u/AdBackground4427

I’ve rewritten this post like five times because I’m scared people are going to misunderstand me or think I’m a horrible person. I have ADHD and I’m on the autism spectrum.

I love my kids more than anything. This is not about not loving them.

I became a mom at 17 before I had even figured out who I was yet. I went from childhood trauma and instability straight into survival mode, then straight into motherhood, and now I’m 30 realizing I’ve never actually had a break or a chance to become my own person. My kids are now 12 & 4.

There were years of hotels, couch surfing, financial instability, emotional abuse, constant stress, and trying to keep my kids fed and sheltered while completely burnt out myself. Even after things became “less unstable,” my nervous system never left survival mode.

I think some part of me is grieving an entire life I never got to have. Not because I hate my children, but because I never got the chance to become a stable person before becoming responsible for other people.

And now I’m having this terrifying realization that I genuinely don’t know how much longer I can function like this emotionally.

I don’t have supportive family, godparents, aunts/uncles, or anyone stable who could realistically step in long term while still allowing me to remain their mother. That’s part of why this feels so scary. My boyfriend but they are not his kids?

I keep wondering whether another family or support system could realistically provide more stability than I currently can. A stable home. Predictable routines. Emotional availability. School consistency. The kind of environment I wanted to give my children but have struggled to maintain long term.

I don’t actually want to give up my children or disappear from their lives. I think what I’m trying to figure out is whether there are options that remove some of the responsibility temporarily before I completely break down mentally.

Is there such a thing as guardianship, respite care, shared caregiving, or some type of support that helps both the parent and the children without permanently severing the relationship?

I guess I’m asking because I feel emotionally cooked after years of surviving without support, and I don’t know what the healthiest path forward looks like anymore.

I do not really want to give my kids up for adoption but I’m staring down the barrel of another 12 years facing housing instability food instability and more?

I know better than anyone that being adopted isn’t a guarantee but …?

Please be kind. I’m already hard enough on myself.

Churches are not realistic for me, I am a survival sex worker. Every time you meet someone new they ask you what do you do for work? I don’t have the bandwidth to lie about what I do for work

KAP – adoptive mother is my biological aunt

I’ve rewritten this post like five times because I’m scared people are going to misunderstand me or think I’m a horrible person. I have adhd and am on the autism spectrum.

I love my kids more than anything. This is not about not loving them.

But if I’m being completely honest, if I knew at 17 what I know now at 30, I probably wouldn’t have had children. At least not without stability, support, or healthy family around me.

I got pregnant really young, at 17, within 6 months the of becoming sexually active, before I had even figured out who I was yet. At the time I thought love and determination would be enough. Everyone says “you’ll figure it out,” and I believed that. For a while it honestly felt manageable. Then life kept happening and things just got heavier and heavier.

My adoptive mom died when I was 6 years old, and I think that affected me more than I understood at the time. Part of why I kept my first pregnancy at 17 was because my biological mother gave me up for adoption, and my grandmother also placed children for adoption. I felt so deeply that I didn’t want to repeat that cycle. In my teenage brain, I think part of me thought, “a baby won’t leave me.” Trauma logic, I guess.

Instead, I ended up repeating a different cycle entirely.

I come from an extremely dysfunctional white trailer trash family situation involving addiction, emotional abuse, scapegoating of me, manipulation, and years of instability. I kept thinking if I just worked harder or proved myself enough, eventually my family would support me or things would calm down. Instead I feel like I’ve spent the last decade being emotionally worn down piece by piece.

There were YEARS of living in hotels, couch surfing, constantly worrying about money and survival. I went into survival mode so hard that I honestly don’t think my brain ever got a chance to rest. I was trying to keep my kids fed and sheltered while completely burnt out myself.

And now I’m sitting here at 30 finally realizing how exhausted I actually am.

I feel guilty even saying this, but I don’t think human beings are supposed to raise children completely alone without support. People talk about “the village,” but some of us don’t have a village. Some of us have families that actively make our lives harder.

My cup is empty. Like genuinely empty.

I’ve leaned too much on my partner because I’ve been drowning mentally, but he’s emotionally immature, avoidant, and our relationship honestly isn’t healthy either. So then I feel guilt about that too because my kids deserve emotionally stable parents and I know they’ve already experienced too much instability.

I look at my 12-year-old sometimes and feel overwhelming guilt. Even with all the dysfunction I grew up around, I still always had my own room, my own bed, and I was always in school. Meanwhile there were long periods where my kids and I all shared a bed in hotel rooms. My oldest has missed huge chunks of school because we kept moving, trying to survive, or because I was too overwhelmed to function properly and kept getting stuck in the next crisis.

Something was always changing. I’d make plans to enroll her and then suddenly we were preparing for a cross country move. Then the move would fall through. Then another housing issue would happen. Even after technically not being homeless anymore, I think my brain stayed trapped in survival mode.

I’ve had to restart from absolute zero so many times since 2015 that it feels unreal. Everything my family owns can STILL fit into a sedan. I’m tired. Not just for me, but for my kids too.

I think people hear a parent admit regret or burnout and assume it means they hate their children, but that’s not what this is. I’m grieving the fact that I brought children into circumstances I didn’t fully understand when I was young and underdeveloped myself.

Now I’m finally coming out of the fog enough to look around and ask: how do I even begin picking up the pieces from here?

I don’t know. I just needed to say this somewhere because I can’t be the only parent who feels completely emotionally cooked after surviving this long without support.

I don’t actually want to give up my children. I want enough support and stability to survive parenting without drowning.

Please be kind. I’m already hard enough on myself.

I’ve been trying to figure out whether what I’m dealing with counts as marijuana addiction or just chronic emotional dependence from living in survival mode for too long.

I was first given marijuana at 17. I’m 30 now and I honestly haven’t really been able to stop since. I have ADHD and likely autism, and weed always felt less like “getting high” and more like finally turning the volume down in my brain enough to function. It takes the edge off my anxiety, overstimulation, emotional spiraling, and constant stress.

But at the same time, I don’t think it’s harmless for me either.

I don’t smoke and become some nonfunctional stereotype. I work, parent, clean, survive, etc. But I also feel like weed became part of how I emotionally checked out from a life that was overwhelming me.

I became a mom at 17 before I had even figured out who I was yet. My adoptive mom died when I was young, my biological mother struggled with meth addiction and gave me up for adoption, and my family system has always been full of addiction, manipulation, emotional abuse, and instability. I think I spent most of my life trying to survive instead of actually processing anything.

I dropped out of high school after becoming pregnant and ended up in sex work barely a year after my baby was born because I had ZERO support and was trying to survive financially with a baby. I now have two kids and spent years in unstable housing situations; hotels, couch surfing, constantly starting over from zero. I honestly think my nervous system has been stuck in fight-or-flight for over a decade.

And weed became the thing that softened that reality enough for me to keep going.

The problem is I don’t know who I am without it anymore.

I don’t necessarily crave weed in some intense physical way, but emotionally? Mentally? Absolutely. It feels woven into how I cope with everything. Stress, burnout, shame, overstimulation, loneliness, parenting exhaustion, trauma , all of it.

I think part of what scares me is realizing that now that I’m 30, I’m finally coming out of the fog enough to see how burnt out and emotionally depleted I actually am. I love my children deeply, but I also realize I became a parent before I had stability, support, or emotional tools myself. Weed helped numb that reality enough to survive it, but I don’t know if it’s also keeping me emotionally stuck.

I guess I’m wondering: What does marijuana addiction actually look like in adults who are still “functional” on paper?
Can something be psychologically addictive even if it’s not destroying your life in obvious ways?
And how do you even begin separating trauma survival from addiction when they’ve been intertwined since adolescence?

Please be kind.