I do not deserve abuse.

Children in difficult houses become expert at one particular skill: reading a mood from the sound of a car door. Which speed the key turns. How the bag lands on the table.

It is a genuine expertise, and it was learned for a reason. Carried into adulthood, it arrives with a quiet piece of arithmetic attached — that if the weather can be read it can be managed, and if it can be managed, then failing to manage it must have been yours to fix.

That arithmetic is how a person keeps hold of some sense of control in a place that offered none. It is understandable. It is also not true.

Deserving never entered into it. Nothing about how you spoke, or what you needed, or how much of you there was, put it there.