This is how sick, damaged and destructive people who can never be wrong are. They will do anything to prove they can’t be wrong. For example:

Their eight year-old kid is upset and no matter how many times mom and dad assure the kid there is nothing to be upset about, the stubborn little bastard insists he’s upset. In fairness, this could be very upsetting to a certain type of parent, one who feels responsible for their child’s well-being but truly doesn’t know how to sit with upsetting feelings themselves, let alone help someone else with them. Imagine how upsetting it is to them to see their child upset! The natural thing for this type to do is escalate things until the upset person is way more upset than they are.

Now they are talking about the basic lack of courage in the child, his self-pity, his sadness, his completely irrational anger. These things are bad, each of them, and together constitute a pathetic excuse for a human personality. They are reflections of a lack of character. They are sad predictors of a miserable life of failure and blaming others for his problems. They remind the boy how angry he was as a newborn baby, furious and hostile, all the time, for no goddamned reason.

Eventually the kid starts glaring at his accusers. This reaction is what they were going for the whole time, though they couldn’t have put into words. Now that the kid is angry on top of being upset, he stares at his parents angrily. The moment is right to strike:

“Look at his face,” the father will sputter, “twisted and contorted with hate.”

My younger sister and I heard this phrase often enough that we both quoted it to each other and laughed about it, back in the years when we were still talking to each other.

To show a face twisted and contorted with hate (isn’t a contorted face always twisted, a twisted one always contorted? Isn’t the overkill of the one two punch a tell?) is different than protesting that your feelings are always dismissed, or calmly stating that as an eight year-old you need to be heard by your parents when you are upset. A face twisted and contorted with hate is the despicable face of a klansman at a lynching, a Nazi, some kind of hate-filled sick fuck who can’t be reasoned with. Certainly not the face of a child who deserves to be heard when he is upset, reassured with kindness.

My father apologized for his abusiveness the last night of his life, and it was good to hear, but the damage had long ago been done. I was close to fifty the first time my father apologized for being a monster as a father. The next evening he was gone.

We are left holding a heavy bag, full of the weighty things our parents were too overwhelmed to carry themselves. It is passed on, endlessly, until someone gets the insight to put the fucking thing down. In that moment she can finally untwist and un-contort her face and feel not a hint of hatred toward those who did their flawed human best to love her.