Scapegoats: not always what you expect

Years ago, when I first went into therapy, I was a client at a clinic that specialized in abused children, including adults who had been abused as children. Their primary focus was on sexual abuse, but they treated other kinds of abuse as well.

One of the most appalling facts I learned as a client of this clinic was that a percentage of the abusers had, themselves, been abused as children. This shocked me…I could not fathom how someone could suffer the pain and indignity of abuse themselves and then go on and do it to someone else. I had just assumed, like I suppose most people do, that if you have suffered from abuse, you will automatically have empathy for others and, because you know exactly how it feels, you will not do the same to someone else.

Well, that was a wrong-headed notion because many of the people with whom I was in a therapy group reported that their abuser had also been abused as a child, and I found that mind-boggling. Our therapist explained to us that some people, when victimized, deal with their feelings of powerlessness by repeating the abuse on people weaker than they are, therefore allowing them to feel powerful instead of powerless. It made sense in a detached, clinically-logical kind of way, but still didn’t feel right. But she was right:  “…psychologists at Yale [have] concluded that 30 percent is the best estimate of the rate at which abuse of one generation is repeated in the next…One of the crucial differences between those abused children who go on to become abusers and those who do not…is whether they have the insight that their parents were wrong to abuse them.” In other words, kids who buy into the notion that they deserved the rough treatment meted out by their parents often do not see those actions as brutal or even unwarranted, let alone wrong.

This distortion of reality can have varying consequences. In the case of a person who later says “I was a handful as a kid: my parents had to be rough with me in order to get my attention,” this person grows up believing not only that he deserved the abuse he received, he believes it is the right way to parent an uncooperative child. In my case, even though I was very clear that I did not deserve her brutality, the very fact that my NM called them “spankings” instead of the beatings they really were, skewed my definition of “spanking” for many, many years. As a result, I minimized and discounted myself by believing I was “merely spanked” rather than forcefully beaten with a thin leather strap that left whip-like welts all over my tender legs, buttocks and lower back.

According to Gaia Vince in New Scientist, “As many as 70% of parents who abuse their children were themselves abused while growing up.” That, of course, leaves a further 30% of abusive parents who were not abused in childhood…like my NM.

Humans have a tendency to want to make order out of chaos. We like to categorize and pigeon-hole things in order to make them manageable, especially in our minds. It is part of our survival instinct to learn lessons from our experiences and then generalize them to help keep us aware and safe. It is also where our deplorable tendency to stereotype comes from: it is much easier to assign the characteristics of a few to the many than it is to take the time to get to know each one of the many on an individual basis. Our social consciousness has been raised to recognize some of the bigger bugaboos like sexism and racism, but we still sort and compartmentalize and generalize about other things. And those of us who live with the legacy of narcissistic parents and families are, in this respect, not so different from the normies.

We tend to presume, for example, that in any household in which there is a Golden Child, there is also a Scapegoat, but that is not necessarily true. My NM is a perfect case in point: she was definitely the GC, spoilt and coddled by her father as the only girl. But despite her position as the GC, neither of her brothers were designated nor treated as scapegoats. And my NM perceived her brothers as the favoured ones because they had more freedom and privilege than she did, something neither surprising nor indicative of favouritism in the 1930s and 40s, when my NM was growing up.

We also tend to presume that anyone who grew up as the family scapegoat will be empathetic and compassionate and find narcissistic behaviours to be anathema. This, also, is not necessarily true. Remember, as much as 30% of people who were abused as children go on to abuse their own kids and up to 70% of people who abuse their children were, themselves, abused in childhood. How many of these abusers were themselves scapegoats and, feeling powerless, went on to assuage that powerlessness by becoming the powerful, the abuser? How many of them do not identify what happened to them as abuse and so repeat it with their own kids?

I have met a few scapegoats whom I thought were peculiarly NM-like, people who emulated and even admired the powerful people in their lives, even sought out those powerful people in order to gain favour in their eyes. These people, instead of rejecting the narcissist’s power paradigm, adopt and embrace it. And while they are clear on their NM’s having hurt them (and sometimes harbouring considerable anger for their having been neglected or ignored or blamed), these people seek to heal the hole within themselves not through therapy and coming to grips with the reality of their dysfunctional upbringing, but by aligning themselves with a narcissist who will give them some semblance of the strokes they need in exchange for their loyalty and devotion.

But we are people cultivated to accept and be grateful for crumbs. When my brother got new shoes, he got the latest, most basketball shoe that was popular with the boys…I got ugly saddle oxfords that went out of style shortly after I was born. But when I complained, NM reminded me that there were children in Mexico…just a few miles from us…who have to go school barefoot and who would be grateful for the ugly shoes, an implication that I could be made to go to school barefoot that was not lost on me. I had to be grateful for having any shoes at all: expecting my tastes and desires to be taken into account was excessive. Conditioned to accept crumbs as children, as adults any kind of positive attention, no matter how contrived or exploitive, can feel validating to us.

Think “cult.” Think damaged people who commit themselves to a cult in which the leader gives them the messages they so desperately need to hear in exchange for their adulation. They don’t hear the insincerity of the messages because they hear what they need to hear: for the first time in their lives they feel noticed, valued, their loyalty and tokens of that loyalty, apparently valued. That they are being fed calculated, carefully doled out platitudes to keep them hooked they are unwilling to accept. You could show some of these people videos of the object of their devotion ridiculing them, multiple testimonies of a whole host of abuses by their leader, and the faithful will not waver: they have finally found a source of ego-gratification, strokes, emotional sustenance, and they will guard it jealously, even from the truth.

Now, imagine someone with that hungry mindset finding a narcissist who understands that, in order to hook the walking wounded, all s/he needs to do is check in every day or two, say something soothing that can be interpreted as compassion or empathy, and be very careful to keep any nefarious deeds tightly under wraps: just act compassionate for a few minutes every couple of days and the hurt and emotionally starved will fall at your feet. Imagine being one of those followers: no painful, protracted therapy, no agonies of experiencing the deferred pain collected over the years, no being held responsible for fixing the damage caused by others, just blessed validation and a regularly renewed sense of being understood. And if the narcissist holds him/herself up as an authority figure, someone who makes and enforces rules, the repetition of the original narcissistic relationship is duplicated and this time you win…you’re getting what feels like love from that authority figure and you will put up with anything…anything…to keep it coming.

People in the throes of this kind of relationship…whether it is with their Nparent, a religious organization or cult, or an internet guru, do not progress emotionally, they stay stuck right where they are. It is against the self-interest of the leader to see the adoring followers improve because that would mean a loss of the Nsupply they provide (and anything else, like financial support, free labour, evangelizing or bringing in new acolytes). And so the followers not only go into a kind of emotional stasis, they defend the controlling narcissist from the truth. They are the man who beats his five year old with a belt and defends himself by demeaning himself and defending his brutal parents: “A little spanking never hurt anyone. My parents spanked me every day…I needed it…and I turned out fine.” No, he didn’t turn out fine: he turned out abusing his child just as he was abused, and likely for normal childhood behaviours misinterpreted by him…and his parents before him…as defiance or wilful disobedience. They are the woman who impoverishes herself and diverts money from her children’s needs to send gifts of money to televangelists or internet gurus for the validation she feels when she receives their thanks. These are scapegoats who drank the kool aid along with any GC sibs in the household and who believe that they owe their abusive parents allegiance regardless of how they were treated and believe the same not only of their own children, but of others as well. And that includes you and any other scapegoat: you were not abused, in their eyes, but got what you deserved. If you, like them, had been a better, more obedient, more perfect child, your parents would not have been forced…by your behaviour…to treat you as they did.

You may find yourself shocked when you first come across such a person, and you may even feel blamed…and even that your abusive parent is being validated. After all, this is not some narcissist talking, it is another scapegoat! What does she see that has escaped you? What does she understand that you do not? Is it possible that your parents and their flying monkeys were right all along?

Don’t be too quick to second-guess yourself. There is nothing in the rules of narcissism that prevents scapegoats from becoming narcissists themselves. Even if the child in question was treated by the family as a scapegoat, there is nothing in the human psyche that prevents an abused child from emulating the person s/he perceives as the most important and powerful member of the household: the abuser. Some 30% of abused children grow up to be abusers; 70% of people who abuse their children were, themselves, abused. Not all of us grow up to have compassion, empathy, and understanding for those who experienced the same pain of being the scapegoat of a narcissistic, dysfunctional family.

Since only 30% of abused children grow up to be abusers, it stands to reason that the remainder develop compassion and empathy for others who experienced the same kind of treatment…we are the majority. But none of us have a brand on our foreheads that tells others where we stand, whether we have compassion for our fellow sufferers or whether we have chosen to identify with our abusers.

The fact that a scapegoat is clear on the fact that she was abused and is hurt and/or angry at her abuser is not proof against alignment with the abusers. If she had chosen to assuage her pain by hooking up with another narcissist, especially if that narcissist is smart enough to feed her enough crumbs to keep her bound and begging for more, the victim is going to defend…and maybe even emulate…her present narcissist while simultaneously condemning her original abuser. I have some experience with this, having been clear about the wrongness of my NM’s behaviour for most of my life, but continuing to connect with narcissistic men who abused me. Key is the fact that they did not physically abuse me (the ones who did found themselves suddenly alone), but abused me emotionally. Eager to please and win or earn their love and esteem, I was dug deep into denial with these men, certain that my performance at whatever task or responsibility that was before me would win the love I so desperately sought and fill that aching hole where my heart belonged. That is how you do it: you simply shut out all forms of criticism against the narcissist who keeps feeding you crumbs while you interpret promises of a banquet from the gesture, you just refuse to see or heed the red flags and warnings until it all crashes down around your ears.

Not all scapegoats grow up to be compassionate, empathetic, understanding people. Some of them grow up to seek out other narcissists and try to get emotional sustenance from them, refusing to see the truth and rejecting all attempts from outsiders to make them see it. They may even turn on their family and friends with hostility and cut ties, even engage in N-like behaviours themselves in order to preserve the relationship with the narcissist, a relationship that feeds them mere tastes of the love and esteem they crave…just enough to keep them craving more. Other scapegoats grow up emulating their abusers, accepting their justifications, believing their rationalizations, embracing the feelings of power and control their own abusive acts provide: they become narcissists themselves, their own need for power (Nsupply) overriding everything else.

So if you meet a fellow scapegoat and are puzzled by the person’s apparent lack of empathy, if you meet a narcissist and find it hard to believe that s/he was a scapegoat as a child, remember that as much as 30% of people who grew up abused go on to take on the mantle of abuse at their first opportunity to have power over others, to repeat the abuse their parents perpetrated upon them. From school yard bullies to jealous boyfriends to undermining or husband-seducing friends to abusive parents to nasty manipulative bosses, these scapegoats, while sharing your unhappy, upbringing, decided somewhere along the line that since they couldn’t beat ‘em, they would join ‘em.

What you may not realize is these are among the most dangerous narcissists of all. Rather like turncoats, they not only have the self-interest and lack of empathy of the typical narcissist, having been in our shoes, they have additional insights into what makes us tick. I am convinced my NexH was one of these: raised by an indifferent, resentful, manipulative mother and a distant, detached, self-interested father, he was an angry, bitter man who used his prodigious intellect to attempt to make “the big score.” His motivation was “I’ll show them!” “them” being his parents, siblings, former classmates and co-workers. He was obsessed with being better than someone…anyone…and because he was not above sabotaging or “sand bagging” someone with lies and innuendo, he was ever convinced that others were focussed on doing the same to him. Rather than take empathy and compassion away from his neglected, even bullied childhood, he took away the “do unto others before they do unto you” message. He couldn’t beat ‘em, so he not only joined ‘em, he improved and refined his narcissism until he was a malignant narcissist who was a master manipulator and admitted psychological sadist. He was not unaware of the pain he inflicted on me, he was keenly aware of it and gratified by it because it made him feel powerful. His early life as a scapegoat gave him the ability to see my vulnerabilities—they were part of his make up as well—but instead of being motivated to give me empathy and comfort, he became increasingly cruel and manipulative because that made him feel powerful and the power made him feel blameless and covered over his feelings of vulnerability.

I am not suggesting that you show empathy or give forgiveness to the narcissists you know: these people have the exact same choices you have—every time you interact with someone you have the choice of being kind or being a bitch. Narcissists have the same opportunities for choice that you and I have: with each interaction they can choose to be kind or to be cruel and it is their unwavering decision to gratify their egos by making those selfish, unkind choices that reveals their narcissism. Worst, I think, are the ones who suffered themselves as scapegoats, who know and understand your pain, and who choose to abuse you anyway.

As much as we would like to think that, in meeting someone who was abused by a narcissist in childhood, we have met a kindred spirit, that is not always the case. If we forge friendships with others based on the assumption that having been a scapegoat in childhood, a person is automatically rendered incapable of being a narcissist, we disadvantage ourselves. Narcissists are, by definition, damaged people. And not all of them got damaged by being the spoilt and coddled Golden Child.

Journalling works! A reader writes...

I got this email (reproduced with permission) today and it says more than I can...

Just writing to give you a bit of an update on how things are going for me.

I followed your advice and have been doing one hell of a lot of journalling. My God, it HELPS!! Most of all, for me to lose my guilt complex and see it was my crazy mother who had all the issues. She'd blamed and SHAMED me for so many years.

I also elected to go extreme LOW CONTACT, meaning sending only cards for mother and fathers day, birthdays and christmas, and the occasional short superfical email to let them know I'm okay and alive. NO PHONE CALLS (I changed my phone number and made sure it's an unlisted number, and NO VISITS.

I feel, not hearing her voice is really helping me to get over all the lies about myself, she inculcated into me when I was young. You know, that hearing her voice in your head, brainwashing stuff.

Dad has replied to just one email (I've sent two), and it was just one line. Mother, who spends hours a day on the computer, has sent nothing. (she's the ignoring type), so it's going to work well, I'd say. She won't write, just on principle.

I only wrote those emails, because mother complained to my sister that they'd not heard from me and that my phone was disconnected. Then my sister wrote begging me to call them and let them know I'm okay, saying mother was worried about me. (yes, I can imagine mother telling her that, but then bitching about me to dad afterwards)

I didn't phone, but I DID send a short email to let them know I was okay. A subsequent email, was then ignored. So, that was it.

It's all been very enlightening, and I've found out where everyone stands, in my dysfunctional FOO.

I did tell my two siblings I was going LOW CONTACT. My Golden Child brother sent me a frosty reply, telling me that he refuses to discuss mother with me, as he can get along just fine with her. And that if I ever mention her again, he'll refuse to comment. He and mother are both very bigoted, so get along well together. I can't stand her long-winded bigotry and racism, but he sticks up for her and says "She's probably right, you know". So yes, they probably would get along well.

I have come such a long way, Violet, and was braced for his reply, no longer having any expectations of him. Reading your blog about the Golden Child, helped to me understand my brother alot better. So, I'm no longer disappointed or get hurt.

I can't really afford therapy, so virtually subsisted on your website's advice, and have since read "When Will I Be Good Enough", and have ordered "People of the Lie".

I can virtually sort exactly where each member of my FOO is at, and what to anticipate from each of them. This really helps.

My father is the quintessential Enabling Father and mother's Flying Monkey. His allegience is totally to her. I realise now, that he just sacrificed me to her, when I was young.

My brother is the selfish Golden Child, whom mother has always indulged and he is above criticism, no matter what he does. It's eerie to me now I see how many of her attitudes he has absorbed. He's very haughty.

I might have been the scapegoat and mother made my life a pure misery (she was the cruel kind), but maybe being the scapegoat has it's good points. In that I could see through her bigotry and hatred (she hates people and says contemptuously that "most people are stupid".), and resisted her efforts to teach me the same. She used to get so furious when I'd stick up for people and wouldn't go along with her bigotry. NO ONE is allowed to disagree with her or have their own opinion.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is, I am in a much happier place. Just NOT hearing mother's voice, her mocking me, belittling my feelings, saying really cruel things to me, has done me the world of good.

I know you don't ask for thanks, but THANK YOU, Violet. And I'm so grateful that you did not take your website down. I would have been so disappointed. It's been an absolute God send to me. (no, I'm not religious. Did all that when I was young, but I consider myself spiritual these days, not religious. Don't like churches. Had enough control, in my life).

I still journal, but it's tapered off a bit now. I cried through a lot of it, had nightmares for weeks, but I'm through the worst of that. (it's hard to relive such a childhood and teen years with a Malignant Narcissist Mother). Harrowing. Over 70 foolscap pages of hideous memories, in all the gorey detail.

But I'm a brighter better place now.

The most powerful thing I got from your blogs, was....I HAVE CHOICE!!

Once this really hit me, I found my power!!!! And I stopped feeling guilty about doing LOW CONTACT. (I'm almost No Contact)

Are you journalling yet? Why not?

Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 3

 The black text is a shortened version of an original work by Chris, The Harpy’s Child. Original at https://sites.google.com/site/harpyschild/  Copyright 2007, all rights reserved

[There are two basic types of narcissistic mothers, the ignoring type and the engulfing type. These may—and often do—overlap but most NMs have a basic style and will be primarily one or the other. Some of the following points may not apply to your NM simply because they describe an engulfing characteristic when your NM is an ignoring type—or vice versa. But our mothers are not the only narcissists we will encounter in our lives. In fact, being raised by a narcissistic parent actually sets us up to be prey for more of the self-centred emotional vampires as we go out into the world, from girlfriends who are anything but friends to lovers who love themselves best to husbands who are the mirror image of dear old mom. So, whether something looks like it applies to your NM or not, read and consider it carefully—it may give you the awareness necessary to avoid the predator lurking around the next bend. As ever, my comments are shown in violet. -V]

It's about secret things. The Destructive Narcissistic Parent creates a child that only exists to be an extension of her self. It's about body language. It's about disapproving glances. It's about vocal tone. It's very intimate. And it's very powerful. It's part of who the child is. ~ Chris

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

3. She favoritizes. Narcissistic mothers commonly choose one (sometimes more) child to be the golden child and one (sometimes more) to be the scapegoat.

And if you are unlucky enough to be an only child, you get play both roles, depending on her mood—that has got to be extremely confusing for a kid, ya know?

The narcissist identifies with the golden child and provides privileges to him or her as long as the golden child does just as she wants. The golden child has to be cared for assiduously by everyone in the family.

This is something I think a lot of people—especially those who were scapegoats—fail to recognize: the GC may get a lot of privilege and attention, but it is at a heavy price. This child is at grave risk for becoming narcissistic him/herself, having been raised with a totally unrealistic sense of entitlement and no sense of family cohesion and loyalty. Their view of the world and their place in it is no less twisted than the scapegoat’s, just twisted in a different way.

The GC is spoiled but there is that unspoken threat underlying it all: do as I say or it can all go away.

Another thing that often goes unrecognized: the GC need not be one of the narcissist’s own children…or even a child! Hindsight being what it is, I can look back and see that my NM divided the world up into Goldens and Scapegoats…and you could be “demoted” from Golden to Scapegoat but never promoted once the Scapegoat mantle settled on your shoulders. My NM had two brothers, her older brother Gary and her younger brother, Pete. NM despised Gary (although she was not above cozying up to him when she needed something from him) but she worshipped the ground Pete walked on. She was the same way with her four grandchildren: the boys were all ignored but my daughter, Annie, was the Golden GrandChild. When NM died she specifically disinherited me and her grandsons, leaving her entire estate to be divided between the two Golden Children: my brother and my daughter. Favouritism and the selection of Goldens and Scapegoats need not be limited to the narcissist’s own children.

The scapegoat has no needs and instead gets to do the caring.

Scapegoats actually do have needs, but are ignored to as large a degree as possible. Whenever I needed something like fillings or glasses or new shoes, I generally got a heap of abuse along with it—or even accused of faking the need or having caused it through neglect or wilful destructiveness. And when the need was fulfilled—I got the visit to the dentist or the new glasses or the shoes replaced, it was always with a stack of guilt, as if I was taking resources away from someone or something more deserving, more entitled, than I.

I suspect every NM treats her scapegoat child differently but that there is a common thread that links us all. In my case, I was pretty much tasked with taking care of my younger brother, something that started when I was much too young for that kind of responsibility. I was to keep him from running out in the street, make him do his chores, keep him out of trouble (but not tattle about his misbehaviour). I had to make his breakfast and lunch—including coming home from school at noon and opening a can of soup or ravioli or such, heating it on the stove, then get him back to school before our lunch break was over. I was two years older, but I was a skinny, gangly kid and he was a husky, hefty boy who was taller than I was.

In my teens, my responsibility for him expanded to include ironing his school clothes and “making sure” his room was clean. In practical terms, it meant doing his chores for him because I would get punished if they weren’t done and he well knew it. Scapegoats become not only convenient receptacle for blame in the N-driven family, they are often treated like household servants, as if they need to earn a place in the household, earn their food, shelter, and maintenance, rather than those things being the entitlements they are to the Golden Children.

Certainly children should have chores and contribute to the household, but in narcissist-headed family, that can be twisted in such a way that one child does a disproportionate amount of the labour or is assigned chores more suited to older, larger, or stronger children or, as in my case, find it necessary to do the chores of another child in order to avoid being punished for not “making” the other child do his/her work.

The golden child can do nothing wrong. The scapegoat is always at fault.

Certainly Golden Children do wrong…but it is rationalized or overlooked or ignored by the N-parent to the degree that a child reporting the bad behaviour of a G-sibling get punished for tattling, the Golden’s Child’s behaviour ignored as part of the punishment!

A perfect example of the scapegoat being at fault was my NM’s proclivity for punishing me when my GCBro misbehaved: I got punished because I didn’t stop him from getting into mischief or make him do his chores or whatever it was that a parent or sitter should have been doing. He was two years younger than me, but a hefty, husky boy who outweighed me by several pounds.

Even when we were younger, NM expected me to control and be responsible for his behaviour. My grandmother once told me a story of how she had come to visit us when my brother was just toddling. He recognized her car as she came up the street and went tearing across the lawn, obviously intent upon running into the street to greet her. Behind him, according to my grandmother, I was running, arms outstretched to grab any part of him I could, tears running down my face. She stopped the car only to hear me screaming that he should stop because “Mommy will spank me” if he ran out into the street. Where was his mother while he was outside playing in an unfenced yard…and why was a not-quite four-year-old put in charge of a sturdy, rambunctious toddler?

Scapegoat children are often made to blame for other things that go wrong in a family or household: I was once told that everything that was wrong in my NM’s life was my fault because I had been born. She had plans…grand plans, mind you…that did not include being “saddled” with a baby at 17 (she was married). How strange, by contrast, when I learned I was pregnant at 17 (and unmarried) I was ecstatic to have a baby on the way...that baby was my plan!

This creates divisions between the children, one of whom has a large investment in the mother being wise and wonderful, and the other(s) who hate her.

This is another uncanny peek into my childhood. I can remember feeling hatred for my mother…inextricably mixed with fear…from as young as eight years of age. By this time I had been exposed to enough other households to realize that other little girls weren’t spanked every day, that spanking was a rare and serious punishment reserved for serious breaches of the rules, that other mothers spanked with their hands, not a thin leather strap that left whip-like lash marks on the skin and, most importantly, other mothers punished the siblings of my friends when they did wrong, not my friends. I was not a stupid nor unobservant child and by the time I hit second grade, I knew without a doubt there was something wrong with my mother.

My brother, on the other hand, was a suck up. And a self-righteous supercilious little tattletale of a suck up, as well. For an intelligent person, sometimes I am a little thick and it took me quite some time to realize that the rules were different for the two of us: whenever I did something he had done with impunity—thinking that because he got away with it, I could too, I would find myself hauled up short and punished. If I said “But Petey did it and it was OK,” I would get “Well, maybe so, but you’re not Petey,” as a response between lashes with the strap. Sometimes he would simply lie—make up a story out of thin air—and tell NM in order to get me punished. I remember getting a thrashing for dancing naked in my room when I was nine—except I never let him see me naked, I always closed my bedroom door when I changed clothes—and I wasn’t dancing, naked or otherwise. On another occasion, he wrote his name on the wall in the hallway in pencil and told NM that I did it and when she asked why I would do that, I said “I didn’t do it!” and he said “She did it to get me in trouble!” I’ll bet you can guess who got in trouble, can’t you? I remember being totally surprised when a classmate at school expressed love for her younger brother who was a mean little brat cut from the same cloth as my own brother. “Because he’s my brother,” she responded when I asked why. “Don’t you love your little brother?” I didn’t…but I didn’t tell her that.

That division will be fostered by the narcissist with lies and with blatantly unfair and favoritizing behavior. The golden child will defend the mother and indirectly perpetuate the abuse by finding reasons to blame the scapegoat for the mother's actions.

This is also very true. NM constantly compared us against each other and, invariably, I came up short. The ways parents can compare their kids to each other are legion, but when the parent is a narcissist, the comparisons go only one way: against the Scapegoat child. So, if the SG excels at music or art and brings home good marks, they will be denigrated in favour of the GC’s marks in math—something “important.” If the SG excels in math but the GC is an outstanding athlete, math will be devalued in favour of sports. The Golden Child’s accomplishments will always be more important, more favoured, more worthy of remark or reward than those of the Scapegoat child whose accomplishments are more likely to be ignored or ridiculed than acknowledged or praised.

Because the Golden Child reaps rewards from his position and because, at least in the beginning, we are talking about a child, the GC sticks up for and defends the narcissistic parent—he has no objective sense of right and wrong or good and bad, after all, as all he knows is what has been learned at the NM’s knee. And just as the parent rationalizes and justifies her behaviour, so will the Golden Child. There is something in it for him/her, after all, even if it is only to be spared the tempers of the NM…but often the reward is tangible and, being a child, the abstractions of justice don’t come into play. Often these Goldens grow into adults whose development of conscience and ethics stay stuck in childhood where their collusion with the Nparent not only let them off the hook for their behaviour but brought them rewards as well. They are well compensated for adopting the narcissistic mother’s viewpoint, for defending the NM, for adding the weight of their support with rationalizations, justifications and even outright lies.

When my NM wrote her will, my daughter, the Golden Grandchild, couldn’t wait to tell me that my mother planned to split her considerable estate between my Golden Child Brother and her, cutting me and the three grandsons out completely.

“Does that seem fair to you?” I asked.

Her voice was flippant. “Well, it’s not like you and Gramma had any kind of a relationship.”

That her brothers and cousin were cut out didn’t even occur to her and the fact that NM and I had a poor relationship was, in her eyes, justification. To make that rationalization work, however, she had to buy into my NM’s gaslighting and rewriting of history—and she did. She did to such a degree that, ten years after NM’s death she suddenly stopped communicating with me because of my blog (see 46 Memories) , claiming everything in it to be a lie and encouraging other family members to sever contact with me. Interesting, you see, because most of what she called “lies” occurred years—even decades—before she was born, so she could have no first-hand knowledge of the veracity of my memories. My NM was dead, so the only person available to her to corroborate the stories would be my GC Bro—and what’s in it for him to tell the truth except to reveal him for the flying monkey and errand boy in collusion with our MNM for so many years?

Even more interestingly, my daughter refused to accept corroboration from family members and friends who supported my memory of events (some of them having actually been there). For example, although I was pregnant with my daughter when I married my first husband, he was not her father—I was four months pregnant with her when we met. Her biological father was my high school sweetheart who, upon learning of my pregnancy, disavowed paternity—an all-too-common event in those days before DNA testing. My NM tried to have my high school sweetheart arrested for statutory rape because I was only 17—but so was he so it didn’t work. When I married, NM apparently “forgot” all about my high school sweetheart and declared my husband the baby’s father.

The man I married was sterile, which he knew at the time he married me. Indeed, over the course of our marriage and his two subsequent marriages, he never fathered a child. I told my daughter the truth about her parentage; my first husband told my daughter the truth; my father and stepmother corroborated that I did not meet him until I was four months pregnant with her. But her biological father, when contacted, maintained that he was not her father (he was married and a father by this time and had never told his wife) and my NM continued to insist that my first husband was my daughter’s biological father—and my daughter chose to believe her grandmother rather than me (even though I was present at conception and NM was not). “Why would Gramma lie about such a thing?” she asked me. I have to wonder why she didn’t ask “Why would Mama lie about such a thing?”

The power of a narcissist to divide a family is the stuff of which horror stories are made. Before I was five years old, the seeds of dissention had been sown between my brother and me and NM nurtured them like they were precious. Binding the GC to her and making me the scapegoat was not enough, however—she had to take her poison to the next generation and sow her noxious crop there, as well.

My sons were not present at the reading of NM’s will and so my daughter took it upon herself to lie to them. Instead of telling the truth, which was that she put in her will that she was deliberately disinheriting me and my two sons “for reasons they already know,” (they didn’t—she never even met one of my boys [by her own choice—she refused my invitations] and the other one was very hurt when he learned that she had not provided for him in her will as she had once said she would) my daughter told her brothers that half of the estate was left to all three of them but she was to administer it. This, of course lasted right up to the moment she wanted the lion’s share of the money to buy something for herself. My oldest son, who is disabled, asked her for some of “his” money to buy a car and she turned him down saying it was all gone—she had spent it on her new McMansion.

The schism in my family created by my NM more than 50 years ago continues to this day: my GCBro and I have not seen or spoken to each other for more than 20 years; my daughter and one of my sons do not speak to me, nor does my daughter’s young adult son. Her ex-husband, upon being freed via divorce from her, told me how she forbade him and her son to contact me once she discovered my blog (the 46 Memories) and how she called me a liar. NM laid down the reigns of power with her death, but my daughter picked them right up. Who knows what the next generation will be like?

The bad news is that the evil wrought by a narcissistic parent can infect multiple generations of a family—the worse news is that narcissists are not just narcissists at home. That narcissism is carried with them everywhere they go, into everything they do, into their workplace, their politics, their morals, their sense of social responsibility. And they fall short…very, very short…of the marks we expect of the average citizen. My NM once told me, with unmistakeable pride in her voice, that she had never voted. She had never even registered to vote, not once in her entire life. Not because she lacked political opinions—she had plenty of them and was not shy about sharing them. No, she had never registered to vote because she was under the impression that the voter’s rolls were the source of jury duty candidates and by never registering to vote, she believed she would never be called up for jury duty! She didn’t vote, and she had no compunctions about dabbling on the edges of the law, either—I can recall her crowing to her friends about “kiting checks” so she would have cash available to go bar hopping on the weekend, the pride in her cleverness evident. When one friend asked “Isn’t that illegal?” NM’s response was “Only if you are caught, Bea, only if you get caught.”

If you have ever had the misfortune of having a narcissist for a boss, you’ve gotten a taste of what it I like to be the child of a narcissist. But whether you were the Scapegoat employee or the Golden One, at least you got to go home and you had the option of quitting the job…children are stuck in the craziness, often unable to escape even when they become adults and have homes and families of their own.

The golden child may also directly take on the narcissistic mother's tasks by physically abusing the scapegoat so the narcissistic mother doesn't have to do that herself.

This can be seen quite blatantly in families in which some children are allowed—even encouraged—to bully others. More subtly, however, there are families in which the Golden Child is encouraged to prey upon the Scapegoats: taking possessions, ordering the sibling around, expecting one sibling to always step aside in favour of the Golden Child.

My NM’s particular means of putting my GC Bro in control—even though I, as the eldest, was nominally “in charge” of him—was to ignore his transgressions and punish me for “whining” or “tattling.” As long as his incursions into my possessions or my safety didn’t result in an injury that required a doctor’s visit (thereby costing her money), I was a whiner or a tattler if I complained of his physical abuses which ran the gamut from simple pushing to actual punches. To say I was afraid of him would not be an exaggeration.

I do not know how she missed the fact that he was bigger than I was. And to this day, I do not know how she expected me to make him do those things he did not want to do, like dry the dishes or take out the trash. I had no authority, when I complained about his lack of compliance I was punished for tattling and then told to “make him do it,” despite him being both taller and heavier than I was. She simply could not be bothered to take care of him herself and expected me, at the tender age of seven, to know what to do to elicit compliance from someone who didn’t respect me and who could…and did…beat me up.

Narcissistic mothers are, as far as I can tell, exceedingly lazy and selfish when it comes to actually caring for their children. Even the Golden Child doesn’t get the benefit of a fully focussed and loving parent, but gets indulgence and a false sense of entitlement in lieu. As a mother who is too focussed on herself to bother with the well-being of her children, the narcissist finds ways, through choosing favourites and scapegoats and playing them off against each other, to absolve herself of the responsibilities of parenting. Nobody benefits from this style of parenting…not even the favoured Golden Child.

Next: Part 4: Undermining

Scapegoat or Golden Child: victims of narcissistic apartheid

Apartheid, a word derived from the Afrikaans word for “apartness,” was a governmental policy of segregation against non-whites in South Africa until the last decade of the 20th century. Since that time, the word has evolved to mean segregation in other contexts as well.

Like most Americans, my view of South Africa’s apartheid system government was that it oppressed the non-white members of its society while providing unjust advantage and privilege to the white members. It was not until I lived here for a while that I realized how simplistic and misleading that viewpoint actually was.

During the apartheid, not only did the non-white people live under onerous restrictions, but the whites did as well. White people could not go to certain parts of their country—they were reserved for non-whites. So, while the beautiful bathing beaches of Durban were white-only, others relegated to the rocky, less pristine shores, if a white person wished to go rock climbing or fishing, take photos of the rock formations or just sit on the rocks that were, perhaps, closer to home than the white-only beaches, he was forbidden to do so.

This may seem small, but this segregation extended to all facets of society. White people could not associate with non-whites, even if they truly wanted to. To be romantically involved with a non-white put you in danger of being jailed; you could not buy a house or even land wherever you wanted—you had to limit such a purchase to areas designated for whites. You had no freedom of association. News coming into the country was filtered to remove any trace of information that might present free options to the minds of the people; movies were censored, television not even permitted in the country until the late 1970s, and then the programming was tightly controlled so as not to provide any incentive to rock the separatist’s boat.

This is not to say that the lot of the white South African was as bad as the lot of the blacks, coloureds and “Asians” (actually, people of Indian descent whose ancestors came here as manual labourers in the sugar cane fields). It was not as bad—but it was not a life of unfettered freedom.

One of the legacies of apartheid that persists to this day, nearly two decades after its end, is the persistent sense, among the white people, that they should be privileged. They feel an entitlement to things people in free societies have known all along were not possible: complete safety, for example. The apartheid society was a police state: if you weren’t in the “right” part of town (based on your race), especially after dark, you risked arrest. Crime statistics were reported only on crimes against whites during this time, so modern crime statistics seem alarmingly high by comparison as they report all crime regardless of the race of the victim. White people in this country expect to be safe everywhere, all of the time and blame the non-white government because they are not.

White people here also have other expectations—a sense of entitlement, if you will—that comes as a legacy of their years of being the advantaged class. Affirmative action is alive and well here and when a young black is hired over a young white, both of them having the same educational background and experience, people cry “unfair,” as if it would have somehow been more fair to hire the white guy. But unlike Americans, who also struggle with a sense of unfairness with regard to Affirmative Action, South Africans are prone to “throw their toys out of the cot”—to have a tantrum about the situation that involves pulling up sticks and moving to another country where they can be terribly surprised to learn that crime and workplace competitiveness also exist!

If you have been following along with this, perhaps you have picked up the subtext: in apartheid South Africa, the non-white citizens were the Scapegoats, the whites were the Golden Children. The society was a macrocosm of life in a dysfunctional household in which the dominant parent was narcissistic. It featured such staples of the narcissistic home as triangulation (information in and out of the country channelled through a single filtering source), gaslighting (telling people their own perceptions of right and wrong, fair and unfair were incorrect), rigid control, blaming, and the creation of a fantastical unreality, an ideal state, in which everyone there must deny reality and buy into the fantasy or suffer the consequences.

In a narcissistic household, one (or more) members of the family are singled out to be the scapegoat, the one to whom the narcissists assigns blame for just about everything. I, for example, was told by my mother when I was 14 that everything that was wrong in her life was my fault—because I had been born! Taking responsibility for getting pregnant with me was not in the cards there—no, the fact of my existence was the reason her fine plans (fantasies) for her life had not panned out.

In these narcissistic household there in also at least one Golden Child, the child who can do no wrong, the child who is the spoiled darling of the narcissist. The Scapegoat may be even be held responsible for the behaviour of the Golden Child—when I was a kid, I got punished when my younger (but bigger) brother misbehaved because I was the oldest and it was therefore my job to make him do his chores and stay out of trouble. This was the case from as young as I can remember and the patent absurdity of making a scrawny 3 year old responsible for the actions of her sturdy, unsupervised toddler brother never seemed to dawn on my mother.

In a household in which there is only one child, that child may alternately be the Scapegoat and the Golden Child, depending on the narcissist’s mood and need to blame something on someone. This has got to be both confusing and crazy-making for the child but, for some odd reason, it seems perfectly rational to the narcissist.

We all have sympathy for the scapegoated child. Nobody should have to live their lives being blamed—and penalized for—the behaviours of other people, but this is what happens in the narcissistic household. But most of us don’t harbour an equal amount of sympathy for the Golden Child. Just like in our view of South Africa’s apartheid era, we sympathize with the downtrodden non-white citizens while at the same time, completely ignoring the dysfunction their more privileged brethren were trained into.

This dysfunction is pervasive and can even define who that Golden Child becomes as a person. They can be resistant to change simple because they fear—sometimes on an intellectually inaccessible level—that change will mean them losing their privilege. Look at the controversy about gay marriage: those who do not have the right to marry seek to share that right with those who do. They want to share. But the opponents are vocal in their fear that somehow extending the right to marry to gay people will somehow diminish their own marriages, take something away from them, even though they are unable to articulate how Adam and Steve getting married will have any tangible effect on their own unions. That other Western nations have legalized it with no deleterious effect on traditional male-female marriages, that it has not led to marrying siblings or pets, penetrates not. These, the holders of state-given rights, are fearful of losing something if those same rights are extended to those who have been heretofore denied them.

While there really is nothing for the opponents to lose in extending marriage rights to the LGBT community, such is not the case in the narcissistic household. The Golden Child may grow up with privilege, but she also grows up with the sure knowledge that at the caprice of the narcissistic parent, her position of privilege can be ended in a heartbeat. And one of the surest ways of getting yourself demoted from Golden Child to Scapegoat is to sympathize with that Scapegoat. The Golden Child must become a psychic “Mini-me” to the narcissist or risk the loss of privilege. And, because there is not middle ground in the narcissist’s mind—if you aren’t for her, then you must be against her—to avoid being cast down, the Golden Child must pander to the narcissistic parent, and in exchange receive the adoration and privileged treatment denied the Scapegoat.

While I was a Scapegoat for most of my life, I did have a brief period as the Golden Child. Not because my mother became disenchanted with my Golden Child brother, however, but because she found a “use” for me. She discovered that I could sing—really sing—when I was about 6 or 7 years old and decided she was going to make me into the next Shirley Temple (a well-known child star of my mother’s youth). Having been the Scapegoat for all of my years with her, I dreaded attention, as it usually meant I was going to end up getting hurt or punished in some way. My mother, however, thought to motivate me by telling me how famous she was going to make me (and, I heard her tell others, how rich I was going to make her), but the whole idea of fame gave me the shudders. It was just too much attention, which I perceived as being dangerous. But during that time, my mother spent hours sewing costumes, curling my poker-straight hair, painting my face with her cosmetics, and dragging me from audition to audition, from talent contests to nightclubs to TV programs to whatever venue she could dig up for me to stand in front of a large audience, my knobby knees virtually knocking with stage fright. She bragged about me, implying that other people’s children were inferior because they didn’t have my big talent. What she never did was pay attention to what I really wanted—something Golden Children often suffer from as much as Scapegoats. When, after a couple of years, it became apparent that I did not want fame the way she did, I was bumped from my tenuous position as Golden Child back to my familiar place among the cinders.

Golden Children suffer in ways we Scapegoats—and even the Golden Children themselves—may not readily recognize. Charlie’s brother, Alvin, was a Golden Child, blatantly his mother’s favourite. And he was a self-made multi-millionaire. But he made his money by skating on the thin edge of the law, disadvantaging others to advantage himself financially, more a con man than a businessman. He grew up without morals, without values, without empathy for anyone other than himself, including the mother who idolized him. He thought himself happy, rolling in money, but he drank himself stupid and had a string of unhappy marriages to women who were no less fixated on him money than he was. He had no respect for others, no self respect either. His mother excused his every transgression by convincing herself that he behaved no different from any other rich man, and to maintain his mother’s adulation, he had to maintain his wealth, no matter who he hurt in the bargain—himself, his estranged daughter, his brother, even 90+ year old ladies he conned into buying investment instruments that were useless to them but paid him a handsome commission.

There is a critical difference between the victims of South Africa’s apartheid regime and the victims of a narcissistic household: where the white South Africans did not have much in the way of democratic role models (that being a concept vigorously suppressed by the State) and the entered adulthood with precious few examples of another way to think or be, the Golden Child has an abundance of examples and role models, from schoolmates and teachers to television and movies to magazines and books, to exemplify a different way of thinking, a more just set of values, a more compassionate way of feeling. Upon achieving adulthood, the Golden Child does not remain trapped in the apartheid of the narcissist’s fantasy world unless he wants to. The Golden Child, unlike the white apartheid victim in the “old days,” has a feast of freedom set at her feet, a feast from which she may partake at any time. Nobody broadcasts messages of elitism to the Golden Child and suppresses messages of justice and fairness as a global phenomenon. The Golden Child, should she desire to do so, may step out from under the mantle of privilege and entitlement settled on her shoulders by a dysfunctional, manipulative parent. Unlike the white apartheid victims of 20 years ago, freedom is at the Golden Child’s fingertips and the consequences of embracing it is highly unlikely to be beatings, imprisonment, or even death.

And yet too many Golden Children will not take the freedom because they value their positions of privilege too much to jeopardize it. From small things like expecting receive the best piece of meat at the dinner table to big things like not feeling bad when receiving a family inheritance that left out the Scapegoat sibling, Golden Children receive much as a result of their assigned role in the family, often at the expense of others, and as adults, few of them find any reason to change that. And so they remain spoilt, entitled, indulged. Without remorse. Without compassion. And without coercion.

The Apple

“There is a Goddamned apple missing!”

Mommy’s bellow could be heard throughout the house and out into the yard, and both she and Brother froze at the sound. A sly grin crossed Brother’s face as he went back to frying ants with his magnifying glass. She waited tensely for the inevitable summons.

“Both you kids get in here, right now!” Brother ignored the command in favour of crisping a few more ants, but she was taking no chances. Dropping her doll on the grass, heedless of its unsupervised proximity to Brother, she dashed into the house.

“What is it, Mommy?” she asked, skidding to a halt on the dreary streaked brown asphalt tile.

“ ‘What is it, Mommy?’ ” her mother mimicked in a sarcastic sing-song voice. “What, are you deaf? I said there is an apple missing! What do you know about it?”

No matter what she said, she was going to be in trouble…either for tattling on Brother or for not stopping him from eating the apple. She wondered which one would get the least punishment. Tattling, she decided. “Brother ate it,” she said simply.

“You knew this and you didn’t stop him?” Mother’s voice was eerily soft. She nodded silently.

“And you didn’t tell me?” Uh oh. Should have pleaded ignorance. She shook her head slowly from side to side.

“And why not, pray tell?” Mother asked.

Because she was afraid of being punished for tattling? Because she was afraid of being punished for not stopping him from eating the apple? Because she was afraid? None of those answers would work…they would make mother more angry, make her say something like “Afraid? Afraid? You want afraid? I’ll give you something to be afraid of!”

“Well, miss…” Mother said impatiently. “I am waiting for your answer. You are taking so long, I hope for your sake it is a really good one.”

What could she say? “I forgot. I was playing dolls and I…”

“Get me the strap,” Mother interrupted her.

“Nooooo, Mommy!” she wailed, her knees losing their integrity and putting her into a half crouch. “Noooo! I didn’t do anything!”

“Exactly,” Mommy said. “You didn’t stop him, you didn’t tell me, you just let it happen. Now get me that strap.” Mommy stood silently, hands on hips, unmoved by her sobbing pleas and promises to never again transgress. “If I have to get that strap myself,” Mommy interrupted, “You’ll get more for defying me.”

She took the two steps to the kitchen door and removed the thin length of leather…formerly a dog leash now devoid of its metal clip…and handed it reluctantly to her mother. “I didn’t do anything,” she sobbed. “It’s not fair. Brother did it, not me!”

“You didn’t tell me,” Mommy said. “Lay across that chair and take your pants down…all the way down…down to your ankles.” She complied, clenching her buttocks and her bladder muscles against the anticipated blows. “You are the oldest,” Mommy grunted with the first swing. A streak of liquid fire wrapped itself around her lower body as the thin lash curled around a pale, thin thigh. She clenched her teeth to contain the scream. “I can’t be everywhere,” her mother yelled, swinging again, raising a thin angry line across her upraised buttocks. “It’s your job to keep an eye on him and keep him out of trouble.” Swish! Crack! “I don’t know why you have to defy me at every turn! He doesn’t know any better but you do!”

Mommy’s invective continued unabated, accompanied by the raining blows until exhaustion set in. Her arm tired, Mommy threw the strap on the floor and looked at the pale little body quivering in front of her, raised red lash marks criss-crossing it like a dilapidated lattice. Mommy sighed. “Stop that blubbering,” she commanded, her voice tired. “Clean up.”

“I didn’t do anything,” came a thin, weak sob. “I didn’t do anything,” the sound repeated.

Mommy’s lips thinned. “Unless you want more where that came from, I suggest you shut your Goddamned mouth and get your ass out of this kitchen.” Mommy paused as she scrambled to obey. “And send your brother in to me.”

Leaving Dolly in the front yard with Brother had been a mistake, she saw upon entering the front yard. There were several small, black-rimmed pinholes in her pink rubber arms and legs and Brother was busily trying to burn a hole through Dolly’s belly button with his magnifying glass. She could just kill Uncle Pete for giving him that thing…one day he was going to set the house on fire, like he tried to set the school on fire with purloined matches when he was five. Brother had a fascination with fire that she thought was creepy, although nobody else seemed to think so. She ran to rescue her doll.

Experience told her that grabbing the doll and engaging in a tug-of-war with him would culminate only in a dismembered doll. He was bigger, heavier, stronger than she was, for all that he was two years younger, and in a physical contest with him, she invariably lost…sometimes quite painfully. Her backside still smarting, she called out to him “Brother! Mommy wants to see you in the kitchen, right now!”

He continued to concentrate on burning a hole in the doll’s belly. “Mommy says if she has to come get you, she’s bringing the strap!”

That got his attention and he looked up at her, paling when he saw her swollen, tear-stained face. “You better hurry,” she said, “Or you’re gonna get it too!”

She could see him weigh his options, then put down the doll and magnifying glass and head for the house with uncharacteristic slowness. Brother never did anything except at a frenzied rush. The moment he was out of sight she snatched up the magnifying lens and went into the flowerbed beneath the living room window and dug a small hole with her hands beneath the flowering maple. She shoved the offending piece of glass into the earth and covered it over, scattering leaf litter over it to disguise the little grave. Quickly, she darted out onto the lawn, snatched up Dolly, and hurried to her room, making soothing apologetic sounds to the abused doll. She should never have left Dolly out in the grass with Brother, she thought guiltily, and the doll’s injuries were her own fault.

She could hear Mommy hollering at Brother. “I am not made out of money!” Mommy yelled. “I buy exactly enough apples for each of you to have one in your school lunch every day. And now there’s one missing!” She waited for the tell-tale “thwack” of the strap, but no sound emerged from the kitchen save Mommy’s scolding voice, and soon enough, that ended. No spanking. She sighed and cuddled her battered doll closer. “He ate the apple but I got the spanking,” she said softly, looking into the blue glass eyes. “That’s not fair. That’s not fair at all!”

From outside an indignant bellow went up and she hugged the doll closely, smiling tightly with delight. Brother had discovered his evil glass was missing, she was sure. The front door banged as he re-entered the house, crying for Mommy. “Uncle Pete gave me that!” he wailed. “She took it, I know she did!”

Ah, her room was about to be tossed. She sometimes wondered if she was some kind of witch, with her uncanny ability to tell the future and, sure enough, her bedroom door slammed open and Mommy filled the portal like an avenging angel. “Where is it?” Mommy demanded, that dangerous “don’t you dare give me any crap!” look on her face. “What did you do with Brother’s magnifying glass?”

She shook her head and hugged the doll closer. “I don’t have it,” she said quite truthfully. "The last time I saw it, it was in the front yard.” Again, a true statement.

Mommy looked unconvinced and did not stay Brother’s hand as he pulled the contents of her closet floor out into the room and strewed them about, then ransacked her chest of drawers. It wasn’t until he started pulling the bed apart that Mommy stayed his hand. “Did you leave it in the front yard?” she queried. He nodded his head affirmatively. “Then maybe some kid picked it up while you were in the house,” she said. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times, don’t leave your toys outside!” Mommy shook her head and turned to leave, muttering “You kids never appreciate anything,” as she walked away, but then stopped and turned back momentarily. “Clean up this Goddamned mess.”

Brother followed Mommy down the hall, complaining bitterly about his missing instrument of destruction, leaving the carnage of her room behind. With a sigh she set about putting things to right, the labour of restoring the order of her room a small price to pay for the satisfaction of saving her little bit of the world from further predation. The telephone rang and she heard Mommy snap at Brother’s whining complaints, telling him if he couldn’t take care of his toys, it was not her problem.

“Hello?” she heard Mommy’s instantly cheerful voice. How did Mommy do that, she wondered? How did Mommy go from screaming and cursing at them to being sweet and cheerful to someone else in an instant? A shudder wracked her thin frame. It was scary, knowing that Mommy could go from a spitting rage to absolute calm and good humour in a single breath…because Mommy could take it the other direction, too…and often did.

“Bettie!” Mommy’s voice sounded delighted. “Oh, fine, fine. Settling a little problem with the kids, that’s all. You’d think I was made out of money, the way they eat me out of house and home!” There was a pause while Mommy listened to her friend’s chatter.

“Friday night? I’m sure I can make it. Eddie has to work, but I’ll tell him I’m going to your place for something. Can Nancy babysit? Eddie will get pissed if I leave the kids alone and he’ll get home before I do.” There was another pause.

“Oh, I just got this gorgeous silk cocktail dress that will be perfect!” Mommy almost giggled. “It’s peacock blue, embroidered all over, and looks Chinese, with that Mandarin collar…it should be a man-magnet!” Another pause, then the sound of Mommy’s voice became muffled, and then the conversation was over.

She continued sorting the jumbled piles of clothes and toys that had been her room when Mommy appeared suddenly in the doorway. “Don’t you say a word to your father,” Mommy warned. “Not one word, do you understand?”

She looked up, an uncomprehending expression carefully in place. “What?” she asked. Mommy stood there for a moment, examining her face minutely for signs of deception, and finally turned and walked away. She picked up a pajama top that Mommy had made, yellow flannel with fluffy little lambs on it, and resisted the urge to bite into it and tear it in half.

First Kiss

There was this boy at school…Kenny Woodruff…who liked her. Trouble was, she didn’t like him. Not even a little bit.

He was nice enough to play with when they were younger, and he lived in one of the big, older houses in the neighbourhood with a second story and old, big trees that were very cool for climbing. His front yard had a really big old pepper tree with a swing and a platform that could be accessed by climbing up slats of wood that had been nailed to the trunk and bigger branches like ladder rungs. You could sit up there alone like a princess in a tower and read or just daydream, hidden away from those mere mortals who congregated below to argue over whose turn it was to play on the swing.

The trouble was, he really liked her. In that kind of boy-girl way that really wasn’t hugely interesting to her. She actually liked his younger brother, Kevin, better. She and Kevin were the same age and Kenny was two years older, even though he was in her grade. He had been held back a year in elementary school and she had skipped a grade. He should be in the ninth grade, she should be in the seventh…they were both in the eighth, although they really didn’t have any classes together…they hadn’t since starting junior high. They’d been in the same fifth and sixth grade classrooms, but in junior high she was in the advanced classes and Kenny was not. But she saw him every day on the school bus and he took it upon himself to walk her to and from the bus every day, despite her attempts to discourage him. It was a blessing when Kevin got to junior high because now he joined them, despite Kenny’s attempts to discourage him. She was, it seemed, the object of Kenny’s romantic dreams, her own feelings notwithstanding.

This was one of those rare times when it was very useful to have a famously difficult mother. She could easily ditch Kenny at the front gate simply by saying that her mother would kill her if she let a boy in. It took him several months to wonder how her mother would know and when he suspiciously asked, she just shrugged. “The neighbours spy for my mother,” she said, nodding in the direction of the house directly across the street…the first house on the block to have a true plate glass picture window, and home of the most notorious gossip on the block, Carolyn Reede. “My mother plays pinochle with Mrs. Reede,” she told him. “And you know Mrs. Reede knows everything that goes on in the neighbourhood.” He had left with a closed, sullen face, but at least he left.

Kenny had grown a considerable amount in the past couple of years, and he was a taller, thicker, beefier version of his brother, Kevin. Nearly platinum blond and extremely fair skinned, when something bothered Kenny it was easy to tell…one merely looked for his face to suffuse with blood and turn beet red. He seemed a bit excitable to her…a bit like Brother, who was annoyingly fidgety and simply could not keep his hands off of anything that attracted his interest, no matter who it belonged to…and she found this unnerving at times. Kenny was not the cheerful, affable boy his brother was, and sometimes his hulking intensity scared her.

She was beginning to notice that some boys were cuter than others, even allowing that she might find it nice to actually kiss one or two of them. There was Nick Phillips, who liked to work out on the bars during lunch break…he was very cute and could do some amazing things on the bars…and he was very nice, too. But her friend Bernadette had her eye on him, was flirting with him, so she kept her interest to herself. But Kenny Woodruff? Kenny was hulking where Nick was muscular, Kenny was blunt and bumbling where Nick was respectful and well-mannered, and Kenny was, while not actually stupid, lacking in the kind of intelligence that would advance him either academically or socially. And his single-minded pursuit of her was more than just a little scary.

But she still went over to his house. She liked sitting on the platform up in the tree, above the rest of the world, remote, unseen, untouchable. Up on the platform, hidden in the long, feathery limbs of the pepper tree, she felt safe from the rest of the world. It was the closest thing she had to a sanctuary.

They weren’t supposed to go out after school, but she and Brother had come to an unspoken agreement…once their chores were done and Mommy had called and checked up on them, they would go out to play…and they would not tattle on each other. She had no idea where Brother went and presumed he had no idea where he might find her. But ten to fifteen minutes before Mommy was expected, they would each scramble home and take up their posts in their respective bedrooms, doing something suitably innocuous like reading or homework. Mommy did not allow them to watch TV, play outside, or have friends over to the house when she was not there. Theirs was a daily ritual.

On a warm spring afternoon she heard the creaking of the slats nailed to the tree trunk, an effective announcement of an impending visitor. Expecting Kevin, who like to read as well, she was disappointed to see Kenny’s blond crew cut appear. Without waiting to be invited…it was his tree, after all…he heaved himself up onto the platform and sat, cross legged, entirely too close to her. She wriggled away.

“Don’t you like me?” he said to her without preamble. “You’re always trying to avoid me.”

She didn’t know how to deal with this, and he was sitting too close again. She wriggled further away. “I don’t know what you mean, Kenny,” she temporized. “I like you fine.”

“Do you like me like a boyfriend?” he asked bluntly, moving closer again.

“Ummm…” she hesitated a moment, then shook her head. “No, Kenny, I’m sorry. I like you fine as a friend, but not like a boyfriend.”

She began to grow alarmed as she saw his face begin to colour. “But you like Kevin, don’t you?” he said, his voice tense, ugly. “Don’t you? You like my little brother but not me!”

She shook her head, edging toward the side of the platform where the slats were nailed. “He’s just my friend, Kenny. Like you…just my friend.”

He was beside her again, so close she could smell the soap his mother used to wash his shirt. She made a swift move for the edge of the platform but he blocked her and grabbed her with one hand behind her neck and other gripping her head. Then, horrifyingly, he pressed his mouth to hers. She struggled, beating against him and trying to twist away, oblivious that she was on a platform in a tree, fifteen feet above the ground. His lips were disgustingly slack, sloppy and wet, and he nearly sucked the breath from her before he thrust his repulsive tongue nearly down her throat. Flailing and gagging, she could not dislodge his superior weight and, desperate for air and freedom, she did the only thing that came to mind. She bit down on his tongue with as much force as she could muster.

He bellowed and thrust her away and before he could recover and renew his grasp, she scrambled down the slat ladder and sprinted home, dashing in the door and slamming it behind her. Panting for breath, she went to the bathroom to clean up…if Mommy saw her sweating and winded, there would be ten kinds of hell to pay. A few minutes later she heard Brother come home and, checking the mirror to make sure she looked as if nothing had happened, she left the bathroom, headed for her room.

It wasn’t Brother who had come in the door. Kenny Woodruff, his face glowing red with rage, was in the hallway outside her bedroom, advancing on her.

“You have to go, Kenny,” she said desperately. “My mother will be home any time and you can’t be here.”

Kenny said nothing but continued to slowly advance upon her, like a cat stalking a mouse. She remembered how strong he was when he had hold of her up on the platform, and her heart began to hammer as she edged toward the exit from the hallway that led to the living room…if she could get there, she could make the front door and run to one of the neighbours for help.

“You’ve got to leave,” she said again and looked quickly into Brother’s bedroom to try to distract him as she darted the other direction for the living room.

She almost made it. But he grabbed her by her long ponytail and dragged her to him. “Look what you did to me!” he roared at her, the veins in his eye gone red with his rage. “Look what you’ve done!”

Confused, terrified, she struggled to get free, but he had her ensnared by her long hair and with one had he was forcing her head down, to look at the floor. “Look what you did to me, you goddamned little tease!” His other hand had opened his trousers and in the brief moment before she squeezed her eyes shut, she saw only a mass of engorged, terrifyingly red flesh protruding from the open fly.

“Look at it!” he raged, shaking her head back and forth by her hair. “Look what you did! And now you have to take care of it!”

Attempting to control her feeble struggles had caused Kenny to move them into the living room, but now he started dragging her towards her bedroom. Keeping her eyes tightly squeezed shut, she tried to go limp, make a dead weight of herself, and alternately dig her heels into the cheap thin carpet. She was able only to slow his progress and he inexorably moved towards the bedroom, alternately cursing her and blaming her for his condition.

Then suddenly she was free. “Take your hands off my sister!” she heard and her eyes flew open in surprise. Brother! Her brother had a stick of some kind and he was whacking Kenny over the head and across the back and shouting at him to leave their house and never come back. She began to cry in relief. “Don’t ever touch her again!” she heard him roar to Kenny’s retreating back. “Don’t even talk to her!”

“Oh, thank you!” she sobbed, trying to hug Brother for his rescue, but he pushed her away.

“Go wash your face and comb your hair,” he said, taking the stick and heading towards his bedroom. “Mommy will be home pretty soon and I don’t want her asking a lot of questions that will make us both have to stay home in the afternoon.” He closed his bedroom door.