Realization. ( Final step becoming mature )

My grandmother was a devout christian woman who was super into 'health food', I guess. My mum was molested as a toddler, and raped as a young girl. I only recently came to find out that my Grandmother tried everything to put her back together but for some reason my mum never responded to any of it.

My mum never grew up properly. She never stuck with therapy as a kid and refused it as an adult so my mom at 25 turned out to be your run-of-the-mill stupid white girl.
She begat me at this age with a very dubious character; [who for the entirety of my life has been an unknown shadowy figure. I prefer it that way].

So she cuts ties with said dubious character and lies to him, saying she's going back home for college, and moves back in with my Grandmother. Dubious character returns, knocking/kicking? down our front door and my Grandmother [bless her heart, at 5-foot-nothing] marches up to his rotund [and extremely tall] person and proceeds to verbally lay down the law about how he wasn't getting me and to leave me and my mother be or so-help-her-she'd-unleash-some-shit.


Dubious character leaves, I live happily with my awesomely-maternal Grandmother [whom I had a very close relationship with, Mum was never around and never held me.]

I started developing kind of funny, balling my fists like a monkey to rise from a sitting position to standing. I was diagnosed with poly-articular Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis.

Sometime around now is when my mother managed to give birth to another little girl. I don't remember anything about her or her father, but my mom gave her up because she couldn't afford another baby with how much I'd cost to raise, having what I have.
.

When I was about three and a half my mum got a wild hair up her ass that I needed a father, and she proceeded to meet a guy at church and proposed to him 3 months later. That's when I met him. He made me kind of uncomfortable.

So we moved in to my 'new father's house' and it was 6 years of my mother hiding in her bedroom, avoiding me and eventually my brother. Stepdad was abusive, but knowing what I know now about his upbringing, he could've done something very worse to me, and he had the opportunity. He didn't take it. I can see moments where he held back. I know he was very sick [bipolar disorder. both him and my mother] but I think some part of him knew what was too far. I think I can forgive him soon, for that reason.

So my mother makes a bad decision [as per us'] and decides to put myself and my baby brother in the care of a psychopath. [I was told some things. They weren't good things.] who did what psychopaths tend to. .. Hurt little kids. :/ I really..

Eventually my mother listened to me about my stepfather and put me in an after-school program. [Boys&Girls' Club]. I didn't really like it there, because all the kids in that town were being fucked up somehow [It was an extremely awful neighborhood] and so of course they were all little shits. I was chubby so they made fun of me, but I had so much bigger shit to deal with that I never cried over them. I was too busy trying to keep my brother and I alive.

Unfortunately my mother's decision to put me in an after-school club spared me. Remaining in my babysitter's care, my brother did not. I warned her many times but only when the forensics came back did she believe me. When I came home for the funeral she pushed me away and told me 'not now.'

My grandmother, somehow sensing with her ultra-mother-senses stepped in and took me for a few days. I remember laying on her couch and her running out to me. I'd been screaming, I guess. I was really out of it.
[size=2]I'd just had to say goodbye to my baby brother because some dipshit white girl who didn't know how to be a parent ignored her daughter and let some awful thing happen. [/h]

So after a while I went back to school and the counselor was I guess, told to speak with me [I can't imagine why] and I ended up [after a lot of coaxing] opening up about my stepdad's abuse. She called CPS and my mother was ordered to take me and move out. So we moved out.

We ended up at a shitty little town outside seattle. I hated it there, my mother lost her shit. She stopped buying my medicine and my grandmother once more stepped in and took care of me for a while.

-I lost a lot of weight.
-I got physical therapy. In hindsight this was actually a stupid idea, my left ankle is nonexistent.
-But i for some reason missed my mother. I hated how she treated me but I'd just lost my brother so I felt like the world was trying to take everything from me all at once.

I moved back in with her. Things didn't get better. She met a guy named Carl. Then they did a little bit.

She got on some meds.

She got on some more.

She got on even more.

My adolescence was spent trying to cope with loss and scars and abandonment and trust issues while my mother popped pills and hoarded food down in her den of denial.

She got me on Vicodin. I became dependent, started abusing it for escapist reasons. I had to enroll in online school because my campus was too large for me to walk. I was in too much pain.

I had one good year, though. Freshman year was nice.. at school, and online anyways.

Things progressively deteriorated until I was rescued by someone. I ended up here, at 18. I starte putting myself back together.

My relationship with my grandmother had been strained after my mom moved out. My mum would try to tell me that my grandmother was ashamed of us, because she smoked and didn't go to church and 'was a failure'. I believed her.

I recently came back into contact with my Grandmother. We had a lot of heartfelt talks. Lots of tears were shed. Lots of hiccuping 'I love you's' and 'I am so sorry's'. I realized that the whole time, she was hoping I or my mum or both of us would reach out when we needed her. We never did.

I love that woman to bits. She is republican and conservative as fuck but damn it, if she would not die for any one of her children/descendants.

I'm in a really weird, new place in my life but even if my mum never gets help, I still have one hell of a woman who has my back. I also have the love of my life. He has a very close family, his grandparents are actually still together. Which, completely blows my mind. His parents are a little nuts but in a different way.

I may not have a lot, but what I've got counts for quite a great deal to me. A year and a half ago, I hated my life and felt I had nothing. I know now that's the farthest from the truth.