My Story Part 2....To Be Continued.....

During my high school years is when I really started noticing the kind of mom my mom really was. I’m sure most teenage girls say that because let’s face it, our hormones are on a whole different level at that age, but my mom really had a way of making me feel so unimportant to her. She was still a stay at home mom and supposedly spent her days cleaning and cooking for our family while my brother and I were at school. She would make that known whenever her and my dad would get into a fight about her forgetting to pick me up from school or her going out shopping and spending tons of money on herself. My dad would drop me off at school daily, occasionally he would have to go to work early and mom would do it, but I always hated when she dropped me off because we would fight just about every time. At the end of the day she was supposed to pick me up from school but slowly she started forgetting or she would be “too busy” and tell me to walk home. It was about a 3 mile walk and I absolutely hated it because not only was I carrying my heavy backpack, but it took time away from my homework and downtime at home before it was time for dinner and bed. I never understood why she was “too busy” or how she could even forget to pick me up until now…but I’ll get into that later.

I had a few boyfriends here and there throughout the first couple years of high school. They were all my age so none of them drove yet. One lived across the street from our high school so the days my mom would forget about me I would just go over to his house and hang out until she could find the time to pick me up. In about 11th grade I started dating a senior. Once I started dating him he pretty much drove me home from school every day so I never had to rely on mom again. I didn’t even bother to get my license until after high school because I ended up dating this guy for a long time and once he graduated high school he would pick me up for lunch and from school every day. My mom never really liked my boyfriend. She seemed to have liked everyone except him. I think it was because he was the first boyfriend who didn’t feel the need to make her like him. He was more worried about my dad liking him, which was smart because my dad meant everything to me and none of my prior boyfriends had tried to get to know him. He and my dad got along very well and that pissed my mom off. She would often make smart ass comments about their relationship.

I’m not going to lie, that relationship I was in was not a healthy one. My mom’s instincts were right but I didn’t see it that way at the time. Our fights (mine and my mom’s) got worse the longer I was with him, not because of him, but because she felt she was losing control over the one thing she always had control over, ME. Her and my dad started fighting more too. There was a lot of closed door fighting going on and I never really knew what it was about until later.

The day I graduated high school my mom filed for a divorce from my dad. I’ll never forget that day. They were both at my graduation as two separate people, no longer as a family. My mom seemed to be handling everything well, but my dad was so sick and weak. He had lost so much weight and was emotionally drained. He didn’t want a divorce but had no choice…she made up her mind and that was it. Looking back now, I don’t even know how he stayed as long as he did or why he even wanted to keep her.

To be continued….