 

( first post, fyi - happy birthday to me )

Beforehand, let me apologize for the absolute word soup I'm throwing at you guys; it's hard for me to gather up my thoughts right now, so I'm just typing out memories and personal problems as they come back to me. I probably missed a few, too.

For some reason I just can't conjure up any positive feelings for her; I care about my stepmom and I know for a fact that she cares about me but almost everything she does seems to stress me out; nothing seems to be good enough for her when I clean the house with my sister, and she loses her temper incredibly easily with us. If we ever say anything that contradicts her, she raises her voice at us for arguing with her, and tells us that we never do anything she tells us to; that maybe she should just become harder on us if we're going to be like that. She just lashes out in anger and rarely tries to make up afterwards, even going as far as to say that it's our fault for pissing her off and being so uncooperative in the first place. And any perceived sign of disrespect (real or not) at all is immediately pointed out and I'm scolded for it. Recently, when I revealed that I feel safer talking with my biological mother (who has a history of drug abuse and is very financially unstable, on top of the fact that she use to stand us up during visitation. Still, I feel like I can talk to her and trust her more) , she launched into this huge, night-long lecture about how ungrateful I am for the work she puts into us, and how she loves us more than that woman ever could, and that if I wanted to be with our biological mom so badly then why don't we try and live with her. Any little thing can piss her off, and she launches into a lecture about how I need to have good grades so I don't end up in my parent's basement like my biological mom did, or worse. One time, she started to yell at my sister who was hyperventilating and obviously having an anxiety attack from already being chewed out for her grades. Occasionally, my stepmom changes up rules when they've always been a certain way, and pretends like it's always been like that. Because of her temper and different way of thinking, I never feel like I could share my inner thoughts around her; they always get targeted as some form of disrespect or they get shrugged off as childish. Both of my parents never seem to take me seriously, and treat me like I know nothing. My stepmom is also incredibly passive aggressive to everybody in the house; even my dad. I'm honestly just afraid of her; she never seems to be able to control her feelings and I can't relax while she's in the house because she'll probably find something to get stressed about.

I'm not even a bad kid; I try my hardest in school and I really try to make my parents happy because I care about them. I used to love my stepmom but for some reason that feeling's just faded entirely into an urge to get the hell out of this house.

Am I the asshole?