HunterSteele
April 4th, 2013, 03:20 AM
Hey everyone. There’s something I’ve been really upset about lately and I wanted to tell you guys to see what you think. This one is pretty long, since it’s a real mess and I wanted to explain things clearly and in detail so you would all understand what’s happening. I thought some of you might be able to help, but it may be a bit late for that so I just wanted to tell someone about it.
The story starts back in 2006. I had just moved to a new city with my mom after she broke up with my dad and was starting grade 4 at a new school. Back then, I wasn’t so self-conscious and felt free to talk to anyone I met at school who I liked. It wasn’t long before I met Cody, a boy in the grade below mine who seemed friendly, kind, and surely someone with who I could make friends.
I was wrong. Cody disliked me from the first time I talked to him. I wanted to play with him at recess time every day, but he didn’t want to. I never found out what I’d done since it was my first year at that school and I had never talked to him before that. But that didn’t stop me. I was determined to make friends at this school since I hadn’t had any at my old school.
My efforts didn’t become fruitful until four years later. It turns out I was right all along. Cody hadn’t hated me after all. He messaged me on Facebook one day in January 2010 and asked if I wanted to hang out and go geocaching together. By then, I was in high school and I’d long forgotten about him. But I remembered how much I had liked him in elementary school and was glad he didn’t dislike me for no reason anymore and we could finally be friends.
When you hear that I live in Canada, you might think we get so much snow we live in igloos and ride polar bears to get around. While that might be true for the rest of Canada, it sure isn’t the case in my little town of Vancouver. While the rest of BC and Canada basks in snow and its beautiful bright white glory ^_^, only a few snowflakes drift down to Vancouver each year. Sometimes the snowflakes stick and we get entire millimeters of snow.
My mom is highly protective of me. I get it, all mothers love their children and want to keep them safe. That’s normal, so I won’t fault her for that per se. Some parents are stricter than others. I get that too. The problem is my mom takes it quite far and she has an exceedingly bad temper. :evil2: If anything doesn’t fit her liking or she doesn’t get her way, she starts yelling, swearing, and name-calling without listening to any reasoning. :headbonk: She doesn’t feel comfortable letting me go out without her, and especially not with other kids. She doesn’t flat out say, “You must never talk to or make friends with other kids,” since even she realizes that would be ridiculous, but her body language does convey that fact. Up until now this had never been a problem since I’ve never had a close friend to hang out with outside of school. Ever. :hmm:
When Cody wanted to hang out with me, it became a problem for the first time in eight years. It was a problem because my mom didn’t want me to go out with Cody, but she didn’t have a good reason. Unfortunately, it just so happened there was a light dusting of snow on the ground outside at the time. She capitalized on the opportunity to use the millimeter or so of snow as an excuse to keep me from going, saying it was unsafe. I told her there was hardly any snow on the ground, but she didn’t care. She started yelling and screaming about how stupid I was to try to go out in the snow. The snow disappeared in less than 24 hours, but she still said no.
Later, she asked me for Cody’s phone number. I gave it to her and she wanted his address. I told her I didn’t have his address and that she’d have to wait until I got a chance to go to his house since it didn’t seem fitting for me to just ask him out of the blue. I explained as I got to know him better over time I’d learn more about him, but it would take time. She started yelling at me for going out with a stranger and how stupid I was since she’d have no one to contact if I was killed while were were hanging out. (Her exact words.) Eventually I found it for her on Canada411.ca (like Spokeo.com for Canada) and told her she could’ve found it herself in one minute if she learned to use a computer instead of yelling and swearing at me all day. Of course, she didn’t really care about the address. She was done with all that at this point. She just didn’t want me to go.
By the time winter had passed and everything had blown over, Cody had moved to another city. I was mad that my mom had taken away my only chance to hang out with the one person I’d wanted to be friends with the longest. I tried talking to her about it, but all she ever said was how dangerous it was to go outside in the snow. She never even acknowledged how upset I was and if I tried to tell her, she just yelled at me.
Over time, I started to forget about it. The city Cody lived in was only about a 20 minute drive away, but I couldn’t drive and there was no way my mom was taking me there. I could’ve taken the bus, but my mom had made such a mess and I was so distraught over what happened last time, I was afraid of starting it all over again. Remember, all of our discussions about Cody were not calm, peaceful conferences. Every time I mentioned Cody it was yelling, screaming, name-calling, swearing, and insulting.
Also, Cody is hardly ever on Facebook (I see him online literally only once every couple of months) and honestly, I was worried as more time passed he wouldn’t like me anymore. I thought maybe he had felt bad about what he did in elementary school for a while, but after that had passed, he’d go back to hating me again, or maybe he was just messing with me in the first place. Take my word for it, he had been real mean in elementary school, and if there was one thing I wanted to avoid more than my mom’s temper, it was Cody hating me again.
Two years passed, and over time I got over it. I didn’t hear from Cody again until December 2012. He messaged me on Facebook during winter break and told me he was in Hawaii. Apparently he remembered me and he still liked me. I was relived. Since he was hardly ever on Facebook, I decided to just ask him then if he wanted to hang out again when he got back since otherwise it might be two more years before I got another chance. Even though he was being nice, I knew I was pushing my luck. I held my breath for a moment, and then he said yes.
I watched out for him on Facebook and didn’t see him online until the end of February. I knew if I didn’t take this chance it could be months, or even two more years, before he was online again, so I went for it. I messaged him and he asked if I wanted to talk on Skype. I did.
It was nice to talk to him again. We talked about elementary school, me getting a new laptop, paintballing, video games, iPads, geocaching, and more. It felt good to talk to someone who was nice and funny and who seemed like they genuinely cared about me for the first time in a while. Cody wanted to play Runescape together so I renewed my membership and we did. I was relieved. Everything had worked out eventually, even if it did take 2 years (7 if you count when I first met him in 2006).
You might want to stop reading at this point. You can hit the back button on your browser and go along your merry way thinking that Cody and I got together, hung out, and my mom apologized for not letting us meet up two years ago. Go ahead, do it. It’s not too late to escape this misery and read a nice topic about cookies (http://www.virtualteen.org/forums/showthread.php?t=168951). Just because there’s more text down there doesn’t mean you need to read it. Mmm, cookies.
For those of the slow kids who haven’t figured it out already, Cody and I did not end up hanging out, riding off into the sunset, and living happily ever after. “Goddamit!” you might say. “I was really hoping things would work out.” Not a chance. It turns out, Cody liked playing Runescape a lot. For hours. We played three more times over the next three days and each time lasted for over three hours. I liked Runescape too, but he always wanted to play into the early hours of the morning. And it got to the point where all we’d do is play Runescape and not talk much. It was even worse since Cody was around level 150 and I was around level 47. He had all these ideas for making money for high leveled players that involved killing high level monsters while I tagged along and felt useless, bored and tired at 3 AM. Even though he shared all the drops with me, (I finally have over 1 million GP in Runescape) it was not how I expected I’d be spending my time with my new friend. So I gently suggested we do something other than play Runescape. He said we could play Battlefield as well. I told him we didn’t always have to play a game and we could just try talking as we had the first time, but he just shrugged (or rather made a noise equivalent to shrugging.)
While this was extremely frustrating, I knew I had to be patient with Cody. He’d agreed to hang out with me during spring break, so if he wanted to play Runescape now, then that’s what we’d do. I’d--for lack of a better term--suffer through these sessions and reap the rewards later. The second time we played, I wasn’t so good at this and I’d lashed out at Cody in frustration. I felt awful after and apologized the next day for snapping at him and explained I was tired and bored. He said it was fine and he understood. It made me wonder that if I felt guilty just for snapping at Cody, how my mom could live with herself at all by practically making a living out of swearing and insulting.
Speaking of which, my mom was not happy Cody and I were getting in touch again. She thought she’d seen the last of Cody when he moved away. She hadn’t counted on her snow pretext working and was thrilled Cody moved away out of my reach just in the nick of time. And when my mom’s not happy, she likes to throw one of her temper tantrums with her in-famed world-class swearing and insults.
Obviously while Cody and I were Skyping was not a good time for one of these tantrums. This was the fourth day and we’d played over 12 hours of Runescape in the past 3 days. We’d been playing Runescape for three hours so far and I was trying my hardest to keep it together. Unfortunately, my mom does not operate on a schedule, nor does she care remotely about what’s convenient for me, so she decided it was a fine time to fire off some power-insults while I was concentrating my hardest on what to do to make Cody see things my way.
After hearing more of her excessive, irrational, and slanderous insults and curses, I lost it. I ended up yelling at Cody and taking my frustrations, Runescape and otherwise, out on him while my mom yelled at me. She told me about what a terrible person I was for fraternizing with Cody and never following her orders. The more she yelled at me, the more I swore and insulted Cody. I thought she was going to go upstairs to her computer and start a conference call so she could insult both Cody and I simultaneously.
Needless to say, I felt terrible after. I’d hurt the only person who had ever wanted to be friends with me in 16 years when he had done nothing wrong and demonstrated to my mom that she could get me to do anything with screaming and insults.
The next day I decided to talk to my mom about what happened. I told her about how important this was to me and I explained how upset I felt about the snow disaster back in 2010. She didn’t want to talk to me and she yelled at me to stop talking to her. I told her about how I felt and she said she would call the police if I didn’t stop trying to talk to her. I told her that it wasn’t illegal for me to talk to her or try to make friends and asked what she expected the police to do. She said they’d “take [me] away for good” and that she’d be rid of me so she could live her life normally. I asked why the police would take away an innocent person forever and she said “You’ll see, you’ll see.”
Cody called me twice the next day. I wanted to talk to him, but I didn’t answer because I didn’t want my mom finding out and going through what happened the previous night all over again. Between the fighting back in 2010 and what happened just last night, I couldn’t take more of her abuse. Even worse, I was worried Cody would want to play Runescape again. I couldn’t take any more of that either.
Now that I’ve calmed down and sorted everything else, I’d like to try talking to him again but I don’t know if I even have a chance. First, he’s still hardly ever on Skype or Facebook. I saw him online last week and was going to ask him if he still wanted to Skype, but I chickened out. I just don’t know how to ask without sounding like a jerk after what happened. If I see him online again I’m going to ask anyway, since what do I have to lose? He's pretty naive and might not notice.
If you made it this far and actually comprehended what I wrote, thank you for reading. Got any ideas? If not, you probably went over to the cookie topic. Can’t say I blame you.
The story starts back in 2006. I had just moved to a new city with my mom after she broke up with my dad and was starting grade 4 at a new school. Back then, I wasn’t so self-conscious and felt free to talk to anyone I met at school who I liked. It wasn’t long before I met Cody, a boy in the grade below mine who seemed friendly, kind, and surely someone with who I could make friends.
I was wrong. Cody disliked me from the first time I talked to him. I wanted to play with him at recess time every day, but he didn’t want to. I never found out what I’d done since it was my first year at that school and I had never talked to him before that. But that didn’t stop me. I was determined to make friends at this school since I hadn’t had any at my old school.
My efforts didn’t become fruitful until four years later. It turns out I was right all along. Cody hadn’t hated me after all. He messaged me on Facebook one day in January 2010 and asked if I wanted to hang out and go geocaching together. By then, I was in high school and I’d long forgotten about him. But I remembered how much I had liked him in elementary school and was glad he didn’t dislike me for no reason anymore and we could finally be friends.
When you hear that I live in Canada, you might think we get so much snow we live in igloos and ride polar bears to get around. While that might be true for the rest of Canada, it sure isn’t the case in my little town of Vancouver. While the rest of BC and Canada basks in snow and its beautiful bright white glory ^_^, only a few snowflakes drift down to Vancouver each year. Sometimes the snowflakes stick and we get entire millimeters of snow.
My mom is highly protective of me. I get it, all mothers love their children and want to keep them safe. That’s normal, so I won’t fault her for that per se. Some parents are stricter than others. I get that too. The problem is my mom takes it quite far and she has an exceedingly bad temper. :evil2: If anything doesn’t fit her liking or she doesn’t get her way, she starts yelling, swearing, and name-calling without listening to any reasoning. :headbonk: She doesn’t feel comfortable letting me go out without her, and especially not with other kids. She doesn’t flat out say, “You must never talk to or make friends with other kids,” since even she realizes that would be ridiculous, but her body language does convey that fact. Up until now this had never been a problem since I’ve never had a close friend to hang out with outside of school. Ever. :hmm:
When Cody wanted to hang out with me, it became a problem for the first time in eight years. It was a problem because my mom didn’t want me to go out with Cody, but she didn’t have a good reason. Unfortunately, it just so happened there was a light dusting of snow on the ground outside at the time. She capitalized on the opportunity to use the millimeter or so of snow as an excuse to keep me from going, saying it was unsafe. I told her there was hardly any snow on the ground, but she didn’t care. She started yelling and screaming about how stupid I was to try to go out in the snow. The snow disappeared in less than 24 hours, but she still said no.
Later, she asked me for Cody’s phone number. I gave it to her and she wanted his address. I told her I didn’t have his address and that she’d have to wait until I got a chance to go to his house since it didn’t seem fitting for me to just ask him out of the blue. I explained as I got to know him better over time I’d learn more about him, but it would take time. She started yelling at me for going out with a stranger and how stupid I was since she’d have no one to contact if I was killed while were were hanging out. (Her exact words.) Eventually I found it for her on Canada411.ca (like Spokeo.com for Canada) and told her she could’ve found it herself in one minute if she learned to use a computer instead of yelling and swearing at me all day. Of course, she didn’t really care about the address. She was done with all that at this point. She just didn’t want me to go.
By the time winter had passed and everything had blown over, Cody had moved to another city. I was mad that my mom had taken away my only chance to hang out with the one person I’d wanted to be friends with the longest. I tried talking to her about it, but all she ever said was how dangerous it was to go outside in the snow. She never even acknowledged how upset I was and if I tried to tell her, she just yelled at me.
Over time, I started to forget about it. The city Cody lived in was only about a 20 minute drive away, but I couldn’t drive and there was no way my mom was taking me there. I could’ve taken the bus, but my mom had made such a mess and I was so distraught over what happened last time, I was afraid of starting it all over again. Remember, all of our discussions about Cody were not calm, peaceful conferences. Every time I mentioned Cody it was yelling, screaming, name-calling, swearing, and insulting.
Also, Cody is hardly ever on Facebook (I see him online literally only once every couple of months) and honestly, I was worried as more time passed he wouldn’t like me anymore. I thought maybe he had felt bad about what he did in elementary school for a while, but after that had passed, he’d go back to hating me again, or maybe he was just messing with me in the first place. Take my word for it, he had been real mean in elementary school, and if there was one thing I wanted to avoid more than my mom’s temper, it was Cody hating me again.
Two years passed, and over time I got over it. I didn’t hear from Cody again until December 2012. He messaged me on Facebook during winter break and told me he was in Hawaii. Apparently he remembered me and he still liked me. I was relived. Since he was hardly ever on Facebook, I decided to just ask him then if he wanted to hang out again when he got back since otherwise it might be two more years before I got another chance. Even though he was being nice, I knew I was pushing my luck. I held my breath for a moment, and then he said yes.
I watched out for him on Facebook and didn’t see him online until the end of February. I knew if I didn’t take this chance it could be months, or even two more years, before he was online again, so I went for it. I messaged him and he asked if I wanted to talk on Skype. I did.
It was nice to talk to him again. We talked about elementary school, me getting a new laptop, paintballing, video games, iPads, geocaching, and more. It felt good to talk to someone who was nice and funny and who seemed like they genuinely cared about me for the first time in a while. Cody wanted to play Runescape together so I renewed my membership and we did. I was relieved. Everything had worked out eventually, even if it did take 2 years (7 if you count when I first met him in 2006).
You might want to stop reading at this point. You can hit the back button on your browser and go along your merry way thinking that Cody and I got together, hung out, and my mom apologized for not letting us meet up two years ago. Go ahead, do it. It’s not too late to escape this misery and read a nice topic about cookies (http://www.virtualteen.org/forums/showthread.php?t=168951). Just because there’s more text down there doesn’t mean you need to read it. Mmm, cookies.
For those of the slow kids who haven’t figured it out already, Cody and I did not end up hanging out, riding off into the sunset, and living happily ever after. “Goddamit!” you might say. “I was really hoping things would work out.” Not a chance. It turns out, Cody liked playing Runescape a lot. For hours. We played three more times over the next three days and each time lasted for over three hours. I liked Runescape too, but he always wanted to play into the early hours of the morning. And it got to the point where all we’d do is play Runescape and not talk much. It was even worse since Cody was around level 150 and I was around level 47. He had all these ideas for making money for high leveled players that involved killing high level monsters while I tagged along and felt useless, bored and tired at 3 AM. Even though he shared all the drops with me, (I finally have over 1 million GP in Runescape) it was not how I expected I’d be spending my time with my new friend. So I gently suggested we do something other than play Runescape. He said we could play Battlefield as well. I told him we didn’t always have to play a game and we could just try talking as we had the first time, but he just shrugged (or rather made a noise equivalent to shrugging.)
While this was extremely frustrating, I knew I had to be patient with Cody. He’d agreed to hang out with me during spring break, so if he wanted to play Runescape now, then that’s what we’d do. I’d--for lack of a better term--suffer through these sessions and reap the rewards later. The second time we played, I wasn’t so good at this and I’d lashed out at Cody in frustration. I felt awful after and apologized the next day for snapping at him and explained I was tired and bored. He said it was fine and he understood. It made me wonder that if I felt guilty just for snapping at Cody, how my mom could live with herself at all by practically making a living out of swearing and insulting.
Speaking of which, my mom was not happy Cody and I were getting in touch again. She thought she’d seen the last of Cody when he moved away. She hadn’t counted on her snow pretext working and was thrilled Cody moved away out of my reach just in the nick of time. And when my mom’s not happy, she likes to throw one of her temper tantrums with her in-famed world-class swearing and insults.
Obviously while Cody and I were Skyping was not a good time for one of these tantrums. This was the fourth day and we’d played over 12 hours of Runescape in the past 3 days. We’d been playing Runescape for three hours so far and I was trying my hardest to keep it together. Unfortunately, my mom does not operate on a schedule, nor does she care remotely about what’s convenient for me, so she decided it was a fine time to fire off some power-insults while I was concentrating my hardest on what to do to make Cody see things my way.
After hearing more of her excessive, irrational, and slanderous insults and curses, I lost it. I ended up yelling at Cody and taking my frustrations, Runescape and otherwise, out on him while my mom yelled at me. She told me about what a terrible person I was for fraternizing with Cody and never following her orders. The more she yelled at me, the more I swore and insulted Cody. I thought she was going to go upstairs to her computer and start a conference call so she could insult both Cody and I simultaneously.
Needless to say, I felt terrible after. I’d hurt the only person who had ever wanted to be friends with me in 16 years when he had done nothing wrong and demonstrated to my mom that she could get me to do anything with screaming and insults.
The next day I decided to talk to my mom about what happened. I told her about how important this was to me and I explained how upset I felt about the snow disaster back in 2010. She didn’t want to talk to me and she yelled at me to stop talking to her. I told her about how I felt and she said she would call the police if I didn’t stop trying to talk to her. I told her that it wasn’t illegal for me to talk to her or try to make friends and asked what she expected the police to do. She said they’d “take [me] away for good” and that she’d be rid of me so she could live her life normally. I asked why the police would take away an innocent person forever and she said “You’ll see, you’ll see.”
Cody called me twice the next day. I wanted to talk to him, but I didn’t answer because I didn’t want my mom finding out and going through what happened the previous night all over again. Between the fighting back in 2010 and what happened just last night, I couldn’t take more of her abuse. Even worse, I was worried Cody would want to play Runescape again. I couldn’t take any more of that either.
Now that I’ve calmed down and sorted everything else, I’d like to try talking to him again but I don’t know if I even have a chance. First, he’s still hardly ever on Skype or Facebook. I saw him online last week and was going to ask him if he still wanted to Skype, but I chickened out. I just don’t know how to ask without sounding like a jerk after what happened. If I see him online again I’m going to ask anyway, since what do I have to lose? He's pretty naive and might not notice.
If you made it this far and actually comprehended what I wrote, thank you for reading. Got any ideas? If not, you probably went over to the cookie topic. Can’t say I blame you.