TIFU by confronting my Mom about the abuse I experienced as a child only to be laughed at.

Okay so, here’s a little context – I grew up in a big family (7 kids, I’m the 2nd youngest) with conservative Christian parents who were different flavors of abusive (my Mom tended toward emotional and psychological abuse whereas my Dad was more physically violent). When I was 3 y.o. my family moved from CA to WA and soon after the relocation my Dad peaced out. He’d send random Christmas gifts in the couple of years that followed but otherwise we didn’t really hear from him. He and my Mom had been through a long, ugly divorce anyway and he’d lost any custody he might’ve had in the process.

Understandably at that point, my Mom had a lot on her plate. Between working two jobs to support us and attending college classes to get a teaching degree, she was rarely home. Instead, my older sister would occasionally act as babysitter for me and my two sisters and, when needed, my brothers (who were all 3 slightly older and usually excluded us younger girls from hanging out with them). When my older sister wasn’t available (she was a kid and had friends & such after all) there might be a church friend of my mom’s who’d watch us for a while. But sometimes there wasn’t anyone around to supervise me and my sisters, especially as we got older. My older siblings became more independent and my older sister eventually went to college and left us completely.

And so, with the youngest of us left to our own devices (and to the whims of each other), in the aftermath of my Dad ditching us, one of my sisters (let’s call her “A”) began regularly abusing me. She had become sexual at an early age, right after my Dad had left she’d later tell me, and would often hit, touch and pin me down repeatedly and for long periods of time. I can remember the hours spent being sat on, sobbing to be let go of. “A” would insist I take showers with her and would force me to make her food, to clean up her things in the bedroom us 3 youngest girls shared, etc. Compared to “A” who was a very talkative, dominant kid, I was shy and passive and so when I was manipulated or hurt by someone I found it hard to speak up for myself.

Not that I didn’t speak up for myself at all. I told my Mom so many times that “A” was hurting me. I told my siblings too. I don’t know how much detail I gave at the time because some of what “A” made me do made feel a great deal of shame, but looking back on things now I can remember quite clearly trying to get help. But I never got help. It would take my family moving to Oregon for “A” to lose interest in fucking with me. At that point “A” was starting middle school and I was going into 5th grade. In this new place, new school, though wracked with anxiety and still devastatingly shy, I managed to form a couple of close friendships with two of my classmates. For the first time in my life, as long as I was with these friends, I felt happy.

But after two somewhat peaceful years of feeling like I could finally breathe a little, we moved yet again - this time to the coast, to be closer to my Mom’s new boyfriend, “G” (whom she’d met maybe a year after our move to OR). Fearing what might be in store for me when we moved, I put all of my hopes on an offer one of my friend’s parents had made, to let me stay with them and their family. But after my Mom discussed the situation with her boyfriend “G” and him telling her it was a bad idea, my Mom broke the news to my friend’s parents first before finally relaying the message to me that I was to stay in my place. It was “what was best for the family”, I guess.

Cut to me being harassed and gaslit for years. I entered into a very deep depression in early high school and became obsessed with suicide my junior year. Unable to control my eating, I gained a lot of weight very fast during this time, which only further contributed to my depression and by the time I was 19, I was dabbling in bulimia. A year later and I was a full-fledged bulimic and was abusing alcohol. A couple more years and I was both bulimic and alcoholic. I’d try to hide these parts of myself from family and the people in my life, but naturally, they’d too often come out and in my experience, few if any people were sympathetic to my situation. Still, unable to keep myself from either of my addictions, I was swept up in both for nearly all of my 20’s.

Then finally, one fateful Thanksgiving a couple of years ago, I got sober. Having driven up to my Mom’s house from the place I shared with my older boyfriend who was himself abusive, I made a whole big dinner for my Mom, my step-dad “G” and one of my brothers who was renting out a room in my Mom’s house. Feeling increasingly sad, and becoming more drunk as the day went on, I ended the day with a realization – that it was now or never. I had been fucked up for years and I was tired of feeling sick all the time so, after hurling a couple times on the night drive back to my boyfriend’s and my place, I made my decision to quit.

In the year or so that followed a lot changed. I finally managed to escape the abusive situation I was in with my boyfriend and came back to my Mom’s house, feeling somewhat defeated but more confident than before. I spent a lot of time with myself, deep-diving into my past, trying to drudge up old memories I’d tried so hard to bury with alcohol and purging. After many long months of self-therapy, of “working on myself”, I made up my mind in early December to confront not just “A” but all of my siblings via text, with the things I’d been keeping in. First, I texted my Dad and told him that I remembered him abusing me. No reply. I sent a text to my sister “A” telling her that I remembered her hurting me and how it had permanently scarred me but she wouldn’t acknowledge it and instead talked down to me. I sent messages to my other siblings, albeit angry ones, and was ignored. Furious and hurt again, I didn’t know what to do, but I certainly wasn’t going to apologize. So I stayed quiet for the past couple of months, biding my time until I could bring it up again and maybe be listened to or else find a new living situation that would help me leave it all behind.

But it all came bubbling back up in the last two days. First, I tried to explain to my Mom yet again that “A” had hurt me and I tried to reason with her. She smiled and told me to stop smoking weed and to keep to myself. So I tried again, this time with my phone in hand to record our conversation.

I got mad and I swore. My Mom denied everything, told me I was paranoid, that I should keep to myself and then she laughed at me. I didn’t expect it to go any other way really, but it still wasn’t great to hear.

Anyways, I’ve got the recording now and I’ve played it back a couple times and cried. At least there’s evidence, though I’m not sure it matters.

If you want to hear the conversation for yourself, I tried to link it here -- https://whyp.it/tracks/84363/voice-memo1?token=Ytwj7 Sorry in advance for the funky audio stuff at the start (I was removing my phone from my pocket).

TL;DR -- My sister abused me when I was a kid and even still my Mom doesn’t believe me. In fact, she thinks it’s funny.