#and 'raised by an abusive parent who was a hoarder herself but god forbid her kids' rooms don't look like magazine spreads'

[queerlyglittering]

some of y'all never had parents who aggressively shamed you for making even a little mess or even just mere evidence of your existence and it shows

[broke-mind]

i woke up this morning realizing i had dreamed my father was dead. my dad wasn’t around for 8 years of my life (ages 5-13ish?) but when it was just me and my mom, mom used to always laugh and say “you’re just like your father” whenever I’d do things like take my socks off right away when i got home, or whenever i said i liked porkchops for dinner.

i still remember when dad called mom one day to say he was considering divorce. mom cried for a week straight. i remember it clearly because she couldn’t cook for herself without her hands trembling too much to maneuver the pots and pans. she didn’t turn on the tv to watch after school cartoons with me. she was sad and couldn’t do any of the things she normally did for my sister and i and i remember being so upset at my dad and so confused because i practically idolized the man through the developmental years of my life where he wasn’t around. mom always talked so positively about him.

and then, one day, the court case, the parole, the legal binding system that meant i was the only one in my family too young to see my dad- it all ended. mom and dad where back together happily, dad was back in my life and i thought that i’d finally gotten my happy ending after 8 years of playing caretaker for my mentally disordered mother and sister.

dad got death threats. people knocking on his door at 3am in the morning threatening to come back and kill him the next day. the neighbors abused his dog with a flyswatter. we had to leave the town i practically grew up in because now we had seen a very ugly underbelly to it and it was going to get us all killed. dad has a severe physical disability that means he can barely walk long distances at all and is in severe chronic pain every day.

but dad didn’t die. we moved to the island, a beautiful, tiny, but dead end town where no one knew anyone and everyone was rich except us. it was right on the ocean, i grew up and did college and had to move away from them to find a job. that meant moving a province over, but i had to do it. i couldn’t keep playing caretaker. i needed an adult life of my own.

and i got that. i moved away. i haven’t seen my parents in going on 3 years now though, and, being the youngest of dads 5 kids (most with different mothers), means that my dad is old. i think hes pushing his 70s soon, with mom now in her 60s. i get that. i know they’re going to die soon. perhaps thats heartless.

out of all dads 5 kids, me and my sister are probably the only ones who didn’t blame him for everything. ive heard multiple times from my half-sisters that dad was a terrible person who abandoned them as kids, couldn’t stay faithful to their mothers and so on and so forth. the sister i was raised with has a mental disorder and still has my dad practically holding her hand through her 30s.

when dad dies? i’m moving mom in with me. i just cant stop thinking about her crying on the couch for a week straight when she thought dad was divorcing her. she couldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep. i don’t think she could function at all and if dad dies i don’t think she’ll handle it well at all.

the dream has been haunting me all day, yet not enough that i actually picked up the phone to call them. i thought about it, once maybe, but i don’t know what i’m suppose to do. when dad dies, i’m going to be the only one to pitch in for funeral costs- i just know it. no one else is going to ensure he gets what he wants and im going to have to fight tooth and nail to make sure all of his useless, hoarder sized pile of useless junk doesn’t just go to the state. i’ll follow up on my promise to ensure his model train set isn’t sold off to the highest bidder.

i dont remember all of my dream. which is probably for the better, but i do remember this part where... dads car, god forbid he loves that thing, was sold to some other fellow who had fixed the thing up and was driving it around town. i had seen it parked outside of some bar/pub and ventured inside to simply ask the man if i could just get something of dads from inside the car that i had forgotten to receive before he died and the man was just... psychotic. he could not settle on whether he was happy to see me, or angry, and it lead to a physical altercation where, somehow, i had almost accidentally strangled the man with a pool cue.

i stopped once i realized what i was doing, of course, and the man laughed it off like it was no big deal. i left the bar/pub/whatever it actually was and had to go back to my parents place to sort through the rest of his belongings. i was somber about most of it. very methodical and unfeeling. it wasn’t until a faceless person had shown and asked me how i was dealing with my fathers death that i actually had a full break down. it was in the middle of that action that i awoke from my period pains demanding attention, but i wasn’t really very sad.

...i feel oddly numb to the whole thing. it scares me a little bit. i think im mentally preparing myself for my parents deaths.