Not me but my younger brother.
My brother was an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy, and from the start my mother wanted this kid gone by any means necessary. Unfortunately the law and her family wouldn’t allow it, so she was forced to carry this child to term and take care of it. She hated my brother from the start, wanted him dead or abandoned by the side of the road (whatever it took to get rid of him), and with that failing she strove to make this child’s life as miserable as she could for the sin of having dared to exist. My mother had a nasty cruel and vindictive streak.
Our parents divorced when I was nine and he was seven, and we moved to a house about 3 miles away. One day my mother got angry at my brother and locked him out of the house with orders to walk to our dad’s house. It was nighttime in mid December, about 15 degrees F outside, and he wasn’t wearing a coat. My mother then called my father and angrily bragged “I just threw him out of the house without a coat and told him to walk to your house. I don’t care if he freezes!”
My mother was not mentally ill, she was in complete control of herself, she was just filled with anger and hatred that she liked to inflict on those around her, especially those that had little choice but endure it. She felt it was a parental perk to be allowed to abuse your kids for whatever reason you wished, even if it was for her amusement (and it sometimes was). She got a certain sadistic joy out of making people feel miserable and worthless.
My father woke up the neighborhood and sent everyone out to find him, and he was eventually found wandering around a grocery store parking lot less than 1/4 mile from my mother’s house. He was minutes away from hypothermia. He very nearly died that day, and this was not the only time he narrowly escaped death at the hands of my mother.
I’ll never understand why she wasn’t charged and arrested for that. She passed away three years ago, and it’s a major trigger to my father (who hates her with a passion), so I guess I’ll never know.
POST EDIT: Several people have asked how my brother turned out, and he didn’t. He died at age 14, and ironically my mother had nothing to do with it. He asphyxiated himself huffing gasoline in my dad’s garage. After he died my mother almost never spoke of him again, and would go into psychotic rages whenever he was brought up. I quickly learned to not talk about him anymore.
He never had a chance from the start. This is the last known picture of him.
His name was Tim.
POST POST EDIT: This is the last update I’m making to this post. A few people have been throwing shade on my father for not having done enough, and it is here I must strenuously object. My father was (is) a good man, not perfect by any means, but he always did his level best for his kids and his family. He was faced with an unprecedented situation that nothing in his experiences could have prepared him for. In his later years he is sometimes racked with guilt at all the things he didn’t do, and I tell him that he did everything he knew to do at the time. He had powerful forces aligned against him.
After the divorce my mother did leave Tim with my father, but less than a year later she hired a lawyer and sued for custody. Why, you may ask? I don’t know, and I no longer care to even speculate anymore. My father hired his own lawyer and ended up giving this guy nearly $20k (in the late 70s). The lawyer did a bang-up job; he interviewed neighbors, family, teachers and psychologists and assembled a thick and detailed dossier of systematic abuses at the hands of my mother.
A few days before the trial, presumably at the advice of her lawyer, my mother went to my father’s house while he was at work (she still had a key) and collected Tim. This was so it could be said at the trial “The child currently resides with the mother”.
The trial itself lasted 20 minutes, and the judge never once spoke to my father or his lawyer. Three times during the trial my father’s lawyer objected and three times he was overruled, and after the third objection he was threatened with contempt. When the gavel swung down Tim was legally and officially hers; it was a foregone conclusion from the start.
My father wanted to appeal, but he was told it would cost an additional $20k and he could expect the same results. He didn’t appeal. He went home, collected Tim’s things, and sent them off to my mother. Three days later he comes home to find all that stuff piled up on the front porch, and Tim is inside watching TV. “What happened?” he asked. “She threw me out.”
This pattern would repeat itself multiple times over the ensuing years. My mother would want Tim back, and since she had legal custody my father was obligated to send him, and then after some time (it could have been days or months) she would angrily throw him out. The incident at the start of this post was one of those times. My father no longer tried to fight it, he didn’t figure anyone was going to listen to him. And he was probably right.
Man, did this post get long. If you’re still here, thank you for reading. This dredged up a lot of shit I haven’t thought about in a long time