Growing up in the Midst of an Emotional and Physical War Zone:

Sometimes I wonder when I actually knew I had been an abused child who grew up to be an abused adult.  I am not sure I always did know.  The truth about myself was hidden in shadows even to myself.  I knew something was there, but I wasn't really sure what "it" was and I just couldn't see it very clearly even though I could sense the shape and the substance of this truth I could not fully grasp it.  I had no idea what the truth was because I couldn't pull it into the light of full consciousness to really examine it and to know it.  As a child I had no words to really describe what happened behind closed doors and how my abuse made me feel and why it was wrong; and, in the early years of my life, I had no perspective of the greater world to even allow me to compare my experiences with my mother to the mothering other people were receiving and societal norms in general.  The ability to consider your life from this point of view requires both experience and maturity as well as the ability to view things objectively as opposed to emotionally.  So my awareness of how abnormal my mother's treatment was of me came only in moments of insight and through memories put into perspective once I gained knowledge of the larger world and other families and I could assess for myself what was normal or abnormal.  It took years of being away from my abuser before I could really think about and analyze where I had come from, who I was because of my experiences, and who she was...this diagnosable monster who had been the true creator and author of much of my life.  I knew very young that I had a crazy, unpredictable, and cruel mother.  But, I didn't see me when I knew these things.  I only saw her and comprehended her like I was an observer watching this awful person on a TV screen and I was constantly engaged in analyzing this character named mother so I could predict her next move.  I had to know what to say to keep her calm and when to say nothing.  I had to know exactly how to act to keep her anger from getting bigger and out of control to minimize my own discomfort.  I had to know when she was approachable and reasonable to get things I needed.  I had to know from the sound of her footsteps what I was in for so I could mentally prepare for the attack if it was coming.  I got so I could literally feel her presence and the weight of her moods like something tangible in the air.  It was like I had supersonic hearing and just by listening I could hear and feel where she was in the house at all times.

I once described myself to a very good friend and a colleague as a walking meat puppet robot that had this little tiny person at the controls seeing out of my eyes like an alien in a cockpit moving all the controls making me move and function as if I was a real person.  I had this epiphany in my mid thirties and I believe I had that insight because I was healing and I didn't even know how damaged I was.  Yet I slowly had realized I had this detachment to life and that I wasn't really fully experiencing or fully enjoying anything because I lived consciously as only this little tiny hidden thing operating controls somewhere deep within myself.   Being away from my mother whether I was at school, at work, with colleagues, friends and being thoroughly engaged doing things I really enjoyed had finally created enough emotional space that I was breaking through whatever it was she had done to me over the years that had created this protective shield.  I have come to believe I lived most of my life surrounded by this mental shield that kept my essence safe and buried deep within my own conscience.  I suspect that this essence of the real me came out fully into the world only once in awhile and as a kind of visitor to the world as crazy as that sounds until I merged body and soul sometime in my late thirties.  I also suspect this detachment which was most likely a true form of dissociation developed within me very young, because when I was a little girl my mother terrified me, I was totally dependent upon her, and I literally could not escape from her.  Also, I am not sure when exactly this shield went up, but I have suspicions based on a lost period of time in my life that I have never been able to explain or access any memory from.   I have no memories of the second grade at all, I never have.  I can remember before with clarity, then there is nothing, and then I have a distinct memory of mentally waking up in the third grade standing in line with other children when a classmate asked me what happened to me because I used to be so different and dressed so nicely.  I distinctly recall thinking about what this child said to me and replying, "I guess my mother stopped caring for me."  I felt just like I had woken up and there I was standing in line realizing my hair was a mess, I was different, and I looked different and I wasn't really sure what had just happened, but I remember distinctly thinking that the changes my classmate noted involved a lot of bad things at home and these bad things involved my mother.  As I stood there looking around with sudden clarity, I knew where I was, why I was there, who was talking to me, but it was like coming out of a fog and everything snapped suddenly from living in a dream to awake.  This experience was so powerful, that I actually went home and tried to tell my father about it and maybe my mother too.  I don't remember what he said or she said, but I'm quite sure I did not have the words to describe the experience as I just did and I can imagine he did not have a clue what I was trying to tell him.  I can't even begin with all my training to really explain how the mind can develop and cope in this kind of an abusive situation to survive day in and day out and I am pretty sure there is a lot of variation from individual to individual who grows up under the tyrannies of a psychopathic parent or primary care giver terrorizing them.  I have read about such things and I just thank God that I did not become a multiple personality or true dissociative personality disorder because the evidence certainly suggests, I had my toe in the water so to speak.  I can only speak with clarity about my own personal experience and how I apparently fled inward very, very young because I apparently had no place else to hide, and by doing so, I never completely lost myself for which I am grateful, but I wasn't fully present for the first thirty or so years of my life all the time either which is very sad. I was never ever again completely as gone as I was apparently for the entire second grade and I have often wondered what exactly happened to me that terrified me so deeply that I went away and into this dream like state from which I can pull no memories that lasted more than a year.  I may never know and I 'm not sure at this point in my life that I want to know the awful details.  I know enough from my studies of multiple personality disorders in my college years as these fascinated me, that my spirit feared its own death and that the pain of whatever it was that caused this total retreat was so bad that I had to go away to survive it.   I also know that this survival mechanism of going into a fog like mental state or state of detachment operated for me like it was on autopilot.  When life hurt me, I was afraid, or something traumatized me, I could go into this detached conscious, but semi-fog like state easily.  I also realize as I write this how as I healed, there was a period of my life when I was out of the fog when I was away from my mother and automatically back in it when in her presence.  Toward the end of our relationship leading to our estrangement, I was out of the fog entirely even though I felt the weight of her around me when in her presence and this weight tended to drain me of energy, but I was fully aware of how I felt and I knew exactly why I felt as I did and I was breaking through that last stronghold of her control over me as well.  I actually believe my breaking away from her controls is what in fact lead inevitably to my estrangement at the age of forty-five, but more on that later as well.

With this introduction, I just want to make clear if possible that it was only with much time, much research, and much reflection that the true picture of how my father and I were both terribly shaped by the psychopath in our lives over the course of years emerged.  In time, I will reflect on the long term damages my father incurred in much more detail, but that subject deserves much more attention than I want to give it here at this time.  At this point I want to the best of my ability to just focus on what it was like growing up for me with this monster as my parent.  Obviously, my father was raised in a very functional and above average family.  His journey in this is therefore completely different than mine in that he started out emotionally healthy and he grew up with great parents and an awesome extended family.  I, however, grew up in a concentration camp of tortures, abuses, humiliations, and lies from amost the moment I was born with my whole being and developing psychology being shaped in a constant tug of war between the parent who abused me and the parent who actually loved me.  But, it is very important to note, that this parent who loved me was also under siege by the same abuser and slowly eroding away from the strong, happy, intelligent, independent human being he was to the broken, trapped, hopeless, and bitter man he later became.  In tackling my own experiences growing up, I am struck by my own awareness that there were for lack of a better terminology "abusive eras" that contained distinct patterns of certain kinds of abuses and my mothers abuses adapted and modified with my age and with my ability to resist her.  These eras I would define in roughed out time spans of my life as follows: from birth to five or six, six to thirteen, thirteen to eighteen, from eighteen to my mid thirties, ending with a final era spanning from somewhere in my thirties to age forty-five and ending only when I was finally freed by estrangement from my entire family by my abuser who could no longer control me and who therefore had no more use for me.

My First Memories & My Very Early Years:

This section will please the Adlerian counselors because my first memories are very early indeed.  I recall with absolute clarity finding my hands.  I was sitting in a play pen or crib under the picture window in our trailer and I realized I could control the direction my hands moved and that they were attached to me and mine.  I recall thinking (symbolically no doubt) when I do this, they go this way, and when I do this they go that way and how fascinating it was to see my fingers rippling through the air.  I was so excited that I wanted to tell my mother about it and I yelled at her to get her attention.  I see her face as she leaned over looking at me and I distinctly hear her say, "Oh have you found your toy, good for you."  I kept trying to tell her I had found my hands and that I could control them and she kept going on about how I was playing with my toys and she finally walked off into the kitchen to continue doing what ever it was she was doing.  As I watched her walk away, I realized she just didn't get what I was trying to tell her and I felt disappointed, but resigned and I went on doing what I was doing with my hands and figuring out how these were different from my feet.

In my next memory, I was a toddler and learning to jump.  There was a square tile floor in our kitchen made up of white tiles and accent green tiles laid out so there was a line of green squares separated by a pattern of white tiles.  I was jumping from green square to green square in a kind of game I had made up.  These tiles were 12" by 12" so I know I was very little, because these were challenging big jumps. I played this game many times.  In the background I could hear my parents fighting, but I don't know what they are saying.  It didn't involve me.  I kept leaping from tile to tile trying to jump further and to land precisely on each green square.  I was wishing they would stop yelling at each other and play with me.

In another memory, I was locked in the trailer while my mother went to "the big house" to do laundry.  She went out the back door and locked this behind her and I could not work this door.  The front door was shut and a hooked screen door was over that door.  I could work that door, but I had to undo the hook.  I wanted to go where my mother went, so I dragged a big chair over to the door and I stretched up as high as I could reach and I undid the hook.  Then I drug the chair back, slid the screen, and opened the door.  I knew where my mother went so I toddled out in my bare feet and my diaper and a little shirt.  The ground was cold and it burned my feet and I could see snow on either side of the shoveled walk way.  I went as fast as I could and I found the cement steps and I crawled up them, and ran as quickly as I could to the big house to follow my mother.  I couldn't open the door to the big house and my feet were burning with the cold so I jumped up and down.  I went to the basement window and I saw her in the laundry room looking angry and talking to herself.  I hit the window and cried loudly and she looked up, dropped what she was carrying, and her mouth formed a gasp of surprise.  I think she may have screamed.  Moments later she came out the big door I could not open, crying my name, obviously frantic, and she picked me up.  She ran back to our trailer and she was rubbing my feet in obvious distress.  I remember thinking if she hadn't come out that I was going back to the trailer on my own because I was so cold and my feet hurt, but I don't think I could tell her this because I couldn't talk yet.  My dad was not home.  He often wasn't.  I remember her telling him what happened when he came home and how she could not leave me to do laundry any more for fear I would escape and get out again.

I share these first memories because I suspect I was not an abused baby.  For what ever reason, my mother did not abuse infants.  She may not have played with me much or paid that much attention to me, but she took care of me and made sure to the best of her ability that I was safe.  She appeared genuinely concerned when she looked up and saw me dancing on the frozen ground outside of the basement window and I was very glad to be rescued.  I think it was only as I developed and I asserted my independence, became more work, and I annoyed her by demanding her time and attention that the abuse really began to come my way.  The conflicts and tensions that were going on in the background when I was a baby involved my parents and they did not involve me.  I can recall not liking the way these conflicts sounded, but they did not effect me and I do not recall fearing them.  I wanted my mother in these memories and I sought her out.  I missed her when she was gone.  I liked it when she picked me up and I wanted to be picked up.  I loved my father and I preferred him even then, but he was not always home.  My needs were being met and I felt secure and loved.

How my relationship with my mother changed from the point of these early memories is something that I don't remember even as I can remember the steady din of the arguments between my parents always going on in the background. At some point my parents moved from the trailer, which was also my father's mobile work home that he pulled from job site to job site when he worked on large construction projects, into the big house.  I know that my dad resisted moving into the big house and I loved living in the trailer for some reason.  Maybe I didn't want to move to the big house because it was big and scary to me and because the trailer had always been my home.  I mourned for that trailer for years though and I always loved it and I always felt a sense of peace being in it even when I was a teenager.  I think I had genuinely good memories living there and that this period of time was before I started to be really viciously abused.  I don't recall my father's reasons for not wanting to move from the trailer to the large 2nd floor apartment that he owned, but the apartment had two large bedrooms, a good sized living room, a kitchen, separate dining room and one full bath as well as ample storage with large closets.  It made sense to move a family into this space as opposed to a small trailer that was like living in a train car.  But the decision to make this move from the outside to the inside of the main house only came about after months of conflicts between my parents.  I do know that my first clear memories of my own physical and verbal abuse at the hands of mother occur in the second story apartment.  I may have been four years old or very close to four when we moved.  I know I had not started kindergarden yet because I remember vividly my father taking me down the stairs to walk me to school in the mornings for kindergarden.  I also know that my father worked until I was five years old and I can remember waking up in the morning and realizing he was home from the road and feeling great joy that he was back.

If I shut my eyes, I can still remember looking out of the second story windows down at that trailer that I had spent the first few years of life in many times and wishing we could all move back into it.  However this trailer was now permanently anchored in the back yard and it had been turned into a rental property to compensate for the rent lost from the apartment in the big house we now occupied.  So a new era of my life had begun in more respects than one.  Impermanent structure to permanent structure, toddler to preschooler.  Unfortunately, the price of developing from toddler to preschooler for me was quite high.  My mother started terrorizing me and tongue lashing me in episodes of verbal abuses that would go on for hours and sometimes entire days.  Living in the big house with her was for me anything but a happy experience.  My parents were fighting and the fights were turning violent.  I remember my mother nagging and carrying on relentlessly at my father and I can recall toddling along beside them when my father punched her hard in the stomach once the door closed.  I screamed and she crumpled to the floor.  He looked at me just haggard when I looked up at him yelling daddy no.  I know he had been verbally abused for hours and he had snapped from the sheer unrelenting stress of the verbal abuse.  I knew it then, but to see my mother hit terrorized me and I knew this was also wrong.  I know this sounds terrible, but I would have punched her too if I was him and I knew that then as well.  Listening to her go on and on saying horrible, cruel things tossing them like knives into my father was absolutely awful.  I hated it and I wanted her to stop.  I even asked her to stop only to be silenced and shoved to the side by her as she went at him as relentlessly as a mad dog.  I saw him snap one other time also when we were living on the second floor and he assaulted my mother for exactly the same reasons.  She had been ranting at him for hours on end with no let up and after no amount of reasoning with her could make her stop, dad snapped and struck her when she said something particularly cruel and emotionally painful to him.  I could see that he hated himself when he lost control and hit her on both occasions; and, I honestly believe this violence only happened on two occasions and each time was limited to exactly one blow.  Even as a child, I could see my mother purposely driving my father over the edge of sanity so he would lose control as if the violence was her goal. To his credit, she only broke him twice so badly that he lashed out physically. The worst she got from him usually was an explosion of verbalized hatred detailing how much he despised her and how he wished he had never laid eyes on her.  Often this verbal explosion in absence of physical violence sufficed as mother's apparent goal.  Once she achieved the goal, her insane tirade of verbal abuse was over; but, she then got immediately on the phone usually calling her brother Bill to tell him exactly what dad said to her when he snapped and of course she relished the two times she had been hit going on and on about each of these two episodes for hours.  Always, she portrayed herself to be the hapless victim with her brother on the line hanging on every word as she was telling lie upon lie about my father punctuated with a very embellished account of her "beating" or what he said to her out of the apparent blue because he was in a bad mood.   Dad and I could hear every word she was saying and I can still see him hanging his head sitting on the porch absolutely silent, making no effort to defend himself  as if every ounce of energy had been drained from him.  Mother tortured him with what she was saying throwing knowing glances his way to make sure he could see her and so she could relish that he was paying attention to her as she painted him to be a villein and herself as a victim.  In her version of events she had done nothing that could account for what had happened, she never even saw it coming, and all she knew was that he was violent and abusive.  At some point, she then went on to her brother that she knew my father was tired of her and trying to make her leave.  But always, after hearing her say to her brother many times that she knew she should leave him as if stating agreement to what he was telling her she should do, she would make me the reason for why she had to stay as if she needed to protect me from him.   This was in fact a very stable and predictable pattern of events that happened exactly this way many, many times over the course of years.  My father asked my mother for a divorce many times during this period of time and his pleas for divorce included pleas for her to surrender custody of me to him because she was too unstable to be a mother.  I heard his pleas for divorce and the ensuing arguments that fired because of his pleas over and over again as my dad would tell her how unsuited they were for each other and how she was too unstable to really parent with her cross firing threats back to him that she could arrange things so he would never see me again if he didn't watch his step.  Mother's roaring enraged threats detailed how she would take me, his house, his money, and how he would have nothing by the time she was done with him and the rage in her voice still rings in my ears with my father's reasonable monotone going on in the background pleading for separation.  As these endless debates went on, she always played the two times he had struck her like trump cards, bringing up these two episodes, embellishing them, and expanding on how everyone, including his family, would know about the "beatings" before she was done with him and that once he had nothing, being nothing, no one would have any sympathy for him by the time she was through with him.  With absolute enraged confidence, she told him over and over again how she would have everything and he would have nothing.  Many times, dad would leave the house to get away from her during these tirades and the minute he was out of ear shot enjoying the luxury of his adult option to walk out, that is when she then turned on me with the full force of her fury and I was trapped and completely at her mercy.  Sometimes he stayed away all day and I suffered all day until either she wore herself out or he returned and she went back at him for another round.

My mother should have gone to jail for the things she did to me in my opinion, but as I have noted, we live in a society where in general only threats of imminent death are often even responded to when children are abused.  I think child abuse back in the 1960's received even less attention than it does now.  Then and now, in many respects children are like the property of their parents; and, short of killing their offspring, the reality is parents can pretty much do what they want to their kids with very few consequences.   I recall being drug by my hair, being thrown into the wall, slapped, having my arms painfully pinched in both of her hands while she screamed relentlessly inches from my face.  I screamed, I cried, I pleaded, and I finally learned to say and to do absolutely nothing.  I learned to say nothing and to show no expression when she was like this because any fear, suffering, and/or pain I showed made her go higher as if it fed her rage like gasoline on a flame.  Over time I learned to stare her right in the eye and to go completely limp showing absolutely no fear.  This limp focused stare tended to lessen the physical abuse and to keep the abuse mostly in the realm of verbal and emotional abuse.  Mother was the absolute master of psychological torture and verbal abuse was an art that she continually perfected via trial and error ferreting out those things that she could say that hurt you most so she could plunge her hateful remarks like daggers into your soul and twist those daggers for the pleasure of watching you squirm in emotional and psychological agony.  Mother's psychological torture of me as a child usually focused on things I could understand such as I was: fat, lazy, ugly, worthless, stupid, useless, like a lazy white dog and so on.  She could run these things together in repetitive strings for hours without becoming bored or ever losing steam and always observing how the barb hurt or damaged and dwelling on those barbs that especially hurt when she realized they were effective. I understood very early on that the goal of these insults and the emotional agony and physical terrorism she all engaged in was for her to enjoy in some weird way the pain she was inflicting on me and her power to make me suffer.  She wanted to hurt me.  She enjoyed torturing me.  She did it purposely and with intent to cause fear, pain, and agony.    In one such episode I was confined for an entire day in my room.  I don't know if I was allowed to go out to eat or even to use the bathroom.  I actually remember peeing in a can in my room rather than ask to use a bathroom and pouring it out of the window.  I remember staring out the window for hours watching the birds in the trees and wishing my father would come home with all my might.  I also was hyper vigilant listening to my mother storming around the apartment flat ranting to the four walls while slamming things like doors and furniture as she went.  Sometimes I heard a dish break.  I remember pretending to play but how I was really focused on hearing her pace up and down the hallway coming almost to my room, sometimes touching the knob and rattling it, but then not coming into the room.  Other times she came in like she had been fired out of canon screaming abuses and insults and all I could do was just stare at her and hope it didn't get physical; so I remained expressionless and very calm.  At one point she exploded into the room and she jumped into the air landing cross legged in my bed and then bounced up in the air landing screaming right before me as I was playing with my toys.  I actually laughed, even though I didn't really think it was funny to show I felt no fear.  Her eyes were black and wild and her fury that time was really over the top.  This was an especially crazy and frightening tantrum and that is no doubt why I remember the details as well as do even now fifty some years later.  Even then, I remember how I worked so hard to show no fear and she stormed in and out of my room over and over again.  I do not remember however, other than being grabbed a couple of times that I was hit though on that particular day.

When there were days like this and my father finally came home,  I tried to tell him what had happened when he left and what she had done to me.  She interfered with my telling him what had happened stepping right in between us screaming at him eye ball to eye ball that I had made this all up to please him and that he was teaching me to lie about her and to disrespect her.  I thought at first my dad didn't believe me or he had some doubt that what I was trying to tell him was true, but the fact that I started to tell on her became a game changer. I recall during one of my parents altercations chasing my father to the door as he was leaving and because I knew what came next that in his absence I was going to take the brunt of mother's rage I was determined to go with him.  I begged him to take me with him and I told him I was afraid and that she was going to hurt me while he was gone.  I physically grabbed him and he had to pry my fingers off of his pants with my mother standing there calling me a liar and blaming him for my lies yet again.  The door shut and he was gone and I recall feeling absolute despair standing eye to doorknob which tells me I was still around four years old; and, then I looked up at her standing to my left staring at me fully expecting to really get it because of what I had just done, but that time there was a strange dark calculating look in her eyes and instead of unleashing on me, after staring at me with that strange dark look for a few moments she walked away saying nothing.  Defeated, I went to my room feeling my father absolutely had abandoned me but also surprised by the fact that my mother had also done something different this time.  This something different coupled with my growing abilities to verbalize what was happening to me actually modified the abuses I received when I look back now even though I didn't fully understand what had changed at the time this particular change started to occur.

I will close this opening segment on my very early years noting that my mother took her frustrations out on other people including small four year old children if she could get away with these abuses without detection.    I absolutely hate and despise how she treated me at that tender age and I am reminded once again in reliving these memories putting them to writing how I have every right to think of this duplicitous, opportunistic, miserable excuse for a human being as a monster.  No child should ever be treated the way she treated me, though many are and I am not alone in having these kinds of experiences and obviously there are those poor unfortunate souls who have had even much worse.  There is no excuse for what she did and no mental illness that can explain what she did.  The fact she lied about what she did and had enough wherewithal to call me a liar and to rigorously hide her deeds is full evidence that she knew full well that what she did to me was wrong, but she did those things to me any way, because she wanted to and because on some very sick level within herself she enjoyed inflicting psychological pain and terror upon others.  Once I was able to tell on her though the tactics she employed in her abuses changed and I will discuss these changes in more detail later on.  Mother knew how to keep up appearances and just as she gaslighted my father painting him to be a villein to her brother even as she was the one actually torturing him, she could switch gears and also with no tweak of conscience or remorse gaslight me to my own abused father who didn't appear to know if I was telling the truth about what she was doing or not.  Secrets within secrets existed within our home even between each other as she controlled everything and everyone within her sphere of influence completely and as she was tireless when it came to defending herself and making herself appear the victim when she was in fact the perpetrator; and, it was not unusual that even my father and I who were closest to the situation and in the midst of her abuses together to feel confusion and self-doubt as she was so adept at creating confusion and planting doubt in order to disguise her guilt.

I considered writing about my parents early years from my mother's point of view for my next blog entry.  Some day I may do just that, but not today.  I do think there is value in examining the things that my psychopathic mother said over the years and to discuss in some detail the stories that she told as these disclosures were obviously significant to her and they had some purpose wrapped up in them or she wouldn't have told them.  Also, her stories may contain nuggets that a clinician may find interesting and which may have some historical value in the overall study of these people.  However, today my thoughts are leading me in another direction and I intend to follow where my muse takes me so that my writing does not stall.  All Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers, children of psychopaths, and children of anti-socials were abused children.  There is overt and covert abuses in almost all cases.  What is astounding to me is how there are so many of us who have survived an antisocial parent into adulthood only to learn no one really knew we were being abused.  As a former human services worker and a former therapist I have learned quite a few things over the course of my career regarding the many ways children can be abused and I am moved to write from my professional experience in this entry.

When I first graduated with my master's in counseling from SDSU,  I was drafted to be a Guardian Ad Litem by another counseling graduate who was working as one at the time, but who was looking to pass her caseload to someone else because her full time job was overwhelming her. When approached about taking over her Ad Litem caseload, I thought this would be an interesting resume building experience, and an interesting match to the full time position I was working with abused and troubled children placed in long term residential treatment.  Guardian ad Litem's are court appointed advocates for children who have been brought to the attention of the court system as being in need of protective court services.  Because the residential treatment facility operated seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, I had enough flexibility to take on a part time job as long as that job was also pretty flexible.  As the Ad Litem job paid $12.00 an hour which was a significant sum per hour back then, I was very happy to earn this extra money and I thought at the time this was a great opportunity learn more about child abuse from two related but different perspectives within my field of choice.

The significance of the stories and the profiles of the children I met and I observed in both jobs continues to evolve for me as I pursue my personal research on anti-socials and anti-socials who are also unfortunately parents.  The children I worked with in residential, long term treatment were so emotionally damaged by their experiences that they needed in patient care.  These children were deemed too violent and/or too dysfunctional to be placed in foster care, or to be offered up for adoption, or even to be allowed go to public school.   Despite the severity of their symptoms and the horrors of neglect and abuse they had experienced, many of these poor children were in fact on track to be returned to their parents if the court deemed this appropriate after reasonable treatment for the child and treatment as deemed appropriate for the parent was also completed to the court's satisfaction.  The prevailing wisdom then and even now is to reconcile the family, no matter how dysfunctional, if possible.  So the long term care plans for many of these children involved their parents getting outpatient treatment to address the parent(s) issues at the same time the children were receiving inpatient treatment.  Of course there were variable situations where the parents had been through the legal system before for abusing their children severely and theses parents' rights were thankfully in the process of finally being revoked and there were still other situations involving parents who were in prison because their abuses and crimes were so severe they were considered a danger to society as well as to their children.  It is important to note there were and are all kinds of abusive family situations that land children in residential treatment facilities.   I think it was in the opening pages of the novel Anna Karina that Tolstoy so aptly stated that all happy families resemble each other, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way...or something to that effect.  This author's observation was in fact extremely apt in my opinion and I thought so the first time I read the words.  In truth there are so many crazy, dysfunctional, abusive family situations that it would be impossible to detail all the ways people can hurt each other and violate the members of their own families without writing volumes on the subject.  So, let it suffice to say that  that some families never reconciled, some had court ordered reconciliations that never should have happened in my opinion, and other families just limped along with the human services system shoring them up as as best they could as everyone in the situation was damaged in some capacity.  Some abusive parents were not evil people so much as they were ignorant and simple, and such individuals actually had no clue how to be parents and very few resources to help them stabilize in the communities where they were barely eking out a living in to begin with.  So if they had nothing to eat, they went hungry.   If there were no clothes, they went without shoes.  If they were sick, they didn't go to the doctor.  Indeed, there are all kinds of unhappy families.

The CHIPS (Children in Need of Protective Services) children assigned for me to case manage as a Guardian Ad Litem were not having the obvious behavioral and emotional problems so evident in these severe cases  I worked with in residential treatment and the Ad Litem cases I worked with were able to live in the community without most other people around them, in many cases, having a clue they were even involved in court ordered services.  All my Ad Litem children in fact were attending public school, living with at least one parent, and able to act and function with relative normalcy.  However, these children also had experienced violence and/or other abuses including sexual abuse severe enough that they had been brought to the attention of the court and social services was involved with each of these families on a long term basis.  The Guardian ad Litem's job duties involved advocating for these children and their best interests based on doing interviews with the children, their parents, reviewing the legal documents pertaining to their cases, interviewing all providers involved, observing the family and the children interacting in their family settings if possible, and by reviewing the social services documents pertaining to their cases.

I soon discovered that this entire area of human services was definitely not my calling.  I could not accept the prevailing wisdom that the first goal of the court and human services was to return these abused children to their abusers or to bend over backwards to give abusers removed from the home visitation and ongoing contacts with the children they had abused and often against the wishes of the spouses they also had terrorized.  The entire legal system in fact favors the abuser giving them multiple opportunities to correct their behaviors and to become acceptable parents.  This prevailing wisdom sentences children to merry-go-round lives of horror where they are taken away, receive treatment and placement with foster care parents, emergency shelters, residential treatment centers, subsequently stabilized and then returned to their abusers for another round of abuse, violence, and neglect.  I have to note that the hands of the service providers in this very broken system are absolutely tied because the way this system functions is governed by law and by politics and by the manipulation of public perceptions during the elections of public officials.  No elected official or individual seeking to become an elected official wants to be dubbed the individual who voted to separate children from their parents.  No elected judge wants that political ad with his name attached, no member of the house, no member of the senate, no governor, and no president.  So a lot of passionate words are mouthed that child abuse must end and that healthy families must be sustained and supported, but there is no meat in legislation to really help abused children until their abuses become so severe that they were in imminent danger of death; and even those cases where an imminent danger of death was assessed, their abusive parents are still often given another chance with a round of treatment, parent education, and home visits by well meaning social workers hoping to heal the world.  Abusers and the abused soon learn the truth about the system that in general only delivers a hand slap to the abusers and a reprieve to the abused.

Is it any wonder really that many of the severely abused children I was working with in residential treatment were very angry and violent.  They bit their care givers as hard as they could, they screamed obscenities and verbal abuses, they hurt other children, they hurt themselves, they touched caregivers in their private parts when they could sneak a feel in, and they threw raging tantrums that required physical restraints.  Working in residential treatment, I was taught the prevailing philosophy that these children behaved in this manner because they had been abused and/or neglected severely.  Because of their rage and their other behaviors, the treatment facility was responsible for providing a safe environment where these children could heal, learn to bond with adults and peers in a positive manner that did not involve abuse, and the caregivers were to model appropriate behaviors so the children could learn by example how to act normally at all times.  If the treatment was successful, these children could then be placed in foster care or released for adoption, or reconciled with their families.   Many of these severely behavioral children were also perpetrators repeating the sexual deviance that had been done to them on other children whenever they had any opportunity to do this or especially whenever they found a willing victim within their peer group of victims receptive to the deviance they proposed.  They also assaulted other children physically using fear and intimidation tactics to keep their unwilling victims quiet and they could be very secretive and sneaky when hurting other children so the caregivers would not see what they were doing right under their noses at times.  All employees had to be on high alert at all times working with these children because they were literally fingering other children they had decided to target or who they had found to be willing victims under the nursery room sized tables they sat at to eat their meals and snacks.  At night as soon as bed checks were done they leapt into the beds of their room mates fondling them in some cases and hurting them to keep their victims quiet and these children were not even ten years old.

I recall one little boy in particular who was around five years of age, plump and sweet, with a face like a little cherub who would watch me come in for the morning wakeup routines and he would purposely defecate and urinate in his bed for the pleasure of making me and his various caregivers clean up the mess.  This darling looking little boy was particularly violent.  One evening I remember vividly holding him on my lap to prevent him from attacking other children as he was in an "episode."  He sat in my lap spitting in my face continuously telling me he knew what my "cunt" looked like" and how it would feel on his face over and over again in very graphic detail.  I have often wondered if this adorable looking little guy grew up to be a full blown psychopath or if by some miracle he responded to his treatment, stabilized, healed and lived even a semblance of a normal life.  I honestly don't know what this child's longterm outcomes were, but his verbal and physical behaviors were like no other five year old's that I have ever known or observed since.

I have to wonder about those children who are so severely behavioral at such a young age as this boy was and I have often wondered how many end up being long term residents of the prison system.  For many of these poor little ones even if they were not born with psychopathy, they had become psychopaths very early in their development displaying all the classic symptoms:  rage, lying, no remorse, no fear, no normal range of emotions, no sense of embarrassment, inability to love/bond, and more significantly no guilt about inflicting pain and suffering upon others.  Easily frustrated, these children would howl with rage, physically flailing about as the painful processes of teaching them to control their behaviors was a large part of their treatment planning.  Many of these severe cases had absolutely no family support when released from treatment as young adults.  So the future for them under the best of circumstances would have been difficult, but with a history of violent emotional/behavioral problems the odds were even more against them.  Because many of these children have literally no one to go home to if they are released from residential treatment, they have no one to guide them as young adults either which makes them extremely vulnerable to fall into violent and criminal acts to survive.  The bonds of these children's young lifetimes may have been limited to a parade of ever changing professional caregivers that came and went constantly with each shift and with each employee turnover and for that matter each round of impatient treatment.   Their playmates and classmates were children like themselves.   For every child who healed and who came out of long term treatment healed and functional, residential treatment facilities are invaluable.  For those who never will be normal, well they have to be placed somewhere and this is the best human services has to offer broken system or not.   In deed without some system in place, these children would have absolutely no intervention at all.  At least children receiving some treatment have a chance to heal, a possible vision implanted in them that life does not have to be the way it was presented to them by their abusive parent(s), and in good treatment facilities every effort is made to teach these damaged souls a normal range of behaviors and how to distinguish social rights from social wrongs.

Unlike the children I worked with in residential treatment, most, if not all, of the ad litem children I worked with were essentially by appearances any way, "normal" children in unfortunate situations.  Many of these "unfortunate situations" involved one severely dysfunctional parent coupled with a relatively normal parent who was also a victim of the severely abusive parent.  Other situations, however, were not so clear cut involving two criminal parents, but neither one so criminal that they couldn't keep up appearances when under court scrutiny and "toe the line" so to speak.  They made their deadlines, they completed their treatment, they said the right things, and their children tended to go right along with what their parents were saying.  Some of these dysfunctional families appeared to all be in agreement in whatever they were doing, choosing each other rather than choosing separation.   One case that I recall that really interested me involved two grade school youngsters whose father had tried to kill them and who insisted to me they wanted their daddy back in their lives.  In this case, dad was beating their mother so severely that she couldn't get out of bed, the children would go to school, attend class all day, and say nothing to anyone including their peers or their teachers.  Finally dad went so out of control that mom actually fled the house fearing for her life and she ran to a neighbor's home to call the police.  Dad responded by nailing the doors to the home shut barricading himself and the two children inside.  As the police closed in, he splashed gasoline on the doors and around the home threatening to light the home on fire incinerating himself and the children.  I think the police finally wounded him to end the standoff, but I'm not sure about that piece of the story at this time.  I do know Dad was sent for treatment, because I interviewed him at his treatment facility, and mom filed for a divorce and wanted him out of their lives.  Dad however, claimed he was very sorry about what he had done, and he wanted visitation to be part of the divorce settlement; so the children were assigned a Guardian ad Litem to be the objective voice representing their best interests in the matter.  The fact this dad's request for continuing contact and visitation with his children was even taking the courts time and that multiple providers had to be paid to provide testimony on the matter is in my opinion absurd.  He threatened to kill his own children and he physically splashed gasoline around his own home, trapping the children inside to make his point by nailing all escape routes shut.  He most likely required a gunshot to stop him.  Really, what, was there to talk about???  But that is the way our broken child services system works.  The abuser gets every opportunity to get treatment, to straighten up his or her act, and to maintain contact with the children because some one, some where, determined that children were best served knowing their parents, no matter how abusive or how crazy these parents may be even to the point of trying to kill them.  

This could lead me on quite a rant about the numerous worthless human services positions that exist only to drain tax dollars, and employing college graduates who have almost no real authority to accomplish anything; there are numerous positions that in fact serve to help perpetuate and not resolve real life threatening problems because these positions and the people who fill these positions are just cogs in the wheels of a very inadequate broken human services system in general; and I could write a regular dissertation how well meaning human services professionals do the best they can in this broken system only to burn out and to get out whenever they embrace the truth that they can't really help these children in far too many cases because the laws and the prevailing philosophy governing the institutions and the providers favors the abusers and not the abused, but all of the above is not really the focus of this blog.  But I have to say, I would not dare write these words if I was not retired from human services.  To state such things is the kiss of death to your human services career.  You have to pledge to this system and claim absolute belief in this system to even land a job within the system.  Speak against it, doubt it, criticize it and you are out of a job. When I was working, I often thought of the classic Mel Brooks line from the 1974 flick Blazing Saddles: "We gotta protect our phony, baloney JOBS......!!!"  Question the system and dare to expose it and it was pretty likely a lot of people would be unemployed; and the higher up you were in the department pertaining to the system you were questioning, the more stake that administrator had to silence all questions, opposition, and to enforce with all their subordinates that they had to sing the praises of the selfless good that was being done by all the providers and especially within that area of service they were in charge of while ignoring the lack of power the service had to serve and to protect the most vulnerable they were charged to protect.  Also, since the funding for these services is completely tied to local, state, and federal government dollars, you would be a fool to bite the hands that feed you by criticizing the very legislation governing the system that signs your paychecks.  No instead you thank your legislators and praise them ad nausea for all the good they do and how the dollars allocated make such a huge difference in the communities you serve. However, the inevitable evidence that the system barely functions and has within it multiple failures continues to bubble to the surface causing spontaneous public outcries when well publicized accounts of children's deaths by torture and systematic abuses surface and the fact that multiple agencies were involved or notified there were problems with this family and actually involved with them surfaces; including the fact the children were often removed and then returned to their abusive parents.  When these cases surface in the media, people in general are quick to blame the low level social worker or agency for what they believe is their incompetence.  People in general just don't know how limited the power of these agencies and their employees are to serve and protect children.  But the administrators of these failed programs who earn big money at the state and federal levels of government to be in charge of these programs and the dispensation of legislated policies and monies to the counties in their states must then propose to the legislators the solution to these cases that have apparently "fallen through the cracks" and it is at that point that they generally start lying through their teeth about why the system failed with the result that another piece of paper or documentation is then added to the whole system as this piece of paper becomes the new magic bullet or proposed solution to make the social workers or providers more accountable to the legislators in how they have provided their services.  This discussion is in fact the very sad history of our struggling human services system and how worthless administrative paperwork duty upon worthless administrative paperwork duty is legislated that in most cases accomplishes absolutely nothing, fails to address the real issues of the lack of legal authority providers have to force real interventions, ignores the providers legislated duty to reconcile families whenever possible, and how providers time is continually burdened with frivolous paperwork that has to be done because it has been legislated and the funding of the agency or service employing them is completely tied to their ability to prove their paperwork compliances.

I will move toward ending this blog entry by noting is it any wonder in a society, in our civilized world in general where only the most severe physical abuses and neglects that can be perpetrated upon children receive attention, how, it is also true, that the comparatively functional families being terrorized by a psychopathic parent who can keep up and enforce public appearances are largely ignored.  In fact, these families are virtually off the radar of professionals for the most part with only the most severe cases commanding attention.  The first real unmasking of the psychopathic family may have come in the process of researchers calling attention to messy divorce custody disputes, involving one parent being alienated by their minor children.  There was a subset of these cases where there was no evidence that the alienated parent was either abusive or diagnosable in any manner.  In tracking this subset of custody dispute cases, researchers discovered a pattern among alienating parents and psychiatrists involved in these cases began assessing psychopathic/antisocial/narcissistic personality disorders in the alienators and these findings began to surface in the literature.   In fact, the first good literature I found on the subject of psychopaths raising children and their ability to apparently brainwash and control family members, fell right in the category of P.A.S. or Parent Alienation Syndrome.  But these studies of divorce cases are just a piece of the puzzle in really dissecting psychopathic parents and how they shape and control the families they raise.  What is especially significant to note is that families with one or two psychopathic parents in charge can appear very functional if you are on the outside looking in.  It is only if you are on the inside looking out that you really know what abuses are happening within the family and even on the inside you can become compliant and completely loyal to the abuser.  It is quite clear from the P.A.S studies that some children become brainwashed minions of the psychopath in charge and that these children have given up or surrendered their independent will to emotionally survive just as adults do when indoctrinated into a cult.  Like the character of Reek/Theon Greyjoy in game of thrones, those who have surrendered their will become extremely grateful for any small kindness shown to the point of feeling overwhelming love for their abuser when rewarded, they are completely loyal to their abuser and thank them for all manner of things to the point of absurdity, and the brainwashed do and say exactly what they are told to do and say to please their abuser.  I found it especially significant how the literature on P.A.S. discusses in some detail what is dubbed "the independent thinker phenomena" where the brainwashed children say terrible things about the parent they have estranged at the will of their psychopathic parent and claim these thoughts as if they were their own.  The literature also indicates it can take years of therapy and separation from the controlling psychopathic parent to break this conditioning once it has been accomplished, but this has been done when persistent loving parents threw every resource they had and went to the mat to fight for their minor children.  However, it is speculated that many of these types of cases are lost or brought to a stalemate because the court system as whole is not prepared to deal with these kinds of cases; also, there are few experts adequately trained to work with the children and deprogram them, and, finally it is difficult to get the children separated from their controller long enough for the children to feel safe enough to deprogram especially if this controller is the mother and she has physical custody in the midst of the divorce dispute.  Sometimes in adulthood, an adult brainwashed as a child has had a break through and realizes what was done to them and actually seeks out their alienated parent.  I have spoken to a number of these people online and I have spoken with mothers who after a decade or more of separation from their children heard from them when they had a break through.  I have no information though on the percentages or actual likelihood that adults who were brainwashed by a controlling parent as children, realize what happened to them.   The ability of the intelligent psychopath to control those within their sphere of influence and to simultaneously keep up an acceptable public appearance is precisely why until there is a rift in such families, such as a messy divorce, that the psychopath's hidden abuses, including the brainwashing of their family members, the reality of their iron clad control over the thoughts of their children, their abilities to tell ridiculous  and cruel lies to maintain control, and their insidious manipulations of others without remorse may be made visible.  It is often only in the process of their systematic exposure with the help of seasoned professionals who are aware of and trained in P.A.S. that this type of abuse may be made visible for all to see.

Tragically, intervention in childhood for the victims of psychopathic parents appears to be almost non-existent.  The vast majority of work on the survivors of psychopathic parents is being done with adults who are going in for therapy when they reach adulthood.  Because there are so many recognized survivors of these psychopathic led families and so many books on the subject for all to read the scope of this very vast problem is finally coming into focus.  The reality is that these adults who grew up being abused by psychopaths as children never received in many cases any intervention as children and in many cases the abuse going on at home was completely hidden to outsiders.  I know this was certainly true for me and for my father as we both lived under the tyrannies of my psychopathic mother.  Even those who did know something was going on in our home, knew in fact very little, and in fact my father and I were very obedient when it came to keeping our family secrets, secret; but more on that subject at some other time.  Another point I want to make is that children displaying psychopathic traits such as some of the youngsters I worked with in residential treatment are theoretically likely to grow up to be psychopathic parents who may in turn not only abuse their families but give birth to or train/groom other psychopaths by their example. The co-occurance of more than one psychopath within a family is well documented at this point whether the psychopathy is learned or inherited genetically is however a matter of much discussion.   Not all severely abused children I worked with displayed psychopathic tendencies.  A significant percentage in residential treatment however did.  As, this was a more select population of abused children, this observation is not surprising when you think about it.  These children were in residential treatment based on the severity of their symptoms and often because they were considered a risk to other children.   However, not one of these children to my knowledge was diagnosed as psychopathic as there was and is a great reluctance to label a child with any diagnosis and the prevailing wisdom is to give dangerous and violently behavioral children a much softer label like oppositional defiant disorder or conduct disorder for example.  So if they were diagnosed, it would only be much later in life when they were adults and most likely due to incarceration as psychopaths are known to not be seekers of mental health services.  Based on the number of survivor stories I have read and the number of survivors like myself I have met online over the last decade, I am very confident most psychopaths are never diagnosed.  The vast majority of these psychopaths appear to be living fairly functional lives and they are limiting their abuses to immediate family members, dishonest business deals, and petty manipulations within their social circles, jobs, and communities, but they are smart enough in many cases to mask themselves so effectively that people really don't know them and what they are unless they become their targets for whatever reason.  Examples of extreme cases of this ability to mask even severe psychopathy are not at all hard to find.  One needs only to look at Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy to see how even severely psychopathic men can be very functional members of society and extremely lethal when they give into their psychopathic urges and allow their psychopathic pleasures to trump their ability to mask themselves from others. People who thought they knew these men well as classmates, colleagues, and friends, stepped up to defend them and to pledge to their good characters when they were arrested.  A well masked psychopath may be invisible to anyone until they choose to reveal themselves for whatever reason, and they are quite able to disguise themselves to even their own family members.

Most of what I know about my parents early years came from my father and these conversations usually occurred when we were taking long slow rides through the countryside escaping or seeking a break from a particularly long siege of one of my mother's especially vicious verbal tirades that often went on for days; and I am not exaggerating when I say days.

When my mother went into what the literature calls a Narcissistic Rage, these rages often went on from sun up to sun down for as long as a week.  She would wake up roaring, rant, rave, cry, scream, throw dishes, slam doors, slam chairs, pace around in bouncing energetic frenzies, periodically getting in our faces and accusing us of horrible things or just saying horrible things about us, punctuating her tirades by physically pushing both of us around and daring us to hit her; and she could sustain these performances with extremely high energy for hours on end.  In fact the incredible energy she was able to muster in these rages that she could sustain for hours falsely lead me to really believe when I was older and a student of psychology that she was probably some type of a manic depressive with possibly psychotic features which would account for the persecutory complex she exhibited when she was in these raging frenzies. Manic depression later came to be known as bipolar disorders in the DSM's just to be clear.  As I write this I am still struck by how bi-polar this behavior appears even retrospectively and I have to acknowledge it is possible there was an underlying chemical imbalance fueling these incredibly energized behaviors, but if this is in fact true and my mother could be dual diagnosed, any bipolar disorder she may have had was in addition to her underlying primary diagnosis of psychopathy.  I also have to revert to the very important observation that she was in fact able to turn these behaviors on and off as if she was throwing a switch and suddenly appear perfectly normal which rather negates the out of control manias associated with a true bipolar disorder.

I estimate that I was around three or four years old when my first real memories of these rages that lasted for days really start kicking in and in my early memories I was terrified of her during those times. Since my father was on the road and still working for the first four years of my life, I was alone with her; and trust me, that was not a good thing, but more on that later.  This introduction is intended to just set the stage for why and how my father and I came to have these very in depth conversations about the early years of his marriage to my mother.  My father was a very good man and a very thoughtful man.  He in fact expended a lot of time and energy trying to understand who my mother was and why she said the things she did and why she behaved the way she did. To his credit, he always tried to believe that there was good in her and that she had to have some history of very severe abuse to account for why she was the way she was.  He considered the possibility that members of her family abused her as a child, and that this abuse may have included sexual abuse.  While I understand why father may of theorized these possible explanations for mother's behaviors, I have to be very clear that not all abused people become abusers and that not all victims of perpetrators go on to be perpetrators themselves.  To treat any living thing, most especially other people and children as objects for your pleasure, to enjoy torturing the living, and to exercise your power to make the living suffer without remorse or guilt leads directly into the realm of the psychopath and whether the psychopathy is inherited, learned, or chosen there is a lot of evidence out there that a tendency does exist within first degree family members for more than one psychopath to occur and I am quite sure multiple psychopaths living within the same space would abuse each other if one is more dominate or one has the advantage at any given time.  I think there is plenty of evidence to support this supposition just by studying prison populations and how identified psychopaths function in that setting.  There will be more on psychopathy as a possible inheritance at some point, but for now, this is sufficient to set the stage for my conversations with my father pertaining to his early years with my mother prior to my birth.

I really don't know when dad starting telling me all he knew about mother and whether his disclosures started because he was thinking out loud sifting for clues trying to figure it out for himself or he was answering my questions about what was wrong with her and why she acted like this, or whether he was trying to share all he knew to help me cope and/or to actually weigh my opinions against his own because he was desperate for answers himself.  I honestly suspect that all of the above are true depending upon what year, what rage episode we were dealing with, and how advanced my understanding of the world was during any given conversation.  We had many conversations about mother and these spanned from my being five years old to being 29 years of age when my poor father passed away from complications related to terminal lung cancer.

My father told me that he was thrilled to be married again and he set off with my mother to his job in Paducah with high hopes and great expectations for a blissful married life and he entertained the hope that even though he was older that it was possible with his younger bride that there might still be time to have a child or two of his own.  But the thrill of the new marriage soon faded as my father began to really know his new bride.  Dad lead me to believe that mother's mood swings and odd habits became obvious within weeks.  He disclosed that he soon suspected he was in trouble and that he had made a colossal life changing blunder getting involved with her; but, as he had made the choice to become involved with her and as he had said the words committing to her before a judge, he resolved to give the marriage the best that he could.  I perceived over the years that dad also felt a great sense of shame having already had one failed marriage and having to deal with the prospect of a second divorce he was humiliated.  Also, he felt deep personal embarrassment because of how thrilled he had been to marry a much younger, attractive woman, which had given him a great sense of pride in himself as a man at the time.  He often quoted: "pride goeth before the fall."

Dad shared with me that mother's inability to remain either satisfied or happy for more than short bursts of time was the first personality trait he really noticed about her that disturbed him.  In his words, if she got something she wanted, she would be thrilled, but when the thrill wore off, she moved quickly into dissatisfaction, moodiness, and possibly depression that seemed to drain her of all energy and make her see everything around her in a negative light. Mother's moodiness soon included rages and periods of sharp tongued retorts gradually evolving into more personalized attacks upon him as she knew him better.  She had episodes he described as chronic, consistent complaining and nagging that went on unabated.  At first he would try to abate her discomfort and please her, but with time he could see he was just in a cycle that never appeared to resolve and her demands and complaints were often, in his words, unreasonable.  Dad became convinced she was unwell and he sought advice from a number of doctors trying find information about what condition she might have.  One of these doctors was a Dr. Leslie Winans who lived in the south and who in fact was a relative of mother's somewhere in her family tree.  Dad indicated he and Dr. Winans talked a lot about mother's "condition" and that Dr. Winans initiated a number of treatments to see if these would be affective to moderate her moods including some injections which dad believed were steroids of some sort.  What ever treatments Dr. Winan's initiated, these did not appear to help and in at least one case may have made her worse; so these treatments, whatever they were, were discontinued.

In the early years of their marriage, dad wondered if the mysterious illness that had apparently disabled mother when she was working in Colorado forcing her to come home to her own mother had something to do with her mental instabilities.  He understood that she had received treatment for a thyroid imbalance in Iowa when she was living with her brother Bill and his wife Opal.  He and Dr. Winans apparently discussed whether or not the medical treatment she had received in Iowa for her alleged Thyroid condition could have had anything to do with the mood instability she was exhibiting.  Although Dr. Winans and my father had a number of interesting conversations regarding mother, they never resolved or came to any conclusions regarding what may have been going on with her to account for the mood swings they were discussing.

My father was a very social man and he loved having company and spending time with groups of people sharing stories and having laughs.  He soon discovered his wife was the opposite and that she almost hated having company.  Over time he observed that she tended to obsess about planning anything.  To minimize conflicts between them, he determined it was best not to plan anything too far in advance so she couldn't obsess about it, get upset, and work herself into an "episode" as he called her temper tantrums.  Dad became a ninja entertainer where he would pop in and say something to the effect of, "Oh I forgot to tell you, but so and so and his wife are coming over for dinner tonight, so bust out the chickens."  Because mother had to get right up and focus on the dinner, she never had time to obsess and to get angry about the pending entertainment and these impromptu dinner parties usually went well.  Even she would concede afterwards she had had a good time.  Dad would then praise her lavishly for the wonderful meal and how much fun everyone had.  Dad actually deployed this strategy for years and I am not sure mother ever figured out why he was doing what he did, beyond complaining to people later in life that she had fried more chicken for strangers she never saw again than she could recount and how she got so sick and tired of him inviting anyone he ran into over for a chicken supper.  In the next breath she often would also lament how they used to have so many friends when they were first married and she sometimes wondered where they all went.

Dad noted how mother had a tendency to alienate people with her negativity, laziness, lack of interest in cultivating any hobbies and the fact she did not participate in any of the traditional ladies skills that tended to knit people together through sharing common interests.  She did not play games and she was not interested in cards though he taught her a few games.  Mother did not quilt, she didn't cook more than a few things, she didn't knit, crochet, paint, scrapbook, embroider, collect, or participate in anything voluntarily.  She liked to sit and to do nothing for the most part and she showed no interest in learning anything new.  Left to her own devices their little travel trailer became a mess and the dishes piled up unwashed.  My father was a very neat, orderly individual who took good care of himself and of his things; so, mother's lack of concern for their living quarters sparked a lot of conflict between them.  Dad reported after working all day, he often had to do dishes and clean the place up because she would not.  It was not unusual for her to neglect her own personal hygiene, and she showed no interest in becoming involved in any ladies groups or in developing any hobbies on her own.  Mother spent her time reading and drinking coffee.  When she wasn't engaged in these activities, her only other hobby appeared to be verbal abuse and the art of perfecting personal attacks by sharpening her tongue at his expense as she ferreted out his vulnerabilities.  Dad noted that in a small village of migrant construction workers living in trailers near the work site in close proximity, privacy was at a minimum and women tended to talk.  When mother's tirades were overheard, it was not unusual for the other wives to start shunning her and him by extension.

Dad also began to realize that mother lied and he took most everything she said with "a grain of salt" as he put it.  He noted that in at least one case she had apparently bad mouthed him to another wife in their trailer village very early in their marriage and that the husband who was a friend of his let him know what was said.  When confronted, mother denied the incident and made up an outlandish story about why the woman told lies about her.  Mother would often say things and then deny she had said them with such vehemence that you could believe that she actually suffered from real memory losses or fugue states.  I actually wondered at one time if she was dissociative when I learned about dissociative disorders.  However, like my father, in the end I concluded she absolutely knew what she said and did she just had no problem or the slightest tweak of conscience when it came to lying about what happened.   Unlike most people, she also had no problem blaming someone else who was innocent in creating her lies and she would rescript her own actions to make herself out to be the victim of the conflict or incident.  Mother had no problems lying about her behaviors even within minutes of having said or done whatever it was she had said and done.  I saw her do this myself innumerable times.  In point of fact mother rewrote our entire family history on a regular basis, especially whenever she had a conflict with anyone over any little thing as well as very big things.  In her version of historical events, she was always a meek, mild, pleasing victim trying so hard to get along with everyone and to hold everything together against great obstacles while struggling under the yoke of constant attacks and criticism like she was some kind of a dog being kicked around.  The reality was that she was the perpetrator and she lied through her teeth about the facts of any argument or incident that ever occurred between her and my father as well as between her and myself making him and eventually me out to be the abusers and herself the victim when we were the ones really being victimized by her.  So, I absolutely know from my own personal experiences with my mother that what my father told me about her was absolutely true.  My mother was a master at rewriting history and her rewritten versions of events always favored her absolutely.

Per my father's report, my mother had a few miscarriages during the early years of their marriage and he had accepted there would be no children born to them.  In fact, after around six years of living with her rages and tongue lashings he decided he wanted out of the marriage entirely.  Mother refused to give him a divorce and she refused to separate.  Dad was determined to end the marriage and this lead to an intense battle of wills between them.  This battle only went into a cease fire in fact when a miracle apparently occurred, mother became pregnant and that pregnancy did not miscarry and became me.

I will end this entry with my personal opinion that I am very skeptical that my birth was in fact a spontaneous miracle.  Many times my mother let the penny drop that she never wanted to have children and that she never really liked children all that much.  These disclosures by her usually came up when I expressed how much I loved my own children and how I often wished I had had a solid marriage so I could have had a large family.  I often lamented that it was hard going for a long time and my children were very shortchanged and so was I, because I did not get to enjoy a lot of their milestones and I missed so many of the little day to day things that happen in a family that are so precious.  I really grieved not being home with my children and I frankly resented at times I had to work so hard.  Mother of course always praised me for all I did and provided for the family, perhaps afraid she would lose her meal ticket, but who knows.  Sadly, it was precisely because I was gone way too much that my mother most likely was able to obtain her iron clad control over my children.  She had way too much time to terrorize them, groom them, and brainwash them to her liking.  But, going back to the circumstances and the timing of my own birth and considering the pregnancies that had previously miscarried prior to my conception, I cant help wondering if I was allowed to be born.  My father intended to divorce my mother.  He was very clear on that point to me many times.  The timing of her pregnancy with me is just way too convenient in my opinion and the reality is that I became the glue that bound my father ultimately to her onto his death.  More than one time I can recall mother saying to me very haughtily that I should thank her for being born at all because she had initiated it.  I thought by "it" she meant she had initiated the sexual act leading to my conception.  But this was a very odd thing to say when you think about it.  But, in a sea of odd things she had said to me over the years, I really didn't think that much about it at the times she said it.  In retrospect, knowing what I know now, I embrace the possibility that she may well have been letting me know in her own psychopathic way that my coming into being was ultimately her choice.  Only she knows the truth about how I really made it out of the chute so to speak, so the rather interesting circumstances of my birth will forever remain a question mark in my life.

I want to write a bit about my parents and the families they came from.  Obviously I can't remember everything they told me about themselves and how they ended up together, but there are significant memories and experiences that serve to set the stage for how my family came to be controlled by my psychopathic mother.  I will start with the family stories I was told adding those details I believe are pertinent to create a picture of both of my parents as I knew them.

My father was 61 years old when I was born and my mother was 41 years old.  They had been married six or seven years and I was their only child.  At least I was the only child that made it from conception to full term delivery, but more on that later.  My mother was living with her mother and her older sister in a tiny home belonging to her mother when she met my father.  My mother was a waitress working in one of the local cafes and my father worked construction requiring travel to large job sites in addition to owning a building converted to apartments in the community.  My father's apartment business had once been his huge family home and this historical home had been converted into four complete apartment flats, one on each floor, by his mother to generate income after his father had died.  Father had inherited the property post his mother's death.  Mother was recovering from an unspecified illness, most likely a thyroid disorder, and she was only able to work limited hours per her report without losing her strength.  Father was divorced and he was extremely lonely.  One night, he offered to give her a ride home after her waitressing shift and she accepted.  They knew each other about a month when he asked her to marry him and join him on the road for his next construction job.  She agreed, they married before a justice of the peace and they left immediately for Paducah, Kentucky where my father's job site was located and to begin their married life.  My father often told me how he regretted his hasty decision to marry my mother and how he never would have married her had he really gotten to know her and what she was like.  My mother often shared how she expected to be a young widow and to advance herself after his death. She resented the fact he was not as rich and as prosperous as she had hoped he was and as he lingered in the world until the age of 90, I endured years of watching her systematically malign him to any one who would listen, while in private she nagged and raved at him, torturing him emotionally by highlighting any fault or flaw she could think of to belittle him and to tear him apart.

Mother's father was a land speculator, gentleman farmer, who bought properties, developed them and then sold them for profit after living on them.   He went broke during the great depression forcing his family to abandon their then current home in Carthage SD to bank foreclosure.  They moved what they could salvage to the last piece of property her father still owned but which had not been improved around Elkton or Ward SD.  This farm and its buildings were in such bad shape that the bank declined to foreclose on it.  Mother was the fourth of six children.  There was a significant age gap between the oldest three children and the youngest three children making mother the oldest of a second brood and she looked upon her older siblings more as if they were other adults than true siblings. Both mother's younger siblings died young.  The youngest sister was born in Carthage SD  and within days of her birth she died of starvation.  She had been born with a cleft palette and the family declined to feed her.  Mother aways remembered this sister and how pretty she looked in the coffin.  She often expressed a desire to be buried beside her because she was the only family member in that cemetery in SD and she wanted to keep her company so she would not be alone. Mother's younger brother started seizing before he was five years old and he was diagnosed with a brain tumor at the Mayo Clinic.  He died around age 20 when the tumor which had been inoperable at that time, but irradiated with the technologies available at the time, abscessed and apparently exploded.   Mother often spoke of how when her brother died the blood oozed out his ears and eyes.  Mother claimed her father and mother believed that education was unimportant for women as they were just expected to get married and bear children.  She was educated through the 8th grade and not allowed to continue school.  All inheritances were to pass to the boys, her older brothers, so she and her sister left home hiring out as waitresses and hired girls when they were older.  The depression had left her parents impoverished and for at least one winter they starved and she remembered layering newspapers on the thin walls to keep out the cold and how the ice had to broken around the pump so they could get water.  Her older sister Lois was often taking care of her and her younger brother Robert.  She claimed she loved country school and that she had advanced reading and speaking abilities.  She often reminisced  that her parents were begged by educators to continue her education, but she was still not allowed to continue school after the 8th grade.  She seldom spoke tenderly of her parents and I always found that odd.  She did have one memory of being on her father's knee and being bounced by him that seemed happy.  Her father's death by stomach cancer made a lasting impression on her and she often talked about how he starved to death unable to eat at the end and how he would ask to have food brought in just so he could look at it.  Mother had no fond memories of her older brother Harold who she seemed to resent right along with his wife Ann.  She spoke of Harold being verbally abusive, selfish, and threatening; and of his wife Ann's self-centered extravagance which forced her father to use his meager resources to shore Harold up and keep him afloat more than once.  She especially repeated over and over how Ann insisted on new furniture after marrying Harold and how she went without necessities because her father had to help pay for the furniture when Harold was over extended.  She had many memories of Harold making her feel unwelcome, unwanted, and like a burden.   She had better memories of her brother Bill, but she almost hated his wife Opal who she considered snotty, rude, and inconsiderate.  She had gone to live with Bill and Opal for a period of time after she fell ill in Colorado to seek medical help in that area and she often talked about how Opal made it very clear she was not their equal and a burden on them.  Mother resented being expected to work around Bill's farm and she had very specific resentful memories of being left behind when Bill and his wife went on couples outings making it impossible for her meet anyone.  She reported Opal made it clear to her that she was not good enough to marry any of her friends.

My mother's older sister was named Lois and she deserves her own paragraph.  Mother's sister Lois was a painfully thin shadow that remained living with her mother after her fathers death.  She had no social life, no days off, and no friends.  She seldom spoke and she just labored quietly helping everyone with no opinions.  I loved Lois; she was kind and gentle and some of my first happy memories of being with an adult are with her.  I would sit on her lap and we would spend hours visiting.  I really actually thought we were talking, but I found out years later I was babbling and she was just pretending to understand me. She would put a blanket over a kitchen stool and make me a tent when we visited and I thought that was the greatest thing ever.  Lois was verbally abused by her brothers and I saw them speaking to her very harshly on a number of occasions. I remember coming to her defense as just a little girl and being ordered from the room.   Lois lived like a slave most of her life as her mother's live in caretaker.  After her mother's death, Lois was cheated out of her inheritance of this home she had lived in for years by her brothers per my mother's report.  Mother also reported that her mother's rings which had been given to her and to Lois were taken away by her brother Harold and passed to his own daughters.  Both Lois and my mother apparently said nothing when these items were denied them and they just allowed them to do this to them, though mother at least seethed with resentment for as long as I knew her. Looking back I am astounded by the greed of her brothers who were well off by this time and who were so petty that they denied a tiny home to Lois within which she had lived in for years caring for their mother's every need.  When their mother's illnesses progressed, Lois went to the hospital and sat with her every day, usually walking across town because she never owned a car or learned to drive.  In the years following my maternal grandmother' death, she moved to a shabby little apartment where she slowly starved herself to death.  Lois had full blown anorexia though we didn't know what it was at the time.  My mother always blamed her brothers for Lois's self starvation reporting they had relentlessly ridiculed her for being big, horsey, fat, and unattractive when she was young.  After her death, I discovered she had a cabinet full of laxatives and suppositories.  I was around 20 when she died and I knew she was in trouble in the months and weeks leading to her death.  I would call her and ask her if she had eaten and insist that she tell me what she had eaten.  I know she lied about eating. But when I called her she dutifully recited to me all the food she had allegedly eaten that day and yet she slowly dwindled down to skin and bones until her body shut down and her kidneys quit.  My mother was also alarmed about Lois's decline and she kept trying to get her to sign over her business to her so she could help her.  I really didn't know and still don't know what she meant by "signing over her business", but in one of the only times I can recall Lois standing up for herself she made it very clear to my mother she did not trust her and that she would never give her access to her money.  She clearly did not trust my mother at all and to her credit she never really told me why she felt that way though I have my suspicions.  Lois was the only person in my mother's family I really loved.  She had a heart and a soul.  I don't know what all happened to her to make her who she was and into the kindly slave and family scapegoat that she obviously was, but she had been very broken by life somewhere along the way.  May she rest in well deserved peace.

Overall, I never saw my mother's extended family much.  I have few memories of her mother even though we went to her house fairly often so mother could see her and that's went I generally spent time with my Aunt Lois.  Grandmother laid in bed most of the time being fed, diapered, and receiving medicines.  I don't know why she was so infirm but I have really wondered if she just decided to stop moving and to let everyone care for her.  Though we lived close to her brother Harold, we seldom visited or socialized.  Only my mother and her brother Harold produced any children and Harold's children were all older than I with only one tail end late in life daughter Linda being even near my age.  I enjoyed the few times I saw Linda as a child.  She was pleasant and funny and she did not seem at all like her father, but I never saw her much and I never really got to know her.  I visited with Harold's son Roger a few times before my estrangement from my family and I found him and his wife to also be very pleasant people.  However, none of my four Winans cousins ever bothered to look me up post my estrangement from the family by my mother.   Their lack of concern for me and their apparent indifference to my being an outcast doesn't really surprise me though as we were never close.

My father was the oldest boy of a District Judge who had once served as the speaker of the South Dakota House of Representatives.  His mother was a well bred lady descended from the very distinguished Beecher  family and she was a relative of both Henry Ward Beecher the famous orator/preacher and Harriet Beecher Stowe famous author and abolitionist.  Dad had two brothers and a sister.  He had mostly wonderful memories of growing up.  He talked of a lively household where funny things would happen leaving them all howling with laughter, of moral lessons taught that left deep impressions, books from their family library their father read them as children, art his mother had collected, fascinating relatives and famous people his family had met, a dog he had especially loved as a child, and of his sister's cat that he despised and frequently battled with.  He remembered sledding, skiing, exploring the woods with friends, playing the trumpet, funny stories from his childhood, sharing interesting conversations at family dinners, and he always praised the fine qualities of both his parents highlighting the many joyful and touching moments he had observed in their relationship.  Dad also deeply respected his two brothers and his sister.  His brother Charles was a distinguished lawyer.  His brother Paul a distinguished Annapolis graduate and a retired navel captain.  His sister Harriet was educated as a teacher in a private college, but she was a full time wife married to another Annapolis graduate who had advanced to the level of vice admiral in a very distinguished navel career.   Father was very proud of his siblings, their parents, and their upbringing.  Dad himself was a distinguished veteran of both World War I and II and he was deeply patriotic.  He had hoped to be a career military man, but in a twist of policy changes, he could not advance rank due to missing what was known as age and grade requirement and this technicality effectively ended his career military plans. As the oldest child of a judge, Dad had been sent to college where he ran through his money in the first few months partying and going to theatre production shows as described it.  When I think of dad, I remember how he always enjoyed a good time, his infectious smile, and his intense curiosity about nature and all things.  When he was not ill and not being brow beaten by my mother he was really a very social and jolly man.   However, his irresponsible ways as a youth had angered his father who pulled him out of school and put him to work in his law office hoping to train him.  Dad left this training to rejoin the military.  Post leaving the military dad then settled in Chicago where he married a beautiful show girl with ties to the mob.  Their relationship was tempestuous and she had a child before she married dad with someone else, most likely out of wedlock.  He enjoyed becoming a surrogate dad to her child and he often wondered what happened to the boy and he even seemed wistful talking about him as if he hoped he was looking for him.  My father and his first wife had quite the life in Chicago drinking in prohibition speakeasies including the Knickerbocker which he often mentioned and she danced with gangsters enraging him and sparking fights that ended up with him getting him tossed to the curb more than once.  He recalled being thrown to the curb where he sulked and he waited for her until she came out chastising him for his bad behavior and jealousy.  He loved her madly I am quite sure and even when I was little but big enough to ask about her, I recall vividly how he once told me what a beautiful dancer she was and what great legs she had and how his eyes sparkled remembering her.  Father had a thriving boiler business in Chicago and he expected to be a rich man.  He was picking out his first new Cadillac and driving to his bank to make a withdrawal to pay for the car when he saw the line stretching around the bank block and then he saw the bars across the bank door.  This bank held both his personal account and his business account.  The depression had hit and he lost everything including his business.  He loaded his wife, her child, and what belongings they could in his old car, after returning the Cadillac he could not pay for, and they drove to his parents home in MN.  He often said they didn't know if they had enough gas to even make it into town on the last leg of the journey.  Dad emphasized how lucky they were to have a place to go as they would ended up on the street the way things were in Chicago.  However, once settled with his parents, fathers first wife clearly hated small town rural Minnesota living and she did not meld well with his aristocratic mother.  Dad found a job and he tried to rebuild their lives, but she was unhappy and bored.  One day she emptied their bank account, took her child, their car and left for Chicago and she never came back. Dad grieved for her, but she would not return to him.  Dads father would not allow him to divorce her as long as he lived; so Dad remained single and unavailable for marriage until after his father's death and upon receiving permission from his mother he was finally allowed to divorce and to move on with his life.  Dad often mentioned how he was always the odd man out with his friends who had married, started raising families, and who increasingly preferred to socialize as couples.  He had many men friends from the military, but he was lonely and he felt disconnected from his friends who were raising families.  When he met my mother, he told me he thought my mother was a good girl who had had some hard luck from a strange family which wasn't her fault.  He also was very proud of her virtue and he reported when he married her she was still a virgin.  So he believed he had married a virtuous young beauty and he expected as a married man that he would now be included in his friends circles as just another couple.

I adored my fathers two brothers, his sister and their spouses.  Having them visit was like a trip to disneyland complete with exotic gifts, lots of laughter, actually playing games as a family, and amusing family stories being told late into the evenings.  I could hardly wait to see them come and I loved going to the Twin Cities to spend holidays with Uncle Charlie's family.  Dad's brother youngest brother, retired sea captain Paul Howard, had opened a book store in Oakland California and every Christmas he would send me a wonderful box of Award winning children's classics.  From my Uncle Roy and Aunt Harriet I also received some of the most amazing Christmas presents.  I can still hear my aunt Harriet's glorious tittering little giggles.  She was jolly and I adored her.  Yet, to our faces, my mother despised my fathers family and she openly raged how she hated going to see them and how she hated having them come.  She hated cleaning the house to get ready for them, she resented every bite of food they had, she felt judged by them, and she threw at least a week long tantrum when ever we either were going to the cities to visit or when Dads family were coming to see us for family reunion visits in the summer.  But when she was actually around them, she became some one else entirely and perhaps that is why their visits still seem like the highlights of my young life.  There were no tantrums, no verbal abuses, no physical abuses, and no vicious tongue lashings when ever dad's family was present.  I was so busy enjoying the fun that I never comprehended mother experienced major personality shifts until  years later when I was trying to figure out why so many people could not believe what an abusive horror of a home life dad and I had endured.  With careful reflection it dawned on me she never, ever showed this side of herself when my dad's family was around and that although this reprieve from her narcissistic rages was truly wonderful, the flip side of our reprieve was that dad's family had no idea what she was doing to us.  In fact I know my father approached his brother Charlie and asked for his help to obtain a divorce from her when I was quite young.  When he shared his reasons with his brother telling him what mother was like to live with, his own brother didn't believe him and he refused to help him. As I searched my own memories I realized my mother became very calm and very pleasant in the presence of other people and I realize how she actually morphed into what appeared to be a quiet, unassuming,  humble, nice person.  But the minute the visitors were gone, she went right back to her regular persona, often with a vengeance screaming her resentments about how they had all treated her like a waitress, how they all looked down on her, and how she didn't intend to put up with waiting on them ever again.  In between these rants claiming that she had been victimized in some manner, she also launched vicious personal attacks on my aunts and uncles making sick fun of their eating habits, voice inflections, bathroom habits and whatever else she could think of to abuse my father and upset him.  The very important fact that dad's family never saw my mother the way we did was really a revelation to me.  Because we lived with her rages and rants all the time, I just assumed everyone knew about them.  I really did not know that she  had the ability to completely hide her vicious, vindictive nature from others as effectively as she could and did.  I never realized until post my estrangement how opportunistic, deliberate, and controlled her abuses actually were.  I also was completely unaware of her ability to convince people that she was a wonderful, mild mannered, hard working good wife and mother.  I gradually realized that most people never saw her in all her glory because she could turn her abusive nature on and off like she was throwing a switch.

Mom often told me she thought she had married money and into a prominent family when she landed my father and she expected the marriage to really launch her socially.  However, she also was feeling a lot of pressure from her brothers to move out of mother's home.  Her brothers, per her report, considered her a mooch on their poor old mom and they wanted her out of there.  Mother often told me about her brothers pressuring her to move out of her mother's home and she always spoke of this with much bitter resentment.  She pointed out how she was ill and still recovering and only able to work part time.  I could never understand the conflict over this living arrangement to tell the truth.  After all, this was her mother too and her mother's home and she had asked her to live there, so how was this even her brothers business really?  But, I only have my mother's account of how this all went down so I can only report this as she so often told it.  I frankly grew up thinking she and her family were all nuts with the exception of my poor aunt Lois who was slowly starving herself to death.  Mother also focused on how she had no money or help and that living on her own was impossible.  She often recounted that my father knew that she was unable to work much when he asked her to marry him; and, per her report, he told her that he made good money and that he would not expect her to work.  What he wanted from her was for her to manage their money because he had tendencies to over spend and he sometimes forgot to pay bills.  She told him she was good at managing money and she agreed to marry him right then and there.  She also often told me that she expected to be widowed young due to the 20 year difference in their ages and to subsequently become the sole possessor of my fathers estate,  She had calculated the likelihood of her widowhood to be quite high especially since he worked such dangerous construction jobs.  I heard her say these things about my father so often that I didn't even find what she said odd to be honest.  However, as I matured and I better understood what she was really saying, I gradually realized that she married my father expecting him to die leaving her free to better herself by leveraging his social position and assets.  I think it is significant how, with constant exposure, things that are wrong like this, just become an accepted part of life.  Mother even shared with me quite young her observation that my father had been an idiot for believing she was a virgin and on a few occasions she talked about some soldier she had had a fling with in Colorado Springs before falling ill.  I never told my father what she said about her virginity being a lie as her "purity" when he married her was something for which he was very proud.  I think he told me about her virginity and its significance to him to impress upon me the importance of abstinence and virtue for a woman whereas she told me how she had fooled him on this issue to impress upon me the general stupidity of men.

I will end this entry by pointing out a few points of interest.  My parents family backgrounds were obviously very different.  Dad's family enjoyed visiting with each other and they shared many happy memories.  Mothers family seemed to distrust and to disrespect each other.  Dad's family obviously had sincere regard and love for each other.  There were serious family dysfunctions in my mothers family.  My father's family was overall a very healthy group. Mother and her siblings had terrible relationships with each other. My mother's sister Lois was a gentle soul and she was treated horribly, disrespected, cheated, and exploited in my opinion by her own family including her mother who should have made a will and just left Lois her house considering all that was done for her by her daughter.  Obviously nothing Lois did was ever good enough for her brothers and the sacrifices she made to care for her mother and her dedication to these duties were largely unacknowledged beyond pittance of a salary.  I personally do not believe my mother ever really loved my father who just presented her with an opportunity to get out of her mother's home and away from her brothers criticism.   Mother actually considered what she would gain from my father when he died and her expectation of being widowed still relatively young clearly had a lot to do with her decision to marry him.  Dad did not know mother until after he married her or he wouldn't have married her in the first place.  Mother's narcissistic rages and abuses were hidden and unknown to other people.