My God, this brings back memories. My parents were a similar kind of sadist. I was forced to crawl on the floor as a young child, sometimes almost completely naked, with only a humiliating strip of cloth to catch my own excrement. Months passed before I realized I could walk— something I taught myself, with no help from my mother or father. They were too busy talking to each other using really long words they knew I wouldn’t understand. All the times when I wasn’t the complete center of attention—sometimes for minutes on end— are still fresh in my mind. You don’t just heal from that kind of abuse.
They used to eat peanut brittle right in front of me— before I had teeth. Do you know what that does to a toddler who’s just coming to realize that the world revolves around him? And we didn’t have LiveJournal back then. If you had an existential crisis to journal about, you had to spell it out with ABC blocks for an audience of stuffed animals and Tonka trucks. Do you know how cold it feels to have an audience of teddy bears sitting there in silence, judging you with their dead eyes?