I feel so alone in my own home.

[Shahbahdu]

I just turned 18 in February. Ever since then, my parents use the opportunity to turn every bad thing I do into a threat to kick me out. I could understand if I wasn't going to school and just bumming, but I haven't even graduated high school yet. If they kicked me out, I don't know where I'd go. All my life, my parents have sent me to private school, and they pay my high school tuition. I get great grades and have gotten scholarships and acceptances to every college I applied to. In less than six months, I will be moving out to go to college, to take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans (I'm so scared.) I don't have much time left to be here in my childhood home.

My younger sister is 14 and entering high school next year; she twisted my parents' arms until they let her go to public school. She gets average, sometimes poorer than average, grades and she has a bad reputation among the people in our town (some of it is false, but she hangs around with a crowd that is promiscuous and into drugs.) My parents adore her personality, praise her for being herself. Despite the fact her notoriety is a little undeserved, she does do lots of bad things. We get along by ourselves okay, despite the occasional, normal bickering, but when it comes to our mother's attentions, I can't help but hate her.

Ever since I was little, I always felt my parents take more interest in my sister, enjoy her company more. I always thought they just liked her more. My parents love me, because I'm their kid, but they don't like me. My parents used physical punishment with me, but not my sister; they still hit me occasionally, but they have never hit her. Around the time I reached middle school, I got tired of my mother insulting me (the c-word is used often) and my father using his fists, and I started fighting back, with equally terrible words. I know I shouldn't call my mother a * * * * * , but she is so mean. If I cry, she will stand there and mock me, "Boo hoo hoo!" She says things like, "I should have flushed you when I had the chance!","The doctor said you needed drugs when you were little, but your father insisted you were normal...","You aren't normal, you're a freak, we should have put you away!" My sister has stood there on the sidelines and watched, and now if I refuse to lend her something (she always asks for money) or we get into a disagreement, she uses the same words against me: "Mom's right, you ARE crazy, you should be locked up! You're a freak."

After a fight with my parents, sometimes I wonder if I am crazy. If my mom and my sister agree on that point, maybe they're seeing something I can't see. I've never really felt normal; I was adult-oriented as a child, and well read, and had trouble identifying with people my age until I learned to dial back the intellect. When I was in the 5th grade, my friends suddenly became my enemies and started to bully me. I would come home and cry every day until my mom had to alert the principal, and everything was set straight again. It took my mother two years however to do this. I didn't have friends until the end of 7th grade; she blamed me as the cause-she'd never had trouble being social. Obviously, there was something that everyone saw that made me different. I have a lot of friends now, and although they don't always come through, they're fun and are usually pretty loyal. But my mom shakes her head and says my social life "isn't real" because "no one actually likes me"; the people I go out with and go to school with aren't "great friends" and therefore I "have no real friends". Not like my sister, who is the queen bee in her social circle, who has everyone following her.

I feel unloved and unwanted. Like my sister and my parents are this little family unit, and I'm on the outside, excluded. They'll be downstairs watching television together in my parent's bedroom, and I'll try to join, and they'll make me leave if I sit down with them, like I'm a nuisance and a disturbance. The dog is more included. You look at the three of them and they look like a happy family. When my sister is sick, she's allowed to be around my mother, but when I get sick after my sister, I'M contagious. I recently got food poisoning around the same week my sister got the flu, and I'm an inconvenience because I'm bent over the toilet throwing up (how can I be faking that, mom? Huh? Tell me how) and my parents are yelling at me, making cry, and my sister is propped up in my mother's bed; 'my poor sick baby', my mother coos.

Lately, in the last few years, I've made some bad choices. But in secret. I've been sexually assaulted, I drink and get high parties, and a little over a year ago, I got a tattoo. I actually like the tattoo. I got it after my entire group of friends suddenly got into piercing and tattoos; my friends said that I was a goody-two-shoes, I'd never get one, after all, I was-technically-the last virgin. I got it, I liked getting it, it felt good. I felt powerful, it made me feel normal. It was small, about a square inch, and on my hip bone. It was hidden perfectly by any item of underwear or bathing suit. It was my secret, I didn't show anyone. As I was growing up, my mom said, "Don't ever come home with a tattoo." It was her one golden rule; she encouraged good grades, but knew that school wasn't for everyone, and even once commented that pregnancies can be aborted, "but the second you come home with a tattoo, you are gone." Why did I get when I had so much riding on not getting it? I don't know. It was a bad idea but I wanted to do it. I think maybe I was testing my limits and her. I never intended for her to find out about it, but my sister walked into my room while I was getting dressed (as usual, without knocking) and blackmailed me for months. I couldn't my sister to see that I wasn't just going to be losing a weekend or a cell phone or risking a beating; I was risking my home and my family. She called me a * * * * * and continued to torture me. She eventually told my dad, who told my mother. I didn't get kicked out of the house, and there were quite a few fights. However, it blew over. At least I thought it did. Then I noticed my mom was less attentive than ever. When I went to kiss her on the cheek, she'd wipe it off. When I tried to spend time with her or give her a hug, she's shrug me off. My mom has never been affectionate but she's downright hateful now. It's my fault, and I know it, she feels betrayed, but I feel betrayed too. She's my mother, I love her and I can't stop, why is her love so easy to turn on and off? In the middle of a fight later, I broke it to her that I was no longer technically a virgin. When I told her I'd been drunk and the act wasn't willing, she called me a liar and said that if it was true, it was my fault.

I cried every day in private, sobbing at night, found myself wanting to burst into tears in the middle of a class or at lunch with friends. And then the worst thing ever happened. I fell in love. I guess I was so desperate for deeper connection, that it happened, and it happened with someone who felt as alone I felt. He was several years older, barely into his twenties. He didn't go to school, he was sporadically employed. He was miserable because of his own familial issues. He was a friend of the family and we had flirted innocently for years, but it finally developed into us hooking up. I could feel my stomach drop whenever I was around him and we made plans to meet in secret, and I felt to different and new. There was commitment and every time I had an insecurity ('what if he's just using me for sex?'), it was like he would read my mind and he would say how kind I was, how funny I was, how he knew he could spend years with me, how he wanted me all to himself and didn't want me to see anyone else; he made me feel beautiful.

A month before I actually became legal, we had sex. Afterward, I felt alone. How could be so close to someone physically, and still feel so alone? I told him that I had some issues with what just happened, and he got annoyed, saying he knew that I'd regret it, that my first real time should be with someone special, and when I told him that I slept with him because I thought he was the special person, he gave me the Talk. You know, the one you hear on TV, "You know I like you, really like you, and care about you, but a relationship wouldn't work because..." I tried not to cry, but it happened, and it turned into a fight. The same day I gave myself to someone, I lost the someone, because I just wanted to be with someone so badly. I feel like if I had given him more time, he could have loved me, but I was too pushy, or worse still-and this is probably the reality-I fell for some slick older guy's lies. Either way, my heart was broken. I came home and called a friend, who took me out and tried to help; they tried but they didn't. Who can I talk to this about? The mother who already thinks I'm a useless?

All of this is coming to head, I can feel it. I'm alone, I'm depressed, I tried to tell my parents but they won't help. As childish as it sounds, I was here before my sister, so why am I the one excluded? Sometimes I think she feels the same way, she always says our dad lets me do more, but then after that little tantrum, she accepts his guilt gifts with a haughty little grin. And then my dad tries to make ME feel guilty because he supposedly lets me do more, but the only thing I have that my sister doesn't is the ability to drive. I just want my mother to love me and she can't; she can't forgive me. She never liked me in the first place and now she finds it hard to even love me. My sister who makes poor grades, and has poor behavior, is loved, and I've only been an adult for a month and a half, with great grades, and I'm going to college, and I made a mistake, and I'm alone. Why can't my mother love me? Why can't I be apart of my family?

[ForeverAngels]

Don't let your Mother get you down. You hang in there and keep up the great work with your grades and all.

I'm soooo sorry your mother and family has made you feel this way. Don't let this stop you from being who you are. You have just become an adult, you have started the frist year of your new life. You are going to meet new friend's, and people that will enjoy your company, and when you become who YOU want to be they are going to regret how they have treated you.

Now if you are depressed please do see a doctor for this and maybe they can help you with finding someone who you can talk to professionally

DON'T LET ANYONE MAKE YOU FEEL BAD ABOUT WHO YOU ARE.

( Bigggg Hugg's )

LIFE GET'S BETTER FROM HERE ON PROMISE !!!!!!!!

[JadedStar]

It is a very sad fact that some superficial parents will bond to their child who has a more outgoing and social personality and often can overlook and neglect the one that is more socially awkward, but who has other amazing gifts.

 

I read your story and just felt so bad for you, I wish I cuold give you wonderful words of wisdom, but I can't. All i can tell you is that one day you will be on your own and you won't have to be subjected to the bullying from your parents anymore. And yes, from the way it sounds the bullying they have done to you is far worse than what you got from school. And i can assure you that you have NOT deserved that.

[Dating Coach]

I only got a few paragraphs down and I had to stop because I want to fight your parents.