“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” ~Toni Morrison, Beloved
My father was on the other side of my bedroom door, banging hard on it with the flat of his hand, screaming at me to get back to the table and finish my plate.
I told him there was no way I was going anywhere near my sister after she’d just hit me.
That’s when he said the thing that gutted me.
“Well, you know, I used to give your mother a good swift kick in the ass when she deserved it. You act like that, and you get what you deserve.”
I was maybe fourteen. I remember my darkened bedroom, the window unit air conditioning humming loudly as water droplets dripped from it, the damp, stark coldness of the room, my bedroom door, the hallway light underneath it, my own breathing. I don’t remember much of anything that evening after that.
What I do remember is that up to that point, my father had spent my entire life denying he ever laid a hand on my mother. Denied it during the divorce. Denied it to her parents. And here he was, in two sentences, confirming it and using it to tell me I’d earned my sister’s slap.
The pain in the ass finally had a name—and for once, it wasn’t mine.
I just didn’t know that yet. It would take me another forty-five years to figure it out.
The Dinner Table
Here’s what led up to that door.
For as long as I can remember, dinner with my dad came with a side of commentary, and the commentary was always about me. I was a picky eater, and every single meal—not most, every—my father would regularly bring it up. How long I was taking. How much I talked. How I’d negotiate for dessert like I was closing a business deal.
He had a voice he saved just for mocking me. It was nasal, pinched, annoying as hell, like a cartoon villain doing a bad impression of a little girl. In that voice, he’d say, “How many bites ‘til I get dessert?”
He said it teasingly, like it was a bit we were doing together, but we weren’t. A bit you’d sit through every dinner you shared with your dad during your childhood stops being a bit. It becomes the story of who you are.
He called me a pain in the ass. Royal pain in the ass. Not once. Constantly.
And here’s the detail that I sat with for decades but could never reconcile: my sister could leave her plate half-eaten and ask for dessert too, and it never landed on her. It was never about the plate. It was all about me.
I had a sister four years older, and she was, by any measure, the more remarkable of the two of us. Physically very attractive. A gifted student, a varsity-lettered athlete, had a flair for playing musical instruments, for singing, too, and even became multilingual by the time she was a young woman.
I was, by comparison, aggressively average.
Nothing about me stood out on paper. What did stand out—what none of us had language for yet—was that she was also mentally ill and could even be physically dangerous when she unraveled. I write about how that impacted me in Why Being Ignored Causes Such Deep Pain and Damage, so I won’t retell it all here.
What matters for this piece is just this: in a house where one daughter was breaking, at times dangerously, in ways the adults couldn’t or wouldn’t fully face, the other daughter’s dinner-table chatter became a very convenient place to put his anger and frustration.
I became the family’s designated and annoying pain in the ass. It was a role. I didn’t know that yet either.
The Night It Became Permanent
The one summer afternoon, I’m fourteen-ish, visiting my dad and sister in New York, my sister and I go get ice cream downtown. Baskin-Robbins. Nothing unusual about that. That night at dinner, my father starts in on me—the same routine; this time it was about my eating ice cream before dinner. It was always something.
I looked at my sister’s plate. Not empty. Looked at mine. Looked him in the eye and said something like, “How come you always come for me, and you never say anything about the fact that Jill was right there with me eating the same ice cream and didn’t finish her plate either?”
That pissed her off. She lunged across the table at me so fast I barely saw it coming. I was out of my chair, trying to get away, and she caught my back with an open hand hard enough to leave a mark. I ran past my father and locked myself in my room.
That’s the bedroom door this piece opened on. And the brutal sentence that was uttered on the other side of it.
I want to be precise about why that sentence did so much damage, because it wasn’t just that it was cruel. It’s that it fused two things together that had no business being fused: the violence he’d always denied and the idea that I was the kind of person who brought violence on herself.
In one breath, he told on himself and blamed me for it.
I didn’t have the tools at fourteen to separate those two things. So I didn’t. I just absorbed both of them as fact.
What Forty-Five Years of Being “the Pain in the Ass” Actually Cost Me
Here’s a piece of the puzzle I only discovered recently. A 2025 meta-analysis published in Child Development combined sixty-five studies and more than 19,000 adolescents and found a measurable link between growing up with a critical, rejecting parent-child dynamic and a teenager’s tendency toward shame.
It wasn’t simply the absence of warmth that mattered most. It was the active presence of criticism, rejection, and love that came with conditions attached. The specific, repeated message that you were only acceptable when you behaved a certain way.
I got the message enough times.
By the time I started dating, “pain in the ass” wasn’t an insult anymore. It was a punchline I told on myself, first, before anyone else could. I’d joke about it three weeks into seeing someone new, like I was saving them the trouble of finding out.
And then, without fail, I’d find a way to prove myself right. I was good at getting a man’s attention. I was never good with keeping it. And I kept choosing the exact kind of guy who would confirm it, over and over, for decades.
For a long time, I believed that I was the problem. I was wholly unworthy of a man’s continued love, faithfulness, and affection.
Psychologists call this repetition compulsion. It’s the unconscious pull to recreate a painful childhood dynamic in adulthood, not because we enjoy the pain, but because some part of us is still trying to master it, to get a different ending this time from an authority figure who once failed us.
Truth is, I wasn’t unworthy. I was stuck at age fourteen, still standing in a dark, bone-chilling cold bedroom, staring at a door, trying to get a kinder sentence out of the other side of it.
I carried that shame for decades before I ever traced it back to that moment.
The Other Side of Him
I want to be honest about the rest of it, because the rest of it is true too.
My dad generously paid for my entire college education without blinking, something he’d probably decided to do before I was even born. Once I graduated and landed on my feet in a sales career, something shifted between us.
He was floored that I was so successful and used to tease me, “I never would’ve imagined you’d be doing so well. I thought all you cared about was your hair!”
But underneath the ribbing, he was genuinely proud and, for the first time in my life, actually interested in what I had to say.
We talked business for hours upon hours on the phone. He became a real mentor to me, not just a father. That relationship was not fake. It was one of the best of my adult life.
And near the end, when Alzheimer’s had started taking pieces of him, something in him softened that had never been soft before. I used to end our phone calls with “I love you” and get a flat “Okay. Thanks, hon, bye.” This was his normal response for years and years.
Toward the end of his life, he started saying it back, freely, easily, even effusively, like it had always been so simple. And he would light up when I entered the room. He would blanket me with the warmest, most beautiful feeling of full, complete unconditional love.
He even told me, in one of those late-in-life conversations, that he’d been really disappointed when he found out he was having girls. He’d wanted sons. He said it almost gently, somewhat shamefully, like a painful admission he’d been carrying around a long time.
It wasn’t just a comment. It was a heartfelt confession, an acknowledgment that he now understood how wrong he’d been. It stung for a moment, but I realized what the underlying message was, and I was truly grateful for his candor.
I don’t tell you this to let him off the hook for the door, or the dinner table, or my shame-laden forty-five years. I tell you because it’s the part that makes this hard to write cleanly.
He was the man who justified my sister hitting me by admitting he’d hit my mother. He was also the man who made sure I never once went without, who later became my best friend, the closest advisor I ever had, and who finally learned to say the words I’d been waiting on since I was a kid.
What I Know Now
It wasn’t until decades passed, several actually, that I began putting all of the pieces together: The label I carried and the conflicting feelings about my dad were all twisted up into the same emotional wound.
When I try and reconcile what happened with my brain, it becomes too difficult to do. But when I do it from my heart, it tells me he was a good, generous, loving man who did some awful things, too.
If you’re standing at your own version of that door, still carrying that label handed to you by a parent capable of providing both love and emotional abuse, here’s what I want you to remember:
The label was never a fact about you. It was a story someone else needed to be true so their own worst behavior would make sense.
It’s time to stop identifying with the role you were handed. You’ve carried it long enough. You’re also allowed to be furious at the person who handed it to you while you still let yourself remember the parts of them that were loving, real, genuine, and kind.
Both things can still be true.
People, even the ones who hurt us the worst, are rarely all one thing. Mine wasn’t. I’m not either.
If you’re still carrying a label someone else handed you at your own kitchen table, I hope you’ll take today as your invitation to hand it back.
About Stephanie Roese
Stephanie Roese is a trauma-informed author/digital creator who helps survivors of emotional abuse and neglect stop carrying labels that were never theirs. If you've ever wondered whether you were the problem in your relationships, take the free two-minute quiz for a clearer read on what you're actually dealing with. Her site offers nine free trauma-informed eBooks and a healing-focused newsletter; her blog covers gaslighting, covert abuse, and narcissistic patterns in depth.
“Both things can still be true”…carries a freedom & forgiveness that sometimes feels like peace. Thanks for sharing!