Apologies for the wall of text, I just need to vent.

For most of my adolescence, and into early adulthood, I realized something was wrong with my parents and their relationships with other people. I was fairly close to my dad as a child, and then as a teenager, I grew closer to my mom. I grew up in a church off and on, so I had been trained with the "respect and obey your parents" mantra from the age of three. I was a docile child, everything they wanted (blonde, smart, helpful, obedient). They later had two other daughters, both severely premature. For the first few years of their lives, I was shunted off to the side, sent to grandma's as often as I could be. Both parents routinely drank to excess, and smoked a lot of weed. Then when I got to an age (8-9) where I could do things around the house, they stopped sending me away, but started giving me age-appropriate chores. This is where normalcy stops.

When I was 10, my mother had a massive stroke that left her more than half blind, with several other side-effects. I essentially became a parent for my two younger sisters while my dad worked, took care of my mom, and ran the business they owned. I had a lot on my plate as a young child. I dealt with it, made sure everything worked out and it went okay for a couple years.

As I entered middle school, my dad completely flipped into a psychotic rage-monster. Everything was about him and his expectations. I had to give a week's notice before any sort of activity that might involve needing a ride anywhere, and my parents had to approve any of my friends. Again, I adjusted to the new normal, despite the crazy fighting and screaming, and NO privacy. If I wanted my coat in a hook in my bedroom, or my backpack, my dad would search it because "I was probably hiding drugs." There were some strange punishments, such as copying the definitions of respect and disrespect 100 times each after an argument, but it was doable.

At 14, I started to work for them at their restaurant. This was nice because there were other employees as a buffer. My mom's alcoholism led to fully-fledged verbal and physical abuse against my middle sister. She would scream things such as "If you let the dog sleep in your bed, I will come stab it to death and make you sleep in its blood!" and "I fucking hate you, you useless cunt. I wish you were never born!" My sister was 9 at the time. She was always my mom's favorite target, and I'm not sure why.

In the meantime, my dad kept putting extreme demands on me: straight-As, clean the house, do x,y,and z extracurriculars, and work more hours." I was told that I was lazy when I would forget a homework assignment, and that I'd never get into college. It was ridiculous, but again, survivable. My sophomore year of high school happened, and we fought constantly. One time that is particularly memorable was when I had had a rough day at school, and I just wanted some peace. I know my room had to be cleaned still, but I just wanted ten minutes of peace before I started. He started screaming at me for being lazy and a brat, and I finally told him, "Just leave me alone for a little while." That snapped him, and he told me to go out to the living room. I refused, and he came into my room with a grill spatula (one of the heavy ones with the varied edges) and "spanked" me until I lost count, leaving massive welts and bruises down my legs. I actually had to lie to my gym teacher and tell him that I had twisted my ankle in order to let the bruises heal.

Almost a year passed, and in one of my classes, we were discussing punishment and discipline, and I brought this incident up. At the time, I thought it was normal and perfectly acceptable. Apparently not, because the teacher called CPS. We all know how that goes down with Nparents. I got off lucky and my dad barely spoke to me for 6 months. His job was in jeopardy, and he knew it.

My senior year of high school was the worst of it for me. He became increasingly verbally abusive because he couldn't hit me anymore. He started telling me I was useless and lazy, and that I'd never finish college, yada, yada, yada. Luckily, I had a guy in my life who made sure I knew the opposite, so, again, I was luckier than most because I had SOMEONE. I was also in every activity I could be, as well as working part-time, so I was rarely home.

My mom was on heavy painkillers and anti-depressants for the blood condition that had caused her stroke, and one night, she had a bad reaction and went unconscious, stopped breathing, the whole nine. I called the ambulance, and she got rushed to the hospital. Dad followed. When he came home that night, he told me the doctors thought she had attempted suicide. My dad hurried to tell me that it was my fault because I didn't clean enough around the house. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was emotionally and verbally abusive to all of us, or that it wasn't even a suicide attempt. I was at fault. A few days later, the true diagnosis came out, and he didn't remember telling me that it was my fault...

I moved to college 150 miles away shortly after that, and I became self-reliant. I got a medical issue taken care of that had bothered me for years, but I was "faking it." They asked me to drop my semester early to take care of my mom, who had been in and out of the hospital, and I refused. That ended the issues with me because they realized they had lost all their control over me. They basically started ignoring me.

Two years later, and things have escalated like crazy. Two times my mom has moved out, and I've been told they're divorcing, only for her to move back in and everything will be okay for a short while. Well, my mom, with the pain meds, has started to act psychotically. She had her leg amputated in May, so she's in a wheelchair. She has started to run my sister over with it if my dad doesn't bring her cigarettes. She'll scream, throw things (they're going to need all new ornaments next year because of it), and she will break anything she can. She put her fist, and everyone's shoes through a screen door in January, and just a bunch of other crazy, batshit stuff.

Late last night, I got a Facebook message from my little sister. Mom has broken the huge window in our living room, stabbed a bunch of Monster cans open, and then chased my dad around with the biggest knife in the house threatening to stab him. The police were called, and they couldn't do anything because my dad didn't press charges. She was left in the home, despite my sisters telling the cop everything, because she claimed that my dad was the one abusing her. She's now calling everyone, including her mom, backstabbers, evil, cruel, etc, because the cops were called. She has tried all day to talk to me and make me believe that SHE was the victim... I fell for the wrong nparent for YEARS. I'm done now, and I believe that will be NC with her, at least for a while. I don't need her crazy in my peace, or her vitriol in my happy. I'm done. This feels good to get off my chest. Thank you for letting me.