My Parents Never Said “I Love You”
Breaking the cycle with my kids.
I’m in a dark place these days.
Writing is my therapy and thankfully it’s free or else I’d owe a boatload of copay fees.
Lately, my childhood trauma is rearing its ugly head and making me feel useless. Unlovable. Broken.
My father grew up the eldest in a strict middle-Eastern family where kids are to obey and never talk back. His father had a heavy cane with a lead handle; my father used this heirloom to hit my brother and me when we were severely out of line. I’m grateful it was rarely used and thus translate it to not being abuse.
In the corporal world of my childhood, the absurdly heavy cane was akin to society’s electric chair: saved for moments when my brother and I were extraordinarily bad.
I should say, “bad”. With quotes.
The threat of the cane sufficed most of the time. On an ultra-rare occasion, there was a horse whip. This also doesn’t seem like abuse (in my mind) since it was extremely rare and it’s not like the kinds you see on TV today. It was more like a thin, flexible piece of bamboo with a metal handle and tip.
My Austrian mother lost her father as an infant and her mother at age five. She was raised by a garbage stepfather who didn’t want her and I think he sexually abused her (she never told us that but I deduced he did inexplicable things). While my father grew up poor, he had a childhood. My mother lost her childhood when her mother died.
Her punishments were more frequent as the primary caregiver while my dad was working or away on religious excursions. My mom used her hand or a cooking spoon as her weapon of choice. While it was frequent, in my mind I couldn’t call it “abuse” because it wasn’t that painful. It was my mother’s anger and the shock to the body that made it jarring.
Her rage is what makes me a master at running upstairs, ever grateful for her obesity that she couldn’t keep up (she’s strong as hell though). My brother taught me the perfect position for the bedroom chair so my door stayed shut as my mother demanded I open it. My door had a basic lock but my mother kept a knitting needle handy to easily unlock the mechanism. I’m grateful for the sturdiness of that chair.
It wasn’t all bad.
I have snippets of good memories, like when I once laid out all my Little Golden Books and my mother told me to point to the ones I wanted her to read next. She never sat on my bed and read to me at night. But having her on the floor with me to read books was a rare moment.
The nice thing about obese parents is that they’re like oversized bean bag chairs. My brother and I could lay or snuggle easily on the couch when she watched TV (before she got rid of it when I was a pre-teen).
My mom twisted her ankle when putting my tricycle away. That was a nightmare for her with my dad away on business while raising two small children. I feel guilty for it even though she never blamed me for it. Okay, that’s not a snippet of a good memory but it’s a positive event because I didn’t get in trouble.
They’re overshadowed by all the bad memories, like all the times my mother complained about how her life would have been easier if she didn’t have kids. What is the appropriate reply when your parent looks at you and says they wish you had never been born?
I reminded my mom of this a few years ago. “I said that?” my mom asked, then laughed as if it were a lighthearted and silly comment. Yeah, ha ha ha, that’s only cost me a fortune in therapy bills. I don’t say that of course because anyone with immigrant (or any Boomer for that matter) parents knows that mental health care is a fabricated construct of current society.
All I can do is try to give my kids as much of a childhood as possible, despite how much I destroyed it by getting divorced. I tell them constantly that even when I’m mad at them, I still love them. I ask them, “You know Mom and Dad love you, right? Don’t ever forget that. I want you to always feel loved.” My kids roll their eyes in response which makes me feel like I’ve done my job.
The relationship with my parents is benign now. I visit every few years and we Skype occasionally for them to see the kids. My dad is chill now and the kids adore him. My mom’s personality is still grating and critical but I tell myself that she’s lonely without her kids in the same country.
She bemoans like a martyr and says, “If only my kids didn’t move so far away. What was the point of having kids if you were going to move away? If you lived nearby I could see my grandkids and help you.”
I remind myself it was her behavior that caused my brother and me to move to a different country as soon as we graduated college. We couldn’t get far enough away.
Today, I took my kids to see Shazam 2. If you haven’t seen the first one, the gist is a teen in the foster system gets adopted and also gains superhero powers. In the sequel, there is a moment where the adopted mother is visibly upset that Billy doesn’t call her “mom” like the other adopted kids. “Give him time,” sagely advises her husband.
Then in a hero moment later in the movie when Billy must leave to fight the villains, she tells him she loves him. He hugs her and says “I love you too, Mom.”
It dawned on me: I don’t think my parents ever told me they love me.
There is the caveat that with grandkids and video chats, my mom hollers “I love you guys!” and I reply in unison with the kids that we love her too. Recently, if she signs off in a group chat with my brother and me with “luv you” (yes, spelled L,U,V), I’ll type back with a generic “love you too”.
I do this because I don’t want karma to get me when I’m old and my kids won’t tell me they love me.
When I told my brother two decades ago that our father hugged me briefly before I moved out of the country, he refused to believe it. That’s how little affection and emotion we received. It’s easier to believe a hug didn’t happen than wrap your head around “Wait…he…he actually hugged you?”
Sitting through the rest of the movie was tough as I kept wiping tears from my eyes to avoid detection. How the hell didn’t I remember never receiving an “I love you” from my parents? It feels uncomfortable to type it now in a chat, how did I not correlate that with them never giving positive verbal affection as a kid?
My mom and dad never said “I love you” when I grew up. It feels like a bomb dropped on my lungs, making me unable to breathe with the smoke of emotional pain rising around me. I ache for the childhood version of me who had no idea what she was missing.
It makes sense why I respond in one of two ways when a guy says they love me.
Either I’m indifferent and almost in awe that they’d feel that way without my noticing. “Ohhh…were we supposed to be feeling that way? I have zero emotion for you, bro. Sorry, you fell in love with me because this is where I’m going to bounce.”
Alternatively, I fall hard. When the guy says he loves me I respond like I’m handed water during a drought. The dude could be an asshole but I cling to that feeling of being loved since deprived of it as a kid. I get paranoid that he’ll realize he can do better and ditch me, then I lose the fragment of love in my life I desperately needed.
Yeah. Not healthy.
A close friend of mine died a few months ago. As her cancer progressed, I made an effort to tell my friends that I love them. It’s a weird feeling to tell a platonic friend “love you!” but it gets easier over time. Life is too short for my friends to not know how much they mean to me.
After the movie today, I bombarded my kids with more “I hope you always remember how much I love you” comments. I said I never want them to grow up thinking that I didn’t love them. My son replied, “Who doesn’t love their kids? Only jerk parents would do that.”
How do I feel now, at 3 am when I should be sleeping? I feel gypped.
It’s like everyone got paid daily as kids and now they’re grown up with a solid bank account. Meanwhile, I grew up with a few nickels in the bank. It feels like I missed out and I’m angry. How much mental anguish could have been avoided if I had parents that did the basics of Parenting 101?
So I sit and stew, knowing everyone around me is full of emotional wealth and I’m scrambling to survive with an empty wallet. My kids help fill it but slashing my time in half from the divorce feels like that wallet of love depletes every week. What will happen as they become aloof teenagers or when they grow up and move out?
This isn’t a situation where I need to learn to love myself. That’s emotional intelligence level 50 and I’m still trying to pass level 3.
I need to mourn and wallow but stop before it gets out of control like my other depression spirals. It’s hard to not translate it as “You’re so unlovable and worthy that your own parents didn’t even love you.” I’m aware that my parents may have sucked at parenting but they still loved me. That means nothing to me if it was never shown but they were capable of demonstrating their hateful rage.
That’s where I’m at right now. I don’t need to feel like I, today, am lovable. For now, I only need to convince myself that the childhood version of me was worthy and deserved love.
Is that the key to healing? Treating my child self with the same affection I slather on my kids? I see pictures of family photographs in my mind and think of one where I’m maybe three or four, bundled in a bright yellow snowsuit in the backyard. My cheeks are red with cold but I’m grinning through it, happy to be playing in the snow with my brother. I want to run to that child and wrap her in a massive, smothering bear hug.
I would tell her she’s worthy of the love she doesn’t even know is missing. I’d insist that she remains as authentic as possible and not fear that others won’t love her if they knew her true self. That child already feels like a bad person at her young age; I’d repeat on a loop that she’s sweet and good.
There is some light in today’s dark revelation. I will not fall prey anymore to a relationship that doesn’t meet my needs. No more excuses for other people’s behavior. If I’m going to break the cycle with my kids then I must break the cycle with myself, too. When I’m unfulfilled in a relationship, it makes me feel awful.
Now I see why I accepted scraps from others or tried to fit with incompatible guys. I used to think the lack of male attention from my father caused my behavior but now I know that’s only part of the story. Whatever love was thrown my way, I gobbled up.
I’m vowing to myself to no longer accept a McDonald’s Love when I want a Fancy Steak Dinner Love. While I may not believe that I deserve it, at least I know what I want. And I know what I’ll never accept again.
Maybe that’s what it means to love yourself.
