When I was four at bedtime, if my mom wasn’t there, I would lie awake in my toddler bed, staring into the darkness and watching the lights swoop onto the streets outside my window. I would think about her turning the steering wheel, far away, far away, and here I was refusing to go to sleep, waiting here for her to come home safely. I would stare into the darkness with my cold blanket and my cold baby-doll, feeling so lonesome that I made test-patterns run across the walls when I squinted.

When I was five, I would follow my mother around the house, demanding, “Do you love me?” Down the basement stairs and in the kitchen and in my room and the dinner table—I was always fiercely demanding, “Do you love me?” It got so that I wouldn’t let her go to the bathroom in peace and would hang outside the door. I couldn’t bear to be separated from her. I dared her to spend any time away from her little sugar.

When I was seven, I went to the grocery store with my mother and had a meltdown. I said, “Go home to your family of four. Set a place at the table without me. I don’t exist. You don’t love me, you don’t love me, you don’t love me…”

When I was eight, I caused a family fight, because I wrote a poem about my mother not loving me enough and her always being on the phone. When she told me my poem was wrong, I knew the truth. She did love me. She did everything for me, treated me as fairly and kindly as ever. Why then was I making her feel like a rotten mother? I couldn’t explain why I was acting the way I did.

When I was nine, I wore a little T-shirt that said LOVE HELPS ME GROW. It didn’t. I remained as tiny and stick-like as ever. I could not stand to be left out of family gatherings, or I felt like I would die. I remember one episode where my mother expressed frustration at not wanting to take me with on an outing with her girlfriend. All I heard was, “But I don’t want to take Lydia!” I read that to mean, “I don’t want Lydia.” All the rage and terror in me exploded. I cried and cried for hours and said some very dark, creepy things, such as that my mother should have left me by the side of the road to die, if I was such a bother to her. My mother was disturbed and more than a little frightened at my meltdown.

Why is that no matter how hard I am loved, I always demand more? Instead of making me grow, love rushed down into my tiny depths and made me a shrinking, crying little wimp. More love. More love. It is worse than a craving for sugar and sweets that is never satisfied. It never fills the weird empty spaces inside me. Love is never OK in the measure it’s given. Or, in the words of Arianna Grande, “Love me harder!”

When you come to feel you’re the littlest child, you feel like it will be your place in the world forever. Try an undersized and underdeveloped littlest child with a high goofy giggle who is the only girl and has two older brothers. She is also homeschooled, so her relationships with girlfriends her own age are very limited. Longing so bad for a sister, having brothers who live in their own little worlds, she takes the next best thing to a sister—her mommy. She wants her mommy to be her sister and spend all her time playing with her. That’s not going to work. Clinging day and night to mommy and begging for reassurance of love is not a sign of mental health in a little kid.

I was never the same way with my dad as I was with my mom. When my dad was home, when I was a toddler, I would cry and scream if I saw him. He was a stranger to me. From ages two to eight, my life revolved around him like water rushes around a stone. I ran past him to my mom. Only she understood. Daddy just went to work and came home and said weird things. Once my dad screamed at me for borrowing his expensive package-tape to tape snow together in the front yard. How in Heaven’s name did I think I could tape frozen water droplets? Stupidly, I hadn’t thought of that. He had hardly ever spoken to me before, so his yelling came as a deep blow.

When my dad tried to “rediscover” me, to find out who this daughter Lydia person was—well, I was irritated for some reason. My dad is irritating to me. When he gets near me, it’s odd and silly and awkward. My dad and I are so different in our personalities. We’re like snow. Our relationship is like taping snow. Even the most ordinary conversation with him is rough, difficult, abrasive, and frustrating.

What do you do with a dad like mine? He seems obsessed with me, but then again, he knows very little about me. He knows only very dimly what I do in my spare time and has vague ideas about my personality. When I am angry or sad, he lets my mom deal with it. That’s OK stuff for a dad who isn’t around all the time. But still…

Talking to him is hard, far harder than talking to my mom. My mom’s personality is imbedded deep inside me; we think the same way. We are the same soul. We could both look at a river and be silent or be silly, and there would be this understanding. But my dad only sees in me what he sees in himself. Anything he hasn’t felt, he has no idea about. He gropes around in my words and tries to think of some intellectual, moral, or spiritual meaning behind them that he’s heard of elsewhere.

I am now the only child at home. For years, I was a troublemaker, demanding more love and attention and complaining about how hard it was to be the youngest. Now that those big brothers of mine are out of the way, I’m the only one in my parents’ immediate eyeshot. No more sibling rivalry. Bliss. Freedom. Is it better this way?

 No, it’s not better, being the only kid at home. They expect too much of me. You see, my parents gave up raising my brothers right many long years ago. Joe was the rebel, the prodigal, the difficult boy who pulled their tempers to the limits and finally wrenched loose from any trace of their influence. It didn’t take long before a cussing fit from Joe brought only a slight rebuke or an eye-rolling from my parents. With Joe, they faced threats from drugs, violence, dropping out of school, and arrest. He escaped by the skin of his teeth into adulthood. My brother, David, defied everyone’s hopes and dreams that he would be even remotely normal. He is an autistic and cannot do anything for himself. He cannot be let out of anyone’s sight because of his elopement. Once, when he was a tiny child, we actually thought he would be normal, just for one shining moment, but then he quickly declined into being nonverbal and nonfunctional. The best we can get from David is visiting him at his group home and making sure he is properly taken care of there. So I am the only one left whom my parents have any control over. Joe and David are beyond their control. My parents had me because they wanted a little sane girl in the midst of two crazy boys. That’s frankly my purpose in life—to be my parents’ last hope for a sweet, darling progeny who would not disappoint them.

They had me because their sun was setting fast. They knew there would be no more babies after me. So they firmly stamped everything that was valuable in them and put it into me. My parents’ features live in me with a peculiar fierceness and firmness. I look like my dad more than anyone—my dark skin and my forehead. Also, I have my mom’s stature, my mom’s talent, and my mom’s personality. Both of them gave me their Asberger’s syndrome. They gave me all they could and then clamped me firmly at home, when the rest of my generation’s ocean was rushing off into public school. I was homeschooled so that they could keep stamping their ideas on me and sealing me up and addressing me to the mailbox of their dreams.

My life is my parents’ letter to the world. I am still about to drop into the mailbox. I’m just hanging by the tips of their fingers. Seventeen years old. In nine months, they will drop me down all the way and hope and pray I get to my right destination. My core values are their core values. They’re sealed with the strongest wax so that I never let go of them.

My parents are too dependent on me. In a way, I am the parent and they are the child. They look up to me to help them spiritually, if you can get such a crazy idea. Me? Help my parents? No thank you. They’re supposed to help me, not depend on me! That’s why, whenever I am in an adolescent ditch that anyone else would run to their parents’ help for, I run away from them, because I know they can’t handle it. They can’t handle my flaws. They will take my rejection very, very personally. I can wound them as Joe and David do not have power to wound them. It’s crazy—they are love-starved and approval-seeking from me, as I once was from them.

It’s a contradiction. My dad makes very bold spiritual statements in the tone of a prophet on a mountain, defying the devil, and then, a few minutes later, he is practically falling apart inside…because of a teenager’s opinion of him. How do I describe this?

It’s painful to hear my dad say things like, “I can’t be perfect!” in the tone of an overachieving child, when he’s talking to me. That is not the way normal parents talk to their kids. It’s wrong. They think they are sheltering me, but I have to shelter them.

If I am my parents’ letter to the world, do I really exist? Who am I? It seems that I am just the sum total of what parents want me to be. My mother wants me to be a sensitive person, perhaps a teacher or a missionary, most certainly a writer. My dad wants me to think like him, outside the box and quirky and Christian. All that they see in me is what they hope to find in themselves. That’s why they look me in the eyes, and tell me to do better than they did when they were young. They think I will carry all their good traits and be different from them.

I don’t know if I can do that. I know I won’t…

I am clutched so firmly that I squirm at the bottom of my parents’ dream-nets. Sometimes all I want is to escape from Mom and Dad, but that thought is terrifying also. If I am going to find myself, what next? I will know then that I am all alone. Just a great big hole of aloneness, what will I find to fill me? Stepping into the unknown and escaping people’s illusions of me is one of the hardest things I could ever do. I might as well take a bite from the moon while I’m at it.

Joe and David were not mama’s boys. They had it easier, being so openly weird and dysfunctional. They just flew off the deep end into madness at early ages, and nobody has quite seen them since then. But I am still hanging at the edge of madness.

“Jump off into madness,” Joe tells me. “The wind is great!”

“Stay in the nest,” my parents tell me. “The view is better when it’s steady and stable, when you’re not flying. Get yourself used to the view first, and then fly.”

It’s hard to not exist. To only live in people’s imaginations. To be the Halfway Normal Person in your family. To be a positive note on the end of the bitter symphony that is your family. To hold yourself together so your parents are OK.

All my life, I’ve been clingy and oversensitive. I’ve had this fierce desire for love, love, love and more love. Whenever I was scolded, I felt traumatized for not being loved enough. I would cry and scream for people to love me more. Deep inside me at night, I can still smell the staircase of my old house where I sat all balled up in a little heap, screaming inside, help me, help me, help me, I’m running out of love.

Bundle of contradictions. There’s this terrible contradiction in me. One part of me is a love-starved child who wants her loving parents to love her even more. The other part of me is a strange girl who wants her loving parents to love her less so she can find out who she truly is and feel the wind scrape her face raw as she flies. Love me…no, hate me! I look out at the world and then run back to my parents’ love. I run back to my parents’ love, and then I want the world again. I am unstable and unsteady, a tossing wave, hating love and loving love at the same time.

Try and make sense of that. It makes no sense. I make no sense.

Crazy.