Have you abandoned or been abandoned?

I’m the child who was abandoned. My father left when I was a baby and went off to start a family with his new wife. He was a sorry excuse for a dad. He would constantly forget to call me on my birthday. My bday is on January 1st. New years day. Explain to me how he “forgot”. He would never pick me up on the weekends I was supposed to be with him. I suppose he “forgot” about that too. At first I absolutely held a grudge against my step mom and new sibilings. I blaimed them for taking my father away from me. But as I got older I started to notice things. It turns out my dad might have physically been there with his new family, living in the same house as them, but mentally and emotionally he was completely gone. Once I realized he was no better of a dad to them as he was to me, I lost my resentment towards them and seen him for what he truly was…a very bad father. I no longer speak with him and I’m much happier with things the way they are.

I grew up with parents who divorced before I was one.
He was an alcoholic and she was remarried and pregnant by the time I was 3.
I stayed at his house most weekends, and I was left alone when he went to make beer runs [He’d go through a 24 pack a day] and would be alone for hours at a time.
He’d bring strange women home and they weren’t always the best people.
By the time I was 6, he was in jail and I was living with my mom and step-father.
[I don’t remember exactly WHY he was in jail, but from the ages 2–4 I went through A LOT of mental, physical and sexual abuse. I didn’t tell anyone details until I met my SO my junior year of high school.. and don’t plan on anyone else knowing.]
I was adopted in 5th grade by my step-dad and things went to hell from there.
I started locking myself in my room and became distant from my family.
We still don’t speak, and I rarely leave my room when I’m home.
[I feel like I abandoned my family in this scenario.]

Christmas of my senior year, my birth dad sent me a message online [Merry Christmas, I’m your father.] and gave me the excuse of alcohol. He told me that any abuse stories I heard were made up (then later told me that there are “false memories” which “may explain” my horrid memories). He went on and on about AA and how he wanted me to be in his life.

It took me about 7 months to reply, and I’ve been very vague with any response after that.
I don’t want him back in my life, especially after him telling me that my memories of what happened to me while in his care was false.

My dad is pretty much a myth these days. Typical story of dad running off with the young secretary…
As for the aftermath, i like to belive that i am well adjusted as an adult, though my teenage years were anything but. As far as relationshps are concerned with the other sex, i have alot of committment/trust issues and generally just dont go there…
when watching movies, TV shows/ advertisements that has anything to do with a loving father puts me in tears…
Appart from that though, i have a very strong family unit with my mother and siblings.
As it is these days, divorce is so common that its become the norm, having friends whose parents are still together is quite the novelty!

My sister and I were abandoned. After my parents got divorced and my mom had custody, she started hanging out with stupid people and getting into stupid things. She went overboard with a new sense of freedom. Which is kind of understandable, I guess, because my dad was a physically abusive alcoholic.

Anyway… It became usual after a while for her to leave us home alone for two or three days at the ages of ten and eight. We never went to school, because we had no one around to make us go, to get us up in the morning, etc. We fed ourselves with whatever happened to be around the house, and a lot of the time it was from cans, uncooked. Anyway. She just didn’t come home one night, two nights, three nights, four nights, five nights. Generally, if she was going to be gone longer than the usual day or two, she would at least call. But when a week went by and she hadn’t even called, we knew she wasn’t coming back.

When my dad came to get us for his visitation, that’s the first anyone knew of it. We went to live with him at his mom’s while he was drinking, yadda, yadda. Time went by, my dad bought a house for the three of us to live in, and one day my mom called out of nowhere. I think almost a year had gone by, at this point. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t feel angry at the time… I don’t remember being angry – until, after more time had gone by and we still barely heard from her, she just showed up one day. I was nine at the time and I remember just looking at her, as I calmly said, “Where were you?”.

Anyway! Long story cut short, there was a lot of drama, for a lot of years after that point. It took my mom years to actually admit that she abandoned my sister and I. The day she finally did admit it was the day that I knew in my heart that if she didn’t, right then and there, that I would never speak to her again, for as long as I lived. I made it clear to her through anger, tears and words that cut to the bone, “You admit this now, or you fuck off and go to hell. You will forever be a piece of shit in my mind if you don’t own your mistake and act like the adult!”. I was still a teen, but apparently it got through to her. She broke down, she apologized – I made her say “I’m sorry for abandoning you”... We talked. Over time, we talked more.

I feel much closer to her now, but it will never be the same. I won’t be like the really little kid that trusts their parents just because they’re mom and dad. I learned the hard way that mom and dad doesn’t necessarily mean safety and love. I’m a pretty fucked up adult. I have a lot of emotional issues that stem from things that I experienced because of both my parents. The stories, the things that they did, the things that I could remember going through because of them… I should write a book.

That was far longer than I intended it to be, so I apologize. I never know where to being or stop when I answer these kinds of questions.

I was put up for adoption 3 months after I was born. My parents were teenagers, and thought they could handle it, but decided it would be easier if they didn’t have to. I never knew them, and I don’t have any desire to. I’ve been through 7 different foster homes over the course of 15 years, none of them wanted me. I’m not bitter about it. At the age of 15 I was emancipated and started living on my own. If my birth parents ever decided to come back into my life, I wouldn’t be angry or opposed to it, but I’m not going to search for them ever. I’m not in any position to turn down family.

My mother and father were divorced before I could recollect. My father was already remarried when I start to recall memories and too was my mother. From my memories what I can remember from the ages 4–8 I was back and forth between the two is some screwed up custody battle or something. Around the age of 9 or 10 I was confronted by my mother who I was currently living with at the time, who asked me, “If you had the choice to go live with your father would you?” I of course was fed up with the physical beatings I seemed to get daily from her husband and said,“Yes.” almost right away. Not so long after my grandmother passed & after the funeral I remember being dropped off alone at what I recall as a gas station / grocery mart or something of the sort. After sitting on a curb for a little bit my father shows up and that was the last I heard from my mother for nearly 10 years.

Come to find out that living with my father wasn’t that much better. He was around, but never really there if you know what I mean. His wife had 3 other children 2 that were older than me and one younger. She resented me and never treated me like the others. I was also physically and mentally abused by her as well. Since my father was never really there, it was kind of like I was alone in some sort of hell. From 11–15 I was your typical good kid gone bad. I was into sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. (well still am, lol) I was constantly getting into trouble, because I constantly never wanted to go home. I wanted to experience good times, since all there was at home were bad times.

When I was 15 the year I was turning 16 I was grounded to my room for the year basically. The only time I came out was to eat and go to school. When I was home I was forced to hand write, coping out of the dictionary don’t ask me, I have no idea why. I was physically thrown into the bathroom to be forced to have my head buzzed by my step mother and her mother. I put up a struggle because I was quite fond of my hair and disapproved of this act. When they realized this they started punching and slapping me, until I had enough and started hitting back and that’s when they through me out in the cold winter in AK without a jacket shoes or socks. I quickly went to a nearby friend and borrowed some shoes and went looking for a place to stay. Months went by and I tried going back to school, as suggested by the father of a friend I was staying with & they called my father who picked me up and we talked about what happened.

From 16–19 was some odd years and believe it or not I left out a lot, but I’ll shorten it at the end. At 17 I was again kicked out by my father and forced to live on my own. At 19, due to not having much friends and being accused of something that never happened I was homeless. Blah Blah BLah stories go on and on until here I am.

I’ve been through a lot and after all this. I really don’t see myself as actually having a family. My mother, even though I’m some what talking to her again kind of rarely, I don’t even know. My father is, well, he’s an ass. I only talk to one of the (step) brothers I grew up with he also is not on speaking terms with his mother (my step mother). I never felt as though anyone was there for me other than friends & only one of those I still talk to. So, I guess you could say I never really had a family. Every one I was technically a part of resented me and was never really accepting. It’s kind of always been up to me.

My parents got divorced when I was nearly 3. I stayed with my father. My mother went to England with her new husband and had 2 more kids. Years later, when I was about 25, she got divorced and moved back to the US and married a third time. I saw my mother over the years when she came to visit her family (sisters, parents) in the summer. Sometimes we e-mail. We are not close.

I have a 16-year-old son by a man I loved but was not married to. He was an immigrant from Korea that I knew for 2–½ years. He was divorced and had a son in Korea that he always talked about going back to . He disappeared without forwarding address when I was 7 months pregnant. I was sure he must have gone back to Korea and his son, which I understood. But I wanted to send him pictures of my son, let him know how he was doing (if he was in Korea, I knew it would be difficult to impossible to get child support). With the information I had he could not be found for several years following my son’s birth. PI is illegal in Korea so it was hard to look there. When my son was 8 a PI in the US found an address for someone of his name – the name is common. I sent a letter and a woman called me saying that was her brother and we talked, and I thought I had the wrong person. Eight years after that, I learned the truth when I got another PI to look, who would have been able to look in Korea if need be. My son’s father had been at that address, and he was also dead. He had died more than a year ago. The woman was his wife. He had another child, a daughter, and raised a stepson 4 years older than my son as his own. His son in Korea, apparently, had disappeared with his mom out of Korea and then she abandoned him and was he not ablle to contact his father, and his father could not find him, until a month before the father died, when he was able to visit him in the US. I found out that my son’s father met this woman (who was also from Korea) the same year that my son was born, and never did return to Korea. In fact, they lived in the same part of the city as me and my son, perhaps only blocks away – until they moved out of state a few years later. So, my son’s father abandoned my son but met a woman (who was still married to her 1st husband when they met) and took care of her son instead of his own. And the woman he married – had taken her 2 children and left her husband (not a Korean), and filed for divorce but made no legal custody arrangements for her kids. She sent her daughter back to her husband (on a bus) and never saw her again. She sent her son to Korea to be with her parents, but then brought him back after she met my son’s father, and he grew up thinking of my son’s father as his real dad. She kept her son’s real father from knowing where his son was. Even his half-sister does not know he’s her stepbrother. How many abandoned or left behind children in this story? Too many. Even the only one who had both her parents all her life (my son’s half-sister) is unlucky because her dad died. You might say, my son was lucky because the man wasn’t good anyway—but—apparently he did miss out. According to his stepson, he was a good father. The woman admits she lied and says that her husband, my son’s father, also knew that I had sent the letter.