Give him heck, Jesse.
WTF, Bryan?
Well, welcome to Omegaman world. Not only do I not love myself, I pretty much despise myself. The assumptions you make with your mouth are of the variety that my ass can’t cash. I’ve done some really horrible shit to others in my life. All the Kings horses and his very last man will never change that. I’ve suffered abuse a plenty at the hands of others but it doesn’t change one iota the evil I’ve done to others in the least. All I have inflicted on others was at my own hand and at the time I perpetrated them, at my pleasure. All I can tell you is this. If you have children love them with all your heart. Even if you have to lie to do it. Otherwise they’ll be me.
I can assure you that would be last thing in the world you would want. Lest you end up in the news as a grieving mother, not knowing what went wrong with your child.
Argh! Jesse, “himself”. “Loves himself”.
That is all.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
These are the words of a “pacifist”???
More like a ‘passive-aggressivist’, it looks like to me.
You seem to have a few people fooled with your puke-worthy sign-offs and sig!
{{{{{{{{Omegaman}}}}}}}}}
Your post sounds contrite to me. We are all of us horrible, awful people at times and capable of doing anything, but there is such a thing as forgiveness.
I do love my children, all of them, with all my heart, and my grandchildren too. Death trumps all that occasionally and leaves some of us ‘Grieving mothers’ anyway. 
Then there are the couple of your children who choose a dark path and you don’t know why. Their choice doesn’t make me love them any less, but it pains me, and I grieve for them as well.
I did give my own testimony on this thread. I know what it is not be loved by either of one’s parents. I forgave them both and chose to love them anyway. They hated me more for that, I think. It’s easier to be damned than forgiven, I’ve noticed, but only in those who cannot forgive themselves. Give yourself a break, we ALL get a brand new day every twenty-four hours and a whole new chance to be who we WANT to be.
LOTS of love - Jesse.
Ya know, I was friends with a girl like this when we were in junior high. Her mother re-married and had a baby. Mom and the new husband went to Angela and told her they didn’t have room for her anymore, they didn’t want her in the house and she needed to move out. She was 11.
She had to go the librarian at her school and ask if she could move in with her. It was really, really sad.
The love of ones children is all that matters. Hate begets hate. It’s what makes a soul hard.
Your kind words are appreciated.
In My Humble Opinion, you should chill out.
Evening Omegaman!
You said:
I agree, but why stop with one’s children? Why not love everyone? Begin with all children if it’s easier for you, but why not make it our goal to love all of humankind? You don’t have to like someone to love them and we can love in principle (positionally) until the feeeeeling trickles down to our heart. Love is the only phenomenon that matters.
Sending some your way,
Shabbat Shalom - Jesse.
God. The hell?! They’re not puppies, they’re kids! You don’t trade up for a cuter version. (Not that you should for puppies either, but your own child? Disgusting behavior.)
This story isn’t as disturbing, but still creeps me out. Like, how does it happen? I mean, I guess I could see a parent just not liking a kid but to let them see it so blatantly? Or does it maybe start out as the mother not liking one as much and then the rest of the family picking up on the cues? I always wonder what those families say when people call them on that stuff–“Why doesn’t Johnny have braces/why don’t you go to his events?”
I mean, my parents weren’t perfect, but I’m super grateful for them now.
No kidding. She wound up moving to a small town (REALLY small town) to live with her grandmother.
I’ll get eyerolled for this, but yeah, me. Ask my sister. My mother was raped when she was pregnant with me, and just a couple years ago confirmed my lifelong suspicion that she never really liked me much. She blames the rape, but still, she never made any effort to overcome it. She sent me away from home when I was eleven, and I never lived there again. And my dad wanted me, his only son, to be a football player: he used to abuse me emotionally and physically because I was an artist–a “pansy,” in his words–and beat me–his word–for being bad at football. He used to get into yelling matches with my mom for her turning his son into a pansy, with me in the room.
So yeah, not everyone is cut out to be a parent. It’s special fun when two such people hook up and pump out four kids.
Evening Freudian Slit!
You asked 'I always wonder what those families say when people call them on that stuff–"Why doesn’t Johnny have braces/why don’t you go to his events?'
You must remember, FS, you’re dealing with people who do not care. My mother never missed one of my brother’s singing recitals, or one of my other brother’s Karate competitions, but in all the years I was growing up and playing/singing/writing, she/they never came to see me once.
After they threw me out at age fifteen and then left the country (no kidding), I saw them some years later when I was playing center stage and working with people such as John Denver, Liona Boyd, Richard Fortin, Gord Sheard, and was under contract to RCA. They still didn’t bother to come and see me and I still couldn’t do anything ‘right’ in their eyes. When relatives wanted to see me play my parents came out once. Once in, at the time I think it was 32 years, and that was the first time they saw me perform - and I’ve been center stage since I was 7.
Before they threw me out at 15, teachers from my schools would call, high school, music school etc. because I’d won some prize or other either for creative writing or music, but that would just result in a beating or three for me at home because I embarrassed them by ‘making’ the teachers call them.
I didn’t have gym clothes and so got the strap twice a week for that. I wasn’t permitted to do homework and so got the strap three times a week for that, yada, yada, yada.
When they don’t care - they just don’t care!
It may be scary and lonely when they throw you out, but it’s better than having to lie about the bruises.
FWIW - Jesse.
This has always struck me as being just as sad a phenomenon as the OP - a (grown) child groundlessly and publicly attacking a parent, especially for sexual abuse.
Oh no, just to be clear, I do think that Pelzer was abused in some way. He was removed from his home by Child Protective Services when he was 12. However, what seems to have come under scrutiny is that he embellished his story quite a bit and that he has only one living witness (the eldest brother, who now also has two books published) able to back up his claims.
So although I think people that speak about such things are doing a service (by giving voice to those that can’t / destigmatizing the phenomanon / pointing out warning signs to others around them in similar circumstances), I take issue with anyone making things worse than it is. That’s degrading to people who’ve actually been in that spot before and in most cases, it’s bad enough as it is.
With Pelzer, it’s turned into a lot more than the help it should be, in my humble opinion.
My daughter pisses me off on a regular basis but I don’t hate her. She somehow thinks that money really does grow on trees.
Jesse Leigh, your post directly contradicts your argument.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
It may be less common, but it was certainly true in this case. He wasn’t properly diagnosed until he was about 7, IIRC, but he’d been exhibiting depressive behavior since he popped out of the womb. I won’t regale you with stories, but as an example, one day when he was maybe 5 or 6, his mother found him laying down in the middle of the street in front of their house. She went running out there to get him up and asked him what he was doing. He told her he was waiting for a car to come and run him over. He really meant it.
But on the opposite side of the spectrum, he could be the sweetest little boy ever. When I was living with them, and he was 3 years old, he used to be the first one in the house to wake up. Every morning he’d come tiptoe into my bedroom, lean up over the bed as high as he could, and whisper in my ear, “Good morning Aunt Giw” (with a soft ‘G’ sound, because he couldn’t say Jill). It melts me even just remembering it.
I have not read Pelzer’s books, but I read the articles you linked to, and I’m torn. On the one hand, it is somewhat weird that he would focus entirely on the suffering without attempting to understand his mother’s point of view, and it’s odd that he would demonize her completely because the truth is often much more ambiguous.
On the other hand, I see a lot of foolishness from people who really don’t understand how traumatic memory works. It’s not like regular narrative memory–even from a scientific standpoint, there is evidence to suggest that traumatic memory is chemically encoded in the brain in a way different than regular memory. Thus, while your normal memory might run, ‘‘When I was 12 I went to the store and bought a coke,’’ traumatic memories are usually experiential and fragmented in nature. The same incident, were it traumatic, might be more like, ''red car… smell of exhaust… I only have $.75 what the hell am I going to do?!! accompanied by a full-scale panic attack.) It’s reasonable that a child of abuse might remember the way their bruises looked but not the physical appearance of their mother. Later, we have to look at all the fragments and try form a coherent narrative. For many of us, this necessitates filling in the gaps (which is not dishonest in the slightest-- the human brain does this constantly on the automatic. Many of the things we remember ‘‘so vividly’’ contain purely fabricated details.)
For me, personally, I experienced a lot of turbulence as a kid, at least one move per year by the time I was 10, and my Mom married 4 times, with a slew of guys in between. Even though we ‘‘settled down’’ at age 10 and had the same family and school from then on, there was always something dramatic and disturbing going down. For certain instances of abuse, I can remember the shirt I was wearing but not my age, and have to piece together my memories based on the age-related details, like whether I was practicing Tae Kwon Do or not at the time. I don’t know whether I was 14, 15, or 16 when my Mom attempted suicide, but if I think really hard about it I can guess 14 since I was in the beginning stages of friendship with a guy whose father was the town sheriff who had to respond to the emergency call. It never occurred to me, at the time, to record my age for posterity, since this was just one incident in a neverending string of incidents–piled in between all the others–well, what’s the odd suicide attempt? When you grow up thinking this shit is normal, you don’t bother to try to remember all the details. It’s just your life.
So I think the level of accuracy that is often demanded of abuse survivors is unreasonable, given the demonstrable unreliability of memory. We do the best we can to put the memory into narrative form so that we can make it a part of our history, so that we can communicate it to others, but it is not, originally, a narrative memory. Imagine if someone took your narrative memories of childhood and hurled a giant sledgehammer at them, fragmenting and compartmentalizing and confusing everything, and that’s pretty much what it’s like to try to remember a childhood of abuse.
Once I was sitting in a chair and my mother approached me and started hitting me. The blow to my face knocked my glasses askew, and I grabbed my eye to protect it. I will never forget the look on her face when, for one brief moment, she thought she had broken the glass in my eye. Right there on her face was all the fear and regret that I had wished for so many years she would demonstrate. In fact, she may even have audibly gasped. The expression vanished immediately as soon as she realized I wasn’t seriously hurt and she went back to her rage, which, if it went like all the other times before it, probably involved screaming and breaking stuff and punching holes in the walls. But I don’t remember anything before or after, what the argument was about, how old I was. I just remember the look on her face, which for one brief second reminded me that she was out of control, but deep down really loved me.
Why do I remember this? I don’t know. Can I prove it happened just how I say it did? Obviously not. But that is what I remember, clearly, and that is the nature of the beast.
Finally, I give very little credibility to what Pelzer’s relatives say. I have no doubt my maternal grandmother would outright lie about my mother’s behavior in order to protect her–in fact, my grandmother once instructed me that she would tell everyone I was lying if I spoke the truth. And that’s with her only having a very narrow insight into what was going on at home. My family universally fears my mother and in general they preferred to stay as ignorant as possible. Since abuse is so prevalent in every generation of my family, acknowledging one instance would unravel the whole fabric of their reality. Why would they bother? It’s much easier to ostracize the one who stands up and says, ‘‘This happened, and it was wrong.’’
I don’t really have an opinion one way or another on Pelzer. My instinct is to believe him until some serious investigative journalism can prove otherwise. I’m just pointing out why the issue of credibility is not so black-and-white.