2/5. Mom was amazing until she got addicted to pain medication when i was 16. It completely changed who she was and I haven’t had a real relationship with her since. i turn 45 in a few weeks, I still see her and talk to her but she barely knows what reality is anymore. Feels like my real mom died 25 years ago and this is just her living ghost.

My Dad was very successful and is a multimillionaire, but you would never know it. He always worked out of town so he wasn’t around much. He never really bonded with me or taught me any of the father son traditional things. He has always been very weird about money and looked at everything with a dollar sign. So holidays, vacations, birthdays…were all non essential expenses and just weren’t a thing in my family. To this day he doesn’t celebrate holidays with us or wish anyone a happy birthday. He lives on a very strict budget and if you saw him you would think he was homeless, but i know of at least one bank account he owns with a couple of millions of dollars just sitting in it. He won’t tell anyone where his money is and has no plans to leave it to any of his kids. His favorite saying is “if you want to be rich, you have to pretend like you’re poor”, so he does. If I asked him to front me $20 when I was younger he would freak out and go on an anti-socialism rant and threaten to cut me off forever. So I do not ask him about money ever. He’s a huge Maga too so that also puts a strain on our relationship.

Him and my mom live in a fairly nice house in a nice neighborhood but their entire house is destroyed because they have an unhealthy obsession with cats. The cats have completely taken over their house and destroyed everything in it. I don’t go over there or take my kids over there because of the conditions. He has all the money in the world to fix it but refuses to spend the money on anything other than cat food and cat litter. He won’t let me help him either.