Love always felt very superficial in my household. “I love you” was said but I never felt actual love. Growing up, I never saw it demonstrated. I was not sure how it looked and I didn’t know how it felt to receive it. My dad never said he loved me. My mom said it often but I always felt like she was saying it because she had to. I felt like she was lying to me. I felt actual shame when she would say it because I felt like it made her uncomfortable and it made me feel uncomfortable to hear her lie to me. I felt like I was this dark, ugly burden to both my parents, especially my dad. I could tell he was disgusted with how I looked. Though I was a pretty normal looking child, I know I was a disappointment to him. He would look at me with such disgust and hatred in his eyes and he’d address me in this steely, cold voice like he was seconds away from snapping and slapping me across the face, like he often did.

I don’t think I was afraid of him but I knew that he didn’t like me. More than that, I didn’t like him. I didn’t like that I had to live as if I were walking on egg shells and in discomfort. It made me angry that other people had normal families with normal dads who loved them and openly showed it. I never said I loved him because I honestly didn’t feel anything toward him but annoyance and anger. And it was hard to say I LOVE YOU to someone who I wasn’t sure even wanted me alive.

I could’ve said I loved him anyway but I would’ve been lying. I didn’t understand him and it made me mad that all he could do was be so hateful toward me. He was so angry at all of us (my sisters and I). He was pissed off and brooding all the time; always complaining about something we’d done wrong. The chores were always done wrong. My clothes were hung in the closet wrong. I called lazy and worthless and stupid if I made innocent mistakes. “Lazy and worthless and stupid. Lazy and worthless and stupid” That’s all I ever heard. He took the mistakes I made as a child very personally. He’d say I was trying to “show my ass to him” when I simply was a very scared, confused child who messed up more because I was nervous around him and less because of what he thought it was. But he never gave me the benefit of the doubt. He just assumed I was trying to be a bad kid and be defiant.

He’d constantly call for us, bothering us to fix something or clean something but it was never good enough, it was always a “half-ass job” because we were “lazy asses”. I could never just be right. At the very young age of 10, I started to feel tired, cynical and mainly suicidal. I felt like I was always working. Because they both had to work, we had to work too. But I was just a kid and I wanted to be left alone. It was too much for me. He was always going out of his way to bother me. It was like it bothered him to see us sitting down or relaxing. We “ didn’t deserve to relax while he had to work hard”. If he had to work, so did I.

My dad was sadistic and mentally unwell. He got off on yelling and slapping us across the face, pulling our hair and telling us how stupid and worthless and stink we were. Yes, we had an odor that he could smell because his nose was “sensitive”. He would brag that his nose was so sensitive he could “smell when a women was on her period”. Disgusting.

So, he couldn’t even stand being next to us.

Growing up, I was treated like a criminal. My room was constantly ransacked and searched, my backpack was subject to random checks, for what, I’m not sure. I was a kid but I was treated like a criminal. An inmate. I was constantly treated like my behavior was bad or suspect. I’d come home from school and my entire room would be turned inside out, clothes and papers everywhere because of a search. I grew up feeling like maybe I was bad or born evil because my own parents treated me like I was this piece of dirty, worthless shit that had to be policed and searched and watched. They didn’t trust me. They treated me like they couldn’t stand me. Even though I made great grades in school they didn’t trust me. Good grades meant I was “book smart” not “street smart”. Good grades meant I thought I was smarter than them so they didn’t like that I was smart. It was like nothing I ever did was good enough.

These things stay with me. I know people say let it go and move on and I have, a huge part of me has. Well really, I let them go. And now I’m left to heal. I realize, I don’t know how to recognize love, accept love, allow love when I grew up under a love that was tainted with suspicion and disconnect.

I needed soft love. Encouragement. Joy. Laughter. Acceptance. I needed a hug. A pat on the back, something.

So how do I process? As much as I try, I do seem to attract quite a bit of abusive/negligent partners. Friendships. Jobs, even.

It’s difficult. People say there’s no such thing as normal but there is and I know I’m not.