Reddit, where's your bully now?

TL;DR - I'm raising they're kids.

Alt account because of sensitive info.

I had a number of bullies over the years but there were two who were more long term. The first was a girl at my new middle school who, for whatever reason, hated my guts and tormented before and after school each day as well as during school hours if our paths crossed. The second was my brother, who was a year younger than me but a foot taller and much stronger. I know what my brother's home life was like so there's no mystery as to why he turned into a bully but I suspect the girl's home life was just as awful and I just happened to make an easy target for all her pent up anger and pain. We moved away after about a year so I didn't know what happened to her for awhile after that.

I left home at seventeen for obvious reasons. Two years later my brother and this girl bumped into each other while he was visiting family in her area and they started dating. She had a baby with her previous boyfriend and within a couple of months she was pregnant with my brother's baby. They were both on every drug imaginable, drunk all the time, physically and psychologically abusive to each other and the kids. They were a mess. DCFS stepped in and took the kids away with the goal of reuniting them but then she got pregnant again and the baby was born addicted to drugs again and DCFS said someone in the family had to adopt them or they would go to foster care. My husband and I tried, as did a few other relatives but my brother refused to sign over custody and the case worker was an awful person who didn't want to deal with complications so she marked in the file that no one wanted them and put them in a foster home.

From there, my brother's two boys bounced around a bit until they were five and six and were adopted by a family. I can't say much about this family but they were at the very least psychologically abusive. They decided the older boy was to much trouble and put him back in foster care at the age of nine and kept the younger boy. As you can imagine, this caused some issues with both boys. The older boy floated around to various foster homes and group homes until last year. He's fourteen now and has been through a lot but he's worked hard to deal with his issues and is ready to be adopted. As soon as we found out we started the adoption process. We hope to have him by the summer. And if his younger brother ends up back in foster care we'll do everything we can to get him too.

I haven't spoken to this girl in fifteen years and other than two or three calls over the years (him calling me to beg for money) I haven't spoken to my brother either. My understanding is that she still struggles with drugs and the law and that all her kids ended up being taken away over the years. My brother spent the last fifteen years mooching off various friends and family, knocking up one girl after another, partying and getting in trouble with the law. I don't know how many kids he has at this point and I really doubt he does either. He has zero interest in his kids but has always been dead set against anyone else in the family having a relationship with them either. I try to understand where he and this girl came from, that they're messed up from years of abuse, but I grew up in the same environment and I don't intentionally hurt people the way they do. It's hard to forgive them for putting little children through so much trauma. I'm trying though.

The silver lining is that I had cancer and was never able to have kids. When the boy came up for adoption, my husband and I had just recently decided we were ready to adopt. My brother and his girlfriend came from so much pain and everything they did in their lives produced more pain. But they had these kids and the kids were pure joy, just the sweetest little boys you could ever meet. Knowing that all that pain can result in something good and kind and that I can help these young men to end the cycle of family dysfunction and hopefully go out into the world and spread something positive gives me a kind of closure and makes it a little easier to forgive not just their parents but all the people before them that put us on this path.

/r/AskReddit Thread