Father's Day depression...and reflecting on the fucked up parental units I've had

Father's Day is weird for me. Ditto for Mother's Day.

Why?

It's because I'm somewhat estranged from my parents. I have a mother, father, and a step-father, and I never wish any of them a Happy Whatever on these days. I used to, sure, but I haven't for a lot of years.

My mother and step-father got married on a Mother's Day, and I think it was on purpose so that I wouldn't forget the date. Not that I ever regularly wished them a happy anniversary either.

I've had a weird relationship with my parental figures for most of my life, due in a very large part to my mother and her constant bullshit. And my father doesn't deserve any recognition anyway. But my mother always made it difficult for me to have much of a meaningful relationship with my step-father, the man I call Dad for a multitude of reasons.

Y'see, my mother is a self-centered narcissist and she told me more than once that it was my fault that her marriages to my father and her second husband failed. Why she would have wanted to remain married to a waste of space who molested me as a child or the waste of space who hospitalized me more than once due to a severe beating is beyond me. But there you go. It always had to be about her and her fear of being along. As if hitching herself and us kids to a man, regardless of how abusive or dangerous he was, made her any more of a woman.

When she got together with Dad I had hoped it would go better. And at first it did. But any time he took my side in the bullshit my mother would create things would be horrible for me. My mother would berate him and make me out to look even worse than before, and after a while it was just easier for him to side with my mother, which seems to be her modus operandi - turning people against me to make herself look like she has suffered with an ungrateful bitch for a daughter all my life.

It got to the point where she would purposely goad my dad and I into fights, usually by lying about something I supposedly said or did, even though in many cases what I allegedly did wasn't even something I would have ever dreamed about. And let's not forget the time she twisted something I'd said about Dad being a stereotypical strict German - she actually had the balls to start telling people that I hated him because I felt he was a Nazi! I NEVER said anything of the kind, and I told her this in front of anybody she had ever told this particular lie to. But she had started a campaign of telling people that I was nothing but a liar over a decade before she told this particular outrageous lie, so people chose to believe her. Or at least they did at the time.

My mother purposely did everything she could to undermine any chance of my dad and I have a good relationship, and she kept it up over the years. Even now I have no relationship with my dad because she will not let me talk to him. It's still all about her and it always will be. So I've given up trying to fight for the relationship that I know he and I could have - should have - had. I saw the glimmer of it before she got her claws firmly stuck into him, and it hurts to this day that she went out of her way to sabotage it.

I remember one of the conversations I had with my mother concerning my move across the country. She was raging about the fact that I took her grandchild away from her - I pointed out that at least she got to spend the first 15 years of my kid's life with them, whereas I never had that opportunity. She raged about more stupid, inconsequential bullshit, and told me that it 'wasn't always all about me' - meaning me, of course. Well, I turned it back on her and told her the exact same thing, that my life and my kid's life was not all about her and what she wanted, that she needed to get the fuck over herself and accept that she was not and never would be the center of our lives, that she did a shitload of damage over the years that effectively fucked me up and caused her only grandchild to want nothing to do with her.

It's bad enough that my kid is actively seeking to change their name because they want nothing to do with their disowned grandmother. My kid has not spoken to the woman in over seven years, and when she refused to accept their gender preference and pronouns the kid decided that he no longer had a grandmother because, in my kid's words, "Fuck her. She doesn't deserve to have me as a grandkid." And I agree. Why should she have the honour of having an amazing person like my kid as a grandkid?

My kid had been named after my mother, my dad, and my Opa. Honestly, naming my kid after my mother at all was not my first choice, but it was a matter of trying to keep the peace when my kid was born 27 years ago. My first choice was Nicodemous, but that choice caused a lot of fights, and at the time I felt it was just better to try to smooth things over. I completely regret that choice now, but such is life, and my kid is at the age where they can make up their own mind about what they want to be called.

And this whole thing has me contemplating a name change of my own - my last name is the same as my Dad's. I legally changed it after I had my kid because I wanted to distance myself from my father as much as I could. And I felt that it would honour my dad, hopefully bringing us closer. Of course, my mother, while she had no issues with my choice of new last name, still sabotaged that chance of my dad and I trying to get closer.

I wish I knew exactly why my mother has hated me so much and has done so much in her attempts to undermine me. I wonder if she ever realized that the reason she has gone through so many friends over the years is because those people have learned to see through her lies - if she would blatantly lie about me, what else has she lied about? Right? I've had more than one of my mother's former friends approach me about the bullshit she's spewed about me, telling me that I'm nothing like she ever made me out to be. These same people have actually asked me what else she could have lied about, and upon long conversations with these people where we compared notes, well, my mother has some issues with being a serial liar, outright inventing things that NEVER happened.

On this Father's Day I wish I could reach out to my dad and wish him a happy day, but I have no way of being able to contact him directly and without my mother's interference. My mother has never given me their phone number for where they live now - our only contact is via Facebook - and I'll be damned if I'm going to contact her for this. Especially after I pointedly did not wish her a Happy Mother's Day - why would I wish her such a thing when she's spent so much of my life tearing me down, treating me like shit, and blaming me for everything that's gone wrong in her life?

Ah well, such is life sometimes.