The cascade of their insistence and my defiance only got worse over the next 10 years. She pummeled me with epithets like lazy, and he restricted my choices owing to what he saw as my lack of commitment and common sense. My parents tried to govern what I ate, how I dressed, when I slept, how I felt. I wasn’t even allowed to be sick unless they agreed (Mom sent me to school sick to my stomach, and only picked me up after I threw up across several desks, because she had determined that my stomachache was “in my head,” even though we’d been out to dinner the night before with her father, where they made me eat rich food I didn’t like. And I’m sure my bout of daily headaches that same year (fifth grade) would have been much shorter if Dad hadn’t decided my squinting was an affectation and they’d had my eyes examined).

By the time I entered adolescence, their insensitivity had achieved epic proportions. Dad continued to demand that I spend one weekend day with the family (Saturday humiliation, when all I craved was some time with my friends in the public library). Mom developed ever more specific and elaborate ideas about the ensembles I should be wearing. Her response to my (normal!) complaints about my hair was to drag me to beauty colleges for brutal haircuts and primitive straightening solutions (bad as the seventh grade frizz was to my eyes, it was far worse when the straightener made my hair break off at my brow hairline; the dark brown bristle that then grew in was impossible to mask behind my bangs).

My friends had clothing allowances but I had to shop with my mother. That not only meant missing out on the mall culture (an experience more important to Mom than to me), but it also included explicit humiliations when she yelled from outside my dressing room for “a bathing suit with a bigger bottom” or otherwise broadcast what we now call TMI to staff and customers. Mom longed for me to be what she considered a normal girl – into makeup and peroxide and shrieking with the other girls – but then she restricted my ability to interact with the girls she would have me befriend. That was similar to the way she ran my “diets;” telling me not to eat sweets during the day and then offering an ice cream reward, after dinner and with her, if I had what she taught me to call a “good” day.

And every time she got mad at me, which was pretty often, she resorted to the “no common sense” and “lazy” accusations, now elaborated with the theory that my undesirable behavior was the product of a friend’s influence (the friend being whomever I wanted to be with at the time).

She was a push-me-pull-you and Dad was kind/cruel. I think his interest and affection were sincere. But he had expectations that were impossible for me to meet. He wanted me to be petite and delicate. I had inherited his medium-large frame and big features. He expected my hair to shine with young health and he acted like I prevented that by applying lotions and conditioners. But I had curls like his, humidity-tightened into frizz, and there’s no way to get our type of hair to shine. When he gave me jewelry (which happened on big occasions like my 13th and 16th birthdays), the piece was simple and classy and way too small for me to wear well (a single cultured pearl on a thin gold chain disappeared on me). The experience was painful, and that had nothing to do with the chain.

They wouldn’t let me walk alone at night, even when I was 15. They wouldn’t let me walk at night with a friend. They didn’t take my guitar-love seriously and wouldn’t help me acquire one, because Dad said that I was fickle and wouldn’t stick with it. And it wasn’t something I could take care of myself; my parents didn’t let me work till I was a senior in high school, and they set my allowance unrealistically low. As it happened, I acquired a sick used acoustic guitar with holiday/birthday money. To the extent it had any tone, I ruined it by refinishing its water-damaged body.

In similar fashion, when my eyesight (which kept getting worse till I was full-grown), had me in coke-bottle spectacles and I lusted for contact lenses, my father made me wait years, because “it takes a lot of determination to adjust to them.” (No it didn’t, I learned without surprise, when I was 18 and in college and finally allowed them).

That’s just some of it. I won’t lengthen this complaint by describing his attempts to pop my pimples or hers to govern my sex life. But I will insist on this: I did NOTHING to deserve all their shit.

I had to get married before they let me be. Not the best reason to wed. And I was by then so full of fight – not sweet or petite or shining – that I was anything but a successful wife. My parents were sad about the divorce, but not all that surprised – they’d already pegged me as difficult, and the marital result was just one more bit of evidence.

But time passes. Dad died two years ago. I promised him then I’d care for Mom. And she has become gentler as she fades. Within weeks I’ll be an old orphan. Soon I’ll have time to be sweet.