FAMILY DYSFUNCTION
My Parents Don’t Know How to Love
When you grieve toxic, abusive parents, you don’t just grieve the abuse, you grieve everything you didn’t have — Lily Hope Lucario
I didn’t get to experience a solid loving relationship with my mother or my father. When I finally unpacked my troubled mind with my therapist last year, I honestly knew no words to describe what my emotions were. I just felt as if there was a big void in my heart or better still, a numbness that resided in my stomach whenever I thought about them. I can see now it was emotional scar tissue — the final formation — after decades of grief and abandonment.
Back then, when I reflected on my circumstances, I would distinctly remind myself that there are so many people in the world who have it far worse in life. Their parents have sold them or starved them — and far more harrowing stories that are inflicted on countless dear children. My motto was and is, ‘It could always be worse.’ How Yiddish of me; the heroism of my ancestry in staying strong and determined — perhaps? My daughter despises that idiom. She wants me to value the cause that is penetrating our conversations, whether hers or mine.
