I was probably… last week old when I found out that my mother had gotten me less than a quarter of the recommended shots as a child. I never did the HepB shot series when I was young, and that came out in 1986 and I was born that same year. I never got the chicken pox shot as a child. It seems like she stopped taking me to well visits when I was six years old as per documentation, but at some point I remember the school sending her a nastygram because I was not up-to-date on shots in middle school. She got me those, but she made it clear throughout the entire process that this was the most inconvenient thing ever for her… caring for me was. I never got a single flu shot while I was a minor, and those did come out at around that time, so I easily could have if she had ever been bothered enough to take proper care of me. She did not consent to treatment of large cavities in my front teeth when she did take me to the dentist, and she did not consent for braces to be put on me when I exhibited need for them and my dad made more than enough money for this to be an easily covered expense. She told me, just as she did whenever she wasn’t going to do something for me, “We’re not doing that.” And when I began exhibiting symptoms of depression as an adolescent and told her, she fabricated the lie of “having to wait for something to come in the mail before she could schedule it”. I literally asked her each day for months if “it” had come in the mail yet — finally she just told me the truth, that she was not going to schedule me an appointment to be seen for depression.

When I was in elementary school, it was frequently suggested to her by people who worked with me that I might be neurodiverse with the strong hint there that she should arrange testing for me. Obviously this never happened. (Instead, whenever she got mad at me she would scream in my face “that I had mental problems”. I was a young elementary school student when she did this.) Throughout the time that I spent in school, she frequently had it suggested to her that I get tested for asthma. Because she did not want to do this, she scared me about the test to the point that I was scared to do that and then she used that as an excuse never to get me tested while I was a child. I was just simply told to quit, or not participate in, sports.

This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the neglect that my mother foist upon me when I was a child.