1967 Ethel Magee: Part 4

“Just because your mother’s crazy doesn’t mean she’s not right.”

~ My therapist, 2011

Years later, shortly before I left to study acting in Manhattan, when Mother was spastic at the reality of my no longer being there to buffer her, to be her go-between with my father — who by then blatantly ignored every word she said — she regaled me with the list of things he’d done to provoke “the crazy” in her. I already had a foot out the door as I’d tried once to self-destructively extricate myself permanently from this sad excuse for a parental unit and I knew that I would not fail next time.

My father had it right that Mother was batshit. I knew from my own experience that in her arrested perception of the world, she was absent of responsibility for anything that ever happened in her life. It was always someone else’s fault and they must be treating her that way because she was worthless, which means it was all her fault after all: that was the loop in my mother’s head 24/7. When you start there, everything becomes a pointless conversation, an infinite eternal loop of redundancies until I wanted to blow my own head off to make it stop.

But by 1984 I had been on the short end of my daddy’s brutal passive-aggressive tactics for getting his own way and controlling all the females in his life. While I did not dismiss Mother’s words out…