whole year before those job offers are available for me and even then, I have to move to the States, get an apartment, get a car, I’d have my own expenses. I feel like I need to do something, but I feel basically useless right now.
TL;DR Dad’s a grade-A asshole who won’t pay up alimony properly. Mom can’t afford a good lawyer. I still have a year left before I can graduate with a B.S. in Engineering, and even when I start working then, I’d have my own expenses up front. What the fuck do I do?
Submitted August 02, 2016 at 07:47PM by anxious_n_alone http://ift.tt/2apmPZ2 relationships
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