Betrayal

When have I felt betrayed?  There was the time when I was about fifteen and my parents had taken me out of school and had me take Grade 10-level correspondence courses with the New Brunswick Community College.  The first math lesson involved a Venn diagram, and I correctly answered 9.  But there was a mark next to it so the market thought I'd written 91.  He would have known that I meant 9 if he'd looked at my diagram, but he just wrote on it, "Too small and messy." He concluded, "Do over properly!" And I couldn't ignore him, I had to do it over again.

I asked my parents to contact the Community College and complain, but they just said, "We aren't going to have anything to do with him because he's unreasonable!" Which meant I was on my own.  What bothers me is that they were rewarding him for being unreasonable!  Because they were afraid of him, of course.

That was just the start of the troubles in the six courses I was taking.  As my course work went on, I got angrier and angrier. (I eventually got an ulcer.)  It went on so long that I ended up writing rude things to the markers.  And now Mother started worrying that I'd hurt their feelings.  When they hurt my feelings, that just meant that I was too sensitive.

Now here comes the betrayal.  My parents insisted that I write a note of apology to the markers.  Even though there was never a single complaint about my rudeness, Mother got the idea inside her head that I had to apologize in order to finish the courses.  Though what I wrote wasn't an apology, my resentment was (and is) permanent.  It was a very bad time in my life.