My mom was an intellectual enigma. She was smart and disciplined enough to hold a management position in nursing for decades, kept an excellent credit score, got me to baseball practice, sewed my patches on my scout uniform perfectly. But her opinions on matters - on politics, society, art - were binary and jaw-droppingly simple to the point of being facile and vapid. I reckoned by early adolescence she was no phi beta kappa. She was abandoned by her mother as a pre-schooler and raised by an apathetic father and although she was never spanked that didn't stop her from adopting the practice with fury. When she spanked it was purely from rage and it would go on until she was exhausted. She hit me with my toys and other household objects on my naked legs until she was spent. And if physical abuse wasnt enough she was happy to ignore me for hours or days no matter how earnestly I may have tried to win her forgiveness. She made me wear signs around my neck when she was annoyed. One said "I am a crybaby", the other said "I am a grouch". I'd have to wear them outside so the neighborhood kids could see. Humiliation was the point.

My dad did not discipline me but neither did he try to to protect me. He was a terrific provider and he supported and championed me through all that I did. He was also a quiet racist- the kind that waits until proper company to complain about ESL immigrants and how white males are America's most victimized demographic. He told me once, apropos of nothing, that he'd rather find out I was gay than ever find out I'd fucked a black girl. I suppose that made him homophobic as well. I did not tell him then that I already had fucked a black girl. In retrospect I ought to have but college needed paying for.

I dearly loved them, however, and wanted their affection even as I began to rebel against them in nearly all things they prioritized, chiefly academic performance. I was tested gifted and high IQ in kindergarten and it was decided by them that I would track as a doctor or judge or some similarly statused position but I committed academic suicide starting in middle school partly by choice and partly courtesy of the ADHD and CPTSD I'd developed. The music I rebelled with was Boomer music - Beatles, Stones, etc... - which they as Silent Gens who anesthetized themselves with stuff like Ray Conniff and Mitch Miller - could not relate to and abhorred.