Letter 2: Dear Dad

 I wish you’d realized how lonely I was as a child and that I desperately needed a parent to be a parent. I needed someone in the family to “be the adult” and set boundaries up front, not retroactively. I wanted to spend time with you, but like Mom, you put your work first. 

I’m not sure why your adult issues were passed on to us kids. I never needed to know about your still-festering anger about your ex-wife, or your desperation to make up for the time you didn’t talk to your mother by trying to force that relationship on us. I know you had very traditional views on who ran the house and how, but your inflexibility caused strife between you and mom - which was another thing that, as a child, I didn’t need to hear about.

I don’t know why you chose to absent yourself from your family, but it was effective. I don’t know why you didn’t serve as a check against Mom’s excesses, but avoiding that didn’t help any of us. I wanted to spend time with you as a child, but you made it very difficult. Was it easier to just turn a blind eye and a deaf ear?

I know you didn’t want kids really, but I tried to be the best non-kid kid I could be. I learned to play chess, poker, and how to shoot pool. I learned about the space program because of your enthusiasm. I tried not to ask for things too much and I tried to be as easy-going with you as I could. I tried, Daddy - why didn’t you? 

Letter 1: Dear Mom

 How fucking dare you expect me to be an adult, shouldering adult concerns and conversations as a *CHILD*? I should never have had to listen to concerns within your marriage, your family, your work, or your social life. I should have never had to worry about being the “good, easy child” because I wanted to make *your* life easier. I should have been experiencing new things, trying and making mistakes instead of reading about them because that was easier for you.

How can you say I’m abusive when it’s the emotional neglect you’ve dumped on me for years that’s made it so difficult to put my feelings first - besides being actively suicidal? I haven’t been the most coherent at stating what was wrong and how - but pus usually doesn’t come out of an infected wound neatly. By the way, during the times my depression actually was bad, thanks for telling me I didn’t have it bad enough to be depressed - did you somehow think that was helpful?

How fucking dare you try to compress my life as small as possible just to be more convenient for you? You chose to send me to a private school - and then only to magnet schools, effectively preventing me from having friends my own age. You chose to actively discourage me from pursuing activities you weren’t interested in; I don’t know if it was feelings of inferiority or simply a distaste for having to plan around me, but it worked terribly well. The only activity outside of school from grades one through six was Girl Scouts, and I remember not wanting to go most times. 

Returning to finish school was selfish; the way you went about it essentially left me parentless when I needed it. You didn’t set boundaries with other people - including your husband - and so that slopped over on to me. Making yourself run ragged at your job was also terribly poorly executed; in your push to make yourself noticed, you failed hard at one of the main components of your job, which was processing books. In addition, I learned that my time wasn’t worth anything if I wasn’t being useful. If I wasn’t helping with stuff for your job, you didn’t really seem to want to spend any time with me - and if you did, from your tone and body expressions I was always left with the impression that I was an imposition.

So much of ‘adulting’ I’ve had to teach myself, from friends, books, and the internet. Things like how to curate your possessions, to eat food that is tasty and nutritious, to maintain things like a house and a car, to exercise and to take care of one’s body appropriately. There were lessons, too, you should have taught me and didn’t - like why a fifteen-year-old girl is never actually interesting to a man seven years her senior, or how to tell people no. 

Why did you have a child that you didn’t want to teach, play games with, or expose to new experiences? Why did you have a child when you left me to be achingly lonely after I started school? Why did you have a child when you treated me like an adult? In essence, why did you have a child when you didn’t want to be a parent?

I’m still so angry and frustrated at knowing that YOU squandered so much of the potential I had to be a happy, fulfilled person. Was your convenience, your to-do list worth my life?

Letters: Introduction

I've been reading books recommended by my therapist and other sources. We talk about them in my sessions. One recent book was "Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life" by Dr. Susan Forward and Craig Buck. In it, the author has exercises targeted toward those dealing with incest, but I felt that the exercises would be useful for me as well, obviously with a slight difference in focus.

One of these exercises is to write a letter to the 'main' abuser (in the book, which ever perpetrated the incest) and the other parent. Although in my case there wasn't incest, I do feel there was one parent who carried out the majority of the abuse, and one who effectively enabled it. In that respect, I'm going to post the letters I've written to each of them.

I don't expect my parents to ever see these letters. I'm not even sure I want them to unless I were about to cut off contact and burn those bridges. They're not nice, happy, 'thanks for the great childhood' letters, which you've probably guessed from the tenor of my previous posts' content. They are, however, what I feel, think, and remember.