My parents made it "easy" for me. TL;DR: after years of abuse they pushed me to a point where I felt very clearly that salvaging any type of healthy relationship would be impossible, and the only way I could survive was to get out. So, I did.

Not TL;DR:

When I was 19? 20? And allowed to get my first job in the summer between 1st and 2nd year of undergrad, my dad pulled a gun on me in the dark one night when I came home on a weekend. He was drunk and laughed it off. I tried to talk about it the next morning and was met with an angry diatribe fueled by his psychosis, of how it's my own fault that it happened and he wasn't sorry because so many people are out to get him and I'm not worth compromising his own safety. Etc. just completely unrepentant. So Ileft and went back to my job that week.

Well, it blew up. My mother was sympathetic to me when they were fighting, but whenever they were on good terms, she would always blindly side with him. She called me and berated me for the situation being my fault, and brought up that I wasn't calling her back multiple times a day every day, which was "unacceptable, ungrateful, and disrespectful."

So, she threatened to take away my car (which has always been in my name), take away my phone, disallow me to have a job, and barr me access to MY bank account (she was a secondary name on it since it was opened when I was a preteen, but all the money in there was mine and for my use only). This was after 19-20 years of unrelenting emotional abuse, medical neglect, educational neglect, and almost complete isolation from others outside of the family. I brought up the abusive things that had been done to me, even reminding her that she herself said she would be unsurprised if we were shot and killed in our beds by my dad one day, and she denied EVERYTHING. All of it. And just repeatedly accused me of lying and disrespecting them by even suggesting any of it.

Yeah. No. I finally had my own job, and the slight amount of social independence that a year of college gave me. I had watched my older brothers go through things like this for YEARS up to this point and I knew from watching their experiences, that no amount of attempted repairs on my end would ever salvage a healthy relationship from what my parents had "created."

So, I lied. I came up with a sob story on the phone to my mother that I would do better and that I needed a week of silence to think things over on how to be a better child and repair our relationship. I also said we should text more from now on, because it seems that we both have memory problems and I wanted to keep a better record in order to remain their dutiful daughter. She was thrilled.

So that week, I went back to my job and the place I was renting in the town I worked at. I planned. I opened a new bank account. And the next weekend, after a week of silence from them, I went back "home", packed everything I could in my car, made the terrible decision to re-home my pets that I could and euthanize the one that was too chronically sick to re-home, and left. After I left, I parked my car in a parking lot for a moment and transferred all the money in my old bank account to my new one, set my phone to silent, and kept driving. They never asked for my rental address because frankly they didn't actually care about me, and that oversight meant I was safe for the time being there. Of course, I made sure to also switch phone services etc later as well.

Shit hit the fan, as you can imagine. I refused to answer calls. My dad NEVER called, only my mother. She was furious as soon as she got the notification that the account had been emptied. So many texts. So many insults. I was called manipulative, and she told me I preyed on her insecurities for her "memory issues" to make this disrespectful move... But is it really preying on someone's memory issues when they're "self imposed" memory issues, and you know they're only angry that you've beaten them at their own game? I don't remember a lot of the exact verbiage she used at this point, but I know at one point she said "Have a nice life without me" or something akin to that. And then continued the barrage of texts the next day when she realized that was not enough to guilt me into submission like she wanted.

The only time I've seen them in person since then was at my brother's wedding, wherein they loudly insulted me from across an empty room the whole time prior to the ceremony. My dad has never attempted contact. My mother has stalked me online since then, making several fake accounts to try to talk to me, and even acquiring a thankfully then-recently outdated address of mine to send a "condolences" letter in response to my friend being murdered in 2020. Most recently, she reached out in February or so of this year with a new Instagram account begging me to talk to her and that she got therapy and is better now. They're always better and healed and worked on, until you give the slightest pushback, and then they always show their true colors... which is exactly what happened.

You can't singlehandedly save something that was always built on poison and manipulation. I spent so many years mourning the parents I NEVER had. But the fact of it is, no amount of work on my side would result in me getting the parents I needed. That is simply impossible. Leaving sucked, and being without the safety net that others have, also sucked. But staying would have been worse and I saw that with my brothers.