Help Ship get their sh&t together!

My name is Ship. You may know me as shiphitsthefan from my works on AO3, or else from Twitter, where I wrote that super viral thread about Sesame Street and autistic representation. Maybe you don't know me, at all. However you got here, I need your help.

Since we left my ex-husband in January 2015, my son and I have lived with my mother. All three of us are autistic, but my mother is also quite the emotionally abusive and manipulative narcissist, though it's taken me until earlier this year to truly understand that. To make matters worse, moving back in meant moving into not just the accumulated hoard she and my father gathered over the decades, but also into the house where I was date-raped as a teenager. My rapist also took sexual photos of me, there in my childhood bedroom. I literally chose to go to college out-of-state just to escape this house and my parents, who never truly believed it wasn't consensual, even though I was a minor and he an adult. (To my mother's credit, she feels terrible, now, that it happened, though her method of expressing that was overly self-flagellatory. Even my rape was about her.) Every choice I have made as an adult was one that would keep me from having to move back home, until I finally had to in order to protect myself and my son.

As a single parent with C-PTSD, I have been fortunate to have my mother's financial support, though that came at a heavy cost. Somewhere along the way, I decided food and shelter and another set of eyes on my son was worth living with someone who knew all my triggers and weaponized them against me. I excused it for a long time--she and my father both had extremely traumatic childhoods. They had no idea how to parent, and no understanding that they both needed counseling. The constant misgendering in the present was easy for me to excuse, too, because she knew me as her daughter for over thirty years, and she still seemed mostly supportive of me, though she refused to understand that I was both trans *and* nonbinary. (I am also unfortunately long practiced at having excuses for her.)

But after decades spent in and out of therapy, it finally dawned on me in April, not long after I secretly began HRT: no, it is not necessarily her fault that she is like this, but it IS her choice that she remains so. Why do I hold myself to a higher parenting standard than she does, or ever did? After our most recent fight in late August, and after noticing my son withdrawing from and ignoring her more and more, in addition to his near-constant anxious and self-injurious stimming, I finally applied for the two of us to be considered for subsidized housing. I want to stop relying on my mother so much for financial assistance, but also need to make sure that we spend as little time at home as possible while we wait for a spot to open up.

That's where I need your help. Trust me, I understand I'm asking for a fairly large number of dollars here. This is where it would all be going:

Thank you for reading this. I think this is the part where I'm supposed to say I'm embarrassed, but the only thing I'm really pissed about is that it took me years to actually finally see the benefit of making this. If you can't donate, please toss the link on the hellsite social media of your choice. Thanks again. <3