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.
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