I should have been aborted.

By my own logic, I should never have been born.  I do not think that people who cannot afford children should have them.

My parents couldn’t afford children.  My mother raised me on WIC and food stamps.  I went through my childhood with only the bare minimum of clothing, food, medical care. 

I wish…they hadn’t had me.

It’s hard, being a child, and being constantly aware of the costs associated with your rearing.

I knew, for example, that becoming sick or injured was bad.  Injury and illness were expensive.  I learned to hide my pain, to bear it, to treat my own injuries, to go without medical care even when it was necessary.

I once suffered through six weeks of strep throat before I caved in and acknowledged it wasn’t going to clear up on its own.  Six.  Weeks.  That’s a long fucking time to avoid solid foods and speaking.

The last winter I lived with my parents, we couldn’t afford to pay the heating bill, and so we went without.  It was an amazingly cold winter.  I don’t think it got above 0 F for about a month in January and February.  I learned how to bundle up, how to dress in layer upon layer upon layer.

I knew the cost of these things, and I knew we didn’t have the money, and I hated myself for wanting them.  I learned to resent myself the same way I perceived my parents resented me. 

My father once told me that having children ruined his life.  I could see his point.  All I ever did was take, and I was so fucking expensive.

I bullshitted myself out of therapy when I was 16 because I didn’t want my parents to have to pay the bills.  I failed to understand that my own well-being was important enough, SHOULD HAVE BEEN important enough, to spend money on.

It was bad enough that I was diabetic, and needed constant doctor’s visits, and medications, and expensive sugar-free things to survive.

In retrospect, I am beginning to see that it wasn’t my fault.  When they conceived me, and didn’t abort me, they were made an agreement to provide me with things like medical care, and food, and warm shelter.  That’s what parents are doing when they have children.  They are agreeing to give that child a good life.

My parents failed.  They did not provide me with these things, and worse, they allowed me (and in some ways, encouraged me) to hate myself for their mistakes.  They let me think I was a shitty, ungrateful person because I wanted things like heat, and dental work, and a house that had running water.

They.  Failed.  Me.

And no matter how much I love them, or want to forgive them, I don’t think it changes the fact that they failed. 

I don’t know if I want to forgive them.  I know that I don’t want them to feel like failures.  Clearly, they did some things right.  I’m not delinquent, at least.  I’m reasonably law abiding.  But I’m not going to go so far as to say I’m a functional adult.  I am not.

I am stunted. 

My parents raised a child who thinks it is okay to go six weeks with strep throat.  Who thinks it’s too much to ask for things like stability, safety, and reassurance.  Who hates herself for wanting things.  Anything.  Who has no regard at all for her own health, both physical and mental.

This, I feel, I can blame on them.  As much as I strain to shoulder the burden of my own failings, as prone as I am to blame myself for things, I am going to take a stand and say it is NOT irrational for me to place the blame for this on them. 

I was their child and they made me feel like a burden.

And now I strive only to be as small of one as possible.