Edit: Thanks for the support guys.

On my twenty-third birthday, I was out to dinner with my brother and Mom and her new husband. My Mom got wine drunk and when her Husband left to feed the meter she told me that she had gotten an abortion before she was with my Dad. It turns out that she became good friends with my Dad, in part, because he drove her to get that abortion. She also mentioned that she decided to not keep the baby then because that Chad was stubborn and could be an asshole and did not make as much money as my Dad. The last thing she said was that she was sure the baby would have been a girl.

That line made it all click for me. My Mom had always been borderline obsessive with having a baby girl. When I was a kid I had normal toys, but she also bought my brother and I barbies and later on would paint my nails (clear luckily). Sometimes she would even send me to friends’ houses with her jewelry on and I didn't realize until years later how that estranged me from them. I had no idea why people didn't like me, or thought I was so weird.

As a result of this, she told me frequently when I was quite young that it was okay to be gay, which is fine. However, my family would watch sheek independent movies, one of which is where a guy "find out" he's gay at the age of thirty. My mom pulled me aside when I was four and told me that one day when I'm thirty I could have a wife and kids and find out that I'm gay and never loved my wife and that my life would crash without warning. This terrified me for a long time, really up until I said to myself, even if I am gay, I don't want to be gay. I am completely straight, by the way.

When my parents got divorced is when it got really bad. I grew up thinking that I was poor. I lived in a nice house, but I never bought my own clothes until I was in high school, I didn't eat lunch in high school for many years because I didn't have the money. I was socially awkward isolated because I didn’t have money to go out with groups on the weekend. I found out this year that my Dad had to pay her 7,0000$ a month in child support and she spent it all going out three times a week to date other guys and drink expensive wine. She worked to "create her own business," but only made around five-hundred dollars a month and never kept the business long enough that it was profitable.

What you don't understand about dating women is that if they're a little crazy YOU can handle it because you’re a man. However, if you get a divorce your wife WILL look to your kids to be that emotional rock, or direction of abuse and they cannot handle it because they're kids. My single Mom would come home and sit down and sit down next to me on the couch and sigh loudly about how hard she had been working and then start yelling at us. It would start slowly where I would say we had no food and she would go through all of the random things we had that I could eat, but wouldn’t actually count as food, like canned tomatoes. She would make us something like burned eggs just so she could start screaming at us about how much she does for us, how little we appreciate her, and so on. The first hour of my day home from school for my entire life was a woman literally following me around and screaming at me to do the dishes, or clean something, I suppose because she is a feminist. Two or three days a week she wouldn't even take me to school for half an hour because she wanted me to sweep, or something. I would then get detention at school, or suspended for being late so frequently. When she was really mad, she would even say things like the only thing men are good for is warming the bed.

In the end, she never acknowledged what she did. To this day, she still tells me that the child support she got was “her money” and she earned it. Whenever I remind her about how she was physically and mentally abusive she snaps into this weird zone of just repeating, I was a great Mom, over and over.

When I was in sixth grade I had to be put on schizophrenia meds because I couldn’t handle life anymore and would sit in my room, or hide under my bed for eighteen hours a day trying to sleep. I was even hospitalized once for “being suicidal” even though I was never was. I ended up getting a GED because my grades were horrible. Luckily my teachers later on understood what I was going through and let me stay in advanced classes even though I was failing because I couldn’t complete the homework. I am doing fine now, in Uni and so on. It took me years to realize that I wasn’t crazy. My dad wasn’t around, he just told me to learn to understand her, to understand how she was abused as a kid and how I shouldn’t judge her too harshly. It’s pathetic.

As a side note, I often wonder if my gay friends would have turned out gay if they were raised in other ways. I do not think that being gay is a bad thing, but deep down I wonder if they feel uncomfortable in male roles because they were not taught how to be themselves. You know, aggression is bad, wanting to hunt animals as a kid makes you a psychopath, wanting to fuck girls is bad because they are special princesses, even though they want you to treat them like shit in bed.