When Your Family Dynamic Is A Dumpster Fire — Complete With Actual Dumpster

After almost two years of encouragement from people I’ve met through this website, I have finally moved out. Getting here has been an ordeal, but here’s a snippet of what went on.

First, my dad and his girlfriend found a house they wanted to move into together. Since the house we lived in was council housing, I could not remain living there without him. So on the 30th of August, I was given official notice that I needed to move out by the 30th of September. Weird as it sounds, I probably would not have moved out without this deadline.

However, actually finding somewhere that, one, accepted pets, and two, I could afford, was still really fricking difficult. With the help of my social worker, I was able to negotiate with the housing council people that I could stay until the 2nd of November. On the 16th of October, I found a house share that didn’t hate Betty. It took a couple of days to go see it and stuff, but I got it. Hooray!

When my dad moved, he left a load of stuff in the house. He spent September moving some stuff to his new place, and he told me to let him know when I’d found somewhere so he could get a skip [dumpster]. Once we had the skip, “we” (meaning my sister and me) could get the rubbish out of the house, and my dad could get rid of the furniture he wasn’t keeping. And something about the carpets. I never really understood why my dad needed to remove the carpets, but it had to wait until I’d moved out.

There was a lot of confusion around this skip. My social worker and a woman I’ll call my helper lady (because her official title is too unique for anonymity) kept asking about it and getting confused when I told them my dad said he needed to know when I was moving out before we could have one. We eventually were able to figure out that the housing council was happy to send a skip whenever, but my dad kept blocking it. He didn’t want us to have a skip too early in case other people used it.

I was also stressing about being expected to clear the house. I had assumed that if my dad moved out before I did, then everything he left would become my responsibility. However, my social worker, helper lady, and a lady from the housing council all reassured me that it would still be my dad’s responsibility and that I just needed to focus on my stuff.

So, October came around, and I was the only person living at home. My sister’s old moldy bookcases were in the living room, alongside the sofa no one used due to the holes the dogs had torn out of it. My dad left his bed and other furniture in his room in case I wanted to take it with me. My sister had several black bags on top of the bunk bed of rubbish and old toys she didn’t want to keep. I kept finding things belonging to my middle sister, stuck pregnant and in a university several hours away and unable to come to collect them. I had a bag of my dad’s dog’s toys, which I was only holding onto because my middle sister might someday take them to him and lecture my dad about trying to throw away his favourites. The kitchen still had my littlest sister’s dirty dishes piled up from the couple of days before she left. The grass in the garden was taller than I am.

Basically, everything was a mess. I didn’t have the energy to sort it all out, and I still had to pack the rest of my room. Now that nobody else was living here, I could put moving boxes in my dad’s unused room without him sulking at me (not that he’d been sleeping there since he’d found his place). But my room was also a tip. There was a lot of rubbish shoved under my bed, and the one black bin emptied once every two weeks really wasn’t enough. I started putting bags of rubbish in my sister’s old room, planning to put them in the skip whenever that got here.

On the 21st of October, I texted my dad to let him know I’d found a place to live. He responded with a “congrats”. This should have given him a week and a half to get the skip and get rid of all his s***, and I’d arranged for my stuff to move on the 30th so he had a couple days before the 2nd.

He phoned me on the 26th. He was not impressed.

He complained that I hadn’t given him enough time to empty the house or order a skip. He complained that my social worker had told him he didn’t need to order a skip. He complained that I’m bad at communicating because I never responded to his “congrats”. He told me how inconvenient it was for him that he’d let me stay an extra month. He told me he was working every day until Wednesday and he couldn’t do Wednesday because it was going to rain. He told me he was starting to feel like he’d just pay the fine instead of emptying the house.

I let my dad know that my new place was too small for me to take any of the furniture he’d left, and he got upset because I hadn’t told him that earlier — how did I expect him to sort all that out? He told me — for the first time — that I never actually had all of the 2nd because the keys needed to be handed back at 10:00 on that morning. And he wanted me to hand them over because he didn’t want to make a three-hour round trip on his day off just to hand in some keys. (My sister was dropping by on the 1st to collect an ornament she’d forgotten, so he had her take them to me.)

Then, toward the end of the phone call, I had to explain to my dad that I’d decided I wasn’t telling him my new address, and I’d also gotten myself my own phone under my own contract, so he could cancel the one on his, and I wasn’t going to give him the number.

Dad: “Good luck, with… everything, if I never hear from you again. I’ll always love you.”

I started to tear up, said, “Bye,” and hung up because my voice had cracked. I didn’t want him to hear me crying over him — which I then proceeded to do, with Betty very concerned about why her human was sad.

So, on the 2nd, the housing council lady came, and I gave her the keys. I showed her around the house and the tip it was in. I explained that the washing machine was still there because the water valve had broken and couldn’t turn off, that I’d left bags of rubbish in my sister’s room, and that my dad had told me he’d rather pay the fine than sort it out. While she was clearly very not impressed, she was very reassuring that it was not my responsibility and that I’d done well to sort my s*** out.

Now I’m here, still getting used to living with strangers. But my aunt is listed as my next of kin, and my dad doesn’t know where I am, and that’s reassuring.