plasticbag
2009-05-03 07:48:57 UTC
Well, I'm 16 and I go to school.
At the moment I live with my dad, and his soon to be wife and her three children, age 12, 17 and 19.
Before last August I had lived with my mother and my sister, a 2 hour drive in distance, for nearly all my life. Well, when I was small my parents lived together until I was about 2 and my dad left my mother, although he still stayed in my life. Then when I was 5 they got back together and then they had my sister, 11 years ago. My dad left again because he and my mother always fought. I remember vividly some terrible arguments around this time, shouting and violence and so on. I was very upset around this time and I had just started primary school and was forced to change to a new school after only 6 weeks. I remember I had a very hard time settling in and making friends and had trouble doing the work (i remember being upset by a piece of writing i had to copy out which said 'dad uses the iron', simply because it said dad) and the teachers were not very sympathetic and I remember being given out to and not knowing why. I lived with just my mum in our house and I remember being quite lonely and my mum lying in bed in the day and telling me to leave her alone. My dad always stayed around for me and he had once a week access and he used to bring me to his office or bring me out places like the park or cinema and we always had fun together. My sister was born when I was 5 and I really loved her and played with her all the time when she was small. In school I was very shy and quiet and only had one or two friends, and not very close at that. At home, I don't remember exactly when it started but my mother gradually became more and more abusive to me. I remember being terrorized by her as what she must have thought was a form of discipline - lots of shouting, hitting me with a wooden spoon, chasing me into corners, smacking etc. I was always very frightened of her and I remember wishing there was somebody bigger than her who would push her around the way she did me. The emotional abuse included her constantly saying bad things about my dad and his family, she basically brainwashed me against them although I tried very hard not to believe what she said about my dad. She would also force me to go on the phone and ask him for maintenance money he wasn't paying and she always had people around her that she fought with or weren't very nice. I witnessed so many violent fights with her and friends and her sister..I was always around adults fighting. My mother began to call me names, like 'cow', maybe when I was around 8. The names got worse and worse and she would tell me I was the cause of all her problems and I was just like my father and would often attack me and take out her anger on me. And I really believed for a long time that it really was me that was the problem, and I had very very low self esteem for a few years and never wanted to go out and play with other kids because I felt like I wasn't wanted by them and I wasn't good enough for anyone. By the time I was 12 I was started to feel a bit of anger towards my mum for the way she treated me, and started to fight back, (which only made things worse) but I started to kind of get a bit more control of my life but I was very cynical and envious of the other girls in my school who were so carefree and happy and popular and had nice families and had lots of fun with their friends and I always felt so left out and so worthless. I sometimes picked little fights with my classmates over nothing, and there was this one girl who I always really liked since she came to the school and at first we were sort of friends and she invited me to her house once but I never invited her back because I didn't want her to see how sad and awful my home life was in comparison to hers. She made lots of friends and I was secretly always so jealous of her, pretty, talented, athletic, popular, kind, always laughing, loving family...etc. I secretly kind of hated her, even though I know now she's just an ordinary girl and it's not her fault and I have no reason to be jealous of her because I'm just as good a person she is. But anyway, I left primary school and deliberately went to a school the rest of my classmates were not going to because I wanted to start a new life and make friends. I immediately got my first crush on this boy in my class and I thought I loved him and he thought he loved me I think but this crush made me so so painfully shy that I could never talk to him in person - our entire relationship was over instant messenger and he broke up with me by text after a few weeks and I was so heartbroken and kept trying to win him back even though he didn't want to know and even though he was just as shy as me, he made me feel like it was all my fault. I was very depressed for quite a few