Pretty much. It is the oddest thing as a normal parent, and I'm more normal than these wackos even with a major mental illness--guess the meds really work, watching these bizarre, flaky, neurotic parents who really believe they're just like everybody else.
I talk to them and they call me things like Julie the Great or act like I'm making myself out to be a perfect parent. I'm not a perfect parent, I'm a normal parent.
Hell, I'm eccentric enough to write science fiction for a living and I'm normal compared to these guys.
The people they're classing me in with saying I'm making myself out as a "perfect" parent and Katie as a "perfect" child----my neighbors are just ordinary parents, like me. Their kids are ordinary kids, like Katie, more or less. Hell, the other parents are even more normal than us.
But we like our eccentricities and are normal enough to have a decent life. We're happy, anyway.
It just weirds me out that these parents don't see how bizarre they are. They think it's just their kids that are different and we just "don't understand" what they're going through. They don't see that we do understand their kids. We see their kids and pity them. We pity their kids because, from the outside, we can see how freaking bizarre these parents are.
It's not just that they send their kids away, it's like that's a symptom. They're just strange.
You know how people who grow up in an alcoholic or abusive family say they always thought it was normal and that everybody lived like that. Or that the people who didn't were just aberrations?
These parents are like that. When I talk to them and they talk about my perrrrfect life. I'm not an aberration, at least not in those respects. I'm just normal. Hell, our life isn't even quite normal. We're always trying to get closer to normal, but at least we know what normal is, and we're not all that far off from it.
Our neighbors aren't perfect. They don't end up sending their kids off, either. They're just normal.
This is the thing that freaks me out about these parents. They think it's their kids that are bizarre. They think they just have things to learn and grow to do better---that they have "work" to do with their kids.
They don't realize that what screwed up their family in the first place is them. Particularly, it's that they're so fucking self absorbed they can't see the forest for the trees.
It doesn't technically fit Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, but it's very, very similar in its characteristics and payoffs for the parents.
Julie
