You were the child - you were never the problem
"Facade: a deceptive outward appearance."
Growing up, I was never really happy. I could never quite put my finger on why, though. I had a roof over my head, clothes that fit, I never went hungry, I got a good education... Any time I displayed my emotions, I was always told that these things meant I had nothing to be sad about. It took a long time and many years before I realised there's a lot more to raising a child than what is really the bare minimum. There is more to raising a child than just physically keeping them alive, and I wish someone had told me that earlier on in my life. Deep down I could never shake that niggling feeling that something wasn't quite right, but I was constantly reminded of how ungrateful I was being and how much worse my life could've been so I usually just assumed I was being dramatic and self-centred. Mum would always talk about how much she sacrificed for me (mostly her own happiness), how ungrateful and selfish I was, how her childhood was so awful that I had no right to say I didn't like mine. She always had a negative comment to make - I couldn't talk about anything I was remotely interested in without her making a snide comment about it. She could never accept that I was just a bit "different" (undiagnosed autism, it turns out, but she hated the thought of having a disabled child so that wasn't figured out until much later). She surrounded herself with a small group of people that enabled her, including my dad, but he isn't entirely innocent either.