Nonightowl, this is so familiar to me. And tragic. I suspect my mother's unresponsiveness was also handed-down, and was a generational thing. I did hear on several occasions how cold, stern, and tightly-wound my maternal grandmother was.

The thing that saved us was the love that was shown by my paternal grandparents. And thank goodness for it!

I am reminded from time to time that there were also some pretty wacky child-rearing theories that were floated around in the forties, fifties, and early sixties. I did not know this until college, when I had to take Child Development courses. One of those theories stated something like, "children should never be the focus of attention", and that "they should never be complimented." That was eye-opening for me. And, of course, it was all wrong; bass-ackwards so to speak. But it might have been picked up as legitimate because "child experts" said it, and people ran with it. Who knows? That could have led to several more generations of confused and bewildered children, for sure.

I always felt so strange. There were a lot of secrets in our house. But I found out later that just about every family on our street had some kind of major dysfunction going on, somewhere, somehow, in their family. It made me sad, knowing that just about everyone I knew was experiencing (and desperate to hide the fact) the kind of loneliness and pain that comes with these experiences. But it DID tell me perhaps there were bigger forces at work than just my freaky, sad little family unit....which was a comfort, of a sort.