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.