I suppose my first instinct here is that I'm asking the internet for permission to go no contact, which is something I know I can only decide for myself, but I just had to write down what my parents are like.
I'm fifty-one. My parents are still together and in their mid-seventies.
I swear - I SWEAR - I am not exaggerating when I say my father has only ever cared about one thing: the television. He has two states: watching television or wishing he wasn't doing whatever he was doing so that he could get back to watching television. Nobody visiting the house expects a word out of him and they just focus on my mother. When we were children (I have a brother) we never knew when his hair-trigger temper (which I no longer tolerate) would erupt and we'd get a smack across the face. But when I look back it was always for a non-sensical reason connected with him being in a situation he couldn't cope with, which was basically anything social. (This also meant it was usually in front of the whole family that we were hit, adding to the humiliation). As an adult I can see he is simply a breathtakingly weak man. He was also happy to hit (with full rage and force) family dogs - I'm talking a Dachsund and a Cocker Spaniel here - and yet he wouldn't DARE behave in such a way towards anyone or anything outside the four walls of our house.
So yes - my mother does all the talking. And yet she too basically has two states: talking to people as if she just caught them at the bottom of slide, or talking to them as if they just fell off the slide and bruised their knee, depending on what the conversation appears to her to require. It's beyond patronising. When she does it to strangers (shop staff etc.) you see them literally back away from her, yet I promise you she goes to bed certain she's an angel of goodness in the world.
She's one of those women who does things for people only for the thanks and the appreciation, and if the thanks doesn't come quickly enough or doesn't communicate enough admiration, someone's going to be getting brutally slagged off.
The talking-but-saying-nothing thing also obviously applies when I've tried to get out of her why she stood by and enabled our 'father' to be such a non-father and completely negative presence.
And yet all the bills were paid, there was always a roof over our heads etc. etc. etc. I've read that they're classed as 'emotionally immature parents'...but my goodness...I literally don't know them. Never miss them when they're not around. I only feel relief.
They seem to value not actually knowing anybody, including their children, in any kind of real way. I think perhaps they've found safety in that. I swear any chatty checkout girl/boy at the supermarket or stranger who asks to briefly share my table in a busy cafe makes for an atmosphere a thousand times more comfortable than they ever have.
If you've read this far, thank you. As I say, I just had to write this down.