The Most Isolated Family

6 or 7 years ago, I finally went “no contact” with my family of birth; something I should have done the day I turned 18. Since then, there’s been a steady dissolving of many assumptions I’d carried into adulthood.  It hasn’t been a road-to-Damascus, scales falling from my eyes experience; more like a failing iceberg, with many small sheerings over time, and a few big ones.  One of my epiphany moments was reading up on “traits of a narcissistic parent (or mother)”. Wow.   Brigid doesn’t qualify by meeting 6 or 7 of the 10 criteria.  It’s as though she deliberately sought to break new ground of insanity and malevolence in every category. Perhaps the most acute expression of her narcissism has been her fiendish work at isolating everyone around her.  This is one of a few areas where my anger has gradually moved from Mombo the Wonderful™, and focused more on Dear-Ole’-Dad. Brigid’s level of mental illness is clearly beyond the point where she should have been prevented from being alone with and raising children. I’m starting to understand the collapse of our family as more of a systems problem. Brigid the parent and middle class housewife never should have happened. Somebody or somebodies should have stopped that train.

In my birth family, I’m the oldest of 4 kids.  The youngest, my brother, has his share of problems but has managed to carve out a decent life for himself. He has a stable marriage, and a good network of friends and associates. And he’s a all-around good person; agreeable, yet capable of setting boundaries.  We 3 oldest are catastrophes, who’s lives never got off the ground.  4 interconnected people = 7, 2 person relationships between them.  Among us 4, 1 of those 7 connections is functional.  The rest of us either aren’t on speaking terms or just barely tolerate each other.  We’re also mostly cutoff from extended family despite having quite a few cousins, uncles and aunts.  My 2 sisters and I have very few friends, and none of the long-term variety, few to no professional associates and a generally horrible track record of making and keeping people in our lives.  My 2 sisters have never had a serious romantic relationship with anyone, ever.  This hyper-isolated nature of our family is perhaps its most striking feature.

This can’t be attributed to genetics; certainly not entirely, nor is it the result of happenstance or bad luck.  Our isolated family is the product of Brigid’s mentally ill and anti-social behaviors, and the unwillingness of anyone to check them.  From my earliest memories, Brigid badmouthed myself and siblings to everyone, including one another.  She relentlessly badmouthed us to Captain Enabler, and him to us (for a while anyway, but that died down by the early 90’s).  Whoever wasn’t in the room or on the other end of the phone got a badmouthing from Brigid to whoever was. 

And she badmouthed us to everyone else.  This is of several “things” where her horrid nastiness and need to offload the brooding inspired steam she’d built up against whomever (us in this case) was so intensive that she made herself look bad.  She’d badmouth us to friends, parents of our friends, relatives, teachers, school administrators, coaches, romantic partners….she’d do this whenever the opportunity presented itself……….at every available opportunity.  This wasn’t an occasional habit of her.

Explaining this trait of hers has caused some confusion with a few therapists I’ve worked with over the years.  Why would a mother, even a highly narcissistic mother, do such a thing?  Aside from destroying any trust between herself and her kids, wouldn’t she know how terrible that would make her look?  An overlapping feature of her sociopathic behavior is extremely low self-awareness, and an equally poor inability to gauge the likely consequences of her actions or how others will respond to her.  

She feel, feels, feels………..angry, angry, frustrated, frustrated….ahhhhh!!!……….. and then, what’s the person on the other end of the phone for if not to imbibe her head full of brooded rage?

A fortunate and chance contact I made with someone 4 years ago, after my first salvo of blogs, helped me understand Brigid better by helping me understand how others saw her.  She was thought to be a crazy woman by most everyone who knew her, and her proclivity for bad mouthing her own children was an oft-spoken of element of that reputation.  Who does that?  It’s like a manager who badmouths their employees to customers, only worse. The enlightening contact (I’ll refer to them henceforth as person A) thought that Brigid’s tendency to badmouth her kids was a cry for help and sympathy; perhaps hoping that others would be more likely to drive her children around or watch over us more. During Brigid’s childhood, that is the world that Brigid’s parents created for her. Her only responsibility was to express her feelings – mainly her negative feelings – and they did whatever they could to make those bad feelings go away. It seems as though she grew to see the rest of humanity in this way.

Brigid has attempted to smear me to literally every friend and girlfriend I’ve ever had who she’s been able to contact, and has often lied to them about me.  She’s often lied to the friends and associates of my siblings as well in her relentless pursuit to isolate. It would take 10,000 additional words to flesh this out in the most cursory way.  One minor example: After my Air Force basic training, Brigid and dummy attended the graduation, and later took us and a friend out to dinner, during which  Brigid hush-hush badmouthed me to this friend and future colleague of mine.   Her behavior in this area is so insane and audacious that it’s hard for others to believe.

I saw some of this behavior in her late, skitzo brother. Whenever a new person would enter the scene………someone he was buying or selling something to….a new neighbor……anyone……..one of the first things he’d do was talk about the problems he had with all the folks in the world he didn’t like, and what he thought was wrong with them. I’m pretty sure that part of that was “testing” Like Brigid, he had some notion that the world of grievances he’d nurtured over the years wouldn’t be shared by many, and so needed to see if this potential new contact would be on board with it all. When person A was discussing how Brigid’s reputation with me, she said something particularly interesting: She was known to give long winded, very dramatic and obviously rehearsed monologues about things……..out of nowhere. Whether talking to someone individually or in groups, these rehearsed cinematic exultations would explode suddenly. They often had nothing to do with anything being discussed otherwise, and involved people and events who nobody else knew a thing about……..but I’m getting a little off topic here. That’s the subject of another blog.

Another of her favorite isolating tactics was making up things that others had said. She’d routinely tell us that relatives, neighbors, parents of friends etc., were just shocked-I-tell-you-shocked(!!!!) when told of our horrible behavior, and encouraged Brigid to punish us far more severely that she did. These were among the countless bald-faced lies she’d tell. She’d make up stories about how neighbors had called her and told her how slowly I was raking the yard……or whatever.

Brigid very actively and energetically prevented us from getting any kind of therapy as kids, and absolutely refused to take part in family therapy. Dear-ole-dud managed to get her to go to one session, after which she refused to go to anymore. This was despite the obviously insane atmosphere of our family and her constant tantrums about how awful everything was and how she couldn’t take it anymore.  Despite being told dozens of times by teachers, school administrators and others, that one or more of us kids had behavior problems and should see a therapist, Brigid made absolutely sure that it never happened, save for a single instance of 1 sibling, when it became absolutely necessary during their later high school years. And when that took place, Brigid arranged for her to see a therapist Brigid knew and tried to control. When I was seeing a therapist in college, I made the mistake of mentioning this to her.  She somehow managed to track him down, called him and badmouth me to him. 

The most obvious driver behind all of this, is that Brigid has always been well aware that others would find her behavior toward her children horrifying, if they knew about it. To address that issue, she took a two-pronged approach of telling fabricated stories about our time together “And so I jumped down the stairs, and all the kids yelled MOMBO!” and badmouthing us relentlessly to everyone. As I now understand, keeping others from knowing how she treated her kids put her in a state of perpetual paranoia.

This touches on a oft pondered question regarding the behavior of bad people…….

“If someone deliberately hides their behavior, is that not proof that they know what they’re doing is wrong?”

In most of the discussions I’ve seen on this topic, people agree that it is, but I think they’re wrong. If Brigid’s behavior can be generalized (and I think it can to some degree), the bad behaving person thinks that others just won’t understand, and fear they might suffer unjust consequences if they were found out. Using the social norms or accepted ideas of those around us, isn’t a good gauge to hold this question to. Consider an extreme example: Someone rescuing Jews from deportation during WW2, or operating the underground railroad prior to the American Civil, hid their behaviors as best they could because they feared the consequences of exposure, to themselves and those they were helping. Fearing the consequences of exposure isn’t an acknowledgement of wrongdoing.

The basic “standard component” parts of a human brain that equip us with a sense of guilt when we’ve violated norms that make collective existence possible, just aren’t there in Brigid’s mind. She never asks herself if she’s done something wrong or harmed someone. If she has, she thinks only of how they certainly deserved it. She only wonders if there might be negative consequences for her.

But back to the nitty gritty……….

This is one issue where I’ve recently thought more about Brigid’s attending court eunuch and less about Brigid. How in the hell did he allow this to happen? By all accounts and appearances, he grew up in a very healthy and well connected family. How did he allow this level of sadness and isolation to take place? Unlike Brigid he’s very intelligent, and intelligent people are often harder to figure out. Still, it doesn’t make sense. There was something or somethings else at work. When backing up and considering how things evolved, the shadows don’t move right with the sun of Dear-ole’-dad.

One part of this, was that he seems to have set his mind to not considering the things Brigid did and said while he was out of earshot. To him, it’s as though those things don’t exist. The most awful and underhanded things Brigid does to her kids have always been when he’s not been around, and he seems to have taken a viewpoint of not thinking about or factoring for them . I suppose that explains part of it, but it’s certainly not the whole onion. The chaos, irresponsibility and neglect of Brigid’s first 5 or so years in Connecticut were so extraordinary that there’s no way he didn’t catch wind of at least some of it. Had she behaved the same way now, there would have certainly been a call or knock on the door from a social worker……a rare thing in an upper middle class American suburb, but she was that nuts. If the great enabler was ever really checked in to his family, he seems to have checked out at some point. During my first 5 years of life, he was on active, full time Air Force duty, then moved to flying as an airline pilot (leaving Brigid alone for days and occasionally weeks at a time), and then to a more-than full time job that required an hour’s commute in each direction, plus occasional working weekends and deployments. His demeanor towards his family was like that of an Alzheimer’s patient………confusion, frustration and the occasional flat smile when he thought that maybe something was going well. His role in this is one of the great wonders of my life, and I’ve accepted that fact that I’ll likely never understand it.

No apologies, no values, and nurtured resentment.

Apologies weren’t a thing in our family; ever.  Not growing up and not to this day.  Apologizing is, and always has been a bad move. 

This is one of a few “things” that had a horrible effect on the 4 offspring of Brigid and Captain Enabler.  I used to assume that his Brigidesque behavior was just an expression of his infinite malleability; his soulless approach to life.  Brigid was capable of causing him more grief than anyone, and so he did whatever she wanted.  More recently however, I’ve had second thoughts.  A very resentful, smug narcissism lies beneath his nice-guy exterior, and perhaps this drew them to one another in the beginning.  He’s not an apologizer.  He’s one of those people who don’t really think they ever do anything wrong, and if it becomes obvious that they have, well, this might provoke a milquetoast “Hey, I probably coulda done that better or differently” admission.

Apologizing didn’t happen.  It was a very disadvantageous move for us kids when we were young.  An apology would set Brigid’s teeth on edge and cause her come at us harder.  And Brigid never apologizes.  To anyone.  I once heard her say “I probably could have been a little nicer to my kids”  That’s as much honest self-reflection as there is among the member of my biological family.

Among other things, apologies are acknowledgements of rules that we’re bound by, but there were no such rules in our home.  There was power and who had it…….a  nice arrangement for Brigid.  She had authority over us, and so never felt any need to apologize.  What good would that do her?  She assumes that everyone else thinks and acts like she does to some degree, and so imagines that others would respond to an apology as she would.

The emotional currency of this family is and always has been resentments.  Resentments are nurtured and utilized to excuse everyone from behaving decently to one another.  Shared resentments are also the primary bonding mechanism between family members.  Apologies diffuse resentments, and that’s not something any of us ever learned to do.  Resentments = power and safety and always have. Of the many ways that our understanding of relationships was warped by the insanity of our home, this was a big one.  Everything is power and who has it. 

Several years ago, I wrote in a blog on this page about the remarkable similarities between Brigid and her late skitzo brother.  I hypothesized that they are/were both stuck in the emotional world of a toddler.  Every aspect of their personality illustrates this.  Their often embarrassing expressions of self-praise and credit taking (the kind that make everyone in the room feel awkward), their shocking greediness, and their unwillingness to ever apologize.  Their understanding of human relationships works at this toddler level. 

I want to be told that I’M the best!  I was the best!  ME!  No, don’t blame me because that makes me feel bad!  I want more, not less, so why give anything to someone else?  Then I have less!

Their spoiled rotten upbringing (never scolded, never made to to anything, given everything they could ever ask for and more) never taught them how to be a part of a group.

In that blog, I also noted their intense love of films about same gender friends having a good ole’ time, giving each other good ole’ nicknames etc.  I didn’t fully grasp what was behind that 4 years ago, but have a much better sense of that now.  Those films portray a world of safe, connected symbiotic relationships that they’ve never known or had any idea how to form.

Both Brigid and her brother have “friends” but they fall into 1 of 2 categories.  Brigid’s closest friends in life have been hyper positive people who have lots and lots of very close friends, and are able to ignore and mitigate negativity.  They put Brigid in a better frame of mind, and in a couple of instances, have developed co-dependent aspects to their friendships.  Brigid is someone who can make others feel better about themselves in comparison, if they can figure out how to minimized the effect of her crazy.

Her brother was the same way.

They don’t really connect with others, and their inability to apologize is an expression of this.  Everything is MEMEMEMEMEMEM, on a very infantile level.  They are clumsy and childish narcissists, who’s crazy and ill intentions can be spotted a mile away by most.  They lack the savvy to be even remotely Machiavellian (save for Brigid’s insanity with us when we were kids) and get quickly sidelines or minimized in any group they’re in.

Apologizing isn’t a thing in among my biological family members and never has been.

The Downward Spiral

During my adult life, I’ve worked quite a few random jobs.  2 of these positions introduced me to a “type” of managerial behavior that leads to collapse.  It has very specific elements to it that I’ll do my best to explain here.  In both cases, the management team were husband/wife duos. One couple started a landscaping at snow removal business.  They’d been married for 12 years.  The second was a strange arrangement.  He married her and took her in as the #2 boss for an oil field parts supplier. 

First, let’s think of an ideal manager, with an understanding that nobody is ideal.  They’re not terribly emotional.  Upbeat and positive, yes, but they understand that big emotional displays of any kind will eventually be interpreted as lack of self-control.  If they have to write someone up, the write them up.  If firing is necessary, they fire them, with a……..

“Sorry it’s not working out.  Best of luck”

Because it’s bad to have resentful ex-employees around.  They set expectations and train.  They understand that they’re dealing with the same labor pool, potential customers and suppliers as their competition, and the goal is to know and maximize these variables. 

In both of the downward spiral management teams, the couples were driven hard by fantasies.  This was their brass ring.  They’d given up jobs elsewhere to make it big.  They had pictures of fancy houses or vacation spots on the wall.  That was the endgame.  That’s what they were entitled to.  But neither couple had any ability or even desire to manage.  They had an image of themselves as bosses……giving out orders while the company managed itself, although they didn’t see themselves that way.  They thought themselves great managers and wise in the ways of people.  They tried to manage by giving or taking favor from employees.  There was little to no training or accountability and in both cases, the managers would rarely work.  All employees would go through a cycle.  At first, we were loved and excused for any screw ups.  When it became apparent that we weren’t going to single handedly turn their company around, the downward spiral began.  The longer an employee stayed, the more negativity built up, even if their performance improved.  In both cases, the was a very strong “In group/out group” to the operation.  In group folks (new empolyees) weren’t blamed for anything.  The managers seemed to think that by bestowing favor upon them, it’d turn them into star performers.  In both cases, there were big boundary violations with employees…..monitoring them and their friends on social media, taking cell phone, putting GPS and secret cameras in places.  After things started going downhill, the primary emphasis was putting the blame on someone.  Both management teams fancied themselves psychology experts.  They’d talk and talk about their employees, diagnose them with whatever, and got to thinking that their job as managers was to dispense their conclusions onto their employees.  It wouldn’t surprise me if the folks at Harvard Business school have a name for this.  As things continued to collapse, these problematic behaviors intensified.  The “in group/out group” became stronger and paranoia set in.  Everybody had a sense that they decisions were being made that they weren’t in on……that was deliberate.

This describes my parents.  There was very little parenting or desire to form healthy relationships with their children.  Brigid believed that she was entitled to “smart jock” kids…….a woman who grew up playing no sports, no instruments (hardly did anything in fact.  Her lack of activity was so odd, it’s made me wonder if she was identified as a special needs kid) and received average grades, despite tremendous parental support.  Deal ole’ dad is far more self-absorbed and resentful than his outward appearance would suggest.  He was fine with the all-show nature of our family. To this day, even as his family has dissolved to mush, he’s happy if only everybody will get together for family photos.

They had the self-reflection abilities of a rock.  Doing things that built trust and bonds with their children hardly ever happened.  It wasn’t something they wanted to do, and so didn’t, and apparently couldn’t imagine how that might be a problem.  As things got worse, they isolated themselves from their kids more and more.  There was always weird things going on in the background behind a vail.  They both took to parenting by formalities like holidays, birthdays and vacations, voicing expectations, approval and disapproval.  That was about it. 

I know Hunter

The Hunter laptop bru-ha-ha struck a chord.  Of all the crazy angles to it, what stood out most was dumping it off at a pawn shop without taking 10 minutes to delete the hard drive.  This seems to be a pattern with him; impulsive behavior, little attention to details and lack of any forethought.  He was smart enough to make it through Georgetown, and then Yale law school, but couldn’t take the necessary 10 minutes to wipe the drive clean.

It’s worthwhile to really ponder that moment.  It was 2019.  Hunter was a multi-millionaire and certainly had name recognition. What’s the most amount of cash that someone could hope to receive from selling a laptop?  $600?  Selling anything to a pawn broker requires filling out a form and presenting a government issued I.D. and Hunter could have been certain that the purchaser knew who he was.  He also knew that the laptop contained compromising information.  It would have taken a few minutes to wipe the hard drive clean, and yet he went in there and pawned it for a few hundred bucks.

His half-sister Ashley seems to have left a remarkably revealing and damaging diary at a hotel.  I was skeptical of this story at first, but it seems to check out.  Ashley’s been open about her struggles with sex and drug addiction.

With the possible exception of George W, every American president since at least George the elder is/was very narcissistic. That isn’t surprising, as our system now favors unprincipled seekers of power and attention.  If I had to guess, I’d say that Joe is tops on that list.  He makes up stories about his past, claims personal credit for handing out government dough (“I gave them…”) and exhibits quite a few other remarkably self-absorbed behaviors.  Most of his political positions have changed, sometimes radically, since early in his career.  He’s a showman.  His current wife seems cut from the same cloth; insisting on the title “Dr.” for her education PhD (which ranks a notch below Jurist doctors of law, or lawyers).

Appearance is everything.  That was my childhood.  Conversations with my parents were invariably pretentious and strange.  Nothing was ever quite what it seemed, and there was always a background fuzz of quiet talks and things unsaid.  There were incessant lies and enforced narratives that were complete bullshit.  Even the rare “I love you”’s weren’t like those I’d hear my friend’s receive from their parents.  Everything was off.  It made the world and people in it seem like blurry characters behind wax paper.

Attention to details seemed and there was an ever present, if only subconscious desire to see it all collapse.  Risks and rewards seemed random and beyond my control.   I yearned for something genuine.

Sex with strippers and fun girls is real.  Sexual addiction is common among people who grew up in loveless homes.  Sex is visceral, simple, powerful and genuine.  The bonding is real and intense.  Drugs are real (although I never moved past marijuana).  Making weird videos of yourself doing weird things………it’s real.  It’s the dirt on the ground beneath it all.

Growing up in a home that’s centered around false images creates Hunter Biden type people.  He has a gaping hole in his soul and a strong desire to connect. I know Hunter.  I get how that went down

The time I ran away from home

A few years have passed since I’ve posted or even seen these wordpress blogs.  I’d forgotten the associated email account and figured all that could reasonably be accomplished by them, had been. They were a cathartic mess, and yet everything described therein was true.  Indeed, they greatly understated Brigid’s malevolent behavior, left out many staggering events I’ve since recalled and gave far too much credit to dear-ole’-dad, among other issues   It was  like the first few bricks in a dam giving way. Coming to understand your parents as crazy, underhanded and/or just bad people humans isn’t fun or easy.

I’m the oldest of 4 siblings, and all but the youngest have seen our lives fade into very limited and dark corners.  I’m trying to climb my way out of things and am have hope, even at the age of 47, that a real go of things is possible.  We 3 old look and behave as differently as can be reasonably expected of full siblings, but share a few traits in common

1. Learned helplessness – Buried deep in our nervous systems is a powerful sense that any goal or expectation is always the first step on a path to failure, shame and humiliation.  We all tried to break free of this and had a few years of success after leaving home, before our inability to make real connections with others or otherwise cope with a world we weren’t prepared for led to giving up.
2. Anger and Defiance – “Screw you! Leave me, fire me, take you can from me!  See if I care!  NO! Look how I can suffer and you still won’t get to me!”

Anyway…….this blog will describe an event from my younger years that illustrates the “next-level” narcissism of my Brigid, my mother, and the atmosphere of our home which gave life to these coping mechanisms.

When I was 7 years old, I ran away from home.  It wasn’t much of a run; just fleeing my friend’s home, about 1/3^rd of a mile away.  I packed the brown suitcase under my bed and left.  It was nighttime and dark outside.

I remember the relevant events of this episode vividly.  One evening, Brigid stood in my doorway and scolded me for not keeping a clean room.  She told me to move this and move that…….fold my clothes and put them here, and then there.  No matter what I did, there was more scolding and hollering………………and laughter. That’s right…laughter.   

These cathartic outbursts of Brigid often involved giggling when she’d provoked the defiance, lies, or fits that she was after.  That allowed her to launch into whatever Meryl Streepesque drama speech she’d been practicing in her head for days or weeks.

I finally stopped trying to clean my room, laid on the bed, yelled back and told her to go ahead and punish me.  There was a deck of UNO cards on my desk and I “threw” them on the carpet.  7 year old me didn’t have the guts to really throw them, or go into the kind of tantrum that Brigid fell into on a near daily basis, and so I neatly scattered the cards.  She saw this and laughed harder. Then I threatened to run away.

If you’ve never known what it’s like to be put into an emotional killbox by a parent at a young age – where they unleash their fury and let you know there’s not a damn thing you can do about it – there’s no way to really describe it.   Brigid let us all know, time and time again, that she was bound by no rules.  She was could whatever the hell she wanted. (more on this in future blogs)

She never helped or showed us to things.  Instead, expectations were given, followed by more insanity when they weren’t met. Brigid never made any attempt to make regular house chores (or anything else) a positive experience or happy routine in a happy home.  It certainly wasn’t a happy home.

Got a problem with my behavior kid?  Don’t think it’s fair, huh? Go ahead and complain, then  I’ll crack the whip even harder. There’s nothing you can do.  I do what I want and right now, I want to lay into you and feel like a boss.

My threat to run away provoked a long and intense laugh.  It wasn’t a chuckle.  She backed up against the door frame and held her stomach while she cracked up.  Brigid had gotten all that she wanted out of me that evening and more.

Over the next two days, she  contacted the parents of my friend and, I suppose, told them what was about to happe.  I didn’t see or hear that part, but my friend’s mother (an eccentric, bohemian artist type……..a rare species in Newtown) was expecting me when I arrived.  

The evening when I ran away, she provoked me into a fit again.  It was obviously planned.  All that was missing was my threat to run, and she went about getting it out of me with more yelling and threats of punishment until I did run away.  She chuckled again, told me to take out the brown crappy suitcase from under my bed and pack it, and so off I went.

Two cars stopped along the way and I think they were the only two.  The first was a man, who asked if I was alright and where I was going.  I said yes and he hesitantly kept driving.  The second was a couple.  They stopped, asked who I was, where I lived and where I was headed.  I tried not to cry but couldn’t help it, and said that I was running away to my friend’s house because I was angry at my mother. They mumbled something to one another, then asked how far away I was.  It was about 200 yards to my friend’s home at that point.  They turned their car around so that it’s headlights brought the road into view, then slowly followed until I arrived.

Brigid did this to create a story she could tell; one of her countless “Ya know what I told em’ doncha!?” tales where she gave whomever what for with one of her root-toot-tootin’ conversation finishers. She’d recite these to whoever was willing to listen, and seemed to think they were crafting an image in the minds of others:

Brigid the wonderful, yet strict and fun good-ole’-Iowa girl mom!

Her brother was the same way. They both thought they could craft their own reputations by telling stories. They both seemed to think that nothing could inspire awe, respect, and joy in others like telling stories where they were hero’s in the end. In one of the blogs from years ago, I speculated that they were both “trapped” in the the emotional development stage of 2 or 3 year olds. They thought and acted like toddlers, who anticipated their mothers bright smile and clapping hands when told of they day’s coloring project, and how great the teacher thought they did.

If Brigid thought she had an entertaining tale, she’d then go down her list of favored persons willing to listen to her endless gossip and advice……….one after the next, usually on the telephone after we went to bed.  The same dumb stories……….over and over and over and over. 

“Oh hey.  How are ya tonight? Great. So lemme’ tell ya about this one……..”

What an obnoxious person.

“So you know what I told em’ doncha?!” This was always said with a southern accent twang, as though she thought it would add additional comic relief to her already hilarious story.  The punchline was invariably followed by her weird cackle.

On a side note:  Throughout my life, I’ve noticed that people who laugh at their own jokes when no one else is laughing are almost always gossipy, resentful a**holes.  They seem to think that laughing at their own stuff raises the levity of a conversation and hides what’s usually a nasty barb they’re tying to jab at someone who isn’t there.

Since writing those blogs a few years ago I’ve spoken to a few people who knew Brigid from those years, and one was particularly helpful.  Almost everyone in our neighborhood thought she was crazy, obnoxious trailer trash.  7 year old kids running away from home at night, carrying suitcases, wasn’t something that happened in Newtown……..except for, well, Brigid.  It’s a middle-class to upper middle-class suburb.  Folks in Newtown life there for the peace and quite. It’s for people willing to forgo the culture and buzz of city life, or the quaint, familiar “everybody knows your name……and your parents and grandparents name” atmosphere of small towns. They live in Newtown in order to avoid people like Brigid.  She was so wildly out of place and her depth.  She didn’t belong there. 

The HBO show Sopranos touched on the issue of borderline personality disorder.  Brigid is so much like the character of Tony’s mother, only trashier, mouthier, more malevolent and even less self-aware.  Tony’s therapist, played by Lorraine Bracco, said something that flipped a switch in my head.  (paraphrased) “To people with borderline personality disorder, life is little more than an endless series of conflicts.  People aren’t much more than abstractions in their drama.”

I suppose The Soprano’s is off topic, but this is relevant. It was the first show that craft story lines around normal seeming people with quirks, talents, and flaws of everyday people. The character of Tony’s mother was obviously created by someone familiar with people of that sort. They were several flashbacks to Tony’s youth, where her nutty behavior was illustrated. In one scene, she kinda-not-too-serious exclaimed that smothering her children to death was preferable to moving to Vegas. In another, when Tony was asked to recall fun moments with her from his childhood, he remembered a time when a relative fell down the stairs and was injured, which made his mother laugh. And so the kids laughed as well.

Eureka! That. I felt that scene in my bones. Brigid rarely expressed joy, save for self-praise or when something bad happened to someone else. We laughed along with her, because it was so great to her happy at anything. If she’d laughed at seeing people skinned alive, I might now be asking a captive in the cellar to put the lotion in the basket.

Despite these crazy behaviors, Tony’s mother, on several occasions, would say things like….

“I can’t thing of a single really bad thing that I did. It was tough raising those kids, and I think I did a pretty damn good job”

In Brigid speak: “I had so much to deal with, but managed to be a wonderful mother”

Brigid doesn’t register any of the horrors her kids experienced while in her care, because they didn’t feel bad to her. Indeed, these are often happy memories to her. “Are you a glad mommy or a mad mommy?” I would ask her when I was 1 and 2 years old. While potty training, when I had a whoopsie, I’d run into a corner and hide. I was terrified, not just of Brigid, but of her tumultuous moods. I don’t remember life at 1, but know this because Brigid has told this story dozens of times to me since……..with a happy grin on her face. That’s who she is. Behavior that would horrify a sane, well socialized person is fun stuff to her.

Brigid could certainly be diagnosed with more sever and sinister personality disorders than borderline, but that absolutely describes her relationships to people. 

She tormented her kids because it made her feel good.  It gave her a sense of control and power that she found nowhere else.  Her ridiculous hee-haw puns, bizarre monologues, self-pity (for “Allllll that (she) had to deal with“), and gossip didn’t inspire the awe and appreciation in adults that she was looking for.  They mostly caused people to conclude she nuts.  But those psycho outbursts –which constituted almost all of the conversations (monologues) she had with us with any real emotional energy – squeezed a ton of guilt, shame, defiance and anger out of us kids.  It was like nectar to her squalid soul.

What a disgusting human being. 

The evolution of human culture and religion over the last 20,000 years, explained to you accurately by a bum (me) and better than any egghead professor has ever done.

This post will explain the basics of human cultural evolution and the origins of religions better than any priest, professor or scholar has ever done.

Seriously.

I’m basically a bum;  never finished college, and yet will really, truly,  outline the most important how’s and why’s of history,  and not in a cliche kinda way.

So……….

First, let’s consider that humans are animals.  Despite our relatively superior higher order reasoning, we are still subject to the same rules that govern all biological life on earth,  individually and collectively

The Dunbar number.  This is a critical.. It’s around 150. It represents the maximum number of people we can form tight relationships with. I’ve read a few theories about why our brains are wired in this way.  They’re ridiculous, because the theorists seem to have a tough time seeing humans as the animals that we are.  Nobody seems to have figured out what’s going on there and so, damnit, I guess I’ll have to do it.

150 represents a genetic “sweet spot”

Bear with me for a moment

This isn’t an intentionally provocative post, but the following might rub some the wrong way.

Oh well….

Every biological life form seeks to dominate the earth, maximize it’s genetic footprint and dominion over everything.  Even you, whether you realize it or not.  Even if you chant every day, to sync your energy with the universe, read tons of Wayne Dwyer and hope to find Zen (or the Tao or oneness with Jesus, or what have you) by losing your identify and will in the ether of it all………your genes are still trying to rule over all of creation.  As simple as this may sound, it’s a multivariable issue.

We’re social animals that reproduce sexually, and so need the assistance of others (womp womp, sad trombone), so our genes have evolved to pair with those LIKE us. That’s our instinctual desire, but only half of it. We want to reproduce with those like us, BUT (big but) we need some diversity in there. We’re wired to avoid mate selection with our siblings and immediate family………..but………..once you get beyond first cousins – 2nd, 3rd, 4th cousins – that seems to be the “sweet spot” This is how speciation happens; why species break off and form new species.  It’s why lions and tigers don’t mate with one another unless they’re in captivity. We crave maximizing those genes that are similar to ours. There’s exceptions within this rule. The “tall dark stranger” is likely a pretty ancient archetype, representing the stranger who is welcomed into a tribe. He serves a purpose. If he can prove himself, his “other” genes can be a long term benefit.

Now, someone might read this and say “oh no no no. Genetic diversity is healthy”  Yes, but that’s not the entire banana.   There’s no evidence that reproducing with your 30th cousin has any genetic advantage over reproducing with your 3rd cousin.

So the 150 Dunbar number represents the approximate size of tribes for an overwhelming majority of our evolutionary existence and here’s why:

Now we’re getting to the important parts…

For a tribe to survive, you need high levels of altruism. You need people who are willing to gather more berries, or vegetables, or firewood than they consume. You need hunters who aren’t going to steal the beast they kill and eat it all themselves.  For the tribe to thrive, it’s members must be willing to self-sacrifice. You need the guy on night lookout to yell and warn of of an attack, even if that means he gets killed. You need altruism.

Another way to look at that:  Tribes that evolved higher levels of in-group altruism among it’s members outcompeted those with less.

And this worked well in the 150 person range, extending out to apx. 3rd cousins.  There would have been some tension. Sure, I’d prefer that my dad be the tribal chief instead of my second cousin, but I’m OK with my second cousin. He’ll look out for me and my family.  I might get a little irate that he’s giving more stuff to his kids than to us, but that’s OK. I might marry one of his daughters, so it’s good. I’m OK with that arrangement. 150. That’s my crew. We’re in this together. If I’m the arrow head maker or I cure the meat, I’m willing to work overtime for my crew because we’ve gotta survive and their fate it my fate.

But now……..

Let’s say that the tribe expand and my 4th cousin becomes chief. Hmmm. Hmmm. He’s less like me. The odds of me marrying his daughter aren’t all that good, and I’m definitely seeing a smaller cut from the take-home carcasses than I was when my 2nd cuz was boss. The aforementioned tensions become enflamed as folks beyond that inner, 150 clan become less sure that their altruism is a good investment, and so the tribe splits. I’ll take my crew over that way, and maybe that will create conflict over the herd of deer we’re tracking (or whatever).

But now we’re back to around 150.  Altruism is restored. I’m now more motivated to perform. I’m less concerned that I’m not getting my fair take from Mr. 4th cousin tribal chief man.

With me so far?

That process repeated itself thousands of times through our existence as hunter gatherers.  Primates – chimps, orangutans, gorillas – despite being wired for a smaller “dunbar number” exhibit those same grouping-up and splitting behaviors for the same reasons.

Now, back when humans were doing this 150-then-split thing, “religion” was likely just the admiration of ancestors.  They were idealized, but probably not worshiped.

“Great grandpa Uff was a great tracker of the deer and brought us to this land! We should live in his footsteps and traditions,” humans would think and say, but he likely wasn’t worshipped as a giver of thunder or fire.

You can imagine a guy giving a toast at the monthly. He’d make the first cut in the meat JUST LIKE our ancestor Uff did, and in doing this, was remembering him……….but that guy wasn’t a “priest”. He was just passing along traditions.

But then……..something important happened……..

Larger groups were outcompeting smaller ones. Groups who had more specialized tool makers.  Arrow and spear head production by specialty castes were producing many more and better arrowheads, even on a per capita basis. Bigger hunting crews, where each guy had a specialty role, could bring down bigger and more game. Once the transition to agriculture began, this specialization and success of progressively larger family groups accelerated.

With me?

Larger, more specialized groups WON.  They outcompeted smaller tribes.  

As plots of land were being more rigorously protected (and that was happening well back into the paleolithic…….sorry yippy skippy twue human way believers).  People who who were exceptionally good at building walls or digging wells now had a place, even if they weren’t so great at clubbing dear or their enemies.  Armies with more specialized groups of archers, spearmen etc. started to win the day. They were more successful……

But…..

They were moving past the 150 dunbar number.  They began to tribe up in the thousands, beginning around 50,000 years ago.  Larger, less closely related groups of people were then living under the same political tent.

So how did the problem of my 4th cousin being chief get solved? Or 5th or 6th cousin? I don’t really know those guys. I want MY clan in charge. How was that problem solved?

Well, it wasn’t solved entirely. Clan competition exists to this day.  In medieval Europe, aristocratic houses fought with one another and broke off when relations became too distant. In Rome, clans fought for power even at the level of guys on the street.

So it wasn’t solved entirely….

BUT, you were still able to get these larger groups of people working together…..became religion became more intensive.

That’s right. Highly ritualized religion was able to provide the necessary glue, and keep people together who would otherwise tear one another apart.

The guy who used to cut the meat, just like Grandpa Uff did at the feast, was now the priest and repeating more ancient traditions. Those people over there may be my distant, distant cousins, but our great-great-great-great-GREAT grandfather was the same guy, and he started to take on far more divine powers. He wasn’t just a good guy who knew how to track deer. He was DIVINE and he’s still looking down on us sternly, to make sure we all obey his rules. We are his descendants.

The increased ritual nature of religion kept people together. Circumcision was a great example of this.  That guy may be my distant cousin, and if we were hunting and gathering, I might not be real happy with how he split up the felled mastodon. I might even start a little civil war over that, but we became “brothers” in larger tribes with more ritualized religions after undergoing the same rituals,  taking part in the same ceremonies and worshiping the same gods.

Ritualized religion proved SUCCESFSFUL in the game of resource competition. It proved to be a successful mechanism for bonding larger groups of people together.

Those of you who think in terms of how illogical or oppressive a religion might be are missing the bigger picture. There’s a reason why no atheist, purely rational based culture ever won out.  People are not co-operative by nature beyond a certain level of kinship.  In fact, we’re wired to be ruthless and lethal when dealing with folks not within our immediate clan.

When grouping up went beyond the dunbar number, a glue was needed to maintain altruism, and religion provided it. The bigger the group, the more intense the religion had to be.

Discussing childhood emotional abuse can feel pathetic

I’ve spoken to quite a few victims of childhood abuse and heard some horrible stories. Rape at the hands of people who were supposed to be protecting them, severe and arbitrary beatings, malnourishment, being left in the care of random and predatory people, having to sleep in horrible places and other things that are difficult for me to imagine. Emotional abuse can be much harder to pin down and might be even be thought vague. Furthermore I’m a grown man. It feels pathetic and on top of it all, my ideas of “abuse” are not modern. I’m not a Dr. Spok advocate or someone who thinks that making your kids feel bad is necessarily abuse. I’m not even sure that parents who beat their kids in bygone years were abusing them. It was a different time and kids had to be acclimated to harsher conditions.

Speaking about my emotional abuse feels a little pathetic, even though the abuse was extreme; even though what I experienced and witnessed as a kid was horrific.

I’ll alienate a few millenials here….. Much of what I hear from that generation about abuse makes me roll my eyes. Of course, this is a minority but still. Spoiled and coddled kids seem much more likely to claim emotional abuse than anyone. Some of the stories I hear from them are ridiculous (some). Not having every word or action “validated” doesn’t seem like abuse to me. Kids need discipline. Discipline, structure and “no” are not abuse. to my way of thinking.

From the time I was 6 years old (and likely earlier) my mother would throw raging, thrashing, teeth bearing fits at us kids. She’d scream so loud her voice would crack. I witnssed hundreds of these outbursts from her when I was young. They were more extreme and violent than any outbursts I have ever seen from anyone since. There was no structure or discipline in our home, only punishments meant to maximize shame. She’d stand in our doorways and torment us for hours before we were old enough to read. She’d tell me how terrible it was that I forgot my coat and school and how poor we were. (we werne’t poor) She’d torment my sister for her weight.

I’ve heard abuse described as defining kids by their faults and using it as a reason not to parent. That sounds right. What do you call standing in our doorways and berating us for hours until we were in tears over ] trivialities? Trivialities that were certainly connected to the atmosphere in our home.

She would scream at the top of her lungs at us kids for……..fighting with one another. She’d claim she couldn’t take it anymore; that we were such nasty children. She would scream at and torment us for screaming at and tormenting one another. We behaved torwards one another as she behaved torwards us. And she was able to see herself as the victim in this.

It’s hard to explain the mind warping nature of our household or how radically different it was from our peers. It’s only well into my adult years that I have been able to come to terms with how completely psychotic our childhood home was.

Growing up, it hardly occurred to me that our mother was anything other than the amazing, superior woman she ceaselessly claimed to be. It is only with time and distance from my family that I’m able to accurately see her for what she was and is – A fairly “trashy” woman, who’s only interests were gossiping, feuding, smoking her cigarettes, telling self-aggrandizing stories, watching her soap operas and berating her children.

The worst part of it was the illusion of normalcy (and even superiority) I wasn’t able to conceptualize how horrible her treatment of us was. I knew nothing else but anger, rage, feuding, cutting into people, beratting those closest to you, making a spectacle of yourself and putting on a display for hohlidays and other public events (wearing nice clothes to church etc) That was ideal behavior to my childhood mind.

I was “encouraged” to stay outside of our home well before I was 5 and ended up in some horrible situations with older kids. When dad wasn’t home (which was often) our house was a complete insane asylum but that is all that I knew.

There was literally NO affection from our mother, save awkward hugs and smiles she’d give when relatives were around. If she didnt know perfectly well that her behavior towards her children was abusive, she knew others would see it that way if they could and I’ve come to understand that the different to her is irrelevant. She has always felt enttitled to treat her kids like garbage and project an image of herself as caring mother. She even feels entitled to our complicity in her decipt and P.R.

There was no help with homework, save for when parental help was necessary with projects. None. But endless “talking to” about hwo disappointed she was, how other kids made their parents proud etc etc….this from a woman who was an average student and non athlete herself. She thought she’d have “two kids and they’d be smart jocks” Our average scholastic performance was probably pretty impressive given our circumstances.

Nothing was ever enough. Nothing was ever sufficient. Time with my mother when no one was looking, was either expressions of dissatisfaction (often extreme and hostile) or tales of how fantastic she was. All of it. There was either distant contempt or aggressive hostility. Those were the only two modes. There were no other modes. She despised her children and learned to dispise us more with every car ride and diaper change she “had” to do. Any accomplishment was treated like a good start, on our road to be something approaching the all-American children she had a god given right to…..and I couldn’t WAIT to give her credit when anything good happened. I couldn’t WAIT to tell her what a wonderful mother she was or how righteous was her indignation at anyone and everyone she was doing battle with.

She hated when we were in the house as we interuppted her phone gossip and would bother her with our needs so we were encougraged to be out of it as much as possible. When we were there, it was in front of the T.V. or in our rooms. She hated us ever being home from school (and said this to my dad explicitly. She sent my sister and I to school with active staff infections on our face. We were held in the nurses office until she game to get us. Being sick invariably made her angry. Failure or trouble invariably made her angry. Everything made her angry and contemptous. Success would be met with her self-praise as a “wonderful mother” We heard that phrase more times than I could count and believed it. We had a “wonderful mother” and were so beneath both her and her expectations.

She broke her kids completely. Of us 4, one has a somewhat normal life while the oldest 3 (me included) never got off the ground as adults. We have few to no friends, sporadic job histories, horrible romantic relationships (or in the case of my two sisters….none at all), credit problems, addictions.

The emotional needs of our mother was and is the locus of energy in our family. It’s the “Reverse Parenting” phenomenon to an extreme degree. She is a sadistic woman, who enjoyed breaking her children. Help with homework, “bonding” time, kind words etc did not exist when we were children. At all. I’d estimate that our mother spent 30+ hours per week feuding. The amont of time she spent gossiping on the phone was extraordinary. On top of this, she’d make cassette recordings of more gossip by the dozens and mail them out. She fought with with everyone; relatives, neighbors, clergy, parents of friends and a substantial percentage of people she came into contact with. She wouldn’t just argue. She’d obsess.

I’m 42. I have a tested IQ of 128. I’ve seen well over a dozen therapists and none have labeled me psychotic. I understand what is going on. I’m not delusional. No psychologist has suggested I’m sociopathic or narcissistic. Despite having done some horrible things in my life, I am literrally crippled by guilt, every minute of the day. I don’t do well meeting the needs of others because I don’t feel capable; instead, holing up in my corner of the world and trying to meet a few of my own needs while causing as little harm as possible (and often failling) I’m attractive (excuse my immodesty) tall and in very good shape and yet I have no life to speak of.

This “giving up” on life also describes 2 of my other 3 sibblings. We have absolutely failed to thrive and for the same reasons. We are unable to connect with the world around us in a healthy way.

Since complete seperation of from my family, my head has cleared up some. I’m more reserved. I act appropriately. I’m less impulsive. I dont’ feel that the slightest misset on my part will lead to certain doom (I still struggle with that) It’s as though the “spirit” of my mother has started to leave me and I’ve been able to see that outlines of what the demon was….and compensate for it.

But I digress. The point I wanted to make with this post is how difficult emotional abuse is to resolve. It’s much easier to understand someone who was beaten regularly as a child than “mom was mean to me” It feels a little pathetic to say. The pain I have caused others is my fault. They aren’t obligated to compensate me for my upbringing. They aren’t obligated to cut me slack. Emotional abuse is so damn difficult to come to terms with. It has been for me anyway.

And it’s difficult to discuss. It’s difficult to discuss how mind warping our home was and is. I feel pathetic when I do it.

Part 10. Perception, random examples of insanity and random thoughts.

I want to do a somewhat random post today. All of this is emotionally difficult to write (as I’ve said repeatedly) and I can rarely do more than a few paragraphs at once. Some of the family anger and resentment comes back to me, even if I’m only thinking about it. We’ve all been emotionally trained to never even THINK something bad about Brigid, lest hellfire rain down upon us and I’m sure a bit of that sense still lingers. This is tough but therapeutic.

I don’t like ranting and just recounting the crazy and abusive things I’ve experienced and seen from Brigid. I prefer to think of specific things and tie it into a larger picture. I intend to that in this post and speak of perceptions that Brigid and other members of our family have, but this post is moderately ranty anyway.

I want to describe a mother I’ve heard about. I’ll call her P

She used to scream and yell at hear kids all the time. She’d emotionally torment them. She’d stay at home while they were at school and brood. She’d smoke, watch soap operas and maybe run a few errands but she’d brood. She was always going over the problems she had with others in very very intense ways. It’s what P would think about when she woke up in the morning and she’d continue obsessing all day.

Maybe her husband had said something to her, that indicated her kids had complained to him. This made her angry. They were trying to get between them, she’d decide. Maybe one had problems in school and wasn’t performing well. Maybe one hadn’t done their chores correctly. She’d brood and brood all day. Then they’d come home. Her anxiety would go up just as soon as they came in the door. They’d have so much weird stuff to say and all of the things about them that bothered her would come to mind and make her angry. After spending all day brooding, literally everything they did was bothering her. One tried talking to her and she couldn’t stand it. Didn’t they have something better to do? They should be better kids; better students or better athletes. Eating her food. They were basically ungrateful parasites and disappointments.

All of this stuff was bothering her but she had to find a reason to really go at one of them. She’d really been thinking of her daughter’s willfullness. She was so stubborn. So P decided to walk upstairs and go to her room. It was locked but P had brought her screwdriver to pop it open. There she stood in the door, looking around at all the things she didn’t like. Then she tore into her

“I need to talk to you about a few things” she’d say, in the kind of voice you might see on T.V., when the police detective had just discovered his partner was taking bribes. It started with a low, serious, soloum tone and then she opened up witih her anger and rage. Her daughter would say she’d do better at school but that wasn’t enough. Next it was her weight and how she knew she was eating more than she should. P thought about the little fight she got into with dad the night before. He’d “felt sorry” for his daughter. “Oh boo, hoo” P thought. That brat

15 minutes. 20 minutes. Her glances of disgust, then turning her head to the side with shakes, as if to say she didn’t know what was to be done about this mess. She let her use the car but may have to rethink that.

After berating her for a good hour, her daughter began to cry and P would try to hide a grin. “Shows her right.
,” she thought. Maybe she’ll think twice before complaining to dad or telling him something that might bother him. Her daughter’s tears only wet her appetite for more. She continued until she was a sobbing mess

OK. So I’m obviously talking about Brigid but wanted to give some distance. If a mother like that was described to someone in our family, they would agree that this was a sick, manipulative and abusive mother. There’d be no question. In fact, my eldest sister could describe the layers of abuse at work in this theoretical scenario. (She studied psychology) If this was a cousin or friend of ours, tears would probably follow. Indeed, Brigid herself would likely act shocked and horrified to hear about a mother treating her kids that way. If she became aware of someone treating their kids like that, it’s very possible that she would do something big and dramatic. Huge amounts of gossip and feuding would certainly follow.

What I have described was a very, very common occurrence in our home. Something closely approximating that very scenario played itself out more times than I could estimate (certainly in the hundreds of times)

I can’t say for absolute certain how Brigid thinks back on those events but I can say for *almost* certain.

The unhinged, crazy, angry emotional predator doesn’t think they are unhinged, crazy or emotionally predatory. They see themselves as victims. The crazy guy on the street corner who shakes his fist at everyone and yells at them thinks they all deserve it. When they avoid him, he tells himself that they are scared of him because he is intimidating and they cannot handle the truths he directs at them. The person who slams their horn in traffic believes they are stronger than the people who wait patiently. They think they are more “raw” and “intense” I’ve talked to enough of these people to understand how their minds work.

When our childhood is called to mind, what Brigid thinks of is “all that she had to deal with,” the phrase we’ve heard over and over and over. Every personality quirk of ours, every problem, every thing she had to do. That is what she thinks of. Every fight that broke out between her kids or with her, is remembered as yet another trial and hardship The fact that she started those fights doesn’t occur to her. The fact that she had 4 healthy children who were desperately seeking her affection and approval, and who behaved very well for others doesn’t get factored in. She had “so much to deal with” It is such an absurd axiom in our home. The cult of poor Brigid.

Brigid’s late brother was exactly the same way. Positing themselves as heros and victims in all circumstances is a starting point of everything. Every feud they engaged in was obviously merited

When Brigid did things like walk up to the alter and chastise a priest during mass for not mentioning her son’s name as she thought he should have, or of screaming at her father-in-law in her own home, over a religious dispute that she started out of nowhere, she thinks of strength. She was “strong” and “determined” enough to do that. The wild inappropriateness of her behavior doesn’t compute, nor does how others may be responding to her insanity. Like the crazy fist-shaker on the corner who watches people walk out of their way to avoid him, so Brigid believes that those who take issue with her outbursts are just weak.. Brigid can understand the crazy person throwing fits as crazy but cannot see herself that way. The fact that she caused these disputes doesn’t register. She is unable to imagine how her kids were absorbing this rage and responding to her. She cannot conceive of how she victimized her children.

Didn’t her daughter eat more than she should have? Well……..OK, maybe she shouldn’t have been *quite* that mean about it but whatever. “GEEEEEET over it,” because Brigid is a “GOOD OLE IOWA GIRL!”, never minding that she gets over absolutely nothing and hordes grievances against people like it’s her reason for living.

“Maybe” she’ll say to herself “I shouldn’t have yelled THAT loud,” but what was she supposed to do? Should she have allowed the priest to continue mass without mentioning her son’s name in the rundown of that weeks events that few were even paying attention to? What option did she have? She certainly wasn’t going to be one of those wimps in the pews who’d just sit there and take such a monsterous personal insult as that! She is strong. She is Mombo. She is the goodoleIowagirl. Should she not have called the grocery store and complained about a swear word she heard from an employee when they were talking? Should she not have blasted away at this or that person? When her brother was behaving in ways she didn’t like 1,200 miles away, was she supposed to NOT spend hours on the phone, gossiping and complaining to everyong and freaking out over everything?

Let me share another story from about 10 years ago. My parents and I were having another one of our fights. Me vs. The United Front. The conversations I have had with both parents at once have been almost invariably awful, all throughout my life. In this one, I brought up my belief that I didn’t think we ever had a healthy parent/child relationship. Brigid discussed my senior year in high school, where I’d done well and won a bunch of awards. “What about high school of those awards you won?” she asked “We were so proud of you” she said, in a very particular way that she’ll say such things, with a scrunched face, tragically looking off into the distance and tears.

According to Brigid, we had a good parent/child relationship because I was doing enough to make HER happy. That is how she sees everything. I was doing enough to make HER happy. The idea of the parent (her) being the primary driver of health or illness in a parent/child relationship never crossed her mind and hasn’t to this day. The idea that she had a primary hand in the problems we had at the time? ha! GEEEEET OVER it, says the GOOD OLD IOWu girl. Assessing herself and how her behavior was effecting her kids and grading herself on that scale? Not a chance. Her mind does not work that way. The wiring isn’t there. We had a good relationship for awhile because I was making her proud

You certainly wouldn’t have known that at the time. She fought with me relentlessly. When I started developing a muscular physique, she one time came down to the basement as I was doing pushups and yelled/cried at how upset she was that I was getting strong “I don’t LIKE IT!’ she exclaimed. Life with Brigid is a regular flow of such mind blowing neurotic moments. In her incessant push to keep me and my dad at odds, she’d drive my car the few times he put gas in it. His doing kind things really bothered her and she’d let me know it. There was still 0 help with homework and no involvement in school. When I was doing well and winning awards, she once ordered me into the kitchen and said (paraphrasing but almost exact)

“You know, I know you’re feeling really great about all those awards you won but your dad and I deserve lots of credit for that. I hope you realize that and don’t get too big of a head”

She was bothered by my increased self esteem and sense of accomplishment. That bothered her.

As was the case throughout the rest of my childhood, pleasant, encouraging interaction with Mombo was 0 then. Life with her during my later high school years was hostile, feuding nutcase city. I ran cross country and was average but one time….somebody told her they thought I ran like a deer.

“We finally found something you do well” she told me. “We’ had found something. This, coming from someone with no athletic prowess at all. She told me that while growing up, she thought she’d have “Two kids and they’d be smart jocks” The B/C high school student who barely made it through nursing school and was never good at sports was entitled to smart jock kids and apparently, we needed to understand what a disappointment we were to her.

These are only a few of the examples of the level 10 insanity that defined my relationship with her during my later high school years but we supposedly had a good relationship because I was making her happy. This is how Brigid sees every relationship in her life. What are they doing for her? Her “favorite” kid would change based upon who was accomplishing the most and the others would be made to feel envious.

I was able to accomplish things IN SPITE of her. I was accomplishing things because I’d made friends and had a romantic relationships with a girl at camp. I had found a few people who LIKED ME and who VALUED ME. This filled me with a great (if very chaotic and unwieldy) sense of self and that translated into performance. My Freshman year in high school, I was taking remedial classes. Below average classes and getting B,C’s and even a D or two. By my senior year, I was taking almost entirely honor’s level classes and getting almost straight A’s. I missed High Honors once, only because of an inexplicable C I got in accounting (and my teacher never bothered explaining it to me)

During this period, her parenting advice to others went into absolute overdrive. She was the mother of the century. I heard the term “wonderful mother” incessantly. Her kid (me) had won a bunch of awards in Junior Achievement and did well in school. She apparently decided that she was now an aristocrat. I once saw her walk up to the mother of my classmate in church and comment that she was mildly jealous because her kids made the paper more often that we did. It was said in a chummy sort of way, as though they were peers; trading nods at what it’s like to have superior kids. The woman I’m referring to has 4 children, 3 of whom went to Harvard and the 4th to UNC on a track scholarship. All 4 were state champion athletes and the 4th was a national champion. They all graduated at or near the top of their classes. There should be a photo of Brigid next to “Uppity” in the dictionary. It’s only with age and distance that I’m able to see what an obnoxious, neurotic and embarrassing person she is. That was my “normal” growing up. That was the adult in my life, setting the example.

What I have described is obviously a narcissistic sociopath and emotionally abusive mother. OBVIOUSLY. This is another “water is wet” argument but that is not how Brigid sees herself. Narcissistic sociopaths think they’re fantastic. Brigid doesn’t care how she effects others. That’s a strong statement to make but it’s the absolute truth. Worse than that, she enjoyed emotionally smashing her kids. I witnessed enough of her chuckling after we’d break down in tears from her beratement to call that a safe conclusion. She got a charge from emotinoally breaking her children. To the degree that she cared about hurting her children, she liked it.

If a divine and all knowing presence were to come to her and say

“Brigid, you have been an horrific mother to your children. You have behaved in perverse and unnatural ways toward your own offspring. They have suffered far worse from you than you have ever suffered from them. You should be ashamed and beg their forgiveness”

She wouldn’t care. She’d only care if this divine and all knowing presence was going to let anyone else in on that knowledge. Despite her endless raging and abuse; her making up horrible stories about her kids and telling them to others because she was pissed, endless chastising. complete lack of anything motherly, not even looking after her 5 year old kid….letting me wander around and get watched after by creeps and all of the other insanity she subjected us to……she would not care. I have never once seen her express remorse. I’ve seen her often bothered by getting caught but never sadness that she had caused harm.

Despite all of her insanity and harm, I can only recall her apologizing to anyone once……I’ve described this incident elsewhere, where she was shouting at me for something that I absolutely didn’t do and was able to prove that I absolutely didn’t do. She grudingly apologized and then took my car from me the next day over something ridiculously trivial, then told me “and you made ME apologize yesterday”

Brigid doesn’t apologize. She’s that type. She’s a GOOD OLEEEE IOWA girl and apparently, good oleiwu girls don’t apologize when they mess up. Everyone else is supposed to GEEET over it. Grudges, anger and the like and hers and hers alone.

Brigid and D both require a “clique” of people around them who are emotionally subjugated to their insanity. The roll my grandmother played in the life of D is exactly the same as my siblings and dad play in Brigid’s life. It’s essentially identical. Even if they don’t join in with her insane feuding, they try to be as sympathetic and “on her side” as possible. She was and is an epic failure as a mother and horribly abusive to her children but……OBVIOUSLY. As I’ve said before, a professional psychologist would come to essentially the same conclusions I have, but her family excuses her. She is held to almost no standards of behavior. My sibblings trip over themselves to be sympathetic to her. I still feel that impulse. It’s very difficult for me to step back and look objectively at how she has behaved throughout my life because the impulse is very strong to forgive and forgive, or at least see all that she has done within the context of something good. “She does her best” is the phrase her kids most often use. When consideering her behavior during our childhood, terms like “She was just really busy” and such are common.

It’s an objectively absurd and enabling/victim type of thinking. Brigid wasn’t so busy that she couldn’t spend hours per week fighting with her kids and many hours more gossiping and feuding elsewhere. She didn’t like her kids. That was the problem. She hated being a mother and blamed her children. She felt “trapped” with the responsibilities of raising her kids and she wasn’t even able to face that reality head on. A cult of personality was necessary to compensate for her failure. She wasn’t bad. She wasn’t even average……….no, she was a superior mother and we all must subscribe to the cult or face the consequences. Despite being told how horrible we were and everything was, there was never any family therapy because Brigid knew darn well that a therapist would see her as the problem. She didn’t care if she was the problem.

And she didn’t “do her best” unless “her best” is synonmous with “whatever she felt and feels like”

Like those around her late brother, the slightest examples of good and decency by Brigid are made to seem AMAZING.

She has brutalized everyone into dealing with her that way and this is the biggest root of disfunction in our family. Nobody is allowed to come to terms with how abused they were and only one of us have shown any ability to thrive outside the toxic greenhouse of our youth. The atmosphere of our family necessitates that Brigid be seen as the hero and victim, who’s approval is the greatest thing one can hope for. Stepping outside of that paradigm means stepping outside of the familiy.

Part 9 The appearance of normalcy. The worst and most damaging part of our childhood.

So far, this writing has taken up 10 or so hours of my time and I suspect will cost me another 20. Piecing this all together is a process. Describing the insanity of my mother and our childhood home in one sitting is impossible and I suspect that this blog wil evolve and be edited over many years as I remember more and make better sense of it all.

I’m sure this writing seems scattered, random and strangely paced and likey will for the first several months after publishing or longer. The volume of insanity I’ve experienced from Brigid is very hard to put down coherently. Drawing conclusions would have little credibility without touching on some of what I’ve experienced and yet, discussing only some of them (as I’m doing) creates what looks like a rap-sheet or tattle-tale rant. Adding to it all: This is emotionally difficult to write, much less write coherently. But it cannot be otherwise. It would take a detached, omni&ever present observer of our family over the course of 4 decades to write a smooth narrative and I am no such thing. My personal biases and bitterness, and even overcompensating for these things in parts have certainly worked their way into this story so far.

For quite some time, I’ve been relatively certain that the most damaging part of our childhood was not our mother’s neurosis and abuse. That may be hard for someone to swallow who’s read up to this point. It was an atmosphere so toxic that a hollywood scriptwriter couldn’t make it up.

Over time, what was most damaging to us kids was the appearance of normality. With a few exceptions, Brigid was careful to never do anything (or miss anything) that would have provoked serious intervention. Social workers weren’t a thing in the suburbian Newtown of the 1980’s.

The innumerable, raging, teeth bearing outbursts at us while we were still toddlers isn’t the behavior of a normal mother having a bad day. The complete lack of affection, touching (the good kind anyway), assistance and all the normal things mothers do, wasn’t normal. Feuding constantly with her children, then feuding more on the phone for hours per week, then adding to the feuding with her audio recordings, then feuding with our dad and a significant percentage of the people she came into contact with……

Not normal at all, or anything other than terrifically abnormal.

but……

We lived in a nice home with a nice yard. Our father had a good and respectable job. Their friends were also middle or upper-middle class people, as were most of our relatives. We went to a good school. There were cars to take us where we needed to go and all the trappings of a normal life.

We would have been better off, having grown up in a trailer park and going to a lousy school. We would have been forced to come to grips with the abnormality of our situation. We would have understood that there were better things to strive for than our circumstances. We could have made sense of ourselves as kids in difficult circumstances often do. Limited or haphazard structure that was obviously limited or haphazard, would have been a far better thing than the emotional pressure cooker of psychosis that Brigid delivered, capped and sealed tight by an outward appearance of normal.

More than just normal, we were told repeatedly how great we had it. Stories of other parents behaving terribly filled the air and occupied our time on car rides. We had “Mombo,” the slayer of evil and enforcer of good throughout the land. I can’t speak for my siblings but I’m as certain as can be that they can relate to what I’m describing.

We didn’t live in a household with a mentally ill, highly narcissistic child abuser. We lived in a oasis of privilege and fortune. The screams and psychotic, arbitrary emotional scenes must have been merited and just and good, because there was our nice home and dad with a good job. There was our nice school.

And there was our mother, Brigid, both hero and victim, striving valiantly to correct endless wrongs in the world. How fortunate we were.

. Individual human behavior may be unpredictable but how people behave in groups rarely is. Cult-of-personality dictators and cult leaders behave the way they do for reasons. The rest of the world must be evil to justify the subjugation. They must be under constant threats, both from home and abroad for their brutality to be accepted. The world they create for their subjects must be superior to all things or their violence has no meaning. There must be constant surviellance, information gathering and a power structure that is absolutely beyond reproach. It can be no other way when the leader sees all things as theirs and existing for their greater glory.

Autocratic political systems have long been a fascination of mine. I even understand their benefits. I know why the people of Rome turned on Caesar’s assassins who hoped to restore the republic. I understand the slavish devotion people had to the great Khan or Chairman Mao and I understand why they needed parades and marches and great, theatrical displays of grandeur. I know why rulers do these things on a very fundamental level.

Unfortunately our brutal cult leader was a petty and insane woman of mediocre intelligence who lashed out anyone she thought was unable to return fire.

Our home was North Korea, plopped in the middle of 1980’s America.

For anyone seeking to understand the crazy of our home, this was the most important thing. Had we grown up in an outwardly broken home, had Brigid left and gone back to Iowa (as she discussed fantasising about out the phone) had our parents been divorced, had we seen social workers or come face to face with the pathology and addiction, I am 100% sure that we would be leading better lives today, as traumatic as all that might have been at the time.

It would have been far better to know that we were being fed poison; to KNOW that it was poison and do what we could…..and what children from broken situations have always done………to seek out other things. This certainly wouldn’t have been ideal. A nurturing, healthy home is ideal but an easily identified broken situation is better than what we had. We gorged on the Toxic sludge well into our adult years and thought it was manna from heaven. In a way, it was the worst of all possible outcomes.

This is the part that I struggle with emotionally. I hate self pity. When talking to other victims of child abuse, I hear stories of really horrible things and I’ve drawn a “theory” that I cannot find any study data on. The earlier they were able to figure out that their circumstances were bad, the better off they are.

I’ve spoken to people who were beaten, raped and slept in the other room while someone killed themselves in the next…..really awful stuff. Trying to explain the horrible effects of our prolonged “garden of eden” view of our family and how much this added to the psychosis is difficult and makes me feel petty. I never heard anyone kill themselves in the next room. I never starved. I was never passed around in foster care……….

None of us have ever been allowed to come to grips with the broken home we grew up in; instead, choosing to see this toxic greenhouse as somehow good.

Collectively, our family has the conscious of the completely insane person, who has experienced so much failure that they are unable to avoid admitting that SOME things about themselves may not be perfect. “Yea, I’ve got a few problems. I’m not perfect” says the bi-polar predator who’s been in jail 6 times and has 12 restraining orders against them…………..before discussing how they have been victimized by everyone and are in their own way, really superior. This is the collective conscious of our family…..unable to grasp the extremes of what we have gone through or how radically different it was than what our friends and peers experienced.

Part 8. The remarkable similarities between my mother and her schizophrenic brother

Note: I’ll refer to Brigid’s deceased brother as D. D died a few years ago but I’ll refer to their similarities in the present tense (“are” instead of “were” etc) During the course of my childhood, my siblings and I were treated to more discussions about her oldest brother than I could estimate. In the mid 80’s, he had moved back in to live with his mother (our grandmother) and stayed there until his death a few years ago. The tension between them put an end to our summer visits after I was 9 years old.

He was horrible we were told. He was a parasitic narcissist. He was a liar and a cheat. She wasn’t beyond lying when running him through the mud to us. (A habit of hers with anyone she feuds with, including her children) She once told me that Santa Clause had given him coal for Christmas. He slept with prostitutes and loose women. She would spend hours on the phone with friends and relatives, talking about D. Her problems with him were a centerpiece of conversation in our home. Out of nowhere, she’d launch into anti-D tirades. I remember once eating breakfast, when Brigid suddenly said “Ya know, I know you’re supposed to love your relatives. That’s so important, but I DON’T love D (said with a signature shout and a pained look on her face). I DON’T!!!” followed by tears. These kinds of random outbursts about people she was feuding with were a staple of our household when dad wasn’t around but nobody was spoken of more than D

After my first divorce, I went on one of many loser adventures and ended up living with him and my grandmother for three and a half years. I quickly realized: He and Brigid were strikingly similar people. At the very least, their “quirks,” or unusual personality traits were startlingly similar.

They both have had limited to no success in living independently at any point in their lives (a characteristic I share) They were both doted over by their mother. They both obsess over the wrongs they think have been done to them throughout their life. They keep lists of grievances that they think have befallen them. They will talk about the flaws in other people for as long as they’re allowed to. They both talk endlessly about each other with a hatred that would be hard to get across in the written word. They are both prone to lying (another trait I share). They gesture similarly. When telling stories, they both move their shoulders up and lean their head to the side. They both get “beady little eyes” when angry. They are both prone to extreme outbursts. They are both very cowardly in their willingness to confront people; instead, usually badmouthing others relentlessly, then claiming to speak on behalf of many. They need to “gather an army” of support in their problems with people. They are both remarkably greedy and jealous. Other’s succes is a bother to them. They enjoy not only getting more than others but that others would receive less. They would both fit the term “uppity.” They both crave status in a way that comes across as obnoxious to others. They both have great difficulty bonding with members of the opposite sex. They both enjoy telling stories where they’re the hero at the end and there’s something even more specific about this: They not only both enjoy telling stories of personal heroism, but stories where they describe everyone around them praising their heroism. They are both prone to neurotic and bizarre acts of vengeance or showing their displeasure. For example: Several years ago, Brigid was feuding with my younger sister. For Christmas, she sent her a ziplock back of dogfood for her dogs. A few years prior, my uncle took down Brigid’s wedding photo in their home, packaged it and sent it to their youngest brother.

Neither ever sees themselves as anything but heros and/or victims. You will never hear either express remorse at their own behavior, incompetence or the pain they have caused others. They both seem entirely without a capacity for guilt.

Both Brigid and D also seem to be of the opinion that talking about a thing and offering advice made them experts, even if in practice they were miserable failures. D was a horrible amatuer auto mechanic. He had a very rudimentary understanding of cars made between about 1970 and 1985 and it was very rudimentary. I saw him purchase several vehicles with the intention of “restoring” them but they were hardly touched. He enjoyed the idea of restoring vehicles but was totally incapable of doing it. One time, a young girl got a flat tire outside of his house while I was there. He was unable to place the jack properly and the car fell on top of it, ripping through her door frame. He had no idea what he was doing, save for a few things involving volkswagons. But he would talk about cars and offer advice for hours and hours and hours on the phone. He would throw out random descriptions of things and discuss having “rewired” just about everything. For every hour he spent working on a vehicle, he spent at least 20 on the telephone, discussing working on vehicles. He had two friends who would listen to him talk for awhile and several others who seemed to tolerate him for a few minutes before hanging up. Brigid’s relationship to parenting was nearly identical to D’s relationship with fixing cars. For all practical purposes, she spent no “parenting” time with her kids. The ratio of time she spent screaming and berating her children vs. helping us, teaching us, encouraging us, etc. cannot be calculated because for all practical purposes, she did none of the later. Apart from taking us places that we had to go, Brigid spent no positive parenting time with her children at all

And yet….

A favorite topic of her phone conversations was offering parenting advice. She would discuss mothering techniques with friends and relatives for hours at a time. Communicating with female friends and relatives was as central to her as communicating to guy buddies was to D. She’d talk about bedtimes and how she introduced her kids to vegetables before fruit. I remember first becoming aware of Brigid’s predilection for lying when she’d recount our vacations to Iowa. She’d tell friends about taking us out to farms, riding horses and all sorts of things that were meant to sound like rural farm life. Brigid went to great lengths to present an image of herself as a parenting expert in the “good ole'” style of things. In truth, she was a completely incompetent child abuser.

Both D and Brigid would tell the very same stories of expertise to their same-gender friends and relatives over and over and over and over. I recall how vividly this stuck out to me when I was with D in LeMars. The same stories of expertise and advice……..repeatedly. Denny should have never been let near a car and Brigid should have been kept away from children by force of law, but both went to great lengths, cultivating an image of themselves as elite-level expert in their respective areas of expertise/incompetence.

There was something specific that stuck out to me when I was around D. This “thing,” as I’ll describe, is not of any great consequence but very interesting. Perhaps someday, someone with knowledge of genetics and behavior may come across this and arrive at a conclusion:

Both LOVE movies with a theme of girls (or guys for D), doing girl stuff, giving each other nicknames, talking about their girl adventures together, forming little clubs etc etc. I witnessed this growing up. When Thelma and Louise came out, Brigid became mildly obsessed with it. It wasn’t just a fun movie for her. She personally identified with one of the characters and gave one of her friends the name of the other. Over the following years, there were several movies with this type of theme. Fried Green Tomatoes and the Ya Ya Sisterhood come to mind. These weren’t just movies she enjoyed. They were movies she obsessed over. She’d give herself the name of one of the characters and assign names of the other characters to her friends. When Thelma and Louise came out, Brigid wore a water pistol around her neck everywhere, even to work. D was the same. Movies like Second Hand Lions and The Bucket List would be watched over and over and over, often several times in a day. He’d identify with one of the characters and describe his friend as the other. It was good ole’ guys doing good ole’ things together and having a good ole’ time Both of them loved movies with this theme. Obsessively.

This obsession with movies is something I can personally relate to. I wonder about the genetic mechanisms involved here and similar personality traits. The ability to fantasize and take on roles outside of our reality likely had some kind of evolutionary advantage and led to various types of creative output (although Brigid and D are not at all creative people) Perhaps this had some advantage in group bonding, where association with idealized figures would provide a platform for shared ideals. I’m not sure

When I was young, I was obsessed with Star Wars in a similar way. This was when I was 6 or 7. I was Luke or Hans Solo or whomever. Later, I became one of the G.I. Joe characters or the Ghost Busters. I’d say that one of them was sleeping in my room that night and assign other characters as roommates to my siblings. These weren’t just stories to me. They were things I emotionally fell into. To a much lesser degree, this fascination with fictional characters continued. By my early 30’s, my interests had moved to real human behavior and I became more interested in how these films were produced and what they were trying to tell us. In any case, this movie obsession was something I shared

Lines from movies and T.V. skits are a big thing for both of them. Brigid also developed a fascination with “Field of Dreams” with Kevin Costner. She posted a photo of him above the washing machine. The line “Is this heaven?…..No, this is Iowa” was something she repeated over and over to her friends on the phone. “No, this is IOWAAAA!!!” followed by gleeful laughs. Both Brigid and D laugh intensely at their own punch lines and seem to imagine that their levity is lighting up a room.

Brigid made a big deal about Iowa growing up (as discussed in other parts ot this writing) She described it in idealistic terms although looking back, I think it was more to advertise herself as wise in a folksy kind of way. After her Field of Dreams fervor died down, she began to describe herself as…”I’m just a GOOD OOOOLE’ IOWA girl!!!” (capitalization for volume emphasis). I suppose those she was talking to were supposed to imagine a few girls on the back of a hay wagon, throwing their cowgirl hats up in the air to the final lines of a Patsy Cline song. She’d say this with a pronounced southern accent. So far as I’m aware, the state of Iowa has no known accent at all, save perhaps for a touch of the Dakota, Scandinavian “Ooh Gosh” in some of the northern parts. She’d often take on a southern accent when doling out condensed, one-liner folk wisdom, such as “GEEET over it” (A mind-boggling piece of advice coming from Brigid….discussed in more detail in other parts of this writing) D was exactly the same. There was nothing about his behavior that was particular to Iowa. The unique parts of his personality were just crazy but he had a pronounced notion of geographical distinctiveness. As he lived in Iowa, this expressed itself as his town being different from other towns. He was LeMars boy,” which was very different from the towns 7 or 14 miles to the west or east. According to D, the people in those towns had very distinct ways of going about their business.

LIke many strange things she did and said as I was growing up, I wonder what her friends thought of these bizarre quirks of hers. When I was very young, Bill Cosby comedy became a big thing for her. Her favorite line was “I brought you in this world and I can take you OUT!” which was a reference to his son. She never said this to us in a threatening way but it was repeated so many times that it’s fair to consider how this reflected her view of her children. In these and many other instances, sayings by people she’d heard are a centerpiece of any conversation you’d have with either of them. Distilling any event or idea of conversation into a catch phrase is the “juice” of most conversations for both of them. Most recently, she’s enjoyed telling people about her “North Korean friend”, who claimed that there are “hill people” and “ocean people” In truth, this was a bit of wondering I did when I was talking to her but Brigid and D both have the habit of borrowing and making things up so frequently that they’ll often forget who they heard what from

In parts of this writing, I’ll speculate and this is such a part. Communicating degrees of certitude in writing is tricky. What I have witnessed or experienced from Brigid are real historical events while my interpretation and thoughts on what motivated her are obiously opionion and I hope the reader is able to differentiate. Some of my opions are as solid as the earth being round – Brigid did not develop normal emotional bonds with her children – while others (what I’ll say next) are less certain

I want to revisist some of the particular characteristics of Brigid and D: Their raging outbursts. Their bearing of teeth when angry. Their constant making and breaking of alliences that center on mutual adversaries. Their unusual level of of showmanship and “big upping.” Their extreme concern for status and credit. Their lack of self-awareness or ability to see themselves as others do. Their need to subjugate those around them. These characterstics call something to my mind: Chimpanzees and other human primate cousins

My mother and her late brother are/were obviously humans but these traits are interesting to consider. With the rapid advancement of culture and tool use over the last million years, our brains have evolved unusually fast. Evolutionary scientists have linked the speed of this evolution to mental illnesses and personality quirks that don’t seem to serve much purpose. Our genes haven’t had time to “level” out and steady themselves in mental development the way they have physically. The traits I’ve just described are not specific to Brigid and D. I possess a few of them while other current and former members of our family exhibit most or all. It’s as though certain parts of the outer, more recently evolved brain region hit a glitch on my mother’s side of the family and some of the traits that distanced us from our primate ancestors of long ago didn’t genetically kick into gear.