child abuse

How resiliency screwed me over

~ KJ ~ 8 Comments

She’s a strong girl. She’s got this under control.

No, no I don’t.

Please stop calling me strong. Please stop saying I’m resilient.

You know what resiliency got me? Nearly 30 years of abuse. Why? Because even though I lived in hell, I managed to appear quite normal on the outside. I got excellent grades. I stayed out of trouble. What did that get me? It got me a longer sentence in hell.

Maybe I could have been saved a lot sooner had I done so poorly, had I acted out in school. Those are the types of kids that get the attention. No one worries about the bright girl excelling in her classes. They just assume she’s got it all together; they assume her parents are teaching her well. The only thing my parents taught me was how to hurt.

No one noticed that I never wanted to go home. No one questioned why I would wander the halls after school was over, looking for something, anything to do so I wouldn’t have to go home. No one questioned why I was constantly wetting my pants, why I was always so on edge. No one questioned anything. They only saw my academic skill set and put blinders on for all the rest.

She’s going to be something some day.

Yea. I’m going to be dead. I wanted to be dead. Why didn’t anyone hear me? I couldn’t speak, but I tried so hard to tell them. And no one heard me. All they saw was a bright girl with a bright future. All I saw was a life of intolerable pain that I wanted to end ever since I was a child.

Resilient children don’t want to die. Resilient children don’t try to kill themselves. I was a hopeless child, going through the motions and waiting for the day she would kill me or I would kill myself. That’s not resilience. That’s not strength.

I was a broken child, who grew into a broken teenager, and then into a shattered adult. I have not survived my childhood. I’m still reliving it.

 

April 25th

~ KJ ~ 5 Comments

On April 25th, many years ago, I tried (unsuccessfully) to end my life.

I should have died. I planned ahead. I did all of the calculations. This was supposed to be the time that it worked. This was supposed to be the end to my suffering.

But it didn’t turn out like I had planned. I ended up vomiting non-stop, my face and limbs were blue and purple, I lost my hearing, and had pain throughout my entire body. I was scared. I thought I was just going to die. This was not what I had intended.

Out of desperation, I told my family what I had done. I wanted to go to the hospital. I wanted someone to help me. I wanted to die, but not like this. This hurt. This was scary.

But they didn’t take me to the hospital. My mother didn’t want her reputation ruined. It was always about her. How could I do this to her? How could I do this to the family?

Instead they took my phone away so I couldn’t call for help. My brother went in his room and played video games. My father sat in the living room and watched Survivor on TV. And my mother laid on her usual spot on the couch muttering about how much of a failure I was.

And I sat there, alone, in tears, scared, and completely hopeless. Because in my darkest moment, I reached out for help, and I realized that I didn’t matter. I could have died. I should have died. And that didn’t matter to any of these people. They went on with their lives like usual, as if I weren’t sitting there deathly ill, as if I didn’t exist. Because my existence didn’t matter.

That is a feeling I will never forget. That is a feeling I will never get over. The small bit of hope I still carried with me that I meant something to my family, that one day my mother would love me, that one day my family would care…that hope was crushed on April 25th.

All of this time, I’ve been struggling to figure out why this day brought up such strong emotions for me. I think I kept assuming there must’ve been some preceding event that occurred on that date.

But I don’t think there was any preceding event. I think the damage caused, the hope that was crushed by my family on that date is what has made it continually difficult for me in the years since. I’ll never forget what that felt like.

Why can’t I feel anything?

~ KJ ~ 1 Comment

I had therapy this morning.

It started out okay. But I knew my therapist wanted to talk about my parts, a topic we haven’t been able to delve into much because my life has been a clusterfuck lately. Talking about parts is not the most comfortable thing for me, because parts come out and I hear things that I am sometimes not quite ready to deal with, or things I don’t want to deal with.

There has been an issue with some of my parts and therapy. Parts don’t want other parts talking. One part doesn’t want anyone (including me) talking about a particular event that several of us happen to share experience and memory of. It’s so complicated. And the problem is that this particular event was so traumatic even for me, that it is very prevalent in my life and I need to talk about it. But every time it comes up, it causes chaos on the inside.

I tried to explain to my therapist a little bit of what was going on without going into specifics, because I didn’t want to trigger myself into a switch. That didn’t work for too long, because I realized I was thinking about the event in question and it brought up feelings and feelings get you in trouble and off I went.

When you come out of dissociation, you ground yourself. You try to engage your senses. My therapist always tells me to put my feet on the floor. I’m able to bounce back pretty quickly at this point, without going through the entire process. She told me to feel the water bottle I had near me, and asked me what the temperature of the water was. I held the bottle in the palm of my hand, but I couldn’t really feel it. I tried to close off everything else going on around me and focus on just the bottle and my hand. I still couldn’t feel it. I think my therapist sensed my frustration. She asked me what was wrong. I told her, “I don’t know, I can’t feel the water.”

She got up from her chair, took the bottle from my hand, felt it, held it out in her hand, then held out her other hand towards me.

“Touch the bottle and my hand and tell me which is warmer.”

I grabbed the bottom of the bottle with my left hand, and reached out and held my right hand against her palm. I tried, and I still could not feel anything. I was frustrated. My therapist played it off like it was okay. She told me she thought her hand was warmer, and went and sat back down in her chair. I sat back and started to cry.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

I was hesitant to answer at first. I just wanted to tell her I was okay. My go-to answer. But she knew by my expression and my tears that I was not okay.

“Why can’t I feel anything?”

She asked me if I really wanted to know her thoughts. I already knew. I developed parts that shut off feelings because that is what they needed to do in order to survive. They believed that feelings were wrong. They believed that feelings resulted in pain and hurt (because they did). How horrible it must be to still be stuck in a world where you believe you cannot feel. The sadness I experience with not being able to feel the water, or my therapist’s hand…that doesn’t come anywhere close to what my parts (and I) have experienced in childhood.

While I was crying over not being able to feel a bottle of water, I was actually crying over a whole lot more.

“I think we need to ban the scale.”

~ KJ ~ 1 Comment

My eating disorder has been out of control.

And my life factors have made it so much easier to go along with it. No money this week? Perfect. We don’t need food anyway. We can stretch out this last cup of rice and make it last a week.

But it’s so much more than that. There are times when I am in such horrible denial that I have a problem. People ask me if I’m okay because I don’t look well. Well, I ate the other day. Isn’t that enough? In those moments, I can’t process that no, going days without eating isn’t normal. I can’t process that, in that moment, I look like hell because I haven’t eaten.

And then I sit in therapy and battle with my therapist. Did I eat today? Well, I had coffee. Coffee is food. Just stop. What is the big deal? I am FAT. I don’t need food. I ate the other day. I am still alive and doing just fine. What is the big deal? No, I’m not about to pass out. It’s the lighting.

I was so angry at myself during our session on Monday because I had gained three pounds over the weekend. THREE POUNDS. I had lost 23 pounds in the last 17 days, but now that I gained 3 back, I only really lost 20. And I was pissed. I told my therapist I couldn’t eat this week until I made up for the gain.

“I think we need to ban the scale,” she said to me. “It’s becoming a problem.”

I weigh myself every morning. Obsessively. And I know that. It is a sick obsession, but I need it. I need to know how much I weigh because I need to know if I deserve to eat that day. Am I too fat today? Someone will notice that extra pound and judge me for eating that bowl of rice. I just can’t do it. We’ll try again tomorrow. It’s a sick and twisted cycle that I keep getting caught in.

I go through periods where I can manage quite well. And then there are times, like now, where my eating disorder becomes full-fledged and affects my everyday life. I sit in therapy sometimes, half out of it, unable to think, because I’m tired and haven’t eaten. And I can sense the frustration in my therapist as she tells me we can’t work through much if I come to therapy starved. I can’t work through my issues if I’m not fulfilling my most basic needs. And I know she’s right, but I keep fighting it. I’m fat. I don’t need food. Why doesn’t anyone understand this?

Why can’t I just have a normal relationship with food? Why did my mother have to point out how fat and disgusting I looked all of the time? “Pull your skirt down, no one wants to see your disgusting legs!”

Why did she have to complain about how much our food cost her? To make us feel guilty for having basic needs. How dare we have basic needs and take away from her. Why did she have to take it away so much? Why did she send me to school with nothing and then yell at me when school would call that I didn’t eat? Why was it my fault? She set me up for failure every time. Food could never be a simple, fulfilling experience.

Why did I only get food if I deserved it? Why did food always have to belong to her or my brother? Why did she turn food into a tool of manipulation?

Do you know what it’s like to be told you can only eat certain food once it goes bad? Do you know what that does to your sense of worth? It destroys it. Whatever sense of worth I had left was no longer. It didn’t seem to bother my father that he and I were treated like shit. He looked forward to when some of his favorite foods were nearing expiration.”I see those doughnuts are just two days away from expiring!” and he was so  excited about it. I was horrified. I saw it as my mother’s way of telling us we were worth nothing. But hey, she can say she feeds us, and she wouldn’t be lying. Sick. It’s sick.

I’m not sure I have ever mentioned it here before, but I have a sixth sense for scoping out expired food and beverages. I can walk past something and just get this feeling that it is expired, and sure enough I check, and it is. It helped me a lot at my last job, as I cleaned out a lot of expired merchandise in their grocery department. I’ve also filled up baskets of expired foods while shopping at stores and dropped it at their customer service areas. I don’t know why it happens, it just does.

And I never made the connection before, until I was laying in bed last night and thought, have I trained myself to scope out expired food because that’s what I had to do at home? Have I done that without even realizing it? I don’t know how else to explain it. It makes me sad.

Deep inside, I still feel an immense sense of worthlessness, that I am in many ways unworthy of food, unworthy of the basic necessities of life. A piece of her is still inside of me, telling me I am worthless.

And now, thanks to all of this shit I’ve dealt with, I can’t even eat like a normal person. Every time I consider eating a piece of food, I have to go down an entire mental checklist. Do I deserve to eat today? Am I fat today? Is this going to make me fatter? Do I even want to eat this? Am I even hungry? Should I bother? I’m too fat to eat this. I can’t eat today. I’m bad. I didn’t earn this. I can’t. 

I ate today. But only because I weighed myself this morning and lost six pounds in two days. The cycle continues.

The D Word

~ KJ ~ 1 Comment

I hate the d word.

Depression.

It came up recently because my primary doctor put Major Depression on my record. And I, of course, flipped my emotional shit.

Because that word has such painful connections for me.

And sure enough, for the last week, the memory of my father has been playing over and over in my head. I’ll give you a reason to be depressed. Pain. Pain was all I felt. And then I felt nothing at all.

I genuinely believe a piece of me died that night. In all these years I have never been able to get over it. I still can’t hear the word depressed without hearing him yell at me. I can still feel my head hitting the wall. I can still hear myself begging him to stop. Fifteen years ago and it still plays like it’s happening now.

And I’m afraid of that label. I responded in anger when my therapist asked me what was wrong. “I’m not depressed! I fucking hate her!”

My therapist made the connection rather quickly on why I was against that diagnosis.

“If I were to pick up the DSM right now and flip to, let’s say, Persistent Depressive Disorder, would you say you wouldn’t fit that diagnosis? You wouldn’t fit under Major Depressive Disorder?”

“No, because I function just fine and I’m not impaired so therefore I don’t qualify for those diagnoses. And while I’m at it, I don’t qualify for DID, either.”

“I’m not talking about functioning just yet. Aside from functioning.”

I hesitated. I grumbled to myself. “Fine,” I said, “I fit every criterion. Every. Single. Criterion.”

“And while you do get up in the morning and go to work, and go to school, you’re not functioning all the way like you think you are. You are good in some areas, and really severely impaired in others.”

“I’m not depressed.”

“We don’t have to call it that. We can come up with another word for it if you want. But you can’t deny that it doesn’t fit. And I know that you know that.”

Damnit. Sometimes I hate being smart. I do know that. But I want to live in denial. Let me live in sweet denial.

Denial. That’s a d word I can handle.

Fat and Starving

~ KJ ~ 4 Comments

I got my blood test results back the end of last week.

I prepared myself in the week before I went to the doctor. I tried to eat like a normal person. I loaded up on vitamins.

It didn’t work very well. My vitamin D level is laughable (but in my defense, most people up north are vitamin D deficient). I foresee the megadose of 50,000 IU being re-prescribed on my next visit. Iron is low. A little surprised there, because I was taking my iron supplements in the week prior to the test. But I guess that wasn’t enough. I guess I took enough of my B vitamins because those were right on the border of being low.

I forgot about one thing that I couldn’t change in a blood test. Creatinine. I should have known better, because that’s what messed me up last time. My creatinine levels are consistently low. It’s a sign of malnutrition and in severe cases, starvation, because your body breaks down muscle mass to use for energy when you’re not consuming enough calories. You can’t take anything to cover that up on a test.

Why am I blaming the doctor? I am the one not eating right. I have horrible fucking eating patterns, and I know it. I am fully aware that my eating sucks.

A few weeks ago, my supervisor bought me lunch. I didn’t really want to eat, and denied it a few times, but eventually gave in because I people please. As I was eating in the back with my coworkers, supervisor, and manager, my manager said “I think this is the first time I’ve seen you eat.” Mind you, I’d been working there almost eight months by that time. But she was right. It was the first time she had seen me eat anything.

Another person told me I eat like a bear. I can eat a meal and then not eat for days, like I’m preparing for hibernation. And it doesn’t even affect me. I’m so used to not eating for long periods of time that it’s normal for me. I don’t feel hunger when I should feel hunger. I’m sure my body is desperately looking for sources of energy so I can function, but I don’t feel it. I’m going about my day just like normal. People offer me something to eat and I tell them no, I ate three days ago, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

And now this medication is not helping my already fucked up eating situation. I am constantly nauseated. The thought of putting anything in my mouth is sickening. Even water makes me want to throw up at times. I’ve eaten twice in the last week, and both ended with me getting terribly sick afterwards, which I know is because I hadn’t eaten, but I just use it as further fuel for rationalizing why I shouldn’t eat.

My eating issues are complex. I’ve talked about them before. I think that is what makes it so difficult to tackle. I think a lot of it stems from childhood, and not having food accessible at all times. Then being told I didn’t deserve food. I continue that tradition on myself today. Did I really work hard enough today? No? Then I really don’t think I deserve dinner. I’ll try harder tomorrow. God, it’s like my mother is living inside of my brain.

Then there are the issues with my weight, which I don’t understand because I really don’t eat enough to weigh what I do. I have a lot of sensory issues and refuse to eat a lot of foods, and end up with a very limited diet even when I do eat. There’s just a lot of shit against me.

Finances are also another issue for me, especially now. Food is the easiest thing to cut back on when money is tight. I can survive without food just fine. I can’t survive without money. I’m scrambling to get my paperwork together so I can get into summer session at grad school because I need the financial aid to live on – if I don’t get that, I’ll need to be cutting back on more than just groceries. And unfortunately, I can’t get assistance with food because I am not a legal renter and have no proof of residence anywhere.

I self-sabotage when it comes to eating. I buy food I know I won’t eat because that will prevent me from buying more food. I bought pasta because it was 50 cents. I hate pasta. But I tell myself I can’t go grocery shopping because I still have pasta in the house, and I won’t eat the pasta until I am absolutely desperate.

I think I frustrate my therapist. It is a constant battle over food. She thinks I need to eat. I tell her I am fat and that I’m not withering away any time soon. Then she reminds me that means nothing, because even the blood tests show otherwise. Then I tell her that I’m not hungry. She tells me I still should try to eat. I tell her I ate last Friday.

Why can’t I be normal?

Why I’ve Been Crying

~ KJ ~ 4 Comments

I’m so used to being able to shut down my emotions, to numb myself entirely of feeling. But for the last couple of weeks, I find myself crying. Consistently crying. I cry in the shower. I cry at work. I cry in the bathroom. I cry walking home. Most nights I cry so much that I end up falling asleep from exhaustion. Normally that would be a bad thing, except that has been the only sleep I’ve been able to get.

Crying gets you in trouble. Crying gets you beat. Crying creates more pain.

I hate crying. I hate feeling weak. I want people to think I am strong and put-together.

I hate crying.

I’m not even crying over one thing. I’m crying over everything.

I’m crying because I’m alone.

I’m crying because I want to belong to a family. I want my family.

I’m crying because I never had the childhood I deserved.

I’m crying because for 29 years, all I was was a pawn in my mother’s game. I was never a person.

I’m crying because the home I am living in doesn’t really feel safe.

I’m crying over all of the relationships I could have had with people, the relationships my mother stopped from happening.

I’m crying because I will never experience the joy of bearing a child.

I’m crying because I’m still so scared of the world.

I’m crying because my father will die before I ever tell him how I feel.

I’m crying because my brother is so far brainwashed, he will never experience true freedom.

I’m crying because so many people could have helped me, but chose to look away.

I’m crying because my mother will never get the justice she deserves.

I’m crying for the children my mother will hurt because I’ve allowed her to roam free.

I’m crying for the people that I’ve hurt because I didn’t know any better.

I’m crying for my younger parts, the ones who miss our mother, the ones who don’t understand why we had to leave.

I’m crying for my younger parts, the ones who got hurt instead of me, the ones still in so much pain.

I’m crying because I’m exhausted. I just want to be able to sleep.

I’m crying because of the pain in my heart.

I’m crying because I fear that a piece of my mother lives inside me, making me just like her.

I don’t want to cry anymore.

Don’t believe her, she’s bipolar.

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

My mother worked hard to isolate me from the rest of the world.

She did it in childhood by instilling into me a fear of the outside. As I grew up, she isolated me by telling everyone else I was crazy and a liar.

I knew for years that she was telling people I was close to lies about me. She was telling people at my work, and people I considered my friends. It was pointless to fight against her. She had her game down pat. She would talk all of her shit about me, and then would tell a sob story about how she was so hurt by my behaviors, how she just didn’t understand why I treated her so badly, why I hated her so much.

Why I treated her so badly? Guess who was paying the bills, cooking meals for the ‘family’, and cleaning up after everyone. Me. Who bought a vehicle for her? Me. I certainly didn’t need the vehicle; I’ve never even had a license. I did all of that because that’s what she instilled in me since youth. If I didn’t support her financially, I was selfish and bad. Yet even when I did support her, she’d still tell people I was selfish and bad. I could never win.

The biggest blow came last spring, when I realized just how low my mother would go to sabotage my life. I woke up to a series of text messages from my mother. My mother allegedly thought she was texting my brother the whole time, and then conveniently realized her mistake a few texts later and then started texting me this sob story about how she was so concerned about me and blah blah blah. I say blah blah blah because that’s all it was. Lies and nonsense. I could see right through her. And I would bet my life savings that her texting me this was no accident. My brother and I have names on complete opposite sides of the alphabet. For a woman so careful in every action of her life, she would never make a mistake like that. She wanted me to read this. She wanted me to know that she was in control of everything and everyone, even the people I called friends.

My mother told everyone she met that I was bipolar, as if it were the main descriptive criterion of my entire existence. She never told anyone how intelligent I was, how selfless I was, how hard I worked…no, instead she told everyone that her daughter was crazy. Even worse, I don’t even have bipolar disorder. She liked to throw that diagnosis around because it came with all the added stigma that played perfectly into her game.

What kind of person tells everyone that their child hurts themselves as a part of regular conversation? I guess she used it to add on to my “crazy” label. But why did nobody question WHY I was hurting myself for the last 19 years? Ten year-old children don’t normally understand self-injury, and they shouldn’t comprehend that type of pain. That is a red flag that everyone just kept ignoring.

Why did nobody question why this woman’s other child, her adult son, my brother, was also hurting himself? What are the odds that a perfectly innocent parent raises two children who end up with psychological problems and extensive self-injury? If I had to hazard a guess, I would say those odds are pretty low. But damnit, my mother just played on people’s emotions like a violin. The odds never mattered because all people could focus on was my mother’s fictitious plight.

She just picks up and leaves without saying anything to anyone! Oh my God, someone call the police! I say that jokingly, but my mother would threaten to call the cops in the rare times I managed to escape from home prison for a few hours unsupervised. But why did no one see an issue with this? Why would her 29 year-old daughter need to ask permission to leave the house? THIS IS NOT NORMAL BEHAVIOR. It angers me that people did not question her at all. It really angers me. They enabled her, allowing her behavior to continue until the day I finally left.

She doesn’t want friends. Wow. I longed for friends. I never had real friends as a child. I was never allowed to spend time with anyone outside of school, and I was never allowed to have anyone over our house. I was alone my entire life. I looked forward to work because that was the only way I could have friendships. Unfortunately, that also meant my friendships were easier for my mother to control, because she had access to everyone I also had access to. I can’t imagine how many people she told these same lies to. I can’t think about all of the people I could have gotten closer to had my mother not poisoned their opinions of me with her lies. I actually had a few people come forward in the months after I left and told me similar stories – that my mother had told them I didn’t want any friends, that I didn’t like anyone, and that I thought I was too good for people. I would be lying if I said it doesn’t hurt me. It hurts me to this day.

She thinks she’s better than everyone else. That could not be farther from the truth. I still struggle with my own self-worth. My problem is I don’t think enough of myself, not that I think too much of myself. I downplay my intelligence and my abilities. I treat myself like shit often because that’s how my parents treated me. I never thought I was better than everyone else. I thought I was worthless and undeserving of life. I figured I never had any friends because I didn’t deserve them. I didn’t realize that my mother played a hand in every aspect of my life, even my potential relationships with others.

The truth is that my mother thinks she is better than everyone else. She believes that she is worthy of respect, that she is above the law, and that she deserves everything to be handed to her.

I can’t find it in my heart to delete these screenshots from my phone. The day this happened, I realized that I could trust no one. I realized that my mother had poisoned everything and everyone around me. It hurt then, and it still hurts now.

It hurts because I know my mother continues to tell lies about me, even to other members in our family. She tells people I have problems, that I make up stories. For so many years, I didn’t fight back.

Today, I have chosen to fight back. I sent a letter to my grandmother tonight. I told her why I left. I told her the truth about me. She deserves to know the truth, and not the lies my mother has continued to tell. I will not continue to be torn down by this woman any longer. I don’t deserve it.

 

I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid

~ KJ ~ 5 Comments

My mother would have made a brilliant cult leader.

I say that half in jest, and half in all seriousness.

When you think about it, my mother already has her own cult. It may be small, it may only consist of some family members and those around her, but it has the dynamics of a cult nonetheless. Her followers do her bidding, no matter how out there her requests and teachings may be. She gets them to leech on to her as if she was their only remaining source of life. By some miracle, I managed not to become a member in my mother’s cult.

Today’s therapy session was mostly about my feelings of guilt concerning my brother. I realized, thanks to my therapist, that these feelings of guilt were the result of my mother’s programming. My mother ingrained in me a sense of responsibility for everything bad that ever happened, even the things that had nothing to do with me.

My therapist is already well aware of the differences between my brother and I, despite the fact that we both experienced some of the same abuse and trauma growing up. While I distanced myself from my mother as best as I could, my brother did the exact opposite; he was drawn to her. My therapist reminded me that even though our approaches were quite different, my brother and I were working towards the same goal: keeping ourselves safe, and not “poking the bear” that was/is my mother.

In the middle of our discussion, my therapist told me “you’re here because you didn’t drink the Kool-Aid.” She was right. I didn’t drink it. But my brother did. And as a result, he is stuck with her, physically, emotionally, and financially. He is so deeply brainwashed that I don’t think there is a chance for him to ever get free. I can’t change him. I can’t save him. He’s been drinking my mother’s Kool-Aid for so long that it’s in his blood. Even though he has brief moments of clarity, moments where he feels fear of her, it’s not enough to break free. He has always, and will always, report back to his leader.

My therapist asked me if there was a way my brother could ever be free. My immediate thought, which I said out loud, was when my mother finally dies. But as I thought about it, not even her death would help him. It may even damage him further. They are so enmeshed that I’m not sure he could survive without her. I have hope that he can, but I’m also realistically doubtful.

“It’s remarkable that you came out of this the way you did. You developed empathy in an environment where there was no empathy, you learned how to feel even though you were punished for feeling.” My therapist was right. But that very fact is why I often doubt my own experiences. How did I end up halfway decent of a person? How am I able to function? It doesn’t make any sense.

And then I look at my brother, a man so badly damaged, so unable to control his anger, living his life as a puppet with my mother as his master puppeteer. Although he experienced much less brutal abuse than I had, he is suffering nonetheless.

We are a perfect example of nature versus nurture. There is likely something in my wiring, something in the way my brain works, that allowed me to respond to my life experiences in the way that I did…something very different from how my brother’s brain is wired. These differences allowed me to survive and eventually to live a free life. While my brother is technically surviving, he’s not really living at all.

I used to be so envious of my brother. Now I see that my mother treated him differently in order to keep him in her favor. She needed a member, and my mother knew early on that I was too resistant, too obstinate, too strong-willed to succumb to her ways. My brother, however, was too easily swayed, too willing to follow, too blind to see reality – he was the perfect candidate. And my mother groomed him so perfectly that now, as a man in his mid-to-late thirties, he knows nothing other than what comes out of my mother’s mouth. I would never want his life. It’s not a life at all.

He drank the Kool-Aid. I didn’t.