Since the age of 12 I have been cooking my own meals and washing my own clothes. I have been totally alone in everything I have done. She has not read my school reports or gone to Parents Evenings. She has not seen me in any plays up until one a few weeks ago which my father made her see. She has not been on holiday with me. She has not paid for anything for me, but made me earn my keep by acting as a childminder for my sister and helping around the house.

I have struggled with everything, including eating disorders, drug addiction, self harm and my mother hasn't been there for me.

I feel totally alone.

All of my extended family live in Israel so I have nowhere to go and my mother has got into the habit of locking me out whenever I've forgotten my keys. I have no idea what to do. As I am only 15, I cannot legally get a job. I am left totally stranded as my dad loves her too much to get involved. I really could do with some advice, thank you.

(PS, it has gotten to the point where I'm considering giving up my entire life here to move to Israel where I will actually be cared for and this will probably end up happening by the end of this summer, meaning leaving behind people who mean so much to me.)

Post edited at 10:49 am on July 24, 2008 by motorhead

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If crime fighters fight crime
and fire fighters fight fire,
what do freedom fighters fight?

My advice is to put all that shit behind you...drug addictions before 15??? Come on...cigarettes dont count.

Earning your jkeep by tidying up and minding kids? Please, every child ends up having to help their parents...earning your keep?

Since the age of 12 youve been making your own meals and washing your own clothes? OMG how have you managed? No other child must have to do that? Please, most people do. Sounds to me like your mother took care of you and made sure you had these skills early in life.

Youre 15, youre young, and at that age you should be enhjoying life no matter what. You are not hard done by, you are living the average teenage life. Stop feeling sorry for your self.

The adult life is a lot more challenging and hostile, and when you reach 18/19 I hope you look back on what youre thinking and realise how immature and stupid it is.

Just stop and grow up.

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Future. Sex. Love. Sound.
Just tell me which way you like it.

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This to me sounds like a typical teenager bl;owing everything out of proportion and feeling sorry for themselves.

My advice is to put all that shit behind you...drug addictions before 15??? Come on...cigarettes dont count.

Earning your jkeep by tidying up and minding kids? Please, every child ends up having to help their parents...earning your keep?

Since the age of 12 youve been making your own meals and washing your own clothes? OMG how have you managed? No other child must have to do that? Please, most people do. Sounds to me like your mother took care of you and made sure you had these skills early in life.

Youre 15, youre young, and at that age you should be enhjoying life no matter what. You are not hard done by, you are living the average teenage life. Stop feeling sorry for your self.

The adult life is a lot more challenging and hostile, and when you reach 18/19 I hope you look back on what youre thinking and realise how immature and stupid it is.

Just stop and grow up.

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Look at the assumptions you're making. You don't actually have any idea what I've been through and you're assuming I'm over exaggerating. Yes, cigarettes don't count, but does cocaine and ketamine..

And how about the fact that I had a long list of chores to do such as hoovering, laundry, cleaning, cooking, dusting, ironing, when my mother is a housewife and actually did nothing around the house. I'd get ready to go out on a Saturday when I'd told her I had plans that Tuesday and she'd make me drop them all to watch my kid sister, and this was something she'd do regularly. I babysit 12 year olds, but when I was 12 I was babysitting!

And it isn't just a case of making my own meals and washing my own clothes, it was a case of making ALL of my own meals and washing ALL of my own clothes. My 18 year old boyfriend doesn't know how to use a washing machine for fuck's sakes! I was only a kid and I didn't get a childhood because I was too busy cooking and cleaning.

So if you don't call that being hard done by then you must have very harsh standards for the lives kids should live, because I was doing everything and getting £10 a week for it, but not doing one job would mean no money whatsoever.

And the fact that my mother locks me out of my house at 11:30pm and doesn't make sure I have somewhere to sleep makes her lovely too I take it.

This site is where people come for help, not to get told that their problems are insignificant.

I maintain my belief that you are exagerating things.

I was 15 too once and thought in a similiar way to how you did I guess, and I wish I hadnt thought I had  a shit time, cos now that Im older, shit is really hitting the fan and 15 was so easy with so few responsibilities.

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Future. Sex. Love. Sound.
Just tell me which way you like it.

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I maintain my disbelief that you were into hard drugs before 15.

I maintain my belief that you are exagerating things.

I was 15 too once and thought in a similiar way to how you did I guess, and I wish I hadnt thought I had  a shit time, cos now that Im older, shit is really hitting the fan and 15 was so easy with so few responsibilities.

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Maintain disbelief then, but if actually bothered looking through previous posts you'll realise I have had it hard.

That said, all you can do is bear it. You can't make your mother pay more attention to you or respect you or care about your well-being, if anything you should have learned from this that the one person you can rely on is yourself. If you want a change then you need to make a change, period. You can't wait for the time to be right because when you're in a shitty situation the right time never comes.

You already know what you need to do, do it and stop posting about it on here. If you can blame your hard life on your mother than your life is not that hard, because it's only hard when you can blame it on yourself. The trick to not being a victim is to intentionally stop being a victim.


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Who dares wins. - Special Air Service

Either way, live life based on your own decisions and accept the consequences and rewards that come with them.

Your situation sucks but it would suck a lot worse if it were your own doing, it's not. You have every right to be happy and to live well but no one has the right to expect these two things to be given to them, loving mother or not.

If you would like to move to Isreal, don't hesitate.

Remember James and the giant Peach? That story is no shit one of the best I've ever read because it taught me at a very young age that ultimately you are responsible for yourself. There are things in life that you can't control and some of them can be horrible things like a shifty family or poverty or a terminal disease or being crippled or being betrayed or being in massive debt or a combination.

What can you do? Find something better. It is much more difficult to do this on your own but I really believe that as long as you keep looking some day you'll find the spirit that will guide you to happiness, that spirit in many cases is your own.

The worst thing you can do is allow yourself to be trapped in your own negative emotion and depression and allow yourself to think that you are at your limit, that you have to force yourself to accept your situation and just live through it miserably.

If you are miserable take active steps to get out of misery just like if you were in a pool with a shark you'd take active steps to get the fuck out of that pool.

The first step is realizing that you can't be disowned because you are not property and the second step is realizing that your not helpess to your own circumstances no matter how shitty they might be.

If you change things and still find yourself miserable, change them again. Realize that sometimes the thing you want most is something you can't force or will into reality, live your life with the mindset that you will always act to have no regrets, if your actions lead to regrets learn from them and move on, a man living in the past or in fantasy is missing out on the present and reality and if he weren't he might find that there are good things in those realms as well and that they tend to last longer and have more meaning.

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Who dares wins. - Special Air Service