Hiromi_X

I didn't have any childhood either, but in my case there were reasons. It would have been easy for me to just hate them, but I knew that if my Mom hadn't been mentally ill and my Dad hadn't been tied down coping with it, I probably wouldn't have even been able to survive at all.

In the end, you just have to make a stand against hating them. I know this is easier said than done and it takes help to do it. You're getting help and that act that you are shows your strength. I hope that as that strength grows. I think it's the key to what you want.

I had many of the same types of complaints about my parents. I was the oldest, and it took my parents a few tries to figure things out, I think.

It actually took therapy for me to figure out why it was so hard to forgive my mother. I discovered that the real difficulty was that I'd internalized the "it's not that your parents were unfair, it's that you didn't deserve the treatment your siblings got" message.

What really brought that home was telling my therapist about something that happened when I was 7 or 8, and she looked at me and said "What could a 7-year-old possibly have done to deserve that?". And I couldn't answer her.

I had internalized "I was a terrible child!" without ever understanding why I was so evil and unlovable. That made it difficult to accept that I was a good person, who deserved good things, as an adult, because if I was so terrible as a child, how did I know people didn't think I was terrible as an adult and just hid it better?

Once I really understood that it wasn't my fault, it was just that my mother, who was in a terrible situation to being with, wasn't very good at parenting me, it really changed the way I thought about myself today.

Hey girlfriend -

I hear what you are saying. Damages done in childhood can, and in some ways inevitably do, last a whole lifetime.

Here's what I've found (suspecting I have a couple of years on you, at least ;) ) -- I am "more" healed every time I give something I didn't get, every time I give that thing to somebody else.

Children, in general, are awfully healing. I don't mean having your own, so much, as finding ways or time to give something to any child who needs it. And then knowing you are a *positive* memory spot in their lives.

Maybe like you had the opportunity to break a cycle and take the power in your own hands, to do good? (Being a child is so powerless.) Using power for good is healing.

Hugs to you. This whole life thing is quite a journey.

E

I've been a lurker on your blog for a while now.. never really have the time to say much, but i appreciate what you have to say for its poignancy. I was just thinking though that your experience is what makes you special.. seems to me that's one of those obvious "look on the bright side" kinds of things to say. I know we all have challenges in life, but how many of us can figure some sort of meaning from them? You can - you've got something to say and that's why I like reading you. Nothing against your sisters or anything, I'm sure they've had their challenges.. but I don't imagine they've got the sort of insight to offer people that you have... i'm sorry your life hasn't been easy, but at the same time your experience and insight helps me.. makes me feel not so alone sometimes. thanks for that.

I think, based on experience, that it helps to be able to admit significant negative feelings about parental behavior and learn that it's okay to have them. Once you can do that, it becomes easier to release that negative feeling (to me that negativity about the past often feels like clenching; and admitting it and learning to accept you felt that way feels finally being able to unclench that fist and let it relax, so that the thing you've been holding on to in that fist all this time can float away from you.)

I don't understand...why wouldn't they treat your asthma? Did I miss something? Was it a question of cash? I wish someone at school (the p.e. teacher or nurse) had seen your attacks and gotten you help.

Why do you suppose your parents offered such uneven treatment? Also, without revealing too much about yourself, how big is the age gap between you and your older sisters?

You write "It's nothing to do with actual *preference*, though."

What else could it be, then?

Where I am going with this is that I have often suspected when presented by such family dynamics (including, to be sure, in my own family) that such uneven parenting more often than not reflects some sort of projection by the parents onto the children. It's very unlikely that this really had anything to do with you: with the exception of families where one of the kids is extraordinarily gifted, as in the star athlete, or one of the kids has some extraordinarily acute personal issue (as in the early-budding anti-social personality type)-neither of which applies in your case, I suspect-young children just do not offer enough material themselves to provide traction to some sort of differential approach by parents. The reason, then, resides within the parents themselves. I suspect the beginnings of a way out of this is to see your parents, perhaps for the first time, as really flawed people (admittedly, this is a very hard thing to do: Tony Soprano could never quite wrap himself around it and I'll let you know if I ever can). If you can begin to intellectually approach these flaws, you'll probably begin to be able to see an emotional logic to their behavior (that doesn't mean you have to justify it) and start making it about them (and their shit: their need to have children play different emotional roles in their own lives), allowing you to make some progress toward no longer hurting.

Or maybe there wasn't projection per se, but something else that happened to them that caused some sort of emotional level-shift in their lives. Then, had either of your sisters come along at the point you did, they as well would have experienced these lapses. The difference would not have been so much between Hiromi and her sisters but rather the eras in your parents lives in which you respectively grew up. Could there have been something like this that went on? I've seen where people sometimes just seem to lose something-a sense of engagement or excitement, perhaps- and thereafter just sleepwalk through the whole thing.

You can't ever get back what's been lost, and none of this will change that. And I'm not expecting you to answer these questions here : the answers would probably take years to find and in any case I'm not entitled to know them.

But you can begin to cage some of the pain from it if you can start to see the larger forces behind what happened. Once you intellectualize a phenomenon, its emotional power almost always diminishes. That's why those clever fellows who made "The Blair Witch Project" never let us see the witch: if we saw it, no matter how much the initial shock value, we'd quickly begin to lose our primal fear of it.

I realize that what I am saying is so obvious it can seem patronizing, but it isn't meant to be: the obvious things can often be the toughest to see when you are the one on the spot.

By the by, those sound like the terrible asthma attacks my little brother got as a kid. I hope that, as in his case, they basically resolved in adulthood.

I had terrible asthma and allergies as a kid, and my parents made me carry an honest-to-god-pocket-fucking-hankerchief to school everyday. (This was tough, because my uniform did not actually have pockets.) Those little purse-sized tissue packets were - I shit you not - "too expensive." It was a running joke - Timory and her hankerchiefs - which even made it into the eigth grade yearbook. I was humilated.

I still haven't forgiven my parents (especially my father, who's high strung himself) for not getting me treatment for my panic attacks. They seemed pretty fucking obvious to me, but I just don't think they hit the parental radar screen.

And I guess I never realized you were the youngest in a family of sisters. In fact,I thought you had a brother floating around somewhere, since you know, you kick ass at karate, and like war movies, and stuff like that.

I let myself have a good cry over the undiagnosed panic attacks now and then. (They made it very hard to learn how to drive, for one thing. I had to take my driver's test like, five times before I passed it. Sympathy was not forthcoming.)

But I really liked this one guy I caught on the tail end of Oprah at the gym, once. (I'm not a regular viewer, I swear!) He was saying that anyone who's lived to be thirty has been through enough to be miserable for the rest of their lives. The key is, to abandon all hopes of a perfect past.

I liked that.

Forgiveness is possible without love. But isn't forgiveness an essential ingredient of love? Children love their parents unequivocally and can forgive behaviour which they would not tolerate as adults. As adults, it is reasonable to assess that behaviour of our parents and withdraw forgiveness if the parents show no remorse or awareness of their cruelty. There is no excuse for cruelty to children.

Hi there,

I pop in here from Grad Student Madness every once in a while. Every time I do, I read something, and I think, "Wow, I feel like a really identify with this woman, who I don't know, who doesn't know me."

In this case, I have very similar issues about my parents (as well as their treatment of me vs my brother), and for many years had an unmanaged eating disorder that had so much to do with the incredible unfairness of the way my parents treated me. Not just as a child--they do the same shit now. I won't even go into the litany, unless you ask.

But, the deeper I got into adulthood the more I learn about my parents, who are flawed, I mean, truly, they are (and were) broken people. Their behavior was totally inexcusable, I was a child and could not MAKE them do any of the things that would have made my whole life better... but I have learned that I can stop looking for answers to the why me? and what the fuck did I do to them? questions. Those answers are not coming, and it benefits me not at all to go digging for answers. Possibly the most painful part is also somewhat reassuring: My parents actually believed, and still believe, that they were and are excellent parents. Even though I've tried to talk to them about these things.

The other thing I'm learning is that my behavior frequently seems to send inaccurate messages to others about what I want and need, and it is possible this was so when I was a child. It's no longer even important to me to figure out the chicken and egg of it all.

Now I ask myself questions about what I can do to be the person I like to think I could've been, if my parents weren't categorically unfit to be my parents.

Anyhow, thanks for reading, if you actually read all that. But more, thanks for writing. I will probably go back to lurking, but I wanted to tell you how your writing has a positive influence.