EPTIt's not really an extraordinary situation. I moved into my first real house around 13 years ago, when I was 3 years old. It was pretty nice there. I don't recollect much about my time in it, other than that I was relatively happy. That being said, I rarely saw my dad. It seemed that he either buried himself in work or always found other things to do. I saw him for maybe 30 minutes to an hour a day, some days even less.
Although I didn't know it at the time, my parents were fighting pretty badly. My mom ended up cheating on my dad with my next door neighbor, and then they ended up separating. Because the house I lived in was considerably more than my mom could afford on her own, my brother, my mom and I moved to a new town. At the time I was devastated, but it wasn't really a big deal. The only thing that constantly recurred was my mom denying that she was dating our old neighbor, despite our constantly seeing him and his son.
I've known his son, let's call him Joe, for almost 13 years. I'm 2 years older than he is, but I still had the displeasure of being around him just because my brother was "friends" with him. I've hated him since I was a toddler. I don't think I've ever liked Joe. He is selfish, mean, arrogant, fake in the worst way possible, and just straight up weird. I don't think I've ever had such a contempt for anyone else in my life. He did really unkind things even from a young age. Joe refused to share, flaunted things that he got yet my brother and I didn't have, and basically did everything in his power to make me feel like shit.
That aside, I was enjoying my time in our new house where it was just the three of us. Honestly, just to keep the blog as short as possible, I'm going to skip forward about 4 or 5 years. This puts us at about 2009. My mom and her boyfriend were throwing around ideas of moving in together. Even if her boyfriend was a completely nice guy and did nothing wrong (which is the completely opposite of how he is, he's a gigantic douche), I don't think I could bring myself to like him just because he ended up causing my parents to divorce. I'm sure that my parents would've divorced regardless, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Conveniently for them, a test came back that we had toxic mold samples in our house. Not that I know for a fact that they fabricated the results or anything, but I don't think there was anything to suggest that there was mold in my house. I never saw any mold. That didn't mean my house was without problems, but I don't doubt that they might have over exaggerated what kind of mold (or its levels) in my house so we could move in with them.
Despite my adamant protests (as well as my brothers), in November we had to start packing our bags. We watched our house get torn apart and bordered off. It was pretty sad to watch for me, since I didn't want to move at all. My brother was slightly more conforming, but I think that was just because he was younger and more naive. To "sell" us into moving in, my mom's boyfriend basically told us about all the wonderful things that we would get: A new TV for my brother, a nice desk for myself, an area for my mom to do work. Regardless of the fact that anyone who wasn't blinded by bias knew he was full of shit, material goods =/= happiness. They never have, and they never will. Maybe that's how he bought out his son since he doesn't know how to parent, but no one really thinks that buying stuff for someone is a replacement for something that they've just lost.
It's been incredibly rough since moving to this house. I go to a private school so the move barely affected me, but my brother had to switch schools. Joe bullied my brother pretty badly. Normally I don't like the word bullying; it's overused and cliche and really is just used by people that got their feelings hurt. Joe really did "bully" him though. He made my brother feel like crap every day, made fun of him in front of all of his friends constantly, recorded him harassing my brother and showed it to everyone he knew (including my mom), and got away with all of it. My brother has never done anything mean to him in his life, hell he even stuck up for his ass so Joe didn't get the shit kicked out of him at a party.
Joe's parents did absolutely nothing about this. Not sort of nothing. The worst punishment he got was a one week punishment of no Minecraft, which wasn't even "enforced." So at this point, it's been a year and a half in our new home. No new TV for my brother, no new desk for me, no room for my mom to do her work. Not only did I actually get a room about 2/3 of the size of my old room (and believe me, my old room was not big by any stretch of the imagination) I also had almost no privacy. There was nowhere else in the house I could go to and be alone, other than my tiny room. This isn't even a bedroom, it's an office that they "converted" to a bedroom.
The last thing I really have on my mind is a story from Hurricane Sandy. I'm not sure how much people know about it outside of the US, but it was pretty bad. I was personally without power for only 13 days, but I know people whose houses were destroyed.
So the actual night of Hurricane Sandy, my mom, her boyfriend, and their two friends all got wasted. They left me to take care of my brother and Jonathan by myself since they weren't actually sober enough to do it. I was really angry about that, until the next day my mom's boyfriend got wasted again. He started ripping arsenic covered pieces of wood off of our fence and threw them in an oil drum. He and his friend then proceeded to throw gasoline in the oil drum, and lit it ablaze. They nearly set the lawn on fire, killed our two dogs, set our house/patio on fire, and embarrassed us in front of all of our neighbors. I'm still mad about this almost a year later. It was so infuriating watching him just pass up his responsibility like that for no reason, and knowing that this is the dipshit my mom chose over my dad.
Hopefully this wasn't too much of a rant. I really just needed to write about this because I've had it on my mind a lot recently.
