Hey, all. I want to clear a few things up. My parents didn't neglect me, in the sense that I was a baby screaming for attention, rattling in its crib. They honestly wanted the best for me. They're both still alive (we're not speaking). (This is probably going to be a long post, but at least it'll be well-written).
Everything was fine in my house hold until my older sister hit high school. She then went through her rebellious phase (dyed her hair black, got a nose piercing, wore goth close, changed all her friends, etc.) My parents (especially my mother) are both from very stiff-upper-lip conservative families and had no idea how to deal with her. Half the time I'd come home from school and I'd find my Mom crying in her bedroom. Eventually I got so sick of it that I locked the door to her room from the outside so she couldn't go in and cry, but she would just drive off in her car and cry. It got to a point where my best friend wouldn't even have to ask where my Mom was; she was just always upstairs, crying.
The slightest thing would set her off: a tree was cut down in our yard, so she cried. She tried helping me put a tie on but I brushed her off and so she cried. This happened all the time.
My Dad, being a doctor, spent most of his time on-call, meaning he'd have to get up at 2:00 am and go to the hospital. I don't want to say, "Oh, he was a terrible father because he was never around," but, yeah, he was gone a lot of the time. If there's a grudge I have against him, it's that because of his work (and my mother, being a nurse) would always come home and talk about the various things they had seen on the job. That was fine, but the problem was that, well, all they saw all day were horrible things like head trauma and broken wrists and legs and necks, concussions, etc. So they discouraged me from doing anything active. Skiing would lead to a fractured wrist ("We see that all the time".) Football would lead to post-anterioal-gobbledy-medical-jargon bone compressions. The lesson to be learned? Don't do anything. Drive safely, because you could flip your car and end up with a dysmexic-alpha-class hip contusion. Careful riding your bike, because you could end up with a sub-partoreal hemotoma in your skull. And for God's sake don't drink or try drugs, because you could irrevocably alter your brain's neuroplasticity. Just go to school, come home.
I just don't know if I would consider this to be neglect.
My sister failed her driver's license test but I passed, and so I got the task of driving home her boyfriends. She never came with me, she always just "got tired". There was no arguing with my father on this, it was just "do it." After all, the hospital could phone at any time and he would have to leave. My mom would be in her room, crying.
My father told me over and over not to do anything to upset my mother. I can hear it in my head. "Don't upset your mother. Don't upset your mother." If my sister had an essay to write for school, my dad forced me to write/edit it for her. If I didn't, the line of thinking was my sister will freak out, my mom will cry. If this can be prevented by having me write her papers for her, do it.
When my sister eventually moved out and got her own apartment, I went to her housewarming party. At that point she said, "There are going to be a lot people doing drugs here and they're not comfortable with you around, so leave." So I left.
I can't count the number of conversations my parents and I had about what to do about my sister. Should we (god, it's so obvious now that I was practically a co-parent) kick her out of the house? Cut her off financially? Change the locks on the doors? Call the police the next time she goes on a screaming rampage?
My sister was adored by all of her friends at school (she's very attractive) but she was completely two-faced. I don't know if this was her way of dealing with my Dad always working and my mother always crying, but if something didn't go her way she would shout and scream and scream and shout. I think is the reason that I have problems around beautiful women; I think that they look great on the surface, but if they're anything like my sister, they're seconds aware from screaming at me. It's like they're ticking time-bombs.
In the midst of all of this, I was completely panicking at school, at home, everywhere. I would get all the horrible body symptoms and feel like death was moments away. There was no safe place. There was no safe person. I had no idea what the hell was wrong with me, and I spent countless hours in washrooms in restaurants, at school, at the mall, movie theatres, locked in bathroom stalls, either sure that I was going to die on the spot, or slapping myself in the face telling me to "snap out of it." I couldn't decide what was wrong with me, so I kept saying, "It's not your body, it's your mind. No, it's not your mind, it's your body." Back and forth, forever.
I could escape the situation at home (which I thought was normal) at high school, but I was very badly bullied by a girl there. I still don't know what I ever did to upset her. She would cut me down in front of her friends, make snide remarks., etc. I had no idea how to stand up for myself. At one point she took my music folder (I was in the band) and hid it under the sink in a washroom so I was forced to copy all my music out from the conductor's score by hand. There was no end to it. I tried everything I could to be friendly to her, but it only made things worse.
My parents (especially my mother) had a strict "we don't talk about sex" rule, to the point where if they rented a movie and there was a love scene, my mother would fast-forward it. My Mom took the family to see A Chorus Line, but when the song started about a girl who wanted surgery to enhance her chest and her butt started, my Mom made all of us walk out. Eventually I connected my panic attacks with my sexual thoughts about the girls in high school. I thought if only I could not be a sexual person, the panic would go away. I thought God was punishing me with panic attacks for how I would steal glances down their shirts when they leaned forward. I thought he was punishing me for, how to put this delicately, taking matters into my own hands.
I prayed and prayed and prayed to God to either just kill me or take my panic attacks from me, but he never did. Eventually I concluded that God didn't exist because he wasn't answering my prayers. I was trying to be the best, most perfect son I could be, and I didn't deserve what was happening to me.
I don't want to turn this thread into a religious one, but after the hell of high school and panic attacks, I cannot, will not and never in the future will believe in God, Jesus or the like.
I loved music, so my parents got me a piano teacher. But they had to have the best for their son, so instead of just getting "some guy", I took lessons from a teacher who was 84-years-old, had a doctorate in music, earned The Order of Canada, and was blind. I remember not wearing a tie to a recital and was forced to write lines. I once had to take a Greyhound bus home from a school trip so that I could play in a recital. My lessons were, well...I don't know what to say. Basically, I was taught that if you couldn't play something perfectly, not to play it. It was never about going in and making music, it was about going in and pressing the keys in the right order and avoiding mistakes at all costs. I think this is where my perfectionism started.
So, to sum this all up: fighting at home, two-faced sister, father always working, mother locked in her bedroom crying all the time, bullied at school, a cultivated sense of perfectionism.
I just don't know if I would call this neglect, that's all.