This is the kind of prompt that I dislike because it forces me to be all woe is me.

I never got anything I wanted as a kid.

Every Christmas, my sister and I would inspect the presents wrapped up under the tree trying to figure out what was what. We never succeeded. Instead of the Millennium Falcon we wanted….

…we would get a knockoff version of an Easy-Bake Oven, which doesn’t even fly. We never got refills for it so it was good only a couple of times.

You get the idea. Mostly for Christmas and birthdays I got IOUs. I would open a box that I was sure had Darth Vader in it and find a new pair of socks with a note that said “This voucher good for horseback riding lessons!” I never got horseback riding lessons. I never got the stereo that we actually went to the store to pick out and put a deposit down on. I never got the car or even the college education I was promised in lieu of presents.

I didn’t really care about any of those things. Well, I did, but it’s not like not getting Darth Vader destroyed my life. It was the lying that did it. It was the bald-face lies that I got for Christmas that ruined my childhood.

If they couldn’t afford a real gift, all my parents had to do was say so. I would have understood. I would have been disappointed, but I would have understood. Instead, for Christmas and birthdays, I got promises that never came true. A broken promise to a child is far worse than not getting a new toy.

I learned not to trust my parents. I learned that when I opened a box and found a note, it was about as valuable as writing “money” on the same paper and trying to pay for groceries with it. Those notes were useless. If I got a piece of paper in a box, my heart sank because I knew it would never be anything more than a piece of paper. Not one of those IOUs was ever cashed in.

I learned not to trust the people I should have been able to trust the most. I learned to keep my expectations very low. I learned how to use my imagination to turn a knock off Easy-Bake into a Millennium Falcon. I learned how to entertain myself. I learned how valuable a library card really is. I learned self-reliance from an early age and it hasn’t failed me yet. I decided to make my dreams come true myself.

But I’d still really like that Millennium Falcon.