Cammy

My sister and I talked to my mom about our stepdad. The house has been divided for a really long time. It seems that even when I try to be cordial with my stepdad, he acts out. I truly think he hates me. He’s already said things like, “I can’t wait until 2017!!”—as in the year I’m graduating. We laid everything out to her and I made it really clear that he is super homophobic and sexist. He said some extremely disgusting things about the shooting in Orlando and Bill Cosby’s victims. Whenever I watch something on TV and there’s a hint of a character being gay he’s super evil about it, so I just avoid watching TV altogether. And that was one of the hugest issues: My sister and I feel so uncomfortable everywhere else in the house that we just hole ourselves up in our room. Sometimes when I know he’s in the kitchen I won’t go down there to eat even if I’m hungry.

We said all this to my mom and the conversation was really intense—my mom started crying. I haven’t seen her cry since I was maybe six 6?? It freaked me out. And she said she’s really tired of the situation and that he’s just so shitty when it comes to us and she doesn’t know why he acts that way. She said if she had known he would act like this she would never have brought him into the house. I feel like all of us are trapped. It’s so hard on my mom because she’s caught in the middle. I don’t know how things are gonna work out, because things have been so messed up for so long. ♦