where I get tangled up

is having grown up with a mother who constantly focused this sort of distracted yet angry, judgmental kind of attention on me, while simultaneously being utterly unaware of me and what was going on with me.

The net result was that I felt constantly scrutinized, examined, subjected to this harsh, unfriendly gaze while pinned helplessly to some microscope slide under a brutal and sometimes hostile light. And yet, she wasn't really paying any attention to me at all. She was totally caught up in her feelings, her needs, her wants. It was like she was projecting everything she was feeling onto me, and then reacting as if it was my fault.

It was really like I didn't exist at all.

She couldn't see or hear me; all she could hear were the demon voices of her own childhood echoing in her head, and she'd look at me with the critical, judgmental eyes with which her parents looked at her, and she'd castigate me for merely existing. I was the screen onto which she (and my dad) projected all their childhood fears and resentments. I became merely a foil for them to empty out their venom, to take back the power they lost to their own insensitive, disinterested parents.