「故事·听力」My Stepmother Hated Me So I Had To Move Out
My Stepmother Hated Me So I Had To Move Out
This is Monica, and her stepmother hated her so much she had to move out. But let’s start from the beginning.
Monica’s mom died when she was around 3 years old, and it made her dad miserable, because he loved her very much. For years he was single, not even daring to start dating again, but when she was 14, he met Taylor. She sort of looked like her mother, but she wasn’t anything like her in terms of character.
Her dad asked her if she would be okay with them being together, and of course she said yes, because she wanted him to be happy. Soon they got married and Taylor moved in with them together with her son James, who was 12 at the time. At first everything was alright – her dad and Taylor clearly loved each other very much, and James was quite easy-going. She hadn’t seen her dad so happy in years!
But soon, she started to notice that Taylor was manipulating him. She would always make him adapt to her lifestyle and if she did something wrong, she turned everything around, so it was Monica’s dad who was “at fault”. Monica herself wasn’t having any of it, and Taylor began to dislike her attitude and started treating her badly, and always blamed her if something went wrong. Even if James did something, it was her fault.
For example, she would get angry at her because she didn’t wash the dishes, even if there was only one dirty plate and James had eaten from it. It was HER who got lectured by Taylor. And that’s the least of the things she would say or do. At first her dad tried to defend Monica, but Taylor eventually made him think that she was right, and that she was a spoiled, ungrateful kid. She told him that Monica was stealing money, which wasn’t true and she doesn’t know where she got the idea from.
By this point, their entire “family” turned on her: Taylor was as condescending as ever, and if she tried to defend herself, her dad would say, “don’t talk with your mother like that”. Of course, she would always answer: “she’s not my mother and she never will be”, which would make her dad angry.
And James listened to all of this and started to see her as a villain too, and Taylor did her best to turn him against her as well. Why did Taylor do that? She probably didn’t like how much attention her father was giving her, which was understandable, because she was his DAUGHTER. Ugh.
Realizing that Taylor had taken over their lives, she tried to talk to her dad, but he wouldn’t listen. So she approached her grandparents, explained the situation to them, and asked if she could move in with them. They said yes, as they also disliked Taylor very much.
She moved out, and both her and Taylor were happy about it. After a year, it felt like she wasn’t part of the family at all. She saw her father just two times a month at best. At worst, they could go for two months without seeing each other. One day, he called her and said: “Honey, please come home, I talked with Taylor and she is okay with it”. Seriously? TAYLOR is OKAY with it? She rudely answered: “I won’t ever step inside that house while she’s still there”.
She expected her dad to call, to apologize, to try to fix things, but it never happened. She understood that he was afraid to be lonely again, and she didn’t mind him having a partner, but it wasn’t okay how she treated her. Nothing helped, even when her grandparents tried to talk about it with him, so she completely gave up on him.
Two years passed, and he was still with her, but he was miserable again. By this point she felt like her grandparents were her parents, and she had a lot of things going on in her life – her first serious boyfriend, school, and other stuff, so she didn’t even think about her family problems anymore.
Then one day, to her surprise, James wrote to her on Facebook. He said how sorry he was about how she had been treated, and that he didn’t understand it at the time, but he wanted them to be friends, or at least not enemies. She asked him what had made him do what he did, and he told her all about his mom, Taylor, and how she only got crazier with time.
Later, she met with James and she was honestly proud of him, because he was such a smart, good guy. He said that her dad was much better to him than his real father had ever been, and Taylor got mad every time he took his side. He said that he saw that her dad was tired, and maybe someday he would finally separate from her. James wanted them to be friends, even siblings, and support each other, and even if her dad and Taylor separated, he wanted to stay in touch.
Monica doesn’t know what will happen in the future, and she’s still hurt about “losing” her dad, but at least she’s found a new family member who is a good person.