Let's give some backround.
My grandparents had 3 children. One son and two daughters, the oldest being my mother.
This family has been dysfunctional from the beginning, and both my mother and my uncle turned to pot and alcohol. My aunt only did cigarettes. (Not sure about alcohol though.) My uncle and mother has since gotten off the drugs. (Well, my uncle still drinks a little much sometimes, and smokes, but life's been giving him a beating lately, so it is understandable that he is having trouble going cold turkey.)
My mother married an abusive man and she was raped whilst still married to him. In the time I was born, in South Africa, if a child was conceived whilst a couple was still married, the father would have full rights to the children. To prevent me from ending up with him, she made a deal with my grandparents and my father that I will stay with my grandparents.
I suffered listening to my grandparent's arguments (my hearing is very, very sharp, they could be half way across the world I'd still hear them.) and listening to how my grandmother just ordering my grandfather around.
But in any case, she never asks anyone to do something, she tells them. She never praises, only criticizes. It is like it is a given that we MUST do what she says.
Nobody in the house has a say other than her.
There is no such thing as communication. We either talk about stupid stuff, work, or not at all. If any other subject matter is raised, within 2 minutes you have a fight. There is no reasoning, no compromising, no logic. Her way or the highway.
And in the rare times that she realized that she hurt me, (she had to do something pretty bad.) she tries to fix it with an hug, which ends up confusing my emotions so much.
The thing is, I always have stood for my rights and the rights of others, and I am very strong willed, but that only tends to fuel the fire.
Now don't get me wrong, we love each other a lot. And I mean A LOT. But to be honest, that only makes the pain ten times worse. If there was no love, it would have been bearable.
I left them for a while to live with my mother when I was 12. That didn't work out because of my step-fathers upbringing. He used corporal punishment. I was in a very fragile state at the time and they have never raised a child, never mind an emotionally disturbed 12 year old whom has just left the home he lived in for 12 years. That, and the fact that I never had responsibilities at my grandparents (I despised any form of work, as I have only seen it represented as something someone orders another to do, and thus as something unpleasant, instead of it being a loving gesture of helping your family members.) and suddenly I have a lot of chores, more homework than I ever had, and all my video games being taken from me because of violence that is in them. They also ended up blaming me for an "heart attack" my stepfather had, and they also accused me of wanting to kill them, and secretly doing witchcraft on them in the middle of the night. (I have insomnia.) My grades ended up plummeting from an 80% average to me failing the seventh grade. Since then I have been doing homeschooling.
Now, I am turning 17 this July. I have 2 1/2 years of school left, but I have an option of moving.
I have only been truly happy in one place in my entire life. Nature.
I surf, and when I don't get my surfing fix, I go insane. The problem is, there isn't waves every day. I live relatively close to the most beautiful sub-tropical forest, Wilderness-Knysna.
But we rarely go there.
Now I have gotten an opportunity that I cannot pass by. A man living in the there, possibly with the best view of the entire forest, inside the legendary Kaaimans ravine, has agreed to take me in.
I am not going to go into to much details about him, but he is a kind, loving man. One in a billion. I haven't met someone I could talk to so openly in my life. Not only that, he somehow actually convinced me of Christianity. Considering that I have been hurt very badly by Christians, and infact at a stage made it my mission to show everyone how much bollocks it is, this is pretty miraculous. There was just something about the way he told his story, the certainty and the passion behind the words, and the wonderful natural setting, that inspired me.
I decided I want to go, but I wanted to give it time, to make sure of things you know. We then agreed that I can come when I am 17, but not before that. It has been 7 months since this happened, and my mind hasn't changed.
The only problem that I have is that I don't want to hurt my grandparents. They have done much for me, and they love me.
I feel sympathy for them, not resentment. But there is one thing that happened that pretty much made me die inside (and I already felt like I was dead at the time, after that, I felt like I was brought back to life only to be tortured to death again, and sent to hell.)
Last night, I can't remember exactly what happened, everything up to that point was a haze. My Grandmother said to me: "You are not my grandson anymore."
I was crushed. It wasn't the same as when an alcoholic father who beats you up says it, this was someone I truly loved with all my hart.
I know she didn't mean it and that it was in the heat of the moment, but what is said cannot be unsaid.
Now, if I leave now she will blame herself for the rest of her life, and probably worry herself sick about me day and night (I am not even allowed to sleep over at a friends for more than one night, and the one time my friends took me camping and I told my grandfather about it over the phone and he agreed, she nearly had a seizure and started calling me and my friends mother frantically and basically harassing me and my friends mother.)
The problem I am experiencing makes it impossible to focus on my exams, impossible to sleep, and impossible to have a single moments rest inside me.
I was depressed my whole life. It got the worst when my mother started blaming me for my stepfathers "heart attack" that wasn't an heart attack, and the whole witchcraft #######4. When I came to where I am at the moment and discovered nature and surfing, things got a lot better. When I had a friend in wilderness whom I visited every other weekend, I was actually happy. Then he moved.
My biggest dream is to be able to live a sustainable life, and moving there would do that instantly, as everything he uses is sustainable, other than foodstuffs which he still buys, and thus has food miles attached to it, that and chemical nutrients.
I'd be able to change that though. (I work wonders with plants. Did you know you can grow all the food you need to feed your family in a 20 square meter area!)
And I am also investigating a promising new method of sustainable farming, called no-plough farming, or natural farming. It utilises the minimum amount of resources, least amount of work, and the highest amount of ingenuity. You need to know what combinations of plants in what order to plant, and the only way to know that is by studying the area. Wilderness would be the perfect challenge for me. If I can manage to figure out what plants can colonize without the aid of herbicides, ploughing, ect. in a forest, I can pretty much do it in any place.
All I know is I can't take another 2 1/2 years of this. I have been praying for a way out my whole life, and now that I have it, I'm to scared of what my family members would think, as well as a ton of xenophobia, to take it.
Help!
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