Rage? Or just good healthy, solid resolve?
I count myself lucky that my mom went back to giving me the cold shoulder once I escaped my gulag. I worried quite a lot when my oldest daughter was young that she'd pull some shit and try to 'rescue' my kids from me.
At one point she actually did seem to be working in that direction. That's when I really shut her out of my life. That was the first time in my adult life that I ever made the foolish mistake of picking up the phone and calling her, of all people, for moral support. The trouble was that my husband was very ill in the hospital. I just needed someone to give a shit, someone to talk to, maybe a few words of assurance and comfort? What I got, instead, was nothing. No real response in that conversation, just 'uh huh, uh huh' sort of thing. Next day, the phone rings. It's her. She's been busy, busy, busy all morning making arrangements for me to check into residential treatment and for some foster care program or other to take care of my two kids, then aged 9 and 2.
Why, you must be asking yourself, would my mother think I needed residential treatment? You probably assume that there was some good basis for it. But then you're probably not factoring in how profound the cult conditioning can be when its philosophy and tenets are well supported by the broader society. Let me explain a little bit about that. The cult we were in was called The Seed till it changed it's name to Straight, Inc. Now they call themselves Drug Free America Foundation and have affiliations through stepcraft and government to almost every aspect of public and private life in this country.
It's a lot like that w/ the WWASP family of cults too. Concensus among the public seems to be that kids are wild animals by default and must be broken and controlled for their own safety and the public good. And there are enough crossovers in personage and philosophy between WWASP and the Seed line of programs to probably justify calling them branches of the same cult.
So this was 10 years after I went through the courts to get out of that program. In that time, my mom and I never did have any kind of relationship. We'd speak occasionally, as in when the occasion absolutely demanded it and there was no way around it. That's how we avoided fighting all the time. So she had no basis for thinking I was fucked up on drugs or fucked up in any other way except for the steady stream of reenforcement she got from her stepcraft practicing friends who had never even met me. The mantra here is once a druggie always a druggie till completion of a 12-step based program.
In reality, I was a good girl. I married, had a couple of kids, worked as much as I had to to make ends meet and take care of those kids. I never got into any trouble. Rarely broke the law even in letter and have always kept the common law to the very best of my ability. But she wouldn't know that because she never came to see me or even called me on the phone. The only times she ever made the 3 hr drive from her cozy home close to the Program back to my home in Pompano was when my brother talked her into it; once for my wedding and again just after my 2nd child was born. Neither time did she spend more than a few minutes just hanging out or make any effort at any serious conversation.
So she didn't know anything at all about me or how I live. She just assumed that, because I split the program without graduating and had not completed a program in the mean time, then I must, necessarily, have been a junkie by then. And she made it clear to me by her response that she had just been waiting for me to have a weak moment so that she could rope me into her highly unpleasant flight of fancy.
I would never, in a million years, leave my kids alone with this sadistic bitch. Her thoughts are scrambled and dark, her words are poison and, given any opening at all, she's demonstrated over and over again her intense will to destroy me.
I don't think we're feeding anybody's rage here. I think we're just offering a little moral support to a fellow former POW in the war on drugs and our own offspring. Hang tough, friend! You're the parent. You decide who is and is not a good influence on your kids. That's your job.
