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Whenever I try to think through my father’s role in our family, I seem to come back around, again and again, to one thing:  He did his job.  He worked as hard as any man possibly could to support us.  He was not a financial deadbeat dad, and he did not abandon us.

This is important.  When I look at these early California pictures I see that we looked like the perfect family.  Gorgeous parents, gorgeous kids, nice houses.  Our family did not fit the poverty stricken profile, even though my parents’ later decisions including homesteading, continual moving, and addition of more children to the family left us with thin resources that certainly placed us on the ‘poorer’ end of the spectrum in terms of food we ate and clothes we wore.  But we did not starve.  While we usually lived in over crowded conditions, we had a roof over our heads.  When push came to shove, somebody went to the doctor.

I think about my mother’s home of origin where past the age of 5, after my mother’s father lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929 and her mother divorced him, it was my educated, motivated and capable grandmother who consistently worked to support herself and her children.  I tie two factors together when I think about how utterly incapable my mother was throughout her lifetime of being able to financially support herself.  If our financial care had been left entirely to my mother as a single mother I know for a fact we would have been in terrible, dire trouble.

I have no way to verify any facts that lie behind the stories I heard growing up about my father’s childhood.  Supposedly my father had been a late, unwanted child.  He was ignored by his mother and raised nearly exclusively by his older sister, Olive.  My mother for some reason despised Olive, and I heard thousands of times in my childhood how much I looked and acted like her.

Right before my father’s brain surgery in the fall of 1990 he came through Albuquerque, New Mexico where I was attending graduate school and my sister had lived for many years.  He was on a mission to return to his childhood home in Holbrook, Arizona in an effort to sadly retrieve some connection to his own self and his own past that had been denied to him during his marriage to my hate filled mother who had demanded that my father disown his family of origin.

On that trip my father told me about his mother that during his childhood remained at home and never left the house except when absolutely necessary to procure goods necessary for survival.  She had no friends and she talked to no one.  My father’s father worked mostly out of town, went through three bankruptcies and died of alcoholism (as eventually did both his only brother and his sister).

My father’s description of his mother was that she might have been severely depressed.  If she had been in that state around the time of his birth and throughout his childhood, my father would have no doubt been forced to develop what is called an avoidant-dismissive attachment disorder.  Most simply put, this means that his brain was never formed to include enough of the right kinds of emotional information to develop a strong, clear healthy self, or to have a strong, clear healthy relationship with anybody else.

The avoidant-dismissive insecure attachment disorders can easily create depressed offspring.  Those same early deprivation experiences with early caregivers can also easily create Narcissistic Personality Disorder offspring.  In order for NPD to develop, I believe other malevolent factors have to exist besides emotional, psychological and mental neglect.  I don’t believe those more malevolent factors existed for my childhood father.  I think he suffered from not being wanted, and therefore from neglect.  In the end, he was anything BUT narcissistic.  I never knew my father to do a single selfish thing — unless ignoring me fit that category.

That made him a perfect fit for my mother, who intuitively would have known, unconsciously, from the first moment she met my father that he would never, ever overwhelm her emotionally.  And he didn’t.  My father’s brain-mind had been created to simply automatically know how to flip inner switches in its circuitry so that he could still function rather than being overwhelmed himself.  He could compartmentalize and dissociate from stimuli coming at him from all directions and still carry an incredibly heavy load on his back as he trudged down the road of his life while his children grew up and his wife abused him.

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This morning I woke up from dreams I could not remember with the image of my father carrying the load of the world upon his back like the mythological Atlas.  Atlas was one of the Classical Gods of Ancient Greece, God of Weightlifting and Heavy Burdens.  If the psychologist, Carl Jung, ever identified a human archetype related to the aspects of this god, my father lived that archetype.  When I woke this morning I saw my father in the role of being a work horse tied into the traces of trying to provide for his family.  He was more like a heavily burdened mule than a man.  And because nobody in his early life had probably ever cared about his emotional or physical well being, being able to care for his own or his childrens’ later on was probably just about impossible for him to do.

Meanwhile, my father took on the work not only of fulfilling a demanding professional profession but also took on his Alaskan lifestyle duties as described frequently in my mother’s letters.  He looks in his pictures to be gaunt and exhausted most of the time.  My father never once in his lifetime abandoned the financial care of my mother, and I don’t think she was able to ever know how fortunate she was, and I don’t think she ever appreciated what my father gave to her.  Those inabilities were simply another extension of her mental illness.

The disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder my mother developed in her early childhood manifested as a severe mental illness which was, though unnamed, just another of the heavy burdens my father shouldered and lived with.  Because my mother had 6 children to ‘raise’ it seemed mostly obvious that she would not be the one to financially support the family in any way.  In that era of time, it was mostly common for men to work outside the home and mothers to remain in the home, anyway.  Those roles were rarely questioned.  But if my father had ever reneged on his own obligations that he assumed, I know for a fact our mother could have in no way filled his provider shoes.  We would have starved and frozen to death if that part of our care had been in the hands of my mother.

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The family stories about my father’s childhood also included reference to the ‘fact’ that he was a shy child, and by the time he was in 8^th grade he was obese and had no friends.  How did the young man who was to become my father respond to the persuasive, seductive charms of the gorgeous young woman who was to be my mother when he met her?  They met through my mother’s brother, who was my father’s university roommate, and were married six months later.  Did he see all hell breaking lose from the start?  Was it a gradual process?

My parents were living in their third Los Angeles house by the time I was four.  My mother berated my father for not being motivated enough to care for the yard at the Atchinson house causing their eviction.  They bought a house in Altadena and only lived in it a brief time before they left that one and bought the one in Pasadena.  I have come to wonder because other people have questioned it, whether it was because of my mother’s rage attacks on tiny me that created a stir in the neighborhoods they lived in so that my parents simply moved out and moved on.  It’s entirely possible that is what happened.

I know that whatever happened during my mother’s labor with me created a fundamental psychotic break in her mind as she believed the devil sent me to kill her and that I was the devil’s child sent as a curse upon her life.  How did that psychosis appear to my father?  To my mother’s mother?  I believe my mother was insane enough, clever enough, and narcissistic enough to preserve her own survival by hiding her feelings about me from everyone around her.  She know how to play the perfect part of being the perfect charming wife, homemaker and mother.  She had her disguises and she chose to use them well.  She had that capacity.

I think about all the Trickster legends in old and traditional lore and legend.  My mother appeared to be an expert at switching in and out of mental and mood states depending upon what environment she was in and on who she was trying to fool.  I think my mother kept my father spinning around and around and around so that putting one foot in front of the other as he hauled his heavy burden with him was all that he could do.  Of the thousand things that were wrong with his life noticing what was wrong with me was so NOT his priority that it never happened at all.  That is what my mother intended, and my mother never missed her mark.

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I believe that in most cases all forms of insecure attachment disorders and their resulting so-called mental illnesses progress throughout a lifetime, and their ability to change or even identify what is wrong deteriorates accordingly.  As I grew older both my father and my mother were becoming sicker and sicker.  The more vicious, demanding and mean my mother became, the more fragmented, dissociated and compartmentalized my father’s brain-mind-self must have become to adapt to her.  I do believe that my father took the easiest route out regarding his daughter, Linda.  My mother fed him a poisoned apple regarding my innate badness, and he ate and swallowed it.  I believe that he came to believe my mother.  He ate her bait, ‘hook, line and sinker’.

It is an odd paradox to me that my father seemed to be so emotionally and mentally weak and vulnerable against the evil hatred my mother was toward me.  The more pressure she put on him the more he caved.  My mother did not want my father to love her mortal sworn enemy, Linda.  She used every power she possessed to make her wish come true.  My father, who could carry every one of the other thousand burdens in his life chose not to think or feel for himself regarding me.  I believe my father ‘learned’ not to question my mother regarding me.  Somewhere along the time-line of being my father and his wife’s husband, he gave up and gave in.

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The worst thing that could have happened did happen.  My father came to believe my mother’s lies about Linda.  Once that happened, I believe that my father believed that ‘if only’ Linda were not a part of his family life would be better.  He certainly had a perfected ability through his insecure attachment disorder to dismiss and avoid not only me as his child, but evidently any possible thought that my mother and he were either wrong in their thinking or their actions – and in his case, particularly his inactions.  I was doomed.  I would have been better off one or both of them had simply taken me out and shot me.

So my commenter was right that my father’s difficulties in taking the life of a moose meant nothing compared to his treatment of me.  My difficulties in seeing this and knowing this fact originated in 18 years of living under conditions controlled by my mother’s hatred of me and of my father believing her.  I was also fed my mother’s poisoned apple.  I look at these early pictures of baby me, and I can’t put the ‘1 + 1 together’ and come up with 2.  I seem to auger myself deeper and deeper in self loathing as I blame and fault myself that I cannot seem to face the truth about my childhood.

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I believe I need to let my thinking wander into an area that I have only one single time seriously considered.  As I describe in +THE MOST IMPORTANT LETTER I’VE EVER WRITTEN – WHEN I DISOWNED MY MOTHER, the only way I was ever able to severe my faulty connection to my mother was when I could consider that evil was present in my childhood.  Never since that time have I allowed myself to consider that thought.

What happens if I can allow myself to add in one more factor into the equation of my childhood?  What happens if I allow myself to understand that evil is not only real, but that it permeated my entire childhood and was present in all the interactions I had with BOTH my mother and my father?  What happens if I say that I was raised in an environment filled with evil, and that both my parents participated in it?

Inside my body I can feel something happening with these thoughts.  I can feel myself separating from the group of others that were my siblings.  At can see it happening inside my body.  Like separating one dull penny from a group of five shiny ones, I am scooped away from them and left isolated and completely alone to suffer consequences that none of them – and this is my truth – cannot ever possibly imagine.

And this is the truth of what happened to me.  I was culled out of the Lloyd children flock because I was evil.  My mother believed that because I was not human, and that because I was the devil’s child, I had the innate power to take my siblings to the devil.  I had the power to contaminate and ruin them, just as I, myself, was ruined.  When I am off by myself in the family photographs, or when I am completely missing from the pictures, it was because I was being held hostage by an evil that I was told existed AS me – not IN me – but AS me.

Thousands and thousands of times that happened in my childhood.  My siblings so grew up in that environment of evil that they could not question it.  The powers of my mother’s brainwashing affected everyone.  That it affected my father is the crime.

I always want to say that I don’t know what evil is, therefore how can I believe in it?  That is a lie.  Yes, I do know what evil is.  At least the part of it that affected every part of me as a child growing up a victim of my mother’s psychosis.  Am I afraid of evil?  Yes, of course I am.  Do I think if I ignore even thinking about evil that I am somehow protected from its powers?  Yes, I think that.

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At this point of being willing to allow myself to think in terms of evil in my childhood, I can feel my skin and everything inside of it tighten up as if I have crashed through the ice on some vast frozen lake and fallen into icy water that I might never be able to get out of again.  I can feel my blood curdling like sour milk, and perhaps it won’t be able to flow through my heart.  I want to know, “Is there some invisible dam that does its job of keeping evil out of human lives?”  If there is, something broke through that dam in my mother’s brain-mind and evil rushed into her life and swallowed me up.  It swallowed my mother.  It swallowed my father.  But I, as their child, paid the price of suffering while they seemed oblivious.

If God is Love, which I believe He/She is, then the absence of God is not love.  In a topsy-turvy world of blurred boundaries about what is right and what is wrong, about what is love and what is hate, there I place my mother and that blurred boundary is where her Borderline was.  She crossed it with me.  She not only did not love me, she hated me, and she never wavered from that decision, whenever and wherever and however she made it.  If it happened as a result of a psychotic break while she was delivering me, it happened without her conscious thought.  But once she made her decision that I was her mortal enemy, evil consumed my mother toward me.

I could see it in her eyes when she attacked me.  I could feel it in her being toward me all the rest of the time.  She was turned, again like sour milk.  Once soured, milk cannot be returned to its sweet, good state.  Something rotten does not reverse its course and have its better life returned to it.  All that was sour and rotten within my mother was so thoroughly projected out onto me that her beliefs about me grew themselves into my brain, body and mind.

My father, whether he knew it or not, was her assistant.  He helped her.  He believed her.  He stood by her against me every time he knew what she did to me and did nothing to help me.  He took her side.  He stood by her side.  And by doing so he kept open all the flood gates that allowed evil to exist in his home and in his life as it tortured his daughter, me.

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I cannot find it within myself to think at this moment in any other way but to say, it was all a tragedy.  When I look at the definition and origin and relationships of words surrounding tragedy, I see that it’s about the downfall off a man – or a woman.  It’s related to ‘goat’ and to ‘ode’.  There are ancient stories contained within the human race, repeated patterns that happen within our species over and over again.  I was the sacrificial goat in my family – yes, the scapegoat.  But the bigger story, the ancient story was about the interactions between people who are ‘fallen down’ and who involve others, even their children, in this down-falling process.

Yet where does the ‘ode’ fit in?  How is it that I, the sacrificed child, be the one to sing the ode now, the “lyric poem usually marked by exaltation of feeling?”  I see at this moment an image of the Titanic going down with my parents on it.  But I escaped.  I did not go down with them.

I am the one doing this writing.  I am the one that takes a break from these words and goes outside to sit in the sun and listen to the contented chirping of the birds around me.  I just watched a cream colored butterfly with purple spots land on a cream colored pansy with purple spots that I brought into my life.  I am the one who has always, from the time of my earliest beginnings, allayed the power of the darkness that surrounded me.

The Dine people (known as Navajo) use a greeting infused with the idea of living, breathing, and walking in beauty.  I was born with that gift.  I have never lost it.  I have never laid it down and walked away from it.  Nothing has ever removed it from me.  Nothing has that power over me.  Even the name my parents gave me, Linda, is infused with the concept of ‘beauty’, though evidently in its origins it is also tied to the concept of ‘serpent’.

Whatever the role I was forced to play in the trauma drama of my parents’ lives, on my innermost levels I escaped unscathed.  I am no more tarnished by the evil present in their lives than I would be if I was that butterfly or that pansy.  It is on the equally real physiological level, however, of my brain-mind-body that my early and ongoing childhood tortures changed me.  It is with those very real changes that I must live with today no matter what I believe about my parents.

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I did not start off knowing I was going to end up today writing about evil.  Yet now I am thinking about another ancient story about Medusa, the snake-haired monster who could not be looked at directly because doing so would turn a person to stone.  Perhaps it is by looking into the mirror of my father as he was in relationship to her that I can better see the monster image of my mother.  Or maybe it was that he looked at my monster mother directly and was himself turned into stone.  So what is it about me that feels a twang of guilt if I think, “Better him than me?”

After all, whose ode am I singing?  If I keep on my own side of the Borderline, I know it is mine and not either one of my parents’.

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