The Last Letter

My mother died in July this year (2025, for future readers). I know I don't have many followers here despite writing this blog for more than 20 years, but if you search the posts, you'll find a lot of background. Some of it is repeated here.

She was ill and declining for six or so months. We never reconnected. Not since October 2013. 

Before:
I’m sorry you’re unwell and in hospital, but I am so much sorrier for you, for the life you’ve squandered. I’m so sorry for you that you know nothing about me, nothing of my partner, and nothing about my amazing, successful, wonderful, compassionate, loving daughters, or your incredible niece.

I’m sorry – and this is the hardest part – that in 12 years, you never reached out beyond notes talking about yourself, or asking for things you wanted; never, “I would like to reconcile; can we talk?” I’m sorry your refrain was always “I don’t know what I’ve done.” I’m sorry you never saw your eldest child was desperate for a real, kind, compassionate relationship with you, and I’m sorry every time there was the possibility of having a relationship, you found some way to kill it.

I’m sorry that, because you have never shown much interest in them, your grandchildren wanted little to do with you; anything you might ask them about was only a springboard for you to talk about yourself. You made no effort to know them or be interested in them, their schooling, their friends, their partners, their work.  They are my greatest joy. I’m sorry for you that your self-obsession prevented you from being interested in and engaged with these brilliant women.

After
I’m so sorry you never understood the immense love you could have enjoyed – from your children, your grandchildren, and your husbands – George particularly. I’m sorry that my children could never know you, know about your life, your family, your experiences – the true story of what it was like to grow up when and where you did, the true story of who your mother was, who your father was – good or bad. I’m sorry my children knew how bright you were, but that what could have been a bright beacon for them was only an enticement into your self-obsession, and your constant belittling of other people, your anxiety, depression, your closed world.

I’m sorry that your anger and your lies caused a permanent rupture between you and your Nova Scotia family. I’m sorry for you that the damage you did to your relationships there means you will be buried far away from your parents, your brother, and your family members. 

I know you spoke against me to your brother and sister-in-law, intending they hate me too. I believe you poisoned my grandfather’s understanding of me.  You didn’t succeed. The last words out of Bill’s mouth to me before he died were “I love you.” The last words Alice spoke to me before she died were “I love you.”  Jeanette and her girls and I are very close. As weird as he is, even Brad and I can get on the phone and talk for ages.

 I’m sorry that you don’t understand how criminal it is you caused such deep divisions between your own children, and I’m sorry for you that you spent your life abusing, maligning your firstborn. I’m sorry that you never understood what all of this cost you and that you never understood the life you could have enjoyed, and the love you could have surrounded yourself with. I see all those condolences people have posted, and those make me sad and frustrated, frankly, because most of these people never knew you beyond a few hours at church or at some event. They never knew the you behind the door. They never saw or knew the chaos, and they never understood how deeply wounded you were. Hundreds of people in your life would have corralled around you, supported and championed you – the real, damaged, human you. But your narcissism was profound and so stifling.

I was saddened and frustrated to receive your note in May via G. I am without words to understand why, after nearly 12 years, your request was that you were probably dying and that I should come make you happy. I have never been successful making you happy at any point in my life. I don’t believe it was ever possible. Nothing I did ever caused you to feel pride, interest, or curiosity. You responded to me as a nuisance, an invasion, as someone who, as you said so often, was trying to ruin your life and doing a good job of it. How could I have ever made you happy when I was a liability you seemed to have to deal with? How would my presence have suddenly made you happy when it hasn’t in my entire life? It felt more like you wanted a win. It did not read that you wanted a reconciliation.

I think you have been anxious and depressed most of your life, and that your coping mechanism was anger, blame and chaos. That too makes me so deeply sad for you. You had an amazing second husband. Amazing. You had three great daughters -different yes, but all bright, compassionate, funny. You were surrounded by so much potential for love, support, understanding, help, but you let your anger colour everything. The cost is immense – for all of us.

I have had the experience of anxiety and chaos ruining my life and relationships several times myself; I have had several periods of debilitating depression. I was very, very ill between 2020 and 2022. I was critically depressed and anxious, leading me to seek out crisis care when I became obsessively suicidal. During this time, I was prone to hours-long rants, and to feeling persecuted and marginalised. I was sure my children and spouse were conspiring against me, and positive I was universally hated and hence should not exist. As I look back over my life and the hundreds of times you engaged in similar rants, anger, inconsolability, I recognize these similarities: depression, anxiety, insecurity. I will always, always regret the distress I caused in my family and to Jason, when I was so ill. I don’t believe you ever considered the damage you have caused, and certainly not that you ever had a moment’s regret.

For most of my life, I wanted a relationship with you. How many times did I try, did I hope “maybe this time,” dare to believe you would somehow have some clarity about how you’ve lived and behaved, and that maybe you would engage with those realities and finally be honest and humble, and willing to accept your failings and deal with whatever mental health issues you surely had.

But the mother I wanted a relationship with didn’t exist. The mother you were was brutal, false, violent, untrustworthy. It took two years for me to mourn the end of our relationship and nearly 10 years more for me to finally accept you were not that mother, and were incapable of being that mother. I had to abandon hope you would ever have any clarity, honesty, or humbleness, and that your inability to do so prevented you from having close, loving, respectful relationships with me, RA and G.

 Your relationships with us have been unpredictable, anger-based, and incendiary, predatory where it concerns RA, controlling with G. I do not have any impression or memory of you being genuinely proud of us. My feeling is we were accoutrements to your life. You said so often I was selfish and that any time we did or said anything you didn’t like or agree with, or if/when we were just being kids of whatever ages, we were out to make you look bad. You said so very often, we couldn’t wait until you were dead. I remember you saying such things from when I was very young. You never understood, or never cared to know, how utterly destabilising it is for children to know themselves as liabilities to their parent. It has taken me most of my adult life to finally put the responsibility for your behaviour where it belongs; with you.

If I were to lose contact with any of my daughters, it would be my sole pursuit to know why and put it to rights. You made absolutely no effort at all. Not once did you ever indicate you were aware your actions and your abuse were, at very least, what caused me to sever contact.

I have no means of understanding why a mother would not make it her obsession to rectify such a catastrophic event. I don’t know if you were unwilling to acknowledge your part in it, if you were utterly unaware, or if doing so would have wrenched open the portal to something impossible for you to take on.  I deeply resent it when people say “she’s your mother,” but never stop for a second to contemplate what might make a person sever their relationship with their mother. I am not infallible, and knowing that helps me be a better, more honest person. You always believed, or at least presented to anyone who passed through your life, that you were infallible, and that somehow, I was just an unkind, punishing person. “I don’t know why she won’t come see me,” puts the blame outside yourself. For people who don’t know you (very few people knew you well), and who don’t know me, or who never met me, you managed to place all the blame on me with that one deeply dishonest statement. 

From my earliest memories, I have known it was impossible to make you happy. I have always known it was impossible to trust you. I have always known that I have been your scapegoat.

The week G was here in 2013, when A was a newborn, was the terminus. It was the last weight I could bear. To watch you be so unkind and abusive to a near stranger you had invited to stay was bizarre. To watch you sulk, be petulant, to lock yourself in your room for two days, and be so abusive to G, who was a new mother trying to get her bearings, and who had brought you your youngest, newest grandchild to meet you, was intolerable. Then, after you had spent that week being vicious and intractable, the morning they were to return home, you suddenly refused to drive them to the airport, leaving G in a panic. You were petty, angry, and narcissistic. That October, I finally accepted a relationship with you was not only impossible, but to continue to try would be dangerous - potentially lethal - for my mental health. The cycle of abuse was present then, and looking back, I could see it having repeated over and over, hundreds of times.

After 53 years of your abuse, I knew in my bones you could not be any different, and that a relationship with you was impossible. I tried so many times to establish a workable relationship, or re-establish after a period of no contact, but you never seemed to understand you had a significant part in that loss of contact, that you had to participate honestly, and that you were culpable. You were impervious to the swaths of damage you caused me, and to RA and G, and to so many people around you. Nothing ever penetrated to cause you to acknowledge this reality, not even losing one of your children. That is astounding. In twelve years, not once did you reach out with anything approaching “what happened?” or “I want to reconcile.” I know, second hand only, you consistently stated “I don’t know what I did.” I believe you did know but I think acknowledging any of it was impossible for you. This is the core of narcissism; it’s always everyone else’s fault. Whatever goes wrong, when you felt bad, or angry, it was never due to anything you did or said; it was always other people treating you badly, being mean to you.

The things you have said and done to me, your dishonesty, your anger, your propensity to belittle, insult, rage against, terrify, has left me with permanent scars. Until I chose to end contact with you, I was unable to know myself. I still struggle every single day with deep self-doubt. Every. Single. Day.

I have lifelong depression and have struggled my entire life to trust people because you, my mother, were immensely untrustworthy and consciously vicious towards me at every possible moment. There was never a time between you and I when things stabilised for more than a month or two, and I could trust you; there was only holding my breath waiting for the next explosion.  From my earliest memories, it was always when, not if, it would all burst into unquenchable flames.

My lifelong depression is grounded in that trauma. I am deeply resentful of your abuse of me, and so much more so of RA and G. More than that, I am so resentful of the deep ruptures between me and my sisters, and particularly RA your abuse caused. You sewed the seeds of this rupture years ago, when we were small, and you never stopped. The divisions between us sisters, our inability to trust each other, or to lean on each other, and in my opinion, RA’s propensity to do as you have done, and shift her anger, her disappointments, her resentments onto me – to continue making me the scapegoat for whatever is wrong in her life – this is the greatest wound and the deepest cut.

It is an unforgivable theft, and an unforgivable shift in RA’s ability to recognize problems and deal with them, rather than shifting blame onto me, or targeting me when she’s angry, frustrated or disillusioned. You disabled her by instilling this process with her; you predisposed her to engaging in bad, sometimes scary relationships, and when those were going badly, to acting out and making me the scapegoat, or the recipient of her anger or frustration. G too is so deeply affected by your abuse. She is brilliant and talented, but deeply insecure – so much so she seems unable to make her immense abilities and her excellent mind the cornerstone. She is angry to the point of scary unpredictability. She simmers only degrees from catastrophic, angry, unpredictable explosions.

It is impossible to describe losing a sister, but much more so seeing that sister fall into the same behaviours, suffer that same anxiety, anger, depression. Of everything you took from us, our relationship and her confidence, assurance, ability to trust – this is my deepest resentment. As for G, I say the same; all the success she most surely would have had were stolen from her along with her self-confidence by you, who never saw her as a person, your child, but as a cog in your desperation to be someone, your desperation to create some fantastical, important, wealthy maquette. I believe your inability to accept and honour yourself also comes from substantial abuse in your childhood. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t have recognized the traumas of your own past, and why you never rejected continuing that abuse and inflicting it on your children. From the time my girls were tiny, I have encouraged them to cherish and nurture their relationships with each other, to champion each other, to love and understand each other, and to acknowledge they are individuals with their own thoughts and perspectives, but to never let their individuality stand in the way of their relationships with each other.

I hope we sisters can heal. I hope RA can begin to understand how your abuse, particularly in these last 12 years, when she has been your sole caregiver, your ride, your confidante, your coordinator, your support, has impacted her. Regardless that she was with you, or helping you, almost daily for the last 12 years, bought you a house when you were homeless, found you safe care when you needed it, dealt with your possessions, liaised with your friends, you continued to harass her, to diminish the immensity of her contribution to your life and your day-to-day and accuse her of avoiding you or “being too busy to help her old mother.”

I hope she will come to understand and deal with how it has affected her, how she lives her life, and to understand how damaging it has been to us as sisters. She literally had neither of us, G being distant physically and me being distant otherwise, and still, you never stopped. Those “you don’t have time for me,” comments, when she gave you so much of her time - more than she had - were cutting and malicious. I know she slagged you off behind your back at times, because she was powerless to speak directly to you – it would have done nothing beyond giving you more opportunity to criticize her, be angry, be despicable to her. She was essentially enslaved by you – an old woman who had made stupid choices, and who took and took and took from her. She was powerless to change any of it and absolutely unwilling to do what many would have done and leave you to deal with your situation alone, regardless of what it cost her.  

At least I was honest: I couldn’t be around you, and I couldn’t fake it; RA felt she had no choice, but I think she reviled you in private. I saw this in a video of your birthday one year, I can hear her being sarcastic and diminishing of you under her voice and off camera. You forced her into dishonesty with herself and with you. I asked her once why she didn’t speak back to you, and she said she didn’t want to make you cry. You, however, never spent a second thinking about the years and years and years you caused such pain to your children, and how many oceans of tears we cried. 

You treated me like an intruder, a problem, I think as soon as RA was born. You used me, and you reminded my sisters from when they were little until I left the province, that everything that was wrong, and anything they did that displeased you, was my fault. If they misbehaved, you told them – and me - it was because I had taught them how as a means of getting back at you. None of us trusts the other and neither of them is concerned about wounding me. It’s normal. You taught them this. I’m the family garbage dump. I am terrified we sisters, and Ruth Ann and I particularly, will never have a good relationship, or any relationship, as it is so critically damaged at present.

When I had escaped and was living in Montreal, you sent me letters and a cookbook professing your love and saying you missed me, but when I did come home for a week, within hours, you were at my throat about my relationship. I hadn’t been in the door three hours, and I was tired – because two hours time change, but you were at me about living with someone who was then and still is an exceptionally decent man. Then, the first morning I was home, as I was coming down the stairs from the bedrooms in your house, you said, “Don’t touch anything, don’t break anything, don’t steal anything.” Why? Because I had slept in, and you were pissed off about it. I was home for a week, but I changed my flights so I could leave early and spent the remaining days out of the house with friends. Maybe you did miss me, but your actions, your derision, your anger, your belittling me, and you suggesting I would steal from you put lie to everything you’d written in the two years I’d been gone.

I am deeply, profoundly resentful that you poisoned my relationship with my dad. Thanks to you, I didn’t trust him, and he didn’t trust me. I spent my life thinking he despised me, and I didn’t know any differently until two weeks before he died. I didn’t get to know my dad, thanks to you. You painted him in such a false and maligning way that, at his funeral, I was blindsided by the things people said about him. I didn’t know my dad the way people knew him. I didn’t know how much he loved me, but how incredibly difficult it was to do that, because I was so deeply distrustful of him. I’m resentful you stole our relationships with my dad’s family. I never knew my grandmother. I was terrified of her, and of Carol and John, thanks to you. I had the same experience at her funeral – of hearing people talk about a woman – my grandmother – who was a complete stranger to me, but who was absolutely not, in any way possible, the woman you led us to believe she was. Maybe she was horrible, but we never had the opportunity to discover that because we’d been poisoned so young. 

In 2020, I obtained your divorce records – 123 pages of documents, including your 10-page, handwritten letter. At 60 years old, I finally understood not only were you abusing me and scapegoating me at home, you had used me as a pawn in court. You put words in my seven-year-old mouth – things I never said and would not have known how to say – to deprive my dad of his children. These documents confirmed the extent to which you are untrustworthy and mendacious, and willing to hurt and use your children to achieve whatever your goals were. Those years are etched on my skin like deep burns. Had I known any of it before my dad died, I would have been able to connect with him, to talk about what had happened, and to explain my understanding was false and manipulated by you, and that you never stopped speaking against him.

You brought that divorce action, not him. You lied about still being married for almost two years after you were divorced, and by doing so, you fostered the falsehood my dad was a philanderer. If I have my timelines right – and I have these documents by which I can verify this – you only stopped claiming he was your husband because you were pregnant and had to remarry.

You sacrificed EVERYTHING that could have made you happy. Yes, you and my dad were mismatched, but you chose that union, probably for the admiration you expected to obtain from your family. I think you always felt less than for being from the farm, and maybe, by marrying my dad, you thought to elevate yourself – and you could have, except you let your anger, your anxiety, your inability to be happy, ruin that marriage, and then you lied about what happened.

Then, you married GG, who was one of the most stellar men, who took on a pregnant wife in the context of the Baptist church, who committed to RA and me, and then G, who stabilised all our lives, and yet you still would not be happy. I miss him, but not because I was unsure he loved us. I miss him because he was a wonderful dad, granddad, friend. I wish so much the people in my life now could have known him. He was everything a man, a dad, a granddad, anyone could wish for. In this entire morass, he was the best thing, and I was not able to appreciate him because you caused unending trauma around him, between he and I.

Occasionally, and far less often now because so many people have died, people say I look so much like you. I can’t describe this in any other way than that observation makes my skin crawl. I don’t want to be like you, look like you, think like you. I want to be a trusting, confident person who can accept the love and care of my family and my friends, and to trust the people around me; I want to care for my appearance but not be obsessed with it: this has been incredibly, debilitatingly difficult throughout my life.

From when I was little, your obsession with how I looked, how my hair looked, what clothing I liked or wanted to wear was the basis for constant little wars. You wanted me to be a compliant little dolly with no voice, and when I wasn’t, you used that as a weapon. How many times did you erupt in anger, sometimes to the point of hitting me with your hands or some implement, because you didn’t like how my bangs looked, or that I wanted to do my own hair at all, or the colour of my shirt? How many months did you threaten to send me away – every morning pretending you were on the phone with a boarding school -because who knows what had set you off before it was even 7:30 a.m.. Occasionally, an old yellow wall phone, or an orange desk phone, will turn up in some thrift shop somewhere, and I am instantly back in that trauma – it’s as real now as it was when I was seven.

How many months did you belittle me by saying the then-fashionable colour was “prostitute pink,” yet years later that became a colour you wore often; how often did you disparage my hair, even dragging me off to the hairdresser to have 18 inches of my hair cut off because you didn’t like the style? How often did you disparage my body by pulling open the front of my shirt and saying “Oh, you poor thing,” or when you would suggest I was somehow improper, or bluntly suggesting I was sleeping with some random person, most often people I barely knew? How could you have been so vicious over things – clothing, hair - that didn’t matter? Not once did you ever understand the immense damage you did, or the hypocrisy of your actions. You tried this with my children too – even once calling C a “heathen” because she happened to be wearing a black dress one day. Horrifying. So, when you said to my kids and to G and RA you didn’t know what you’d done and why I wouldn’t come see you, you made it ever more impossible to reconnect with you.

When my girls told me you were in hospital and going to respite, I STRUGGLED to know what to do. I knew you were very ill and that I had very, very little time, should I want to see you. The trauma and the indecision that caused was brutal. But here’s the rub: my lovely girls – C, particularly – and G (after the fact) told me you would not have a moment of clarity; you would not accept any responsibility, and that there would not be any kind of reconciliation. They said if I chose to go see you, I should expect you to chastise me for not having come sooner and perhaps even chastise me for having abandoned you or some similar accusation. I am sure this is true, given your note that I come make you happy. Even when you knew your life was coming to a close, you didn’t write a single word I could have interpreted as you having any awareness. The mother I wanted to know and love never appeared. 

When G messaged me to say you were gone, my first thought was regret for YOU, that you could have, but didn’t in twelve years, and not in the last six months when you KNEW you had little time, you would not overcome whatever drive you had to never acknowledge your actions or behaviour. 

My mother died without doing anything to reach her eldest child. My mother died, welded to never being culpable, to never acknowledging she had any part in my – our – life-long trauma. How could this be possible? When I was very sick in 2021, particularly, I was estranged from my children, because I had caused an immense disruption; I had caused an impassable catastrophe. I didn’t know how sick I was until A wrote me a message in which she called me her abuser. She was correct, and I had been incredibly abusive for six months.

That message felt as brutal as being kicked in the head with a jackboot. That message sent me immediately into crisis care. That message caused me to accept everything I’d said and done, and to get help – medication and six months of intense therapy – rather than lose my children or continue traumatizing them. I will regret my actions for the rest of my life, but I am so very grateful my girls are as confident as they are, and that A was willing to risk terminating her relationship with me so that I would hit the wall of reality and facts, and be propelled into seeking help. Had you done this – ever, at any point in our lives, even last year – it would have changed everything. It would have given you your family back; it would have given me a mother I was so desperate for; it would have changed all our lives. But because you refused to acknowledge the things you said and did, you died without contact with your eldest, and with your grandchildren saying “good,” regarding your death.

I can forgive you for being a victimized child – I’m assuming you were – granny was unkind to us as children, and inexplicably derisive of you when we were to Nova Scotia for that reunion; I have to let that be my reality; I can forgive your anger and depression resulting from the effects of being an abused child, but I don’t know how to forgive you for the things you stole from me – my sisters, my self-esteem, my feeling worthy to exist, my father, my aunts and uncles and cousins, and my paternal grandmother, and for leaving me - us - motherless in every way but biology. 

I can forgive you for your own deep and debilitating insecurity that made your life performative, rather than authentic, leading to acquisition of a revolving door of friends, catastrophic disagreements with your family, and termination of your relationship with your Nova Scotia niece and nephew, but I don’t know how to forgive you for doing everything you could to isolate me – belittling my friends, leaving me questioning everything and everyone, leaving me unable to trust anyone, and to my being paranoid – because you told me so often you had people watching me. Although you did hit me, in the context of being scared all the time, having nobody to talk to, and having my sisters disliking me, being distant from me, and the three of us unable to overcome your abuse and the fracture of our relationships, being hit is the thing I remember the least.

Recently, I watched an episode of a popular series, The Bear. The mother character is, in many ways, you. Abused as a child, deeply insecure, anxious, depressed, angry, and vicious to her children to the point one has taken his life, another having left the country for years, and her daughter left walking over the broken, sharp bones of a destroyed family. Following a catastrophic, violent family altercation at a Christmas dinner (quite like what happened to us in 2007), her living children will not see her. Unlike you, she has her “come to jesus” moment, when her living son comes to her house. She is overcome. The soliloquy is riveting. She bares it all, acknowledges the damage she’s done to each of her children, her part in her son’s suicide, the distance she caused between her children, and she begs her son for forgiveness. The night I watched that episode, I made that speech mine. I made that the apology I had always hoped to hear. I know it’s a TV show, and I don’t believe TV characters are speaking to me, but I have been desperate for such an apology for most of my life, and there it was. I know you didn’t say, or ever think any of those words, but the fantasy mother gave the fantasy apology. It is what it is.

In another life, I would be mourning my mother’s death as so many people do. So many are blessed to have had good, loving relationships with their mothers, blessed with the opportunity to mourn and to miss their mothers, and then to fill that space left by loss with good memories. I mourned for perhaps three years, but now, at the moment of your actual death, I don’t feel loss; I feel a combination of nothing, freedom, release, sadness that I have very few good memories to fill whatever small void, and guilt that I am not mourning. I wish we could have reconciled, but I also wish I had known so many years earlier it was impossible. I mourn the life you could have had. 

I want you to know that despite a lifetime of abuse, I have survived, and I am happy. Jason and I have been together 29 years this year. My girls and I are unbreakable.  I have graduated five times from university. I own three businesses; my clients appreciate me, and the members of my studio have a safe, warm, welcoming space because we make it that way. I have real, long-term friends who actually know me – my successes, my failings, my insecurities. I deeply hope my sisters and I can reconnect, and I hope with all my heart, body, and soul RA and I can finally, finally find each other, learn to know and trust each other, and that we can be supports and champions for each other. 

 

Cults, white men, anger, and deadly viruses

 In the last two years, social division has become a destructive force. Conspiracy thinking, anger, rhetoric, full-on lies and disinformation have infected everything; social discourse, politics, health, families. 

This stuff - opposition to necessary health measures, bizarre beliefs the government is scurvy and not trustworthy - has become currency in certain social/cultural groups in this country, the US and the UK, and to a somewhat lesser extent all over Europe as well.

I dislike the term "dog whistle," but it is apt: this rhetoric - they're out to get us/kill us/destroy our country - signals to others the person writing/speaking is part of that in-group and that in-group, despite being small but vocal, somehow knows all secrets. This is a core aspect of conspiracy thinking.

It is fascinating to watch people -very often men between 25 and 50, most always white men - align with these sentiments. Curiously, this age demographic is also the most-often represented in crime stats, but that could be a case of correlation, not causation.

This type of group-think, more than borders on cult; members/adherents must accept all of what the group is founded on. "Membership" requires dissociation from certain realities - that the "leaders" are compromised, complicated, criminal, and in the case of Lich et al, self-aggrandizing grifters - and separation from wider social groups where the group's positions are at best unpopular, and usually rejected for the extremism they espouse. One could study certain - ok, all - religions and see exactly the same constraints.

Certainly, in private, some members of these de facto cults will question parts, or maybe even the whole of the platform. However, publicly voicing discomfort with the group's goals, questioning those, or the acts associated with those goals, results in expulsion and shunning - again, as with cults, you're either in all the way, or you're not in at all.

As with other cults, expulsion results in loss of contact with and acceptance by the group, and the loss of self in some respects: members of these groups - and they are extremist in their own rights - define themselves through membership in the group and by the group values. Expulsion necessarily results in full, usually uncomfortable and often personally devastating reassessment of one's self and one's beliefs. When we add in aspects of "We are real men fighting for 'freedom' ", it's worse because the "who am I, " Am I a proper man," and "Are my values correct?" questions necessarily arise.

The "cult" in the scenario here requires dedication to specific platforms:
Trudeau is a dictator (obviously false and ridiculous)
Trudeau intends to ruin the country (also false and impossible in a democratic country where people vote every four years)
Trudeau is a criminal (false. He might not be great at his job but that doesn't make one a criminal).
The pandemic is fake (ridiculous and the core fallacy)
Health measures (used by every country in the world to the extent a country's economy allowed) violate "freedoms."
Vaccines are dangerous, ineffective, deadly (despite the indisputable fact the VAST majority of people who have access to vaccinations have had at least one and something over 75 percent of people on the planet have had two or more).
VARS is reliable (it is absolutely not, and a disclaimer to that effect precedes the tables of "incidents")

So. It's a cult and it's members share a number of similarities: white, male, under-educated, angry, feeling marginalised, very uncomfortable with significant social shifts (LGBTQ+ rights/Women's rights/autonomy). When that demographic is already feeling very out of control and seeing their world and their hold on "power" shift substantially, and then you add in a pandemic, and necessary health measures, this stuff is a predictable outcome. 

EDIT, March 2024:
This week, I happened to find a fascinating TikTok account - a political psychologist, who is an expert on the sociocultural aspects of politics, and by extension, although not his specialty, cults/religions. Via that creator, I found a metastudy of exactly the points I have covered here: Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition  (https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/jost.glaser.political-conservatism-as-motivated-social-cog.pdf): 

I am no expert, and my background in sociology amounts to a diploma, but this stuff fascinates me mostly due to clear evidence since 2016 of how incredibly destructive membership in certain social groups and in religion generally are in terms of people subjugating themselves. 

The terror of being ill around a narcissistic parent

My mother has a full-on HATE for anyone who is ill - she claims it's just them needing attention. Obvious illness causes her to express rage and derision. For hours. I don't know what happened to her that she is so violently hateful of vulnerable people – although I know from personal experience, her mother - my grandmother  - was much the same. 

In my adult life, when I've been employed (I have been self-employed for almost 25 years) I had a terrible time calling in sick no matter how sick I was.  I always felt I would be called out as a liar. It was terrifying.  I'm in my late 50s and even now, being ill to the point I can't work really bothers me; I feel a deep sense of guilt, like I'm committing some type of fraud, and fear whatever response I might get. Some of that is my mother’s reaction to sick people generally, and how she handled me being ill specifically.

As a kid, I had terrible colds; I would often be up coughing all night and exhausted for weeks from lack of sleep.  I still went to school - by choice because feeling unwell at school was preferable to being in the house with her, enduring her endless rage.

In the worst years, I maintained my social life, being between 16 and 17 years old when the cruellest of this was going on. My mother railed on that my “never being home,” was why I was sick. That and the night air, which she claimed the doctor had told her was keeping me sick. According to her, I was doing everything I could to stay sick and keep her up at night. She argued my entire goal was to cause her as much distress as I could.

I remember once when I was very little – maybe 6 – I had a bad earache. I remember sleeping in my mother’s bed and her saying she wished she could take the pain away, and I remember that statement didn't ring true. As I grew up, she became more and more hostile towards me and particularly when I was sick. Those many nights I'd be coughing so hard, trying to stifle the sound into my pillow, she would burst into my room in the early hours screaming at me that I was keeping her awake on purpose and was trying to wake the whole house, that I was selfish. She didn't care at all how sick I was, didn't offer help or medicine, never mind I was nearly barfing from coughing so hard... It was horrible. I was sick, exhausted and terrified she'd turn up screaming at me at 3 a.m..

My "favourite" incident of her going ballistic because I was sick was in the week after my boyfriend visited over the winter holidays in my 12^th grade year. This incident set off a chain of events that reverberated for more than 10 years after.

That December, my boyfriend, who lived away, came to stay with us over the winter holiday. Meeting him for the first time, my mother vacillated between being sugar-sweet and trying to make an impression on him, and being a full-fledged bitch. Near the end of his stay, she did a bizarre, really weird thing - the catalyst for events to occur a week later. He and I had come in late-ish from a New Year’s Eve party; She heard us come home, but we didn’t hear her emerge from her bedroom.

My mother’s controlling personality and her “religion” make for her being extremely caustic about intimacy, sex and relationships – insulting, derisive, weird. We weren’t allowed to share a room – and I get it; it was her house – so before parting for the night, we did what in-love 17-year-olds do and had a little make-out session on the couch. Her sudden, “That’s enough of that!” revealed my mother standing in the dark, observing us. She then disclosed she’d been watching us for 10 minutes. It was, among the many, many weird moments of her parenting, a pinnacle of her bizarre behaviour. We were mortified, embarrassed and of course subject to her barrage of insults and abuse. I still feel sick to my stomach remembering it; it was extremely peeping-Tom of her. So gross.

In the days after my boyfriend left to return to his home in another province, I came down with a wicked cold.  All the parties we’d been at and all the shared food we’d consumed were likely the source of whatever bugs I had, and as a 17-year-old, I was doubtless not as careful about hand-washing as I could have been – nor was anyone else. I was sick enough the week after the winter holiday I couldn't go back to school. My friend (a gal my mother absolutely detested for some reason - but she hated all my friends, so true to type) came over to bring homework material. 

My mother hadn't contacted the school to see if there was homework.... my fault that I wasn't there to get it myself, and I was just trying to get attention... endless, but I had called my friend and asked her to bring over whatever I needed to be working on. My mother absolutely freaked out at my friend came to the house. My mother cornered my friend in the front hall of our house, my friend’s back against the front door, unable – or too terrified – to leave, as my mother screamed in her face, called her names, tore into her character, shamed her. It was horrifying.

After four days of being at home, subject to my mother’s endless abuse, despite still being sick, I went back to school and to my job serving tables in a busy restaurant. At the end of my first night back, I left by the staff entrance where my step-dad (who was amazing) and my mother (who bullied him) were waiting. My dad often picked me up, but this time, she was with him and my suitcase was in the car. It was 9:30 at night, I was tired after my shift, still quite sick, and VERY confused about what was happening. I don’t have words for what happened next; they drove me to the hospital and left me there.

I have almost no memory of what had actually happened that night. It was so deeply traumatizing I have only vague and incorrect memories of that night even now.

In my memory, my parents drove to the hospital and we came together into the lobby. I went to the bathroom and came out minutes later to find my parents gone and my suitcase abandoned in the middle of the lobby.

I didn't know I had spent two hours with a psychiatrist – I have still no memory of these two hours or having met with or spoken to anyone. I only remember entering a typical hospital public restroom, doing my thing and leaving in the usual time it takes.  I only discovered what had happened after yet another terrifying incident of my mother’s irrational rage, occurring almost 10 years later.

The incident that led me to discover almost four months of mostly-lost memory was spurred by my mother’s behaviour one particular day about two months after I got married, when she was visiting my house. I was juggling new spouse, new home, young child, new marriage, and on this day, caring for my two-year-old daughter and my friend’s child – a one-year-old.

My mother has a bizarre propensity for getting herself into rages. The usual trajectory is she says something caustic or critical about another person. Whoever she has said the thing to might respond with a counter of some type, at which point she blasts off into some explosive tirade.

As per her usual, this is exactly what happened. She launched into a rage within 30 minutes of arriving and began seething about my new spouse (who wasn't there) and my dad (definitely not there). After an hour of it, I finally couldn't take it anymore and asked her to stop slagging them off, that it wasn't fair or right and that she was not welcome to come to my house and tear into people, particularly when they weren't there, or to subject me to her shit in my own house. 

This made things worse by orders of magnitude.  She wasn't having it and doubled down on her attacks on my spouse and my dad, and screamed she could come to my house whenever she wanted, and I couldn't stop her... So bizarre.

As my mother slid into her rage, I put the kids in my bedroom in the crib, so they'd be out of danger, if not out of earshot. My mother - enraged, and irrational - and now resorting to striking me - refused to leave; she said she couldn't go because she needed her purse. I opened the front door and threw her purse onto the front lawn hoping she'd follow it. Nope. She still wouldn't leave and was in a massive, irrational frenzy. This is when I called the police.

By this point, we were both screaming.  I was pleading with her to leave, which became "you have to leave," which became "GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!" 

Suddenly, she went from full-on rage to dead calm; she spat out that she was leaving, adding her usual barrage of what a terrible person, mother, wife, daughter I was and how “everyone” knew how “sick” I was. But rather than heading out the front door, she went down the hallway, opened my bedroom door and scooped up my child. She tried to leave the house with my baby in her arms. This did not go well for her... 

I admit I threw a few hard punches to dislodge my child. This was the first time I had retaliated with purposeful violence. My mother had struck me many, many times in the past with fists and with objects. Sidebar: once she chased me upstairs with a carving knife – one she still has. I locked myself in the second-floor bathroom, but she kicked the door in and stood there with the knife in my face, screaming at me. Terrifying.

I had often defended myself, or had run off, sometimes down the street in the dark - once in bare feet in winter - but I had never reacted this way - consciously, purposefully resorting to violence with the goal of hurting her.  That she would attempt to take my child made me blind with anger.

It. Was. Horrifying. 

When the police finally arrived, she saw their vehicle pull up, threw herself into the couch beside the door, and as the officers came through the open front door, she bleated "Help me, she's trying to kill me."

I had already told dispatch what was going on - and they'd heard her screaming her head off in the background, so the police were aware of what was going on, that she was attempting to take my child, that she was in my house and refusing to leave. The officers managed to coax her out the door and into her car, to a cacophony of her pleading and desperately trying to convince them she should take my child. 

As much as my mother attempting to abduct my child was horrific, as were the hours leading to that moment, and the years before, and her regular, horrifying, middle-of-the-night attacks on a sick teenager, I'm glad - strange word to use - it happened. Her rage and her having tried to take my daughter that day compelled me to find out what had transpired 10 years earlier. 

That incident was a turning point. I knew then I needed to comprehend what was going on and what had been going on my entire life. I knew I had to understand as much as I could about her – and, by extension, about me. The gaslighting my mother is so expert at had led me to question my fitness as a parent and my sanity from as far back as when I was in fifth grade, when she would tell me, on an almost-daily basis, she had people watching me.

I started calling around. I remembered a couple counselling sessions we’d attended as a “family,” and I knew which hospital they'd taken me to and knew that there must be a record. When I called the hospital, I was transferred to the psych unit. Reception confirmed there were records of that family counselling and gave me the names of the people who'd seen us. My call was then transferred to a doctor - a psychiatrist - who said he remembered me, and that he'd met with me for two hours on that night many years earlier. 

I was STUNNED to understand I'd spent two hours at the hospital with a psychiatrist. I remember walking into the hospital's main reception area, my step-dad putting my suitcase down, me walking forward into a small white bathroom and walking out soon after to find my suitcase sitting in the middle of the floor, and my parents gone. I remember calling our then-pastor, who came to pick me up, and spending two or three nights with him and his family, sleeping in their den on their pull-out.

I had no memory of anything else (even now), and asked the doctor if he was sure he had met with me. He was, and said he had a file with names, dates, and record of that meeting. Writing this now, 40 years later, I'm still amazed I remember nothing of this night beyond these incorrect details.

I requested access to the file and said I wanted to come in and read it. When I arrived to the doctor’s offices in the basement of the hospital annex a few days later, he was at first very reluctant to let me read the file - because, he said, my mother was not there, so something about consent. I said that file was also about ME and I WAS there. He relented but said I could not copy anything, or take the file out of the small room he put me in. Fine. I had notepaper with me and I did copy. Furiously.

This file was a compilation of notes from the initial intake – that two hours I remember nothing of – and several family sessions. I was utterly stunned - again - to understand we had attended EIGHT family sessions. Even now, I have no memory of these sessions beyond two.

We – my mother and I – had attended family counselling sessions in the past, usually with a minister at our church or a school counsellor. My mother had tried many times to find a counsellor who would say I was crazy, and threw around “schizophrenic” like she was some expert on mental health.

As a sidebar to her behaviour in counselling, this anecdote:
When I was 15, at her insistence, we'd met with our then-pastor. He had heard her out on a couple prior occasions, and I think she thought he was an ally. However, within 15 minutes of the start of the session, she exposed herself, her anger, her behaviour, and the abuse she was heaping on me. He identified several issues and suggested she shouldn't treat me the way she did and that things would be easier if she weren't so harsh. 

This, predictably, resulted in furious, loud outrage on her part, and her stalking out, as was her usual response to anyone pointing out she might have contributed to the situation. She accused our pastor of attacking her, and of conspiring to ruin her reputation in the church. Bizarrely, but not unpredictably, she turned on that man with a vengeance. Although she had led the charge to see him hired as our pastor, she launched a vicious campaign to discredit him, and have him fired.

Her personality and tendency to extreme outbursts were well-known in our church of barely 150 people (on a good day when dessert was served), so her campaign was unsupported and unsuccessful. Her efforts resulted in him remaining with the support of the greater congregation, and her leaving our church and to begin attending the very large church up the road from us - a church she had spent many years maligning for its demographic of "all those wealthy people who look down on me." It was bizarre. 

In my memory of the counselling sessions following the hospital incident, I was there with my mother, my step-dad, and a female counsellor. I didn't remember her name, nor do I remember how I got to these sessions or where they were held. I was living with my dad at that point, so likely he drove me, but I don't have any memory of getting there or leaving or being dropped off or picked up. 

In the two sessions I have in my memory, my mother was OUTRAGED. I remember her being utterly furious at the psychologist for having identified my mother’s negative, angry behaviours and their effect on me and on my siblings and step-dad; and I remember her furiously lashing out, calling the counsellor names, accusing her of making stuff up, of being unfair, of colluding with other people who were out to get her. She stalked out of both sessions claiming everyone was against her (she said this regularly, along with "You can hardly wait until I'm dead.... ").

As I sat in that small, windowless cubicle reading the notes written by the psychologist who did the sessions, I remember being relieved that she had identified my mother’s extensive personal issues. This was the first time I’d had anyone – particularly an adult – identify my mother’s serious mental issues. The counsellor observed my mother took no responsibility for her actions or behaviours, or anything she said; that she perceived herself as constantly set upon and persecuted by other people; that people were out to “make her look bad;” and that she was still furious at my father for leaving her. The counsellor wrote my mother was dealing with her mental distress by making me her target. In her notes, the counsellor identified my mother as intensely angry and having deep-seated feelings of maltreatment. She wrote, "The mother is scapegoating her child." Yes. Yes she was. From the time I was about two years old.

Discovering the truth about the night my parents left me at the hospital, and knowing the extent of counselling, how many sessions there were, identification of my mother's serious personality issues, and understanding - finally - those were not my fault, and knowing the extent of them was horrifying but a relief.

That counsellor wrote my "behaviour" issues, which she identified as my acting out as a means of self-preservation, were a direct result of my mother's scapegoating.

I began to heal after the incident in my house, and discovering these counselling notes. Very slowly. I was completely out of contact with my mother for almost two years after that, but there were many relapses, many times I tried to have a relationship with her; many, many more of her outrages, her abuses, her irrational anger, her tearing me to bits, and the time she lashed out at my parenting with “You’re a terrible mother; you don’t feed your children potatoes.” Yes, she actually said that. That comment caused a huge crack in the “matrix.” That comment, and my mother’s apparent narcissism, irrational, unpredictable, abusive behaviour, are the foundation for the vast raft of reasons for our present reality.

When my children were in their early teens, she began directing her anger and treachery towards them in person, and in emails. She told them they were “heathens” and that she was sorry they would never go to heaven. In emails, she wrote things like, "I don't know why you hang around those people who hate me and want me dead." Six years ago, she finally, terminally, crossed the line. (Chapter six million... to follow).

Am I still amazed that I have no memories of that hospital visit and six of the eight counselling sessions? YES. Do I still struggle with taking time out when I’m ill? Yes. Do I feel guilt about being out of contact with my mother? Yes.

But I understand that guilt and why it is misdirected. The guilt I feel is attached to a mythical "good, loving mother" who doesn't exist, but who I have abandoned. Six years ago, when I finally hit that terminal wall and suspended contact with my mother, that guilt was suffocating. My extrication left my sibling with care and feeding of this abusive woman, who has since turned her abuse on this sibling – the was-golden-child (chapter six-million-two-hundred to follow). For the record, there are three of us siblings. The other one literally fled the country, where they have a “relationship” with our mother from a safe distance (chapter six-million-three-hundred to follow).

In the last three or four years, I've come to understand this guilt and its context; every child’s enduring wish for a good mother who cares about them, is kind and loving, and engaged in a caring, unobtrusive way. However, in my case, this mother does not exist and never has. I finally understand there is nothing at all I can do to elicit the good mother. I can let go of feeling guilty for abandoning what is a fantasy mother who doesn’t, and never did exist. The real thing has serious personality challenges that no amount of me "being good" will fix. It took me 50 years to get to this point, many bouts of deep, terrifying depression, much self-flagellation and self-hate, but I am finally out. 

Nobody was paying attention....

 Last week, my mother moved from her two-story home into a supported living facility - much smaller digs - and the excavation was initiated. Somehow, she has managed to acquire enough stuff for four families, despite being very elderly and a widow....

Among all this stuff, surprisingly, is a small archive of my report cards from a couple grades of elementary school, two from junior high school and one year of high school.

It was riveting and heart-wrenching to read the comments on those reports - all hand-written, dating back as far as 1966.

Our home life was, shall we say, disturbed. My parents fought - not regularly, but spectacularly - and finally separated when I was maybe five, which is the year I started kindergarten. Their relationship was acrimonious. Actually, not "their;" her relationship with him. Brutal. As it was the 60s, we, my younger sister and I, stayed with our mother. My mother has the most spectacular case of narcissism I've ever met, although I didn't know that until maybe 10 years ago. Such affected people do not great parents make....

I read those hand-written comments with a shifting mix of chagrin, anger, embarrassment, and wonder. In all those years, did not one single person - teacher, librarian, principal - ever wonder what was going on? It was the 60s/70s and people didn't meddle back then - certainly not teachers; they had enough on their plates between planning lessons, working five days a week and doing everything by hand, so probably paying attention to the more personal aspects of their students' lives was too far outside their area of attention. I understand that. But.

See, I grew up in total, daily chaos. My mother was always angry about something, angry at me, angry at what I was wearing, how my hair was, who my friends were, how I spoke and acted... you name it, she found something in it to be angry about. I was, until 2013, her scapegoat. I think I still am, but I am out of contact now, so whatever she might say about me, I don't hear, exept for the occasional vitriolic, hateful email she writes that someone forwards to me....

When I was in second grade, the bulk of the comments on my report cards were that I was distracted, occasionally confrontational, not doing well, rushed, missing fundamentals. At home? M mother would pick a fight with me every morning. For a period of a month (I was little; could have been a week, could have been three months; it was fucking terrifying, however long) and then threaten to send me to boarding school. She would pick up the phone in the kitchen and pretend to make calls to some school. The second she started for the phone, I would run upstairs to her bedroom and pick up the handset of the bright orange phone sitting on the table beside her bed to prevent her from making the call. It was terrifying. 

So yeah, I was distracted, because I was terrified of what might be happening - what my mother might be doing or calling or planning during the day, or what might happen when I came home after school. It wasn't a maybe; it was a for-sure. If the what-might-happen was relative peace, it was a rarity that was proof of the rule, and the calm before a certain storm later, or the next day, or....

By the time I was in fifth grade, her terror campaign was well established and deeply rooted. My mother reminded me on a regular basis she had people watching me and reporting back to her about what I was up to during the day. Can you imagine what it's like to be an eleven-year-old child who is convinced she's being watched all day, every day??? Like, who do you trust?!

During all this chaos my mother remarried. He was excellent. Really. We'd known him since we were born so he wasn't a stranger at all. He married my mother (the sunday school teacher) because, despite her outwardly puritanical, judgemental views on sex and relationships, they were screwing around and she became pregnant. If you're the puritanical, once-divorced sunday school teacher in a baptist church, in the 70s, you must, at all costs, keep up the appearances....

The upside was he was a great dad and we got a little sister out of it. The downside is we got a little sister out of it and I went from being my mother's constant target to being that, and the scapegoat for ANYTHING she didn't like - my younger sister's teenage behaviour, and anything that our new baby sister did that my mother didn't like. Apparently, I was going around behind her back "teaching them to misbehave." That accusation continued up to about 10 years ago... the 'baby' was 45 years old by then....

When I was in junior high, I was bullied. Endlessly. One guy put his foot in my back and pushed me down a flight of stairs. Later, he took to following me home. In eighth grade, my so-called best friend decided she was furious at me because I'd made one other friend, so she chased me home... with a stick. Then she never spoke to me again.  One day couple of girls, twins, waited for me outside the school, the back side, in a corner not visible to the street or windows, threatened me, pushed me off my moving bike, and attempted to steal my bike. In home Ec. class, someone stole my bra while I was trying on a dress I'd made in that class. An hour later, I was horrified to see the boys kicking my bra down the hallway.  A boy in several of my classes took any opportunity he could to harass me. One day he decided he hated me and, right outside our science class, he pulled a huge clump of hair out of my head - hurt so much. I wacked him with my binder - and was hauled into the office and chastised for the "friends" I kept. A few months later, he slapped me across the face in full view of an auditorium of kids.... I was ridiculed for my hair, my size, my build. You name it, it was up for target practice. At any point did any teacher or parent step in? Nope.

My mother, of course, was carrying on as "normal" which meant I was never sure what would be on the other side of the front door when I came home after school, but it was never good. Once, when I was 13, it was really, really bad: she was in a fury over how I was doing the dishes - criticizing absolutely everything to the point I began screaming at her to leave alone (this kind of harassment was the usual - almost any time she screamed us into cleaning up, she'd also spend the entire time screaming it wasn't good enough).

This time, she picked up a knife - a 12-inch long, bone-handled, serrated knife she had beside the stove (which, by the way, she was still using 40 years later). She was terrifying anyway, but armed? Holy shit ... so I raced out of the kitchen, up the stairs into the bathroom and locked the door. She kicked the door in and held that knife to my face - in our second-floor bathroom with one of those 60s-style wide side to side, narrow top to bottom windows high up in the wall. You don't know terror until you're pinned against a wall with your crazy-ass mother shaking a knife to your face and threatening you, and there's no escape.

So yeah, my schooling suffered. I was angry. I was scared. I daydreamed. I escaped into a book or up into my head. I looked for any possible means of escape - which, for the record, did not include drugs or alcohol.

Not a single teacher ever asked if I was ok. Not one. In twelve years of school, how many teachers does one have? 60? I know some of this had to do with the era - people didn't meddle and, given divorce was such a horrifying event still - common enough but still considered a morally-contentious choice.

Hilariously/sadly/confusingly, my mother used to write comments back to the teachers on those report cards - it was always their fault I wasn't doing well, and true to her character, she was an exemplary parent, and had expectations for everyone's behaviour. As she'd been a teacher herself, she was bizarrely judgmental, and her imperviousness was more pronounced.

In fifth and sixth grades, I volunteered as a library page in my school. I LOVED that job. The school was always quiet - mornings, 7:30 to 8:30 or so and sometimes after school. It was safe, and provided a legit means of being out of the house. And I really liked the librarian, Mrs. Woods. Like, a LOT. She always had a smile on. She was nice.

Even that bubble was burst, though. When I was 28 years old, I was out for groceries with my two babies - I think I was probably pregnant with my third at the time - and ran into Mrs. Woods. I was really happy to see her. During the conversation, I made the fatal mistake (being a stay-at-home mom at the time and it being the late 80s and being that mothering wasn't necessarily considered a job), of replying "not much" to her question of "What are you doing these days." Her reply was, "Well, you always were a bit lazy."  I was DEVASTATED. I wasn't, and I'm not now, lazy; I was an eleven-year-old child with a chaotic, scary home life turning up almost every morning for two school years to shelve books, to get some peace and stability.

I still struggle day-to-day with feeling like I belong, like I have the right to belong, with feeling like I'm not contributing to anything, like I'm failing, like random shit that happens is my fault; like with "bad things wouldn't happen if I weren't around;" with living.

With LIVING. 

There was an "into traffic" incident a few years ago - the second, the first being the result of agreeing to go to counselling with my sister, who spent an hour of a two-hour session with her finger in my face, screaming at me. The first "into traffic" incident scared me a LOT and took two weeks to come down from. The second was even worse. I was driving alone on the highway and I struggled for the entire 90 minutes to not drive across the centre line. Semi-trucks are big. The driver is up high. It would be a bump for them. That's where I was in my head for and hour and a half....

My family members don't think I hear their whispers of "well, you know how she is." They don't know how devastating their petty little comments are. They don't acknowledge their actions and they don't understand they scapegoat me, or, if they do, they're somehow justifying such lifelong abuse.

My sister continues to scapegoat me - this month of moving my mother gave her the opportunity to unload her resentment on me - and to be fair, this time she copped to it; she called me to tell me how resentful she is (except she ignores she chose the situation she's in, and that I had zero input into it), so at least there's that - but yet again, after her having unleashed on me, demanding money from me, but refusing to let me understand what she, or my mother actually need, we're back to radio silence and, "Well, you know how she is."

No, they don't know how "she" is, because they don't give a real fuck.

It took me years and years and years, not a little therapy, and total non-contact to get to a place of reasonably good functioning, but there are still moments or interactions that throw me into chaos.

But at least now I have all these report cards spelling out all my faults and failings - why would I be surprised my mother kept them -  that will reinforce just how separate I am from the family and how invisible I was at school, and how important it is for my family members to maintain me as the scapegoat.

Update, November 2020:
Since I wrote this, my spouse has gone to bat for me with both my siblings. He has always been firmly in my court, right at my side. The shit he's seen and put up with... a lesser man would have been out. His having met with them/spoken to them and speaking for me - bluntly - took a huge weight off me and, I think, may have given them a level of insight they were surprised by and needed to hear. 

Also since then, I engaged a pretty great counsellor, and finally got a diagnosis - CPTSD: complex PTSD. And also since then, I have acquired a copy of our parents' divorce records (these are public and accessible to anyone who wants them, as it turns out), which was unbelievably enlightening, and brought my mother's - and indeed the family's - scapegoating into clear focus. More about this here:
https://stupid-files.blogspot.com/2020/07/raiding-archives.html

The dogs of hell. #unleashed

.... you narcissistic, conceited, self-centred old boot! In almost 80 years what have you done? What have you contributed besides three girls who never had a mother but who suffered through your endless, ridiculous fits and tantrums; who lost their fathers - yes, two of them - due to your fucked up world view; whose childhoods..... never mind: what childhoods?

And now that you've achieved (yet again on the backs of others, having done little to contribute and nothing to deserve) living quarters in a place you can show off from, you're still making every one's life a living fucking hell! Are you never ever satisfied? And for the record; nobody cares a damn about where you live, how big 'your' house is, how 'expensive all these horses are' or about your 'rich clients.' Nothing. Not one bit do we care about any of that. Nobody does. Only you. And no, none of that has anything to do with you. You're still a fucked up, mean, old woman.

You're stupid beyond comprehension to believe that any of that has anything to do with you or any reflection on you. You are nothing to anyone beyond being the crazy, bitch of an old lady who lives in that house. Yeah, the house that most people have begun avoiding just to stay away from you.

Here's the truth you old bitch. You are a joke. Full on. There's barely a soul whose spent more than a day with you who doesn't know you're as fake as a wooden nickel and measurably less useful. There isn't a soul who doesn't know you're a poser and a liar and a conceited idiot.

Are you three years old? Are you still that spoiled bratty little kid? Fuck! Grow up already! Isn't it time you made some steps toward being a human rather than the most disgusting, painful, stinking putrid boil on all our asses? Is this your legacy? You're going to go down in history as one of the most despised people there ever was?

What did you ever do for anyone?

Your kids? You spent years and years and years poisoning them against others - their dad! Their grandparents; their aunts and uncles; their cousins and even them against themselves, and you spent years poisoning others against them! Who does that to their own children? You could write a book on how to abuse, isolate and ruin a child.

We never learned to love. Oh sure, we heard all about it - you stuffed your stupid false pack of religious lies down out throats hard enough to choke the life and spirit out of us but we never saw anything even remotely close to 'love' from you. You have always been to busy making everything, every event about you. You are the 100% pur laine version of a narcissistic asshole.

You taught us how to never trust, never believe -even in ourselves: oh never mind; you never gave us any reason there was anything about us to believe in. We were the shite that trailed about your house making a wreck of your life. Yeah. Forgot.

Everything's about you. Everything that goes 'wrong' is about you; everything that anyone does is to 'make you look bad.' Let me tell you this: you do a fine, fine job all by yourself; you have not for one second needed anyone else to make you look bad.

And now you've resorted to 11 p.m. temper tantrums forcing your daughter, who's been working 6 a.m to 11 p.m. for weeks, to come chasing after you so you don't get your idiotic ass killed on the highway because you're such a fucking attention-seeking baby! And then you take two or three hours of another daughter's time having yet another poor-me tantrum? Fuck you. You know why they didn't call me??? Because I will tell you the truth.

You're the worst of the worst. We put up with you. Tolerate. That is it. We do NOT like you and there's no way we've even thought about loving you. You're less lovable than a ton of squashed maggots.

Here's the reality that you choose to blind yourself to.
You've been married to TWO pretty decent, hard-working men, both of whom provided everything for you and your children. You haven't worked a full day since something like the spring of 1961. Busy work does not count and neither does the copious time you've spend meddling in other people's lives and trash bins! What the hell is up with that!?

You have three children who are all blessed with great minds and health and strength but whose spirits you stomped and killed over and over again because you are incapable of tolerating anything you perceive as competition, even from a two year old baby.

You have lived in a wonderful home - that someone else paid for; you now live in another wonderful home - that someone else is paying for; yet, you have never been happy because neither home has been big enough or rich enough for full of enough costly things THINGS! that you could show off, as if those THINGS somehow make you a decent person in any respect.

You have an excellent education that you've squandered.

You've had friends, all of whom you've alienated at best and many of whom you've caused to hate you, despise you, distrust you and laugh at you.

The one thing that saves me from hating you entirely is that I'm sure you know, somewhere in your fucked up, denial-bound mind that you've created this hell and now you have to maintain it. Anything else would require you to be honest to yourself and about yourself and you are far too self-centred and false to even consider that option, so hell for all concerned it is.

I'm sure you wish, as much as I do, that you were dead. That is the one thing that saves you and - you can take some of your weird brand of comfort in this - keeps us bound in the hell you seems so determined to keep burning.

Dear LGBTQ....

Dear Non-binary people;

I get it. You struggle: for recognition; for equality; for safety; for compassion; for acceptance. I get it, and I know it has been, and will continue to be for some time yet, probably, difficult and frustrating.

I also get it you hate labels. You don't want to be different, outsiders, unacceptable, sinners, disgusting... labels suck. You're human.

So when you create new terms - labels - for me, in your terminology CIS-gendered, you apply the same de-humanising tactics you're desperate to stop. Because I'm also human. That I don't occupy any of the letters of LGBTQ does not render me weird or lesser.

I get it; you don't want to be marginalized

Labels blow. For everyone. The only viable label is HUMAN.

or invisible, but creating labels for people whose lifestyles, genders, genitals, orientations you don't like, understand or live, doesn't make your struggle easier.

The List. Religion is STUPID.

How to know if god is an asshole.

CLICK that link. 

DO it.

 

http://youtu.be/3PbVu0kq0Bc

Listen carefully.

Analyse.

Killing me softly...

I have, once previously, a long time ago, been the victim of vicious gossip directed my way by a jealous young woman. It was horrific. This week, I felt that sickening shift again. I have no clue by what means or why I have become dizzy, but dizzy I am.

As I am leaving this part of the world in a few days, I have no means of knowing and frankly, I have no desire to know, what was the incident that formed the core. I'm sure it has a basis in something ridiculously innocuous. I am saddened by the realization something is afoot and even more sad to speculate on the originator of the shift. The effect is an irreversible change.

Of the many things I hate about gossip, at top of the list are how it victimizes an unknowing and usually innocent person, how it spins innocuous events and conversations into something terrible, and how those participating in the 'sport' support the malignant needs of bullies - because that is what gossip is; bullying .

Gossip seems to be the national pastime in the UK. It is what spurs sales for most UK magazines, particularly those aimed at women, and is the key feature of what pass for newspapers here. The recent breakup of a TV personality's marriage was front-page news, and the 'coverage' - which contained not one interview with either party - was characterized by endless editorializing and ridiculous speculation for the reasons and the fallout. This reporting carried on for three days.

Meanwhile, the USA is fomenting war against TWO countries, with Syria at the top of the list but none of that is interesting to the majority of readers. Rather than consider what effect Britain being dragged into another US-lead war will have on them personally, being that so many here are victims of a nearly-dead economy, they seem quite content to digest the written assassinations of people they will never know, and use the structure of those assassinations as the foundations for their own attacks on people they do.

The main and most devastating effect of gossip is the soul-killing impact is has on victims of it, particularly when that person is directly in the line of fire but doesn't realize it. The clues that something is up emerge slowly and manifest themselves via a growing realization that something in one's environment has shifted and that one is slowly but surely being marginalized.

The bitterest part of all of it is the impossibility of asking "what have I done," because, despite having usually not done anything at all, asking confirms the lie for the weak-minded participants, who know they must side with a gossip or be subject to the same treatment at a later point. The gossip maintains their ill-got power through the amassing of the troops.

Gossip disgusts me. It is the purview of the uneducated, disinterested, bored class and seems to be the only quasi-intellectual pursuit many are interested in having.

As an observer, whilst on vacation in the UK, to watch people participating in this country's deeply-ingrained need to tear others apart, makes for not a little discomfort. Worse - and particularly for one who is not a regular part of the group - inability or reluctance - or refusal - to participate gains one the title of snob. It seems never to enter participants' consciousnesses the reason why NOT to participate.

Perhaps gossip is as prevalent in my country - although I think not, given the absence of it in the press. Perhaps I don't see it or hear it because my friends do not engage in it. Regardless, I hate it for its sickening, devastating, unintelligent and unnecessary presence.