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Not All That Is Confessed Can Be Forgiven

It’s time to rip off the bandaid and tell the truth as it is and as it was. I cannot hide from it forever and that is why this post exists. When I talk about ugly and shocking I am referring to things which I have no rational explanation or excuse for, even as the person who said and did those things. Part of the recovery process in A.A is “We Took A Moral Inventory Of Ourselves”. Step four is not a confession but an honest self-examination of who we are and the decisions we made and what lead us to make them. What drove those actions and how we allowed ourselves to become immoral and desensitized to harmful behavior. As part of this process we tell our worst actions and deepest regrets to whomever we choose. As I take an honest look back at who I was and all of the things that I did, I want to bring into focus the reason behind this post; to heal and also to help anyone out there who has shameful dirty in their own pasts. I want to be clear that what I write here is not for the faint of heart. Proceed with your best discretion and remember, I am trying to heal and be better to this day, though some of this stuff might be cause for concern to many. Perhaps my efforts to disclose everything won’t be for naught.

Running Away From The Past

It can be difficult to live with the memories that still haunt us. For most there might be an occasional regret they can casually shake off but for me, I live with some ugly lore that comes back around the holidays and though we are now into 2026, every year the memories go off like a bomb inside of my mind around Christmas and New Years. I don’t know how much more relief I can get as I’ve already spoken about these things with therapists and A.A Sponsors galore over the years, but I suppose putting it all down on paper helps to alleviate the pain and the shame associated with my past actions. It also helps me to try and make sene of who I was and what kind of mindset I was in back then.

Destroying My Own Family

As an adopted child one of the things that meant more to me than anything else was somehow to bring my broken family back together. I wanted my birth father Bob to have a relationship with my birth mother Mary again, I wanted to somehow live with them with both of my sisters under the same roof. As I grew, instead of becoming more realistic about this and maturing enough to realize that it was an impossibility, with age this delusional desire only grew. I clung harder and harder to fantasies of approximating this if I couldn’t have it exactly the way I wanted it.

In my selfish desire to have my own way, I tried to get my parents to talk to each other during the very brief period I was on speaking terms with them both, while I was still in drug rehab. I remember after offering to give Bob Mary’s phone number he said “No thank you, I don’t want to go down that road again” and his response always hung over me. While I didn’t persist any further, my own resentment towards my parents and even my siblings to some extent motivated me to hold on and hold on harder yet, to this dream that never could be. Well into adulthood. It was this very resentment that I believe over time, accumulated into a mess of my own making.

How The Nightmare Began

When I told a family member in my birth mother’s family about assaulting my adoptive mother Kerry (which I was deeply embarassed and ashamed of), word got back to my mother Mary who then sent a letter of concern to check up on Kerry. By this point I had already served my time in juvie and had been free for a long time. Hearing about this, I sent a vitriolic and angry letter to the family members who spread the word (My Uncle Jack and Aunt Joy) and my sister Molly found out about this, which must’ve been strike one against me. I believe I was nineteen or twenty at this time. Keep in mind by this time, I was sober.

Mary had spent a few years trying to track down my younger sister Jenna and not long after she was released from prison in early 2014, hired a private detective who eventually did find her and the three of us triumphantly reunited for a brief period. In the months that followed everything seemed to be going well. However sometime in October of 2014, my mother Mary and I decided we would arrange for her to come and visit me during Christmas of that year. We involved my parents in the conversation and began making plans. What I find interesting is that years later after talking to Kerry, I would find out that my counselor Gary whom I had already been seeing for seven years by the time my mother came to visit, strongly advised against it and warned that it could be a mistake. I guess my parents had discussed the visit with Gary before it happened and he saw a hidden danger that no one else could predict. Yet nevertheless, we decided to go through with it.

The Moment Of impact & The Final Straw

On that day of the drunken incident I wanted to treat my mother to a lunch at one of my favorite restaraunts. When I blacked out I had already slurrped down three Long island Iced Teas and then I was gone. Like I said in a previous post covering this incident in full detail, bits and pieces of what followed only came to my mind. I don’t remember most of it. Hardly any at all, in fact. What I was told later on after sobering up was that I had ranted at my mother for missing my High School graduation and for not being there for me in my life.

I was also told that I had said that I wanted to hurt both of my sisters, which to this day still messes with my mind as I can’t imagine why I would say such a thing. And that last sentence right there is one of the most painful parts of the whole episode that I have seldom disclosed to anybody, besides close friends. I have never recalled feeling that in my life and I also struggle with whether or not I should believe it, but to her dying day my birth mother seemed to be able to recite what she claimed back then with such a level of confidence that it is honestly haunting and disturbing. As if it had just happened minutes ago. Making it feel real.

Making Things Worse Unfortunately I later decided to send gay porn to my mother over facebook to harass and bother her to get back at her for telling my sister about the drunken incident. It was after hearing about the my drunken episode that my sister decided to cut ties with me and we haven’t spoken since then. In 2018 I told my younger sister Jenna, who was already upset with our mother for reasons I don’t rememeber, that I had been diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, which angered Jenna and caused her to want to cut ties with our mother.

This felt justified to me at the time as I was extremely heated. It is true that I was diagnosed with “Fetal Alcohol like features” and that from age seven to nine I attended physical therapy because I had poor motor skills which made it difficult for me to button shirt buttons, tie my own shoes and perform basic tasks, but I framed these things more as an excuse for the drunken incident later on after my younger sister stopped talking to mom. This hurt my mother greatly because at this time, Jenna was the only one of her three children that had kids of their own, so she was effectively barred from ever getting to know her grandchild because of me. This was not intentional, as I was venting to my sister the same way that my mother was venting to Molly but the outcome was still the same. It still happened because of my actions.

In the years that followed my birth mother and I would go through patterns of communicating again, with me blowing up on her out of the blue because I could not forgive her for telling my sister about my embarrassing drunken episode. Deep inside of me I struggled with a contradiction; on one hand I loved her because she was still my mother but on the other, she was still the reason why my sister and I stopped speaking. This inner conflict always boiled over and I never learned how to control my anger surrounding it. She would give me a new chance to prove I had become a better man but I always would ruin it. We would go months or weeks without talking, then talk again for a day or two, then I would start ranting again. Then she would disappear and stop talking to me for a long while. This pattern persisted up until late 2024. I rememeber it like it was yesterday, my mother sent me angry text on December 1st at three in the morning and I happened to be up at the time. She demanded that I explain what I told Jenna about her, that she suspected it was more than just about me having FAS because her daughter thought of her as “dangerous” and “to be avoided at all costs”.

I was really upset with her that she had the nerve to disturb me late at night, thankfully I didn’t have work the next day. I just couldn’t sleep. Mostly because it was December again and I still was haunted by the memory of my actions from a decade prior. I remember letting loose all kinds of expletives, saying every possible negative and hateful thing I could think of, even words that you should never say to another person. I told her that I couldn’t wait until the day she died and that I would celebrate it, instead of mourn. I called her every name in the book, everything. Absolutely every line was crossed and none of it mattered to me at the time. It was a very tense few minutes of texting back and forth. It ended with her begging me to “leave her alone” and “never contact her again” to which I replied “You’re the one that contacted me first, you damn idiot!”. Then it was all over.

The Aftermath

Months later in April of 2025 while I was at work I started thinking about how much I missed my mother and as an exercise to help me cope I texted her number and she replied back. I would come to find out that she was very ill and was close to dying! It turned out she had contracted Hepatitis C many years ago from Jenna’s biological father and it had been left untreated for many years, causing her to have episodes of vomiting blood. From that time forward until her dying day, I started treating her differently, much better. I even sent her the first Mother’s Day Card that she ever got from me. She didn’t text back often but I wanted to lift her spirits. The last text message she ever sent to me said “Son, I will call you when I get better! My immune system is low because of my medicine so I guess I will get sick a lot! I got the mother's day cards. Thank you I love them”. Which is the reason why I have that text message as my thumbnail for this post, because it was the last time I would ever speak to her again! My attitude upon finding out she had fallen very ill had softened up considerably and I would send her encouraging texts from time to time about trusting God and remaining hopeful. It wasn’t until about a month later that her husband Larry got back to me to let me know that my mother had died.

The Purpose Behind This Post

I want this story to serve as a cautionary tale to those who are feuding with loved ones in your family. I know it’s a cliche but it’s true; you never know how long the people you care about will still be here! Looking back had I put the past aside and been willing to give my mother a chance like she gave me so many, I might even be talking to my older sister by now. Instead, we’re still not on speaking terms and our mother is dead. It’s a tragic story and one that you should avoid if you can. I’m at least grateful I got to make peace with her before she went. What saddens me is that in her last text to me, she had sounded so hopeful that she would have another conversation with me, that she would eventually recover. I even believed it myself, I was living in a fairytale thinking that God would not allow thnings to go tits up like that. But they did. Whatever problems you have with your ex, a former best friend, whomever. See your part and be quick to squash the beef.