I have thought about this many times. I still live at home currently so it's hard to "cut her out" so to speak, simply because when my mother is happy, the household is happy. However I have kept her at an arms length for a long time, whether she knows it or not. We were so close when I was younger and I thought of her as the best mom in the whole world, but after my stepdad came into the picture, things changed drastically. He was in full-on, hardcore addiction with heroine and my mother apparently thought that was a good environment for her 14 year old daughter to be in. He verbally abused me for years (right in front of her, never stuck up for me. It was pretty severe, things like bitch, whore, nasty slut, no one cares about you or likes you. She never said word until I fought back, then I was the most disrespectful child in the whole world), watched him overdose and do heroine right in front of me at 15 (multiple times), things even got physical at one point and he shoved me against a wall for having my dog with me in my room after a particularly bad verbal insult session. He pounded on my door and yelled "give me my fucking dog bitch" then burst in, shoved me against the wall, squeezed under my arms all while spitting in my face that "he dares me to fight back, give him a reason to hurt me." Mom heard the whole thing, and me screaming for her, but to this day she calls me a liar about the whole thing.

I have a lot of anger towards her about that, even now at almost 21. She also developed her own addiction to alcohol to deal with HIS addictions. When I was 16 she slashed her wrists so deep with a box cutter that I could see the tendons, all because he ran off in HER car after a bad fight. I remember holding dish towels to her wrists. There was blood everywhere. The paramedics were so worried about me that they refused to let me ride in the back, but let me ride in the front instead. I think I had some sort of mind black-out thing because I remember everything going very silent from the time I saw her wrists and everything felt like a blur. It felt like I was going through the mechanics of everything but not feeling any of it. I was sitting in her hospital room watching her get stitches when the sounds of the emergency room hit me full force and it was like I was back to reality again. That was an awful night.

She also made it very hard for me when I came out as a lesbian. New fodder for the rash of insults, except it came from the both of them this time. The girl I was dating when I came out, who is now my fiance, is the only reason why I am alive today. During this whole thing I was also very sick with an eating disorder and she is a very big part of why I went into recovery. I am now in remission and have been for almost 6 years. She is my light and she has taught me so much about my worth. If you're reading this baby, thank you for helping me heal.