I moved to the US exactly around November 16, 2017. I remember my family offering me to go with them around summer to visit the Philippines. I had a shit ton of reasons around that time.

Summer of 2018, my mom asked me if I wanted to go home for the first time.

“Oh I wanna hangout with my boyfriend!”

“I just left the Philippines, they (talking about my family and friends) don’t miss me yet!”

Yup. At that time I thought those were the only reasons for not going back yet.

Summer of 2019 came and same reasons, but at that time me and my mom were not really getting along well. We would get into really really bad fights and in my head, “Why tf would I go with her when she doesn’t even like me and we barely get along?”

At that time, I was really close with my stepdad because he was really nice to me.

While they were in the Philippines around that time, my stepdad and mom got into a fight. I was involved because I stood by my stepdad. I wanted to go with him because I could not imagine living with my mom. I felt like I’d rather die and I was really suicidal and depressed but all my mom would say is “suck it up” or “you’re just being crazy and lazy and making excuses”.

My stepdad wanted to take me too because he saw how me and my mom would fight and it was bad. He was scared that she was going to neglect me and keep treating me differently like how he’s been observing as I was living with them.

I told her I wanted to stay with him. She got so mad and thought that I wanted to stay because of my boyfriend! She texted my boyfriend at that time saying how I’m crazy and how he should break up with me and that I hurt her and that I’m not the person who he thinks I am. Like who tf does that??

That made me want to not live with her more, but legally speaking, I wasn’t old enough to make a decision on who to go to and she was threatening my stepdad that she’s going to report “kidnapping”.

At the end, I had to pack everything we had to move to a different city. I had to live with her friend. Mind you, I hate guys. I had to live with him while she was still out there living her life while her daughter is packing all of their stuff alone. I was crying, having breakdowns and I wanted to kill myself. Not to mention that my boyfriend at that time didn’t make efforts to see me or to check on me.

It made it even harder for me to live because we had to put the dog down before I had to move because my stepdad knew that he might not be able to afford to find a place to say that would accept pets considering the fact that he was getting really old and really weak too.

That’s how I spent my summer 2019.

Summer of 2020, I joined the navy. Prior to that, I was forced to work at a nursing home working 16 hour shift that I wasn’t even trained for. My agency and my mom made me lie about my qualifications and my age. No one knew that I was a high-school student. When I wanted to quit, we had a huge fight because she told me how ungrateful I was. She kicked me out of the house.

I left and never wanted to go back. I stayed at an airbnb for awhile before asking help from my old coworkers from Costco. My good friend, Tammy, made me stay at her place for awhile.

Supposedly my shipping date for training was September but I had to call my recruiter begging him to ship me out earlier due to my situation. They understood my situation and helped me out.

I still worked at differenr nursing homes because I didn’t have a choice. Unfortunately, I worked with my mom in one of them and she told me to come home.

“Trust me, I don’t want you to go home either but you should at least until you ship out.” She said.

And so I did but that didn’t last for long.

I ended up shipping out around July. I spent my summer and the rest of my year in training.

The pandemic got worse too which had a lot of restrictions with traveling but honestly, I’m still traumatized from what I’ve been through in the Philippines.

Adding all the shit that my mom made me go through made it even harder for me to go.

I never told a lot of people my story because I didn’t see the point.

But now, I want to. I want to let everyone know that just because you heard one side of the story doesn’t mean it’s the truth.

This is just the small part of the horrible shit that happened, but that’s for another #RealShit post.