Help Matt & Becca Feel Safe Again

Hi, all. My name is Becca & even though this is incredibly difficult for me to share, we are desperately hoping doing so will bring us some much needed relief. It is a very long story, but I will condense it the best I can.

Matthew and I have been together 10 years. Anyone who knows us knows we are not that couple who breaks up & gets back together over and over again. We both come from dysfunctional families and our main goal has always been to create the safe environment we have both always longed for.

But even prior to the incident that lead us here, we have always deeply struggled with our mental health & getting the help we need. For context, Matthew has anxiety, depression, borderline personality disorder, ADHD and is autistic. I have anxiety, depression, PTSD & C-PTSD, ADHD and I am also autistic. On top of this, I also have fibromyalgia which causes me chronic fatigue & pain (and more), and PCOS, which causes hormonal issues (both emotionally & physically).

As you can probably imagine, living with these obstacles has proven difficult, to say the least. But we were doing the damn thing regardless, for years. We moved into my childhood home, renting to own, from my mother. We worked our mental & physical health into the ground in an attempt to better ourselves. But then the pandemic hit. That’s when things came to a head and started to shift downhill drastically.

Everything I had kept pushing through for years was just building and building and I had reached complete mental and physical burnout. My body was showing me just how much I needed true rest. I had the worst flare up I’ve had to this day and was put completely out of commission for months. This lead to my having to quit the job I loved to focus on my health. I had plans to start my own cake business, thinking that working from home would be easier on me. But this is when I finally received my ADHD diagnosis and no treatment, and the ADHD paralysis and executive dysfunction that followed only added fuel to the fire.

We began falling behind on bills. We tried and tried to get caught up, me delivering for doordash and donating plasma twice a week, & him working at a local restaurant. But the odds just kept stacking against us. Between fixing car problems & having to kick our roommate out because we found out they had a drug addiction, our financial situation dwindled. Every time we thought we found a new roommate, it fell through. Utilities were getting shut off and we were sinking deeper and deeper into depression. You can only get pushed down so many times before you don’t even have the energy to get up and try again.

Every time I thought we hit rock bottom, I was proven wrong. That descent goes on infinitely, I can now say with confidence. Throughout all of this, my father was diagnosed with cancer and my mother’s health started to go downhill as well, eventually also getting diagnosed with cancer. But despite it all, we still could have came back from this. That was, until the abuse began immediately following my father’s death.

Understandably, I would think – I was a complete mess, with everything going on. But my father left a small inheritance for me & I had to drive to NC to get it. And so I rode there with my mother’s husband, and the plan was to drive my mother’s car back since her husband was staying in NC longer.

Despite how awful everything had been, I thought this small sum of money was going to fix everything. Our plan was to use it to get our rent and bills caught up, and my mother reassured me several times that things were going to be okay.

But little did we know, this arrangement wouldn’t quite work for everything she was scheming. Giving her the amount we owed wouldn’t have been enough to save the house, and then everyone would know her big secret. And she’s always cared a lot about her reputation.

It was when I was in NC that things began not adding up & I had a really bad feeling. But I was not in the right state of mind to be trusting my intuition & I told myself everything was fine. And when my mother told me everything was fine, I almost believed it. I spent some time with her husband and even opened up to him about some things, like how my ADHD has caused issues with skin picking & how I’m really self conscious about it. I told him how people have been treating me like a drug addict, and how I knew the marks on my arms from donating plasma didn’t help either. We talked about how mental illness & drug addiction can present outwardly in a similar way. I thought we were kind of bonding. It was actually nice. But he would only go on to use that information against me.

Just a couple days after returning from NC, not even two weeks after my father’s death, we get a message from my brother. My brother, who has never showed any sort of interest in knowing me at all, but I thought our relationship was neutral. And he was immediately hostile. He said our mother wanted Matthew & I out of the house immediately. And the real kicker – that we ‘should have known’ this was coming. Everything he was saying was the opposite of what my mother had been telling me, but I should have known, apparently.

All the while my mother was manipulating me into believing everything would be okay – that we wouldn’t lose the house, that we wouldn’t be homeless. I had been determined to pick myself up & not let us fall behind again. Here we were, finally relieved to see a light at the end of the tunnel after surviving a winter without heat & more, and suddenly, my heart dropped to the floor. This single text message triggered a massive trauma response in me. My C-PTSD & severe ADHD paralysis was now coupled with freeze mode and complete emotional dysregulation – I was absolutely inconsolable. For over a week straight, if I was awake, I was in a constant panic attack. If I was asleep, I was having the worst nightmares of my life & Matthew kept waking me up, saying I was screaming.

The only thing we took care of during this time were our kitties. They were always taken care of, even when we couldn’t take care of ourselves. We don’t want children; they were our children. They meant everything to us. My family knew that too & had to add them to the list of ways to break us down completely. But, I’ll get to that later.

While this was going on, my mother’s health was declining fast & doctors were stumped. It was only a matter of time before they would find the real cause of her strange symptoms. But before this realization was made, my siblings began harassing me about mine and her relationship. We’ve always had difficulties (though nothing quite like this), and between being stuck in freeze mode & feeling beyond betrayed by her, I couldn’t bring myself to go see her. My brother and his wife & kids all came to our house at around 3 in the morning and began pounding on our doors, yelling & throwing things at our windows. We just laid in bed absolutely paralyzed and traumatized. I just wanted it all to stop. They finally gave up after about an hour, but it wasn’t long until they would send my sister, who had a key, to our house. She came up to our bedroom & continued where they left off, on our bedroom door. “Mom is dying and she’s asking to see you!” I finally agreed to go because I couldn’t take any more harassment. The guilt from not being able to bring myself to see her was eating me alive already without the added chaos that ensued. But she wasn’t dying and she didn’t ask to see me, she was drugged out of her mind and didn’t even remember me being there. It was all just to trick us into a waiting room full of people who were being told lies about us. They just wanted us involved in the drama.

But then, her secret was out: she had been hiding a meth addiction from everyone, except her new husband. He’s the one who got her into it. The sudden withdrawal from being in the hospital was wreaking havoc on her body.

When this came to light, everything made so much sense – I was almost relieved. It made so much sense that I thought it couldn’t be denied. My sister even confronted her and her reaction said everything. We also found out that my mother’s husband had stashed meth in her car for me to, unintentionally, deliver to her back home. Livid doesn’t even begin to describe how I was feeling.

But this discovery lead to a lot of realizations for us. The puzzle pieces were starting to fit. All of this and more led us to strongly suspect my mother had been using our rent money (& money we borrowed from friends trying to get caught up), for drugs. All the while, telling everyone that she’s in such a tough position because we didn’t pay our rent the entire time we lived there, which is just a boldfaced lie. It now made so much sense why she wouldn’t/couldn’t take the money we owed her, why she threw us under the bus, and why she ended up getting a loan for x3 the amount we owed.

We were in extreme survival mode, desperately trying to find a place to go, and nobody was showing us any empathy. My sister did at first, saying her and our aunt were making a GoFundMe for us. But suddenly, she started acting shifty like everyone else & I found out the GoFundMe was posted, but it was now for her instead. I’m thinking this is around the time my mother “recruited” her and she started backtracking to fit her narrative.

This is when they started reaching for anything, and my mother’s husband started spinning lies. Even though my mother had admitted to the meth, she was still determined to not be accountable for anything it has caused, cause remember – that reputation is on the line.

So suddenly, we’re the ones on drugs, haven’t paid rent – ever – and are refusing to leave. This is the picture they have painted for my whole family. And the way I see it, if my own family doesn’t know me well enough to know better, or care to ask before taking all this as fact, then I don’t care to try to change their mind. I know my heart is good & I’m too exhausted to defend myself.

At some point, my mother tells us that the loan to save the house didn’t go through in time and it was sold. I tried to find out a set in stone date that we needed to be out by, and was never given one.

The abuse continued as we frantically tried to find a place to go. We had several ideas, which all fell through. We received an unofficial, highly illegal ‘eviction notice’ from my brother (claiming to be the supposed ‘new owner’), which had a lot of threats and other criminalizing things I definitely could have used in court, if I had not been too traumatized to go. We were served the actual eviction notice a few days later and it was filled to the brim with lies, and lots more I could have used against them if I had been in a better state of mind. I knew I needed to stand up for myself but every molecule in my body was saying to just leave. My fight or flight was in full swing and I just needed to go.

I don’t know why they felt like they had to go through all of this just to get us out. We never once said we weren’t going to leave. Who wants to fight to stay somewhere they’re so incredibly unwanted? We were just trying to find some place for our cats & us to go. We also thought we had more time because no matter how I asked, we were never told an official date to be out by, nor given any official documents until we got served the eviction notice.

The abuse didn’t end there, either. They wouldn’t be finished with us until they’d taken everything. They even called the cops and told them awful lies about our cats in an attempt to get them taken, too. Even the cop said they looked well taken care of.

The court date came a week later & because we were unable to go, we were given until 5 pm that day to be out. We were forced to drop our cats off to live on a farm, because our last housing option fell through the day we had to be out & all shelters were full. They meant absolutely everything to us, but we had to do what was best for them. And living all together cooped up in a car isn’t it.

We moved as much as we could to a safe place, and around 2 my brother and his wife & kids all showed up while we were in between trips. They went through the house and opened up all the doors, and just stood outside watching us as we moved stuff, as if we didn’t already feel violated enough. We still had/have one cat who can’t fend for herself, and luckily she hid in a closet when they came barreling in. We had just lost our other babies and I would have just died if I lost her, too.

I deeply apologize for the long-winded, mess of a story. We’re now caught up to present-day. My brother is living in my house, paying rent to our mother, since everything about the house getting sold was a lie. They are all living their best lives, bouncing their delusions off one another while we’ve been homeless & living in our car for the past 4 months. I’ve done all I can to cut them off completely. My family has always been dysfunctional but I am still in utter disbelief about this whole thing. It feels like I’m the main character in a movie I didn’t consent to being in.

I’ve always said I never want to be like my mother, and one thing she’s never been able to do is admit when she is wrong. So I will readily take accountability for my wrongdoing. But the only things we are guilty of in this are struggling with our mental health & falling behind on bills. Nothing about the way they dealt with this was okay. We did nothing to deserve to be treated like this; nobody deserves to be treated like this.

So now, here we are, living in our car and struggling more than ever. They have ruined any chance of us being able to rent again for at least 7 years, not that we want to be put in any kind of housing that someone can just randomly decide to take away, anyway.

We have several dilemmas that need solutions as soon as possible. We are both working but still can’t seem to get one step ahead. I know this is going to be a big ask, but we really, really need your help here. We need a fresh start. We need a real chance at getting out of this mess.

• Before anything else, we desperately need a new vehicle. Besides that ours is falling apart, it really is not suitable for us to be living in at all. Our trunk doesn’t open, the seats don’t fold down or come out, and the a/c doesn’t work, just to name a few. It has gotten scary hot more than a couple times. It would be such a weight off my mind, and would also make my deliveries go much smoother & faster. We would also just feel much safer with a vehicle my family doesn't recognize. Our credit is decent so we just need to come up with a down payment.

• We have a couple tickets we need to get paid off as soon as possible. They’ve gotten pushed to the back burner with everything we’ve had going on & I’m terrified I’m going to lose my license and thus, my job as well.

• We could also really use help getting our friends paid back. They graciously helped us in the beginning of all this to get caught up, but the funds never went to that cause, unfortunately.

• And last, but definitely not least – we just really need a safe place to call home. Again, we have decent credit so we just need a down payment. It would be a dream just to sleep in a bed again. Which, speaking of –

• If we were to receive a miracle & reach our goal, any remaining balance would go toward replacing the furniture & appliances we had to leave behind.

Neither of us are the type to ask for help, even when we really need it. If we can just get an ounce of normalcy back in our lives, we will surely do everything in our power to pay it forward.

If you made it this far, you’re an actual angel. Even if you can’t afford to donate, if you could just share this, it would mean more than you’ll ever know. Even if we don’t receive financial help, it helps just getting our side of the story out there. Domestic abuse occurs in far more than just romantic relationships. Sometimes, it’s the people you share blood with, the ones who are supposed to be supportive – the people who are supposed to be safe.

“A child doesn’t abandon their parent without good reason; a child doesn’t abandon their parent first.”