#hopefully I'm still playing nice enough to get some inheritance when she kicks it

[cesium-sheep]

well op turned off reblogs while I was writing my tags I guess but there's a poll going around about grounding and it sounds like they may have some self-reckoning they're not ready to do but like. I still wanna write it down anyway for myself.

she never grounded me as such cuz I didn't have friends from the enshittification to like 16, and before that I can't really recall ever getting punished. dad was around to do most of the emotional work and the rules were gentler and I was also like 7 so there were less options to get mad at me for in the first place. although I can't really recall ever getting punished at dad's after that like. at all. again maybe because he didn't have primary custody so he didn't feel like it was his right or whatever, but maybe because she was just, to put it bluntly, fucking insane. she even got pissed at me once for letting one of my nearby friends come hang out at our house for a little bit, who she'd known personally for several years and who only lived a little up the hill.

after I had friends again at 16 I was already able to do whatever as long as I was home before she could notice. and dad didn't mind as long as I didn't make him late for work, since I would fuck around in his neighborhood where my school and my friends and the rest of the town actually was until he woke up to drive me back to her house before his night shift. (up until like 13 or something I wasn't really allowed to do anything by myself, we would get left at daycare or with a hired helper or at gmagpa's to be fucking babysat while she was at work during the summer. I can't remember the exact year but even I was old enough for it to be patently ridiculous by that point, let alone my older brother. we would've been better off left alone.)

she would take away autonomy in a lot of other ways, and she would sometimes reject specific requests as punishment, but she never set out a blanket ban on leaving the house for purposes other than school. probably because it wouldn't have made a difference if she had, since we lived in the middle of fucking nowhere and she wasn't home to enforce it because she was busy being a workaholic and at the previous schools I could only get home by school bus which had no options for fuckabouts that didn't leave me immediately exposed. and there was nothing of worth in walking distance back then. the cafe where my stepmom worked, a gas station, a grocery store, a church. that's it. and I didn't receive an allowance that I could've spent at any of them anyway. now there's a movie theater by the target but that's pushing it by most people's definition of walkable.

god I fuckin hate her. she never should've had custody. and she has already demonstrated that for all her "growth" she will never, ever be able to reckon with that.