Disturbing discoveries.
Had an hour-long phone conversation with my aunt whom I rarely talk to. She and my other aunt helped my stepfather take care of my mom in her last few years when the dementia was in its final stages. Now...I should have known better to believe my stepfather when he criticized my aunts for being 'irresponsible' and 'not giving enough time to your mom', because I KNOW how much he lies and manipulates and exaggerates things to make people look bad. I dealt with that shit for 10 years while I lived with him, but for some reason I believed him.
Well, my aunt saw something I posted on FB mentioning how when I was 17, the thing I feared the most was my stepfather, and she wanted to talk to me about it because she never realized that he was abusive to me. So for an hour we talked about how abusive Bob was, not just to me, but also to my AUNTS (I never knew this) while they were helping to take care of my mom. Apparently Bob would yell at them and belittle them like he did to ME when I was a kid/teen, criticizing them for everything. Keep in mind my aunts were helping care for my mother out of love and concern. They weren't getting paid, they were taking time out of their OWN schedules and from their own families to try to give some help to their sister. But my aunt revealed how Bob took that bit of kindness and treated them like fucking servants, yelling at them when they did things he didn't tell them to do, like taking the dog outside when nurses would come. The nurses were terrified of the dog (he's super friendly, but VERY badly trained, and he's a big dog that will jump on everyone and bark), and wouldn't come inside unless he was put away. But this apparently set Bob off. Because he wasn't in fucking control of everything around him.
We were both SUPER pissed on the phone as we revealed the layers of Bob's manipulation. While he lied to me about my aunts, he lied to my aunt about me being 'a selfish bitch who doesn't care about her mother' because I rarely visted (I was 2,500 miles away at college, and then 1,000 miles away at grad school...I kind of COULDN'T visit until I was home on vacation, which I always did when I returned). And then we came to a horrible realization.
My aunt had been under the impression all along that I yelled at my mom and didn't invite her to my high school graduation.
I was LIVID. The reason my mom didn't come to my graduation was because 2 weeks before, Bob threatened to break my neck because of a fucking hamburger bun and I called my brother to pick me up and take me to my dad's house. I never returned because I was done with being threatened and abused. When Bob and mom came to get the house key from me, he tore into me about involving my brother in a 'family matter' (um...excuse me...my brother IS family, and more fucking family than Bob would EVER be), and he ended it with, "well don't expect us to be at your graduation." I remember seeing the look on my mom's face...she was too afraid to say anything against him...to this day I think she wanted to go to my graduation but couldn't because he said they weren't going to. I left their tickets with my brother to give to them if they wanted to come, but they never showed up.
Yet Bob never told my aunt any of this. He twisted the story to make ME sound like the bad guy. He conveniently left out the part about how I literally fled the house in fear because he physically threatened me (after years of verbal and emotional and mental abuse). He conveniently forgot to tell her about how HE said they weren't going to come, how I stood there, scared to say anything because of years of being conditioned where standing up for myself = punishment. No, according to him, I was some mouthy little disrespectful bitch who screamed at my mom and told them all to go to hell and took everything they did for me for granted. "Everything they did for me" being them stealing my father's child support payments and trying to make me pay for electricity and maxi pads and underwear with my meager part time after school job as they bought cigarettes and beer and shitty 'collectables'.
I was trying to put the past behind me, but you know what? Fuck him. My aunt said the same thing: "FUCK HIM." She told me she was wondering why I was being such a 'bad step-daughter' and not visiting him after my mom died, but after we talked about all the shit he's done to me and my aunts, she apologized and said if she'd known how abusive and manipulative and untruthful he'd been, she never would have suggested I visit. She said she would never ask me to go over there, because she knew now why I was afraid of him.
You know wounds are deep when just typing about them makes you shake with anger and anxiety. It's been 10 fucking years since I left that hellhole and the memory still terrifies me as if it were yesterday. I was ready to give him the benefit of the doubt that maybe he changed, but after hearing all this, I know he's still the same evil, manipulative, sadistic asshole who took pleasure in destroying the self-confidence of a kid out of his pleasure for power. Fuck. Him.