I told my mother I had a stomach ache. I wasn’t keeling over or anything. Probably something I ate was backfiring – too much Halloween candy, downed too much soda or maybe I was constipated. Who knows? But I wasn’t near death or in critical condition.
Next thing I know my mother has me on the floor, on my back – M*A*S*H style – shirt pulled up, asking me where it hurts. Yada, yada, yada, she’s franticly calling neighbors and has me rushed to the hospital. It was quite the scene.
After four days of whistling dixie and watching television in the hospital they sent me home. The doctors came up empty. Nothing wrong. Nada.
Why was I put in the hospital?
Munchausen by proxy syndrome (MBPS) is a relatively rare form of child abuse that involves the exaggeration or fabrication of illnesses or symptoms by a primary caretaker.
In MBPS, an individual — usually a parent or caregiver — causes or fabricates symptoms in a child. The adult deliberately misleads others (particularly medical professionals).
It isn't just the attention that's gained from the "illness" of the child that drives this behavior, but also the satisfaction in deceiving individuals whom they consider to be more important and powerful than themselves.
Because the parent or caregiver appears to be so caring and attentive, often no one suspects any wrongdoing.
Along with everybody else, my father couldn’t make sense of why she had me rushed to the hospital. It just didn’t make sense. To this day it STILL doesn’t make sense.
My mother has told and retold this story many times over the years. It would go something like this, “Remember when I had to rush you to the hospital? They kept you there for four days. You’re father didn’t even want me to take you.”
Her takeaway has always remained the same: She was saving the day while my father didn’t even want me in the hospital because he couldn’t care less if I died in the street.
Those who create the chaos, control the chaos. Control the chaos and you get to control and manipulate the people you’ve sucked into your chaos.
This is often experienced in arguments where one person refuses all attempts at appeasement and compromise. No matter how well reasoned your peace offering may be, this kind of person refuses peace. That’s because they want to perpetuate crisis and chaos to emotionally manipulate, abuse and punish you. Chaos used as a weapon.
My father wasn’t home, I was 7 or 8 years old. I was in our bathroom, standing in front of the sink, facing the mirror and screaming. My mother was standing behind me and was physically forcing a bar of soap into my mouth.
There wasn’t anything I could do. I couldn’t stop her. She was just too strong and angry. Back then they didn’t teach jiu-jitsu in 2nd grade so all I could do was scream and thrash. There was nothing I could do – she had me pinned against the sink and I was overpowered. Mangia!
“I’ll wash your mouth out with soap,” was one of my mother’s many trademark threats to instill fear in me – to keep me in line. Her sentences often ended with “… or else.”
Because I was facing the mirror, I was able to watch her angry, distorted face as we fought. She was manic – screaming – I was a terrible child, I was a liar, she wished she never had me – the bar of soap in my mouth was all my fault. I was inspired.
After she was done washing my mouth out with soap it was bath time.
I’m sitting in the tub. Miserable. She leaves the bathroom and comes back with a camera. She tells me to cover my privates with the washcloth and takes my picture. “Smile!” Click.
Pigs Do Fly
This is one of those memories I’ve had bebopping around my head for over half a century. It has always been there, but it just never made any sense. It’s like having a recurring memory of watching pigs fly. It doesn’t make sense because we all know pigs don’t fly.
But what if you found out later that pigs DO fly? Suddenly your memories of flying pigs make sense, the circular thinking in your brain ceases, your internal conflict goes away, and you stop thinking you’re crazy. Everything suddenly makes sense.
Gaslighting: psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one's emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.
Right about the year 2000 I began gathering up all the family photos to begin scanning them into a digital format. I collected boxes and boxes of pictures from everybody in my family and began going through them and scanning everything I found. There were thousands of pictures.
Smile!
At the bottom of one particular box, I discovered the picture you see to the right. It was torn up, so I stitched it back together in Adobe Photoshop.
This is the picture of me in the tub after having my mouth washed out with soap. I’m holding the bar of soap. Behind the white box I am wearing the washcloth over my ding-a-ling.
Suddenly pigs are flying and I’m not crazy after all.
Psssssst!
These things didn’t happen when my father was home.
A rule was, “No more than 4 ounces of juice.” We didn’t understand why. Completely nonsensical. It felt like just another reason to be punished. “Because I say so” never worked for me.
Drink the last of the orange juice and she might randomly get annoyed and say, “You didn’t leave any for me?” The juice bottle could have half an ounce in it for days because nobody wanted to drink it and get yelled at. We got yelled at anyway for letting the juice spoil.
We didn’t understand why she was exempt from her own rules. (Establishing specialness)
Rules were subject to change without notice. (Destabilizing)
Sometimes we didn’t know a rule had changed until we were getting punished for breaking it. “You should have known” or “Now you know!”
Random punishments create paranoia, anxiety and a sense of foreboding. Life becomes an unpredictable mess. What happens to you is beyond your control. This creates long term destabilization; a constant sense of "something is wrong" or "something will go wrong."
Rules would be changed for a week and then be changed back without notice. Destabilizing. Random punishment.
“Why can’t you be as good as your brother?” creates friction, division and destabilizes sibling relationships.
Get a “B” on your report card and you’re asked why you didn’t get an “A”. If you get an “A” why isn’t it an A+?
Back in the good old days we used to read these things called newspapers. They were like magazines except the pages were very large, the paper was kind of rough and the ink would rub off on your hands. They were messy, but we loved reading them.
Millions of people read newspapers every day because we knew there was always something inside worth reading about, even if it was just the comics for a quick laugh. We read the parts we liked and skipped the rest.
We knew going in we weren’t going to like or agree with everything we found inside a newspaper, so sometimes there was nothing worth reading and it became an exercise in page turning. No hard feelings, Mr. Newspaper.
If we did read something that turned us sideways, we didn’t linger over it. It was just a newspaper – everything in it happened yesterday – we just turned the page. Such is life. There will be another paper on the porch in the morning.
When you think about it, each of us is kind of like a newspaper. We’re filled with pages and pages of information, opinions and even comics that define who we are.
As we skim through each other’s newspaper let’s look for those things that pique our interests and just skip the rest. There’s no value in lingering on those areas where we differ.
“I disagree with you,” is not synonymous with “I challenge you to a duel!”
“I think you’re wrong,” is not an invitation to a debate.
“Who I am, what I think and how I feel are not invalid by default pending validation by your court of approval. There are no cross-examinations, no rules of the court. I am my own jurisdiction and I alone preside over me. Case closed.”
~ Paul Rubino, just now
I am the sole editor of my newspaper.
If either of us becomes too unhappy with the other’s newspaper we can either skip straight to the comics section or unsubscribe and all future deliveries will be stopped.
I answered the front door of our home at 4 o’clock in the morning. I turned on the porch light to reveal 6 police officers positioned in various locations on the lawn with their guns drawn and aimed at ME. Two of the police officers had shot guns.
According to my mother, this is what happened on that night . . .
She was fighting with my father. She was standing at the top of the stairway, my father was at the bottom of the stairway standing on the floor. My father was drunk and angry, waving his gun around. He then pointed his gun up the stairs directly at my mother and barked, “I’m going to blow you away, bitch!” My mother jumped down the full flight of stairs – landing on top of my father. The two of them crumbling to the floor. My mother was hysterical, screaming for her life. She began screaming for all of us kids to “Run, get out of the house!” “Go! Get out! Get in the car! Your father is crazy!” She fled the house with my siblings.
My mother saved not only her own life on this night, but the lives of her children. She saved us from my father, the drunk animal. She was a true life hero. A bonafide Momma bear risking it all for her cubs.
We were reminded about this heroic act for decades. She retold it many times over the years at family gatherings to anybody who would listen. It was David defeating Goliath.
After all these decades of telling this story, my mother had forgotten one important detail: I was there. I witnessed the entire event. I wasn’t more than 8 feet away. I saw everything.
Let me tell you what I saw …
My father was a New York City detective assigned to the Midtown North Investigation Unit. He’d been on the NYPD about 15 years at this point, about half of those years as a detective. He was exactly where he’d always wanted to be in his law enforcement career.
It was the middle of the night and the family was asleep when I heard the back door unlock and my father stepping into the kitchen. My father was home from an evening shift. He went to the living room where he fell asleep on the couch.
I heard my mother’s feet hit the floor across the hall in the master bedroom. She was getting out of bed to confront my father. Heading for the stairs she tells my younger sister to go sit with my younger brother in his room.
I didn’t stay in my room. I wanted to see this. It was show time.
She stomped down the stairs like she had baseball bats for legs. She went into the darkened living room and began hitting my father and screaming at him.
My father awoke to my mother screaming and hitting him. He got off the couch and exited the living room. She followed. They wind up at the bottom of the stairs screaming at each other. My father is on the foyer floor facing my mother who is now on the first step, eye-to-eye with him. She is still screaming and dropping hammer fists in any opening she could find in his defenses. When she couldn’t hit she scratched. My father was trying to grab her hands and wrists to restrain her. He is in pure defense mode. Now she’s screaming across the house that my father is hitting her. “Oh my god, what are you doing? Let go of me! Stop! Stop! Help!”
Believe me when I say, my mother can scream the dead back to life.
She grabbed my father’s throat with both hands and began squeezing. He was now trying to back away. My mother used both her thumb nails and began digging them deep into both sides of his neck. My mother had long nails and they were sunk deep.
My father was backing up while she had her claws in him and the two of them wound up falling against the wall, creating a large hole in the sheet rock. They crumpled to the ground where she lost her grip.
She jumped up and began screaming across the house for us kids to run for our lives! She gathered up my younger brother and sister and left the house.
I refused to go anywhere. I stayed with my father.
Dad and I are now alone. The chaos was gone. He went back to the couch to try and sleep, I went back upstairs to my room and tried to sleep.
This is where I almost lost my face.
About 4 o’clock in the morning I heard a knock on the front door. I figured it had to be my mother returning for round 2. My father yelled up from the living room asking me to get the door. He wanted no part of her.
As I open the door I turn the porch light on and there stood 6 police officers spread around our front lawn, guns drawn and leveled at me. There was a cop on each side of the front door standing against the exterior wall of the house. Those were the two cops with the shot guns.
One wrong move and I would have had my face shot off.
When my mother fled the house she went to a relative’s house where she not only recounted her twisted version of events to extended family but she also called the Suffolk County Police Department and told them her 6’4”, 240lb cop husband was drunk, out of control, waving his gun around, threatening to “blow her away” and he was very violent!
A cop grabbed me forcefully and pulled me away from the front door like he was rescuing a hostage. I was taken around to the side of the house. The cops began asking me what happened. I told them what happened.
“What about the gun?,” they asked.
“What gun?,” I asked back, “There wasn’t any gun.”
This was the first time I was hearing about a gun and the first time they were hearing there wasn’t a gun.
The cops pointed towards the other side of the house where I can see my father standing in the driveway. He was handcuffed in his underwear. Apparently the cops thought I was too afraid of him to tell them what really happened so they wanted to show me King Kong was shackled and I was now safe to tell them the truth.
“Okay, tell us what happened,” the cops started again. I told them, again, what happened. No gun, he was defending himself. She tried to pierce his neck with her thumb nails. She was playing offense, he was playing defense. That’s it.
My mother attacked my father.
I look over to the driveway again. I see cops with flashlights looking under my father’s chin, at his neck area. They had him looking up and turning his head side-to-side. They were looking at the scratches and the two gouges on his neck. One was bleeding. The gouges were located exactly where I said they would be. They looked far worse now than they did immediately after they were inflicted. They had become these dark purple bruises, like he’d been shot on each side of his neck with a paint ball gun.
What the cops didn’t find was, evidence of intoxication. My mother lied.
The cuffs came off, Dad and I went back inside. It was just the two of us in the house. It was peaceful. Finally, the chaos was over.
The next day, my mother called my father’s boss and repeated her lies. She demanded he be fired.
I had just graduated junior high school and our family was moving from Brentwood, NY, to our new home in Setauket, NY.
It was a new house, new town, new school and new friends. It was exciting.
But this was also the start of a five year period of my life best described as a black hole of chaos and confusion. So dysfunctional were these years that I blacklisted this entire period out of the timeline of my life. As far as my brain was concerned these years didn’t exist.
For decades, these five years sat on a shelf in the subbasement of my mind gathering dust like an old, unsolvable cold case file.
40 years after the fact I find out my mother stole the family savings in 1975. This changes everything.
