Both of my parents were marked by “signs of the dark tetrad.” Both inflicted extreme harm on me and enjoyed doing so. In no way am I downplaying the actions of my father, who enjoyed treating me sadistically even in the more commonly-understood sense. But this post will be about my mother, and why, with great reluctance, I’ve had to give up on having any kind of relationship with her.
My mother grew up as the fourth-born of six kids. The eldest had autism and the second-eldest had severe clinical OCD. My mother somehow managed to discount the eldest two as the ones who “had problems,” and routinely described growing up as the second of four; the first two didn’t count as people. I later found out some disturbing things about how my grandfather treated the two uncles who “had problems,” so I can only assume that my mother learned the attitude she had toward her brothers from an early age. As horrifying as some of the things she said were (like repeatedly calling an autistic man a “moron”), in a way, it wasn’t her fault. She witnessed the dehumanization of two people and had to survive by separating herself from them as clearly as possible. Besides, it’s natural to want to defend one’s parents because we couldn’t have evolved this far as a species if we didn’t do so, so I suspect my mom stuck up for her dad at the cost of her brothers.
So, Mom has some personality issues. I can’t diagnose her because I’m not her clinician, but I would definitely say that one of her hallmark features is sadism as described in the video above. She wounds people psychologically and emotionally. She grew up and went out into the world, and found my father. My father was raised by loving parents, but (and take this with a grain of salt because I’m not his clinician either) I would say he has symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder. There was almost no research on this when he was growing up. My grandmother once recalled having worried about him due to his lack of social connections. She said he had a little friend in elementary school, but when his friend moved away, he was all alone. She didn’t know what to do when he overdosed on aspirin in high school. I personally was always confused by Dad’s incredibly exaggerated and strange gestures and body language. I internalized that there was one type of body language for Daddy, and another for everybody else. He would throw his unkempt eyebrows all around his forehead when anxious or angry, and curl his lips strangely when he was thinking about penguins. One of his more bizarre tendencies was that he would constantly whisper to himself, with his lips pulling themselves as far as possible from his face so as to exaggerate their movement as much as possible. I never saw him imagining a conversation with anybody who he didn’t hate. His face contorted into various types of scowl as he barely uttered a sound, but clearly was imagining talking to somebody very angrily. He also never groomed himself. His teeth were yellow, pointy, and slimy, and his breath was disgusting. When he got a cold, he would sneeze snot wads everywhere, including into the food that we were all supposed to be about to eat for dinner, and he never seemed to notice. One time on a very long road trip, he sneezed a snot wad onto the steering wheel and I remember watching it slowly slide down for hours. Don’t get me started on his constant farts. The man was as repulsive as any human could be.
But he had what Mom needed. She met him in a church group, and the story goes that she used to invite all the young adults at church over for pancakes. My dad would come over and he liked all her teddy bears, so he kept coming over and then he would come over by himself to see the teddy bears, and finally he came over to see my mom, so they got married. Mom got him a stuffed penguin as a wedding present.
I seriously doubt my mother ever believed anything that the church taught. I never saw her in front of an open bible unless she knew someone was watching. However, when my dad found the church, he was fully engrossed in the doctrine and spent endless hours reading obscure bible commentaries for as long as I knew him. However, he had been raised by my grandmother. She was born in 1925 and when she came of age, she decided to get a PhD from Stanford, and then she did so. My grandparents’ contempt for traditional gender roles worked for them because they were consistent in their egalitarianism. My mother found a gold mine in this and managed to masquerade as the humble housewife, while she absolutely dominated and controlled my father and turned him against his family of origin. It was (and I can only assume still is) an incredibly abusive relationship. My dad treats my mom like an equal because of how he was raised, but doesn’t expect her to actually lift a finger because she has him blind to an obvious double-standard: she won’t get a job because she’s too conservative, but she won’t do domestic tasks because she’s too liberal. My mother needs my father because he earns a good salary and because pretending to submit to him brings her status in the church. She subtly convinces everyone that she submits to him even though it’s hard. She would smile in a condescending way and pretend she was amused whenever he whipped out the cap of his pen in church and gritted his teeth dramatically as he used it to clean the wax out of his ears. This was her M.O.: she needed him to appear pathetic, so she forbade anyone from pointing out his lapses in social skills, lest he feel “hurt” (and change his behavior and be harder for Mom to control). That’s why I had to sit in silence and watch the snot wad on the steering wheel.
My mother’s only needs in a relationship are to be adored, and also to be able to control, humiliate, and cause pain to the other person. My father once confided in me that after decades of marriage, he couldn’t remember her ever apologizing for anything, no matter how slight. I observed this in her as well, plus the fact that she could never ever be wrong. Whenever she was in an argument and she was indisputably wrong, she would change the topic so she could be right. Her greatest fear was somebody making her look “stupid.” Whenever she thought this was happening or else minor things just didn’t go her way, she would fly into a rage, her face beet red, yelling and screaming and literally stamping her feet like in “When You’re Angry and You Know It.” Nobody outside our home knew that she did this, of course; she was the gentle submissive wife as soon as she was in public.
She loved small children because they were the easiest to manipulate. She played my siblings and me against each other constantly. One time, she bragged that she had asked my brother to tell her where something was in a room, knowing that children go through a developmental stage where they look directly away from a hidden object. She was like a spider constantly luring prey into her web. When her younger sister’s husband died, she managed to make the sister totally and completely emotionally dependent on her. She refused to get a job even when all her offspring were grown, refusing to interact with anybody who she had not managed to cast under her spell. She would get her victims to tell her their deepest secrets, then tell everyone else what she had learned under the guise of concern, with the signature line “…but don’t tell them I said that because it would hurt them.” This was her second-favorite thing after when she thought she had used her psychology skills to figure something out about someone that they did not know about themselves. For example, she decided that my brother was dyslexic because he wasn’t learning to read. Never mind that she was homeschooling him and she had never taken a single class in teaching literacy. It couldn’t be her fault; he must be dyslexic. She told this to anyone and everyone she crossed paths with including mere acquaintances at church, but went to incredible lengths to make sure my brother never “found out” himself. “If he were in a school he would be labeled, but he thinks of himself as really smart,” she bragged. I honest to god don’t understand how nobody but me figured out that if she’s talking about everyone else behind their backs, she’s probably also talking about me behind my back. Once I went back to the state where my family lives only to discover that “somebody” had started a rumor in the church that I had bipolar disorder (spoiler alert: I don’t.)
Another thing about her and also my dad is that they take gaslighting to another level. But while my dad is mostly just stupid with zero self-reflection, doing exactly whatever strikes his carnal whims, my mother is calculatedly evil. Whenever I was happy as a child and adolescent, she would tell me that I was “acting drunk.” As a tiny baby she always said, “There’s the right way, the wrong way, and the [Apostate Turtle] way.” She managed to make me feel “just a little off” right from the beginning. She knows what she’s doing. She and Dad both claim that the trauma I remember couldn’t possibly have happened and the symptoms of trauma that I have couldn’t really be symptoms of trauma, but I think my dad has actually convinced himself that he did nothing to hurt me. My mother, by contrast, creates elaborate lies that change the narrative just a little tiny bit, just enough to make her the victim and me the perpetrator. Again, I don’t understand how she’s managed to get everyone in the church to believe that she’s 100% honest all the time and would never intentionally harm someone. One time, someone at church mentioned that he had a birthday coming up and asked her to guess her age. She gasped and said, “You’re not sixty, are you?” The man laughed that she had thought he was older than he was, and she responded, “No, I said, ‘You’re not sixty are you?’”
“Oh, well if you change the intonation,” said her friend, still laughing.
He clearly thought it was all in fun. He didn’t see how quickly she whipped up a lie which, had she told it in our home, would have been believed by everyone but me. The reason I remember this story is because I remember thinking it was exceptional that someone had come so close to finding her out. She’s made up all sorts of stories about me that my dad and my siblings still swear are the gospel truth. She manages to gaslight so badly that she has a team of supporters willing to back up anything and everything she says, no matter how far-fetched.
Unfortunately, her fear of “having problems” and being like one of her ostracized brothers makes her getting psychological help impossible. Instead, she throws everyone else into the “has problems” category, especially me. Her ability to control and manipulate my dad revolves around his constantly getting feedback from the world that he’s not good enough, because then he can only get self-worth through the tiny crumbs of affirmation that my mother gives him. That means that not only can my mother not go to therapy, but neither can my dad. Instead, she has him between a rock and a hard space; “too good” for going to therapy like his worthless, broken daughter, and yet never good enough to have actual self-esteem.
So why is all of this coming up right now? Last night, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos by CrashCourse Biology because I figured it was high time to learn about the evolution I had never been allowed to learn about in homeschool or Evangelical college. My mother had a Master’s degree in teaching Biology, so I knew that my mother had probably known this whole time that evolution was real and had been hiding it. I figured out a couple years ago that she couldn’t really be taking seriously the pseudoscience put out by Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis or Dr. Jay L. Wile who wrote the Apologia science curriculum I read in the homeschool “equivalent” of high school. What I didn’t know was that my mother lied point-blank. I imagined that she had simply guided me toward faulty evidence. Instead, she sat me down and “taught” me the one and only subject she had ever been certified to teach by telling me that scientists had never been able to find an intermediate species anywhere in the fossil record. She claimed that the fossil record perfectly matched what we would expect based on a young-earth creationist viewpoint that God had made all the animals in the Garden of Eden between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago. The closest we had apparently found to an intermediate species was Lucy, who she said was really just an ape with “strange ankles.” She also said that no beneficial mutations had ever been found in multicellular organisms except sickle-cell anemia, which isn’t even beneficial except that carriers with one of the recessive genes were immune to malaria. Spinning all of this was a lie that was more intricate than I had thought even she was capable of. By the time I sat down to watch the videos yesterday, I knew that evolution was real; I just didn’t realize the amount or the quality of evidence that there is for it. Part of me still hadn’t thought to question that it was the young-earth creationists searching for answers with open minds, and the evolutionists looking for evidence to back an agenda. Boy, was I wrong. Nobody is flailing around hoping that the evidence will back evolution. It just does. You can’t look at the facts with an open mind, searching for truth without an agenda, and come away not believing in the Big Bang theory and evolution. And now, it’s impossible for me to evaluate my mother with an open mind and no agenda without coming away with the belief that she’s a pathological liar.
I hate being constantly shocked that my mother is more conniving, calculated, and evil than I had previously thought. Just when I think I’ve grasped the depth of how dangerous she is, I realize that she was worse than that. And it’s incredibly difficult to believe because it is embedded deep in human DNA to trust our mothers. Primates who didn’t do so didn’t survive. This, plus the fact that no matter how long I write I will never be able to fully describe 30 years of manipulation makes it really hard for me to form relationships. Friends find out that I gave up on forcing my mother to have a positive relationship with me, and they think I must have a chip on my shoulder and something is wrong with me. Societies almost universally shun people with toxic parents because “they’re your family” and “no family is ‘normal.’” As though my pain is from anger that I refuse to release, and not from the structural changes that trauma created in my brain. My whole family is so unbelievably charming that when people meet them, they think I’ve been lying to them and they’re not really bad at all. They didn’t see my mother cackling maniacally when some ill befell someone she hated. They don’t believe that she’s only called me literally once or twice since I went off to college almost 15 years ago, or at least they can’t believe that I loved her at the time and begged her to call me only to be let down every time. They don’t believe that when I had been away for years and went back to visit my parents, I was greeted by my mother mid-rage because she was too hot and thirsty and she was going to make sure everyone around her suffered until she was pacified. Or they say that I must only remember the bad and I should focus on the good. What they don’t know is that of course there was good, and that’s all I remembered until therapists plead with me to see the toxicity. Even in the good, there was the sinister side. It was all love-bombing, part of a plot to create dependence.
I would give just about anything for a mother that loved me. But my mother, perhaps through no fault of her own, cannot love. I feel bad for her and the torture she must go through. But the time came that I could no longer keep crawling back to a woman who pathologized everything about me and never took any initiative to contact me even when I was fully brainwashed. If the only one working on the relationship is me, it’s not a relationship.
Further Resources
Anyone wondering about trauma and the structure of the brain, see this book:
Van Der Kolk, B. (2015). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0143127741
For anyone else who didn’t get to learn about evolution growing up, I recommend CrashCourse Biology and CrashCourse Big History, available here:
If you’re curious about the folks putting out misinformation that the science all backs a young earth, there are probably lots of them but the ones I grew up with were these guys:
Wile, J. (2010, August 14). I No Longer Work for Apologia Educational Ministries [Blog post]. Retrieved August 24, 2021 from https://blog.drwile.com/i-no-longer-work-for-apologia-educational-ministries/
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