I didn't want to have to break it down like this, but I figured it'd be useful to keep available after arguing with someone why my family and I don't have ties.

To sum up the early years, I was born in northern California and within a year, I was in Arizona, where my younger sister was born a year and five days after me.

The first six years of my parents' marriage seemed to be uneventful, as I remember living with the two of them and they were sleeping in the same bed.

Sometime around the age of six, my father stopped appearing in my memories, and it took me until I was an adult and met him to learn why.

As it turns out, my mother was not a very stable individual, and my father wanted out, but he did NOT want out of me and my younger sister. We were his kids after all, and he didn't want us to be left alone to our mother. My mom, on the other hand, was dead set on removing my father's influence and as I had it confirmed by a few other individuals involved. One night, my mother called my father, claiming I, his only son, was crying to see him.

My father came over, reluctant to have to even share presence with my mom, only to be met with no son, just my mom and two officers.

Turns out my mom had lied to the police and claimed that my father had threatened to come over and beat her. Him actually showing up... not a good look for 1996 domestic values. I later learned my father was arrested and deported for this incident, since Arizona treatment of immigrants and potential domestic abusers was far from glamorous.

Because of my mother, I was indirectly a contributor to my father's loss of citizenship.

But the battle didn't end there. Despite my mother's insistence on keeping my father out so she would be the only influencer, she didn't like having less money to take care of me, my younger sister, and my older sister. So soon enough, the calls continued again. For about the next decade, my mom would make frequent calls to my dad, accusing him of not providing enough to us. He would send money, and my mother would take it, turn around, and pass it off as her own earnings to sell herself up in our minds as the woman providing us basic cable and occasional video games for me. She worked tirelessly to build the image in our minds painting my dad as a lazy irresponsible deadbeat, when he was easily the one working the hardest for our happiness.

Fast forward to 2006, and there's been a falling out between my mother's consistent manipulation and my stepmom's tolerance of the exchanges with her husband. For better or worse, my father's payments halted again, only this time, my mother wasn't prepared for the rejection. In a fit of hysteria, she had called her mental health counselor and informed them that she was leaving my sister and I at our home and never returning. We learned this when a couple of officers knocked on our door to inform us of the encounter.

From there, we were given a choice that didn't feel like a choice. Stay with our older sister, who had just had her first child, my nephew, or call up my dad, who thanks to clever timing and mental revision, was a deadbeat asshole who let this happen to our mom. At least during the moment of this choice.

Our older sister (half-sister with no blood connection to my father) took us in reluctantly, under promise of child services of receiving multiple stipends that she thought would ease the burden of taking us in. For the worst, she saw little to nothing of these supposed promises, having to support us on the income of her and her boyfriend, out of their own pocket.

Misfortune struck as the stress, child-rearing, and numerous other factors swung my older sister straight into the throes of post-partum depression, culminating in her locking herself inside the house, leaving my crying nephew out on the front porch in Arizona heat, for her boyfriend to find. Save to say, child services was quick to step in and determine my sister and her unmarried boyfriend as unsuitable candidates for our care, putting us right into the group home and foster system.

I got to spend the time between my seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays in a Tucson group home. Despite my attempts to keep to myself built up from budding depression sinking in from the multiple tragedies up to this point, I was regular assaulted and harassed by other boys, several of which had been disowned by their parents because of their criminal record. It was unpleasant to say the absolute least. Once I hit the age of eighteen, I blame a lot of my failures strictly on myself for the last ten years. The only exception was when I did try to ask for help to stay with my dad and stepmom, because I was running out of options.

My dad had an ulterior motive for taking me in. Still living in the states illegally due to the loss of his citizenship, but doing plumbing under licensed contractors, he couldn't obtain a North Carolina license on his own. In short, he wanted me to work and earn the experience and study of the code in order to get a plumbing license in my name. However, despite our efforts, we learned that getting a license in North Carolina requires two years of documented full time plumbing experience as a prerequisite to even taking the exam. No amount of under the table experience was going to substitute for that, and my usefulness slowly dissolved.

In November of 2012, my stepmom delivered to me an ultimatum to leave. Regardless of whether I worked with my father or found work elsewhere, she wanted me out of her house.

My father sat in the other room quietly for this conversation.

I packed my things, and left in the middle of the night. I didn't have the self-confidence to make any sort of case for myself, and I didn't want to prolong the inevitable. That was when I finally left the impossible net of argument that was my family (my mother had called and texted both me and my father in the couple years I was living with him) and decided I was done. My reliance on blood to help me in any way was completely gone.

So no, I cannot go back to my family. It's not a matter of pride. My mother has aged and currently lives on disability, my father and stepmom have already washed their hands of me, and my siblings have enough disadvantages making their own treks into adulthood a rocky one. It doesn't matter how needy I am. They are not in the position to provide me anything, and at this point, I wouldn't want to accept any of it, for risk of being dragged into the incessant tornado that is my family.

Furthermore, I have lost respect for my father over the course of multiple instances revolving around the time he drove us home drunk, the multiple times he introduced me to his mistress and attempted to drag me into a green card marriage for his mistress' sister, and the fact that he puts more stock in the words of a woman he plans to "leave in 5 years" over his own son.

The person I wrote this all down for knows who they are. Here's a protip for you: That old saying you quoted is actually misquoted. The complete saying is:

"The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb"