I’ve started this post countless times and a dozen different ways -attempting to properly frame what I would share and how I’d go about it.
A line from an older movie stuck in my head since the moment I heard it delivered. I’ve enhanced it a bit to drive home the point.
“A father can mess a child up, but mothers make monsters.”
We are grown inside another human for the first (ideally) 9 months of our life. We are fed & nourished by their existence. Without them, we would fail to be. It’s only natural that we would have a deeper psychological connection to our mother than with anyone else.
That’s where the potential for devastation resides.
I was once married to a woman who abandoned her kids in daily life. They did their own laundry, fed themselves, and virtually all other aspects of what an adult/parent would be responsible for. She stayed drunk most of the time, forgot to give them money to eat lunch at school, refused to help her oldest find/retain a job, competed with her oldest daughter for the attention of boys she brought home, gave beer to her kid’s friends, and so on, and so on… Her two oldest had severe anger management issues. Her youngest was the victim of what’s called emotional incest.
When we eventually split, they stayed fiercely loyal to their mother – The very source of all that plagued them for their entire life. I was labeled as just another bad guy their mother had chosen to subject them to.
Oddly enough, it’s not the women I see as responsible for this behavior. It’s the men. The lack of respect. The predators who stalk women. The men who abuse and treat them like objects and/or possessions.
Worst of all – The fathers who rape their daughters.
All that psychological damage stacked up year after year… Then one day that child grows up, has a kid of her own and uses the only mold she was provided for childcare in order to raise her own.
The monster is formed… And the cycle continues.
Off The Rails 