Family TW: Abuse
Sorry so long.
I (Candice, 34f) had a pretty rough childhood. My three sisters (Della 33f, Mary 32f, and Alice 31f) and I were raised by my stepdad (he was the youngest two’s real dad). He was a good dad in some ways but there was a lot of physical abuse under the guise of “discipline” along with being exposed to unsavory people.
When I was around 11 or 12, my youngest sister, Alice, brought a letter to my dad that was apparently written by someone named Candace. It was to a boy named Dustin and the letter basically said, “I don’t like it when you try to touch me inappropriately.
Please stop. Sincerely, Candace. My dad called me in and said that I had written the letter, even though that wasn’t how I spelled my name, and the handwriting was different from mine.
I tried to explain that it wasn’t me, but he wasn’t hearing it. He made me tape the letter on the wall of his bedroom, and he beat me every day, morning and night, for three days, making me write the date and time of each beating on the letter.
The only reason he stopped is because the last day he beat me, his friend came by while he was beating me and told him he should let it go.
This has been a memory that I’ve always struggled with. Getting beaten was bad enough, but those beatings were some of the worst I’d ever experienced, and I didn’t even do anything wrong.
I have been bitter about it my whole life. I had my first child when I was 20 while my husband was deployed and I lived with my dad while my husband was gone. I confronted my dad about the beatings, saying that it was messed up that he beat me like that over something I didn’t do.
He got mad and said how dare I question how he parented me. I packed up my stuff that night and the next morning my baby and I left to another state to go live with my husbands family.
I never saw or spoke to my dad again, and he died the next year. I was sad that we never spoke again, but I was still bitter about those beatings. Every time I told the story, whether to a friend or my partner, I would almost come to tears, still angry about it.
Fast forward to the other day, I was talking to my second youngest sister, Mary, on the phone. She has had mental health problems for years. We were discussing beatings we had gotten from our dad as kids and I brought up the letter beating.
She then told me, laughing, that it was her that had written the letter all those years ago, and she thought I knew. I was in shock. I told her I needed to hang up to process what she had revealed to me, but she kept laughing like it was no big deal.
I was devastated. While I went through all kinds of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse as a child, those beatings were some of my worst memories. I couldn’t believe she watched me basically get tortured for three days and never said anything to stop it.
I hung up and called my sister Della, who was shocked to hear that Mary had done that all those years ago. She told me I should go no contact for a while to recover emotionally.
So I did just that. Now my other sister and mom are blowing up my phone calling me an AH for cutting my sister off for something she did at 9 years old. They say she was just a little kid and didn’t know any better.
So, am I the AH?
Edit: my mother wasn’t around; she ran off when we were little, which is why we were raised by my stepdad. She came back around when we were older.
My relationship with my siblings is normally okay. Ironically, I always had a worse relationship with Della than Mary and Alice, at least until the last five years. Alice is extremely religious and is always preaching about forgiveness which is why she’s trying to convince me to let it go.
My mom just tries to keep the peace; plus, Mary lives with her and has mental health problems, so my mom just tries to keep her calm and happy. Della and I went through the worst things growing up so we’ve bonded over that.
She alone understands how much I went through as a kid.
Thanks for all the comments. I didn’t know if I was making too big of a deal about it. I’ve been in therapy for years (along with my childhood trauma, I’m also a firefighter and have seen some pretty bad stuff, so therapy is a biweekly occurrence for me).
I will definitely be NC with most of my family for a while.
Edit 2: I didn’t expect this many people to read my post. Besides the few comments accusing me of faking my story, or being a bot, thank you for your kind words.
#TW Abuse
