But was she really that bad?

Yes, she was.

She was that bad.

She was that bad in real life, on a normal street, in an ordinary house, just like the one next door if you live in the downmarket part of town.

She was like that from my earliest memories, though it got more frequent over the years. But, as an example, my first memory—yes, the first thing I can remember in my life—was her smacking me across the face in front of company and hissing “dirty!”

She was that bad toward her children. Being four years old was no defense.

She was that bad toward her husband, and to her next one. In fact to the next one, she was worse. The first one tried to murder her while we three children watched. He was dangerous and evil, but because life is gray, not black and white, it is also true that she deliberately provoked him into violence. She turned a blind eye to the concussion he gave her son, and to the rape he performed on her daughter (and his).

The second husband, the current one, was disabled and vulnerable. This time, she could threaten to kill him and he’d just have to take it and cower.

She had more than one affect. Sometimes she cried so piteously it broke your heart and you wrapped your arms around her and said, “I love you so much mommy. I’ll always love you.”

By 6 o’clock she would turn again, and you would be “an ungrateful little lazy bastard like every other fucking man I’ve ever met.”

For reasons too obvious to recount, I’ve long been obsessed with Christina Crawford’s story. She told the tale of her adoptive mother, Joan Crawford, and the abuse that went on behind the French doors in that Brentwood mansion. The book “Mommie Dearest” was turned into a movie which almost everyone knows.

The most common reaction from the public: “It’s so over the top it’s funny. No one could really act like that-lol/lmao.”

For her trouble in writing the first truthful tell-all about American child abuse, Christina Crawford was called a liar, a jealous slut, and a born-bad deviant who provoked her mother into the gorgon that Crawford was. Hollywood actors who knew exactly what kind of reptile Joan Crawford was did their damnedest to mock and silence Christina Crawford. Because protecting the demonic golden goose was the only thing that mattered.

Normal, anonymous people like me get the same, but a little different. “You just hate your mother,” they say, without connecting the “hatred” to the obvious abuse. Because men like me are men, we only “hate” being terrified and abused as young children because it’s a woman doing it. We don’t actually suffer. You can hit us, lie about us, tell us we’re crazy and that we’re going to be institutionalized and it doesn’t hurt us. Because we’re male. Only women suffer. We just say we do because we’re “misogynists.”

You probably think, right now, some of you, that I’m “exaggerating.” Perhaps the way you think “it wasn’t really that bad with your mother either.”

No matter how good one is with words and prose, there’s a point where they can’t be good enough, accurate enough, direct enough, to really demonstrate to another person what it was really like.

You have to see it, and hear it, to truly understand it.

If you have ever wondered what it was like, subjectively for me, my sister, and my brother, if you’ve ever wondered, “What did someone like his mother actually look and sound like,” I have found it for you.

Do you remember the famous scene in Mommie Dearest, the movie version, when Crawford loses her shit and makes a wild mess in the bathroom with scouring powder, beats her daughter, and then orders her to “clean up this mess?”

Do you remember the moment, maybe a few frames of film, when Crawford’s eyes cross as she turns to leave? You will see the same thing in the motion video at the end of this post. This is real. Not “just what they do in movies.” It looked like this:

Sometimes people say they can’t understand why I won’t speak to my mother again until she is lying in a coffin unable to talk back.

This is why.