Author: Skipper

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Rule of Law vs Charismatic Leader

Politics continues to reveal to me interesting things about people in general, but especially about my FOO.

For about the past decade, I’ve been truly mystified by the number of people who really, really WANT to run their lives and make decisions according to something other than facts and data.

Religion, astrology, tarot cards and palm reading, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop thing. Mysticism. The Power of the Ancients. The Secret.

It’s all the same snake oil, and it’s all bullshit, but it keeps selling.

This post by Teri Kanefield discusses the difference between those who want Rule of Law (a rational system) in our country, and those who want a Charismatic Leader, and boy does it shed some light on that whole conundrum.

One way to understand U.S. politics is a clash between two kinds of authority:

  • Rule of Law
  • Charismatic Leader

The American right wing wants a charismatic leader…  Most of us want Rule of Law (rational-law model).  The “Rule of Law” and “Charismatic Leader” models are mutually exclusive.  To exist, each must destroy the other.

  • Rule of Law requires facts.
  • Charismatic leader requires myth.

AND

  • The way to undermine the Charismatic Leader is to prove the myth false.
  • The way to kill Rule of Law is to undermine factuality.

The Charismatic Leader needs to undermine facts and law…
(note:  This is the same as the form of abuse known as “gaslighting”.)

If the myth that props him up is shattered, the leader loses support.
(It’s okay if he lies. It’s not okay if the myth is shattered.)

Clearly this was my big sin, as seen by my FOO:  destroying the myth.

Prof. Timothy Snyder explains that in the past, the ones who didn’t want to live under Rule of Law went west to the frontier, where there they could do as they pleased and create myth. In Europe, during the period of empire, they went to the colonies.  Snyder says that our current crisis —liberal democracy in trouble worldwide— resulted from the fact that we ran out of places for them to go.

In my FOO, the timing was such that when the Rule of Law (Dad) showed back up to live at home full-time, the Triumvirate was on the way out the door to go to college anyway.  Thus they were able to preserve their myth of our mother as a rational, loving parent, and our father as the source of all the problems.

One idea underlying liberal democracy is the “social contract,” which forms rule of law. The way to save the Constitution is for an overwhelming majority of people to reaffirm the social contract.

In my case, the obvious social contract that was broken is the one that says a family is a family, no matter what; that these are the people you can always count on.

But another one was also broken, the social contract between a mother and her children:  the cultural idea that a mother is engaged and loving, and sacrifices willingly for her family.

The seduction of believing in myths is that they are glamorous and shiny.

The problem with believing in myths is that sooner or later, they run up against the Real World.

One example of how belief in a “harmless” myth affected my mother, and our family, is that she sincerely believed what she was told in her teens by a fortune teller at some fair:  that she would give up a glamorous “stage career” that she could have had. In my mother’s head, this was a career as a concert pianist.  Instead she became a non-glamorous wife and mother.

(I never heard my mother play one single note on a piano, ever. I have no idea if she was really that good, but I have my doubts.)

I heard this story dozens of times through my childhood.  And plenty of mothers probably have similar stories about “what might have been”.  But with my mother, she never followed it up with anything like, “But I have you, and that’s better than anything else I could have had!” and a hug.

No, my mother’s repeated telling of this story was an expression of how dissatisfied she was with her life choices.

If that’s the choice my mother wished she had made, she had no one but herself to blame for it – or possibly she could have blamed a competing myth, the Catholic Church.

But a career as a concert pianist takes a lot of fucking work and practice and grit, and a certain amount of luck.  It isn’t glamorous except for maybe the 2 hours you’re on the stage. I imagine there are plenty of people who did try to make it as a pianist and failed. It’s not quite the same as the failure of not even trying, but it’s still a failure of the myth.

So what happens when the myth fails to deliver?

The believers look around for someone else to blame.

My mother chose to act the martyr and victim, and shift the blame instead, usually to my dad.

Just one small example of how belief in a harmless, entertaining myth can fuck up a decent reality.

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The Cult of Mom

Pavlovitz is writing about political brainwashing, but this resonates with me as also describing what happened in my family of origin.

I’ll include the idea of projection, which is yet another form of blame-shifting and one that is “commonly found in personalities functioning at a primitive level as in narcissistic personality disorder .”

Over the years, our mother often accused our father of “brainwashing” us younger kids, to “get us on his side”, so as to win The Divorce settlement.  It was a convenient explanation for how she could have lost custody of “her” children, without having to take any responsibility for that outcome whatsoever.

All Dad’s fault! She’s the victim!

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File Under “Obvious”

“Depression during pregnancy and in the year after childbirth is surprisingly common. It’s estimated that 1 in 7 pregnant women will suffer depression while pregnant or following childbirth.

“The consequences of maternal depression can be severe, according to Davidson, who describes a “cascading set of problems” including premature birth, low birth weight and failure to thrive. After childbirth, new mothers who are depressed can be neglectful and inattentive to their newborn, putting the infants at risk for an even greater number of problems.”

As a society, we really, REALLY don’t want to talk about the idea that motherhood isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. The idea that a mother could NOT love her child is flat-out disturbing to a LOT of people.

I know, because as a kid, in order to describe the unusual distance in the relationship between my mother and myself, I used to say that I “didn’t have a mother so much as kind of an aunt.”

Looking back, I can see where this put a lot of people off. It made adults uncomfortable. They didn’t like the sound of it, they didn’t deal well with it — UNTIL I gave them some kind of explanation, or excuse.

The excuse part went like this: “My parents are divorced, and I live with my dad, so my mom isn’t at home all the time.”

This made some kind of sense, so people took it at face value, because the alternative — to ask why on earth would 4 blocks mean that I couldn’t have a close relationship with my own mother — well, that’s one rabbit hole that no adult ever went down, to my recollection.  There weren’t that many divorced people around at that time and place — I was definitely the only kid with divorced parents all through elementary school — so no one had much of an idea what a “normal” divorce looked like.

Later on, a few of my friends probed a little deeper, and to them I would say, “She’s not there to fight about things like what I’m wearing or how much makeup I have on or whatever.” And this made sense to them, at the stage where they were asking the question.  (In fact, it turned into a strategy — when we were going out in high school, we’d get ready at my house so my friends could avoid such confrontations.)

But despite such easy explanations, the idea that a MOTHER’S LOVE could be changed by a short physical distance still doesn’t actually make sense. And she was neglectful of me prior to The Divorce, anyway.

There was something truly wrong there: whether it was my mother’s mental illness, the electroshock therapy, the two month-long absences during my first year – all things beyond anyone’s control – or her maladjusted way of dealing with adversity, which was to cast blame around and scapegoat, along with the clear indications that she just was not interested in being a mother.

I think if the root cause were confined to that first year of my life, if she had wanted to have a loving relationship with me and had worked at it, that we would have been able to have a better relationship.  But she didn’t put in much effort. (And it’s clearly the adult’s responsibility here to do so, not the child’s.)

We never were close, especially physically: we rarely hugged, we never sat side by side on the sofa, “Love you” and a kiss was confined to goodbyes, and as I lived further away and saw her less often, occasionally hellos. No wonder she saw my childhood physical contact with my father as abnormal and perverted, as I sat on his lap, or he rubbed my back.

In later years, it didn’t take much to break whatever bond we had. In my freshman year of college, while on the phone, I must have said something that she didn’t like, and she claimed to take offense “at my tone” and wanted me to apologize. I refused to do so, and we didn’t speak for about a year and a half.

HOLY SHIT. Just think for a minute about just how abnormal that is. Not speaking to your youngest daughter (who is 18 or 19) for a YEAR AND A HALF because you didn’t “like her tone”!

But it got worse. Shortly after college, there was the time she stayed with me in Texas while Joe & Susan were getting married, and my then-boyfriend-now-husband noted that every time I went somewhere with my mom, I came back crying, because of something nasty she had said to me.

The worst of those was when my own mother told me to my face, “I like Susan better than you, because she’s nicer to me.”

I will bet money that any of my siblings who read this will say to themselves, “Well, that’s perfectly understandable.”

No, it’s not. It’s abnormal. It’s considerably fucked up. Mothers who love their children do not say shit like this.

I’ve long wondered whether our mother was unhealthy and maladjusted and mentally ill with all her kids, or just with me. Of course, no one will discuss it, so there’s no hope of finding out for sure.

But I feel like the fact that they have found ways to excuse EVERYTHING awful she ever did, means that they were in training to do so for a very long time. She may not have been depressed or psychotic in the early years of her parenting, but I will bet money she was narcissistic. With Dad often absent during the week, she would not even have had to be all that subtle about it. And I’m so grateful I was saved from growing up enmeshed with that.

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Family Estrangement

I’ve been coming across lots of pertinent things lately.  These are some interesting notes from this article that a friend sent to me about family estrangement.

“For me, as for most people, it took an exchange so toxic, so far outside the boundaries of what’s acceptable, that something snapped inside me.

“…my only regret is that I didn’t do it earlier. Much, much earlier.

“The cultural narrative around estrangement is that it’s a problem that needs to be solved. We see and feel the supremacy of the genetically connected family in a thousand ways throughout childhood. By the time we’re adults it literally goes without saying…

“For us, estrangement isn’t a problem; it’s a solution to a problem, a response to an otherwise unsolvable dilemma. It’s a last resort when you’ve tried everything else over and over, when you no longer trust the relationship. When — as Ann Landers once wrote — you’re better off without the other person in your life.

“I’ve interviewed more than 50 people who have estranged themselves from family members, and I have yet to meet a single one who regrets it. They regret whatever situation made it necessary. They regret not having a parent/sibling/family member they could come to terms with. They regret that their problems were severe enough to make estrangement look good. But they don’t regret doing it.

“More than three-quarters of the participants in one study felt estrangement had made a positive difference in their lives. One woman I talked to who initiated an estrangement said her main feeling was relief, even liberation. Another told me it was as though she’d lived under a cloak of silence that had suddenly been lifted. A third said, “There really are cases where estrangement is the better course. It’s horrific, it’s sad, it’s tragic, and it’s better than the alternative.”

“It’s also a lot more common than you might think…The most recent research suggests that up to 10 percent of mothers are estranged from at least one adult child…

Fascinating side notes from this paper: some suggestion that the lack of a loving relationship between my mother and me was far outside the norm, and probably caused or at least exacerbated by factors outside my control.

  • the mother–daughter tie has generally been found to be the closest, most enduring, and mutually supportive of all parent–child gender combinations.
  • mothers report being most emotionally close to last-born children.
  • parent–child relations tend to be more stable when both parents are present
  • maternal depression has been shown to interfere with parent–child relationships
  • mothers who have a larger number of children may be more likely to have an estranged child simply because the risk of having a child become estranged is greater as the size of the group increases.

“…and that about 40 percent of people experience family estrangement at some point. Most people, though, fall somewhere less definitive on the estrangement continuum, a term coined by Scharp, one of the few researchers who studies the phenomenon…“I find that people are just more or less estranged.”

Some families talk by phone but never visit. Some email but never talk. Some see each other once or twice a year but keep their relationships superficial. Many sustain long periods of silence punctuated by brief reconciliations.

In my case, what I did was put words to a situation that already existed, and eventually I escalated and formalized the estrangement when they refused to deal with it or even admit it.

I forced them to make a choice, and admit to an unpleasant reality:
Prove to me that I’m really a member of this family. Listen to me and defend me against this unacceptable behavior — the way you defend everyone else who’s really included in this group — or not.

Clearly, they chose not to.

They literally could not do otherwise.  They could not show me respect, love, or support against an in-law’s disrespectful behavior, and then a brother’s.
Not even the level you might extend to a stranger.  To them, I am less worthy of those things than a stranger.

It was far easier to judge me, instead of judging one of their own.
Instead they chose to scapegoat me again, to say it was my fault for putting the choice out there — when it was the actions of others against me that brought it out in the open — and then my fault for no longer accepting my scapegoat role.

What makes my situation different from those described here, though, is that I didn’t choose the estrangement.  I was estranged by them from the very beginning.  Thus the difficulty I had, the pain and the loss I dealt with, in grappling with the fact that I wasn’t a “member of the tribe”, and never had been.

What I am guilty of is wanting a family, wanting my birthright — when that “family” made it clear so many times and so many little ways over so many years, such that when the big thing happened, I was supposed to have known better than to even ask.

“In my experience, estrangement makes people deeply uncomfortable. They wonder what’s wrong with you when you can’t get along with your family. They worry that if you can estrange yourself, maybe their parents/children/siblings could do that to them. Estrangement seems to threaten the primal order of things and opens the door to a lot of questions most of us would rather not think about…

“Imagine for a moment that these people have good reasons” to be estranged, says Scharp.”

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Postpartum Crazy

It can happen even to someone with their shit together and a loving, supportive husband. Full NPR article here.

Lisa wanted to be the perfect mom. She was ready to be the perfect mom. She and her husband lived in San Francisco, and Lisa had worked as a successful entrepreneur and as a marketing executive for a Silicon Valley tech company. When it came to starting her family, she was organized and ready to go. And that first week after her baby was born, everything was going according to plan. The world was nothing but love.

…”I needed to feed her — that was the most important thing. And my well-being didn’t matter.” She was barely sleeping. Even when she could get a release from what felt like breastfeeding purgatory, she couldn’t relax. As she got more and more exhausted, she started to get confused.

… Lisa says, “It felt like the walls were talking to me.”

… she noticed police helicopters circling over their apartment. “There were snipers on the roof,” she remembers thinking, “and there were spy cams in our bedroom and everyone was watching me. And my cellphone was giving me weird messages.”

Lisa told her husband… she was going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. And that’s when her husband told her he was going to drive her to the police station himself.

Her husband, David Abramson, remembers it as one of the worst days of his life. “I’m bringing my wife to the hospital and then checking her into an inpatient unit,” says David, explaining what really happened that day. “It was really, really challenging.”

“That was probably the most heart-wrenching thing, was having to leave her that night with the hospital staff,” he says. “You could see in her eyes and her body language that she was panicked.”

Lisa doesn’t remember any doctors or nurses telling her why she was there or what was going on. But she does remember, about a week into her hospitalization, her husband bringing a printout from online about postpartum psychosis.

“I really was just like, ‘No. I’ve heard of postpartum depression,” she says. “No! I have never heard that there’s postpartum crazy.”

But postpartum psychosis is real. Studies suggest it affects about one or two women out of every thousand that give birth; some doctors now think even more women than that are affected, but go undiagnosed. Without proper treatment, some of those women end up dying — by suicide.

Dhami is an expert on postpartum mental illness, and often treats cases of postpartum psychosis that OB-GYNs mishandled. Based on her clinical experience and observations, she says, a lot of doctors don’t know the early signs of postpartum psychosis; they don’t know that the symptoms wax and wane.

“A lot of times the patient will present very clearly, then at other times, will present with acute confusion and disorganization,” Dhami says.

It’s what happened to Lisa Abramson — feeling like she was of sound mind one moment, and then believing the walls were talking to her in the next.

“This is a symptom that clinicians who are not trained in this field can easily miss,” Dhami says, “Because when they see the patient in their office with the family, they can think that the patient is normal and is probably suffering from sleep deprivation — and discharge them home.”

After Alice gave birth to her son… everything started to spiral.

“There was a definite snap,” she says. “I started yelling about things that didn’t make sense. They made sense to me.”

To her family, it was just an incoherent rage. They called the police and they took Alice to the nearest hospital that had an available bed…

During her three-week stay, she saw her son once, for 20 minutes.

It’s hard for her to admit what it was like coming back to him, after she was discharged.

“It felt like a burden, “Alice says. “It felt like, ‘How am I ever going to do this?’ I held him, I bathed him, and I did all the things — but the connection was not there. I lost time with my son and I’m never going to get it back.”

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Hindsight

Happy 2019. Do less work on being friends with people who are doing zero work on being good to you.

Captain Awkward

I recently ran across this post online and found it surprisingly validating. While the whole thing has parallels to The Susan Incident, this paragraph really caught my attention:

“You are not overreacting, and FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK [Susan] for this behavior and fuck family members for enabling it by acting like your reactions to bad stuff [are out of line].”

All I could think was, wow, I wish I’d had this advice and the ability to respond like this 6+ years ago. For example, I wish I’d been able to say this:

Hey, I don’t want this to be forever, but until I can trust that this won’t ever happen again, until I trust that y’all understand how serious this is, and until y’all stop treating me like I’m the one doing something wrong, this is how it’s going to be.” 

“Until you get a real apology and whatever else you need to put this behind you, as long as other family members keep pressuring you on her behalf, Keep. Naming. What. She. Did.”

(Well, I kind of did do that, after I found out that Joe & Susan lied about it all to everyone else. It’s just that no one wanted to listen.)

For her: “Susan, do you understand why I am mad? It’s not just for having a conversation. It’s because when I simply asked you to go elsewhere to have it, and it was clear that it was upsetting to me, you refused to do that one thing. It’s ’cause you could have said you were sorry but you didn’t. It’s ’cause you raged at me when I brought it up to Joe. It’s because you both lied about that rage attack to everyone else, and told them it was all my fault, that I picked that fight. It’s because your fauxpology came with a side of blame, like me being pissed off and upset about this is “overreacting”.” 

For other family members: “She stood there laughing and chatting with the hospice nurse, while I was trying to cope with my beloved father’s death. When I politely asked them to take their conversation somewhere else, she refused to do so and continued her behavior. The next day she flew into a rage, literally yelling in my face when I tried to talk to Joe about it. They both lied to everyone else about who started that fight. When I got understandably upset, they tried to blame me for “overreacting”.

If you want to work on someone about this, go talk to Susan about her behaviors instead of trying to police my feelings.” 

For everyone/both: “You want me to come back and visit, and put this all behind us? I’d like that, too, someday, so, show me that I can trust this won’t happen again by taking the time it did happen seriously. Show me that you’ve learned from this.

At minimum, going forward, you can’t continue to treat me like the problem person all the time. You can’t treat my opinions or feelings or life choices as though they are WRONG or inconvenient for you or a sign that I’m irrational.

You don’t have to agree with me or understand it in order to do it. Not negotiable. ” 

Not that it would have made any difference to the outcome — I highly doubt anyone would have listened any more than they did(n’t).

I just wish *I* had had the ability, the groundedness to see it that clearly, and communicate it that succinctly. I wish I’d realized sooner that I had spent my whole life fighting a losing battle whose outcome had been decided probably even before I was born. I wish I’d been able to understand that that boundary was needed — even though these people were supposed to be my “family” — and to set it a long time ago. It would have saved me a lot of time, pain, and work.

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Smiles

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/oct/24/terrible-effects-postnatal-depression-mental-illness

“…I am a lifelong sufferer from depressive illness. I have spent many years trying to work out why, and I have come up with many possible explanations. To date the most convincing one I can find is that my mother unwittingly “gave” it to me… through the tragedy of her own postnatal depression.

“My mother’s depression was a closely held secret. In fact, none of my family could remember Jean, my mother, having it. Perhaps there just wasn’t a name for it then. But when she died, more than 30 years after my birth – she killed herself after a depressive episode – and I checked, many years later, on her medical records, there it was in black and white.

“The note comes in July 1956, six months after my birth. It reads: “It would appear that her present relapse has been going on since the birth of her first child.” She was prescribed potassium bromide – an anticonvulsive and sedative, a precursor of modern antidepressants. Later, until 1959, there were prescriptions of phenobarbitone and Largactil. Phenobarbitone is another tranquilliser, Largactil is a “phenothiazine for treating schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, particularly paranoid symptoms”.

“So for the first three years of my life – at least – my mother would have been suffering some form of psychosis. What I was faced with for the first few years of my life was a mother whose emotional spectrum, presumably, was limited, and registered at the dark end.

“I suspect I would not have often looked up to see a delighted, smiling face.”

“I cannot say with certainty how causally tied [my own depressive episodes] are to my experience as a newborn of my mother’s depression. But more than one developmental psychologist has explained to me how profoundly sensitive babies are to their mother’s facial expressions. As I understand it, the unresponsiveness of a depressive mother who cannot mirror her baby can lead to the development of a depressive child. The report rightly recognises this, noting the effect “over decades on their children’s prospects, both in terms of development in the womb and during the crucial early years”.

I can still vividly remember the second visit to my therapist, to whom I had just started telling the whole tangled story, and who had given me the assignment of trying to define any “beliefs” in my FOO. I had come up with “Mom is never wrong” and “Susan is never to blame.”

I voiced those two phrases and then I looked at her and asked, “Are those the same thing?” And she instantly got the biggest, widest smile on her face, a genuine, happy smile of approval.

And I suddenly REALLY wanted to see that again.

Immediately, viscerally, desperately, I wanted – NEEDED – to make her smile at me like that again.

The feeling was so strong, and unexpected, that I immediately did my best to hide it, and I didn’t mention it to her, ever.

In hindsight, it is more accurate to say that, while at the time my THOUGHT was to “make” her smile at me — what I really wanted was simply “for her to smile at me like that again” — without the part about me having to make her do it.

Because of course a baby doesn’t usually have to “do” anything to make a mother smile at her. Sometimes the mother just smiles, I expect.  But in my case, I think it shows that I didn’t get that kind of smile — the smile that says, I love you, for no reason other than that you are here — and deep in my mind, it became established that I had to do something to make it happen. I wasn’t going to get it for just being me.  Not from her, anyway.

And the pattern continues into the years that follow. Maybe my siblings picked up on her dysfunction, through things as subtle as a smile that didn’t happen, and mirrored HER. Maybe they were trying to gain her acceptance and approval as well, I don’t know. Maybe this is why I have never been able to make my sister laugh.

I do know that I wasn’t ever “really” a part of the family in some eyes, and for years I tried so hard to “make” them smile at me and accept me — when acceptance should have been automatic — but because of my mother’s illness, it wasn’t.

But the one place that I did get those kind of smiles was from my dad. Not quite the same as from a mother, I am sure, but I got something, enough to keep me from being a complete lifelong depressive mess.

In fact, I may have been saved by the factor written about in this article, which was what led me to the one that inspired this post. My guess is that with my birth and my sister’s, my father wasn’t depressed. I heard stories from my mother about how he insisted on giving my sister her first bath. And while at the time of my birth, he may have been under stress from the move and the new job, and confused or even angry about how my mother ran a household, and how she reacted to my birth – I’m going to say he probably wasn’t depressed.

“The report, like many modern social care reports, focuses on the economic cost of such illnesses, which strikes me as odd. It is the human cost that is primary – the agony of mental illness, which is very often avoidable with treatment, being passed from mother to child.

“… For me and thousands of others, the long-term costs are, 50 years later, being pinned to a bed by your own mind unable to think anything but the blackest thoughts… I haven’t suffered postnatal depression – but I have suffered from it.

 

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Like Mother, Like Daughter

Around the holiday season, one tends to think of one’s FOO, whether one wants to or not.  It happens less and less as the years pass, but it still happens sometimes.  In my case, I think I ruminate on all the bullshit that happened because I am reminding myself exactly WHY they are not in my life any longer.

One phrase I learned while shoveling through it all was this:

And so it was with this year.

My sister has four kids, two girls and two boys.  The first boy was a handful.  I happen to think a lot of what he pulled off was because he was smarter than her – or at least, more creative.  The best one I know about was when he used the attic access in the boys’ bedroom to create a pot-smoking den in the attic.  Freakin’ genius.  The kid only got caught when one day he thought the house was empty, but one of my older brothers was visiting, and the uncle was still in the house and heard him overhead in the attic.

Anyway.  So by the time he was a teen, my sister was at her wits’ end I suppose, but her proposed solution was that she wanted her husband to teach the kid a lesson – a physical lesson.  I don’t know the exact details, as of course I heard all this second-hand.  But she definitely wanted her husband to physically attack the boy in some way, in order to discipline him.

God, that is so cringey even to type out.

Well, my BIL wouldn’t do it.

So my sister’s next idea was to BRING IN HER TWO BROTHERS TO DO THE JOB.

Again, this is all second-hand, but I guess she was ready to have our two oldest brothers fly in for the express purpose of doing some kind of physical discipline to the kid.

I don’t know what else they might have tried before this idea showed up.
I do know that this idea is not going to work.

I have a suspicion that family therapy, or anything like that, even if they tried it, would not be too effective, because CLEARLY the problem here is the KID, and CERTAINLY NOT MY SISTER.

Just like when I went to therapists, some think that “proves” I was the problem, and everyone expected it to “fix” me.  Which is often the case, that the people who need to do the changing don’t think they can possibly be the problem.

Well, my sister’s plan never came to fruition, AFAIK.  I think my BIL found out about it and put the kibosh on it.

But in revisiting it this year, I realized that this story is another confirmation that my sister is my mother all over again.

Because remember how, when my dad used to be gone all week, traveling for work — my mother used to keep a tally of what the boys had done wrong all week, and when Dad got home on Friday he had to physically punish them?

No, actually, because I’ve only alluded to this a couple of times here and there, and never really spelled it out. Well, I can remember Mom doing this to the two younger boys, and I have no doubt she did it with the older ones too.

I can remember standing in my parents’ bedroom, near the closet, watching the proceedings.  I probably had to be in the room because I was certainly no more than 5, if my mom was still there, and presumably I was not to be left alone in another room.  (Which doesn’t make a lot of sense coming from a parent who let me sit outside on the sidewalk for hours, and sent me to walk to school by myself, so maybe I just wanted to be near my Dad when he returned from being gone all week.  Or maybe Dad was the one who realized I should not be left unsupervised.  I don’t know.  But I do know I was in the room.)

The punishing involved both parents:  Mom reading from her scribbled list on the back of an envelope, or something, and Dad swatting the boys on the behind with a belt as they lay on the bed.

This is straight authoritarian parenting, the “strict father” family model.

I now wonder if maybe Mom was angry at Dad because he DIDN’T PLAY HIS ROLE PROPERLY.  He was supposed to be the head of the household and make all the decisions (and therefore take all the blame).  With him gone all week (to earn the money, but that apparently isn’t a good enough excuse) — those responsibilities fell on her and she couldn’t deal with them.

Further, since she had to do HIS job, maybe she decided, consciously or unconsciously, therefore she wouldn’t do HER job — which was to cook and clean and launder and maybe even nurture.  She passed most of THOSE responsibilities to her oldest daughter.

Who in turn, years later, decided that physical punishment from a man (preferably a relative of some kind, after all this is FAMILY) was the thing that had to be done to a kid.  Like mother, like daughter.

Ugh.