Sweet? Sweet? I’ll be damned if I’ll be sweet. That’s all my parents wanted of me, as early as I can remember. So it’s the last thing I’ll give them.

For the longest time I found no fault with them. I was unhappy and frustrated but everyone could see they were doing nothing wrong. They doted on me. I was their sun and moon. The problem had to be me.

For the longest time. Oh I had some complaints as a child and my share of angst as a teen, but that was all normal, to be expected, nobody’s fault at all. That’s what it takes to grow up and be a separate individual, everyone said.

But eventually I learned that it’s up to the victim to define abuse. I am the victim. I was abused.

They didn’t beat me. There were some complaints about my laziness and lack of common sense, but I don’t think anyone would have categorized their statements as verbal abuse. I was fed, clothed, sheltered, guided, loved.

I was abused.

My first days were lived in Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. The year was 1950 and the protocols were peculiar. Back then the doctors thought they were in charge of childbirth. They thought nothing of knocking out a laboring woman and extracting the baby from her. Then the nurses took over. Swaddling was a procedural issue. Feeding was by clock and of chemicals. The idea was that the experts – doctors, nurses, and then the nurse-taught mothers – had to train the baby to eat, sleep, and even shit on schedule.

When we came home we brought the baby nurse with us. Of course I have no memory of her. And yet I know she was older, rigid, Germanic in attitude. Dressed in white clothes and ugly shoes. I know that as much attention was paid to sterilization of all the bottle equipment as to me.

My parents loved me, but they didn’t hold me enough. Too often they arranged me in my crib, clean-diapered and clad in adorable pajamas amid sheets, blankets and bumpers that matched, and left me alone there, to figure out my path through tears to sleep.

They fed me when I wasn’t hungry and withheld the bottle when I was. Mom gave me gloppy “solid” food before I wanted it, and then was quite insistent about me swallowing it. She put me in the dresses she wanted me to wear. Carted me to places she wanted to go (that would have been okay, within reason, but the woman was a compulsive shopper, and she never had the time or interest for cartoons or playgrounds or mud). Mom even decided, months too early, when I should be done with diapers, and then took steps that included shame, bribery, and an enema, to bend my colon to her purposes.

I objected before I had language. By the time I was three I was articulating some complaints. But my objections and opinions were classified as willfulness, stubbornness, selfishness. A cascade of misunderstanding developed.

Dad laid down rules from on high. He often said the ship of our household was NOT a democracy. Mom jabbed with petulant demands: “I just want it that way,” or “because I said so,” or “Just do it, dammit!” were typical of her responses to my questions. She also had a tendency to lash out when frustrated (“aggravated” was her word), slapping with her right hand or poking with whatever kitchen implement she happened to be holding. It was up to me, alone, to form my bottom-up, grass-roots campaign for personal freedom.

There was a time-line of parental mistakes. The toilet-training debacle was triggered by the birth of my baby brother. Mom was as confident with this infant as she’d been insecure with me; he was the light of her life, and I could “damn-well walk on my own” as long as she had him in her arms. I was suddenly a big girl expected to do much for myself, alone.

I already had some contempt for her then. Her maternal shyness had put me off, had made me turn toward my doting besotted father. But this was in the early years of their marriages, when they fought a lot and he acted parental toward her. So I witnessed him treating her with disdain and disapproval. Of course I mimicked him to the extent I could. Of course that didn’t improve the mother-daughter relationship.

Next up was the tonsillectomy. I was five, the hospital stay was overnight, my parents didn’t tell me what was going to happen. They turned me over to smarmy or cold medical people, and left me to deal with them on my own. As it happened, my parents returned for me the next day. But I don’t remember anyone telling me that they’d be back for me, and by the time they showed up, I was an altered me. I’d learned not to count on them. I didn’t see them as demons – I knew they still loved me and I depended on them to keep the food and shelter coming – but I no longer viewed them as gods.

That experience made me a little more difficult for them. Definitely more willful and stubborn. And my more adamant attitude led her to increase the “no common sense” accusations and him to engage in some head-to-head disagreements which, when he didn’t prevail, “forced” him (his word) to restrict my activities or withhold from me things I coveted. Then I started diversifying my desires, in an attempt to find some that were attainable. Dad’s response to that was to conclude that I was spoiled and didn’t know what I wanted, and to make me wait longer for whatever, ostensibly to give me time to REALLY decide I wanted it.