I need to vent

•trigger warning• like it’s a lot
Some sht has happened in my family and it’s fcking crazy. Like everything is crazy from my life but bc I grew up with it, it felt normal to me. But after finding out this new sht, idk, it’s a lot.
First my mom died. She had lung disease bc she was an obsessive smoker. Like at one point was smoking 4 pks a day, & it killed her. She was also the victim of a tragic life. Her brother was killed by a hit & run when she was a baby bc her mom had to stay home with her bc she was sick, & her 6 yr old brother was hit by two cars getting off the school bus. 2nd her father who beat my grandma & sometimes his kids, (like she had this memory of him pulling up my aunts dress to beat her with a belt), got mad at my grandma, so he took her car & drove it into a wall going 100mph. My mom was 14. That night an older boy came to take my mom for a drive so she could get out of the house & just talk. Except he raped her. My mom had never even kissed anyone or held hands bc she was raised in an evangelical home. My mom spiraled & at 15 tried to kill herself by overdosing. Her mom had her commited, and that’s how she met the man who we always belived was my older sisters father. The story surrounding my mom’s first husband is a story in itself. He was 27, my mom 16. At the end he blackmailed my mom into staying with him until she threatened to kill him and he finally let my mom & big sister go. So my sister never met her dad, or who we thought was her dad.
Another thing about my mom is she was gay. She didn’t come out till after my brother was born during her 3rd marriage, & that’s a crazy story. Basically my mom lost interest in sex but my step dad was in love with her but still wanted physical intimacy, so my mom let him get a girlfriend. A woman who moved in with us & turned out was my mom’s gay awakening. So she stole her husband’s lover. I think it was something like a throuple for a bit. I can’t be sure since I was like 5-6 at that time.
But back to the new thing that’s got me feeling all kinds of ways.
My mom suffered a brain bleed that damaged a part of her brain causing pre-dementia. The thing that was crazy was as her short term memory went to hell, memories from the past became more vivid. And repressed memories came forward. In the last years of her life my mom would cry out in her sleep, no, stop, don’t touch me. It was scary and sad. Then one day she came to me and told me she remembered being raped & she didn’t know if the man we thought was my sister’s dad was actually her father. Unfortunately my mom went into respiratory arrest, followed my cardiac arrest from not breathing for to long. Bc of that and the fact her DNR orders hadn’t gone through, she was brought back, but was brain dead and dependent on life support. This nothing like giving the order to let your mom die. Like I’m literally tearing up typing this. She just looked like she was sleeping and we had to watch her die.
Anyways bc of the suddenness of her death my sister and I didn’t have the ability to parse through that revelation. Until a few months ago. My sister was born with a heart defect that was negatively effecting her life & decided to have it repaired. She had no info on the health of her paternal side & decided to get a DNA test. A man we’d never heard of showed up as her father & we began to unravel the story of what happened to my mom and how my sister was conceived. My mom hadn’t given much detail but some answers came from a surprising place.
My sister reached out to her bio dad, wondering if he remembered our mom & asking about health history and the brothers and sisters my sister she’d seen on his social media. She approached him gently as he was much older & she wanted some answers but was worried he would cut contact if she was at all confrontational. The man said he didn’t remember our mom but remembered having a one night stand and he’s tell his wife and kids what happened. It’s galling he didn’t remember our mom when he had such a negative effect on her life. Then his wife called my sister. The wife had some cryptic comments at first, like your mom wasn’t the only one hurt and I had to protect my kids. Both my sister and her fathers wife were feeling each other out, I guess trying to ascertain what the other knew. Finally this woman told her side of the story.
It started with a funeral. She and my sister’s dad along with their kids went out of town for a family members funeral. Her husband left early to return home & at some point a neighbor who’d been watching the house for her, called her to tell her that they’d seen a girl in their neighborhood doing sales. That her husband let her in. When she came home she asked her husband a question & idk how she knew she needed to ask this: was it consensual. He couldn’t answer her.
My mom was 20 years old, a HS dropout & trying to make a living. She had a sociable outgoing personality & was stunningly beautiful. So she clawed her way into the middle class doing sales. Starting at the bottom and ending a high paying sales job at a tech firm. But we now know that she was attacked in those early days when her only options was doing door to door cold calls. She repressed those memories until her brain brought them back when she was least prepared to deal with them.
My sister never had a chance to confront her dad. Shortly after making contact he went into the hospital for a routine procedure, had a reaction to the anesthesia, and died.
My sister is the glue that holds our fam together & has spent years working through her traumas. She’s been much more successful then me. And now she has this added thing to deal with. The child of rape and no parents to talk to about it. I don’t even know if she’s gotten angry. I don’t even know if I’ve gotten angry. I feel frustrated. This much older man raped my mom when she was already dealing with so much trauma. During my childhood my mother suffered severe depression and some of my earliest memories is of her being in the psych ward and me asking my grandma when I could see mommy.
But my sister can now make an argument that maybe her father is the worst, tho I think I win bc while her dad was a rapist mine was a pedophile.
I’ve just been thinking a lot lately about how other ppls actions can have such a ripple effect in other ppls lives, the lives of ppl they may never meet. My mom suffered so much & struggled to find love. Bc of her upbringing, she was literally in her 30’s before it even occurred to her that she could be gay. Once she came out she struggled to find lasting relationships & all those parents she brought in, who then left, became part of my trauma. I think about who my mom, my sister and I could have been if ppl hadn’t hurt us. My sister coped by forgetting almost the entirety of her childhood and repressing the majority of her emotions. She couldn’t feel pain but also couldn’t feel joy. I also have memeory gaps in my childhood but my trauma became focused inwards & manifested in self destructive behaviors. My mom’s manifested in an obsessive desire for love and an obsession with cigarettes. Her search for love ultimately hurt us, and her cigarette addiction killed her, and took our mom from us. She was a brilliant woman who adored her kids. I haven’t even told half of the horrors she felt with. Like having her 2yr old son taken from her after she left my step dad bc he threatened to use his money & the fact my mom was gay to have all her children taken from her. Like I have so many fcked up stories from my mom’s life & me and my sister’s life. There’s just so much & I just needed to vomit some of it out.