The Good, the Bad, and the Gullible

Years ago, my cousin Sue found herself in desperate financial straits. She was over extended and needed a consolidation loan to sort it all out. But our local lenders had turned her down for such a loan and she was looking bankruptcy in the face…until she spotted an ad in the classified section of our local newspaper that promised loans to people who had been turned down by more conventional lenders.

She answered the ad but soon found herself in a quandary: there was a $600 “loan origination fee,” and she didn’t have the $600—I found out about this because she asked me to loan her the money, promising to pay me back as soon as the loan came through. She came by my house to pick up the money and in her hand she had a FedEx envelope and in my head the red flags began waving furiously.

I pointed out to Sue that the “lender” wanting the fee was suspicious, the lender wanting her to send the money via money order or certified check was suspicious, the use of FedEx rather than the regular mail was super-suspicious. But Sue explained it all away, attempting to allay my fears in the same way she had allayed her own: loan origination fees were not uncommon (even though wanting the money up front was unheard of), why would a lender trust a check from a person who is desperate enough for funds to answer a classified ad, and the FedEx was just a way to expedite things, not a way to avoid being arrested for mail fraud.

Well, you probably guessed it—it was a scam, Sue lost the $600 and the so-called lender was never heard from again. I sent her to a debt counselling service that helped her dig herself out of the financial hole she was in and she lived another 20 years in much better financial health due to the lessons she learned.

We have all heard tales of people who lost their life savings in various scams: the Nigerian scam, Ponzi schemes, even putting money down to rent a property at an incredibly good price, only to find out on moving day that twenty other people also think they have rented the property. We have heard of young women going out with someone they met on the internet, only to end up beaten and raped or worse. There are now epidemics of completely avoidable diseases circling the planet because some parents trusted wrongly and did not vaccinate their children and now not only are they paying the price, but some of their innocent children are ending up blind, deaf, crippled or even dead.

What all of these people have in common is gullibility…and we are all susceptible to it. And being gullible doesn’t mean we are stupid, either. In fact, “‘Intelligent people are more likely to trust others, while those who score lower on measures of intelligence are less likely to do so,’ reports a just-released study from Oxford University.”

Intelligence, however, is no match for greed or desperation. Our ability to rationalize, to engage in confirmation bias, to believe what we want to believe leaves us vulnerable to predators of all kinds. To my way of thinking, gullible people fall into three basic categories: 

1) Greedy: these are the people who get involved in “get rich quick” schemes;

2) Too trusting: those who see the world through rose-tinted lenses, unwilling to admit that people are not what they seem to be on the surface; and

3) The desperate and hopeful: these people, while they may know better on a deep level, are so despairing and hungry that they ignore the warnings from their subconscious, desperately hoping the illusion they are ascribing to is true.

Many ACoNs fall into the last category because 1) they so badly want something to be true that they fool themselves into believing it and/or 2) they simply do not trust their own judgment, their own critical thinking skills, and so they go along with something that sounds plausible…or that fits with what they want to believe. A University of Leicester study found that “People who have experienced an adverse childhood and adolescence are more likely to come to believe information that isn’t true—in short they are more suggestible, and easily mislead…they might succumb to peer pressure more readily…The majority of people may learn through repeated exposure to adversity to distrust their own judgment; a person might believe something to be true, but when they…read something in a newspaper that contradicts their opinion, or they talk to someone with a different view-point, that individual is more likely to take on that other person's view…This is because the person may have learned to distrust their actions, judgements and decisions due to the fact that the majority of the time their actions have been perceived to invite negative consequences...there is already evidence to suggest that there is a relationship between intensity/frequency of negative life impacts and degree of vulnerability. Experience of adversity may have a knock-on effect on a person’s mindset—they may come to believe that ‘they are no good’, or ‘nothing they do is ever good enough’…”

As people who had negative, abusive childhoods, we are at particular risk for this vulnerability. According to the same study “…parents who cope with stress/negative events in a more stressed manner (raging, acting out, drinking, expressing a pessimistic view of the world)…may in turn transfer that way of behaving onto their children.” It’s no surprise that we might learn certain behaviours from our parents…they are our primary role models during our most formative years…but those of us who grow up as the family scapegoat may well be the ones who experience the knock-on effect mentioned above while our GC siblings emulate the narcissistic parents and learn raging, acting out and a host of other negative behaviours.

Growing up as a scapegoat is anxiety provoking. According to Christina Valhouli in a Columbia University publication “Psychologists agree that all belief systems—astrology, Objectivism, religion—ease anxiety about the human condition, and provide the illusion of security, predictability, control, and hope in an otherwise chaotic world.” One of the things that powerless people like scapegoats crave is a feeling of security or predictability in their lives and, like the anorexic who seizes on food as a way to have at least some sense of control in her life, we are susceptible to accepting and believing things that give us that same feeling of control, including things that we would reject if we viewed those things critically, trusted our own judgment, and did not feel such a pressing need for control…any control…in our lives. This leaves us vulnerable to exploitation by everyone from New Age nonsense to manipulative narcissists both inside and outside of our families.

We seek and develop or accept beliefs that make us feel secure, that give us a feeling of control or comprehension of a world we have heretofore experienced as chaotic, regardless of their objective truth and effectiveness. Columbia sociology professor Herbert Gans says “People believe in things like astrology because it works for them better than anything else…Your own system is the most efficient one, whether it's a guardian angel, a rabbit's foot, or a God watching over you. And if it doesn't work, there's always an excuse for it.” This is how we end up with perfectly intelligent people spouting nonsense about guardian angels, protective crystals, magic cures like EFT and a host of other pocket-picking, common sense hijacking exploitive panaceas: we need to feel protected or in control so badly we sacrifice both money and good judgment to anything that makes us feel better.

“Dr. Robert Glick, head of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, calls belief systems ‘societal pain relievers.’ ‘People will recruit anything from their environment that will ensure and protect their safety,” he says. “It gives you a sense that you're not alone, and helps ease feelings of being powerless.’ Power—whether an increase in a person's perceived power or an abdication of it—is a major component of pseudoscience, and Glick explains people's relations to power in Freudian terms. He describes belief systems as a metaphoric representation of our parents, providing a release from authority and responsibility. ‘People have a built-in predilection that wishes for assistance and support. This is an extension of childhood, where there were always people around us who control our life. Beliefs like astrology and even religion are a projection that there are forces in the heavens that are like your parents.’”

Some of us may think this is not really a problem, that if a person derives comfort from these beliefs, that it all that really matters. And while I can see why someone might think that way, my point of view is much different. I think it is dangerous, not only because it encourages a vulnerability to the predators out there, but because as long as we are seeking magic fixes for our problems we are not actually fixing them. I liken it to a cancer patient who, fearful of chemo and radiation therapies, seeks quack remedies that ease her mind but allow the cancer to grow to unmanageable proportions. Quack therapies, whether for physical or emotional problems, are good only for their purveyors, lining their pockets and/or boosting their egos. They ultimately do nothing but harm to the believer by keeping the believer gullible to other quack remedies and preventing the believer from getting real, effective help.

So how do you know if you are gullible? And what do you do about it?

Do you eschew mundane, ordinary solutions to things, especially if they might take a long time and/or cause you to feel pain? If you do, you are vulnerable to quack remedies (it doesn’t mean you will fall for them, only that you are exactly the kind of person the promoters of such quackery are looking for). Do you distrust the government, modern medicine, or the scientific process? Do you believe that magic is or “might be” real? Do you think that the ancients knew more than we do now? Do you think there is a way to change another person through meditation, potions, prayer, or other forms of manipulation-at-a-distance? Are you superstitious about anything? If you answered “yes” to even one of these questions, you are at risk: somewhere out there lurks at least one charlatan who specializes in your particular vulnerability and s/he has a magical, scientifically-bankrupt scheme intended to either separate you from your money or inflate his own sense of importance by drawing you into the fold…or both.

The question you must ask yourself, before you buy into one of these quack theories is whether or not it is scientifically valid. Not junk science, but bona fide, real science…has it been independently studied, have the studies been published in bona fide scientific or medical journals like Nature or Lancet? Can you access these studies through sites like PubMed or NIH? Because if they are only available through a website, if they purport to be a “secret” or something “known by the ancients,” it is virtually certain that you are looking at a scam disguised as something beneficial.

We who have narcissistic parents have spent our lives living in fantasy worlds constructed by someone else and for their benefit. Most of us “drank the kool aid” as part of our upbringing: to be safe, we had to go along with the craziness that was our narcissistic parent. But as adults, unsure of our way and not trusting our own judgment, we are vulnerable to those whose voices ring with authority. I can remember second guessing myself…wavering on my own memories…because my narcissistic (now ex-) husband was so absolutely certain that he was right…his confidence was so strong...that it made me question my own. We are vulnerable to that voice of authority because we have been conditioned to not trust our own senses or thought processes but to accept what others…those to whom we allow authority over us…tell us.

So how do we overcome this vulnerability, how do we stop being gullible? The short answer is “critical thinking.” It means depending on scientific method and healthy scepticism. It means analysing something and throwing out what we want to believe in favour of what is rational…and sometimes it means believing things we don’t want to believe. It takes time and it takes self-education and sometimes it takes being willing to embrace ugly truths instead of the pretty lies that we want to believe. Start by learning how to differentiate between “junk science” (like the anti-vaxxers rhetoric) and real science, then move on to learning how to differentiate between valid and specious logic. Learn what the “scientific method” is and then apply it to claims from various sources for miraculous or instant cures for your ills, both physical and emotional. Learn to be sceptical of fantastic claims…the more fantastic the claim, the more likely it is to be untrue.

By becoming sceptical you not only begin to protect yourself from the scammers and cultists and manipulators out there, you begin to acquire the skills to protect yourself from the narcissists in your life. They depend on your gullibility and vulnerability to succeed in having their way with you. When you start being sceptical, you stop believing their every promise, spoken or implied. You start pulling away from the games they play that inevitably end up hurting you or those you love. As you gain clarity about how people hoodwink each other and how your own subconscious desires play into it and allow you to be the mark yet again, you will start seeing the game before you get sucked in and hurt, not after. It is all about forcing yourself to see and recognize the truth…the real, ugly, hard truth.

And that truth will ultimately set you free.

She manipulates your emotions...: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 10

 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

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Part 10. She manipulates your emotions in order to feed on your pain.

This exceptionally sick and bizarre behavior is so common among narcissistic mothers that their children often call them “emotional vampires.” Some of this emotional feeding comes in the form of pure sadism. She does and says things just to be wounding or she engages in tormenting teasing or she needles you about things you're sensitive about, all the while a smile plays over her lips.

This is rather a difficult one for me—it was not until I read this that I associated some of my NM’s behaviours with her feeding on my pain. Only a very few examples come to mind, but I am not sure that her way of “feeding” on my pain is even remotely similar to how other NMs do/did it.

My parents separated several times during my childhood but, oddly, I cannot actually recall my father being gone. It is like those months of his absence are completely shuttered from my memory, as if they never existed. Their final separation, however, the one that led to their second and final divorce when I was 10, is more clear. I can only recall random events, however, and I cannot recall them in their proper order of occurrence. At some point after my father moved out of the house, he left the state. His version of events (explained to me after he returned) and my NM’s differed strikingly. It is important to remember that this occurred in the late 1950s, years before “no-fault divorce” came into being, and in a divorce, the party at fault was pretty much stripped of assets in favour of the complaining party.

And so it was with my father. NM filed for divorce on the grounds of “mental cruelty” and the divorce was duly granted: she got the house, the new car, all of the furniture, custody of both children and child support (because she had always worked, she could not get alimony). My father got a 10 year old car, his clothes, mechanic’s tools, and his hunting and fishing gear—and a monthly bill for support and car/house payments that nearly exceeded his income. He lived rent-free with a friend and worked “under the table” for him just so he had some cash.

My parents had been separated when I was 8 but that is completely closed to my memory. According to my stepmother, however, this is when she and my father met and started dating. When NM found out he had a girlfriend, she turned on the charm and begged him to come back home. He broke up with Patsy, telling her “I got to go back for the kids’ sake,” and returned home. I remember absolutely nothing of this, not even his absence.

When they separated the second time, my father looked up Patsy to see if she was still single. They started dating again. They got serious—marriage serious. But he was unable to marry again—virtually all of his earnings went into NM’s pocket. So he took off to Nevada, married Patsy and fled to Oregon (our home state).

What happened next depends on who you ask: to this day I do not know what is the truth. NM says that the whole time he was in Oregon, he sent her no money at all; Patsy says he sent child support but didn’t pay the other bills, like the mortgage and her car payments. Personally, I don’t know. What I do know, however, is how my NM acted over his removal to Oregon: she was pissed-really, REALLY pissed. I don’t know if she expected to crook her finger and have him back at her command when she got tired of the game of musical bedrooms she was playing or if she was angry at him having found someone else. Whatever it was, she became the archetypal “woman scorned.”

With a child’s typical self-serving sense, I very much preferred my father to my mother. He did not hit me, terrorize me, or even yell at me. If he felt it necessary to chastise me, it was usually in the form of explanation of what I did wrong, why it was wrong, followed by extracting a promise from me not to do it again. I am not saying he never spanked me, but if he did, the experience is buried in one of those inaccessible black holes in my memory. I just know I was never afraid of my father and I loved him very much.

Once my father had gone to Oregon, NM never passed up an opportunity to demonize him. Birthdays, Christmas, special occasions came and went and nary a word from him. And she could not disguise her delight in rubbing it in. “So, another birthday and not a word from your PRECIOUS father, eh miss?” she would ask, her voice dripping venom, her face an undisguised mask of glee. Eventually the lack of contact and NM’s incessant campaign against him began to chip away at my brother’s resolve but the more Petey turned against him, the more staunchly I stood in our father’s corner. This, of course, enraged NM and she would not pass up an opportunity to rub in both his absence and his silence—and she wouldn’t stop until she had me on the verge of tears, in which case I would then get browbeaten for “blubbering.”

The summer I was 12 I was at my grandparent’s house (her parents) and I remember telling my grandmother how much I missed my father…and she suggested I call him! We were in Oregon, after all, and the call wouldn’t be that expensive… I remember puddling up in tears because I didn’t know where he was, until she suggested I talk to my other grandmother—certainly HIS mother would know where he was. Within the week my father and Patsy drove down from Portland to my grandmother’s house to see me and, joy of joys, with a new baby sister for me! I was over the moon!

But the telling thing about their visit and subsequent move back to Southern California was when I asked my father why he had not written to me while he had been gone. He and Patsy exchanged a telling look and the truth came out—not one birthday, not one Christmas, not one holiday had been over looked by them! They had send letters and cards with money in them so I could buy a present for myself—and NM had intercepted every one, kept the money they sent, and destroyed the cards and letters. I was so relieved to know he had not abandoned me that I wasn’t even angry with NM…just relieved that my trust and faith in him had not been misplaced.

Looking back on this now, I can see the grimace-like smile on her face every time she lied to me about my father’s apparent lack of contact. She was playing both ends against the middle, hoping that my not receiving his cards and letters would make me feel abandoned by him and subsequently hate him—and that my lack of response to his letters and cards would hurt him, perhaps make him think that my brother and I didn’t love him.

Interestingly, when she took my children and kept them away from me, she did EXACTLY the same thing! I wrote, sent cards (some with money in them), remembered them for every occasion and non-occasion in between, and sent them care of my grandmother’s house, knowing she would get them to my NM for the kids. Her enmity towards me was so great that she withheld those cards and letters (I later received a large kraft envelope from my grandmother containing them) from the children, telling them I had abandoned them and my lack of correspondence was the proof. Interestingly, it did not work on me but it DID work on my daughter, who refused to amend her belief that I had abandoned her even after I gave her that big envelope of cards and letters my grandmother fished out of the trash and saved.

I think she got a lot of joy out of my pain, even when she wasn’t there to see it.

She may have taken you to scary movies or told you horrifying stories, then mocked you for being a baby when you cried, She will slip a wounding comment into conversation and smile delightedly into your hurt face. You can hear the laughter in her voice as she pressures you or says distressing things to you. Later she'll gloat over how much she upset you, gaily telling other people that you're so much fun to tease, and recruiting others to share in her amusement. . She enjoys her cruelties and makes no effort to disguise that. She wants you to know that your pain entertains her. She may bring up subjects that are painful for you and probe you about them, all the while watching you carefully. This is emotional vampirism in its purest form. She's feeding emotionally off your pain.

A peculiar form of this emotional vampirism combines attention-seeking behavior with a demand that the audience suffer. Since narcissistic mothers often play the martyr this may take the form of wrenching, self-pitying dramas which she carefully produces, and in which she is the star performer. She sobs and wails that no one loves her and everyone is so selfish, and she doesn't want to live, she wants to die! She wants to die! She will not seem to care how much the manipulation of their emotions and the self-pity repels other people. One weird behavior that is very common to narcissists: her dramas may also center around the tragedies of other people, often relating how much she suffered by association and trying to distress her listeners, as she cries over the horrible murder of someone she wouldn't recognize if they had passed her on the street.

My NM used very different tactics to accomplish the same ends. She was an angry, spiteful person so the melodramatics of “nobody loves or appreciates me” didn’t work for her. Instead, she was the put-upon one, the brave noble soul soldiering on under impossible conditions. Life was an uphill battle with her obtuse, difficult daughter and all the work and sacrifice she had to put in for the unappreciative brat. She was my victim, to hear her tell it, a paradigm that not-so-coincidentally justified her brutal physical attacks on me in the name of “discipline.”

She did not even have the wherewithal to muster up false empathy for someone else, so other people’s tragedies were shunted aside in favour of her own bitch-of-the-moment. When I had a miscarriage at five months and nearly died of a subsequent infection, her one telephone call to me was not to empathize with my loss or to comfort me—no, it seems my husband had been calling her, hoping she would fly across country to help him with the kids while I was in the hospital (I spent 3 weeks there) and as I recuperated. And was she calling me to tell me she was on her way and I should relax and get well? No. The call was to tell me the miscarriage was a good thing as I didn’t need any more brats clinging to my skirts and for me to stop malingering and get home to my husband and kids so he would stop calling and bugging her.

I could almost see the indignant yet somehow malevolent smile playing over her lips as I struggled on my end of the phone not to burst into tears...

Next: Part 11. She's selfish and willful.

Choice

“Don’t take off on one of your marathon ‘walks’ tomorrow morning,” Mother said, slamming the frying pan down on the counter near the sink. “We have an appointment.”

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Just never you mind,” Mother said. “Just you be ready to go at eight and bring along a change of clothes.”

“I’m not going,” she said flatly, looking back to the book in her lap. Out of the corner of her eye she could see her mother doing a slow burn, a dull red flush creeping up her neck, her jaw going rigid.

“Don’t you sass me, young lady,” Mother said through clenched teeth. Her right fist was clenched, too, her arm rigid at her side. “You still aren’t eighteen and you will do what I tell you to do.”

She looked up, keeping her face carefully expressionless…no point in pressing the provocation unnecessarily. “If I don’t know where I’m going, I’m not going,” she looked down at her book again.

“We’re going down to Mexico,” Mother finally said, putting the finishing touches on Frank’s plate. “We have an appointment.”

“What kind of appointment?”

“Just an appointment. Just be ready.” Mother walked out to the living room with Frank’s dinner and coffee.

“I’m not going,” she said again, more to herself than to anyone else.

Mother suddenly materialized in front of her, eyes blazing. “Do not get defiant with me, miss! We have an appointment tomorrow morning and we will keep it, if I have to tie you up and drag you there!”

She shook her head again, her face closed and mulish. “Then that is what you will have to do because unless I know where we are going and why, I’m not going.”

Mother’s hand flashed out but stopped just millimetres away from her face. She had not flinched but continued to stare defiantly at her. “I won’t go,” she reiterated, “Unless I know where and why.” She did not feel as calm and collected as she hoped she looked. Dear God, what if Mother dumped her there or sold her into a whorehouse or something? She wouldn’t put anything past her any more.

“You’ve sure gotten cocky, these last few weeks, haven’t you?” her mother sneered. “But you won’t be pregnant forever and then you will get what’s coming to you, I promise!”

“I’ll be eighteen by then,” she replied. “Eighteen. Legal. Adult. And gone!”

Oh, no you won’t!” Mother shot back at her. “Your birthday isn’t for a month after your sore-footed little bastard is due. But even that’s moot. You just be ready…”

“Oh, for the love of God, Georgia,” came a bellow from the other room. “Tell the girl and get it over with so I can hear my program!”

Mother’s eyes shifted to the curtain dividing the kitchen from the living room with a look of supreme annoyance. “Frank, this is none of your Goddamned business, so…”

“It’s my Goddamned business if it’s drowning out my Goddamned TV!” he interrupted with an indignant roar. “Your mother’s taking you to Tijuana for an abortion!” he continued. “Can we have some quiet now?”

She sat there on the cot, stunned. This was her mother’s first grandchild and she was planning to kill it before it was even born? She was incredulous…she had not thought even her mother capable of such a thing. She shook her head to clear the buzzing in her ears, then looked up at her mother who was standing in front of her, arms akimbo. “That’s illegal,” she said simply.

“Not in Mexico,” Mother said. “Not if you’ve got the money.”

“Then you will have to drag me kicking and screaming to the car and you will have to tie me up and gag me because I will jump out and run away at every red light. And if you succeed anyway, I will call Daddy when we get back and I will tell him. And I will call police and tell them,” she paused for effect. “And then I will call Nana and Grandpa and tell them.” She gave Mother that slit-eyed look that had come to signify seriousness between them and held her gaze unwaveringly. Mother clamped her jaws tightly together and left the kitchen without a word.

She spent the next morning in a state of nerves, skittish as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, to quote her grandfather. She kept waiting for Mother to sneak up behind her and drag her down to the car, but Mother had made herself scarce. By early afternoon she had begun to relax her vigilance a bit, and then Mother came in from one of her outings and sat down on the cot beside her. She instinctively moved away, knowing that to be within arm’s reach was to be in peril.

“So,” Mother said conversationally, “What are your plans?”

She was nonplussed. “Plans?” she echoed dumbly.

“Yes,” Mother said, continuing conversational tone, “Your plans. Exactly what are you going to do? Having a baby isn’t free, you know. How do you plan to pay for your prenatal care? Your hospitalization? How do you plan to support this baby?”

She hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I don’t know yet,” she hedged. “I thought we had medical insurance?”

Mother laughed. “Yes, but it doesn’t cover the illegitimate pregnancy of a dependent,” she said. “So what are you going to do?”

“Mark will help out,” she said, even though she and Mark had barely spoken since she found out she was pregnant.

“Really?” Mother laughed again. “Have you spoken to him lately? I had a conversation with his father this morning and they are both claiming the baby isn’t his. Where does that leave you and all your fine plans?”

She bit the inside of her cheek to control her indignation. Of course the baby was his! There wasn’t anyone else! Assuming a calm demeanor, she shook her head. “I wouldn’t believe anything Mr. Hornung says,” she replied. “He thinks we aren’t good enough for his family.”

“Is that so?” Mother bristled. “And just what makes him think that, pray tell?”

She shrugged noncommittally. “Because of the bar,” she said.

Mother looked uncomprehending. “What is that supposed to mean?”

She shrugged again. “Mark’s father thinks we are white trash and not good enough for his family because you used to own that bar. He’ll say anything to put as much distance between me and Mark as he can. So you can’t believe anything he tells you.”

Her mother sat silently for a few minutes, digesting that bit of information. She could see it rankled her mother, being thought “not good enough,” for it was something she watched her mother struggle with all of her life. Mother’s face cleared.

“Be that as it may, you still haven’t told me what your plans are. Since getting rid of it is apparently not an option, you must have had something in mind.”

Mother’s conversational tone was unnerving her. She could sense she was being lulled, lured into a trap of some sort, but she just couldn’t see where the hook might be. She shook her head. “I hadn’t really planned very far ahead yet,” she admitted cautiously.

“Well, then, I have a plan for you,” Mother said brightly, the uncharacteristic cheeriness more frightening than comforting. “Actually, more than one plan so you have something to choose from!”

She began wishing she had begged harder for Nana and Grandpa to keep her with them. This was beginning to sound a bit scary, and she wondered if she would have a chance to call them for advice before a “choice” was forced upon her. She stayed silent, knowing Mother would reveal these “choices” whether she wanted to hear them or not.

“There are lots of people who can’t have babies themselves and would be happy to adopt…”

“It’s my baby and I’m keeping it,” she interrupted flatly.

“Let’s not be hasty,” Mother said placatingly. “You haven’t heard me out. These people will give the baby a good home and give it all the things you can’t. They’ll pay for your prenatal care, your hospitalization, even give you some money to help you get your life back on track after the baby is born. And you can stay here, live at home, during the pregnancy.”

A warning bell went off in the back of her mind, but she remained sullenly silent.

“There’s also a home for unwed mothers here, the Florence Crittenton Society. You can go live there and they will take care of everything and you can keep the baby if you want.” Mother sat there expectantly, a parody of a smile painted on her face.

She turned the information over in her mind a few times, then took a deep breath. “It’s my baby and I am going to keep it. And I don’t want to go to a home for unwed mothers, either.”

Mother’s eyes narrowed. The gloves were off. “Well, miss, you don’t have any other choices…unless you want to make that trip to Mexico. If you think you are going to live here and waddle around pregnant in front of the all the neighbours and then bring a bastard child home with you, you had better think again because it is not going to happen! You want to keep your little bastard, fine…but you’ll go off somewhere so that I won’t have to put up with the gossip!”

“You mean that my choices are to give away my baby like an unwanted piece of trash or you’re going to put me in an institution?” she cried, her composure evaporating. “Is that what you are telling me?” She couldn’t believe that shrill voice was hers! She braced for the mind-numbing slap that she knew had to be coming but instead, Mother just laughed. Loudly. And long.

“Yes, ma’am,” she smiled, “that’s about the size of it. It may be your brat and I can’t have any say in the decisions about it, but you are my brat and I have full power over you!” Mother was virtually crowing.

“Daddy won’t…”

“Oh, don’t even think about that, missy,” Mother grinned thinly. “With that fat-assed broad of his and those three little curtain-climbers, not to mention Brother, the last thing he wants right now is a pregnant teenager in the house. He doesn’t want you, missy. I am all you’ve got!” From the look on her face, Mother was positively delighted.

“And how much time do I have to think about this?” she finally asked. “It’s a big decision. It will affect the rest of my life…and this baby’s,” her hand went protectively to her lower abdomen.

“Tomorrow morning should be fine. I need to give the people at the Home an answer so they can reserve a space for you. You’ll stay here until you start to show, and then off you go.” Mother stood abruptly and brushed her hands together as if dusting them off. “Think on it. Sleep on it. You have three choices. Give me your answer in the morning.”

She felt deflated. She sat there on her cot after Mother had gone and wondered what to do. Nana and Grandpa would go for the adoption idea…they had already suggested it. Daddy didn’t want to have anything to do with her. Mark was only six months older than she was…he wasn’t exactly in a position to spirit her away to a place of safety, even if he wasn’t scared spitless about having made a baby with her…besides, he was adopted, so it was a pretty good bet that he’d weigh in on that side as well. Why didn’t anybody understand that this was her baby? Flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood, bone of her bone? All of her life she had wanted someone to love without reservation, without fear of rejection, with the certainty of reciprocation, and now, with that just within her grasp, why was the whole world conspiring to snatch it away from her before she even had a taste?

She lay down on the cot and turned to the wall. Despite the warm temperatures she curled into a tight little ball and buried her face in the pillow and felt a gaping, cavernous, echoing hollow open in the region of her heart. What was she going to do?

Fudge

She really hadn’t wanted to skip a grade, but she did have to admit she was a little excited about it.

Her second grade teacher had told Mommy and Daddy that she was so far ahead of the rest of the kids that she had almost finished the whole year’s work, and the year wasn’t half over yet. “So,” Mommy had asked, showing an uncommon amount of interest…Mommy was never interested in anything about school except for her report cards… “What are you going to do about it?”

Daddy didn’t want her to skip. “Give her something more challenging to do,” he said. “But keep her with her peers.” She didn’t know what a peer was, but she didn’t really want to go to another classroom. She knew this one, she liked Miss Brandon, she had known most of her classmates since kindergarten. She didn’t want a change.

But she hadn’t much choice in the matter. Herded along by the momentum that Mommy’s insistence created, she ultimately had only the choice of which third grade classroom to join in mid-term…one where she knew some of the kids, and one where she did not. She took Mrs. Webber’s class because the two Janeys were in it…both girls lived on her street so at least she was not completely among strangers. The fact that the Janeys would never play with her because she was “too little,” being a year younger and a grade behind in school, was not as important to her mind as being in a classroom where she was at least acquainted with some of the kids.

Mrs. Webber was scary. She wasn’t the warm, nurturing kind of teacher she was used to. Mrs. Webber had large, bloody red lips and long, long teeth that reminded her of a rabbit, a thin, pointed nose, the most alarming shade of red hair she had ever seen, and a disconcerting habit of running her tongue over her teeth…lips closed…first the top set of teeth from jaw to jaw, and then the bottom. It made her feel a little bit like one of the Three Little Pigs being eyed by The Wolf.

And Mrs. Webber didn’t bother to help her learn what the children in her class had learned in the last semester. Perhaps the teacher was given to understand that this “gifted student” was up to speed, perhaps not…but the result was the same: the class was learning division and she didn’t yet know how to multiply! When she timidly approached Mrs. Webber at the first recess after the math lesson to explain her dilemma, fully expecting a kindly arm around her shoulder and a promise of help, she was stunned to get the same eye-rolling look of incredulity that generally heralded a tongue-lashing…or worse…from Mommy.

“Oh, great,” Mrs. Webber had moaned. “Just great. This is not what I understood when I agreed to take you into my class. I’m going to tell them to send you back to second grade…”

“No!” she interrupted hastily. “Please don’t do that!” Mommy would have a true-to-life fit! She was already lording it over her friends and bragging on how her child was a genius and was skipped a whole grade in mid-year. Mommy would not easily accept her being sent back, after only one day. “I’ll get my Daddy to help me. He’s very good at multiplying,” she improvised. “I just thought you might have something to help…”

Mrs. Webber rummaged around in her desk drawer and finally withdrew a list of tables. “Memorize these and you’ll be fine,” she said in a somewhat more kindly tone. “Now go outside, you need the fresh air.”

If she had thought knowing the Janeys would help her in the classroom, she was mistaken. She might be in their class, but she belonged in the second grade and they weren’t about to let her forget it. Unfortunately, her second grade friends seemed to view her mid-year promotion as some kind of abandonment or betrayal, and none of them wanted to play with her either. She sat on the steps…third graders weren’t allowed on the monkey bars or the swings or in the sand box, they were “too big”…and waited for recess to be over.

Walking home was no better. Her second grade friends, Choosey and Nancy, wouldn’t walk with her because she wasn’t one of them any more, and the Janeys wouldn’t let her walk with them because she was still, in their eyes, “a little kid.” It was a long three blocks home, and she wearily changed into her play clothes and began her chores. She wasn’t liking school much these days, but there was always hope. That’s what Nana liked to say to Grandpa when they were talking about Mommy and didn’t know she was listening… “There’s always hope, Johnny, always hope.”

It took weeks. She quickly became the best reader in her class, the best speller, and once she got the hang of writing rather than printing, her cursive was the most adept. She didn’t consider this out of the ordinary…she could not remember being unable to read, she could spell any word she had ever seen, and since she was a fair hand with drawing and cursive was more like drawing than writing, it seemed a rather easy skill to master. Arithmetic, however, continued to plague her. She couldn’t seem to keep the number combinations straight in her head, and each time she was faced with reciting in class, doing a problem on the board, or taking a quiz, her brain turned to mush. She could sound out multi-syllabic words, spell them, and even make reasonably accurate guesses as to their meanings, provided she had context…but she simply drew a blank on those multiplication tables. Unlike the kids in the second grade, however, the kids in Mrs. Webber’s third grade didn’t seem to see her as a friendly resource, someone who could help them with their spelling or reading. Instead, she seemed to be viewed as an interloper, a younger child who made them all look stupid by comparison…except in arithmetic, of course.

But at the end of several weeks, things seemed to be getting a little better. In the Girl’s Room at recess on a cloudy, windswept day, the kind of day that blasted stinging gouts of sand through the air, and pelted the children on the playground with an endless spray of tiny pebbles, the Janeys actually deigned to talk to her. She was delighted!

She had gone inside the restroom because the raw, open patch of eczema on the inside of her left calf stung and burned from the blowing sand. Mommy would not let her have knee socks to cover up the ugly, weeping rash that covered most of the inside of her lower leg, saying that it needed exposure to the sun. But without the long socks, the itchy patch was exposed to the rest of the elements, too, not the least of which was the blowing sand that embedded itself in the damp, oozing tissue. On days like this she went to the Girl’s Room at recess and stayed until the bell told her she could go back to class.

The Janeys found her in the bathroom, and surprisingly, engaged her in conversation about what kinds of dolls and accessories she had. Knowing the way of little girls, she recognized this as a kind of interview, a preliminary investigation into her worthiness to join their little clique. Janey Kinkki excused herself to use the toilet while Janey Bertolli continued to compare notes with her about their dolls and toys, and when Janey Kinkki came out of the toilet stall, she called the two other girls over. There was a word written on the inside of the stall door, a word she did not recognize.

“What’s this word?” Janey K., as she was known in class, asked her. “You can read anything, so maybe you can read this word.”

That familiar sense of being drawn into a trap came over her and she shook her head. “I’ve never seen it before,” she said warily.

“C’mon,” Janey B. said. “That doesn’t stop you in class. Sound the word out, like you do for Mrs. Webber.”

She shook her head, backing away from the stall door and the four letter word crudely printed on it. “I don’t know that word,” she said, edging towards the restroom door. “I haven’t seen it before.”

Janie K. ran to block her exit from the restroom. “C’mon,” Janie B. taunted softly, advancing on her. “C’mon. You can read anything, Mrs. Webber says so. So read this, smarty pants!”

She felt panic rising and began to pray for the bell. The Janeys would have to leave when the bell rang or they would be late to class and Mrs. Webber wouldn’t like that. “Yeah,” Janey K. chimed in, “Miss Smarty Pants, read it. It’s only one word. We’re not as smart as you are…we didn’t skip a grade like you did, why don’t you show us dumb kids how you do it?”

She could feel tears pricking behind her eyes, but stifled them rather than be labelled by these girls a “cry baby.” Why were they doing this to her? Even her mother could be pleased when she excelled at something…why were these girls mad at her just because she could read well? Janey B. grabbed her by the hair in a gesture terrifyingly familiar and tried to drag her resisting form back to the stall. “Read it!” she commanded. “Read it!”

She couldn’t struggle against the two of them as they pushed her into the little stall. “Read it or we’ll lock you in!” one of them said, laughing.

“Fuck!” she cried out, but never having heard the word spoken, she wasn’t entirely confident of the pronunciation. “That’s what it says!”

The Janeys froze and looked at each other, then burst into laughter. “Boy, are you in trouble now!” one of them said. “That’s a really dirty word and I have to tell Mrs. Webber that you said it.”

“You forced me!” she cried hotly. “You forced me to!”

Janie K.’s beautiful blue eyes widened to round, innocent circles, her white-blonde curls framing her angelic face. She blinked and looked at Janey B. “Did you see anybody force her to say that nasty word?” she asked, all innocence. The other girl shook her long dark ringlets.

“Did you hear her say that awful word?” Janey B. widened her eyes and nodded vigorously.

“Do you think we should tell Mrs. Webber? Or maybe we should go right to the principal?”

“Let’s tell her mother,” Janey B. suggested. “I live across the street and she gets a spanking every day, don’t you?” the child asked, turning her attention to her miserable victim. “Your mother would give a real good one for this, wouldn’t she?”

Not knowing what the word meant, but suspecting it was a serious transgression, she nodded dumbly. The bell rang but the relief she had anticipated did not materialize. If anything, she felt even more threatened.

“Please don’t tell my mother,” she begged. “You don’t know what she will do to me!”

Janey B. giggled. “Yes, I do. I seen her whip you when the front blinds are open. She whips you on your bare butt!”

Janey K. looked incredulous. “Every day?” she asked. “You get a whipping every day?”

She nodded miserably. Now that they knew how bad she was, they were never going to want to play with her. She found out in the first grade that other little girls didn’t get spankings every day…some of them had never, ever had a spanking.

Janie K. shook her head. “Your mother is tough!”

They were running for the classroom now, trying to get in line before the second bell rang and they were marked tardy. She miserably took her place in the line, knowing that as soon as the girls told, her life was over. Her mother would wash her mouth out with soap, then take the strap to her, then tell her father, and Daddy would be so disappointed in her! She sniffed, trying to hold back her tears, lest Mrs. Webber see her crying and try to find out why.

Behind her in the queue, Janie K. poked her in the back. “We won’t tell,” the girl whispered, “But you gotta do whatever we say. OK?”

Relief flooded over her and she nodded her head vigorously.

“OK, then, after school today I’m going to come over and you are going to give me your Dinah Shore paper dolls.”

Her heart sank. Nana had bought those paper dolls for her and she played with them all the time! Miserable, but knowing the alternative, she nodded slowly.

“Good,” Janey said. “Oh…and if anybody ever asks you to say that word again, say the word is ‘fudge.’ Then they have to say the bad word instead of you and you can get them in trouble if they don’t do what you want. OK?”

She couldn’t imagine why she would want to do that to someone, but to keep the fragile peace forged with the Janeys, she nodded. They weren’t exactly her friends, but they would have to do.

True Confessions

“Oh, no you don’t, Miss Priss,” Mother’s voice stopped her as she was half-way into the passenger seat of the car. “You get your smart ass in the back seat with the dog, where you belong.”

She was beginning to think she was crazy. She had no idea why she was being dragged to the juvenile court…she hadn’t been arrested…she hadn’t gotten in any kind of trouble at school…her grades were good…she didn’t talk back to Mother or defy her rules. What on earth was going on?

“You incorrigible little bitch,” Mother snapped from the driver’s seat. She could see the garish red-lipsticked mouth in the rear-view mirror…almost as if it was dripping blood. “I don’t know what you think you are up to, conspiring with your father against me, but let me tell you, you won’t get away with it! Not this time, not ever!”

“Daddy?” she said. “What does Daddy have to do with this?”

“As if you didn’t know,” Mother sneered, twisting around in the seat to face the back. “You and your precious father…you two think you’re so goddamned smart, but you’re not. He thinks he can run me broke by dragging me back to court for custody but it’s not going to happen because before this day is out, you’ll be out of his reach.”

She must have looked puzzled, because Mother laughed. “I have outsmarted you both, this time! There won’t be any more lawyers and court visits and trouble because you are going up the river, my girl. Up the river!”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she replied, keeping a tight rein on her fear.

“You know, this is all your own fault, don’t you?” Mother said, almost conversationally. “This whole thing centers on you…but then you always did like to be the center of attention, didn’t you?”

She shook her head slightly. Actually, she preferred to be as close to invisible as possible, at least around Mother. It was safer that way.

“Well, you’re going to get your wish, little girl! You are going to be the real main attraction here! This whole hearing centers around you, and when it’s over, your father will have to pay the court fees, my lawyer’s bill, and a whopping monthly maintenance bill.” Mother paused to wipe a tear of laughter from one eye.

“Yessiree! Your father and his pasty-faced little paramour are going to rue the day they crossed me! And you are too!”

She shook her head again, wiping the beads of sweat off her upper lip. It was hot in the backseat, with the windows rolled up tightly. “I don’t understand.”

“Well then let me spell it out for you, Miss Genius,” Mother laughed scornfully. “Your precious father is taking me to court again for custody. But before that hearing, you have a hearing in chambers…I’m having you declared an incorrigible child, the judge is going to send you to reform school, and when your father gets to his custody hearing, all he’ll get from the court is a bill!” Mother’s laugh was triumphantly self-congratulatory.

She paled, sitting immobile in the back of the car. Reform school? Wasn’t that where girls who rob and steal and stab each other get sent? She wracked her brain for even a single transgression sufficient to warrant such a sentence. “What did I do?” she wailed, suddenly overwhelmed with panic.

“Incorrigible child,” her mother said smugly. “The law says I can have you committed as an incorrigible child and that is exactly what I am going to do!”

She wept. “If you don’t want me, why can’t I just go live with Daddy? Why do you have to do this?”

“Because he wants you,” Mother said through thinned, tight lips. “Because he wants you and I will be Goddamned if I will give that man anything he wants!”

“Why?” she said through her tears. “Why?”

Mother lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the closed interior of the car. “This is all your fault, you know,” Mother said, resuming her conversational tone of earlier. “If you hadn’t been born, none of this would be happening, my life would be different…better. But no, you had to come along and ruin everything!”

Mother blew a couple of smoke rings before continuing. “You know, I had it all figured out. Your grandfather, that rigid, old-fashioned old fart, wouldn’t let me go out or do anything. Oh, Pete and Gary could come and go as they pleased…they were boys, and even though Pete was two years younger than me, Grandpa let him do whatever he wanted while I had to ask permission to do just about anything other than take a pee.”

Sounds familiar, she thought to herself, but held her silence rather than break the spell of Mother’s memories.

“And then one night I was at a high school football game and there was this cute sailor in the stands, home from the war. And I flirted with him and when the game was over we went off on his motorcycle for some ice cream and he took me home.”

Mother took another deep drag off her cigarette, rolled the window down an inch and blew the smoke out the window, then cranked it up tight again.

“I had to sneak out after everyone had gone to bed to see him, Grandpa wouldn’t let me go out with him because he was Hill People…you know, poor dirt farmers who lived in houses with no plumbing or electricity. But I knew he was my ticket to freedom.

“So one night, just after school was out for the summer we sneaked away and got married. He was 21 and I was almost 17. His leave from the Navy was almost up and he was going to be shipped out to China…the Navy was going to send me money every month as his wife for living expenses…and as a married woman I wouldn’t have to answer to Grandpa anymore. I could take that money, move out of the Godforsaken little gossip-ridden hick town, and live my own life, no father…and no husband, either…to tell me what I could or could not do.”

Mother stopped talking and looked out the window, a faraway look in her eyes. “At least that was the plan,” she said softly.

“But things didn’t work out that way,” Mother resumed, her voice tinged with bitterness. “Gramma Janssen wrote to the War Department and told them that he was their only son and they needed him to help out on the farm and the War Department discharged him. There went my freedom…he wasn’t going to go to China and there wasn’t going to be a monthly check from the Navy and before my father could put together an annulment…” Mother turned her hard, embittered face to the backseat, “…guess what happened?”

She shook her head slowly, afraid to hazard a guess.

“I found out I was pregnant. With you. And then it was all over for me.” Mother opened the car window again and flicked out the burning butt. “I swelled up like a poisoned pup. I got stretch marks all over my belly, my boobs, I got so fat I would barely waddle. Then, when I went into labour, you wouldn’t come out. I was in labour for 36 goddamned hours before they finally decided to do a caesarean section…your head was pointed from being crammed against my pelvic bones for so long! And then I almost died. I had to have a live transfusion from Grandpa because that tiny little shit-assed town didn’t have a decent blood bank. I got milk fever. You lost weight because I didn’t have any milk and those blockheaded nurses wouldn’t give you formula.

“And once I got you home, all you did was cry. All day, all night, you cried. Then you got the goddamned eczema and had raw, open sores all over you and I had to keep your diapers and your bedding and your clothes sterilized…but we were living in that drafty old shack next to Gramma Janssen’s house with no electricity or running water. And I couldn’t drive, so I was stuck out there living like a goddamned heathen, only ten miles from town, but I might as well have been in the goddamned middle of nowhere! So there I was, stuck out in the sticks with a screaming baby…it wasn’t at all what I expected, you know. You can’t put a baby back in the closet and close the door when you are tired of playing with it. I was stuck in that horrible little shack with Gramma Janssen always looking over my shoulder and telling me what to do and no way out!”

Mother paused for emphasis, fixing her with an unmistakable glare of enmity. “And all because of you. If you hadn’t come along, I’d have had that annulment and found another way to get away from Grandpa. But you ruined it all.”

“But…” she hesitated.

“What?” Mother snapped.

“But what about Brother? If you hated it so much, why did you have another baby?”

Mother shrugged and lit another cigarette. “When your life is already ruined with one screaming, demanding brat, what the hell difference does two make?”