4. March 2009 by gennyfer.

     Damn. I have other things to do, other things to think about but it seems Frank shoved us in to food week. Used to be I was the pushy one. Is the following the strength you mean when you say how strong I am to have survived it all?

     It was liver for me too. I can’t think about the stuff without getting sick to my stomach. God forbid I catch a whiff. Sometimes even smelling beef frying in onions evokes a memory of the smell and I am drawn back. A Counseling & Human Services professor I had in college once told me that he saw forcing a child to eat something they despised was on the same level of sexual abuse. Forcing anyone to put something inside their body that they didn’t want is equally wrong he said. I don’t know about that, I don’t think it is quite the same and argued the point back then but reading Frank and Mary’s tales of our dinner table nightmares had me thinking about that debate. Perhaps my teacher was more right than I was.

     Sitting down together as a family is one of the top things parenting experts tout as being essential to raising happy well bonded children. I have been a mother for 16 years now and I’ve really tried to make this part of family life work. But I just can’t do it. I’ve noticed, living with my brother now that he can’t seem to sit and eat “en famille” either. He most often grabs a plate and wonders off to anther part of the house. I manage to stay in the room but rarely at the table.

     The dinner table was the major battle field in my childhood. Dinner was regularly taken away for poor behavior during the day, “off to bed without supper” became the replacement for the wooden spoons. I was a stubborn kid though. I tried, I really did, and there were times when I would choke down my liver (mom was sure we needed liver once a month or so, there were a lot of these nights). I’d slice a small piece and bury it in a forkful of mashed potatoes trying to figure out how to swallow it so I wouldn’t taste any of it. One night, I can’t remember why or when exactly, I just couldn’t bring myself to eat it. Dinner was over for everyone else and I sat, not allowed to leave the table without finishing my dinner, staring at the cold hated slab of liver. I was not going to eat it, somehow my line had drawn itself in the sand and I was going to win this battle, just this once.

     I sat at the table until bedtime. Probably two hours from start to finish. Finally my mother released me and sent me to bed. Hungry again. But I didn’t care, I felt triumphant. Until I came downstairs, ravenous for breakfast the next morning. The liver trauma shoved aside in my ADD haze. No thought to anything but the cereal I’d have for breakfast. I climbed up on the kitchen stool. Is at down to ready my bowl when mom swooped in and grabbed the cereal away from me. Stunned, I watched as she opened the refrigerator door. She pulled out my plate from the night before and set it in front of me.

     Cold liver for breakfast. I did not cry. I sat. It must have been a summer or weekend day because there was not a rush, no imperative to get anywhere. I sat. My mother eventually left the room. I crept over to the trash can, tilted my plate in and watched the liver slide in to a pile of coffee grounds. I pulled some other garbage on top of it to hide it. I guess I moved too fast. I didn’t think about how obvious it would be. After being so stubborn for so long there was no way my mother would buy that in the five minutes she was out of the room I’d gobbled up that piece of liver.

     The first place she looked was the trash. She dug that liver out of the garbage. Brushed a few of the grounds off and put it back on the plate back in front of me. I did not eat it. I sat for hours that morning, hungry, uncomfortable, miserable but unbroken. I don’t know how the story ended. I can’t remember the details. I don’t know if she verbally relented or just let it go. I know by this time she was getting a lot of flack from her parents about me possibly being anorexic. She may have felt compelled to ease off. All I know for certain is, on that day, I won. I have never, and will never eat liver again.

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4. March 2009 by Mary.

Food stories. I have a few those too. I think my favorite is the Good Ship Lollipop one.

     I am 5 or six years old. We are all living in a small northeastern town in PA with my father. Life is not good here. No one is happy. And we are not talking about it. My mother is teaching in the local elementary school where I am going to kindergarten. Dear old dad is not really working at all. Money was tight.

     One night my mother makes liver and onions; cheap and good for you(so my mom always told us). Mmm mmm good. Ewww. It smelled gross, it tasted gross and I was not going to eat it. Not for anything. As you may already know, refusing to eat my mother’s dinner was a capital crime. Since my mother had stopped hitting her children to get them to conform to her will, I was left to sit in the kitchen alone with my uneaten liver. I was told to contemplate why I wouldn’t eat it, and why I was doing this to my mother (her words).

      Now on this particular night, and this is what makes this story great, I was to be in the spring pageant at my mother’s school. I was singing the “Good Ship Lollipop” with two other girls while holding up huge lollipops. As it became clear to my mother that I was not going to figure out through solitary contemplation that I should eat my dinner, she had to come up with a plan to scare me into eating the now cold, gelatinous mess. Her anger was so intense that my sister was begging me to just eat it, fearing for my safety. But I couldn’t. My mother also has to go to the pageant as she had students performing in it too. The tension was high. Finally, after all else had failed her, she got me where it really hurt; sugar. No sugar or candy of any kind for a week. Two weeks. One month. Finally two months! Which would mean no Easter candy for me. I still didn’t care. And she knew it.

   Punishment locked in place; no sugar for two months, alright. Time served with the dead cow parts; time to get ready to go. But wait, mom had not yet dealt her final blow. Because harsh punishment was never enough when she could add in some public humiliation. During that evenings performance, I would not get to keep the lollipop like the other girls on stage with me. In fact, I could not even hold it on stage. I remember the look on my teacher’s face when she asked my mother if I could just hold it during the song. I remember the teacher looking at me questioningly; like “is your mom for real? Is she really going to do this to you?”

   Oh yes. She was very much for real, and she did exactly that. Over and over again, every chance she got. It was shortly after that time that I remember starting to compulsively over eat. Looking for some kind of comfort I could never find from her.

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2. March 2009 by Frank.

     Gen and I were talking last night about dinner, and whether or not her kids were going to eat or not. It seems like all of her kids have different quirks when it comes to food, but none of them are normal eaters. Neither is my own son. She is actually worried that her oldest might be malnourished in some way. Like berri-berri or scurvy. But after what we were put through in the Gulag, I mean our childhood, she just can’t bring herself to force him to eat certain foods just because she knows they are good for him. After all, our mother was convinced the foods she forced us to eat were good for us. Wasn’t she just trying to be a good mother?

     Let’s take a trip back in the time machine. I will pick a year. Lets call it 1977. Some guy has come into our house and is sitting at the round wooden table in our kitchen. This is nothing unusual. Our house had a revolving cast of characters coming in and out of it. Some we knew quite well, others were, well, strangers. I was eight years old and knew how to lie and cheat and steal, and I was learning how to roll a mean joint, but I had never been told a thing about stranger danger. (Not to ruin the ending of this story for anyone, but there is no funny business or hanky-panky in this one. Just forced feedings. I swear. So relax) This guy is at the kitchen table, and my mom is serving him coffee, and he is telling us how his car has a flat tire, and he didn’t have a spare to fix it, and could he borrow a phone to call a tow truck. Pretty normal stuff, right?

    We did live right in the center of a large city,  things like this happened from time to time. Our family knew all about tire problems. Our car was constantly having a major tire problem in our neighborhood. We would go out in the morning and all the tires would be missing, the car up on metal milk crates. Just a little local flavor.

     Flat tire guy is telling my mom stories, and she is telling a few herself. I don’t remember much of that. You know, boring adult talk, blah blah blah… Then he starts talking about this group he is involved with that practices fighting in armor with swords and spears and bows and arrows. That got my attention. Sounded pretty cool to an eight-year-old boy who had owned a few wooden swords in his day. He talked about this group he belonged to that dressed up like medieval knights and trained to fight like them. I was thrilled. Why hadn’t I ever thought of that? Tire guy finally got a tow truck to show up after a few calls and a few cups of coffee. He took off into the night, another stranger just passing through. But my sweet mother, bless her heart, had gotten his phone number, and an invite for me and Jenny to go and watch his group of crazed barbarians perform their ancient rituals of sweat and steel. Score one for the home team!

     To say that I was excited about this prospect is a complete understatement. I was in a frenzy. How in the world could there possibly be anything as cool as this group in the whole wide world. How could I be lucky enough to meet someone that belonged to a group like this, and was actually going to take me to witness it myself. Fuck Disney or the Grand Canyon. I was going to my first SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) weapons practice at eight years old! Finally, the appointed day arrived. I was on the edge of my seat. Ramped up all day long. Ready to roll. Practically peeing in my pants in anticipation. Then, tragedy struck. I know your thinking, oh, no. That poor little eight-year-old Frank. He was so excited. What could possibly happen to ruin this for him? That’s right, folks, the worst thing that could happen, inevitably occurred. The one thing standing between me and a few hours of blissful childhood heaven. It was….. dinner time!!! AAAGGGHHHH!!!!! (Does this seem a bit over the top to some of you? It might. To my sisters and to me? We understand in the way that survivors understand. These little slices of hell are seared forever into our brains. We cannot forget. What? You were never terrified to sit down and eat dinner in your family? Lucky you.)

     In all fairness to my mom, she tried to cook healthy and tasty meals for our family. She quite often failed miserably on the taste side of things, but she did make the effort. Unfortunately for me, that night happened to be mystery soup night. I can’t tell you what it started out as. Or what all the other healthy ingredients were. I can only tell you what was on the bottom of my bowl when I had finished. A dreaded group of Lima Beans was staring back up at me uneaten. There are certain foods we all have that we can’t stand. Sometimes it is the taste, sometimes the way it looks, or the texture, or just the idea of the food itself can make you sick. I have always hated beans myself.

     When I was a kid, I hated them all. Like anything else in our lives, there were some I hated more than others. Black beans and navy beans were not nearly as bad as kidney beans, for example. Garbonzo beans were the worst. Just looking at them would remind me of the awful feeling of them in my mouth, and I would start to retch. To this day it completely squicks me out to even think about them. For me it was the texture of the beans that I couldn’t stand. Something about the dry, grainy feel of the beans in my mouth completely revolted me at that age. Our taste buds mellow and change over time, but at eight years old beans were the great Satan to me.

     The flat tire medieval sword guy shows up just as we are finishing dinner. He was ready to take us off to his super duper cool weapons practice session. I jump from the table to go, but a disapproving look from my mother freezes me in my tracks. She is looking down over my shoulder into the mostly empty bowl of whatever soup and frowning. “You need to finish all of your dinner before you go” she says, the permafrost drooping frown returning to her face, hardening there. Now let me clue you in on a little secret here, fearless readers. My mom knew that I detested Lima Beans. I was eight years old, and was never a picky eater. It wasn’t like I never ate my greens. I ate just about everything you put in front of me. My Uncle Joe used to call me the human garbage can, and for good reason. I actually ate food out of trash cans at that age. It wasn’t like I hadn’t choked down the rest of the slop she served up that night. I was trapped. There was no mercy in those pitiless eyes. She sat me back down in front of the Lima Beans. I will never forget staring into that bowl with that pre-vomit watery feeling creeping up in my mouth, tears beginning to well up in my eyes, and tire guy standing there looking at his watch wondering just what the holdup was.

    I know some of you are thinking come on Frank, it was only seven or eight Lima Beans, for Christ’s sake. How bad could it be? Believe me when I tell you, I would have rather eaten eight goat turds than choke down those Lima Beans. I had no idea what goat turds tasted like, but those beans? I had eaten those before. Ugghhh. Time was running out. Flat tire guy had people to beat up with blunt weapons, and that wasn’t going to wait forever. I finally dug into the beans, my mother literally standing over me like some grim jailer, making sure I choked down every last one. Nothing was ever free in my relationship with my mother. She always made me pay the hardest price for anything good in my life.

     Finally, having satisfied whatever sicko fantasy of good parenting had been wafting through her head that day, I was free to go with flat tire guy and Jenny to watch the weapons class. The funny thing about so many parts of my childhood, I cannot for the life of me remember one thing about the practice we went to. Bowl of nasty lima beans: permanently burned into my cortex. Awesome medieval sword practice with a bunch of high powered super geeks: no memory whatsoever. The good things constantly faded out of my memory. Is there somewhere I can get a refund for this shit? Seriously.

     Did I mention that my mom sent eight year old me and seven year old Jenny of with flat tire guy by ourselves? For all of you parents out there, I ask you, would you send your young precious children off for hours with some guy you met once? Remember, we didn’t meet this guy at church or a school function. He wasn’t even a good friend of a good friend of our family. Nope. He was just random guy. Doesn’t sound bad enough? I was not allowed to go back to super cool medieval weapons practice. I was told that I kept trying to get out onto the fighting field myself. Go figure. My sister had behaved admirably, and was allowed to go back again by herself with tire guy a few times. As I said at the beginning of this montage, flat tire guy was completely cool. He didn’t try anything out of the ordinary. But handing your seven year old daughter over to a complete stranger over and over again. Really mom?

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25. February 2009 by gennyfer.

     I was following my husband out of the room after a fun filled family money discussion with Frank. We all live together with 6 children most of them mine. My back was to Frank when he said “Oh, I had a question for you?” Innocently I turned around. “Who was worse? Mom or our step-father?”

      My instant response, “You’re such an asshole.” I stood in the doorway looking at him, Forrest had stopped our exodus too and was standing behind me. “What kind of obnoxious question is that?” Really it’s like one of those Zobmondo questions where you have to chose between two equally noxious things. I hate that game.

      “Seriously, which one do you think was worse?”

      I hate to answer this question. Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me before. I tend to fall back to over-analyzing things when I’m in a tough spot emotionally. “Well, mom was mentally ill and I guess you have to let some things go. There are some things she probably couldn’t be considered responsible for. But R. was a child molester, there is no excuse for fucking little girls. Accept doesn’t it kind of follow that someone who would even do that must have some kind of mental illness too?”

      My husband interrupted… “You aren’t seriously trying to stand there and make an argument that it was somehow OK because he was mentally ill?”

      “No,” I said, “Of course not. I don’t mean that. I’m just trying to figure out a way to explain it to you. After I told her, I was in 7^th grade when I told her he molested me.” I looked at my husband. “You know, I only ever told her because I wanted to protect Mary. I figured it I told her Mary wouldn’t have to go spend weekends with him anymore and I could be sure she was safe.”

      Frank cut in here, “You know statistically that doesn’t happen as much, the biological dad doesn’t go after his own kid.”

      “Of course I know that, now, I didn’t back then. She didn’t know. Shit. No one knew that. No one knew much about the subject then. Anyway, I told her, just to protect Mary, and you know how badly that went.”

      “Yeah” said Frank, “That was fucked up. You’ll have to write that one up for the website.”

      “So telling her was a big Fail. She blamed me and Mary kept having her weekend visits . Sometimes mom would even have me ‘entertain’ him when she couldn’t be back with Mary on time when he came to pick her up.”

      “What!” said my husband, “Entertain him? What the fuck?”

      “Well, yeah, I know I’ve told you this one before but you always block it out. Cause it sucks pretty bad. But she’d know she was going to be late so she would tell me I had to make coffee for him and keep him company until she got there.” I moved in to the room Frank was in.

      “I was terrified. I didn’t want to be breathing on the same planet with him let alone be all alone in a room, an empty house with him. So it went like this, I was alone in the kitchen with him, making coffee. He was across the room sitting at the table.” I moved to the desk in my brother’s living room and gestured to where Frank sat. “So I was here at the stove and he was about there where Frank is. I was making coffee. I was scared, really freaked out but knew I’d be in trouble if I was rude. So I was making coffee, like a good girl.”

      “But I wanted to be as far away from him as I could get while still obeying mom and I really didn’t want my back to him. So I did this”. I turned my back to my brothers desk and leaned back. “That was what I was doing when mom walked in. She did her long chat with him and then he took Mary away for the weekend. When they were gone mom railed at me, screaming about what a slut I was, for leaning back on the stove like that, deliberately showing off my body.”

      I walked back to the center to of the room. “So yeah, yes! I think she was worse than him. Fuck you for asking.”

      My husband decided we should decamp and head back to our side of the house as he was “Going to be sick now.”

      I said to Frank, “See! Now you made me make him sick. See you tomorrow. Dork.”

[Frank and I have communicated in this way for a long time. It’s such a harsh topic it is hard for me to convey in words that I wasn’t actually angry at him during this exchange, the name calling is just a reflection on our warped sense of humor. Without each other we would not have survived the childhood we got stuck with and I wouldn’t go back and change any of it if it meant not having him as a brother.]

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24. February 2009 by Frank.

     Really, it was the seventies. But how many people can remember a babysitter named Ace? Sure, when you are five, it sounds really cool. Ace was way cool. He was tall, had long hair, and even wore a black leather jacket. I imagine he later got a motorcycle and joined a biker gang. I remember Ace smoked Lucky Strikes, which I thought were neat because of the red target logo. At the time I never wondered where babysitters such as Ace came from. They just magically appeared when my mom and evil stepfather wanted to go out without the kids. Since this was before cable television, sitters like Ace actually played with us and were very entertaining. I had a deep and passionate love of army men of any kind at that time, and Ace would occasionally show up with one of those cheap plastic bags of army men. I was in heaven. Ace told me that his brother was a backup guitarist for the Jackson Five, and even at five I thought that was pretty sweet. I don’t know why Ace felt the need to lie to a five year old to impress him. Especially with something as remote to me as a famous music group. But that’s what he told me, and I believed him. Perhaps that is why my mother chose him, for his proclivity for making up fantastic stories. Or maybe his brother really was a session artist with the Jackson Five. That was the thing with my childhood. One just never really knew what to believe.

      At the time of your life when all adults, or even older juveniles, look like towering giants to a little kid, Ace was certainly adult enough for me, but he was probably only sixteen or seventeen. I imagine he met my mom from coming to one of her many stellar parties that began every Friday night and regularly spilled over into Sunday morning. Or, as we did not attend church on a regular basis, i.e. never, she could have met up with him at the guru gatherings she regularly attended. Who knows? I wonder if my mom paid Ace in cash, or Lucky Strikes, or pot. The world will never know. I will say that, other than the babysitter we had much later who liked to play the pull his pants down and touch his willy game, my mom regularly chose cool babysitters for us.

      Ace had a lot of girlfriends at the time. How could he not? He was always bringing someone different with him to watch us. Of course, the young ladies adored me. More cool points for Ace! So what is the point of this story, you ask? Where is the crazymom? Sounds pretty good so far. Ace was cool as shit to a five year old, and I had a blast every time he showed up. Until my mother ruined it all. Yes, she even managed to fuck up Ace the babysitter. What was the use in giving her children something to enjoy in life if she couldn’t wrench it away? I have had the carpet pulled out from underneath me so many times, I am surprised I can stand up straight.

      Here it is. Picture this one. I am five years old. Ace is over watching my sister and me. We had dinner early, and Ace was sitting at my evil step fathers desk talking on the phone. I was sitting on a stool next to him, listening to the rap master at work! I was never one to have my hands idle. They say that idle hands are the devil’s playground! I started to fidget with the phone cord, twisting it up, wrapping it around my index finger, weaving through all my fingers, etc. This was back in the day, when our phone number had letters in it, and all phones looked the same. Big, black boxes with the dialing wheel, and a long, straight, black hard rubber cord that disappeared off into the floorboards somewhere. Fidgety five year old me decides after playing with the cord for a while to get a little more experimental. For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to take a closer look inside the phone cord and see just how this magic talking box really worked. I picked up a pair of scissors from the desk, you know the big metal ones with the black painted handles? I started to try and peel back the outer layer of plastic to see what was inside the cord. I actually got some of the outer cover peeled away pretty well before disaster struck.

      Ace was rapping away and must not have noticed what was going one. He sure took notice when his phone conversation ended abruptly. He looked down at me in surprise. I was pretty upset myself, as I certainly hadn’t intended the results of my excavation. I had somehow managed to snip the cord in half. Whoopsie. I have to say in the continuing legend of Ace that he was super cool about it. Kind of like, “Hey, no problem, little man. Lets see if I can fix this.” No big deal to Ace. His girlfriend could wait. Ace spent at least fifteen or twenty minutes trying to splice the phone wires back together, but despite his most valiant and heroic efforts, it did not work. All this time, my subconscious fear was growing. Ace might have been one cool cookie, and was certainly understanding of a little five year old boy who was just trying to explore his environment, but I don’t think he had any idea of what was coming. He thought my mom was super cool. The party mistress. The go to guru lady. Grace under pressure. He didn’t have any idea who he was really dealing with.

     So, where was I? Ah, yes. The paralyzing fear that was gripping me as the moment approached of my mother’s return. The fear of the unknown. Well, partially unknown. I imagine the feeling is more like someone in a torture chamber, hearing his tormentor coming down the hallway, terrified as to what it will be this time. The knees? The teeth? An eye? One never knows until they get there.

      Poor Ace. My mom finally came home, and I am sure Ace didn’t think it was a very big deal to tell her that the phone cord was cut. I have done plenty of babysitting in my day, and kids do stupid shit sometimes. It happens. Oh well. It was, indeed, a big deal. My mother was probably drunk and high that night when she got home. I know that now. But five year old me didn’t really understand those things. Upon hearing about my transgression, she flew into a rage. She started yelling and screaming at me, towering over me, face red, hands flailing, all her pent up rage and anger and frustrations spewing out right on top of little me. If steam could come out of people’s ears someone would have had to call the fire department from all the smoke. I was frightened. I was terrified. I had no where else to go. No where to run to. This was my mother. She was all I had. My protector. My sole care giver. She screamed. She yelled. She went ballistic. She held absolutely nothing back. Over a fucking phone cord.

      Then she threatened to call the police. As soon as the phone was working, she was going to call the cops and have me arrested. Now to most of you reading this, that sounds laughable. Ridiculous. But to a five year old kid who has been taught from an early age to fear the cops, it was even more scary to me than her rage and anger. My parents were druggies. They taught us to fear police because of what they were doing. I was sure that the cops were going to come and haul me away. What I should have thought was, how bad could that be? How could what the cops would do to me be any worse than her?

      She scared the living shit out of me that night. It was like she cut some vital part of me out. I am not sure I even remember just what it was or what it was supposed to do. I just know it’s gone. Like the tip of a cut of finger that you feel from time to time. And Ace? Standing there stunned while the drunken monster raged, feeding on the terror and helplessness of her little five year old boy. Yeah, we never saw him again. Go figure. I will wrap this up here, but, true story, while writing this, I remembered another babysitter story that was, for me, even worse than this one. Rock on!

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22. February 2009 by Frank.

Time to Change

4/17/2004

I am filled with demons

they are here

They grow because of my fear.

When I am afraid I freeze

and don’t move.

This allows the demons to groove

on my weakness and shitty mood.

I see they are constantly fed

by my indecision, my dread.

I don’t even know I allow

them to grow

As I see this mess I have made

I know that to be afraid

will cause them to keep on

growing.

It is time to change

this around

   “I am filled with demons, they are here”. What a great place to start. My mom wrote this poem in her sixties, just a few years before she died. It is tough stuff to read, to see how, even at that age, she was still tortured and tormented by her past, unhappy in her present, and yet, still strangely hopeful about the future. This was what I grew up with. It is one thing to read this poem in my thirties and feel sadness and compassion for a woman who is clearly, at best, very troubled, if not truly disturbed. It is another thing entirely to deal with a mother who thinks like this at the age of two, or four, or six. Imagine dealing with this kind of a mentality as a little child. How do you process it? How do you make sense of the world when the woman who is the primary care giver in your life is filled with demons? I never knew as a child that my mother was mentally ill. I thought it must be me. Or my evil step father. Or the government. How do you understand or comprehend at a young age that your mom has an undiagnosed and untreated mental problem. You don’t. You suck it up. You deal. You cry, and you hide, and you try to shield yourself from the worst of it. But you never understand. It is truly and utterly bewildering. And indelibly painful.

My mother beat me with wooden kitchen spoons when I was a very little boy. I don’t remember the shock or the pain of the beatings, just the raw terror of those moments, this mother who I loved so much chasing me around the house, smacking me with those spoons. Like some twisted surreal version of Jack and the Beanstalk come to life. I can’t remember what I did wrong. I only remember the fear it created in me. I have a young son myself now, and I can’t imagine just what he could do to make me beat him with anything. Or how devastated and confused he would be if I did. Would his loving smiles change or disappear all together? Would there always be an edge of fear in his eyes every time he looked at me?

I was six years old when I took all my mother’s wooden cooking spoons and hid them in a tiny crawl space in the back of our kitchen cabinets that only I could ferret my way into. I will never forget the look in her eyes when she asked me about the missing spoons. I could see the regret there, the sadness she suddenly felt after realizing how terrified I must have been to hide those spoons from her. That was the thing with my mom. Sometimes she was all there, and sometimes she was gone. It made things even harder for me as a little kid. You never knew what you were going to get. But at that moment of lucidity, she leaned down to me and hugged me. She promised if I gave her those spoons back she would never hit me with them again. I crawled in and got them out, and she never hit me with the spoons, or anything else, ever again. So you can pull a gun on me, or wave a knife in my face, and I am a cool customer. But threaten me with a wooden spoon? I just might piss my pants. I think I must have inherited a few of those demons myself. Thanks, mom!

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21. February 2009 by Mary.

      I always knew my mother was different than other moms. It wasn’t just that she was into different things like obscure European philosophies and organic gardening. It was everything. She had her opinion about how the world worked and that was how it was, absolutely, there was no other way it could be. Until she changed her mind and then this new version of “reality” was true. Growing up, I didn’t really know how far down the rabbit hole she had gone. I mean living with a crazy mom is kind of like trying to explain to someone what its like to have dyslexia. I can’t tell you because it always been this way for me. My mom had always been crazy, I just didn’t really know how crazy.

      It wasn’t until I moved to CA and had some space from her and started growing up myself that I could understand that she wasn’t right in the head. It is a long hard journey to a place of acceptance for me. That’s part of what this sight is about for me. To let other people know that they are not alone. If you too have a “crazy mom” then you know what its like. It’s different and because she’s your mom you can’t just drop some change in the cup and walk away.

      It has only been since her death that I have been able to really heal and truly laugh about how tragically funny it all is. I hope that by sharing my experiences that you too can get a laugh and some hope. That was what I needed after wading through all her things and finding out the rabbit hole was so much deeper then I could have ever imagined. With twists and turns that are so far out there that they are beyond any screen play or book I could ever write. It has helped me put my own life in perspective.

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