Cammy

I’m dealing with really weird changes with my home life right now. They were bound to happen, but I wasn’t prepared.

My mom has been engaged for three years, I think, and last month or so she decided to get married without telling anyone. No one knew at all: It was just her, my stepdad (barf), the guy who officiated, and a witness (I guess).

I’ve never really liked her fiancé because he’s too much of a lot of things. Too obsessed with how the house is decorated, and too inconsiderate when it comes to me and my sister’s feelings. One time he found a spider and held it over my sister’s face knowing that we all really hate spiders. She cried for a week. You’d assume that my mom would jump in to do SOMETHING about it, but she doesn’t. She defends him all the time. Once, we told her that all his decorations in the house made us feel like it wasn’t really our home anymore, and she said that he was just trying to make the house look nice because “it’s not like we help anyway.”

A while back, a big concern I had was that my mom had stopped prioritizing us. She was working hard and spending time with my stepdad, but falling short with me and my sister. It would be things like forgetting to pick me up, or not taking us shopping for school supplies. But now, that neglect has reached into my emotional needs and it’s probably the worst feeling ever to not feel like your mom is your mom. I want to be able to talk to her about important things like figuring out my sexuality, or getting over a relationship, or friends who are bugging me—things that moms know how to handle. But she doesn’t want to do that. She spends more and more time with my stepdad and less and less time with us.

It’s one thing to feel ignored, but she makes me feel unwanted, too. A while ago, she and my stepdad would say, “We can’t wait until 2017,” whenever I did something slightly irritating—referring to the year I graduate and move out. I want to move out, but it’s different when your mom says she wants you to…it’s just a lot worse.

So when she married him, it just confirmed that all this that I have to deal with is going to be long-term. And that’s really scary. ♦