"They're not on your side."

Not everything has to be dramatic, like---OMG! SEXUAL ABUSE!!!!

There are, though, often ongoing tedious belittlings that wear you down. Not enough for a hash-tag, or anything. But, still...they build up, and you wonder why they happened.

In 1976, the nation's Bicentennial, my middle school handed out envelopes, and if you put your name and return address on them, they'd send them to your home with Bicentennial stamps. I filled out my name and address on 5 envelopes, and they were mailed to my home. When my mother saw them: "Why did you put your own name on all of these?"

In 1983: I was 18, and with my mother and younger brother in Germany. While we were all standing on a street-corner in a German city with one of my mother's two older sisters, I lit a cigarette. My mother insisted that I put the cig out, which I did (and her sister later praised me for how docile I was). I learned later that my mother, while a pre-teen in the '50s, often sneaked cigarettes. At one point, when she and a friend were caught smoking, an old woman chastised them: "Just like the Russians!" (My point: If my mother sneaked cigs as a kid in the '50s, then why so adamant in 1983 re my own smoking? At that point, it wasn't verboten for grown women to smoke in public any more---I don't think it had been since the '30s.)

In 2010, when I got back to Austin from NYC, I had to move into a 400-sq-ft apartment because I couldn't afford anything more. One room, one closet. My mother had one crate of my old LPs stored at her 1400-sq-ft house. For the whole time I was at this 400-sq-ft place, I constantly heard: "When are you going to pick up your records?" Not just once. A dozen times.

None of the above is dramatic. It's just constantly soul-draining. Like when there's a family Christmas gathering, and Mom blatantly takes pictures of everyone except me (!). Sounds stupid when you complain about it, but at the time, and later, it's actually hurtful.

My parents divorced in 1977 when I was 12, and my dad was overtly awful prior to that. So, obviously, my mother was the better of the two. She was well-organized and kept a clean house; Christmases and birthdays were very nice, and I appreciate them.

One thing I remember, though, pre-1977 while they were still married and we all lived in the same house: Whatever had just happened to me and whatever humiliation I was just feeling: I heard an actual voice (inner, or was it a voice from the cosmos?) that said: "They're not on your side." Wow! I'd never heard such a thing before, and I never heard such a thing since. Whatever this "voice" was, it utterly validated my own feelings. I wasn't crazy after all for thinking that my own parents didn't like me. Hard thing to admit: Neither of my parents liked me, much less loved me.