There's someone I follow dealing with both toxic parents and a dying parent, and it's got me reflecting on my own toxic parents and dying parent.
Dad, who left when I was 7, who literally stole the family car the day I started first grade to go on a 2-week bender, who I last saw in-person Christmas when I was 14 and they were blitzed out of their gourd on anti-psychotics, who came out to me as trans when I was 27, has liver cancer. Probably caused by the decades of alcoholism. Was in the hospital less than a year ago to get a hip replacement because they fractured theirs, and the surgery had to be delayed because they were picked up off the street high out of their mind on marijuana, cocaine, AND meth. Picked up off the street in their wheelchair, because they had a serious stroke in 2018 and haven't been able to walk without assistance since. Dad is in their late 60s and still dealing with their chronic pain with hard illegal drugs, cool cool cool. Last I heard from whatever VA doctor I spoke to, I verbally signed off on (because despite not having seen Dad in DECADES, they decided I'm the one best qualified to be their Power of Attorney) every and any treatment the VA will provide for liver cancer (Dad did a stint in the Army a million years ago), insomuch as Dad agrees (Dad has literally said they only want to stay alive for me despite, again, not having been an active part of my life for decades [Dad is mentally unwell to the point of considering me, their daughter, to be their actual soulmate, since I was still a minor. This obviously didn't fuck me up at all as a kid!])
...Kind of just realized this Christmas is going to be the actual 20 year anniversary since I last saw Dad in person. Fucking yikes.
Mom, my primary caregiver as a minor, managed to be both neglectful and abusive in all kinds of exciting ways. She managed to avoid getting me taken away from her by CPS purely because my bio-aunts and their husbands took pity on me enough to provide me clothes, meals, and normal kid experiences, as well as paying untold numbers of bills for the shitty apartment I grew up in. There were still SO many months we didn't have A/C (in SoCal, which regularly breaks 100 degrees in summer), or hot water in the winter, or even electricity (read so many books by candlelight or battery flashlights as a kid, wow). She's an absolute professional at gaslighting and verbal abuse, and I've been 100% no-contact from her for years at this point.
Prime example of her madness: when I was still in tech school for linguistics in my first enlistment (I'm also a veteran, initially joined as a ground linguist, re-classed to IT for 10/12 years of my time in the AF), I got pulled out of class to go speak with the unit chaplain despite not being any kind of religious, and once in his office he got out, "So your mother called," and I immediately said "Oh no, I'm so sorry," and he winced and nodded, and the entire conversation after that was a polite dance around this man trying SO hard not to say "Hey your mom is fucking NUTS, no wonder you ran away to military," while he verified that yeah, I was totally fine and just wanted to get back to class and didn't want to waste his time. Back then Mom was 100% convinced I'd been brainwashed by the military to hate specifically her and no one else instead of like, you know, me getting some distance and experience as a new adult and realizing she was fucking nuts and a detriment to my mental health. She watched the Manchurian Candidate one time and decided that was what happened to me, instead of, y'know, normal ass Basic Military Training following the incredibly casual experiences seen in every service member that studied at DLIFLC.
Secondary proof of bad parentage: the DARE program was HUGE when I was a kid in the 90s/2000s. Literally my MOM was the ONLY person to ever offer me drugs, and I had to be FIRM with her that I was doing HOMEWORK, Mom, please GTFO with the marijuana
Like yeah, I know we're on the Fuck The Military website, and I get it and I agree, but the Air Force was really my best option at 18 at the height of the 2008 recession, and despite my deployment fucking my body over a myriad number of ways I don't regret my 12 years. I'm on 100% disability these days and I'm not able to keep a steady job, and it's that VA disability pay that keeps me alive and stable. 80% of my time in was great, personally speaking, and I won't swear off the whole 12 years just because 20% of it sucked for, well, mostly NOT military reasons. (I signed a whole stack of NDAs so ask me again in the 2050s, but FUCK the NSA. Worst fucking 5 years of my LIFE.)
Anyway what got me started on this post was that this person I follow was blogging their family woes, and my phone recorded Mom called from the same blocked number she last used (she's been regularly switching phone numbers for poverty/homeless reasons for like a decade), which got me wondering where the hell she's at these days. Like, Dad's in a VA home situation or in a VA hospital, both of which I verbally agreed to because again, somehow I'm their POA. But Mom and I have been 99% estranged for like a decade, outside of my cautious and always regretful attempts to communicate like fucking adults. Last I saw her in person was at her younger sister's funeral, and years before that the younger sister's husband drove me to the Section 8 homeless apartment she was living in at the time, where she dumped a bunch of garbage on me like it was supposed to mean something, and at that time I also cleaned out and stopped paying for her storage.
All that to say I did a casual Google on Mom and she's apparently no longer living in that Section 8 housing in Hollywood. She's in an old folks home back in Santa Clarita, the city I grew up in (not shy about stating that, since I've been cackling over the existence of The Santa Clarita Diet show for years). My basic googling suggests this place requires payments, which begs the question of which family member she's squeezing. As I said her younger sister died a few years ago, and her older sister died the year after, and they were the only bio-siblings she had in CA. Her surviving brothers are both, to my knowledge, still in Chicago. Mom's also in her late 60s and, knowing her, she's been squalling about money for the last decade. I'm obviously no longer in a position to shit on her since I'm living off VA disability, but to my knowledge she never registered for any disability so the fact she spent literal decades of her life fucking around and failing to do anything to earn legit social security really is on her.
Either way I'm dreading the payments I'll need to do but fuck me I can't wait for the days both my parents finally fucking die.
