As a child I was desperate for emotional attachment. As an emerging adult I longed for love. It was absent in my family home, and what took its place seemed an eternity of gloom, an ongoing storm of anger. Where children require emotional stability and the comfort of love, there seemed only to be a routine of hurtful accusations and loud misery. Symbols of love, caresses, hugs, verbal assurances were not part of the daily life that greeted me and my siblings.

Of course, I was aware of those constant verbal assaults my father withered under, and felt myself to be similarly bombarded, but gave little thought to the ongoing trials that my younger brothers and sister were also exposed to. It was only later, much later, that my sister, four years my junior, informed me what a hell their lives also had been, living with my mother. My mother was a good and decent human being, but a dreadful mother. Only in the sense of withholding supportive, loving emotions from her children. Otherwise, she was attentive to our material needs, and food was always there for us.

I was anxious to leave that toxic environment. And I did, when I was married at age 18. My husband's own home environment was discordantly dysfunctional and lacking in parental love and guidance. When we met at age fourteen our fate together was set. Fifty-eight years later, love continues to radiate between us. The continual warmth of his loving gaze, his reassuring smile has comforted me and given me the assurance in life I needed. His humour and intelligence have been a bulwark of sustainable respect and shared love.

Before my mother succumbed to the frontal-lobe dementia that finally succeeded in shutting down all her bodily functions leading her to death, she once said to me, over the telephone, that she loved all her children equally. The word love out of her mouth came as a surprise. The reality was that identifiable love was withheld equally from all her children. I assume that as she was raised so did she raise her children.

We did the opposite with our children; surrounding them with palpable and unrestrained love, evidenced physically, emotionally, emotively. We were determined to raise children unhampered by the emotional conflict of uncertainty that they were valued, cherished for what and who they were. My sister's reward is two children coping with life in bi-polar-afflicted challenges, and a grandchild as old now as my husband and I were when we first met, with deep-seated autism and related problems.

She muses now over how she feels about our mother in retrospect, wonders whether she was capable of loving her. She and the older of my two brothers looked after the welfare of our mother when she was institutionalized; to them fell the entire brunt of that duty of loving children. That particular brother is a social recluse, likely himself an undiagnosed Asperger-syndrome victim.

My sister is a chronic sufferer of sleep deprivation, little wonder she is always tired. She is legally blind, the result of a birth procedure where a forceps delivery impacted her so deleteriously in later life. She feels herself surrounded and engulfed with living evidence of human suffering. I am perhaps more emotionally resilient than she is, but then I also have not, since my liberation from the close confines of an emotionally-stifling childhood, suffered the endemic familial woes that she has been exposed to.