Evil Trait Number 2: Like Marries Like...

Now on to the mother.

Folks: here's the dirty little secret about the mother who married an abusive man: she's exactly the same way. Her goal is to destroy the children, while looking innocent doing it.

The difference is she's female. She's smaller, less physically imposing, not as strong. Yet in any relationship, she's the capo -- the mob boss -- and he's the hit man. She runs the show; he's the leg breaker. She's actually the stronger one in the partnership because he's out of control, while she's exquisitely in control.

Here's her covert-aggressive way of destroying the children.

When she is beaten by him, how often does it happen in front of the children? Women have been known run into a room where children are when a man is ready to beat them, so that they (the children) could witness it. (Later she would tell the police, "I didn't think he would do it in front of the children!" Hey, Lady: it's never a good idea to use children as a shield.)

The real reason was to take a hit (or several) herself, so she could destroy the little ones by having them witness it. Also, men who beat their wives, often beat their kids.

After the husband has spent years pounding the kids into whimpering shells with his explosive behavior, she divorces him -- or sends him to prison -- and then she has them all to herself. He is, after all, the weaker half of this Evil Duo.

As the children become adults and the father's influence gets weaker to (due to time, frailty, and often physical distance) she gets stronger. She starts sabotaging any relationships her adult children might have that cause them to grow up and move away.

She's pleads poverty when they want to go to college or trade school, yet seems to have plenty of money for herself.

She insists the adult children don't move too far away.

She insists that they come back for every single holiday, ruining anyone's plans.

She fakes illnesses, eliciting sympathy.

She insults any sexual partners they bring home.

In short, after the husband has destroyed the children's past, she picks up the baton and destroys their future.

It's an Evil Dance.


Erin Pizzey wrote a marvelous article on this Evil Dance in the following article. The words that spoke to me are:

"They (cruel statements spoken by mothers) were vicious words that I have heard repeated over and over by mothers everywhere. Indeed, when I later opened my refuge for battered women, 62 of the first 100 to come through the door were as abusive as the men they had left."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1215464/Why-I-loathe-feminism---believe-ultimately-destroy-family.html#ixzz0SPryrmSv

Evil Trait Number 1: Doing bad while looking good...

Like marries like, so two parents who look --and act -- different on the surface are actually co-conspirators in an conjoined effort to destroy the children. It's a dance.

Men are more aggressive than women, so the father is aggressive-aggressive, while the mother is covert-aggressive.

My father beat us, used the "Now I'm angry/Now I'm not," posture, and threw things at us. He beat and choked my mother.

I thought she was the innocent one.

Eventually she threw him out of the house, but he still insisted on visitation rights so he could maintain a menacing presence. While he was menacing us at every visit, he also: got us library cards, went to every PTA meeting, and played "catch" with us.

As well as the stories above, he also...

1) Absolutely refused to buy us new clothes or food. My mother was on food stamps (God bless food stamps) until she could get herself on her feet. We wore extremely worn clothes.
2) Gave us birthday presents, and made us open them...at a restaurant!
3) Called us stupid and cuffed us when no one was looking.
4) Presented us with savings bonds for our birthday, made out to his name and ours. After showing it to us (whoopee!) he took them back ("...for safe-keeping,") and we never saw them again.

Have you figured it out yet?
1) PTA meetings: He looked like Father of the Year. The teachers were in awe of him.
2) Library cards: Looked good, to the librarian.
3) Opening the gifts in a restaurant: He wanted total strangers to adore him for what a great father he was. (Ditto "playing catch": it's out in public.)
5) He "presented" us with a "gift" that was impossible to spend, and we never even got that much.

Hitting, name calling, food insecurity (look it up), skinnyness and worn (but clean) clothes were covered up.

He wanted to do bad, while looking good. His entire world was divided into those two acts because he's Evil.

His goal is to destroy the children, while looking good doing it.

Because he's male, his acts of aggression are violent and out-of-control.The father  is usually outed -- in public, in a divorce court -- as someone who is bad for the children. The children are "given" (awarded) to the mother, who stands by looking innocent.

She's not.  She invited the vampire over the threshold in the first place. Out of an entire world filled with nice men, she bred with the demon.

Following the formula that Like marries Like, and he's Evil, then she's Evil as well. 

Following the formula that she-- also -- wants to do bad while looking good, she gets the man to do her dirty work (destroying the children) while she stands by looking frail and victimized. Then, when, through divorce, frailty or frustration with his efforts, he's no longer in the picture, she takes over and becomes the Greater Evil.

It's a dance.  He plays the greater role in destroying the children when they are young, and she takes over and continues to destroy them when they are older.  

Five Stages after going No Contact

1(800) SUICIDE

I went No Contact approximately ten years ago. Your experience may not be like mine, so I would like to hear how it went for you.

The five stages of grief following the pronouncement of impending death are: Denial, rage, bargaining, depression, and -- finally -- acceptance.  You may go through these very stages following cut-off.

Denial: I'm their child: their flesh and blood.  They can't possibly be treating me that badly...can they?
Rage: Why the fck are they treating me so badly?  I don't deserve that.
Bargaining:  If I give you what you say you want -- one more holiday, or choose this career path over that one, or show you that my marriage doesn't mean I am abandoning you -- you'll lighten up...right?
Depression: You're never going to accept me and my decisions, are you?
I really have to cut you completely out of my life in order to save myself, don't I?
Acceptance: self-explanatory.


The five stages following No - Contact (NC) for me are: Rage, Second-guessing, Peace, Sadness for others, Transcendence.

Rage: Self-explanatory. I went through every possible phase of yelling at people who aren't there, bending my husband's ear with, "Don't they know how much time they are wasting?" cursing, taking it out on loved ones; you name it.

Second Guessing: "If I had just said it this way, it might have gotten through,"
"If I had said this, at this time -- right after the incident -- it might have worked,"
"If this..."
"If that..."
Never once did I question going No Contact; everything had reached an impasse. I questioned letting things get that far gone. That was clearly something I could control, since I was the only thinking human being in the room...right? If I could climb into my way-back machine and correct their bad behavior immediately instead of rewarding it by smiling and putting up with it one more time, could I have nipped it in the bud?

Peace: Through all the second-guessing, time passes. And with the passage of time, knowing that I don't have to spend one more Christmas with them, wherein they insult my gifts, or one more holiday, where I am sick to my stomach two weeks ahead of the event, or...well, everything. A type of peace settles over the household.
In between devising ways to screen email and phone calls, and saying "heads up" at places they might gather, there is peace. There are longer and longer stretches of time where there are no demons riding along in my head. One heals in those stretches of time. Much like not picking a scab, it finally heals and falls off, leaving the scar. The peace quells all the second-guessing.

Sadness for others: Once I got over feeling sorry for myself and all the time that was lost, I could finally begin to see -- with mounting horror -- that time is still being lost for them. Buckets-full, barrel-loads of precious time are thrown away by them as they wait, plot and plan to get me back into the fold. They didn't move on with their lives, as I did. They are frozen in time, getting older, but not feeling it, because they think they have forever.
 And I realized they will go to their graves that way.
Their house falls into disrepair, their marriages fail, their children move away, they don't make out any wills or trusts -- not the least being the ones saying where they would like to be buried, or have their ashes scattered.
 Sadness -- and horror -- settles in when I realized how pathetic they are.
I have peace and they have...pettiness.
 It is this realization that brings great sadness.


Transcendence: This is the stage I resented the most.

Cutting them off not only saved my sanity and my soul, it suited my deep-seated need for revenge. Who cares if they suffer and decay? I was their victim, and I suffered. Eye for an eye.
Then I started to realize that abuse is generational.  I know for a fact that my grandparents were abusive to my parents, and I can only assume that the abuse echoed down through the generations.

For whatever reason, I was the firewall.  The abuse stopped with me.

But once you see the ripples within ripples, and if we know an Evil Parent can take an innocent little child, and destroy his sense of normalcy, all the while looking like a pillar of society -- giving that child no where to turn -- don't you think the child (who became my parent) is going to be very, very angry, indeed?

This realization didn't cause me to forgive them -- taking it out on me was unforgivable.  That's why I never go through the "acceptance" stage: I'll never "accept" what they did to me.
But this bit of insight helped me to turn my back on them without so much rage inside.

How do you mourn when they're not dead?

After going No Contact, One Angry Daughter said, "I had to mourn the idea of family and come to terms that my FOO would never fit that ideal."

This is so true. I found that it is no less than mourning a death, except they are still walking around.

They are are a bit like zombies to us. We want No Contact, and we fear running into them at the shopping center or grocery store, because they will tear off chunks of our still living flesh and feed off of it, as they have done so many times before.

I had to come to terms that my Family of Origin would never "fit the ideal." Ever. It's been ten years since I went No Contact, and just when I think my hide has hardened, something -- sometimes the strangest thing -- will make me cry.

You know the movie Dan in Real Life, with Steve Carell? I loved that movie on the surface of it: it was beautifully filmed, it had pitch-perfect casting, and we were supposed to weep when we saw him sleeping single in a double bed because his wife had died, leaving him with three growing daughters.

I never shed a tear over that. And I recognized the standard romantic comedy of falling for your brother's girlfriend. I walked out of the theater having enjoyed it, but I was stiff with grief over something unnamed. I didn't cry until much later, when I was all alone.

I was grieving over the three-generation hierarchy I saw in one lovely old house. The grandparents were wise, loving and funny. They weren't stupid, as so many old people are portrayed in movies. The middle-agers were struggling with marriage, loss, jobs and careers. Also realistic. The kids were just happy to be there, as children should be: care-free. Everyone was different, but they all got along. They were all happy to share what precious time there was.

I watched that knowing that I will never experience it. It will never be mine. Something that I covet will be out of my fingertips' reach, through no fault of my own. But rather merely...circumstance.

I was unlucky enough to be born amid a den of freaks.

My grandparents were dead before, or shortly after, I was born. So that generation is lost.

My parents are freaks, so that generation is "lost."

My four siblings are awful, so that generation is not an option.

Do you see where I'm heading? I could never be the child in the three-generation family: it's gone forever.

I can't be the middle-agers, because although my children are delightful, my parents and siblings are horrible. This scenario is slipping away with the passing of time.

Ah. There is a slender hope: I can be the grandparent, along with my delightful husband. If we play our cards right, and assuming (and they are free to do as they wish) my children want children themselves, we can maybe -- just maybe -- be the loving, wise, and funny grandparents in Dan in Real Life.

I treat my children with respect (and much love), so that they will want to come visit me at my house after they are independent and on their own. I treat my husband with respect (and much love) so that we may remain vibrant in our old age.

And maybe -- just maybe -- I can have the three loving, caring generations under one roof that I so covet, and cried over.

The Evil will always work against their own best interest.

It's true.


If we make Hitler, "The Patron Saint of Evil," think about how he ended up: Shooting himself and his mistress in the bunker. His Third Reich (The Third Empire) was supposed to last a thousand years and rule the entire world.

It lasted less than twelve. His war machine was broken and penniless by the many bizarre decisions he made.


His own people killed Mussolini, buried him, dug him up, hung him by his boot-heels and shot his corpse full of holes, along with his mistress.


Hirohito lived to a ripe old age, but he lived long enough to know that his people were told, "He is not a God, he's only a man." What do you think that did to his overripe ego?

Gaddafi, (of Libya) who had billions of American dollars stashed in overseas accounts waited until the very last second to run; he was captured and killed by his own people on the way out of town.

These Evil Parents divide their children into the Golden Child and the Scapegoat. They stunt the growth of the Golden Child and treat the Scapegoats like dirt.  The Scapegoats escape, and grow into capable, whole adults. The Goldens, by contrast, are unable to care for themselves, let alone anyone else.

Too late, the parents realize that. 

My mother did that. Whoever will take care of her? With five children, four of whom worship her and one who despises her (me) guess who she fixated on to take care of her in her old age? Yup: me.

My siblings are Evil, or control-freaks, or just plain seriously f**ked up, and she's Evil.  They have to get together for every freakin' holiday up to and including Groundhog Day so that they can vibrate to the same Evil emanations. So you'd think she'd want to spend her rotten old age with one of them.

But nooo. She wants me to take care of her.

Me. Someone who can't stand to be around her, who tried to escape her Crap-taculars so I could lead a normal life, someone who went no contact just to get away from the ghasty holidays where I had to force a smile on my face and pretend I liked their stink. Actually, I felt dirty afterwards, like I'd f**ked a corpse.

During the very last conversation I had with her, I said, in these exact words, "I wouldn't spend one hour of my precious time, or one dime of my hard-earned money, taking care of your worthless carcass."

Do you think she got mad? Yelled at me? Picked a fight, in any way, shape or form? No...

She blinked. That was it. File not found. She searched in her memory banks and said to herself, "No. I am lovable. It is inconceivable that someone wouldn't love me. Therefore I will erase the tape of what I just heard." And just like that, she did. (Think also of Hitler, Hirohito, et al, right here. They also believed the masses adored them.)

She waited until the conversation went back to "normal," and then proceeded as if nothing happened; which, in a sense, it did. If she decided nothing happened, then, by God, nothing happened.

One of the many reasons I went No Contact with her was so that she would make other plans for her old age. I am Plan A.

There is no Plan B.

Now, ten years on, with no contact whatsoever, I still get the feeling she is waiting for me to "come around." It sends shivers down my spine.

She saves no money, she treats her other children like dirt, thinking it will draw them closer (which it does) and she makes no plans for her eventual decline. She is eighty, and can't see past the end of her own nose.

The Evil always work against their own best interest.