I (F19) need to get out of my household.

Hi all, I’m going to try to get straight to the point and make this as understandable as possible. I truly have no one in my life to confide in about this, so here I am. I’m new to Reddit, so sorry for any potential errors. I need someone, anyone, to please take the time to read through this thoroughly and share any advice.

Before I begin, I want to ask for understanding. My life has been an unconventional one, to say the least. I’m going to withhold some information for privacy reasons, obviously, but what I will say is be prepared for what will come next in this post.

I just turned 19 a few weeks ago and, besides my mom, I have no one in my life.

My dad has been out of the picture since before I even turned 10. My mom and him never even got married but for some reason wanted to have a baby, once I was born, my dad realized how much it truly takes to raise a child and checked out mentally but not physically, if that makes sense.

Before I was born, my dad was battling with a severe alcohol addiction and was a drug user too. After I was born, my mom suffered labor complications and was given a pain medication that she ended up getting addicted to herself, and quit when I was 3, so she’s been sober ever since then. Alcohol was never much of an issue with my mom, she could drink once in a while and be fine, whereas my dad essentially used alcohol as a replacement for water.

For some reason my mom thought my dad would change after I was born, but his behavior towards her became much worse, he was an extremely angry man and threatened to kill my mom multiple times and I’m sure he’s probably tried to as well (I only know what my mom chooses to tell me now, as I blocked out a lot of the traumatic experiences I witnessed before my mom got full custody of me.)

My dad was abusive and neglectful towards me, my mom insists that he always has and always will love me and I’m sure that’s true, but at the same time I just don’t think I’ll ever understand how someone could love their child and treat them that way at the same time. We did have some good times together, I think. A lot of those times were only occurring because my dad ended up cheating on my mom when I was around 3-4 with a mutual friend of my mom and dad’s, she had a house and two kids while being financially stable. My dad was a bum, plain and simple. He still lived with my grandma and grandpa, insisted he had an apartment and a whole separate room for me, which was a blatant lie that no one believed. My dad could hardly afford groceries, he had the occasional shady job and that’s where his income came from.

So my mom fought in court to get full custody of me, this began when I was around 4-5 years old and the battle finally ended with my mom gaining full custody and officially left my dad for good.

My dad basically said that if he didn’t have at least partial custody of me, then he didn’t want to see me anymore. He had tried a few times before to kidnap me and take me to a different state, but he got caught by the police pretty quickly and couldn’t afford the stay at a motel anyway.

So I haven’t seen my dad since, and my relationship with that side of the family is nonexistent, as my dad’s siblings are just not mentally stable to say the least.

I want to emphasize how strong my mom is for getting out of that situation and how proud I am of her, I’m so thankful for her. She managed to pick herself up and get us an apartment, a job, and a car within a short time period so we could finally be free.

Life was great at this point, I was a spoiled kid thanks to my mom working her hardest and I just got to live a very happy and normal life after all of the abuse we went through at the hands of my dad.

All of that was until my grandma on my mom’s side passed, my mom was completely crushed and fell into a deep depression, she lost her job and our family grew distant too.

My mom was always so close with her family in the past, and while I wouldn’t say I was particularly close with my mom’s side of the family, I loved seeing them during the holidays. All of that came to a close when my grandma passed away, it was so weird to see in real time just how much my grandma held my family together.

So my mom lost her job and needed support from her family, especially her closest sister, who we’ll call A. A was reluctant to help at first and her husband is very controlling in general so he didn’t allow A to help.

Also, for some reason, A’s husband actually hates my mom, he’s explicitly said that to her but it’s always confused me because A’s husband has known my mom for way longer than he’s known me, but he had the audacity to tell my mom to her face that he only cares about me and not her.

So A’s husband wasn’t happy about the whole needing assistance thing but eventually helped my mom out occasionally, alongside A herself.

But my mom was still barely holding it together. She was having trouble keeping a job, she had another bum ass “boyfriend” that was more like a babysitter than anything who literally did nothing but sit on a couch and play video games all day, she was losing money fast and it certainly didn’t help that our landlord upped the rent.

Then my mom and her “boyfriend” got into a nasty fight and broke up, my mom was hysterical as he had taken some expensive things of ours while we weren’t home, including her computer and a gaming console that was bought for me. He sold all of those things, I’d assume, and is probably still couch surfing.

I had to comfort my mom through all of these things, because that’s just what any other daughter would do, right?

Rent became impossible to keep up with and my landlord gave my mom an eviction notice, we had a month to leave. My mom couldn’t afford a storage unit and even then, it wouldn’t be enough to store everything we had while we were to live in a shelter.

My mom desperately asked her family members (A and another sister who we’ll call B) to allow me to stay with them for a little while until my mom could get back on her feet again and move us into another apartment, or at least take some of our things so we wouldn’t lose them permanently.

They all said no, literally everyone my mom asked said no.

So then we lost just about everything we had besides the clothes on our back, including our 2 pets that had to be given up for adoption. I was crushed.

I had to across the state, away from where I grew up, and live in a homeless shelter.

One thing led to another, and I stopped attending school. Everything in my life had just gone completely wrong, so I stopped caring about anything.

We lived in a homeless shelter for a few months. My mom had to work two jobs and was also driving around a lot around this time up until we moved into an apartment that we didn’t know was completely infested until after we moved in, and I had to stay at home all of the time too because my mom would work and I had no friends at this point other than the people I spoke to online. On top of all that, I actively refused to go to school.

I was literally living my worst nightmare, I have a huge fear of insects and rodents so being alone in a house with them made me hide away in my bed most of the time and just cry.

I was only 11 at that time and I couldn’t take living that way anymore so I attempted suicide. Not much in my life changed afterwards if I’m being honest. I started therapy again but the therapist unfortunately wasn’t much help.

A couple months went by and I noticed that my mom seemed significantly unhappier than usual, considering our circumstances I understood and expected that, but she started to take it out on me.

She was just a completely different person then and I had become hyper vigilant all over again. She and I would get into screaming fights, really bad ones over the smallest of things, and I would be a misbehaved kid sometimes and spoke back to my mom, which led to her screaming in my face until I was sobbing and hyperventilating, I’ll never forget the look she had in her eyes either. I would refuse to speak to her for days after that, and what made things worse was the fact that it literally was only my mom and I in that household. She never got physical with me but I always thought at this time that she would just snap one day and actually hit me.

I, again, became suicidal and isolated but I will not deny that my mom tried to get me help by taking me to therapists and psychiatrists, I just refused to tell them the truth about anything and would instead smile and act like everything was perfectly fine.

I neglected myself, I stopped going to school, I didn’t attend routine appointments, and I think around this time (11-12) my mom slowly began to give up on me.

Yes, the school district found out and called CPS to investigate, but I would just pretend to be doing schoolwork so I wouldn’t end up being taken away from my mom, because no matter what I still love her and was also afraid of what foster care would look like.

I’m 19 now and admittedly haven’t been to the dentist in 8 years, I have major depressive disorder and couldn’t be bothered to brush my teeth or even get out of bed sometimes, so now I have to deal with the consequences of having one adult tooth that is completely gone and crooked teeth that are in the process of rotting. It’s why I don’t smile with my teeth in photos anymore.

I stopped attending school and my mom would cover for me, I do think she came from a place of genuinely wanting the best for me but not knowing what to do, because I’ll admit that school made me miserable and suicidal too. It didn’t really matter whether it was public or online school, but the way that online school functions made it so easy for me to just lounge around the whole time anyway.

I will say though that I went a few years without attending school at all and made the dumb decision to try and dive back into things at a PUBLIC SCHOOL in my FRESHMAN YEAR. I didn’t know anyone at this school and worried about my grades, surprisingly the students were fine and I got all A’s and B’s except for one subject. I was so proud of myself for getting things back together in my life it seemed like, but then I started having daily panic attacks at school that disrupted my whole day and led me to giving up and asking to go home early. School became miserable for me again and my mom let me do my own thing all over again because I begged her to.

So from 11-14 I didn’t attend school whatsoever, tried again and did fine academically but my daily panic attacks were too much for me.

I became a shell of myself and spent most of my time online, my agoraphobia only grew worse after this (obviously) and it didn’t help that I lived in a town where the crime rates are significantly higher than the one I grew up in, so I was always worried of something happening to me. I literally worry about everything all of the time, ever since I was little.

So here I am now, 19 and I haven’t much to show for it. I still live with my mom, thankfully in a much nicer apartment, but we’re getting evicted again. My mom’s only form of income is through government assistance and she just can’t hold up a job nowadays for reasons I won’t dive into too much. She’s depressed herself, whether she realizes it or not, and spends her time watching television or sleeping. She doesn’t go out much and really doesn’t like people.

My mom definitely developed a permissive parenting style with me, I don’t have any responsibilities and now I am an adult that doesn’t know what to expect and it’s so hard and embarrassing. But I brought it on myself in a way.

I love my mom more than words can describe and I spend a lot of time with her, we have a much better relationship than we did back when I was a young teenager, but that doesn’t take away from my opinion that our relationship has never really been a healthy one. I feel like I’m just a shadow of her and I don’t know who I am without her either.

So here’s where my mom’s other sister (B) comes in. B also has two kids and is married, they live a state away from me and are financially stable as far as I’m aware, they live in a town much safer than mine and own a house. My mom and B don’t have the best relationship, B thinks my mom is irresponsible and needs to get herself together, and my mom thinks that B is too boring and strict.

Regardless of their relationship with each other, I have spent time with B and her husband as well as their kids (who are in much closer age range to me than A’s kids.) Their kids like me and wanna see me again, and they’re both well behaved so we never had any major moments where we didn’t get along.

But I haven’t seen B in years, she’s my aunt but I think my mom wants me to go full no contact with that side of the family too.

If I’m being honest, sometimes I wish I was B’s child instead. The “structure” that those kids have is meant to further help them in life. I have no structure, nothing to back me up, and I live in a low income area where most people don’t make it out of here. A lot of dangerous things that seem impossible to avoid happen here.

I’ve had this reoccurring thought lately that I should get back in contact with my aunt B, and maybe ask if she’d let me move in with her family, but I don’t know. It’s not like I’d be misbehaving or anything, I would genuinely love to follow whatever rules they’d have in place for me just because I’d feel acknowledged in a way, and I’m really not a troublesome person either.

It’s just insane to think about being a whole state away from my mom, but also relieving in a way? And terrifying all at once, because I’ve always been so attached to my mom and I’m literally all that she has, she says all the time that she doesn’t know if she could live without me and that scares me because it feels suffocating. But my mom understands me better than anyone else does, my mental health might be worse without her and I don’t want to be a burden on B’s family.

Not to mention that B and her husband are probably not exactly in the mood to essentially have a third child, especially one with a long list of mental illnesses. I care about them and their children, in their perspective it’s completely understandable that their own children should come first. So I guess I’m completely nervous to even bring this up to them out of nowhere when they don’t even have my phone number right now.

I just can’t keep living like this, I need to get out and become my own person and I want to be away from my mom, not saying I want to go full no contact with her, because I absolutely love my mom and want what is best for her, at the same time I just don’t think I can keep being the crumbling rock that she leans on.