This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I honestly think that if the mom I grew up with hadn't given me such a great sense of self-esteem, I don't think I would have lasted as long under this current strange mother that I was now stuck with. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening.
Episode 211. What if you had to let her go to save yourself?
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I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. My mom had me when she was 17, and she didn't really want my dad in the picture. She called him things like a deadbeat, and she just said that life would be simpler without him in it. So I never really met him. It was just me and my mom.
We lived in a little trailer that was straight out of the 80s, just this ancient brown shag carpet, brown linoleum. The appliances were beige. We were on Social Security and we were on food stamps because my mother was disabled. It was definitely that sense that we were always kind of on the verge of possibly going hungry or possibly having our utilities cut out. I remember that as a cloud kind of hanging around above us.
That being said, we were poor, sure, but we were also really happy. My mom, for the first 13 years of my life, was an amazing mom. She helped me with all my homework. She was really involved in my extracurricular activities. She was very good at making me believe that I was capable of doing anything I wanted. Nothing was out of range for me.
Her kidneys failed when she was a teenager. She never really liked to talk about it. We couldn't afford a babysitter, so I always got to come along with her to her treatments. And so I have memories of going to the hospital with her twice a week and just hanging out in the hospital and running around on wheelchairs while she was getting her blood cleaned. She did get a transplant that stuck.
And so by the time this story really gets started, she's no longer on dialysis. She has more energy. All she has to do is kind of take a small mountain of pills every day to make sure that her body doesn't reject the kidney.
I don't think I knew at the time that it was a little weird that I was the one taking care of my mom sometimes, but she needed it and we were getting along fine. And I wouldn't say I felt responsible for her moods, but I did feel responsible to make sure that she got her meds and make sure that she at least got breakfast and make sure that she at least got out of bed. It made me feel happy to bring my mom coffee. I felt like a little adult.
But we also had fun. She was basically my best friend because she was so young. When we went out in public, she would get mistaken as my sister. And she actually, I think, really liked that. I think she found that very flattering. And she got along great with my friends. And so when my friends would come over and hang out, sometimes all of us would be playing video games together. She just was a young, cool mom.
I was incredibly outdoorsy. I would spend most of my time in the woods surrounding our house where I very definitely was not allowed to go and I very definitely went anyway. One of my favorite activities was reading books while up in a tree.
But I also really loved animals. I was always, you know, catching wild snakes and bringing them home to observe for a couple of days. And I was responsible for temporarily adopting and finding homes for many, many dogs over the years.
Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be some type of scientist. I always knew that I wanted to go to college. And my love of animals, I think, was the thread that kind of carried me through all that. I was the child of a single mother in the Bible Belt. And I was also unbaptized because my mother didn't appreciate that she had been baptized when she was too young to remember it. And she decided that she was going to let me make that decision myself.
And I'm glad that she did because I am not Christian. I converted to Buddhism when I was 13. And in a way, I really respect her for making that decision. But it also made life with other kids kind of hard. There were kids in school whose parents would not let them speak to me because I was unbaptized.
Other than that, I was happy. And I 100% credit my mom with my confidence because ever since I can remember, she was always telling me, you know, you're great, you're pretty, you're intelligent, you can do whatever you set your mind to. And if these people don't like you, that's their problem. And they're the ones missing out. That was actually a very nice mentality to go through grade and middle school with.
I was told years later that my mother had actually been institutionalized when she was in high school. If you asked her, she said it was because her mom and dad thought she was too difficult to control. But I was told by my mom's half-sister, my aunt, that she had attempted to harm herself. And so she was being monitored to make sure that she would be okay.
Mom never talked about this. Anytime it came up, she would shut down. The first time I noticed that things were starting to change, I was 12, not quite 13 yet, and small little things started happening. The first one was that mom started drinking and suddenly boxed wine started showing up in our fridge. Then occasionally it would be Crown Royal.
And the reason why I didn't like the drinking is because it changed mom a lot. And I wasn't sure what to do with her when she was drunk. I mean, this was my first experience with an intoxicated person. And so suddenly not being able to understand, you know, why are her words slurring? Why is she swaying? Why is she listening to the same Led Zeppelin song on repeat and screaming along? Like all of these things were very, just very new and very strange.
But I got used to it. And when she was sober, we were still playing video games together. We were still being a family. So I just adapted and went with it.
My mom had a lifelong problem with infidelity and I have never met my birth father. That was intentional on my mom's part. But I come to find out years and years later that there's a pretty good chance he wasn't actually my dad. I think that my mom had slept with more than one person and just didn't want to admit to him that he wasn't my dad.
Most of the men that she had in her life, they were more of a friends with benefits situation. Then we got a computer with an internet connection. Don't know if you remember those early 90s chat rooms, but that is how my mom met my stepdad. They got close very quickly and they liked to, instead of sending emails, they liked to actually chat online.
We all had AOL. And so you could, you know, go into a chat room and then private chat to the people in the room. And so that's mostly how they spent their evenings. I went from having a mom who wanted to watch TV with me at night and play games with me at night to a mom who was sitting at the computer talking to someone I'd never met for hours a day.
But I adapted to that, too, because she seemed to really like this guy and he definitely made her happy. I could see a change in her mood. She was brighter. She was a little more steady. Despite the drinking, it seemed like a good thing. So I just started hanging out alone at night or going over to my friends more so that she would have some time to talk to him herself.
She started working as a telemarketer to kind of bring in some extra funds. She was finally feeling healthy enough that she could hold down a part-time job. And it became harder for her to attend my school events. But I had just been inducted into the National Junior Honor Society. And it turned out that the day of the ceremony where I'd get my certificate and be recognized by the school was the day she had off.
And I remember being super happy about this because I'm like, yeah, my mom's going to be able to come with me. And I tell her and she gets this look on her face and she goes, oh, God damn it. That's my day off. And she follows it up with I was going to be talking to stepdad. And so she didn't go to my awards ceremony. She stayed home and talked with him.
And it was the only school event that my mother had missed. And it was, to me at the time, the most important one. And she just stayed home and spent her time on the computer. My stepdad did come to visit us. And it turns out that he actually did that to propose. He didn't have a ring because he didn't know her ring size.
At that point, I believe they had seen each other in person for maybe 24 hours, but they'd been speaking for hours a day online for a year. He was definitely an army grunt. He had the look. His head was shaved.
They got married, I believe, either the day or the day after he proposed. And actually, yeah, me and my best friend, we were the ones who signed the wedding certificate. It was actually kind of cute, but definitely not your traditional wedding. And then afterward, my stepdad wanted to take her out line dancing. She had a bottle of champagne while she was getting ready to go.
And then according to my stepdad, while she was there, she had five shots of wild turkey. And by the time he got her home, she was just incoherent and groaning in the bathtub. She had crawled into the bathtub because of how ill she felt and how out of it she was. I guess you could call it their honeymoon date ended with a hospital trip.
My stepdad had only known her for a little over 24 hours and had no idea about any of her medical issues. It's about 2 a.m. I have school the next morning. I'm in the ER just rattling off the medications that my mom takes, the dosages, the timing, everything.
While I'm having this conversation with the ER doctor, my stepdad is kind of staring at me, just shocked at all of this information that he didn't know about her. And then two feet away, she's getting her stomach pumped. She hadn't told him about any of her health issues. She spent the majority of the first time they had ever met in person, either drunk or hungover.
I was worried that things were going to continue to change because the plan was that in a couple months when he got redeployed, we were all going to move to Hawaii. I had only spent maybe 48 hours with this man, and I was being pulled onto an island in the middle of the ocean. The airport is basically open now.
And so the second you step off the plane, you've been in that cold, dry, processed air. And then bam, you get hit with this wave of warm humidity that smells like plumeria. And there are birds that you've never seen before running around under the eaves of the airport. And there are plants you've never seen before just blooming everywhere. It was completely overwhelming.
I had been to my hometown. I had been to Dallas, Texas, and I had been to Wichita, Kansas. And now I've moved into what is essentially a jungle island. Where have I been taken?
The military, at least at the time, really encouraged drinking as a way to unwind. And so Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, we would be going to parties at other people's houses.
And so every weekend, I would just take my homework to whatever house they were going to party at that night, find a quiet corner and make it through the night so that I could do it again on Saturday and then again on Sunday. I was 13 and most of these people didn't have kids. There were a couple of times that were actually pretty scary where older guys got too drunk to realize how young I was and hit on me very aggressively.
One of those guys, once he realized how old I actually was, was absolutely horrified that I was at the party at all. And so after that embarrassing start, he actually kind of became my guardian and would keep an eye on me because mom and my stepdad were off drinking and my mom was often too drunk to function by the end of these events. So he was kind of acting like my big brother. I'm really grateful that he did that for me because he didn't have to.
My mom had never had the chance to be a young adult who got to go to college because she had me. And now here she is married in a beautiful area with plenty of opportunities to party and meet other people, except she still got me. And now I'm holding her back.
I had spent the first 12 and a half years of my life being told that I was smart, that I could do anything. I was a talented writer. Then suddenly she just started making digs at me. She once called me a failed experiment in liberal parenting. She once told me that she would be surprised if I ever amounted to anything.
And sometimes I would be telling her stories or asking questions and she would cock her head and stare at me like I was some sort of mutant and go, I don't understand how you think. I started to feel like she didn't want me there. And I honestly think that as she drank more and as that made her mental state decline, she really resented me. My main chore was to clean the kitchen every day after she cooked. That had been my main chore growing up.
But it didn't matter how long I spent in that kitchen or how much I scrubbed or if I moved underneath the microwave to check and make sure that there weren't crumbs there. She would walk in after I had spent that long cleaning the kitchen and she would without fail find something that I had missed. She would call me an idiot and she would call me lazy and then she would ground me.
I was grounded to my room until I, quote, learn how to clean a fucking kitchen. Right. So I just got grounded and stayed perpetually grounded for the rest of my time in Hawaii.
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I was only allowed out twice a day. My stepdad was definitely not interested in being an actual father figure. He was perfectly polite. He never started anything with me. He was never rude to me. He never put me down.
He didn't have a ring when he proposed to my mom. But when we were settled down in Hawaii one day, he got permission to take me on an errand. And so I got to get out of the room and we went to the mall and I helped him pick out a ring for mom because I knew her ring size. And we actually had a very pleasant time.
I liked my stepdad, but I can still be a little mad that he didn't step in when he should have. I was going to school during this time and I did manage to make some friends and even gotten a boyfriend. Then my mom and my stepdad decided that we needed to move on to base on the other side of the island, which might as well have been across the country.
By the time I got pulled out of school, my mom was restricting what I could do while being grounded to my room. She had taken my radio. At one point, she took my bedding, so I was just sleeping on a bare-air mattress.
And she also wasn't letting me use makeup or style my hair. And she was dressing me herself. And she was dressing me in such a way that would make me ridiculed by my peers. She was very intentionally trying to make me get bullied. At this point, I had realized that things weren't quite right with my mom and that she was doing things to me that she shouldn't be doing. And I knew instinctively that I was being emotionally abused.
But I didn't try to talk to anyone else about it until the day she hit me. I can't remember what caused it, but she backhanded me with her rings on, one of them being the wedding ring that I helped her husband pick out for her. I remember in the bathroom sobbing myself sick, and I realized that I have cut marks on my face from these rings.
And I remember looking in the mirror and seeing what she'd done to my face and getting so angry. And I looked myself in the eyes and I promised right then that that was the only time she was ever going to get to hit me.
And then the next day, I went to school and tried to find my counselor. We set up a time. And so I go at the appropriate time to meet him. And I walk into his office. And I'm getting ready to sit down and finally tell an adult what has been going on over the past few months. And he looks at me and he grins. And he goes, so what's up? Having a problem with your boyfriend?
I was so far removed at this point from normal school drama that this just completely shut me down. I no longer trusted him. And so I just told him that I had to go back to class and then I never tried to speak to anyone at school about what was happening ever again.
At this point, I think it's safe to say that I'm feeling very alone and very depressed. And I think that this is the point where I started wondering if things might be better off if I were no longer living. It was just this quiet thought that seeped in one day.
Things got pretty dark pretty quick, but it wasn't until the block party for New Year's 2000, the big Y2K celebration, that I realized that things were irreparably damaged.
Somebody let out a very angry Rottweiler and he had been so worked up by all of the people coming in and out of the houses and all of the noise and all of the drunkenness that he starts bellowing and charging through the crowd.
And then suddenly one of the girls screams, grabs me and pulls me in front of her. And I turn and I see that this Rottweiler is just charging right at us. And she's using me as a human shield. Thankfully, one of the guys in the area saw what was happening and tackled the dog before it could bite me. But in that moment, time really slowed down and everything around me got a little hazy.
Despite everything going a little foggy, I can very clearly hear laughing. And once the dog gets caught and time starts to act normal for me again, I look over and I realize that the person that was laughing was my mom. Once she stopped laughing, she just turned around and walked off. She didn't even check to see if I was okay.
The families of the other girls who were with me, including the girl who used me as a human shield, they came running and were looking them over and making sure they were okay and then pulled them off to, you know, calm them down and get them a soda. When she did that, she was no longer the mom I knew.
She was essentially a stranger. I had no idea how she would react to things. She had no interest in me. She clearly had no care for my safety. And that wasn't the mom I grew up with. In my head at the time, I realized that I was living with two strangers because I didn't know my stepdad either.
It was a very, very lonely feeling. But there wasn't really anyone I could talk to because my mom had stopped letting me talk to our family when they called on the phone. My grandmother would call to check in. My grandfather would call to check in. My aunt would call to check in. And they would always ask to talk to me. And I found out later that she was saying, oh, she doesn't want to talk to you. And then just never told me they called.
So I had no way really to reach out. I felt isolated. I felt trapped. But I knew that there was a way out as things got worse and worse. And at the time, I believed that my mom was actively trying to get me to kill myself. It was almost comforting to think that at least I had the power to do this now.
half this memory of us walking down the street in the rain. We're walking to a dentist appointment and I can't remember what I said. I can never remember what it was I said in these situations because anything could set her off and there was no rhyme or reason to it. But she just turned to me and she's like, you know, I'll be surprised if you ever amount to anything.
I honestly don't know if there really wasn't any anger. All I remember, in all honesty, is being sad because I had already lost my mom. And in a way, I was grieving for the mom that I had grown up with, my mom that I loved,
And I found personally in my life that it is difficult to be angry when you are too depressed to get out of bed. After she and I had that conversation on the way to the dentist, that's when I started seriously looking around the house and debating the ways with which I could kill myself if it came to that.
And I honestly think that if the mom I grew up with hadn't given me such a great sense of self-esteem, I don't think I would have lasted as long under this current strange mother that I was now stuck with.
When I was out doing chores, I would go into the garage and see the weed killer and file that away and go, well, that would probably be very painful, but it would also probably be very effective. Or I would go into the bathroom and I would see the Tylenol and I'd think about all the alcohol mom had in the house and I'd go, well, I could always try pills. You're doing the dishes. You look down at the kitchen knife. You think about slitting your wrists off.
I wasn't ready to give up yet, but I was close. And so I was taking the time to make sure that if I did this, I would do it right. My skin didn't look so great. My hair wasn't being well kept. And I remember not having an appetite.
I'm wondering why my stepdad can't see it. But I'm also realizing she's awful to me when he's at work. And then when he's at home, she tries to be normal old mom, which gives her the chance to get mad at me when I don't reciprocate because I don't trust her anymore.
I'm slowly going through my list of possible ways to end my own life and debating which one seems the most effective. And we get invited to a barbecue. And that is unfortunately the night my mom kissed another man. And that is unfortunately the night that while she was kissing him, the man's wife walked in and caught them both.
I remember sitting in the living room and the woman storming out of the kitchen. And a couple seconds later, my mom comes out and she's very drunk and she's swaying a little bit. And usually when she's that drunk, she's very, very happy. But this time she looks like she's actually crying. And then a few minutes later, my stepdad comes to collect us and we leave.
And I remember my mom acting really weird for the rest of the night. At that time, I had no idea what had happened in the kitchen. It turns out that my stepdad hadn't been told either. And we were supposed to host that family at a barbecue the following day. My mom probably should have owned up to what happened. But instead, she pretended like nothing had happened at all. And the barbecue went ahead as normal.
The wife and the man that she kissed showed up and the wife started a scene. My stepdad, here he was being told this by the wife who was affected by this instead of hearing it from his wife. And they were in the middle of a barbecue for this. And he had also been drinking. So he got explosively angry. And he and my mom got into a physical fight.
I was in my room for it, but I heard him literally dragging her down the hall by her hair into the bedroom where they shouted at each other for a couple of hours. Then my next memory is waking up to a knock on my door and my mom walks in and she goes, honey, is it all right if I sleep with you tonight? So I gave her the lower bunk of the bunk bed.
and just lay there in silence that night listening to her sobbing beneath me. I couldn't think of anything to say, and I couldn't think of any way to comfort her. I just was no longer available. The next morning, I got up, and she was still in bed, and I made coffee, and I got her meds together, and I had her take her meds.
That first day after he found out about the kiss, he spent all of his time being angry and hurtful. And she spent all of her time just slowly closing in on herself and beginning to shut down. They made zero progress. My mom spent a second night on my bottom bunk, curled in a ball and crying while I lay there above her, wondering if there was anything I could possibly say and knowing that there wasn't.
She was already awake when I got up and she was sitting dressed out in the living room. I could tell what was going on in her head based on how she looked and how her eyes were kind of staring off into nothing. There was a familiarity there. She was feeling the way I had been feeling for the past couple of months.
So I went through our ritual again and I made her her coffee and I got all of her pills together and I made her some toast this time. And then I walk over and I try to get her attention. Hey, mom, you need to take your meds. And there's a long delay between when I say those words and when she looks at me. And she says, you need to go to our family friends for the day.
My stepdad wanted to talk to her and he wanted there to be privacy. And I remember standing there looking at her face and knowing that there was something wrong and also knowing that she and I no longer had the sort of relationship where I could say something and fix it.
And I also didn't have the sort of relationship with my stepdad or with any adult at this point, really, because none of them had helped me for months to go to him and say, hey, just just be careful. Just just be gentle because she's not OK. So when she told me that I needed to leave, I did. And part of me was going, you're just being paranoid. They're going to work it out. It'll be OK.
And then part of me was going, at this point, it felt like it was either her or me. I wasn't ready to give up and I wanted to survive. And I felt like if she survived this and things went back to the way things were, I was going to stop planning and actually die by suicide myself. My relationship with my mom at that point was so broken that in some ways she was already gone.
It felt like I was grieving for the mom I used to have. So it was almost like I was worrying about what a stranger was going to do. So what did I really owe her? All of that was what was going through my head as I biked over to the family friend's house.
And once I was there, I sat down at their computer. And of all things, I loaded up the PC version of the Game of Life and played Life for like seven hours while I waited for the phone call. Everyone around me was waiting for the phone call to tell me to come back home because my mom and my stepdad were ready for me to be there again. But I'm sitting at the computer playing the Game of Life,
probably dissociating at least a little bit. And I'm waiting for the phone call to tell me that my mom has died by suicide.
There is this voice in the back of my head that's going, you're just paranoid. She'd never do that. She loves you. She loves your stepdad. She wouldn't do that. But I knew that that wasn't quite correct because I had personally been feeling what she was feeling in that moment for months. And once you get that tired, loving someone isn't always enough.
It's late afternoon at this point, and I had been at the friend's house since breakfast. And I do hear the phone ring. The family friend picks up the phone and is like, you know, hey, how's it going? And then there's a pause and you hear her go, oh my God, what? And I turn around from the computer because I heard something in her voice. And she's just staring at me.
And she just wordlessly pulled out the phone and I pick it up and I go, hello. And my stepdad is on the other line and he manages to get out the words. Your mom just shot herself and then bursts into horrible, horrible tears. I have never heard anyone cry as hard as he did. And I couldn't get any more information about,
I'm standing there with the phone to my ear and the family friend is staring at me waiting for a reaction and I don't have one. I was probably in shock, but I had also mentally been preparing for this all day and it felt bad that I was right. It felt bad that my mom was gone, but I wasn't really processing emotions.
We unfortunately can't go back home because our house is now a crime scene. The military police were called and they treated my stepfather like a suspect. I remember being told later that they forced him to identify her body. They made him look at her after she shot herself. To me, that's the saddest part of all of this is what he went through after this.
My mother had never told him that she was mentally ill. So he had no idea that she had suffered from depression. He had no idea that she was bipolar. She hadn't been honest with him about it because I think she was afraid of being judged. I remember him talking to me and my grandfather and saying, if I had known this, I would have acted completely differently.
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And it felt weird to cry because I had written the eulogy that I knew people expected that they would hear from a daughter. But in some ways, I was standing up there in front of all of these people giving a eulogy to my abuser. She had made my life miserable on purpose for months. She had said she didn't want me.
And I was sad because my mom was gone. But I'm also happy because she can't hurt me anymore. That weird blend of emotions all caught up to me when I was reading these words that these people expected me to say. We had to get approval from the military police immediately.
for me to go in and get some clothes and some toiletries. And at that point, I was packing a bag because my stepdad and I had unanimously decided that we probably shouldn't continue living together. And so I was going to go live with my aunt and uncle who were days away from having their first child.
And so the military police let me into the house and I walk in. And the first thing that hits me is the smell. I turned to my left and in the entryway, there's a warm water, freshwater fish tank. That was my mom's pride and joy. She worked so hard to keep it clean. She worked so hard to keep it pretty. And it was full of very gorgeous fish. And she had names for all of them.
And I look to my left and the water is green and every single fish is dead because nobody took care of them while the house was a crime scene. For some reason, that really hit me. What a waste. What a horrible, really clear way to show that mom's not here anymore. I look from the fish tank and I get a glimpse down the hall to the master bedroom and I
And fortunately, I see a lot of blood on the walls. And so after seeing the aftermath of where my mother died, I went into my bedroom and packed my bag so that I could get on a plane and move for the third time in eight months. I left Hawaii and moved in with my aunt and uncle.
It was four days after they had their first child. And so they had a very troubled 14-year-old arrive at the same time as their first kid. And I can't even imagine what that must have been like stress-wise. My family put me into therapy. It wasn't super effective at first because I still didn't trust adults and I wasn't ready to talk.
I threw myself into my work because that's what I focused on to feel normal. And I also have to admit that some of it was done out of spite because everyone around me expected me to be a disaster because of what had happened in Hawaii. And I got very tired of their expectations being so low. So the way I rebelled was to be a straight A student.
Part of me understood that if I didn't go on medication, chances were good that I could end up like my mom did because she was self-medicating with the alcohol. She was trying to manage her moods. But I saw how that ended. And so despite while I was in college,
Being fiercely proud of the fact that I was getting these grades and making friends and dating successfully while not on medication, I realized that wasn't the badge of honor that I thought it was. So I made the decision to go to the psychiatrist at the college and get formally diagnosed and reenter therapy and begin managing my mood disorder with medication.
I remember staring at the pill bottle going, you're going to be taking this three times a day for the rest of your life. And then immediately thinking, yeah, and if I do that, I'll outlive my mom because she was only 31 when she died by suicide. I'm older now today talking to you than she ever got. And I owe that to medication and therapy.
I definitely did inherit my bipolar disorder from my mother. I have no reason to think that it came from anywhere else. Knowing that I got this from my mom and knowing what it made her put me through, I have no interest in ever having children. And I think that that might be the biggest direct impact, knowing where my disorder came from and knowing that I could pass it on to someone else.
And also the fear, in all honesty, that if I did have a child, what if I get too sick to take care of them properly and do to them what my mom did to me? I don't want to repeat the cycle. So as a result, I married someone who also doesn't want children and we fill our house with pets instead. And our pets are our babies.
I realized after all of this time and after all of this therapy that my mom had been lonely and frustrated. And that doesn't excuse anything that she did, but it did make me capable of relating to her again. This definitely was the point at which I stopped thinking of my mother as two separate people.
At the end of the day, she was sick and she was complex, dealing with things of her own that at the time I was too depressed and upset to really understand. And over the course of my life, I have had situations where I realized it would be safer for me to be in the care of other people for a few days, which is my euphemistic way of saying I have been institutionalized before.
I don't think that until I had those moments and realized how difficult it was to accept the social stigma that was going to come with that and to accept that you needed the help, reaching out in those situations is very difficult.
Some of my friends did treat me differently afterwards. And so it made me understand why my mom was trying to self-medicate instead of reaching out to get the help she needed. I think she was terrified that her husband would think less of her. Thankfully, I'm in a position where I now have friends who are mental health advocates. I'm a mental health advocate myself.
And my spouse is supportive and knows what to do on days when I'm not doing so hot. But I had to work really hard and very actively to build up that network. And mom never did. I just think back to feeling like I had no one to turn to while she was doing all of that to me. And I realize now that she didn't feel like she had anyone to turn to either.
So it's kind of sad in a way because we were both miserable and both alone, but our relationship had been destroyed so thoroughly that we couldn't reconnect. And that still makes me really sad. The most challenging part of this whole experience is looking back on that moment with my mom where I knew that if I left the house, I would never see her again.
There is a part of me that has always said, you let your mother die. It has taken a long time to come to terms with that thought and to realize that that's not quite correct. I did leave that day and I didn't tell anyone what I suspected. And that's okay because I was protecting myself at that point.
And there are days and moments like right now where I feel a little heartless saying things like that. But I also know that my mom loved me, raised me and made me a strong person. And she wouldn't have wanted me to die before she went and kissed that man in the kitchen. And she and my stepdad got into their fight.
I had narrowed down my list of ways to die to either the weed killer or the pills. And so if this hadn't happened, I would have died by suicide probably within the next couple of weeks. I never made it to my 14th birthday.
I like being alive. I like the life I have. And if I had been given the choice to choose between myself and my abuser, and my abuser had not been related to me by blood, nobody would have expected me to choose my abuser. Just because someone is family doesn't mean that they need to be in your life.
You don't owe family anything if they are making your life hell. People are complex and they are also incredibly resilient, especially if they're given the resources to bounce back.
And I think this whole experience is one of the reasons why I'm such a huge mental health advocate. I want to make sure that if someone needs me in a moment like this, they're not afraid to reach out. And I want there to be a world where you can tell people that you're having a bad mental health day and need a little extra care. And you won't be looked down on or shunned or viewed as crazy for doing that.
I have a very strong love of the horror genre now. And when I have a bad day, my favorite way to unwind is to either put on a horror podcast or put on a horror TV show. And I have found by talking to other people who have had trauma in their life that they also find horror soothing.
I write horror now, and I have had a story adapted for audio, which was an amazing experience. You'd think that you would want to avoid it, but for me, I like that there's a formula. The monsters that you deal with in real life...
don't always look different and they don't always act different. They blend in. They're hard to find. It's difficult to, I guess, trust everything you see in real life because who knows what's lurking under the surface, right?
And then you get to a monster movie and you know exactly who is bad and you know exactly why it's bad and you know exactly what it's going to do. And the nice thing about monster movies is they're so different from dealing with monsters in real life. And so I get this sense of catharsis.
But I also get to divorce myself from real world monsters for a while and watch people win against admittedly fake monsters, but they're winning. And that's a good feeling.
Today's episode featured Wren Feeney. Wren lives her life surrounded by pets and people who love her, and yet spends her free time writing horror. If you'd like to read her work or just reach out and say hi, visit wrenfeeney.com. That's W-R-E-N-F-E-E-N-E-Y dot com for stories and contact information.
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Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast, Against the Odds. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who live to tell the tale. In our next season, it's July 6th, 1988, and workers are settling into the night shift aboard Piper Alpha, the world's largest offshore oil rig.
Home to 226 men, the rig is stationed in the stormy North Sea off the coast of Scotland. At around 10 p.m., workers accidentally trigger a gas leak that leads to an explosion and a fire. As they wait to be rescued, the workers soon realize that Piper Alpha has transformed into a death trap. Follow Against the Odds wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app.