Teaching yourself how to love when your parents didn't

Most people grow up in loving homes with parents that care about them and truly love them. That’s not to say that all loving parents did a good job or that even parents with the best of intentions weren’t abusive and traumatizing, but most people do grow up with parents that love them, no matter how poorly its shown and expressed.

Not all of us have that luxury.

I’m sure that everyone has been told at one time or another that their parents love them, that they sacrificed so much for them, that they should be grateful to have parents at all. I’ve been told this when I talk about cutting my parents off or anytime I talk about the abuse that I endured from them. Phrases like “they did they best that they could with what they knew at the time” and “they love you, you should treat them with a little more respect” are heard all too common from usually well meaning people who can’t even conceive of a world in which parents don’t actually love or care for their kids. But such a world exists for a lot of us.

I don't know what its like to have parents that actually love me. From the moment I was born, I was an object, an unwanted responsibility, an unplanned pregnancy that they were stuck with, and when I grew up and developed my own identity and personality, it was even worse. I was tolerated, at least some-what, when my parents could spoon-feed me far right propaganda and I swallowed it whole without question or resistance. I was tolerated when I did exactly as told, even when it was wrong or didn’t make sense, when I was useful to my parents and did nothing but emotional or physical labor for them. I was tolerated when I made them look better to the rest of the world. The food and money and space that they wasted on me was a fair enough trade off for garnishing their reputation as a perfect happy family, and I was the tool they used to hide their addictions and domestic violence behind a perfect little veil. I was taught growing up that love is to be afraid, but we all know now that fear is the opposite of love.

The truth is, even now years after we’ve stopped speaking completely, that I keep waiting for an apology. Somewhere deep deep down I want to forgive and forget and hug and move on. I want an apology, I want the tiniest shred of accountability, I want a reconciliation that will never come. I wait for these things in vain. I wouldn't forgive my parents even if I got them. No apology would ever be good enough, not even groveling inbetween tears, on their knees, begging me for another chance. But sometimes, in the dead hours of the morning, or on not enough sleep, or after a bad day, or a little bit too drunk for a little bit too long, the only thing I want in the world is an apology. Half-hearted, half-assed, a single sentence, it doesn't matter as long as its something, some tiny minuscule thing that I could point to to convince myself that maybe they could be better now. It will never ever ever come, and I will have to learn to heal around these wounds and grow inspite of them.

I think most people remember what it was like to go crying to your mom as a kid, asking her to fix something that only her kisses and hugs could. To kiss your boo-boo all better, to tell you that you will find love again inspite of the heartbreak, to tell you that it will be okay again even if it isn’t fair, to stroke your hair and kiss your cheek, wipe your tears.

The urge to go crying to your mom, asking her to fix something that only she could, doesn't go away as an adult. The urge doesn’t go away, even if it never happened that way as a kid either. It doesn't go away even if your mom has told you time and time again for decades, every single time you’ve gone to her for comfort, to leave her alone or deal with it by yourself. It never goes away and I'm not sure that there's any amount of healing or moving on that will ever stop me from wanting to cry out for my mom’s comfort. There will always be that little kid in me that begs to run to my mom crying so she can kiss it all better. When I really had my first heartbreak, all I wanted to do was to break down in her arms while she told me that I would find love again. When my first car was totaled, all I wanted to do was to call her and cry on the phone for an hour about how unfair it is. Last time I was hospitalized, all I wanted was her to sit at my bedside and hold my hand.

The good things are tainted in much the same way. I want to go to her when I’m excited the way that a little kid rushes home from school to show their mom the macaroni painting that they made in art class. I want to celebrate the good things with her, to be happy and let her share in that joy with me. When my best friend had her baby, I wanted to text my parents pictures. I long desperately to call them and tell them that me and my partner are going to start trying for kids in a year or two. I want to tell them that I still write, and share some of it with them. I want to send pictures of my new car, all cleaned, and have them tell me that it’s cool. I long desperately for them to be proud of me. But how can you be proud of someone that you’ve never loved or cared about and who was always little more than a burden to you?

Nothing that I’ve ever done has been good enough for my parents, and they’ve told me so time and time again. When I got straight As, they were dismissive and barely impressed, as if that was the expected and anything less was automatically a failure. When I got honors on my GED, they were disappointed that I’d gotten a GED at all instead of a diploma. When I got my learners permit, it was yet another burden on them that they had to grin and bare. At every major accomplishment, milestone, or happy event in my life, they’ve done nothing but tell me how disappointed they are in me for this or that or something, always something. Everytime I make another strive towards finally being happy and healing, in some ways, from lifelong mental health issues, they just tell me about how much they’re disappointed in my life, how they thought I would be more and now I’m nothing but wasted potential. It doesn’t matter that I’m finally happy for the first time, it doesn’t matter that I was so miserable getting straight As that nothing seemed to matter to me at all. I’m constantly faced with the question: why haven’t you done more? Why aren’t you more?

“Love the sinner, hate the sin” is a phrase that anyone who grew up in the Bible belt has probably heard since before they could walk, and I’m no exception to this. Practically every single choice that I made from puberty onwards was a sin that they hated. Everything about me, to the very core of my being, is a sin in their eyes. My queerness is an abomination, my transness is disgusting and abhorrent, my bodily autonomy is a big ole’ fuck you in the face of g-d, my lack of ambition —nevermind that it’s a direct result of the trauma that I went through— is the sin of sloth and laziness, my morals and ideals (like everyone should have food to eat, shelter, and a land free from war) are evil seeds planted in my head by satan himself to corrupt g-d’s world, my jewishness is a disgusting perversion of g-ds word AND a one way ticket to hell. Love the sinner, hate the sin. How can you claim to love someone when you hate everything about them from the very core of their being? Its like saying, “I love you, but a world in which you're happy in any way is a world in which you are nothing but a disappointment to me.”

I know the way that people describe loving parents. I feel like I can almost picture it. Like I'm drowning and the lifesaver is just out of reach, grasping, reaching, struggling so close to being able to grab it but I can never quite get there. I have no choice but to make it on my own.

One of the most terrifying and isolating parts of having unloving parents is that I know there is no safety net for me. If I can’t do everything on my own, there is no one there to catch me when I fall. If I were to go to college and need to move back home while looking for a job in my chosen field, there is no home for me to go back to. If I fail, if I can’t make it alone in a world built on the back of community, my parents will just laugh to themselves. They’ll talk about how they knew from the very beginning that I would never amount to anything, that I’ve wasted all of my potential. They’ll talk about how its sad how helpless and pathetic I am for not being able to do it myself; it doesn’t matter that my dad can’t hold a job and we’ve gotten evicted and had to move schools, sometimes even states, almost every two years since I was born; they won’t mention that my mom, married in her 30s with three kids, has had to move back in with my grandma a dozen times in two decades. When they have to rely on family, it’s because everyone needs help sometimes and that’s what family is there for, but if I were to ever ask for the exact same kind of help from them it would be because I personally have failed, because I am a failure, a loser that can’t even handle the most basic aspects of being an adult. They think that I am someone destined for nothing nothing nothing forever.

My whole life has been a tightrope balancing act without a net to catch me. Say the right thing, do the right thing, make your parents look like good people. Protect them from the consequences of child abuse, manage your mental illness so perfectly all by yourself that they can almost call you normal. Be this, but only when I need you to otherwise being that is an unforgivable offense. Change everything about yourself, with not a second of notice, to fit exactly what they need at any given time. Be more extroverted, talk more, talk less, be quiet, speak up, tell me how you feel, be honest with me, don't show any emotions at all. Everyone that I ever was was the wrong person to be. Every waking second of my childhood was spent trying to make myself into a kid that they would finally love, but there is no one I could have made myself into that they would have loved anyway. There is no version of me in any universe that performed that tightrope balancing act well enough for them to love me. They had no love to give.

It was so easy as a kid to feel like I was the problem. That’s exactly what they wanted, because, of course, it could never ever be them that was the problem. And as I’ve spent the past few years in therapy and in circles with adults with early developmental trauma and abusive parents, I’ve spent more than my fair share of time reflecting. I’m far enough along in my healing journey that I know it was never my fault, not even for a second. Even if there were something I could have done, even if I could have actually become so perfect that they loved me, the mere expectation that I should change everything about myself as a child to earn their love makes it their fault inherently. A lot of the feelings of worthlessness that I grew up with are gone. I no longer think of myself as too stupid, too fat, too ugly, too annoying, too much, not enough, unlovable. The reason that my parents didn’t love me was nothing that I did, it was that they chose not to.

Most of the feelings that are left now about my relationship with my parents, or lack of, is grief. When I cry out in my empty bedroom for my parents because life is dealing me blow after blow after blow, and I’m not sure I can take even one more thing, I no longer expect comfort. That childlike desperate hope is gone. The comfort will not come and I learned it long ago. When I cry out for them, it is, more than anything, out of grief. Grief for the parents I should have had, grief for the childhood I deserved but didn't get, grief for who I could have been if there were someone, anyone at all, in my corner when I really needed it. I grieve over not having a dad to go fishing with, I grieve over not having a mom to give me advice, I grieve over knowing that I will never have those things and I never have. The grief is the worst part of it all. Not the flashbacks, not the overwhelming loneliness, not this fear of being truly all alone in the world, forced to stand on my own two feet forever, but the grief of things that could have been.

Nothing will change and we will never have a relationship again. Nothing short of betraying every fiber of my entire being, all of my beliefs, forsaking every shred of happiness that I've clawed and scraped and and dug to the bottom of the pits of hell to have, nothing short of becoming a completely blank slate, forsaking even my memories, could ever make them love me. And yet I yearn for it. I cry for it the way that a newborn cries for his mom, before he's realized that he's not a part of her body. It feels like a part of me is intrinsically missing and I long desperately to find it. But it was never there. And it can never be found. And I must learn to cope with its absence and the grief that it left behind.

I learned a lot from my parents: how to yell, how to lie, how to use a vpn and put passwords on apps to hide even the most basic things like texts, how to fall victim to dangerously violent right wing propaganda, how to both sob and laugh completely silently, but there is one thing I can say for sure that they had absolutely no hand in teaching me.

How to love and be loved.