Can you help me with my abandonment issues?

Question by Elle: Can you help me with my abandonment issues?
OK, I’m going to try my hardest to sum up/shorten this story but PLEASE read it, I really need some help.

My parents divorced when I was 2 years old and until I was 13 years old they had split custody of me and my sister (one week with mom one week with dad). When I was 13, my mom began dating an inmate. She is a paralegal and at the time had taken up a job working for the state, helping inmates with their parole cases. She took us to visit him every other weekend so we could “develop a relationship with him” since he was going to move in with us when he was released. She told us not to tell our dad and we didn’t. The day the inmate was released, my dad found out and got temporary custody of us. He took my mom to court, filing for full custody. During the custody battle, my mom ran off and married the man and got pregnant. She then told us she couldn’t fight our dad anymore and that she had a baby on the way and was going to have a new family.

This was 7 years ago (I’m 21 now). She now has 3 children with him. During the past 7 years hes been in and out of rehab and prison again and put her through hell (you wouldn’t believe the stories… crack-cocaine is his drug of choice… makes people do horrible things). For the first 5 and half years, I continued to have a relationship with her. She relied on me to rescue her, loan her money, and do so much more. I got fed up when (after not hearing from her for over a month) she asked me to loan her money for the down payment on a new house, in a town two hours away. She was moving to the town where her husband was in rehab. I haven’t seen her since she moved in November 2008 and I stopped answering/returning her phone calls in February 2009. My sister still has a relationship with her and told me this – mom moved back in town last December, filed for divorce, and just found out last week her now ex-husband has bone cancer.

Its been so hard not having much parental guidance these past few years and not speaking with my mom for a year has really taken a toll on me. I need a mother or a father or some adult to care about me and support me and give me guidance especially being at such a crucial time in my life (I’m about to graduate from college). After my dad won the custody battle, he sent me to boarding school and kept my sister at home and in her same high school. Hes a whole other story, but in a nutshell I have no relationship with him either. I’ve been living on my own since I was 18 with no help from either of them.

Should I forgive them? How do I forgive my mother? What do I do? Any input is appreciated, I’ve been in and out of counseling, therapy, etc. and it hasn’t helped so any words of wisdom will be helpful. Please help me :-/

Best answer:

Answer by Kelly_Fan
My parents are not divorced but a few months ago I felt like what you might be feeling. It seemed like everything bad was happening in my life all at once. I wasn’t getting enough hours at work to even pay my little bills, my boyfriend broke up with me for no real reason, and everyone I knew seemed hostile toward me for random stupid reasons. It was like everyone hated me and I didn’t know why or how to make it stop. One night I was driving home from work and I was SO depressed and I was thinking why is this happening to me, and then in my head I heard God saying: “Don’t you know that even if every person in your whole life walks out on you I will never leave you. I haven’t abandoned you. None of the things anyone might say about you don’t matter to me. I don’t judge you. I am not waiting for a chance to condemn you. I accept you just the way you are, and to me you are so beautiful. I love you so much that I thought you were worth dying for, and I was right. And I would do it again if I needed to. Even if you were the only person in the world you would be worth it to ME. When you love me, I love you. When you HATE me, I love you. Choose ME. Give your heart to ME, I will never break it.” So by this time I’m thinking that I’m CRAZY and that was not God it was my imagination just making up what I wanted to hear. So I said SCREW IT, THAT WASN”T REAL. And I started listening to the radio and right away a song came on the radio that said ALL those EXACT SAME THINGS that I had just heard God saying to me!! At that moment I felt more love and peace than any person has ever or could ever show me. I had to pull over in a parking lot because I was crying so hard. But this time I was crying because I was so happy…

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