#follow the readmore for a breakdown of ONE layer of my abandonment issues

[dredshirtroberts]

it's been 15 years since i learned my biofamily didn't actually want me around.

I'd gone off for two weeks away to be a counselor in training at a summer camp. The intention was the potentially try and get hired for the full summer the next year, so it was a good trial run to see how i did far away from my support system for a long period of time. I was 17. I had just gone through a really rough breakup right before i'd left, and i'd been dropped off by my mother - our first time being just the two of us for longer than 3 hours since... maybe since my sister had been born, 14 years prior.

I cherished that car ride with my mother. I was really stoked about it and I thought we were having a great time. It's important to note i'd been away from home for a week or so at a time previously. I'd done sleepaway camp and i've never seen my parents get teary-eyed at dropping me off anywhere. They weren't the most emotionally-vulnerable people i already knew, so it didn't surprise me but like. A little regret and pre-missing wouldn't have hurt but like. We didn't do that as a family - that was a thing I felt alone and expressed on my own time. Expressing it to my family just made them make noises of agreement at me and then try and redirect me to how much fun i was about to have - distraction from my pre-homesickness i guess?

About 3-4 days prior to leaving, i'd been unceremoniously dumped in the middle of a documentary, he then made out with me, and then stayed until dinner was ready which took a whole monopoly game, and then STAYED FOR DINNER before leaving immediately afterwards. i was not in a great place emotionally, but my parents hadn't even noticed i'd been broken up with even when i went and sat on the couch and cried during Ghost Adventures because that had been my first ever shot at a romantic relationship and i was convinced i'd blown it. I was 17 and figured i'd lost my one and only shot at being able to get married and have kids and settle down like a Proper Girl is supposed to do. It was a 2 week "relationship", it's okay i was a slightly delusional 17yo as it was, not to mention all the patriarchy and religious crap i'd absorbed, on top of the worship of capitalism's ballsack.

this is to set the stage for how those two weeks away from everyone i knew would go.

i had a phone with one of those slide-out keyboards (this was just slightly before smartphones took off), and that was my ONLY connection to the outside world. I could technically access facebook, but the wifi in the dorms we were staying in were spotty. I didn't have money for food outside of what was provided during when the campers were on site. So on the weekend between sessions I was surviving off of poptarts from the vending machine while EVERYONE ELSE went to a waterpark together.

including the other counselor in training.

I was EXTREMELY alone for those two weeks.

I was very excited for my time away from home to be done. I wanted to go back to my room, i wanted to be in my space and talk to my friends on my computer because that was the only place i had friends. I wanted my mommy who'd left me there two weeks ago to come back and pick me up and hold me and tell me i existed and was worthy of love. I wanted my dad to hug me and tell me it was going to be okay and that it wasn't my last shot at happiness.

I was the last to be picked up. I was so excited I rushed out on my bad knee, sprinting towards them and launched myself into their arms.

They weren't ready, and quickly disengaged from the hug, teased me for being so excited, teased me for the tears I was feeling well up. Teased me for a speech pattern i didn't know i had but they'd picked up was from me in the interim time and were doing it with sly smiles and joking nudges back and forth for a LONG while before they clued me in on why they were doing that. like. Possibly not until after our lunch.

and I learned i wasn't wanted. I was a joke to my whole family. They talk about me negatively behind my back. And only negatively. They didn't miss me except the ways they could make fun of me.

I'd been gone for two weeks with no money and no support. I came back and nothing changed from that status quo for a while.

I never got hired at that camp the next year. When my application was rejected it hurt, but i also couldn't fathom going away from a summer to be rejected by my peers again and then come home to people who gave zero shits about me.

The next year I went many states away to live with my mom's cousin as a live-in nanny and do an internship at a graphic design company. I had money and more support and love in Louisiana than I'd ever found in Virginia. I never wanted to leave, but i'd already been signed up for classes at the local community college that next year back home, so I had to go back.

My parents weren't even in town to come pick me up from the train station. It was my sister and my Nana who came and got me and they were both irritated by the drive and the wait. No one was excited that I was home again.

I didn't feel missed upon coming back home until I was living with my big-E Ex and i'd gone off to be a counselor at the new camp I'd finally found friends in - it was my third or fourth year, but the first with us living together. I can speculate the actual reasons why he missed me, but the fact of the matter was that he wrapped me up in his arms when i came back and said it hadn't been the same when I was gone.

I didn't have someone miss me like that again after I left him until I met my current partner and we started talking in 2020. I moved away from Virginia to Michigan two years later to join them up here, and my parents didn't care about anything in my life until i wasn't in the same state anymore. they barely cared now that i was out, but it was enough to throw me for a loop.

Where was this interest and need to know how i was doing 15 years ago? where were you? If I'd missed you and you came to visit me and I'd run up to launch myself into your arms, would you have caught me? would you have cried? would you have held me until you absolutely had to let go because you had to go?

they wouldn't have. because it wasn't about me. they didn't miss me. they wanted to look like Good Parents. and by that point, almost 15 years later, I was done.

It's been almost a year since I cut them off more or less successfully. there was a brief allowance of breakage in the no-contact rule for my grandfather passing earlier this summer. I'm.. still working through that fucked up relationship and my feelings about it, but that's not the point. I don't think they'd be excited or happy to see me, because they never were. I don't think it's changed. I think i could be gone for ten years and they'd never miss me.

I think they think they do. but they just miss knowing what to talk about behind my back.