Is it normal that i hate my dad even more now that he's stopped being abusive?
Get comfy, this is a bit of a rant:
I grew up in unusual circumstances. My mom was diagnosed with brain cancer when I was born and she held on until I was 15. My dad would take out his stress and frustrations on me by making a huge fucking deal about my grades.
I used to get A's and B's until my second semester in Middle School when I brought home my first failing grade. After that, Dad contacted all of my teachers to keep tabs on me during class and report to him whenever I missed an assignment. Every day he was waiting for me when I got home. He would show me the emails from the teachers, scream at me for hours, then send me to my room when he had finally yelled himself out. This was around the time my mom took a turn for the worse.
My grades began to suffer and I found I could no longer do my homework at the house. Every time he would see me with an assignment he would hover, read over my shoulder, correct things himself or force me to redo the entire thing if he thought it wasn't good enough.
I couldn't fucking take it. I started lying to him about school to buy myself some time between scream fests. I tried to use the time between the lie and him finding out to finish late work and get a handle on getting my grades up. I never could. He would find out eventually, of course, and just kept getting worse. Kept upping the ante.
Before, he would just yell at me about school, insult my intelligence, ask me if I was retarded, shit like that. Just verbal stuff. Then he started getting rougher. He'd take me by the collar, shake me, push me to the wall. He never used his fists on me; he was more fond of the belt.
On several occasions, he would grab my arm and lead me to Mom's room and make me tell her myself just how much of a fuck up I was. His favorite thing to say was "Stress kills." The chemo had taken its' toll on Mom at this point. She had a few straggly wisps of hair that she couldn't bring herself to cut off and was almost completely bedridden at that point. Looking back, I don't think she gave a fuck about my grades, but I didn't know that then. I thought I was single-handedly speeding up her illness.
He would call our relatives and tell them about me. Sometimes he would put them on speaker phone in front of me to hear what they thought about my actions. (They didn't know I was listening and reacted with straight horror when I told them about it a few weeks ago).
High School came with no relief in sight. He started doing the same shit to my sister at this point. I was still passing classes without doing homework. I would still get A's on all my tests and finish in-class assignments. I was passing with C's. I was still sent to Summer School. Still grounded indefinitely during the school year.
Mom finally passed away during my Junior year. My memory is fuzzy. I just went numb for a few years. I can remember getting yelled at for scoring below a 3.0 for some of my College classes but I can't remember how he found out/ why I showed him. I've been doing worse in College since then. Whenever I miss a class or an assignment I get so embarrassed and ashamed that I can't usually force myself to go back until it's too late to do anything about it. I've stopped going. I don't know if I'll go back.
I'm out of the house now, thank god, and Dad's no longer the monster he was. He's got a new girlfirend he's planning to marry, he's renovating the house and makes an effort to have "Family Days" a couple times a month. He's always very pleasant whenever we talk or see each other. He takes my sister and I out to dinner and movies and stuff when we get together. He's acting like a normal dad to his now adult kids.
And I fucking hate him.