I wish my parents could change

They won't though.

A few days ago was my 27th birthday. I've been no-contact with them since I was 24, and things had been bad for decades before that. On my birthday, my dad texted me with a tech question, pretending nothing happened at all, and my mom texted me "I'm so grateful I'm your mother, and I'm proud of you." Sounds good, right?

Except that's not the problem. I don't care what they think about me. What I want is to respect them, and I don't. They are January 6-supporting religious extremists who had 6 children and beat all of them, isolated us from the real world in rural appalachia and homeschooled us to try to prevent us from being educated on shit like young earth creationism not being true... And now that I'm grown up, they lie and act like it wasn't that bad, and they were actually moderate and chill, and I'm just overreacting for being upset at the life they stole from me to protect their fragile egos and bigoted worldview.

I want nothing more than to like them. But they demand to be respected, and feel no responsibility to be respectable. So the impasse remains, and we all just get older.