I'm not going into the nature of my abuse in this post, obviously everybody here knows it's horrible. But I remember that as a child, and even as an adult when I was still in contact with my parents, my mom would make a tremendous fuss out of holidays. You had to get all dressed up. Everything had to be perfect. House perfectly clean. Your hair freshly washed. Not to mention the gifts, on holidays where gift-giving was involved - they had to be extravagant. You had to show that you were super excited to be given something super expensive, otherwise my mom would get offended.
Now, I wonder if this was some distorted attempt at replacing the real love that was missing from our family? I have a family of my own now, and when my husband took me on a suprise mini-biketour on my birthday when I was 6 months pregnant, stopped at a confectionary on the way back and came out with a big smile and 2 pieces of cake to go, I was way more delighted than at any of my mom's staged, extravagant gifts. When my son ran around among the colorful balloons I just blew up for him and put in a huge cardboard box yesterday because I felt like it, seeing him so happy filled me up with pure joy. Like, this is it, this is all I ever need in life. My husband and I also share little moments of joy in everyday life, like when we all had the flu, but we just happened to notice that our toddler was wearing brown socks and he looked like a little bear :) Or when we think there's no ketchup left but we discover a fresh bottle in the pantry.
That sort of stuff never happened when I was a kid. I was only allowed to be proud of results and accomplishments and happy about posessions and basically ashamed the rest of the time for existing. I just wonder if anyone else has noticed this particular contrast. Tldr little happy moments in normal life vs big theatrical moments versus abuse/neglect in childhood.