My parents raised me to have no life.
I don't mean that they raised me to have their life, or to have only a life that they approved of, or that they raised me to live in a basement and play video games and eat pizza. I mean that they raised me to have nothing of my very own that they didn't judge as unworthy and stupid and barely worth mentioning. If I liked something, they had nothing but disdain for it, and they would spend hours telling me how stupid that thing was. Nothing escaped their judgement, not my books, my friends, my tv shows, my music. Nothing was good enough, and if I enjoyed doing anything, it wasn't the right thing to enjoy. Anybody who did was an idiot.
Except I had seen these people, hadn't I. I had seen them and I knew there were people like me who thought and acted the way i wanted to think and act, the way I knew I could think and act if I only let myself alone. The way I knew I would be happy and free. The way I wanted to be for the rest of my real life.
But no. Those things weren't okay. They were okay for other people. But not for me. I wasn't good enough. Those people were better than I was. They deserved to have those things.
By the time I was ten, I knew that I couldn't ask my mom for anything. Money, food, clothes, help with my homework, help with anything. I knew that my dad was the scariest, loudest monster there was in the world. I knew that our house could become a nightmare in a split second, and I knew how fast I could run up the stairs to my room, and I knew how to freeze in place so no one could hear me.
I also knew how to make things better. I would be riding in the car with my mom and she'd get so angry about something at me, yelling and pushing all of her anger to my side of the car. She'd start with a story about some kid in her class, or maybe it was just about how much money I was costing her. "What you do you think about THAT?" I was terrified, but I knew I had to stay still and try to calm her down so she could keep us in our freeway lane. "How can you even understand, you don't understand the pressure I'm under. Nobody does." Here's where I would take in all of the anger and squish it down inside myself. "I'm sorry, Mom. I wish I could help. Are you okay?" "Well of course I'm okay! I'm just sharing my day! What's the problem with you? You're always so dramatic!" Here came the fishing for compliments time. "I guess I'm just a terrible mother, aren't I?" Now my job was clear. I knew what I had to do. "Oh no, Mom! You're a great mom! I love you very much. I know how lucky I am!" "Oh, that's sweet. Well you're my favorite first-born daughter!" This was the only compliment she gave me, so specific as to be meaningless.
My dad's rages were different. These days he's got a lot of labels, but I'll save the technical terms for another day. Suffice to say that you never knew which dad you were getting when he came home: jolly and fun and laughing with that deep barrel-chested laugh; or yelling and angry and threatening to back a dump truck up to the windows of your bedroom and throw all of your crap away if you don't clean your god-damned room right now. When you helped outside, you could get the patient, loving dad who trained you how to carefully clean out a horse's hoof with a hoof pick without getting kicked or stomped on (important when you're dealing with draft horses weighing 2,000 pounds each), or you could get the dad who called you a cow when you accidentally hammered your own thumb in the rain helping him work on the raised beds. Like I said, you never knew.
I spent so much of my childhood dodging their madness, trying to fix their problems for them, and hiding what I liked so I could dodge being judged for five minutes of peace that I never figured out what I wanted to do with my life. I never thought I would live past thirty; I didn't do any long-term planning. I'm here at 45 years old having razed the construction of my life five years ago and trying to rebuild from scratch. I can tell you that it's been a lot of work. But it's worthy work, and it's healthy work, and it's work that I don't regret doing.
Doing this part of the work means telling on them.
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