Anne Lamott from Small Victories

The reality that most of us lived our first decades feeling welcome only when certain conditions applied: we felt safe and embraced only when the parental units were getting along, when we were on our best behavior, doing well in school, not causing problems, and had as few needs as possible. If you needed more from them, best of luck.
It also doesn't help that the planet is not nearly as hospitable as one might have hoped.

In the beginning there was implantation which was either the best or the worst news, and then God or life did some voodoo knitting that created each of us. We came into the world one by one. The next thing we knew, we were at the dinner table with delusional unhappy people, who drank, or should have drunk,and who simultaneously had issues with rigidity and no boundaries. These people seemed to go out of there way to make it clear that we were not the children they'd had in mind. You were thwarting their good intentions with your oddness and your bad posture.

They liked to think their love was unconditional. That's nice. Sadly though, the child who showed up at the table for meals was not the child the parents had set out to make. They seemed surprised all over again. They'd already forgotten from breakfast.

The parental units were simply duplicating what they'd learned when they were small. That's the system.

It wasn't that you got the occasional feeling that you were an alien or a chore to them. You just knew that attention had to be paid constantly to their moods, their mental health levels, their rising irritation, and the volume of beer consumed. Yes there were many happy memories marbled in, too, of picnics, pets, beaches. But I will remind you now that inconsistency is how experimenters regularly drive lab rats over the edge.

Maybe they knew the child was onto them, could see through them,could see the truth,could see how cracked, unstable and distant they were. We knew there most intimate smells sounds and vulnerabilities, like tiny spies. The whole game in the fifties and early sixties was for no one to know who you really were. We children were witness to the total pretense of how our parents wanted the world to see them. We helped them maintain this image, because if anyone outside the family could see wo they really were deep down, the whole system, the ship of your family, might sink. We held our breath to give the ship buoyancy. We were like little air tanks.

They knew deep down they were manic depressive crazy people, but they wanted others to see them as good family men and women, peaceful warriors,worker bees,and activists who were making the world safe for democracy. Their kids knew about their tempers and vices, but the kids were under the wizard's spell and also under the constant threat of exile or hunger.

The silver lining to this is that since the world we came into is an alcoholic, sick, wounded, wounding place, we also ended up with an owner's manual for dealing with craziness. We knew how to keep secrets. Also our parents came with siblings who adored us, because we were not theirs. They actually got me. When I'd come through the door, the expression on my uncles' and aunts' faces would be so happy. There she is! There's Annie. Isn't she something? The way the looked across the table at me, with pleasure and wonder, taught me what love looked like.

- Anne Lamott, from Small Victories The Book of Welcome pg 18-20