"Look What You Made Me Do"

Theresa wore her hair like Alice the housekeeper on the Brady Bunch, the only difference was her horn-rimmed glasses. Like Alice, Theresa wore sensible double-knit polyester that stood up to many washings and dripped dry.

She was my grandmother’s card-playing girlfriend who lived halfway between our apartment in Fullerton, California, and my grandmother’s at the end of the block. Theresa was the neighborhood babysitter for all of us proto-latchkey kids. We went to her house after school before we were “old enough to be left alone”, or “old enough to watch your younger brother and sister.”

I did not know it then, because I didn’t know the condition existed, but Theresa had Borderline Personality Disorder. I couldn’t recognize the sickness in my mother until decades later, but I could recognize something was very wrong with Theresa. And it had nothing to do with me.

Theresa liked children, I really think. She kept a revolving corner store magazine rack full of Archie and Superman comics for us children. She put our favorite cartoons on the TV.

Lunch was tuna fish and boxed macaroni and cheese—Lady Lee generic brand. I once said to my mother, “She doesn’t even give us Kraft,” as if I were from some fancy family. “She does her best, Josh,” my mother said.

And she did, until she could not. She could not do her best if we children ran too much in the tiny gated patio, if we accidentally stomped on her gladiolus, or if our play yelling gave her “a sick headache.”

When Theresa hit her limit, she called the children into the living room. She seated herself on the couch and told us to sit on the floor before her.

She raised the hem of her slacks-shorts—Robin’s-egg blue, with the big standing seam down the front—and began beating her inner thighs. Hard.

Slap.

Slap!

Punch.

”Look what you made me do!” she screamed. “Stop making me hurt myself!”

Theresa’s thighs were always yellow and purple with bruises. You’d never know it to talk to her in the grocery, how she was behind closed doors.

Strangely, I wasn’t afraid of her. I felt desperate sadness for her at eight years old. It was obvious something was very wrong with her and that it was not my fault or anything we children had done. I suspect some of the other kids were frightened.

”Look what you made me do” is a classic move of every psychological abuser. A violent or emotionally unstable mother will do it. A pugilistic drunken father will whale you and tell you that you’re making him hurt you.

Why do you want to get hurt? What pleasure do you get from making him do this to you? Why do you like that Theresa has to blacken her legs?

What kind of perverse little fuck are you?

Theresa is everywhere now. She’s doing in public what 40 years ago could only be gotten away with behind the locked door.

Theresa is the progressive left. Her emotional instability has been culturally normalized so completely that behaviors that would have embarrassed even a full-fledged Borderline 20 years ago are considered reasonable and proportionate.

It’s not you. It’s Theresa. You aren’t doing anything to Eli; Eli has a psychological problem.

On the first episode of Disaffected in early 2021, I said, “Domestic abuse has gone public, and feral.”

Keep your eyes wide open and see the signs.