80 People Reveal What Their Parents Did That Made Them Finally Walk Away For Good

Mine was my mother threatening to harm my kitten. She could harm me, she could say and do whatever she wanted to me and I was so deep in the fog that I would just accept it as deserved treatment, but when she started threatening my tiny little kitten, it broke through to me. I wouldn't protect myself, but I wasn't going to allow her to harm other beings.
My cats and I left shortly afterwards.

It took me a while to unpack it all mentally - my sense of self worth and inner child got workouts over the next few months.

He spoke to me horribly, I tried to talk to him about the way he treated me and it turned into a huge fight. He emailed me months later (no contact prior to that) saying that he would apologise if I did first for what was said during the fight, but that he did not want to discuss it in any way.

I'd been umming and ahhing over it in the intervening months, but his outright refusal to talk about things was just confirmation that he would never change and he didn't want to, so I called it. That was 2019. We've had very low contact since, and he's just popped up recently as he's having health issues. I asked if he wanted to see me and talk about things and he very much said no, with even more bite than the last time.

My final straw was her behaviour when my grandma (her mother) was diagnosed with liver cancer. My mother was anything but a mother figure in my life, and I watched as she took advantage of everyone, but I had no idea that she'd go to such lengths in her selfishness while her own mother was d***g.

After throwing emotional a***e my way for over two years because I wouldn't see them unless they got vaccinated, completely ignoring my birthday, and trying to hold the condo I live in over my head (I pay the mortgage, but they own it) she messaged me to tell me how nice it would be if we could start talking again for her birthday.

Refusing to go to rehab after yet another drunk episode calling me and threatening to hurt herself. I made it clear if she didn’t go I would have to stop talking to her because it was absolutely toxic. Got married, had kids and raising them without her. It’s tough.

2020 was a rough year for me. Not just the pandemic, but my dad got caught up in q-anon and became evangelical.

My mom left him in December 2020 after he snapped at her for sleeping in. She told me everything he had done behind closed doors. The a***e was there the whole time, but i was blind to it until she left.

I was on shaky ground with him after that. But I watched how a*****e he became to my younger sister. She always stood up for herself, which he hated. They always had the worst fights, and recently, he shoved her in the middle of a fight.

And for me personally, it was when I met him for a bday get-together. We go to a restaurant and he wants to dine in. He's not vaccinated, and the sign on the door said they had to follow guidelines. He just said to me, "Mom and pop shops dont follow covid regulations." and went in as though it would not be an issue. When she inevitably asked, he stormed put and embarrassed me and my boyfriend in front of the entire restaurant.

And many other similar incidents. This is scratching the surface.

I no longer trusted him nor felt safe in his presence.

When she sat me down after my grandmother’s funeral (I had gotten out of a mental hospital the same day due to a s*****e attempt to be able to attend) and she told me,

“If you think I’ll ever choose you over God and Jesus then you have another thing coming. You’re gay s**t means nothing to me and I won’t put up with it.”

After years of trying to get her to love and accept me I finally realized that she had never and could never love me, so I spent the next 3 months pretending things were fine and then one day moved 1200 miles away. I blocked her phone number before I left the drive way and never looked back. She’s tried to send me letters telling how much she misses me, and it’s taken every ounce of self control to not make a burner email and tell ask why she’d miss me when her relationship with Jesus should be far more fulfilling than with some dirty queer like me.

I had been low contact with my mother for years. I wanted so badly for things to be fixed, for her to acknowledge the a***e and to apologize, and for us to have the rosy mother daughter relationship I've always wanted.

Then a series of events happened in close succession and I finally decided there was no hope. It was hurting me too much to continue any amount of contact.

1. Wore a white dress to my wedding
2. Asked me to buy her newly published book. I did, read it, and it was a s*x, b**m, s******l ideation book. Horrific for a daughter to read!!
3. Had told me for years that she had kept all my childhood stuff. I finally had time and money to get it back, only for her to tell me she *actually* had gotten rid of it all.

Every day, I have to remind myself that I don't owe my a****r anything, and my mental health needs to be my top priority.

It's all recent, I'm still grieving, and I'm dreading mothers day.

It was the thing where you're explaining something clearly to them - and you get the nonsense back, the random "w*f?" noise that just doesn't relate or is even in the realm of sanity. It's not even that wall of denial, it's just garbage data... like 'the earth is flat and made of purple oranges!' in reply to real pressing issues.

I suppose it wasn't anger in the end, it was just the utter collapse and loss of hope.

Went VLC with my mom after years of her denying my daughter has a hearing disability. “But she seems fine!!”, she’d say. I’d retort “she is fine, she just hears differently from you and me”.

My mother is a hypochondriac, thirty plus surgeries in twenty years - many of them elective. She diagnoses herself with illnesses and has no medical support to back up her claims. When I asked her about her diabetes diagnosis, she hedged for a while getting defensive as I asked about her labs, did she need insulin, was she checking her blood sugar daily, if so what was the trend. I was concerned and wanted to know how advanced it was and she brought it up in the first place. Finally she admitted she’d had no test, it was from a book (thank god she refuses to learn to use the internet because webmd would have her dying on the daily). I mention this because if anyone else is diagnosed with anything, it’s minimized compared to her illnesses/issues. Or she outright won’t believe it even though people questioning her is the most offensive thing a person can do.

She came to visit and while she was with us, she witnessed my daughter’s speech therapy. I want to reiterate that she knows about the hearing disability, hearing aids and speech therapy, she still misheard my daughter say something and made fun of her for how she said it/my mom heard it. She went so far as to give her a nickname mocking the misheard word. I wasn’t present for that exchange but when my mom told me about it she said that she had misheard and my daughter confirmed meaning my daughter didn’t misspeak. My mom also saw a humorous misprint that referred to an item as “dumb”. This also became part of my daughter’s “fun” nickname. Mispronounced/misheard word + dumb item. This was the nickname she gave my 9 year old daughter.

When I asked her not to use it anymore and that I was sure she was trying to create fun memories which I support, I think there are kinder nicknames to give a child, she DARVO’d me. It wasn’t her, she didn’t do it, it was my daughters idea, it wasn’t a nickname, it was my fault for not speaking up sooner.

Growing up, I remember too well the “joking” she’d do and when I said it hurt my feelings, she’d mock me and tell me I needed to learn to take a joke and what was wrong with me?! She did the same to my daughter during that trip. That plus the nickname was the straw for me.

She asked me how my kids were. Or I should say she asked me how Hudson and Marshmallow were (fake names I promise) marshmallow is actually Mountain.

She never met my kids. She never cared about my kids. And not even knowing one of their names made me realize she doesn’t care and I can’t let her hurt them too. I stopped calling and she never called me.

I had a full blown, years-in-the-making crying meltdown at my grandmother, begging her to acknowledge the a***e her daughter (my mum, and also my mum’s partner) had put me through as a child/teen, because the entire family just pretend none of it happened and black-sheeped me instead. She barely responded, then typed up a document to make me read, detailing all the trauma she (grandmother) had experienced through her life - still not acknowledging mine, basically stating “we ALL have trauma”. STILL not acknowledging my pain and just making it about her own instead 🙃.

When I moved back within a 40 min drive of my dad and step mother’s place (I had previously lived a 6 hour plane ride away.)They invited me to a family dinner at their place. Afterwards, I wrote them a thank you note via email. I said thanks for having me and thanks for a delicious dinner. They responded saying that I was treating them like servants, that I owed them thanks for a lot more than dinner; they had welcomed me provided a home for me and that I owed them thanks for that.

When my mother decided to destroy my faith in myself as a mother and decided I wasn’t allowed to be any happier than she had been. She diligently committed to this process, starting with telling me “you’re going to have a d**d baby” on my second day of new motherhood and everything else she said after that at every opportunity. I was told I was a “horribly disconnected mother” when I had to go back to work after my maternity leave ended. She took every opportunity she could to tell my I was an a*****e, terrible mother. Sadly, after years of it I finally believed it, as happens to a***e victims. I truly believed that my daughter would be better off growing up without me, and I tried to k**l myself. She never talked about it with me. Ridiculously, I GAVE her another chance to be in our lives - w*f in hell was I thinking? She switched her constant a***e to my daughter instead. So I went VLC with her for about 4 years after. Then one Christmas she decided to reach out and accuse me of “turning my daughter against her family.” I was f*****g done after that. The last thing I said to her was on the Mothers Day following that, where she sent me her usual “Happy Mothers Day to the best mom ever” b******t that she only says because she wants to hear it in return. I straight up asked her, then why did you say what you said at Christmas? She didn’t respond and after a few months I blocked her and my daughter did too. Best feeling ever when that happened, we are FREE and HAPPIER than ever now that the wicked harpy is gone!

When I naively shared my psychological evaluation that outlined that I'd been s******l for years under my parents' nose, thinking it would be a chance to clear the air and try to start over, and dad took that opportunity to effectively end our relationship.

The moment I realise I have a nmom and we have zero emotional connection. It's just her bullying and judging me. Working my way to LC. Haven't spoken with her face to face or read her messages since Christmas. She's playing the victim but said she'll never treat me like an adult.

When I had my baby and all my past trauma came up and I thought how could anyone do that to their own child and why did no adult in the family protect me.

Had a phone conversation and I actually thought it had been going well. We were having a discussion on a topic that I’m passionate about and I thought we’d finally had common ground.

Apparently in my excitement to think it was a productive conversation, she was seething and upset by the whole thing and proceeded to go off on me about how wrong I was and how I was shaming her for “how she had to do things” when I had literally been agreeing with her assessments the entire time and just saying we still have issues today and we (society) really need to fix things.

Apparently me saying there was nothing she could have done back then because she didn’t have those rights was me attacking her and telling her how stupid she was. I get that it was probably her own internal struggle that was actually coming out but that was pretty much every conversation - always had to be about her and she always had to be the victim.

Anyway, she yelled at me and hung up. Like pretty much every single call we had.

I think because I had actually thought the conversation was positive up until that point it just hit differently and I was like “never again.”

I think I was still LC with her for a while because of a preplanned trip but after that I will never speak with her again.

I’m not worried anymore about protecting her feelings by giving up pieces of myself in the process.

It was her sighing and hemming and hawing over helping me when I had a panic attack that did it. I have multiple traumas with basements and my basement was flooding with Hurricane Jeanne water and I was losing it and SHE was the one who always told me her Boss's son needs money for odd jobs and I asked her to call him to wet vac my basement and she sighed and hemmed and hawed.

Being accused of stealing money from my father and his partner when idiot bank tellers withdrew money from their account instead of mine, then being asked to pay them back 1) in the early stages of the pandemic and 2) the bank reimbursed them.