Wow… Some Stepmothers Are ACTUALLY Evil

CONTENT WARNING: Abuse

Growing up, my living situation was a game of hot potato as my stepparents competed to see who could make my life worse, resulting in my parents handing me off to each other several times rather than deal with the situation. This story takes place while I was living with my father and stepmother, following my mother’s fourth husband grabbing me by the neck and shaking me like I was Bart Simpson.

My stepmother was taking her adult children and their partners to an Orlando vacation for Christmas, hitting up the major theme parks. She didn’t want me to come, but she had decided that, despite being seventeen with a part time job, I couldn’t be trusted alone and if I wasn’t brought along, I’d “burn down the house out of spite.” My biggest crimes up to this point had been not cleaning my room to her satisfaction and playing too many video games, so I have no clue where she got that idea, but she ran with it.

My stepsiblings and in-laws, bless them, liked me and were not okay with how their mother treated me. On the trip, they did their best to mitigate the situation even as my stepmother did things like “lose” my ticket to one of the parks and try to make me wait in the car all day (in a theme park parking lot… in Florida…). The real fireworks, however, started the night before we came home.

I forget what exactly she considered to be the final straw, but it was egregious enough in her eyes that she demanded I leave the time share and figure out my own arrangements for the remaining night. My father had me to wait outside the front door while he and the others argued with her. I was standing there with my suitcase for a few minutes, then the door opened, and my stepmother screamed “This is what you get for standing there eavesdropping! I told you to leave!” and dumped a full stock pot of water on me. My father gave up and took me to a cheap hotel, with me stuck soaking wet until we got there. We didn’t talk much that night, and in the morning headed for the airport.

I should now note this took place before 2001, so in-flight rules were somewhat more lenient than they would be today. My stepmother was sitting three rows in front of me, on the opposite side of the aisle, with pretty much all of her kids in between us as a buffer. It was also long enough ago that a two-hour flight served a meal, and her turkey sandwich apparently went down the wrong pipe. She lost it.

She began screaming that I had tried to kill her, using my “evil psychic witchcraft” to make her choke, and demanded the flight attendants throw me off the plane. To be clear, she didn’t ask them to land and deplane me; she wanted them to open the door at cruising altitude and toss me out. When they didn’t, she threatened to do it herself.

The flight crew’s solution to this was to find some poor guy in first class who was either a psychiatrist or psychologist and brought him back to sit with her for the rest of the flight, where she played the victim about how I was evil incarnate. (I do feel really bad that this was how he had to end what was presumably a vacation.) Within a couple weeks of our return I was living with my mother again.

I don’t really have a good conclusion, no snarky bon mot or profound insight. I eventually went no contact with my father. I’m in a much better place now, decades later, with found family, an actual support network, and zero interaction with just about everyone from my childhood. But I do still have a panic attack any time I’m caught in a sudden downpour.