“She called me crying on her way home from her last visit with him, asking if she was a bad mom.”

As a Writer at BuzzFeed, I write and curate quizzes, listicles, and articles about everything from pop culture and history to food and fashion.

I also grabbed responses from threads 1 and 2. 

"This was the last time I tried hard to be close with her. She was about 22 when this happened. It's the great tragedy of my existence. She's my only biological child, and when people ask me if I have kids I lie and say no because thinking of her makes me want to die of shame." 

"All because she wouldn't buy him, a minor, cigarettes. He is in his mid-20s now and is constantly in and out of jail. My aunt doesn't believe in medication for mental health, nor does she believe in psychiatrists. She thinks that because she is his mother, she can solve his issues. My mom and I are afraid he is going to kill her one day." 

"No marriage or kids, despite a lot of hard work and money spent on 30 years of meds and a shit ton of therapy. I also got a hefty dose of childhood evangelical brainwashing and purity culture, which I'm still unraveling.

My parents were aware of the abuse, but their attempts to protect me were anemic at best. I didn't even have a lock on my door (he broke it, dad repaired it, he broke it, rinse, repeat, dad gave up). They remain in a permanent "will acknowledge if you raise it, but will minimize, won't remember any details so you'll have to bring those to the conversation, and even then won't likely remember," with a vibe of "Did that really happen?" about the abuse. Recently, I found a letter I wrote at age 13 describing my brother sexually abusing me. I don't remember writing the letter, nor any sexual abuse—I always thought it was solely physical and emotional. But what I wrote absolutely rang true, so it was a shock to read. It is extremely unnerving not knowing if it happened once or much more. So it's back to therapy I go. But this time I am making my parents pay for it. What makes me the angriest is that everyone has forgotten that he was the abuser, he was the predator, and I was the victim. Now that he's in the nursing home, everyone in the family feels sorry for him." 

"He didn't trust our guidance—everything we said was just to hold him down and hold him back. So he learned everything the hard way. He was charming enough to be liked by his teachers and others, but always in all sorts of new and exotic types of trouble they'd never seen before. He damn near got himself killed more than once. He could be loving and funny with me—we had a fucked-up wicked sense of humor together—but he could also turn deeply hostile, with incidents that were basically attempts at assault and deliberate, malicious attacks on my property. His emotional intelligence was very low—empathy wasn't completely absent, but he was chronically oblivious to the reactions of others. He had a cold sort of logic that could be quite chilling at times.

And somewhere along the line, somehow, it got better. He switched to destroying his own property when he was angry and then stopped destroying it all together. He learned to manage his anger, more or less. He learned to filter his reactions through rationality. He learned to interpret and analyze. He became more aware of himself and others and developed empathy. He's still a bit of an odd duck. He's still insanely stubborn. He still needs to school his anger. But he's learned to self-regulate enough that he can be a decent person and have genuinely good relationships." 

"When I went to community college, I tried to get him to go with me. He's plenty smart enough to go to school, just terrible at attending; he dropped out shortly after. 

My parents had been very hard on him as a kid every time he had screwed up. Once I showed up (younger sibling), they essentially wanted him to start being independent, and they hadn't set him up for it, I don't think. My entire family, parents included, would clam up if you talked about emotions other than happiness. We were expected to process emotions by ourselves behind closed doors. 

I'm not saying my parents were terrible; I don't think they were. I turned out ok, I think. I just don't think they knew how to deal with my older brother, and it ruined him in a way. I try and do what I can for him and make an effort to be there for him.He's a loose cannon; he definitely has emotional issues, and he won't seek help for them. He's a pathological liar and slick enough to talk his way out of most things, especially with a therapist/psychologist. He isn't self-sufficient and relies on everyone else for everything. Believe me, once I'm all he has left, he's going to get self-sufficient real quick."

"And I turned a corner. By late middle school I was just a weird, awkward young teenager. I liked death note, Hot Topic, and being "random." By high school I was ambitious, had amazing grades, and had a solid group of friends. Still a little weird, but I grew out of it by the time I went to college." 

"Whilst buying tickets, I turned around and saw him sparta kick a 6-year-old down the flight of stairs and then screamed and spit at the mother... I was in horror, and both the mother and I froze, and he just sat there laughing. I then took him home and uninstalled Minecraft and changed the WiFi password.

The next six days were like watching someone coming down from heroin, with my entire family begging for me to give him the WiFi password, which I refused. To which during Christmas eve he proceeded to light our Christmas tree on fire and break every present. Luckily, my Dad caught him and booted them both out of our house.Looking at my aunt, the kid never had a chance, a product of divorced parents, with them pushing him to learn the flute and refusing to take him to any outside activities; his father is constantly working, so he just left him alone to play Minecraft." 

"My mom took to looking after my nephew like her own son and did a good job of helping him in every way possible, teaching him to talk, walk, and have good manners, and singing him lullabies and reading with him. All the things my sister should have done, but she preferred to be off snorting coke with whichever man she was sleeping with at the time.

Mom would say regularly how sad she was about the whole thing, how disappointed, how worn out and brow-beaten and isolated and abused she felt because of my sister. It didn't help; she was in cahoots with my mom's husband, bitching about her behind her back and making her feel unwelcome in her own home.Of course, she criticized everything my mother did, quite nastily, and would regularly drop my nephew on my mom whenever mom had plans, just to ruin them, because she knew mom would always care for an innocent child while she was off stealing money from her and drunk driving."

"He is following in the steps of my druggie, good for nothing father, and all I can do is watch while everybody refuses to acknowledge the downwards spiral my family is going. It's frustrating that a teenager has a better idea of where my family is going than the adults who choose to close their eyes and decide to reinforce bad habits. It's caused my mental health to suffer because of the lack of emotional and mental support from selfish people, and now all I want to do is to get into university and get as far away from these people as possible."

"Not the first or last kid; he's messed up either. Mark my words, this kid is going to kill someone some day, I have no doubt. I'm just staying as far out of the picture as possible so that it's not me or one of my kids."

"He gently took me aside and pointed out that a four-year-old should not be screaming at their parents after having been asked to perform a simple task.

I got therapy to help work through my own issues, and together my husband and I came up with a strategy that allowed me to discipline our daughter without physical punishment. (It took a few tries before we found a strategy that worked.) Then COVID-19 happened, and now my husband works from home four days a week, which has helped immensely. Our daughter is still spoiled, but her behavior has improved a lot over the last few years to the point that she's usually pleasant to be around, lol.She and I are both a work in progress, but so far the whole family is doing better."— LJGHunter

"Things could've ended so badly, but our daughter was already on the police radar. I spent so many days with them at the high school because she was always lying and making false claims. I love her because she's my daughter but cannot take the chance of her being near my younger kids. She still claims she didn't make the false claims, but she did literally read like all her other claims. If believed, my now-late husband would've been arrested and on all the news channels."

"She called me crying on her way home from her last visit with him, asking if she was a bad mom. She is the best mom. She has done so much for the both of us. She would move heaven and earth for my brother and me, and it truly enrages me that he’s made her feel like this."

"That was so serious that her son had to run away, and they almost locked up my grandmother and confiscated my cell phone because my grandmother sent all the tax documents and bribes on my cell phone.

My mother, the youngest, grew up relatively alone; my grandmother beat her, let my great-uncles and great-uncles take advantage of her, my aunt threw her out of a third-floor window, my uncle told her she was adopted and not one, she told her she wanted to, and one of my grandmother's brothers raped her. He grew up with her paternal uncle, a priest, because he was the only one who loved her, when she went to university, she was forced to study something she did not want, and when she left her, they treated her like the worst of all. My grandmother did the same to me, as my mother worked to support my grandmother and me. I also grew up with the priest uncle, who gave me the strength to continue.The stories are repeated, almost as an inheritance; I hope I can break the chain. Currently I have been estranged from my grandmother because she hates me for not studying what she wanted. My family is full of stories like this from my great-great-great-great (many great) grandparents. The good thing is that I get away from my family."

"Now he's in his early 30s; he's also having to teach himself discipline. My sister-in-law, despite odds, is extremely driven and motivated. Recently got her master's degree, and is stubborn to a fault. That said, 'stubborn to a fault' also has a darker meaning, not just positive ways. She tends to be rather self-centered and is stubborn to the point where she (more or less) has horse blinders in. She's so in her own world + priorities that she doesn't really seem to care about other people. If it isn't about her, her new husband and soon-to-be baby, or her new in-laws (she's newly married and pregnant), forget about it; it's like nobody else exists. 

My brother-in-law, who is in his early 20s, is on his way to becoming the creepy 40-year-old virgin living in mom's basement. Barely made it through high school and flunked out of community college. We urged him to take gen-eds at the community college (in person) before transferring to a state school. Of course, he went against guidance shared and took two gen-eds online (math and english), as well as a few music classes, which he strongly vouched for. Not only did he fail math and English, he also flunked the music class. The same music class that was once a week at 5 p.m. But what do he & my MIL do? Blame the professor for failing the class; they claimed she was "strict about attendance." The community college was on a grant/free because our state recently passed legislation making community college free for first-time college students. His grandparents also offered to pay for a four-year institution (full-ride). So, he wasted two great opportunities. My BIL is basically wasting his life away; he plays video games all night and sleeps during the day. My MIL coddled and enabled him like you wouldn't believe."