Chapter Eight: The Fundamental Theory of Patty G.

The daughter whines to her father, "You messed up my childhood!" And the father says, "How could I, baby? I wasn't even there."

Although the temptation exists to conceptualize my mother as a terrifying and malicious Minotaur, the reality is that my mom is a human being. She has real feelings, rich years of experience, and her own unique worldview. My mom did not always embody the emotional distance and fear she presently exhibits. Actually, I distinctly remember that I was once incredibly attached to my mother's presence. In the most basic terms, I'm going to explain how we got from point A to points W, T, and F. The following represents my attempt to break down my mother's psychological chronology, from birth to present, with the purpose of better understanding the riddle of my mom's psyche.


Her birth came in 1959. She was born in the epitome of small-town America, Laconia, New Hampshire. She was the product of a hardworking, hard-drinking jackass and a homely Lithuanian-speaking girl. She was the first of four daughters in typical New England working class family. However, I have reason to suspect my mom began suffering from a very early age.

In the words of her best friend, my mother's biological father was the "meanest man [she] ever met." The details are cloudy, but it's obvious that things were bad for my mom from the start. I know her dad liked to hit the bottle, and probably the women as well.The fact that my biological grandfather was out of the house by my mom's tenth birthday does not bode well for the circumstances of her childhood. Neither does my mother's reluctance to reveal details about her family during that time in her life.

I see my mom as blaming herself for her broken home. Parents rarely effectively shield their children from the contagious self-hatred that brews in dysfunctional families. My mom was in the proverbial thick of things as the social delusions of the 1950's reached a boiling point.

School life wasn't much better. My mom attended Catholic school from kindergarten to the start of high school. Anyone with older Catholic relatives knows that those nun's had acquired a ravenous taste for corporal punishment. The nuns would get you when you least expected it, too. My mom once recounted how she lived in such a state of perpetual fear that she once wet her pants in class. That little stunt didn't go over too well with Mother Superior. It cost my mom quite a bit of flesh and dignity at the expense of an extensive paddling. Not just any ordinary paddle either. It was one of those paddles with holes in it, to make the paddling motion more aerodynamic, so you could really put some zest on it.

These first ten years of my mom's life were surely a nefarious nightmare to those of us accustomed to basic respect for human rights and dignity. These days, teacher's who paddle for fun wind up in jail real quick. Further, these ten years passed with the cultural revolutions of the '60s in the ever looming societal background. As my mother went through the motions of poorly disguised emotional abuse, she saw an entire nation's youth rebelling against authority. Yet here she was, confined to strictly enforced norms and expectations.

While the first decade of my mom's life was marked by the presence of a distant, angry, and abusive father figure, the rest of her years had no father figure at all. By the time she reached high school, the flamboyant counter-culture rebellions had subsided and my mom had yet to experience the love of a supporting male figure. My mom entered her most impressionable years without any idea about how a healthy intimate relationship should operate. Like many young women, my mom likely suffered from a low self-esteem. Her odious father was certainly no help either. This seems like a predictable recipe for a potential future of physical and sexual abuse.

But my mom did not follow down any truly dark paths. In fact, she supplemented her fatherly void with attention from boys during high school. Apparently, Patty G. was quite the cutie in her teen years, because she went through boyfriends like toilet paper. Her primary criterion for selecting a boyfriend was how nice his car was. She was a bombastic teen unto herself, and predictably received considerable flak from her mom and step-dad for it.

At 18 she moved to northern Virginia, where she's worked various paralegal and law clerk positions since. She met my father in the early 80's and the two dated and traveled for nearly a decade before they decided to settle down. My father surely saw something in her. And as far as I can remember, my mom was quite normal up until her and my father split up.

So how does all of this culminate in the Patty G. we all know and love today? Well, when my mother and father separated my mom realized that my sister and I would inevitably end up favoring one parent or the other. My mom wanted to be sure that it was her we turned to if it ever came down to choosing between parents. It was this simultaneous awareness and fear that drove her first attempts to manipulate me. My mother began to tell me that my father didn't care about us, that he had new girlfriends, and more important things to do than visit or provide for his kids.

I wouldn't be surprised if my parent's marital issues had drawn distant and painful memories out of repression. As I matured and drugs, sex and alcohol became bigger and bigger blips on the radar, the only guideline my mom had to follow was her own experience. The only lesson she learned was that pain is the best motivator. Fear and suffering were acceptable methods of coercion. You do what your told because your parents are always right.

My mom's signature trait is her compulsive lying. She'll manipulate facts, omit details, or even construct entire webs of lies. Whether she's talking to me, my dad, a friend, or a cop, my mom has a distinct aversion to presenting an objective view. It's because she has a need to control things. She's been making up for the agonizing lack of control she experienced as a child with any means possible. My mom thinks that she knows what's best, not just for me and my sister, but for my father and her friends. So what's the problem in some white lies to get them pointed in the right direction?

Yet the more she tried (and continues to try) to control me, the more it backfired. I saw the fear behind my mom's attempts to attach herself to me. She wanted me to be her precious son forever. The closer she forced us, the more uncomfortable I felt. The more I understood myself, the more I understood my mom's motives. And the less I respected her questionable parenting techniques. I want her to be happy, but she needs to realize that to be truly content she cannot be contingent on other people's lives.

I wonder if when she looks back at painful childhood moments, my mom feels the anger in her parents eyes more heavily than the fear in her little heart. Because she certainly does not seem to identify or sympathize with my side of things. She may remember the pain she felt, but she doesn't see me in that same light. She sees my lifestyle as the harbinger of everything that brought down her family: chaos, mischief, disdain for authority, dishonesty, and distrust.

It's as if she wants me to let her down. She's still looking for something to hate, something that will fix her shattered past. She thinks, somehow, what she's doing now is making up for lost love. But my mom just doesn't have perspective on her actions. My mother has no equitable standard gained from experience. In her misguided struggle to feel loved, everything is expendable. The worst part is I want to help her, but she refuses.