Cruel in A Childhood Lost

Cruelty is pleasure in inflicting suffering or inaction towards another’s suffering when a clear remedy is readily available.
My therapist brought up this word as a response to more than one story I had about my mother. At first I was surprised to hear it. After another week of digesting what my therapist had to say, I began to realize that she was correct.
I cannot understand much of my mother’s behavior because I can clearly see a path to less suffering that she steadfastly avoids. This sentiment is one that has defined my perception of her for longer than I care to admit. I suppose I need to get connected with that lack of care. I should care to find out, and to admit, how long she has been this way towards me.
As I drive, I often use that time to reflect and to think critically about my experiences. I am sure that most people have the experience of going over interactions in their mind days, weeks, or even years after they happened. It’s as if I know that I should have done something different; I could have prevented that situation; I wasn’t my best; but I have not learned why. And that is why I keep thinking of it. It will come back and back and back until my dying day if I do not learn the lesson that is there for me. And, I can attest to the fact that, once the lesson is learned, those thoughts do go away. I am no longer haunted by a great number of them.
But, this is a more recent revelation regarding my mom. I’ve always had the experience that my brother I were timid, silent prisoners of my parents. We were regularly forced, intimidated, manipulated or coerced into doing whatever they wanted. Neither of us had the bravery to ask what was going on. We would sit in quiet anxiety for nearly ever car ride, wondering where we were going. My parents might deign to explain their actions to us if they were feeling nice, or if the guilt of toting around terrified passengers got to them. In reality, I can only imagine what their motivation or thoughts were, because they never told us.
And, I can only think; if only they were open about what they were doing, if only they told us their intent, they would not have to force and manipulate. They wouldn’t have to endure the misery and guilt and exhaustion of authoritative dictating. They could find happiness in the simple relation between parent and child, and find achievement, satisfaction, pride, in the outcome of every negotiation.
Because a parent has the opportunity to teach the child how to negotiate, and then to benefit from that child’s ability to negotiate! It is a win-win, from any perspective. Yet a parent that entirely neglects their child finds that their child is suddenly asking about logic and reason and how the world works, they are flooded with guilt that they themselves had nothing to do with teaching, showing, modeling, or even simply witnessing their child up to that point. It is a stark reminder that they are not a parent, but a biological prisoner of their own making. Parenting is something that you do.
And so, the non-parent must resort to authoritative positioning. Which of course works only for so long. It is only a matter of time you know, before children outgrow your superiority physically, and even mentally. While you decline, they grow and rise to their peak.
We really should be having children during our peak years. As parents, we really owe that to our kids. We owe them our very best- physically, mentally, emotionally. If you really believe that children are people (they are) then you have the highest responsibility to them to provide them with no less than exactly the absolute best of yourself.

I don’t think my parents had any sense of this at all.
In fact I think that they believed the exact opposite.
It seemed to me, and still seems, that they believe and behave as if I owe them things. I owe them respect. I owe them love. I owe them affection. I owe them time. I owe them attention. I owe them kindness. I owe them consideration, understanding, compassion, sacrifice, care, vulnerability, receptiveness, openness, obedience.
But in reality. I don’t owe them a goddam thing.
Not one thing.
They took from me all of those things that they owed to me and created in me a perception of debt to them. And for some ungodly reason, they have the audacity to be offended when I point it out.