The chronology of this time is confusing.
I remember her mother and her father fighting. He’s become violent. She’s again demanding her daughter’s total involvement.I ‘m a psychiatrist by now and call the ‘bluff’. The constant alcoholic family drama and crisis have worn me down. My wife is in her final year of her residency but this constant loud distraction of her mother’s is a priority. I’ll be unfaithful after she graduates. After I throw the big party for her. After she gets angry about the gazebo insisting we can’t ‘afford’ one , after she’s taken the lowest paid academic job. After she’s said she doesn’t want children and maybe we could adopt.
I drove over with her and took her mother to an apartment leaving her drunken father and drunken brother. Problem solved. Yet, no. The mother is now more depressed. Aparently safety and being out of the situation is not the solution. She’s now even more of an issue for my wife. The mother’s chronic depression, hypochondriasis, drunken marriage, all of that is competing for centre stage as my wife is coming up to the finishing line of a good thing, her pediatric specialty. It’s all about the mother. Alcoholism is like that. Untreated Al Anon’s are like that. But the whole family drinks and I drink. And as the stress of work increased the drinking increased a bit for us whereas for the mother she and her husband drank more along with the older brother who would soon die of liver disease from alcoholism
But my new friend is a woman doctor, quite the genius, from an amazing family. Yet she’s married the bad boy whose father is a schizophrenic criminal and whose family is even more bizarre than my in laws and definitely lower class to their middle class. My friend’s family is if anything upper class. Class and education become a thing now because the boyfriend is a biker drug dealer and his attraction to the beautiful doctor with high intelligence is rather classic bad boy good girl dynamic. I’m of course studying all this at the time and treating families with wayward adolescents and paralleling my own life is this whole psychotic work life where the descriptions of the patients resonate with the friends and families outside of the psychiatry ward and psychiatry outpatients. The walls between the two are grow thin.
I have real difficulty with this time. The final year of my residency. There’s the conference and infidelity. She’s teaching and I’m continuing to do my residency, work seeing patients in my basement, moon lighting in the detox ,studying for exams, preparing for orals,and actually attending my first AA meeting because I am invited as a professor and am working with alcoholic families. It’s unusual. I don’t think in a thousand years I’ll ever come to such a meeting as fellow sufferer. decades later I will.
I remember that there are these huge house parties that academics throw.I’m attending them occasionally by myself. I guess this may be after my ex and I separated. I remember the big party I threw for her graduation and that there was no such celebration of my graduation. It was Maria Gomorri who convinced me to attend my final exam. I was going to leave. I have a tendency to leave things that bother me.
I had been fucked by my professor. I’d divulged to him my difficulties with my wife. We were apparently working on staying together but she was furious and hurt and life was a mess. I was either at work with crazy people who were angry and wanting to kill me or at home with a wife who was angry and wanting to kill me.
I was smoking dope. i remember hot knifing hashish because the biker friend had brought some in from Montreal. There’s a few of us. Now. I’m a good customer. He’s used his wife to access uptown markets. I introduce him to other faculty members.
At this party in Tuxedo, millionaires and academia, there’s a girl passed out on the coats in the room for that. I come in to get my coat and this guy is about to rape her. He’s with his friend. Their pants are down. She’s drunk and trying to push him away feebly because she’s so out of it. I fight with this lawyer and his buddy and push them out of thee room then carry this woman out to my car. Her girlfriend comes with me bringing her fur coat. I drive them to her apartment in the Osborne area. It’s very uptown. I carry her into the bedroom and leave her with her girlfriend.
The lawyer and businessmen from my high school are identified as serial rapists who have victimized dozens of young women using the new ‘date rape drug’. I don’t even register that this is what has happened to this woman I’ve rescued but that her assaillants were another couple of predators. I’m just glad I stopped it.
I’ve stopped dozens of women being raped having arrived to interrupt the attack. Weird. I remember an Indian woman being raped outside a bar and I walked across the street because she was screaming help and this guy was ripping off her dress. They were both drunk. My car was parked nearby. Broad daylight. Winnipeg.
“Would you like some assistance, “ I ask as she’s being punched in the side of the head and he’s ripping off her panties. It may seem strange that I’m so formal in these sitatuions but I am. I’m kind of like a Roger Moore OO7 character come to rescue. There’s a funny movie of home made super hero’s and I identify. I discuss these situations with my psychiatrist. He eventually says, the insight, the bit I’m to reflect on , ‘you must be ‘scanning’ your environment for opportunities to rescue people. I think most people just don’t see what’s going on around them. They have their head down or are focused on where they’re going but you must be scanning your environment for an opportunity to help.”
I remember the woman drowning at the beach. There were hundreds watching. Only six of us went to assist. The lifeguard pulled her out of the water. I ran the length of the beach to help him pull her body out of the boat as he’d pulled her in and now was getting her out of the boat and I was helping with CPR. But there were hundreds of people and only 6 of us came to asssist him. I’d run by them taking pictures, pointing out to the friend that there was drowning person, commenting on the lifeguard rescuing her.
“I’d rather be raped by an Indian than rescued by a white man,” she shouting at me spitting. At that time a half dozen other Indians stumbled out of the bar and I made my escape. They’d run a chain on her. I never know if she said that because she meant it or knew that this guy was one of a gang and that they would kill me if I interceded. I just didn’t know but I left.
Now I’m avoiding talking about sex.
I told my psychiatry supervisor, the professor, the clinical supervisor. “It’s all counter transference. You must tell me as it can affect your therapy patients.” He will abuse my trust. Use my information for his purpose. He is a narcissist at best, perhaps a sociopath but not a psychopath, thank God.
So I open up and tell him about being raped as a teen by a man ,about the drugs , the betrayal by the band, the police and ‘good time Charlie’s back in town’ , about the first marriage. He told me it was terrible that the man had hurt me and that I shouldn’t have been hurt when I was penetrated.
Someone who cared would go slowly and caringly and heal all the pain of that time.” It seemed like something odd at the time but only was something I thought of in retrospect when the mind wonders ‘why didn’t I see that coming....how could I have taken a different path...should I have taken a different path.”
I’d go on to tell him about my wife and the girl in Phoenix. I’d tell him how there’s no more sex in the marriage any more, how lonely I was , how I’d given up everything ,being a country gp and flyin doctor to be a psychiatrist and now I didn’t know I wanted to be because my marriage didn’t make any sense and I didn’t like where we were going. I felt trapped and desperate. I was so vunerable. She was constantly angry and I told him how depressed I was, how guilty I felt, how remorsefulremorse, and how I’d been seeing this psychiatrist for training but now all I knew was remorse.
Virginia Satir has come to town and we were attending a workshop. She was doing all her human sculpturing and teaching us through ritual the positions of power. I was paired with my supervisor on stage and must sit before and below him.
“I really liked when you were on your knees before me,” he said.
“I liked the workshop,” I said.
He was Jewish and had invited me to attend this weekly study of the tarot. It was Aleister Crawley and the demonic and we always drank and did drugs. We’d go, smoke dope and watch the slides and have a discussion of Alester Crowley and sexuality. It was very stimulating. . There were followers of Crawley there. He was into the demonic and drug use. Ironically my new friends the biker drug dealer would eventually tell me he too was a follower of Aleister Crowley.
There was this whole ‘gnostic’ excitement. I felt invited into an inner circle of esoteric teaching by psychiatrists and psychiatric staff. I was studying psychiatry and attending this weekly seminar with a half dozen people from the psychiatry department. We were always smoking dope and drinking wine and it was intellectually very stimulating and fun.
My work was thoroughly demanding and my home was depressing and these wonderful people invited me into their inner circle. One was an old lady who was a card reader and clairvoyant. We’d talk about spirituality andspiritism and the discussion of sexuality was free ranging as well. I was the youngest.
I was deeply interested in spirituality and had been for ever. I was not meditating or doing prayer because I’d been told not to. I was ‘thinking’ and ‘overthinking’ and everything was related to everything. There was this huge fun insightful revelation of meanings in meanings and all this analysis. Analysis and analysis and analysis and jokes about analysis and comments about double entedre’s and lots of exhilarating insight into the unconscious.
I was no longer involved with Community Medicine because I was told I had to ‘choose’. I was always being manipulated. In retrospect I see this massive manipulation and how it was never about my “needs’ as a student but always about their “needs’ . They were always saying what they felt would be good for me but not ever how it would serve them. So of course I was taking extra call and doing others work and it was all their self sacrificing by letting me do their work. I’d train in all this and realize how it was used in the workplace and it’s just all part of daily life but now I saw it. Always there was a quality of you should ‘volunteer, but if you don’t you’d be failed in the residency.”
I had friends in the residency. A beautiful colleague. She was getting all the same manipulation and disclosed that she’d had sex with her supervisor. I didn’t register this.
A senior colleague told me that my professor was homosexual and that I should beware . He had a history of using the young staff men and students. He had a overtly gay medical student as his companion frequently. But I was in theatre. I wasn’t homophobic . I had friends who were gay. I was married. HE was married. His Irish wife was divorcing him. I don’t know the reason but when I told him about my own marital problems he divulged his wife was cold and angry. “Irish, angry, unforgiving.”
My mother was Irish and she sure was one to hold a grudge.
He was such a good man. So hard working. So spiritual. So loving to his daughters. His wife like my wife was so unsupportive. The women at the Aleister Crowley study nights were older but so sexually liberated. So open in discussion , so avante garde.
He invited me to attend a Jewish dinner. I think it was Passover. It was a central feature of his religion and he told me that I was being invited, ‘initiated’ into the very core of Judaic religion. He thought I would appreciate this. It was so spiritual.
I went to dinner with his wife and children. It was a wonderful evening. The children participated in the ceremony. His wife was withdrawn and angry but they preceeded through this candlelight ritual. I think we had Matso ball soup. Maybe gefilte fish.
It was family. Warm and Rockwellian..
He invited me down stairs. We’d already drunk quite a bit and we smoked drugs. “My cousin gets the best stuff. You’ll love this.”
I was catatonic after I’d shared a joint. He undressed me then. I remember the most amazing sexual experience. I was frozen in moving, and he was all over me, pleasuring me in every way, massaging my body, licking me, fellating me, then he was in from behind, gently entering me. It was surprising. Not painful. Perhaps he had lube. I know he was prepared. I was floating alsmost like a float room experience.
He kept saying, “I know you wanted this. You forced me to do this. You made me do this. You were so sexy. You wanted this. You made me do this”. Then he was pounding me from behind, his voice angry.
He was very angry at his wife. She was using the children as a weapon interefereing with his seeing them. They were separated. He liked me to wear her lingerie so he could fuck me in their marriage bed. I did as I was I told. I felt that my residency, more than three years of twining depended on my not angering him.
I enjoyed it all. Physically it was pleasurable. After it was over and he was sated I felt guilty and ashamed.I told him that I just wanted to be friends, after that first time,
“I just want to be friends. I don’t want a physical relationship” I’d tell him every time and he’d just persist. A little wiry man who could destroy my career and reputation. The department was dominated by Jews. I now believed they all or most had been initiated this way. I didn’t want to look the fool, I just wanted it over.
He’d describe homosexuality as the highest spiritual act and insist that my desire to be spiritual without being physical was the problem. That I must embrace my sexuality in my spiritulity. They were not separate.
I’d figure that this was what Jews did. This was the spirituality of Judaism. I’d also figure that my fellow residents were going through a similiar initiation into psychiatry. There was the woman being fucked by one of the other professors. I didn’t think hers was spiritual as much as romantic.
I felt I’d been so ignorant of this other adult mature level of reality and consciousness. Was like doing drugs, feeling elite but dirty.
Maureen had moved out with her mother. I was left in the house alone. This whole separation and her moving out had preceded the sex but it was all so overlapping, his divorce and her leaving and then I met my friend and musical mentor from years before. We’d talked over the years, having coffee in Osborne village. This night he told me he’d sold his guitar and was drunk and picked up a bottle and threw it at the mirror on the wall across the from counter. I settled things down. I did that. I’d countless times especially with doctors out drinking paid for the damages and got them home in a taxi.
I brought my friend home and told him as he had no place to stay he could stay in my basement. Maureen moved out. He smoked dope every day and I kept the refrigerator full and he said “every artist needed a patron’.
But he taught me to play guitar while he was there. And the psychiatrist came over and I had my harmonium and tabala and we’d smoke ganja and play drums and make music and chant. It was all so very holy but after the artist went downstairs, the man would get angry and demand sex. He was always agitated while the artist was so mellow. Stoned I’d see them as a cross and a star. We’d be smoking Thai weed and I’d see them morph into the catholic and the Jew. I didn’t know what I was. I was some kind of Christian Hindu. I’d say years later I sold the house to get rid of the house guest. I’d not say it was because I no long felt my bed was safe. He’d drop in at all hours for his “booty call”. I’d wonder whether I’d have liked this if he didn’t hold power over me. I wished we’d elsewhere and elsewhen but I grew increasingly to realize I was more an object to him.
I loved these nights but I didn’t like the sex. I loved making music. I loved the discussions. Which isn’t true in a way because I loved being used or more, I loved not being in control. I loved that after years of pleasuring of my frigid withholding wife here was this person who was solely interested in pleasuring me. And yet it wasn’t right and I felt wrong. But I liked that I was receiving rather than feeling she was always taking and then I felt he was taking and no one cared that I said no. I’d talk to him about it and say that I didn’t like it. I told him over and over again I didn’t want to do it again but he’d just climb into my bed at night. Show up for his ‘booty call’ and I thought I was such a woman, complaining and yet participating. Saying no and doing yes.
It was all what I assumed the other residents were experiencing or at least those who were the best. My friend was studying multiple personality disorder and I was fascinated with borderlines. I had this sense that I was now ‘split’ , two persons. Animus and anima. I felt I’d become the animus and anima and that this man who was Simon to my Garfunckel was enlightening me. I was doing kundalini yoga exercises and felt my chakra opening and expanding. I felt his energy penetrating me, burning up my spine. I felt at times he was breeding demons in me, I would later wash for years.
Later I’d read that great line about Bob Dylan, “Bob, how come you promise us girl’s you’ll make us princess’ and we all end up feeling like whores.’
I’d stopped seeing my psychiatric psychotherapist. I don’t know why. I didn’t want to talk about my homosexuality. I felt forced gay and wondered why I didn’t just leave my residency, leave the university, leave the city, the country and go to Africa. But I stayed.
The women fm the Alistair Crowley group asked me to come by and stopped me naked and had sex with me.It was a bit mechanical. There was lust but I was depressed. I’d known love I thought with Maureen but that had just become nothing. Here was this other world of sex and drugs. I was in the inner circle. I kept wondering which of the Jewish psychiatrists was a top and which was a bottom. There was all this secrecy and I was told I wasn’t to know ‘yet’. I’d ask always about judaism and Freud. There were heady discussions but he wanted to ‘show’ our sexual relationship. I was ashamed of it. I wanted to be discrete but he’d touch my bum in the cafeteria. He’d try to fuck me on an elevator. We’d almost get caught and that thrilled him though it horrified me.
Once we were supposed to just be going out to park and talk and next thing I was stoned and having my cock sucked and a policeman was at the window. This invigorated him and terrified me. He was off on vacation coming back and telling me about his gay pursuits but it was increasingly just sex.
I was also feeling like my other friend was using me. I was giving him a place to stay and lending him thousands. The week of needing a place to stay became months. He wasn’t leaving. Why would he. Don’t feed the raccoons.
I learned I had a problem saying ‘no’ to everyone . I was simply not assertive when it came to my personal space and relationships. Years later it would be a central issue of advanced therapy. I was repeatedly pushed into situations I didn’t want because I was afraid of the emotional extortion. I was afraid if I said ‘no’ to the emotional bullying by Maureen she’d leave me. I felt if I said ‘no’ to my professor he’d have me kicked out of my program.
I felt that I’d given up my general medicine, my northern medicine and my community medicine and my marriage, all to complete this psychiatry residency. I was in the last year and if I could just take it up the ass a few more times I’d pass.
Mostly I felt that I’d worked so hard and had the highest grades and was the most admired resident, offered positions in all the university, yet now it was reduced to my just being a ‘fuck’ . I felt I’d never be thought of as having passed psychiatry on my own merit but that I’d passed because I’d sucked the supervisors’s cock.
I’d become a bimbo.
I’d tell a friend years later about this feeling. My friends were psychologists and they’d say, “He bred you. He made you his bitch. That’s all it was a bout. Domination. You were the golden boy and he showed you. You were probably a fantasy aryan in his twisted perverted mind.” Women and men would all tell me their rape and date rape stories. All my friends had been used in someway. I identified with the women. I’d been reduced to a hole in the mattress, a number on an arm. I had no self esteem. I just wanted out. I only felt good stoned. I was down so low it felt like up to me.
I thought that. He hated his wife for what she was doing. I was Irish. I’d find myself in these weird ancient struggles. A catholic Irish doctor would fuck me over, not literally but figuratively, and I’d eventually learn he hated the ‘protestant Irish’. “You’re family was never Irish. You’re British. .” It never was an issue to me. The idea of being Irish only gained meaning years later when I went to Ireland. I’d spend the next decades wondering about my sexuality. I’d wonder as much about my identity.
I’d begin to drink more heavily , regularly a bottle of wine and now I was smoking dope a whole lot. He always had some from his cousin and my drug dealer biker friend was supplying me with it and my friend had his source. I was working two jobs and paying .
So here I was being fuckcd and not wanting to be fucked, this guy showing up and taking me somewhere to fuck me when I ‘just wanted to talk’ and me feeling like I was in this weird Bizarro movie. My wife was not speaking to me having gone back to her mother. I couldn’t say anything to my parents and I didn’t want to be ‘gay’. I wasn’t gay. But I didn’t think I wanted to be a pscyhiatrist any more because the other psychiatrists were gay.
I was offered a job by Dr. Nady El Guebaly and I took it. I became an assistant professor. I had a clinical position as the head of family therapy at the teaching hospital. I became terrified.
“Now we’ll be working together I can have you whenever I want you. I ‘m so looking forward to fucking you over lunch. You can suck my cock between patients and we can really get it on all the time. “ he whisper to me in the hallways grabbing my crotch. I’d cringe.
I was horrified.
I’d had a girlfriend for a few months but she said she was pregnant and I said we could have the baby but she said she wanted an abortion and I begged her to not but she went ahead anyway. I was devastated. She was Jewish.
When I left the city he took that girlfriend as his own and told me she hated me now. He took the position of head of family therapy that had been created for me and now was vacated.
We’d remain ‘friends’.
I was supposedly ‘bisexual’.
My friends sister was beautiful. I was visitting him in California smoking dope and drinking wine and he told me ‘don’t get involved with my sister.’ Her ex is a great guy but she just had a kid with him and then made his life miserable. She ‘s my sister and I love her but she’s a bitch. I dont want to see you hurt.”
I didn’t know what sex I was but I was a ‘slut’ and easy. She just had to take off her bra and I was to quote Paul Simon, “just like a dog who was befriended.’
St. Paul said, I do that which I don’t want to do and don’t do that which I want to do” my own life was a reflection of my fundamental clinical concern. I flew to India when I graduated, asked what I always wanted. I’d spend a couple of life changing months around Bombay, now sex with women, wanting to be sure I was okay but feeling somehow ‘impregnated”
I returned to Winnipeg just wanting to get away from the insaniety. I couldn’t go on with his desire. He was oblivious of my feelings and I felt like I was saying all the things women said. It wasn’t spiritual. It was just lust and lies and sordid. After I went to California and came back to move ther felt I was again with a loving woman and with friends. I would move to the US and leave this mess.
My friends were multimillionaires. I was going to parties with world famous doctors. I just needed to do my exams.
I felt badly telling Dr. Nady I was leaving. I so admired him despite my colleague fucker disparaging him. My colleague lover fucker friend was brilliant in a different eccentric way and admirable in his own way and intellectual. I liked being fucked but I didn’t like being fucked. Especially when I compared that to the experience I had with the women which was transcndent by comparison. So deeply emotional and reassuring. Homosexual sex was a kind of advanced mutual masturbation whereas love and lust with women was something more.
It’s was all just overwhelming and I was a bit paranoid with all these ‘witchy people’. He was so looking forward to my joining them and he’d touch my crotch or bum. Some of the women on staff were telling me they were part of a coven and excited I was joining them. . The Alester Crawley reference was always coming up. I was reading a book given to me about Madame Blavatsky. It all seemed secret and sordid. I felt like I was in a Rosemary’s Baby episode only somewhere.mn the line I’d deliver a demon. I’d d meet still occasionally with Carl Ridd or John White and they seemed lighter freer. I felt so dark and heavy. I needed the pot to get by and to get sodomized. I needed more and more to be drunk fo when he entered me.
I was however having wild crazy time. My biker friends had me on the back of their motorcycles when we’d careen about the streets of the city at high speed. I was dealing with lawyers with Maureen. My mother was incredible. I kept wanting to just walk away. She’d help with all the horrendous ‘paper’ and protect me. I felt safe with my parents but a disappointment, I avoided my brother and sister in law not wanting to bring my sordidness in to the joy of their growing family and love.
“I still think Maureen is wonderful woman but I’ll never forgive you for letting that mother anywhere near us. She’s the nastiest person I’ve ever known. She’s so shallow and arrogant. I understand now everything you were going through but I don’t approve of any of it. You’re old enough to know better..”
Well, I went off and had a glass of wine and smoked a joint and left the mothers to fight over the dead carcas of a life.
One night I spent the whole night drinking a bottle of whisky and considering ways to kill myself while looking at the pink house and all our possession and that life which was now dead .All of this was dead ‘stuff’. I threw the television at the wall. I thought everything was better when we’d kept it in the closet. I blamed the tv and all the propaganda and us watching movies all the time and the news. I blamed this and that. But in the end I blamed me. I didn’t kill myself. The sun came up. I watched it. Winnipeg is a beautiful city at dawn.
I had the Mustang. I ‘d driven down to San Francsisco to see my friend and his wife. I’d begun a love affair with his sister. She wanted me back. She said we would move in together. It seemed such a good solution.
I traded my mustang in for money. The now ex had frozen my accounts and was taking all the money. I told my Mom I just wanted out. I said not to fight. She took the house and the possessions and the back account and I left in this beat up bug that had been used by the Vancouver Folk Festival as an amb ulance. I was travelling south with a Mennonite artist. I’d named the bug, Pendergast. I’d been given tickets for speeding in the mustang and convinced the authorities that this bug couldn’t speed. It hardly made 80 and was without a hand brake so on hills I opened the door and put a brick under the front tire. It had problems with hills.
Still I had money for getting to SF.
“You can’t leave, I’m not finished with you.” Maureen had said. I’d replaced. “I gave you 10 years of respectability and nothing was ever enough.”
We would never talk again. I’d done my best. It turned out to be the worst.
The gazebo had been the last straw for me. I’d been working three jobs and all the money was going to her but I wanted to sit outside in the summer. I hated the mosquitoes. I had my garden and I barbecued outside. These were good times for me. Gazebos’ went on sale for $100 and I could have put one in the backyard but she’d said ‘we’re not having a gazebo’ .she put her foot down. More shouting. More anger. And in retrospect I expect she didn’t want the neighbours to hear her screaming. She’d begun to scream at me just like her mother screamed at her father. It’s an eerie thing.
I never got a gazebo even though I had the house to myself for six months.
With my new “love” rented a house in Marin. I had a steady supply of pot. We all smoked pot back then and we drank wine. She went to work . I studied for my American exams and got A’s. Stanford offered me a job on the basis of Jack Hildes reference.
“Dr. Hildes is greatly admired. That’s a great reference to have.” They told me.
I was going to enter the community psychiatry program on staff . I had made a friend of a Berkeley prof and he offered me a position teaching in their philosophy, communication and culture department, a new position, which would have involved psychiatric research in community psychiatry.
Her boy had been impossible. The first week I arrived I was at the principal’s office because he’d been destroying things. He was violent and destructive and I’d not been told he’d been expelled from every school, seven in total. He was in Gr. 1.
I’d come to know that women no longer were interested in me as a friend but would almost invariably have a crazy person in their family and see having a boyfriend who was a psychiatrist as a cheap solution. I’d learn women with old cars liked mechanics. It was a different and difficult insight.
Now that I had been womanizer and bred I was softer and had more insights identifying with women and understanding them differently.
I assumed this was why psychiatrists as part of their finial initiation had sex with the residents. I didn’t think mine was an unusual thing. I knew there were psychiatrists who just prescribed drugs and were kind of ‘junior neurologists’ but I figured the psychiatrists who like me were the psychiatric psychotherapists, the analytically trained, the inner circle who could do magic, these ones had sex. I found myself wondering who was having sex with who and who I’d have to have sex with. I didn’t want any more homosexuality. I didn’t want it at work. I wondered if non Jewish psychiatrists went through the homosexual initiation or just the Jewish ones. I couldn’t imagine the Jews I so admired all being homosexual or even have sex with students.
I was going to marry and raise this kid and hang out in Marin and have a good life. It was a full time job straightening out this kid. His mother used him as an emotional weapon. Her ‘inability to control him’ resulted in him making her the centre of attention. No one wanted her around. He was sexualized. What I’d call the single mother syndrome. Without a man to protect him from the mother she’d smothered him. She treated him like a boyfriend. I’d call it emotional incest.
I became the boys friend, another uncle. I ‘d phone up his father , meet with him and tell him that I was ‘pinch hitting’ that I was not going to interfere with his fathering. I was going to continue to love his ex but that his relationship with his son was completely sacrosanct. He was my friends friend and soon the three of us would be taking the “little man’ everywhere with us. His mother didn’t like this. “You’re ruining my son.” Yet he stopped being kicked out of school and soon we were invited everywhere as a family. He was a great kid and no longer had temper tantrums when his mother was angry . He had stopped being her surrogate amplifier.
That’s when the shit hit the fan. One day at this elegant affair I heard the mother and aunts and other important women telling her how pleased they were with her son’s behaviour “since Bill had come along.’ They actually said she was doing a lousy job of parenting because he’d been becoming a little terror. They told her matter of factory the family had been going to insist he be sent to military school. However, now that “ Bill had smartened her up and let her son be little gentleman it was all thanks to Bill. Feminists don’t like any praise going to men and single mothers demanding their be no other god but them aren’t likely to take well to being told by their very successful wealthy and powerful mothers the way things were.
She was furious. She was angry. Her son this little man of 7 years old suddenly through his old fashioned temper tantrum beginning to break dishes at the table. I picked him up and gently put him in his room. That had been the ‘technique’ which had lead to his stopping all his acting out. I’d simply remove the audience and remove him from the audience. I was highly effective while his mother had played the game ‘i’m overwhelmed. I don’t know what to do’ but refused to give up control. She and he could ruin any event. He was a very bright boy and learned a lot of bad behaviour from her.
I’d been called and offered a locum at the Brandon Mental Hospital. The provincial psychiatrist had called me because they were desperate with an asylum and no psychiatrist. Could I come for a month or two. I was to start at Stanford. I didn’t need this drama. I’d been through the insaneity with Maureen.
Now she took the boy out of the room and brought him back into the kitchen . Splitting and using the poor kid to get back at me and her mother and all of society for wanting quiet and order.
I phoned Manitoba.
“What are you doing.”
“I’m taking the job I told you about.”
“You’re supposdd to be starting at Stanford.”
‘That can wait. I don’t want the kid screaming and your screaming and us going back to the way it was when I arrived. I told you I was never again going to sit in front of a principal again.. I’d done my own time as a child and I wasn’t going to do that for you again. Your son was doing great. That’s what your parents and grand parents and everyone said. He’s getting A’s at school.You’re angry so he’s angry but we agreed he’s not allowed to break things or he goes to his room. You’ve arbitrarily changed the rules and frankly I’m not going to do this again. The evidence is overwhelming. I think I’ve done my job here. You can think about it while I’m away.”
“No one leaves me.”
“I’m leaving you now.”
I got on a plane the next day. We exchanged letters and calls for awhile
Eventually I’d send her a bill for psychiatric services. She didn’t like that. She never paid. My friend said that all the men who knew her thought that was genius. True coup d’tat. “ But my mother and she will never forgive you. The boys doing well and his father thanks you.”
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