Ask Lemmy

I’m American: my dad told me a couple years ago that immigrants were “unclean.” I’m almost 40, and that was the first time he’d ever used that phrase. That’s probably the first time I realized how “mainstream” extremism had become, since he has virtually zero online presence.

Just sitting and having a casual lunch with my dad at work. Sack lunches that my mom had made us! When he nonchalantly tells me that women aren't people and only exist for men's enjoyment. I basically completely froze out of shock as he spends the next half hour trying to use excerpts from the Bible to prove his point.

I haven't had a conversation with him since and that was nearly 20 years ago. Also realized that Christianity is not something I want to be associated with.

Funny thing is that he used to be adamant that god uses Parkinson's to punish only the worst sinners and he's got it now... Apparently there was some engine cleaning solvent my mom desperately tried to get him to stop using? The government banned it because it was giving people Parkinson's so he stocked up on it to prove my mom wrong...

I had moved away a few years and my mother was homeless due to her own choices and lack of effort to do anything. My wife and I were in town visiting her family, and we decided to take my mother out to dinner. During the meal she was (rightly) complaining about the perils of being homeless and having to watch out for the pigs. I suggested that she look into getting into some government housing. You know her response?

"I don't want to be the light in he dark."

If you're as confused as I pretended I was, she means she didn't want to live with/around black people. Which was really fucking surprising to me, considering we had lived with, around, and had been friends with all kinds of POC growing up (as you you tend to do in poor and mixed neighborhoods and when you have to rent out rooms to get by). That level of racism was rather surprising, but she had become toxic as fuck in the years before I moved, so it shouldn't have been.

Back when Wicked, the musical, was brand new & the hot topic & it was just so so cool culturally speaking -- my high school choir was going to take a field trip day to go & watch it live in a big city. 🤩 Time off of school, going to this cool musical, it's a no-brainer. Right?

My parents told me I couldn't go because there was a 20-25% chance of snowfall. Combined with a significant 2+ hour commute, there was a chance I wouldn't make it back home by 6:40 PM on a Wednesday night, and that would cause me to miss the hour long 7 PM Wednesday night church services. 🥴🥴🥴🥴

Not even Sunday morning, most of everyone's day of rest. Wednesday. Night. Services. Couldn't even take a chance on missing that. That was...."special".... 🙄 Religious brainwashing at its finest!

I'll forgive you if you come back to God. My crime was finally standing up to her abuse and her insane religious bullshit (at 16) and moving out (at 18). Conditional love, just like Jesus preached lol

I found out my parent's computer had a lot viruses because they are dumb and bought a McAffee subscription. I told them, they answered that they knew better than me, I replied that I had a degree in computer sciences, and my father laughed like the fucking idiot he is.

Let's say we don't talk about my job or computer anymore. Also I reduced the visits and phone calls that they had because I'm tired with their bullshit.

I was pregnant as the oldest daughter- three month later my sister told us she's pregnant too. My mother (having a boyfriend of my age at that time): "Oh wouldn't it be fun if I get pregnant too now?"

I couldn't believe what I heard (she is an abusive parent, only 2 of her 9 children contact her at all now, the other have gone non-contact)

"Dinner's only a couple of hours away. Why don't you wait?"

Because I had just finished a sponsored fast for charity and hadn't eaten for two days.

I don't remember if my parents have said something crazy. Maybe the time mom told me not to stir the tea a certain way because the clanking offended the spirits. Asked her about it years later and said she didn't say that. Lol

The day my niece was born, my mom had asked me to wake her up so that she could be there after the birth.

Apparently, me actually doing what she asked me to do turned out to be a grave insult.

She ended up yelling and screaming at me, which triggered me, so I started yelling and screaming at her, and then she hit me with the only thing she could think of to actually hurt me.

See, from before I get into that, I've got to explain that from the time I was 15 until I graduated high school at 17, my mom and my stepdad essentially locked me in my room and only let me out for punishment, which was digging up stumps in the backyard or picking up a rock from one pile and hauling it to another pile, picking up a different rock from that pile, hauling that one to the third pile, back and forth. for eight to ten hours a day, And for going to school, just enough to prevent CPS from being called on them.

There was also a healthy dose of corporal punishment on top of that, being beaten for half an hour or longer for the smallest infraction.

It really messed with my head because I honestly thought like at some point they would come to their senses and realize how absurd the entire thing was and apologize and they never fucking did.

Anyway, now that we've got the groundwork in place, my mom decided she would say the thing that she could think of to hurt me, which was to tell me that her mother, my evil grandmother, had convinced her to do all of those things because otherwise no one would ever love me.

And why is it that otherwise no one would ever love me?

because I'm not white

My mom had shamed the entire family by marrying a Native American and giving birth to his child, And my grandmother, who is evil for multiple reasons, and I'll be glad to go into those, cause may she rot in piss, was a terrible person, had decided that the only way to cleanse the family of the stain of my existence was to psychologically induce my own mother into tormenting me in every single possible way she could.

And so every single time I think about all the opportunities I missed out on and all the times my mom wasn't there for me and all of the times that I was neglected and abused throughout my entire childhood, it all rolls back to my grandmother being a racist cunt, and my mother somehow not realizing that for what it was, and just being a good little flying monkey and doing whatever her mother told her to do with her own fucking child.

So yeah, I was abused because my grandmother is racist, and I didn't find out about that until I was 23 years old.

We’re spending all this money on you now so you can’t grow up and say we didn’t spend money on you when your were a kid.

C'mon now, don't be ungrateful. I mean... you made the conscious decision to be born, right?

"Cults do like to cut off and distance their members from outsiders and their families" In the same email that he was threating to block me for suggesting his quoting of a Nazi might be a bad thing.

Close second: "Trump (married to a woman) is misogynist" but also "I (British), married to a Malay, can't be racist because I'm married to a Malay".

Honourable mention: "I don't like the word 'Islamophobia' or your Newspeak". My guy, Newspeak was famous for doing something to the dictionary, and it wasn't adding words to describe more concepts.

Anyway, he blocked me... Like cultists do. All quotes are paraphrased, I CBA digging through the emails.

My dad once said he never hit me as a kid. I was like "bro what world are you living in?"

My mother used to call me a son of a bitch until I one day replied "I know".

Or

"I don't believe in god because of the things He has done to me, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't believe in Him"

She also talked about her "schizo friend" quite a lot, as if the events were recent, even though there was no chance she had seen the person in over a decade.

We don't speak anymore.

My Dad's gone totally off the rails conspiracy theory nutty.

Fake moon landings, fluoride in the water is mind control, vaccines cause autism and maybe microchips and mind control again, foreign people are simultaneously lazy stealing benefits and stealing all the jobs, my god the racism. He fell into an echo chamber during COVID and hasn't come out again.

The best one was when I was telling him as a healthcare professional on the front lines watching patients and colleagues die that COVID was serious and we should take any opportunity to avoid it and make it better, he told me it was just flu and all fake news.

Yeah I don't talk to my parents much anymore.

Parent told me I shouldn't hold it against my older sibling who abused me when I was younger because the older sibling also remembered my birthday and got me toys when I was younger

"We shouldnt have accepted east germany. They just get out money." And that its their fault for getting a dictatorship

"I hit and abused you because i was overwhealmed because of you" (i have adhd and autism)

We dont talk. She doesnt understand why.