Student in need of help !! | Business Accounting

Question:

You have just cited another reason why continental Europe has not – and probably will not – opt for adoption of the US court system. From a purely subjective point of view the US jury trials (real ones, not soap operas) we see here on TV often resemble – soap operas.

Some interesting discussion on the possible ramifications of an Andersen acquittal. http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=82541 http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=search&StoryID=1039157 — Jim Hudspeth, CFE, CPA http://survivalworks.com

Response:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Comparing legal systems, do you find that a case such as Andersen is really better decided by a jury that by, say, a panel of 3 professional judges? My own experience has been that professional judges from state levels (not county) and upwards simply tend to do a more professional job evaluating evidence, examing the law, legal doctrine, prior decisions, etc. than do laymen jurors. A. Lucien Meyers, CIA, CMA Better? In whose eyes? Also– in many instances (unsure if all instances), the defense may elect trial by the judge (1). Right on wrong, our system relies upon our peers. It leads to plenty of abuses, e.g., juries could and have made huge awards to their fellow citizens that, if upheld by higher courts, would cause the bankruptcy of their own city governments.

You have just cited another reason why continental Europe has not – and probably will not – opt for adoption of the US court system. From a purely subjective point of view the US jury trials (real ones, not soap operas) we see here on TV often resemble – soap operas. A. Lucien Meyers, CIA, CMA — If you receive this by error, please delete it and inform the sender. PGP Key fingerprint=F1C0 D9AE 1B18 1405 4DFA B4CC 6DC7 FF78 C76E FB15 To Big Brother Echelon from "spook": South Africa security NSA Rumsfeld BATF Sharon supercomputer Uzi AK-47

Response:

Comparing legal systems, do you find that a case such as Andersen is really better decided by a jury that by, say, a panel of 3 professional judges?

Depends on what you mean by better. If you are the defendant in a criminal trial you are probably a lot more interested in a "not guilty" verdict than a professional decision. Also, trials by judge don’t end with "hung" juries. While a "hung" jury is not exoneration, and can result in a new trial, it is also not "guilty as charged". At a minimum it gives the defendant another chance to be found "not guilty". At best (from the defendant’s point of view), the prosecution might decide not to retry the case. My own experience has been that professional judges from state levels (not county) and upwards simply tend to do a more professional job evaluating evidence, examing the law, legal doctrine, prior decisions, etc. than do laymen jurors.

I would agree with that. Also, judges over here have a way of controlling juries by determining what they can and cannot hear. — Jim Hudspeth, CFE, CPA http://survivalworks.com

Response:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Comparing legal systems, do you find that a case such as Andersen is really better decided by a jury that by, say, a panel of 3 professional judges? Depends on what you mean by better. If you are the defendant in a criminal trial you are probably a lot more interested in a "not guilty" verdict than a professional decision. Also, trials by judge don’t end with "hung" juries. While a "hung" jury is not exoneration, and can result in a new trial, it is also not "guilty as charged". At a minimum it gives the defendant another chance to be found "not guilty". At best (from the defendant’s point of view), the prosecution might decide not to retry the case. My own experience has been that professional judges from state levels (not county) and upwards simply tend to do a more professional job evaluating evidence, examing the law, legal doctrine, prior decisions, etc. than do laymen jurors. I would agree with that. Also, judges over here have a way of controlling juries by determining what they can and cannot hear.

Jury trials are much more seldom here in Switzerland. They are also very expensive, which is probably one reason for their rareness. But haven’t the equities markets judged and condemned Enron, Big 5 et al as effectively as courts? Prices have broken through negative resistance levels and not a day elapses without harsh expressions of investors’ mistrust in the "den of thieves" which I like to term "soft occupational fraudsters" who perpetrate creative accounting. Nevertheless, it would be encouraging if the legal system would separate many of them from their ill gotten wealth and sentence them to stiff prison terms. A. Lucien Meyers, CIA, CMA — If you receive this by error, please delete it and inform the sender. PGP Key fingerprint=F1C0 D9AE 1B18 1405 4DFA B4CC 6DC7 FF78 C76E FB15 To Big Brother Echelon from "spook": genetic security Iraq explosion terrorist cracking KGB ammunition Nazi

Response:

Comparing legal systems, do you find that a case such as Andersen is really better decided by a jury than by, say, a panel of 3 professional judges? My own experience has been that professional judges from state levels (not county) and upwards simply tend to do a more professional job evaluating evidence, examing the law, legal doctrine, prior decisions, etc. than do laymen jurors. A. Lucien Meyers, CIA, CMA — If you receive this by error, please delete it and inform the sender. PGP Key fingerprint=F1C0 D9AE 1B18 1405 4DFA B4CC 6DC7 FF78 C76E FB15 To Big Brother Echelon from "spook": Qaddafi Kennedy SEAL Team 6 Afghanistan Nazi SDI kibo AK-47 FBI FSF KGB

Response:

Andersen goes to jury News analysis by Greg Farrell, USA TODAY HOUSTON ? Arguments in the government’s extraordinary obstruction of justice case against Arthur Andersen ended on an explosive note Wednesday as defense attorney Rusty Hardin was nearly seized by U.S. marshals for refusing to sit down during the government’s closing statement. As lead prosecutor Andrew Weissmann spent the last hour of a marathon 12-hour session picking apart elements of Hardin’s four-hour closing statement, the Texas defense attorney repeatedly objected, at one point refusing to obey Federal District Judge Melinda Harmon’s direct order to sit down. Hardin only relented as two marshals approached the defense table. <a very large snip By Wednesday morning, the government appeared to have the upper hand. But Hardin’s spirited defense of Andersen, which warned of hyperaggressive prosecutors trying to convict people based on what they were thinking, might have turned the day. Don Compton, a jury selection consultant in attendance, predicted that the jury would probably be initially split eight to four in favor of acquittal. But, Compton warned, several of the four in favor of conviction would probably be militant in their beliefs. Ultimately, he predicted, the verdict would come down to which juror would become the leader and whether he or she could convince either the militants or the acquitters to come together. "The entire trial will come down to the last 45 minutes of deliberations," he said. http://www.usatoday.com/money/covers/2002-06-06-andersen-trial-jury.htm (free) This article is a great trial summary. — Jim Hudspeth, CFE, CPA http://survivalworks.com

Response:

Comparing legal systems, do you find that a case such as Andersen is really better decided by a jury that by, say, a panel of 3 professional judges? My own experience has been that professional judges from state levels (not county) and upwards simply tend to do a more professional job evaluating evidence, examing the law, legal doctrine, prior decisions, etc. than do laymen jurors. A. Lucien Meyers, CIA, CMA — If you receive this by error, please delete it and inform the sender. PGP Key fingerprint=F1C0 D9AE 1B18 1405 4DFA B4CC 6DC7 FF78 C76E FB15 To Big Brother Echelon from "spook": Qaddafi Kennedy SEAL Team 6 Afghanistan Nazi SDI kibo AK-47 FBI FSF KGB

Response:

Question:

Don’t confuse: F.A.S.B. G.A.S.B. F.A.S.A.B. I just read in the March 2000 issue of AGA that Secretary of the U.S. Treasury (not to be confused with the Treasury Secretary) recently changed the ratio of gov’t to private members on FASAB– a lot less gov’t members. I posted the FASAB info a few days ago. Now I’m confused. How can the Government change the FASAB? If it can, then perhaps the FASAB items should be free. — Tippy

– * Ronald Lee Todd M.B.A., C.P.A. * * Unemployed for six years, mistake of being an accountant. * * From the Socialist People’s Republic of Kalifornia, * * the Seventh worst state for business, * * Ayn Rand was right *

Response:

It is even worse than you thought. The Government Accounting Standards Board [located in the same office complex in Connecticut as the Financial Accounting Standards Board; GASB shares some administrative support with FASB] issues standards for state and local government entity reporting. That makes THREE sources of USA accounting standards and we have not yet included the International Accounting Standards Committee, AICPA committees which have a habit of making accounting / disclosure "recommendations" [I.e. mandates] in the Audit and Accounting Guides or the Statements of Position of the Accounting Standards Division and the Auditing Standards Division let alone the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal bank regulatory authorities et cetera et cetera. Isn’t GAAP fun? says… – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Maybe…yep. FASAB for government (i.e., state and local gov’ts as well). But many were discussing FASAB and how one had to pay for the statements. Their web site requires payment for their statements unlike *most* federal entities where the info is free on line like at GAO. Now it seems FASAB is at least somewhat controlled by Sec of Treasury…so why aren’t they free. The argument was that FASAB was non profit and therefore it had to get monies from such sale to help finance its operations. Well? How does that go from Saturday Night Live….Nevermind

Response:

I just read in the March 2000 issue of AGA that Secretary of the U.S. Treasury (not to be confused with the Treasury Secretary) recently changed the ratio of gov’t to private members on FASAB– a lot less gov’t members. I posted the FASAB info a few days ago. Now I’m confused. How can the Government change the FASAB? If it can, then perhaps the FASAB items should be free. — Tippy

Response:

The Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board promulgates accounting principles for Federal Government reporting entities according to http://www.fasab.gov/ The Financial Accounting Standards Board promulgates Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for private sector [as opposed to government sector] companies including those required to register securities under the Securities Act of 1933 or the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and those privately owned "for profit" and "not for profit" entities which choose to prepare GAAP financial statements. Are you confusing these two bodies? says… – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – I just read in the March 2000 issue of AGA that Secretary of the U.S. Treasury (not to be confused with the Treasury Secretary) recently changed the ratio of gov’t to private members on FASAB– a lot less gov’t members. I posted the FASAB info a few days ago. Now I’m confused. How can the Government change the FASAB? If it can, then perhaps the FASAB items should be free. — Tippy

Response:

Maybe…yep. FASAB for government (i.e., state and local gov’ts as well). But many were discussing FASAB and how one had to pay for the statements. Their web site requires payment for their statements unlike *most* federal entities where the info is free on line like at GAO. Now it seems FASAB is at least somewhat controlled by Sec of Treasury…so why aren’t they free. The argument was that FASAB was non profit and therefore it had to get monies from such sale to help finance its operations. Well? How does that go from Saturday Night Live….Nevermind The article I read is at http://www.agacgfm.org/publications/downloads/March2002TOPICS.pdf Page 3 Tippy

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – The Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board promulgates accounting principles for Federal Government reporting entities according to http://www.fasab.gov/ The Financial Accounting Standards Board promulgates Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for private sector [as opposed to government sector] companies including those required to register securities under the Securities Act of 1933 or the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and those privately owned "for profit" and "not for profit" entities which choose to prepare GAAP financial statements. Are you confusing these two bodies? says… I just read in the March 2000 issue of AGA that Secretary of the U.S. Treasury (not to be confused with the Treasury Secretary) recently changed the ratio of gov’t to private members on FASAB– a lot less gov’t members. I posted the FASAB info a few days ago. Now I’m confused. How can the Government change the FASAB? If it can, then perhaps the FASAB items should be free. — Tippy

Response:

Question:

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – They did count all those votes in the months after the election was over and I they found that Bush won over gore. The counts were done by a number of different sources and they counted them gore’s method of counting and still came up with Bush winning. Go look it up and read about it. It’s amaizing how some people don’t even pay attention to the news, or read a paper. I acknowledge that he won… I still say he hardly carries anything resembling a mandate.

Had Gore won he wouldn’t have a mandate either. — Etherman AA # pi EAC Director of Ritual Satanic Abuse Operations "I tasted poison, when I drank the wine of fate."–Blind Guardian

Response:

The Supreme Court was simply enforcing Florida law. — Etherman AA # pi EAC Director of Ritual Satanic Abuse Operations "I tasted poison, when I drank the wine of fate."–Blind Guardian

Response:

| | | | | | …gave Al Gore the US Presidency. | | | | So, who is the guy in the white house? | | | | The guy who got the most electoral votes. | | | The guy who got the most Surpreme Court votes. | | The Supreme Court was simply enforcing Florida law. | Envorcing Florida law is the job of the Florida Supreme Court. The Federal Supreme Court had no business (other than insuring a Republican victory) sticking there collective noses into it. | | — | Etherman | | AA # pi | | EAC Director of Ritual Satanic Abuse Operations | | "I tasted poison, when I drank the wine of fate."–Blind Guardian | |

Response:

The vote count thing is a joke and everyone can see that except those blinded by what they want to believe. Better to think everything went the way it should than believe that they actually supported the greatest political fiasco of our time. 1) Does anyone truly believe that it was coincidence that the state that caused the trouble just happens to be baby brother’s Florida? 2) With at least one truckload of votes ‘gone missing’ does a recount mean anything? Sure, if you throw away enough of the other guy’s votes you can eventually make it seem as if you won. 3) What would the count have been if they actually allowed everyone to vote that was eligible? 4) What would the vote have been if they had a fair balloting system, or better yet, run an emergency paper ballot re-vote for Florida? Of course you can point to the fact that various things were done in accordance with FL law. But for how many thousands of years have crimes been committed within the parameters of the law? I just hope that we can keep it together until we get rid of this idiot. Electing Dubyah had nothing to do with his qualifications to lead, and everything to do with people being pissed at Clinton for lying about keeping his pants zipped. Personally, I don’t really care who was giving him a BJ. He was doing a hell of a job running the country. I don’t know if Al could have filled his shoes, but at least he can read and write. As an aside, I was listening to NPR and they had a press conference recorded. Someone asked George Bush about the failing economy and he indignant and said he ‘wasn’t hired to be president to know about finance’, so the questioner should ask an economist about what the economic future would be. Yes, I am not quoting exactly, but in a nutshell, that is what he said. Personally, I don’t think the economy has a lot to do with what is going on in business, but a lot to do with people being afraid of who was put in the White House. To me, a lie from one man about who he is screwing (which is none of my business) is a lot less serious than a lie from another who says he won’t touch the money put aside for my old age and then turns around and says ha ha that was just a "symbolic goal." Okay, I will stop here, but I just get enraged when I hear anyone defend the criminal retard that is sitting in the Oval office right now. What I truly wish is that we could have another election right now. From what I have read in the polls, Dubyah has one of the country’s all time lowest approval ratings from the public. What do you want to bet he couldn’t do it again even if they turned in ballots saying every soul in FL voted for him? FREE pagan/metaphysical newsletter. For info or subscription:

Response:

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – | | | | | | …gave Al Gore the US Presidency. | | | | So, who is the guy in the white house? | | | | The guy who got the most electoral votes. | | | The guy who got the most Surpreme Court votes. | | The Supreme Court was simply enforcing Florida law. | Envorcing Florida law is the job of the Florida Supreme Court. The Federal Supreme Court had no business (other than insuring a Republican victory) sticking there collective noses into it.

You can criticize the details all you like but the real truth was that the margin of error in this election was greater than the margin of victory for either candidate. The closest interpolation of the rules at the state and federal level favored Bush. It was a fluke for Bush to win and it would have been a fluke for Gore to win. The upside of all this is that election process is being updated to minimize the level of error so that future votes should be less confusing.

Response:

They did count all those votes in the months after the election was over and I they found that Bush won over gore. The counts were done by a number of different sources and they counted them gore’s method of counting and still came up with Bush winning. Go look it up and read about it. It’s amaizing how some people don’t even pay attention to the news, or read a paper. I acknowledge that he won… I still say he hardly carries anything resembling a mandate.

It depends on how you want to look at it. Bush has the support of Generals, Wall Street, and most private business owners. Gore had the support of the poor, Hollywood and a lot of disparate groups with single issue concerns (like abortion). If I am president, I want the support of the former, not the latter.

Response:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Give me a tear-jerking break! Don’t you left-wingers *get it*? The rich have enough money to buy influence, while the poor do not. Translation – It isn’t might that makes right, but money. — Phil Hays And when has anyone, any time in history, and in any country in the world, seen a different pattern? Why do you think "bitching about it" is going to change anything, when this has never worked before?

Sure, when the mighty ruled. And less commonly, when the wise ruled. That the rich have influence, or that the rich rule and the poor have no influence? Different things, Charliew, as different as morality and power. — Phil Hays

Response:

…gave Al Gore the US Presidency. So, who is the guy in the white house? – Chive Science is not belief, but the will to find out. George Walker Al Gore Bill Clinton Bush. Same politician, different face, different mannerisms. Same results: rich get richer, poor get poorer.

Actually, in this country, the poor have been getting richer too, just not as fast as the rich themselves. As a result incomes gaps have increased. If everyone is benefiting, is there necessarily a problem with that?

Response:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – | | | | | | …gave Al Gore the US Presidency. | | | | So, who is the guy in the white house? | | | | The guy who got the most electoral votes. | | | The guy who got the most Surpreme Court votes. | | The Supreme Court was simply enforcing Florida law. | Envorcing Florida law is the job of the Florida Supreme Court. The Federal Supreme Court had no business (other than insuring a Republican victory) sticking there collective noses into it.

If one is honest, one must admit that the stupid candidate did legally beat the evil candidate. That’s the electoral college. Harvest Dancer

Response:

Clintoon and the croonies are out of a job a while. It’s about time. Quite franky, one more tax hike from Clinton and I was going to throw up on the IRS forms and send that in for the years earnings!

Well I for one was pretty happy with Clinton. High taxes yes, but making more money than I ever have in my life so the very slightly higher taxes weren’t even felt. I would much rather have that than no job at all which is what Dubyah is offering. I would rather pay taxes I could afford and make a good living while I am able than have to eat garbage off the street in my old age because some crook depleted my old age pension. FREE pagan/metaphysical newsletter. For info or subscription:

Response:

Give me a tear-jerking break! Don’t you left-wingers *get it*? The rich have enough money to buy influence, while the poor do not. Translation – It isn’t might that makes right, but money. — Phil Hays

And when has anyone, any time in history, and in any country in the world, seen a different pattern? Why do you think "bitching about it" is going to change anything, when this has never worked before?

Response:

Give me a tear-jerking break! Don’t you left-wingers *get it*? The rich have enough money to buy influence, while the poor do not. Translation –

It isn’t might that makes right, but money. — Phil Hays

Response:

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – | | | | | | …gave Al Gore the US Presidency. | | | | So, who is the guy in the white house? | | | | The guy who got the most electoral votes. | | | The guy who got the most Surpreme Court votes. | | The Supreme Court was simply enforcing Florida law. | Envorcing Florida law is the job of the Florida Supreme Court. The Federal Supreme Court had no business (other than insuring a Republican victory) sticking there collective noses into it.

They were asked to stick their noses into it. — Etherman AA # pi EAC Director of Ritual Satanic Abuse Operations "I tasted poison, when I drank the wine of fate."–Blind Guardian

Response:

| | | | | | | | | | | | …gave Al Gore the US Presidency. | | | | | | So, who is the guy in the white house? | | | | | | The guy who got the most electoral votes. | | | | | The guy who got the most Surpreme Court votes. | | | | The Supreme Court was simply enforcing Florida law. | | | Envorcing Florida law is the job of the Florida Supreme Court. The | Federal | Supreme Court had no business (other than insuring a Republican victory) | sticking there collective noses into it. | | You can criticize the details all you like but the real truth was that the | margin of error in this election was greater than the margin of victory for | either candidate. | | The closest interpolation of the rules at the state and federal level | favored Bush. It was a fluke for Bush to win and it would have been a fluke | for Gore to win. | | The upside of all this is that election process is being updated to minimize | the level of error so that future votes should be less confusing. | Can’t really argue with that. |

Response:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – | | …gave Al Gore the US Presidency. | | | | So, who is the guy in the white house? | | | | The guy who got the most electoral votes. | | | The guy who got the most Surpreme Court votes. | | The Supreme Court was simply enforcing Florida law. | Envorcing Florida law is the job of the Florida Supreme Court. The Federal Supreme Court had no business (other than insuring a Republican victory) sticking there collective noses into it.

Yeah. Where’s those "States’ Rights" folks when you need ‘em? Next thing you know, Bush will start meddling in local school districts’ affairs. I’m sure the "Local Control" and "Unfunded Mandate" people will show him what for.

Response:

following steaming pile: The upside of all this is that election process is being updated to minimize the level of error so that future votes should be less confusing.

Ceding Florida to the Cubans is merely a formality, at this point, and should prevent similar incidents. — V.G. "Smoking marijuana and THEN doing something stupid which results in your death is NOt a death attributable to marijuana. It is attributable to poor judgement." – "Stoner logic" takes a leap

Response:

…gave Al Gore the US Presidency. So, who is the guy in the white house? – Chive Science is not belief, but the will to find out. George Walker Al Gore Bill Clinton Bush. Same politician, different face, different mannerisms. Same results: rich get richer, poor get poorer.

Give me a tear-jerking break! Don’t you left-wingers *get it*? The rich have enough money to buy influence, while the poor do not. Translation – your jealousy and envy are not nearly enough to eliminate the advantage that the rich have, whether you like it or not. Get over it and move on. And BTW, the next time you want to criticize the rich, quit using that same old tired and dusty cliche. If the rich have committed a crime, prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. If they haven’t committed a crime, get off their backs for being rich.

Response:

Response:

I acknowledge that he won… I still say he hardly carries anything resembling a mandate.

Luckly for him the Constitution does not require a mandate from the people, but rather more electorial votes. It’s a silly system, but it’s the only one we’ve got. — Andy

Response:

Anyone actually got the links to the recounts…..? The Miami Sun was it ? Wasn’t there also one of the accounting firms doing it ? — Tim Worstall Portugal office. Cogito Eggo Sum…..I think therefore I am an omlette.

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – They did count all those votes in the months after the election was over and I they found that Bush won over gore. The counts were done by a number of different sources and they counted them gore’s method of counting and still came up with Bush winning. Go look it up and read about it. It’s amaizing how some people don’t even pay attention to the news, or read a paper. I acknowledge that he won… I still say he hardly carries anything resembling a mandate.

Response:

…gave Al Gore the US Presidency. So, who is the guy in the white house? – Chive Science is not belief, but the will to find out.

George Walker Al Gore Bill Clinton Bush. Same politician, different face, different mannerisms. Same results: rich get richer, poor get poorer.

Response:

They did count all those votes in the months after the election was over and I they found that Bush won over gore. The counts were done by a number of different sources and they counted them gore’s method of counting and still came up with Bush winning. Go look it up and read about it. It’s amaizing how some people don’t even pay attention to the news, or read a paper.

I acknowledge that he won… I still say he hardly carries anything resembling a mandate.

Response:

…gave Al Gore the US Presidency. So, who is the guy in the white house? – Chive Science is not belief, but the will to find out.

Response:

…gave Al Gore the US Presidency. So, who is the guy in the white house?

The guy who got the most electoral votes.

Response:

They did count all those votes in the months after the election was over and I they found that Bush won over gore. The counts were done by a number of different sources and they counted them gore’s method of counting and still came up with Bush winning. Go look it up and read about it. It’s amaizing how some people don’t even pay attention to the news, or read a paper.

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – …gave Al Gore the US Presidency. So, who is the guy in the white house? – Chive Science is not belief, but the will to find out.

Response:

Question:

big trigger further on. about rage and violence and children and who is guilty of what…. no spoiler, no splats you read as your choice when my son was two months old he had colic. he cried all nite and slept all day. i stayed up with him every night walking walking walking. singing and patting his back and humming deep sounds that helped him stop crying. we never stopped moving, two four eight hours till finally he would sleep. i would sleep. his male donor (who is so far from actually behaving in any way like what i would consider fitting for the word father) berated me for "getting his sleep schedule all screwed up" and for "being selfish cause now he (the male donor) didn’t get to see the child hardly at all cause of what i "was doing." this was common for the ten years i, lost in my own illness and pain and exhaustion, lived with this person. he is abusive and a bully and a very very ugly sad little human. he says leave the son alone to "cry it out." no. so i am nursing my son and stop eating every food that might be making the colic happen until i am drinking water and eating dry toast for so many days i begin to be unable to stand up but still i nurse him and still i walk the floor all nite every nite and still i hum deep sounds to ease his crying. and still the man yells at me. he never offers to help. that is not his way. then one night son cries and cries and can’t stop and i am having a hard time to walk up and down the stairs and i wrap him in his blanket and lay him in bed and try to walk away. but he cries even more and now it is breaking the heart of us both. but also i am so tired and so weak that i can’t think how i can keep taking care of him and no help and if i could just get some sleep. all this thinking and i walk into pick him up and we go into hall, i lie on floor with him and he cries and cries and suddenly my hands are on his neck and i know that in one more second i will k*ll him. i roll over to face the radiator and feel the rage and horror and sickness and despair wave across me and i shake and shake and shake and i think that now i will die. and i pick him up and we walk and walk and i hum deep sounds to soothe his crying and pat his back and hold him close and he rests on my shoulder and the colic pain subsides like it has every nite this month. time passes. years pass. still living with the male donor who bullies the son and bullies me and spins his hatred around everything until breathing is poisoned with his rage. by now i am so beaten into myself and trying to protect the son from the ugly rage and spending plastic money like i am rich and not a high skool dropout working part time living in a slum apt. with a lawyer who needs to abuse me and my son. i spend money and get crazy with fear and spend more and try to make the world right for my son and probably i am so sick in my mind now that only death would have been a worse place to exist. and i go out with the son and a grown friend of mine and her daughter. and we go to see movie and then friend needs to get some clothing thing. and i make son promise not to beg for "stuff." he promises. then we get to clothes place and he begins to beg and carry on and i say no and he begs more and it is all out of control and i am ashamed he is like this in front of friend and i am ashamed i have been so terrible a parent that he is so messed up and i am ashamed to be alive and i hate me for being a failure and i hate him for making it so obvious. so i begin to scream at him. insane banshee scream arms flying thru the air like i am going to take off like some helicopter on acid. and he cowers and my friend grabs my arm "what is wrong? stop it." she says. what is wrong? what is wrong? there are so many answers i don’t know on top of the ones i do know. what is wrong? what is wrong? so i say these things here because i want to know if i become a child abuser. do i get banished to the land where all the unforgiving people go when jill gets to banish everyone. who decides who gets tattooed and banished and jailed and made into forgotten chunks of shit. i just want to know. in my case no one ever reported me. in my case these were the only incidents of outright abuse. of course there was all the daily dissing and the intense depressions where i couldn’t get out of bed and the angry words spit thru gritted teeth and the times when i shut down and no one could talk and who knows what else cause i don’t even remember. i know that a few degrees more of the hell i was living or the hell i was given as a child and i would have done physical damage to my son. but somehow i was "lucky" enough to be within the degree where my abuse was emotional, not physical. and he got something i could give very well sometimes, he got loved unconditionally. not enough, but some. not loved for being or doing and trying to be some achievement. just because he was lovable. i loved him. so do i get applause? i hope to hell not. but i will tell you that if someone had seen me in either situation and reported me then i would have that record. i would be one of the ones to be banished to the land where only evil resides. which means that my son would not now be a 19 year old who tells me that he can see how much i have learned from being in therapy. who has said he wants to see a therapist so he can sort out his rage and other problems so he doesn’t carry them around for 40 years. i would not be here to tell him that any time any place he wants to talk to me about how i parented and what i did or didn’t do so he can face me and face what and who i am, all of me and in the real. he who has said that he wants to be a child therapist. who, in spite of being a hi skool dropout is working for the ymca at the local elementary skool with at risk kids and loving it and talks about them and is really excited for the first time in years. of course, in the world where anyone with a record gets banished this young man, who has tattoos all over his arms which is his form of si and personifying his pain, who dresses like a greaser cause he still hasn’t grown up, well, this boymanchild has a record. he set off fireworks in the rich peoples neighborhood and got busted. and he swiped a bottle of wine from a grocery store. stupid. wrong. yes. but he is also one of the smartest people i have ever known. and he is an empath in the making. and he is one of the single funniest humans i’ve ever known. and he loves being alive, which i have always envied enormously. and if he goes to college and hones his skills and get thru his own therapy and comes out whole he will be one of the most superb therapists and teachers for children on this sad old planet. now this is just my own personal story. but when i think of the poor immigrants i see at the local thrift store, Cambodians, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Vietnamese, endless numbers of the working poor, and i know that they are here to escape worse at home and they are living ten to a room in apartments run by ‘benevolent’ slum lords who never get cited cause they contribute their dirty money to political campaigns. but these people put up with it cause of fear of reprisals or fear of eviction and they do it in order to stretch their income and send money home to sisters and fathers and cousins and they bring their children here with great hopes that they will get an education and instead their children learn the great american ethos—buy have get. and culture and family and poverty and the sickness of america begins to destroy people and they commit crimes. stupid crimes. pointless, gonna get caught crimes. crimes to prove they’re tough. crimes to bring home something special. crimes of ignorance and desperation and stupidity and longing and it should break your heart. and if these people also are going to be banished to some hell island so the rich and self satisfied and perfect in deed and thought can feel safe and righteous then i think we might as well get right down to the core of it and just kill off anyone who isn’t the ideal. of course, there may be a great discrepancy in what the ideal is. a lot a americans think the new pres and his wife are ideal. of course he has a few drunk driving citations and mrs. prez killed her boyfriend with reckless driving when she was a teen. and mr. prez has been involved in numerous shady business bankruptcies but these people are considered to be ideal and righteous and worthy. of course being rich seems to buy on the planet something they can’t attain in the kingdom of heaven. i know there’s a line somewhere about rich men and the eye of a needle. so who decides? cause in my ideal world the rich people would be stripped of everything and placed on some desolate island and kept away from the rest of the world so we could live safely. and i would take all their wealth and pass it around so everyone had enough to eat and a safe roof over them and a soft bed under them and good health care and their children would be educated and everyone who needed help with raising children would get help because that is the right and smart thing to do for the children. and no one would have to steal what they wanted cause it would be easily available and people would be encouraged to train to do work that made their hearts sing. there could be schools of musicians who would be paid all their lives for making beautiful songs and children who liked to run on the playground would be encouraged to become athletes and to teach other children who love to run and people would be appreciated and honored for who they are and what they CAN do and what they like to do and not pushed into cubicles to do tedious and hateful work so a few people at the top can take home millions while the ten thousand at at the bottom can’t pay for a doctor. so, i haven’t written here for a while. there are too many things i find triggering. i have

Response:

Dear betsy – Thank you for your powerful words. Yes, I stand in line with the criminals and crazies and human trash. Yes, I lie down in the gutter to be with anyone who needs me. And, yes, I have *never* talked to the mother of a colicky or sleepless infant who has not had the impulse, at least once to – throw the child against the wall, out window, whatever (and never, never, never wanted to follow that impulse – been horrified at living on such an exhausting, excruciating edge). We haven’t done it – the violence to our children – because – we love the child more than our own lives. More than. Or maybe we have screamed into the face of a sobbing infant: "Shut up!!!!!!" Because we thought we were going to die if we could not somehow have some kind of comfortful contact with the child. Oh, yeah, and we went w/out meds to nurse, because we believed that nursing was what he needed – and he did – and it cost us, hugely, and we did it against the advice of our MD, who did not understand how vital that physical bond between mother and baby is, because that was the *only* thing that was working between us that was totally connective and peaceful. And today, my son and I are so bonded that no one can ever imagine what hell I went through with him as an infant. No one can imagine that there have been times when I have taken him by the arm and gritted my teeth and yelled at him, "F*cking stop crying!" because I couldn’t stand one more fussy moment. Do I worry night after night about the damage I have caused him? Do I worry because he saw his mother almost die in front of his eyes of an overdose? No sh*t, I worry – no sh*t. But my son knows that he is loved entirely. He also knows that I tell him the truth. He also knows that I confess my weaknesses and errors, and tell him immediately when I have been wrong, when what I have done is not okay. I have also worked through therapy and meds so that I don’t yell at him anymore, okay? Show me a perfect parent. Show me one. I want to know what one looks like. I’ve never seen or imagined one. And so life goes on. And guess what????? For the love of heaven, if we lived in a natural society where people actually lived together and helped one another, no mother need ever feel that way, because she would *never* be alone to have to bear that burden: there would always be an entire lineage, an entire village worth, or at least a household worth, of people for whom that baby’s life was also more important than their own. Am I idealizing a more primary form of life? Well, I don’t think so – not in that way, anyway. Yeah, so maybe the baby dies of dysentery – because rich peoples don’t care enough to make sure that primary ways of living are not tampered with but supported. But the baby dies in loving arms – the loving arms of an entire culture. I am rambling beyond coherence. Okay, so if you want violent rhetoric, do you remember what we used to say in the 60s and who we used to say it to? We used to say, "Up against the wall, motherf*ckers." What would I do when I got those people up against the wall? I think I would just ask them very, very, very quietly: "Stop pushing people down, stop stepping on people who were born down, and especially stop telling us why we deserve it." That’s all. Okay, standing back for the barrage of hate mail – Beauty. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – big trigger further on. about rage and violence and children and who is guilty of what…. no spoiler, no splats you read as your choice when my son was two months old he had colic. he cried all nite and slept all day. i stayed up with him every night walking walking walking. singing and patting his back and humming deep sounds that helped him stop crying. we never stopped moving, two four eight hours till finally he would sleep. i would sleep. his male donor (who is so far from actually behaving in any way like what i would consider fitting for the word father) berated me for "getting his sleep schedule all screwed up" and for "being selfish cause now he (the male donor) didn’t get to see the child hardly at all cause of what i "was doing." this was common for the ten years i, lost in my own illness and pain and exhaustion, lived with this person. he is abusive and a bully and a very very ugly sad little human. he says leave the son alone to "cry it out." no. so i am nursing my son and stop eating every food that might be making the colic happen until i am drinking water and eating dry toast for so many days i begin to be unable to stand up but still i nurse him and still i walk the floor all nite every nite and still i hum deep sounds to ease his crying. and still the man yells at me. he never offers to help. that is not his way. then one night son cries and cries and can’t stop and i am having a hard time to walk up and down the stairs and i wrap him in his blanket and lay him in bed and try to walk away. but he cries even more and now it is breaking the heart of us both. but also i am so tired and so weak that i can’t think how i can keep taking care of him and no help and if i could just get some sleep. all this thinking and i walk into pick him up and we go into hall, i lie on floor with him and he cries and cries and suddenly my hands are on his neck and i know that in one more second i will k*ll him. i roll over to face the radiator and feel the rage and horror and sickness and despair wave across me and i shake and shake and shake and i think that now i will die. and i pick him up and we walk and walk and i hum deep sounds to soothe his crying and pat his back and hold him close and he rests on my shoulder and the colic pain subsides like it has every nite this month. time passes. years pass. still living with the male donor who bullies the son and bullies me and spins his hatred around everything until breathing is poisoned with his rage. by now i am so beaten into myself and trying to protect the son from the ugly rage and spending plastic money like i am rich and not a high skool dropout working part time living in a slum apt. with a lawyer who needs to abuse me and my son. i spend money and get crazy with fear and spend more and try to make the world right for my son and probably i am so sick in my mind now that only death would have been a worse place to exist. and i go out with the son and a grown friend of mine and her daughter. and we go to see movie and then friend needs to get some clothing thing. and i make son promise not to beg for "stuff." he promises. then we get to clothes place and he begins to beg and carry on and i say no and he begs more and it is all out of control and i am ashamed he is like this in front of friend and i am ashamed i have been so terrible a parent that he is so messed up and i am ashamed to be alive and i hate me for being a failure and i hate him for making it so obvious. so i begin to scream at him. insane banshee scream arms flying thru the air like i am going to take off like some helicopter on acid. and he cowers and my friend grabs my arm "what is wrong? stop it." she says. what is wrong? what is wrong? there are so many answers i don’t know on top of the ones i do know. what is wrong? what is wrong? so i say these things here because i want to know if i become a child abuser. do i get banished to the land where all the unforgiving people go when jill gets to banish everyone. who decides who gets tattooed and banished and jailed and made into forgotten chunks of shit. i just want to know. in my case no one ever reported me. in my case these were the only incidents of outright abuse. of course there was all the daily dissing and the intense depressions where i couldn’t get out of bed and the angry words spit thru gritted teeth and the times when i shut down and no one could talk and who knows what else cause i don’t even remember. i know that a few degrees more of the hell i was living or the hell i was given as a child and i would have done physical damage to my son. but somehow i was "lucky" enough to be within the degree where my abuse was emotional, not physical. and he got something i could give very well sometimes, he got loved unconditionally. not enough, but some. not loved for being or doing and trying to be some achievement. just because he was lovable. i loved him. so do i get applause? i hope to hell not. but i will tell you that if someone had seen me in either situation and reported me then i would have that record. i would be one of the ones to be banished to the land where only evil resides. which means that my son would not now be a 19 year old who tells me that he can see how much i have learned from being in therapy. who has said he wants to see a therapist so he can sort out his rage and other problems so he doesn’t carry them around for 40 years. i would not be here to tell him that any time any place he wants to talk to me about how i parented and what i did or didn’t do so he can face me and face what and who i am, all of me and in the real. he who has said that he wants to be a child therapist. who, in spite of being a hi skool dropout is working for the ymca at the local elementary skool with at risk kids and loving it and talks about them and is really excited for the first time in years. of course, in the world where anyone with a record gets banished this young man, who has tattoos all over his arms which is his form of si and personifying his pain, who dresses like a greaser cause he still hasn’t grown up, well, this boymanchild has a record. he set off fireworks in the rich peoples neighborhood and got busted. and he swiped a bottle of wine from a grocery store. stupid. wrong. yes. but he is also one of the

Response:

Hi betsy, Major snippage of your beautiful, eloquent, and heartfelt words….. so do i get applause? i hope to hell not.

You get respect from me. Lots and lots and lots of respect. Infinite respect. And love. if there is going to be a lining up of the ones who are marked as criminal and the ones who consider themselves pure then i choose the line of criminals. because in that group i think is where i find the humanity that is the only thing really worth a damn to me. i will never be pure. I choose to stand in line next to you, betsy. Scr*w pure–like you I never will be and I never have been. It was a pleasure reading your words of wisdom. I miss NOJ too. Take care, Domino – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text –

Response:

Dear betsy – Thank you for your powerful words.

thank you Beauty for starting me to speak. it was your words about your terrible experience when your son was a baby that pushed me to speak. i think too many people are made ashamed for being broken at times. i also know that i have spent most of my life thinking that only perfect was good enough and since i had already failed then i should just d*e and stop being a waste on the planet. i hate the ones who made me feel the shame and i hate the emptiness they propagated and i reject people who would tell me that i should always be ashamed and that i am worthless and bad. i am human. i have many aspects. i am capable of great good and probably great evil. but what i am taught, and what is expected of me, and how i am loved or hated affect who i am in the world. i think this is how humans are but maybe it is only me. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Yes, I stand in line with the criminals and crazies and human trash. Yes, I lie down in the gutter to be with anyone who needs me. And, yes, I have *never* talked to the mother of a colicky or sleepless infant who has not had the impulse, at least once to – throw the child against the wall, out window, whatever (and never, never, never wanted to follow that impulse – been horrified at living on such an exhausting, excruciating edge). We haven’t done it – the violence to our children – because – we love the child more than our own lives. More than. Or maybe we have screamed into the face of a sobbing infant: "Shut up!!!!!!" Because we thought we were going to die if we could not somehow have some kind of comfortful contact with the child. Oh, yeah, and we went w/out meds to nurse, because we believed that nursing was what he needed – and he did – and it cost us, hugely, and we did it against the advice of our MD, who did not understand how vital that physical bond between mother and baby is, because that was the *only* thing that was working between us that was totally connective and peaceful. And today, my son and I are so bonded that no one can ever imagine what hell I went through with him as an infant. No one can imagine that there have been times when I have taken him by the arm and gritted my teeth and yelled at him, "F*cking stop crying!" because I couldn’t stand one more fussy moment. Do I worry night after night about the damage I have caused him? Do I worry because he saw his mother almost die in front of his eyes of an overdose? No sh*t, I worry – no sh*t. But my son knows that he is loved entirely. He also knows that I tell him the truth. He also knows that I confess my weaknesses and errors, and tell him immediately when I have been wrong, when what I have done is not okay. I have also worked through therapy and meds so that I don’t yell at him anymore, okay? Show me a perfect parent. Show me one. I want to know what one looks like. I’ve never seen or imagined one.

i sometimes see some parents who have been lucky to have healthy parents (and we know it goes back in history, just as the unhealthy ones go back to their histories) and are healthy parents to their children. not perfect. sometimes tear their hair out impatient. but they have been given a learning of patience and interest and knowing love that is stuff we didn’t ever have. and their children are pretty healthy from being loved well. not perfect. well. i envy them. both sides of the equation. i wish i could be the child being loved well and i wish i could go back and be that parent to my son. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – And so life goes on. And guess what????? For the love of heaven, if we lived in a natural society where people actually lived together and helped one another, no mother need ever feel that way, because she would *never* be alone to have to bear that burden: there would always be an entire lineage, an entire village worth, or at least a household worth, of people for whom that baby’s life was also more important than their own. Am I idealizing a more primary form of life? Well, I don’t think so – not in that way, anyway. Yeah, so maybe the baby dies of dysentery – because rich peoples don’t care enough to make sure that primary ways of living are not tampered with but supported. But the baby dies in loving arms – the loving arms of an entire culture. I am rambling beyond coherence. Okay, so if you want violent rhetoric, do you remember what we used to say in the 60s and who we used to say it to? We used to say, "Up against the wall, motherf*ckers." What would I do when I got those people up against the wall? I think I would just ask them very, very, very quietly: "Stop pushing people down, stop stepping on people who were born down, and especially stop telling us why we deserve it." That’s all. Okay, standing back for the barrage of hate mail – Beauty.

people step on others because it is necessary in order for them to keep what they have stolen. this is true for the corporate thugs as well as the street gangstas. i do not embrace every criminal. i am no jes*s clone. i don’t even think i want to be that. but if people refuse to look honestly at how human beings become criminalized and why they learn to destroy others then it will never never end. if you create monsters then you are responsible. isn’t that the credo of the lawnorder crowd? that criminals should take responsibility for their crimes? but it always stops at the lowest rung of the ladder. only the poor and the ignorant and the powerless are made to pay for their greed or stupidity or broken lives. the rich buy their way out. i don’t know the medical truths of this but i do believe that there are some few people who are born broken in their minds and hearts and do evil things because they don’t care. no medicine or therapy will ever teach them to care. these people are truly dangerous for all their lives. but i think that most people who do damage to the world are people who were broken as children and if we made a world that took care of children and helped families and gave to each other instead of stockpiling riches in a few hands then maybe there wouldn’t be so many broken children who become criminal adults. i could be wrong, but since the way it works now does not, in fact, work, it seems i could be right. poverty brutalizes human beings. anyone who isn’t sure about that should check into you local homeless shelter for a few months. leave your credit cards at home. b. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – big trigger further on. about rage and violence and children and who is guilty of what…. no spoiler, no splats you read as your choice when my son was two months old he had colic. he cried all nite and slept all day. i stayed up with him every night walking walking walking. singing and patting his back and humming deep sounds that helped him stop crying. we never stopped moving, two four eight hours till finally he would sleep. i would sleep. his male donor (who is so far from actually behaving in any way like what i would consider fitting for the word father) berated me for "getting his sleep schedule all screwed up" and for "being selfish cause now he (the male donor) didn’t get to see the child hardly at all cause of what i "was doing." this was common for the ten years i, lost in my own illness and pain and exhaustion, lived with this person. he is abusive and a bully and a very very ugly sad little human. he says leave the son alone to "cry it out." no. so i am nursing my son and stop eating every food that might be making the colic happen until i am drinking water and eating dry toast for so many days i begin to be unable to stand up but still i nurse him and still i walk the floor all nite every nite and still i hum deep sounds to ease his crying. and still the man yells at me. he never offers to help. that is not his way. then one night son cries and cries and can’t stop and i am having a hard time to walk up and down the stairs and i wrap him in his blanket and lay him in bed and try to walk away. but he cries even more and now it is breaking the heart of us both. but also i am so tired and so weak that i can’t think how i can keep taking care of him and no help and if i could just get some sleep. all this thinking and i walk into pick him up and we go into hall, i lie on floor with him and he cries and cries and suddenly my hands are on his neck and i know that in one more second i will k*ll him. i roll over to face the radiator and feel the rage and horror and sickness and despair wave across me and i shake and shake and shake and i think that now i will die. and i pick him up and we walk and walk and i hum deep sounds to soothe his crying and pat his back and hold him close and he rests on my shoulder and the colic pain subsides like it has every nite this month. time passes. years pass. still living with the male donor who bullies the son and bullies me and spins his hatred around everything until breathing is poisoned with his rage. by now i am so beaten into myself and trying to protect the son from the ugly rage and spending plastic money like i am rich and not a high skool dropout working part time living in a slum apt. with a lawyer who needs to abuse me and my son. i spend money and get crazy with fear and spend more and try to make the world right for my son and probably i am so sick in my mind now that only death would have been a worse place to exist. and i go out with the son and a grown friend of mine and her daughter. and we go to see movie and then friend needs to get some clothing thing. and i make son promise not to beg for "stuff." he promises.

Response:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Hi betsy, Major snippage of your beautiful, eloquent, and heartfelt words….. so do i get applause? i hope to hell not. You get respect from me. Lots and lots and lots of respect. Infinite respect. And love. if there is going to be a lining up of the ones who are marked as criminal and the ones who consider themselves pure then i choose the line of criminals. because in that group i think is where i find the humanity that is the only thing really worth a damn to me. i will never be pure. I choose to stand in line next to you, betsy. Scr*w pure–like you I never will be and I never have been. It was a pleasure reading your words of wisdom. I miss NOJ too. Take care, Domino

thank you Domino. it has been a painful and frightening night of bad dreams and aching heart. we don’t want to know how ugly we can be. but we don’t want to be another one of the lies that fills the world. it is only in true knowing of selfs and actions that this one can become real. if those selfs or actions make others despise us then that is what they have to live with. it is on their heart. it is our heart we work on. peace to you. we are glad you have the big new adventure of the business. that is what being alive is for. b. and others — Memory is not enough. One needs a mythology, too. – Nasdijj

Response:

Dear b., I have great respect for what you have written here. Your son sounds like he is a wonderful person who is growing and healing and maturing. I think you have lots of reasons to be proud of how you have been as a mother. I also think your son is very fortunate that you are available to talk to him about mistakes you’ve made, and to help him with his healing. IMO, the context in which ab*se occurs is often at least as important as the act itself. I think isolated incidents of emotional or physical ab*se often are not truly damaging when they take place in the context of an environment that is generally loving and supportive, or a relationship that is generally loving and nurturing. I think sometimes parents beat themselves up for lots of minor things when they’re basically doing a good job. On the topic of people being born "evil," some research indicates that often people who seem this way have in effect been ab*sed pre-natally through severe drug and alcohol consumption by the pregnant mother (who often was ab*sed herself), and this causes serious damage to the fetus, especially in the areas of impulse control and empathy. I don’t know if anyone has figured out why these two areas seem to be so strongly affected, but it happens a lot. Even in mild cases of fetal alcohol syndrome, major symptoms include impulsivity, difficulty with cause and effect, and difficulty understanding the perceptions of others, all of which can lead to failures in empathy, aggression, and offending behaviors. A number of serial k*llers have been reported to have been subjected to much larger amounts of drugs while in the womb. So what can look like intrinsic evil may sometimes be due to neurological impariments that came from the environment the baby developed in. Just another perspective. -Nancy

Response:

Hi betsy, Your recount of your son’s colic sent shivers down my spine. My son (now 2) had some, though not as severe as yours thank goodness. I am very, very glad those days are over. (We did a lot of the same kind of things but I had a supportive partner which helped tremendously. Still darn tiring though for everyone involved and exasperating.) What I hope to find for myself is some kind of "real" understanding of who I am and what kind of person I am. Sometimes I feel hideous and cruel, other times wishy-washy and vapid. Sometimes I feel real and like a real mom with real problems but who is self-aware enough to be a good parent. Other times I feel like I have as much self-awareness as a stone. Anyhow, your post touched on something I’ve been thinking about lately in wanting to know how I size up as the measuring stick is constantly moving. (Not for egotistical purposes but sometimes I feel dreadfully and wholly inadequate, as a parent particularly. My son is in day care 10-30 hours a week while I sit home and contemplate my navel (or navel lint as the case may be). But I also know when I am really dissy I am pretty useless. :/ Other times I feel very strong for realizing I need to take care of myself to be a good parent.)) And I am not sure what counts as "*b*se" and what doesn’t. What you tell doesn’t sound like it to me. It doesn’t sound easy for any of you, but it doesn’t sound like *b*se either. Macademia – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – big trigger further on. about rage and violence and children and who is guilty of what…. no spoiler, no splats you read as your choice when my son was two months old he had colic. he cried all nite and slept all day. i stayed up with him every night walking walking walking. singing and patting his back and humming deep sounds that helped him stop crying. we never stopped moving, two four eight hours till finally he would sleep. i would sleep. his male donor (who is so far from actually behaving in any way like what i would consider fitting for the word father) berated me for "getting his sleep schedule all screwed up" and for "being selfish cause now he (the male donor) didn’t get to see the child hardly at all cause of what i "was doing." this was common for the ten years i, lost in my own illness and pain and exhaustion, lived with this person. he is abusive and a bully and a very very ugly sad little human. he says leave the son alone to "cry it out." no. so i am nursing my son and stop eating every food that might be making the colic happen until i am drinking water and eating dry toast for so many days i begin to be unable to stand up but still i nurse him and still i walk the floor all nite every nite and still i hum deep sounds to ease his crying. and still the man yells at me. he never offers to help. that is not his way. then one night son cries and cries and can’t stop and i am having a hard time to walk up and down the stairs and i wrap him in his blanket and lay him in bed and try to walk away. but he cries even more and now it is breaking the heart of us both. but also i am so tired and so weak that i can’t think how i can keep taking care of him and no help and if i could just get some sleep. all this thinking and i walk into pick him up and we go into hall, i lie on floor with him and he cries and cries and suddenly my hands are on his neck and i know that in one more second i will k*ll him. i roll over to face the radiator and feel the rage and horror and sickness and despair wave across me and i shake and shake and shake and i think that now i will die. and i pick him up and we walk and walk and i hum deep sounds to soothe his crying and pat his back and hold him close and he rests on my shoulder and the colic pain subsides like it has every nite this month. time passes. years pass. still living with the male donor who bullies the son and bullies me and spins his hatred around everything until breathing is poisoned with his rage. by now i am so beaten into myself and trying to protect the son from the ugly rage and spending plastic money like i am rich and not a high skool dropout working part time living in a slum apt. with a lawyer who needs to abuse me and my son. i spend money and get crazy with fear and spend more and try to make the world right for my son and probably i am so sick in my mind now that only death would have been a worse place to exist. and i go out with the son and a grown friend of mine and her daughter. and we go to see movie and then friend needs to get some clothing thing. and i make son promise not to beg for "stuff." he promises. then we get to clothes place and he begins to beg and carry on and i say no and he begs more and it is all out of control and i am ashamed he is like this in front of friend and i am ashamed i have been so terrible a parent that he is so messed up and i am ashamed to be alive and i hate me for being a failure and i hate him for making it so obvious. so i begin to scream at him. insane banshee scream arms flying thru the air like i am going to take off like some helicopter on acid. and he cowers and my friend grabs my arm "what is wrong? stop it." she says. what is wrong? what is wrong? there are so many answers i don’t know on top of the ones i do know. what is wrong? what is wrong? so i say these things here because i want to know if i become a child abuser. do i get banished to the land where all the unforgiving people go when jill gets to banish everyone. who decides who gets tattooed and banished and jailed and made into forgotten chunks of shit. i just want to know. in my case no one ever reported me. in my case these were the only incidents of outright abuse. of course there was all the daily dissing and the intense depressions where i couldn’t get out of bed and the angry words spit thru gritted teeth and the times when i shut down and no one could talk and who knows what else cause i don’t even remember. i know that a few degrees more of the hell i was living or the hell i was given as a child and i would have done physical damage to my son. but somehow i was "lucky" enough to be within the degree where my abuse was emotional, not physical. and he got something i could give very well sometimes, he got loved unconditionally. not enough, but some. not loved for being or doing and trying to be some achievement. just because he was lovable. i loved him. so do i get applause? i hope to hell not. but i will tell you that if someone had seen me in either situation and reported me then i would have that record. i would be one of the ones to be banished to the land where only evil resides. which means that my son would not now be a 19 year old who tells me that he can see how much i have learned from being in therapy. who has said he wants to see a therapist so he can sort out his rage and other problems so he doesn’t carry them around for 40 years. i would not be here to tell him that any time any place he wants to talk to me about how i parented and what i did or didn’t do so he can face me and face what and who i am, all of me and in the real. he who has said that he wants to be a child therapist. who, in spite of being a hi skool dropout is working for the ymca at the local elementary skool with at risk kids and loving it and talks about them and is really excited for the first time in years. of course, in the world where anyone with a record gets banished this young man, who has tattoos all over his arms which is his form of si and personifying his pain, who dresses like a greaser cause he still hasn’t grown up, well, this boymanchild has a record. he set off fireworks in the rich peoples neighborhood and got busted. and he swiped a bottle of wine from a grocery store. stupid. wrong. yes. but he is also one of the smartest people i have ever known. and he is an empath in the making. and he is one of the single funniest humans i’ve ever known. and he loves being alive, which i have always envied enormously. and if he goes to college and hones his skills and get thru his own therapy and comes out whole he will be one of the most superb therapists and teachers for children on this sad old planet. now this is just my own personal story. but when i think of the poor immigrants i see at the local thrift store, Cambodians, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Vietnamese, endless numbers of the working poor, and i know that they are here to escape worse at home and they are living ten to a room in apartments run by ‘benevolent’ slum lords who never get cited cause they contribute their dirty money to political campaigns. but these people put up with it cause of fear of reprisals or fear of eviction and they do it in order to stretch their income and send money home to sisters and fathers and cousins and they bring their children here with great hopes that they will get an education and instead their children learn the great american ethos—buy have get. and culture and family and poverty and the sickness of america begins to destroy people and they commit crimes. stupid crimes. pointless, gonna get caught crimes. crimes to prove they’re tough. crimes to bring home something special. crimes of ignorance and desperation and stupidity and longing and it should break your heart. and if these people also are going to be banished to some hell island so the rich and self satisfied and perfect in deed and thought can feel safe and righteous then i think we might as well get right down to the core of it and just kill off anyone who isn’t the ideal. of course, there may be a great discrepancy in what the ideal is. a lot a americans think the new pres and his wife

Response:

I haven’t read any of the replies to this post…..I’ve been finding the group draining & triggery lately, but I wanted to tell you that your post touched me, and I read it with tears streaming down my face. I, too, have dark blotches on my soul, if not my "record". And I know that I have caused hurt – unintentionally, regrettably, and with a deep aching in my heart still to this day, though the hurt inflicted was only a slap. I fear, despise and loathe s*x offenders, but I do not condemn them, nor do I hate them. It’s a fine line, and not all of me agrees, but I’m not perfect either…and wouldn’t have been even had I not been ab*sed. Of course, to this my T. would say "You’re so loyal!" and shake his head at me that I can so minimize the ab*se I suffered, and don’t see the difference between my slap and my f*ther’s repeated use of his f*sts(i), and my ncl’s (u, e) "gentler" use of his h*nds… My only response to him, to myself, and to others is that I can forgive myself for my actions, because I have worked hard to make sure I’m a safe person; I’ve paid gladly for th*rapy, year after year, to right whatever wrongs I can in my brain, so I can be happy & safe, and therein lies the difference. My ab*sers have admitted to their cr*mes, but have taken no actions to change their ways. That I cannot forgive. So, okay…I’m competely off-topic; My words are scandalous; My thoughts are disordered… But my heart is true. Peace to you, my friend. dyenths – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – big trigger further on. about rage and violence and children and who is guilty of what…. no spoiler, no splats you read as your choice when my son was two months old he had colic. he cried all nite and slept all day. i stayed up with him every night walking walking walking. singing and patting his back and humming deep sounds that helped him stop crying. we never stopped moving, two four eight hours till finally he would sleep. i would sleep. his male donor (who is so far from actually behaving in any way like what i would consider fitting for the word father) berated me for "getting his sleep schedule all screwed up" and for "being selfish cause now he (the male donor) didn’t get to see the child hardly at all cause of what i "was doing." this was common for the ten years i, lost in my own illness and pain and exhaustion, lived with this person. he is abusive and a bully and a very very ugly sad little human. he says leave the son alone to "cry it out." no. so i am nursing my son and stop eating every food that might be making the colic happen until i am drinking water and eating dry toast for so many days i begin to be unable to stand up but still i nurse him and still i walk the floor all nite every nite and still i hum deep sounds to ease his crying. and still the man yells at me. he never offers to help. that is not his way. then one night son cries and cries and can’t stop and i am having a hard time to walk up and down the stairs and i wrap him in his blanket and lay him in bed and try to walk away. but he cries even more and now it is breaking the heart of us both. but also i am so tired and so weak that i can’t think how i can keep taking care of him and no help and if i could just get some sleep. all this thinking and i walk into pick him up and we go into hall, i lie on floor with him and he cries and cries and suddenly my hands are on his neck and i know that in one more second i will k*ll him. i roll over to face the radiator and feel the rage and horror and sickness and despair wave across me and i shake and shake and shake and i think that now i will die. and i pick him up and we walk and walk and i hum deep sounds to soothe his crying and pat his back and hold him close and he rests on my shoulder and the colic pain subsides like it has every nite this month. time passes. years pass. still living with the male donor who bullies the son and bullies me and spins his hatred around everything until breathing is poisoned with his rage. by now i am so beaten into myself and trying to protect the son from the ugly rage and spending plastic money like i am rich and not a high skool dropout working part time living in a slum apt. with a lawyer who needs to abuse me and my son. i spend money and get crazy with fear and spend more and try to make the world right for my son and probably i am so sick in my mind now that only death would have been a worse place to exist. and i go out with the son and a grown friend of mine and her daughter. and we go to see movie and then friend needs to get some clothing thing. and i make son promise not to beg for "stuff." he promises. then we get to clothes place and he begins to beg and carry on and i say no and he begs more and it is all out of control and i am ashamed he is like this in front of friend and i am ashamed i have been so terrible a parent that he is so messed up and i am ashamed to be alive and i hate me for being a failure and i hate him for making it so obvious. so i begin to scream at him. insane banshee scream arms flying thru the air like i am going to take off like some helicopter on acid. and he cowers and my friend grabs my arm "what is wrong? stop it." she says. what is wrong? what is wrong? there are so many answers i don’t know on top of the ones i do know. what is wrong? what is wrong? so i say these things here because i want to know if i become a child abuser. do i get banished to the land where all the unforgiving people go when jill gets to banish everyone. who decides who gets tattooed and banished and jailed and made into forgotten chunks of shit. i just want to know. in my case no one ever reported me. in my case these were the only incidents of outright abuse. of course there was all the daily dissing and the intense depressions where i couldn’t get out of bed and the angry words spit thru gritted teeth and the times when i shut down and no one could talk and who knows what else cause i don’t even remember. i know that a few degrees more of the hell i was living or the hell i was given as a child and i would have done physical damage to my son. but somehow i was "lucky" enough to be within the degree where my abuse was emotional, not physical. and he got something i could give very well sometimes, he got loved unconditionally. not enough, but some. not loved for being or doing and trying to be some achievement. just because he was lovable. i loved him. so do i get applause? i hope to hell not. but i will tell you that if someone had seen me in either situation and reported me then i would have that record. i would be one of the ones to be banished to the land where only evil resides. which means that my son would not now be a 19 year old who tells me that he can see how much i have learned from being in therapy. who has said he wants to see a therapist so he can sort out his rage and other problems so he doesn’t carry them around for 40 years. i would not be here to tell him that any time any place he wants to talk to me about how i parented and what i did or didn’t do so he can face me and face what and who i am, all of me and in the real. he who has said that he wants to be a child therapist. who, in spite of being a hi skool dropout is working for the ymca at the local elementary skool with at risk kids and loving it and talks about them and is really excited for the first time in years. of course, in the world where anyone with a record gets banished this young man, who has tattoos all over his arms which is his form of si and personifying his pain, who dresses like a greaser cause he still hasn’t grown up, well, this boymanchild has a record. he set off fireworks in the rich peoples neighborhood and got busted. and he swiped a bottle of wine from a grocery store. stupid. wrong. yes. but he is also one of the smartest people i have ever known. and he is an empath in the making. and he is one of the single funniest humans i’ve ever known. and he loves being alive, which i have always envied enormously. and if he goes to college and hones his skills and get thru his own therapy and comes out whole he will be one of the most superb therapists and teachers for children on this sad old planet. now this is just my own personal story. but when i think of the poor immigrants i see at the local thrift store, Cambodians, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Vietnamese, endless numbers of the working poor, and i know that they are here to escape worse at home and they are living ten to a room in apartments run by ‘benevolent’ slum lords who never get cited cause they contribute their dirty money to political campaigns. but these people put up with it cause of fear of reprisals or fear of eviction and they do it in order to stretch their income and send money home to sisters and fathers and cousins and they bring their children here with great hopes that they will get an education and instead their children learn the great american ethos—buy have get. and culture and family and poverty and the sickness of america begins to destroy people and they commit crimes. stupid crimes. pointless, gonna get caught crimes. crimes to prove they’re tough. crimes to bring home something special. crimes of ignorance and desperation and stupidity and longing and it should break your heart. and if these people also are going to be banished to some hell island so the rich and self satisfied and perfect in deed and thought can feel safe and righteous then i think we might as well get right down to the core of it and just kill off anyone who isn’t the ideal. of course, there may be a great

Response:

Thank you for this information, Nancy. I have not been one to believe in the idea of innate evil. It is helpful to know that there are some suggestions that there are environmental explanations which might apply in cases which might look to some like innate evil. Beauty. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Dear b., I have great respect for what you have written here. Your son sounds like he is a wonderful person who is growing and healing and maturing. I think you have lots of reasons to be proud of how you have been as a mother. I also think your son is very fortunate that you are available to talk to him about mistakes you’ve made, and to help him with his healing. IMO, the context in which ab*se occurs is often at least as important as the act itself. I think isolated incidents of emotional or physical ab*se often are not truly damaging when they take place in the context of an environment that is generally loving and supportive, or a relationship that is generally loving and nurturing. I think sometimes parents beat themselves up for lots of minor things when they’re basically doing a good job. On the topic of people being born "evil," some research indicates that often people who seem this way have in effect been ab*sed pre-natally through severe drug and alcohol consumption by the pregnant mother (who often was ab*sed herself), and this causes serious damage to the fetus, especially in the areas of impulse control and empathy. I don’t know if anyone has figured out why these two areas seem to be so strongly affected, but it happens a lot. Even in mild cases of fetal alcohol syndrome, major symptoms include impulsivity, difficulty with cause and effect, and difficulty understanding the perceptions of others, all of which can lead to failures in empathy, aggression, and offending behaviors. A number of serial k*llers have been reported to have been subjected to much larger amounts of drugs while in the womb. So what can look like intrinsic evil may sometimes be due to neurological impariments that came from the environment the baby developed in. Just another perspective. -Nancy

Response:

Here’s my hate mail, Beauty… You are truly beautiful, deep inside where it counts. dyenths

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Dear betsy – Thank you for your powerful words. Yes, I stand in line with the criminals and crazies and human trash. Yes, I lie down in the gutter to be with anyone who needs me. And, yes, I have *never* talked to the mother of a colicky or sleepless infant who has not had the impulse, at least once to – throw the child against the wall, out window, whatever (and never, never, never wanted to follow that impulse – been horrified at living on such an exhausting, excruciating edge). We haven’t done it – the violence to our children – because – we love the child more than our own lives. More than. Or maybe we have screamed into the face of a sobbing infant: "Shut up!!!!!!" Because we thought we were going to die if we could not somehow have some kind of comfortful contact with the child. Oh, yeah, and we went w/out meds to nurse, because we believed that nursing was what he needed – and he did – and it cost us, hugely, and we did it against the advice of our MD, who did not understand how vital that physical bond between mother and baby is, because that was the *only* thing that was working between us that was totally connective and peaceful. And today, my son and I are so bonded that no one can ever imagine what hell I went through with him as an infant. No one can imagine that there have been times when I have taken him by the arm and gritted my teeth and yelled at him, "F*cking stop crying!" because I couldn’t stand one more fussy moment. Do I worry night after night about the damage I have caused him? Do I worry because he saw his mother almost die in front of his eyes of an overdose? No sh*t, I worry – no sh*t. But my son knows that he is loved entirely. He also knows that I tell him the truth. He also knows that I confess my weaknesses and errors, and tell him immediately when I have been wrong, when what I have done is not okay. I have also worked through therapy and meds so that I don’t yell at him anymore, okay? Show me a perfect parent. Show me one. I want to know what one looks like. I’ve never seen or imagined one. And so life goes on. And guess what????? For the love of heaven, if we lived in a natural society where people actually lived together and helped one another, no mother need ever feel that way, because she would *never* be alone to have to bear that burden: there would always be an entire lineage, an entire village worth, or at least a household worth, of people for whom that baby’s life was also more important than their own. Am I idealizing a more primary form of life? Well, I don’t think so – not in that way, anyway. Yeah, so maybe the baby dies of dysentery – because rich peoples don’t care enough to make sure that primary ways of living are not tampered with but supported. But the baby dies in loving arms – the loving arms of an entire culture. I am rambling beyond coherence. Okay, so if you want violent rhetoric, do you remember what we used to say in the 60s and who we used to say it to? We used to say, "Up against the wall, motherf*ckers." What would I do when I got those people up against the wall? I think I would just ask them very, very, very quietly: "Stop pushing people down, stop stepping on people who were born down, and especially stop telling us why we deserve it." That’s all. Okay, standing back for the barrage of hate mail – Beauty. big trigger further on. about rage and violence and children and who is guilty of what…. no spoiler, no splats you read as your choice when my son was two months old he had colic. he cried all nite and slept all day. i stayed up with him every night walking walking walking. singing and patting his back and humming deep sounds that helped him stop crying. we never stopped moving, two four eight hours till finally he would sleep. i would sleep. his male donor (who is so far from actually behaving in any way like what i would consider fitting for the word father) berated me for "getting his sleep schedule all screwed up" and for "being selfish cause now he (the male donor) didn’t get to see the child hardly at all cause of what i "was doing." this was common for the ten years i, lost in my own illness and pain and exhaustion, lived with this person. he is abusive and a bully and a very very ugly sad little human. he says leave the son alone to "cry it out." no. so i am nursing my son and stop eating every food that might be making the colic happen until i am drinking water and eating dry toast for so many days i begin to be unable to stand up but still i nurse him and still i walk the floor all nite every nite and still i hum deep sounds to ease his crying. and still the man yells at me. he never offers to help. that is not his way. then one night son cries and cries and can’t stop and i am having a hard time to walk up and down the stairs and i wrap him in his blanket and lay him in bed and try to walk away. but he cries even more and now it is breaking the heart of us both. but also i am so tired and so weak that i can’t think how i can keep taking care of him and no help and if i could just get some sleep. all this thinking and i walk into pick him up and we go into hall, i lie on floor with him and he cries and cries and suddenly my hands are on his neck and i know that in one more second i will k*ll him. i roll over to face the radiator and feel the rage and horror and sickness and despair wave across me and i shake and shake and shake and i think that now i will die. and i pick him up and we walk and walk and i hum deep sounds to soothe his crying and pat his back and hold him close and he rests on my shoulder and the colic pain subsides like it has every nite this month. time passes. years pass. still living with the male donor who bullies the son and bullies me and spins his hatred around everything until breathing is poisoned with his rage. by now i am so beaten into myself and trying to protect the son from the ugly rage and spending plastic money like i am rich and not a high skool dropout working part time living in a slum apt. with a lawyer who needs to abuse me and my son. i spend money and get crazy with fear and spend more and try to make the world right for my son and probably i am so sick in my mind now that only death would have been a worse place to exist. and i go out with the son and a grown friend of mine and her daughter. and we go to see movie and then friend needs to get some clothing thing. and i make son promise not to beg for "stuff." he promises. then we get to clothes place and he begins to beg and carry on and i say no and he begs more and it is all out of control and i am ashamed he is like this in front of friend and i am ashamed i have been so terrible a parent that he is so messed up and i am ashamed to be alive and i hate me for being a failure and i hate him for making it so obvious. so i begin to scream at him. insane banshee scream arms flying thru the air like i am going to take off like some helicopter on acid. and he cowers and my friend grabs my arm "what is wrong? stop it." she says. what is wrong? what is wrong? there are so many answers i don’t know on top of the ones i do know. what is wrong? what is wrong? so i say these things here because i want to know if i become a child abuser. do i get banished to the land where all the unforgiving people go when jill gets to banish everyone. who decides who gets tattooed and banished and jailed and made into forgotten chunks of shit. i just want to know. in my case no one ever reported me. in my case these were the only incidents of outright abuse. of course there was all the daily dissing and the intense depressions where i couldn’t get out of bed and the angry words spit thru gritted teeth and the times when i shut down and no one could talk and who knows what else cause i don’t even remember. i know that a few degrees more of the hell i was living or the hell i was given as a child and i would have done physical damage to my son. but somehow i was "lucky" enough to be within the degree where my abuse was emotional, not physical. and he got something i could give very well sometimes, he got loved unconditionally. not enough, but some. not loved for being or doing and trying to be some achievement. just because he was lovable. i loved him. so do i get applause? i hope to hell not. but i will tell you that if someone had seen me in either situation and reported me then i would have that record. i would be one of the ones to be banished to the land where only evil resides. which means that my son would not now be a 19 year old who tells me that he can see how much i have learned from being in therapy. who has said he wants to see a therapist so he can sort out his rage and other problems so he doesn’t carry them around for 40 years. i would not be here to tell him that any time any place he wants to talk to me about how i parented and what i did or didn’t do so he can face me and face what and who i am, all of me and in the real. he who has said that he wants to be a child therapist. who, in spite of being a hi skool dropout is working for the ymca at the local elementary skool with at risk kids and loving it and talks about them and is really excited for

Response:

Dear b., I have great respect for what you have written here.

as i have very great respect for you and all that i have seen you speak here your comments carry great weight for us. Your son sounds like he is a wonderful person who is growing and healing and maturing.

he has his dreadful times too. he is, as you say, growing. it’s ok. what is most ok is that he is learning he doesn’t have to be perfect (the bully father message) and that even if someone gets ticked off with him they don’t stop loving him. I think you have lots of reasons to be proud of how you have been as a mother.

~some~ reasons to be proud. i know too many of the days of lost self when he needed me to be there. i have always been struck by the understanding that neglect is a form of abuse. he never went without food and clothing, but there were times when we weren’t there except as a body. it was neglect of spirit, of heart. I also think your son is very fortunate that you are available to talk to him about mistakes you’ve made, and to help him with his healing. IMO, the context in which ab*se occurs is often at least as important as the act itself.

yes. i think this will be very important to him. i realized that if i wasn’t able to see clearly for myself what caused hurt and then to be there when the accounting was needed then i was no better than those who hurt me. he already has begun to learn that when he is furious and lashes out i don’t turn away or lash back. i listen and accept what is true and explain what he gets mixed up and offer my apologies along with some sense of now that gives it a context, i hope. he is learning that i don’t lash out and i don’t try to make it his fault. i think it helps him trust. it hurts. don’t think it doesn’t hurt. for hours and days. but it is his due. it is the very least he deserves to get for all the pain he lived thru. I think isolated incidents of emotional or physical ab*se often are not truly damaging when they take place in the context of an environment that is generally loving and supportive, or a relationship that is generally loving and nurturing. I think sometimes parents beat themselves up for lots of minor things when they’re basically doing a good job.

what i told were the big, frightening things. there were too many days of shouting anger and fugue depression and stuff in between that were perhaps more damaging as they were more common. i was trying to make a point that blanket condemnations of humans as "perps" and the desire to erase them from the planet could include millions of people who are not "trying" to perpetrate anything on anyone, but are broken and suffering and living in situations over which they have no sense of control. i know you understand that, i just don’t want to mislead that the things i talked of were the only times i failed to parent well. but i did, in the midst of so much that was wrong in my life and my son’s life, find ways to offer him clear love that he could accept and understand and hold onto to. it is what i am most thankful for in my life. above anything and anyone, that i was able to create a bond that will allow him to find his way out of the ugly places and make a life that will have joy and learning in it. . On the topic of people being born "evil," some research indicates that often people who seem this way have in effect been ab*sed pre-natally through severe drug and alcohol consumption by the pregnant mother (who often was ab*sed herself), and this causes serious damage to the fetus, especially in the areas of impulse control and empathy. I don’t know if anyone has figured out why these two areas seem to be so strongly affected, but it happens a lot. Even in mild cases of fetal alcohol syndrome, major symptoms include impulsivity, difficulty with cause and effect, and difficulty understanding the perceptions of others, all of which can lead to failures in empathy, aggression, and offending behaviors. A number of serial k*llers have been reported to have been subjected to much larger amounts of drugs while in the womb. So what can look like intrinsic evil may sometimes be due to neurological impariments that came from the environment the baby developed in. Just another perspective. -Nancy

thank you so much for telling this. i know some about FAS children, and my son had a friend in school who was FAS, tho undiagnosed. i only realized many years later that he was textbook for symptoms and i know his mother drank when pregnant. but i have not done extensive reading on this nor on the pyshology/physiology/history of these criminals. for me this is so important. it makes what seemed like some terrible genetic anomoly that could have no clear sensible darwinian thread or purpose (and so seemed very grim and evil, as if sprung from an alien source… you know? out of context as humans) and gives it a human face. i want to believe there is a reason for human behavior. it reminds me that humans are real and not just jumped up monsters without a reason or context. i want it to make sense, i guess is all. so thank you for telling me this. it helps enormously. and thank you for your supportive words. i understand what i did well for my son. but i don’t ever want to forget what i did badly. and i don’t want to lie about it to make myself seem better than anyone else. if nothing else matters, the truth matters. betsy — Memory is not enough. One needs a mythology, too. – Nasdijj

Response:

Hi betsy, Your recount of your son’s colic sent shivers down my spine. My son (now 2) had some, though not as severe as yours thank goodness. I am very, very glad those days are over. (We did a lot of the same kind of things but I had a supportive partner which helped tremendously. Still darn tiring though for everyone involved and exasperating.)

very glad you have a supportive partner. i can’t imagine what that would be like. i mean that. to consider what my son’s life and my life might have been if there was another person who really cared about either of our needs would have made a massive difference on every level of our lives. my son’s colic was the classic, 2 month old to the 3 month old nothing really fixes it kind of colic. if i kept moving and humming and patting his back he could relax enough to lay on my shoulder, awake. if i stopped he would startle awake and his stomach pains would apparently begin again. it was possibly the worst month of my life, as i was helpless to make it go away and no one had any good advice, even doctors, except to avoid every food ever created or stop nursing, and that was no guarantee either. sorry for the digression. it is easy to go back to that time cause we were so alone and so new to being a parent and so frightened of doing it all badly. What I hope to find for myself is some kind of "real" understanding of who I am and what kind of person I am. Sometimes I feel hideous and cruel, other times wishy-washy and vapid. Sometimes I feel real and like a real mom with real problems but who is self-aware enough to be a good parent. Other times I feel like I have as much self-awareness as a stone. Anyhow, your post touched on something I’ve been thinking about lately in wanting to know how I size up as the measuring stick is constantly moving. (Not for egotistical purposes but sometimes I feel dreadfully and wholly inadequate, as a parent particularly. My son is in day care 10-30 hours a week while I sit home and contemplate my navel (or navel lint as the case may be). But I also know when I am really dissy I am pretty useless. :/ Other times I feel very strong for realizing I need to take care of myself to be a good parent.))

it is a wonderful thing and a the hardest thing of my life. i empathize with all you say. i know many of the mistakes i made and discover the more secretive emotional ones as i grow up myself. the only thing i know for sure that i did very well was that i always saw my son as his own person and i always loved him for being that person. it meant that when i was ok and real he knew that it was him i saw and loved, not someone i wanted or needed him to be. even in that context i made some bad mistakes and got stuff messed up and hurt him and it is long and complicated for anywhere but therapy. but it is clear to me now that when we connected and when we connect that the basis is one of trust that i will be real to him and see him as real and there will be no lies and no manipulations. like i said before, at the best of times i loved him unconditionally and he knew it. i believe that, even if there is a huge amount of garbage mixed into a relationship, that if the thread of love is still there, and it is understood to be real and unconditional, then finding your way out of the anger and hurt is, maybe, one step easier. because there is hope. hope was the thing we lost when we were small. And I am not sure what counts as "*b*se" and what doesn’t. What you tell doesn’t sound like it to me. It doesn’t sound easy for any of you, but it doesn’t sound like *b*se either.

i think it was. i think emotional abuse is as destructive as any other kind. but part of the point is that if someone had seen these things happen and decided to call the police i would very easily be someone with a record of child ab*se. and in the world where ab*sers are all shunted off to the island of no return, i would be there. and any healing that i have done or that my son is poised to do would never happen. and the circle of the poison of my family and his father’s family would continue forever down generations. not extreme ab*se, not physical or s*xual ab*se. but constant and destructive and crippling emotional ab*se. i am so glad you have a supportive partner. i think that means everything when you are working on healing. and i am glad your son is at day care. i am one of those folks who is a big supporter of day care for the good health of children and parents. a healthy day care center is really wonderful for kids. my son got so much from his. very nurturing teachers and appropriate socialization and lots of fun. the kids we knew who stayed home all the time had a much harder time transitioning to nursery or kindergarten and often seemed to be easily overwhelmed by the activity inherent in a schooling situation. it helped that my son is a natural, ummm, can’t think of the word. oh, extrovert. from the earliest days he was waving at strangers on the street as i carried him on my shoulders. so day care was like a banquet for him. ok, i’m prattling. thank you for writing. don’t pick on yourself too much about your navel gazing, or lint picking. maybe if you consider this to be time needed to settle and lessen anxiety and sort and sift instead of just empty wasting time you wouldn’t feel so guilty. you know a lot of people go to classes to meditate and i often wonder whether it is just group lint picking. of course, this may be sour grapes since every time i ever tried meditation we dissed so intensely we started to depersonalize and float outside the body. i don’t care what the mystics say, we don’t find this to be a healthy state, at least for us. betsy Macademia

– Memory is not enough. One needs a mythology, too. – Nasdijj

Response:

I haven’t read any of the replies to this post…..I’ve been finding the group draining & triggery lately, but I wanted to tell you that your post touched me, and I read it with tears streaming down my face.

i’m sorry to cause tears. we have so many sometimes it feels like they never end. I, too, have dark blotches on my soul, if not my "record". And I know that I have caused hurt – unintentionally, regrettably, and with a deep aching in my heart still to this day, though the hurt inflicted was only a slap. I fear, despise and loathe s*x offenders, but I do not condemn them, nor do I hate them.

i do hate them and condemn them (and often myself) but constantly find myself trying to understand the "whys" of what they did. not to excuse but because it is so important for the me’s that the world make some kind of sense. to think that there is no cause, no reason, however twisted or stupid, is almost as frightening as the offenses. It’s a fine line, and not all of me agrees, but I’m not perfect either…and wouldn’t have been even had I not been ab*sed.

yes. this is very important, imo. the concept of perfect has been a terrible ab*sive boogeyman in our life. trying to live up to perfection has made so much anguish and self hate in our life. we are coming around the circle to almost hating the idea of perfect, as it is used so often to hurt people and perpetuate impossible expectations. it is a stupid and unreal idea and it precludes being truly human, imo. sorry, ranting. Of course, to this my T. would say "You’re so loyal!" and shake his head at me that I can so minimize the ab*se I suffered, and don’t see the difference between my slap and my f*ther’s repeated use of his f*sts(i), and my ncl’s (u, e) "gentler" use of his h*nds… My only response to him, to myself, and to others is that I can forgive myself for my actions, because I have worked hard to make sure I’m a safe person; I’ve paid gladly for th*rapy, year after year, to right whatever wrongs I can in my brain, so I can be happy & safe, and therein lies the difference. My ab*sers have admitted to their cr*mes, but have taken no actions to change their ways. That I cannot forgive.

i think this is very important. the essential thing is both admitting what was done, accepting the reactions, and working to change yourself. do you think that minimizing the ab*se you suffered is about loyalty? i think, in my case, we minimized certain things at different times to protect against the pain of fully understanding how much it hurt us. it was better to let the knowing and the anger and hurt come slowly. but it was never because of loyalty, tho it may have looked that way, even to us at the time. So, okay…I’m competely off-topic; My words are scandalous; My thoughts are disordered… But my heart is true. Peace to you, my friend. dyenths

i think that those last words, you last five lines, are a very wonderful poem. having a heart that is true is the most important thing you can own. it will carry you thru every thing that ever tests your abilities to care or learn or change. thank you for calling us friend. we are honored. betsy for all of elspeth – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – big trigger further on. about rage and violence and children and who is guilty of what…. no spoiler, no splats you read as your choice when my son was two months old he had colic. he cried all nite and slept all day. i stayed up with him every night walking walking walking. singing and patting his back and humming deep sounds that helped him stop crying. we never stopped moving, two four eight hours till finally he would sleep. i would sleep. his male donor (who is so far from actually behaving in any way like what i would consider fitting for the word father) berated me for "getting his sleep schedule all screwed up" and for "being selfish cause now he (the male donor) didn’t get to see the child hardly at all cause of what i "was doing." this was common for the ten years i, lost in my own illness and pain and exhaustion, lived with this person. he is abusive and a bully and a very very ugly sad little human. he says leave the son alone to "cry it out." no. so i am nursing my son and stop eating every food that might be making the colic happen until i am drinking water and eating dry toast for so many days i begin to be unable to stand up but still i nurse him and still i walk the floor all nite every nite and still i hum deep sounds to ease his crying. and still the man yells at me. he never offers to help. that is not his way. then one night son cries and cries and can’t stop and i am having a hard time to walk up and down the stairs and i wrap him in his blanket and lay him in bed and try to walk away. but he cries even more and now it is breaking the heart of us both. but also i am so tired and so weak that i can’t think how i can keep taking care of him and no help and if i could just get some sleep. all this thinking and i walk into pick him up and we go into hall, i lie on floor with him and he cries and cries and suddenly my hands are on his neck and i know that in one more second i will k*ll him. i roll over to face the radiator and feel the rage and horror and sickness and despair wave across me and i shake and shake and shake and i think that now i will die. and i pick him up and we walk and walk and i hum deep sounds to soothe his crying and pat his back and hold him close and he rests on my shoulder and the colic pain subsides like it has every nite this month. time passes. years pass. still living with the male donor who bullies the son and bullies me and spins his hatred around everything until breathing is poisoned with his rage. by now i am so beaten into myself and trying to protect the son from the ugly rage and spending plastic money like i am rich and not a high skool dropout working part time living in a slum apt. with a lawyer who needs to abuse me and my son. i spend money and get crazy with fear and spend more and try to make the world right for my son and probably i am so sick in my mind now that only death would have been a worse place to exist. and i go out with the son and a grown friend of mine and her daughter. and we go to see movie and then friend needs to get some clothing thing. and i make son promise not to beg for "stuff." he promises. then we get to clothes place and he begins to beg and carry on and i say no and he begs more and it is all out of control and i am ashamed he is like this in front of friend and i am ashamed i have been so terrible a parent that he is so messed up and i am ashamed to be alive and i hate me for being a failure and i hate him for making it so obvious. so i begin to scream at him. insane banshee scream arms flying thru the air like i am going to take off like some helicopter on acid. and he cowers and my friend grabs my arm "what is wrong? stop it." she says. what is wrong? what is wrong? there are so many answers i don’t know on top of the ones i do know. what is wrong? what is wrong? so i say these things here because i want to know if i become a child abuser. do i get banished to the land where all the unforgiving people go when jill gets to banish everyone. who decides who gets tattooed and banished and jailed and made into forgotten chunks of shit. i just want to know. in my case no one ever reported me. in my case these were the only incidents of outright abuse. of course there was all the daily dissing and the intense depressions where i couldn’t get out of bed and the angry words spit thru gritted teeth and the times when i shut down and no one could talk and who knows what else cause i don’t even remember. i know that a few degrees more of the hell i was living or the hell i was given as a child and i would have done physical damage to my son. but somehow i was "lucky" enough to be within the degree where my abuse was emotional, not physical. and he got something i could give very well sometimes, he got loved unconditionally. not enough, but some. not loved for being or doing and trying to be some achievement. just because he was lovable. i loved him. so do i get applause? i hope to hell not. but i will tell you that if someone had seen me in either situation and reported me then i would have that record. i would be one of the ones to be banished to the land where only evil resides. which means that my son would not now be a 19 year old who tells me that he can see how much i have learned from being in therapy. who has said he wants to see a therapist so he can sort out his rage and other problems so he doesn’t carry them around for 40 years. i would not be here to tell him that any time any place he wants to talk to me about how i parented and what i did or didn’t do so he can face me and face what and who i am, all of me and in the real. he who has said that he wants to be a child therapist. who, in spite of being a hi skool dropout is working for the ymca at the local elementary skool with at risk kids and loving it and talks about them and is really excited for the first time in years. of course, in the world where anyone with a record gets banished this young man, who has tattoos all over his arms which is his form of si and personifying his pain, who dresses like a greaser cause he still hasn’t grown up, well, this boymanchild has a record. he set off fireworks

Response:

Beauty, shaking her head at the amazing kindness of a deeply self-searching dyenths. Thank you. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Here’s my hate mail, Beauty… You are truly beautiful, deep inside where it counts. dyenths Dear betsy – Thank you for your powerful words. Yes, I stand in line with the criminals and crazies and human trash. Yes, I lie down in the gutter to be with anyone who needs me. And, yes, I have *never* talked to the mother of a colicky or sleepless infant who has not had the impulse, at least once to – throw the child against the wall, out window, whatever (and never, never, never wanted to follow that impulse – been horrified at living on such an exhausting, excruciating edge). We haven’t done it – the violence to our children – because – we love the child more than our own lives. More than. Or maybe we have screamed into the face of a sobbing infant: "Shut up!!!!!!" Because we thought we were going to die if we could not somehow have some kind of comfortful contact with the child. Oh, yeah, and we went w/out meds to nurse, because we believed that nursing was what he needed – and he did – and it cost us, hugely, and we did it against the advice of our MD, who did not understand how vital that physical bond between mother and baby is, because that was the *only* thing that was working between us that was totally connective and peaceful. And today, my son and I are so bonded that no one can ever imagine what hell I went through with him as an infant. No one can imagine that there have been times when I have taken him by the arm and gritted my teeth and yelled at him, "F*cking stop crying!" because I couldn’t stand one more fussy moment. Do I worry night after night about the damage I have caused him? Do I worry because he saw his mother almost die in front of his eyes of an overdose? No sh*t, I worry – no sh*t. But my son knows that he is loved entirely. He also knows that I tell him the truth. He also knows that I confess my weaknesses and errors, and tell him immediately when I have been wrong, when what I have done is not okay. I have also worked through therapy and meds so that I don’t yell at him anymore, okay? Show me a perfect parent. Show me one. I want to know what one looks like. I’ve never seen or imagined one. And so life goes on. And guess what????? For the love of heaven, if we lived in a natural society where people actually lived together and helped one another, no mother need ever feel that way, because she would *never* be alone to have to bear that burden: there would always be an entire lineage, an entire village worth, or at least a household worth, of people for whom that baby’s life was also more important than their own. Am I idealizing a more primary form of life? Well, I don’t think so – not in that way, anyway. Yeah, so maybe the baby dies of dysentery – because rich peoples don’t care enough to make sure that primary ways of living are not tampered with but supported. But the baby dies in loving arms – the loving arms of an entire culture. I am rambling beyond coherence. Okay, so if you want violent rhetoric, do you remember what we used to say in the 60s and who we used to say it to? We used to say, "Up against the wall, motherf*ckers." What would I do when I got those people up against the wall? I think I would just ask them very, very, very quietly: "Stop pushing people down, stop stepping on people who were born down, and especially stop telling us why we deserve it." That’s all. Okay, standing back for the barrage of hate mail – Beauty. big trigger further on. about rage and violence and children and who is guilty of what…. no spoiler, no splats you read as your choice when my son was two months old he had colic. he cried all nite and slept all day. i stayed up with him every night walking walking walking. singing and patting his back and humming deep sounds that helped him stop crying. we never stopped moving, two four eight hours till finally he would sleep. i would sleep. his male donor (who is so far from actually behaving in any way like what i would consider fitting for the word father) berated me for "getting his sleep schedule all screwed up" and for "being selfish cause now he (the male donor) didn’t get to see the child hardly at all cause of what i "was doing." this was common for the ten years i, lost in my own illness and pain and exhaustion, lived with this person. he is abusive and a bully and a very very ugly sad little human. he says leave the son alone to "cry it out." no. so i am nursing my son and stop eating every food that might be making the colic happen until i am drinking water and eating dry toast for so many days i begin to be unable to stand up but still i nurse him and still i walk the floor all nite every nite and still i hum deep sounds to ease his crying. and still the man yells at me. he never offers to help. that is not his way. then one night son cries and cries and can’t stop and i am having a hard time to walk up and down the stairs and i wrap him in his blanket and lay him in bed and try to walk away. but he cries even more and now it is breaking the heart of us both. but also i am so tired and so weak that i can’t think how i can keep taking care of him and no help and if i could just get some sleep. all this thinking and i walk into pick him up and we go into hall, i lie on floor with him and he cries and cries and suddenly my hands are on his neck and i know that in one more second i will k*ll him. i roll over to face the radiator and feel the rage and horror and sickness and despair wave across me and i shake and shake and shake and i think that now i will die. and i pick him up and we walk and walk and i hum deep sounds to soothe his crying and pat his back and hold him close and he rests on my shoulder and the colic pain subsides like it has every nite this month. time passes. years pass. still living with the male donor who bullies the son and bullies me and spins his hatred around everything until breathing is poisoned with his rage. by now i am so beaten into myself and trying to protect the son from the ugly rage and spending plastic money like i am rich and not a high skool dropout working part time living in a slum apt. with a lawyer who needs to abuse me and my son. i spend money and get crazy with fear and spend more and try to make the world right for my son and probably i am so sick in my mind now that only death would have been a worse place to exist. and i go out with the son and a grown friend of mine and her daughter. and we go to see movie and then friend needs to get some clothing thing. and i make son promise not to beg for "stuff." he promises. then we get to clothes place and he begins to beg and carry on and i say no and he begs more and it is all out of control and i am ashamed he is like this in front of friend and i am ashamed i have been so terrible a parent that he is so messed up and i am ashamed to be alive and i hate me for being a failure and i hate him for making it so obvious. so i begin to scream at him. insane banshee scream arms flying thru the air like i am going to take off like some helicopter on acid. and he cowers and my friend grabs my arm "what is wrong? stop it." she says. what is wrong? what is wrong? there are so many answers i don’t know on top of the ones i do know. what is wrong? what is wrong? so i say these things here because i want to know if i become a child abuser. do i get banished to the land where all the unforgiving people go when jill gets to banish everyone. who decides who gets tattooed and banished and jailed and made into forgotten chunks of shit. i just want to know. in my case no one ever reported me. in my case these were the only incidents of outright abuse. of course there was all the daily dissing and the intense depressions where i couldn’t get out of bed and the angry words spit thru gritted teeth and the times when i shut down and no one could talk and who knows what else cause i don’t even remember. i know that a few degrees more of the hell i was living or the hell i was given as a child and i would have done physical damage to my son. but somehow i was "lucky" enough to be within the degree where my abuse was emotional, not physical. and he got something i could give very well sometimes, he got loved unconditionally. not enough, but some. not loved for being or doing and trying to be some achievement. just because he was lovable. i loved him. so do i get applause? i hope to hell not. but i will tell you that if someone had seen me in either situation and reported me then i would have that record. i would be one of the ones to be banished to the land where only evil resides. which means that my son would not now be a 19 year old who tells me that he can see how much i have learned from being in therapy. who has said he wants to see a therapist so he can sort out his rage and other problems so he doesn’t carry them around for 40 years. i would not be

Response:

betsy, I think it is great that your son is getting past the bully father message and learning he doesn’t have to be perfect- I think that’s one of the most essential things for all of us to learn. It sounds like you’ve been a very good role model of this, in being willing to openly acknowledge that you have made mistakes and are willing to discuss them. I joke with my staff that one of my "talents" as a T is that I’m so good at showing how imperfect I am- I make mistakes so regularly, I’m a great model of how to be far less than perfect I think kids and vulnerable adults all need this a lot. I understand what you mean about neglect of spirit, and I certainly didn’t think that the examples you gave were the only mistakes you made as a parent (I doubt there is any parent who hasn’t made many more mistakes than that). I think it’s important that you’ve been able to let your son know that the neglect was due to your issues, not his being unworthy of your attention. It sounds like your ability not to make things his fault is very helpful to him. It sounds like you and your son do have a very powerful bond. You write about your relationship in a very loving way. It is clear how important he is to you. I’m glad that the info about pre-natal damage was helpful to you. -Nancy

Response:

Dear betsy – Once again to speak. I am amazed that you credit me with anything to do w/the power of your own honesty – but if my presence has given anything to your strength, then that adds something of importance to my life. I will say a few things below, just, I think, underscoring those things you say that seem so resonant to me – Dear betsy – Thank you for your powerful words. thank you Beauty for starting me to speak. it was your words about your terrible experience when your son was a baby that pushed me to speak. i think too many people are made ashamed for being broken at times.

Oh, yes. We broken ones are meant to hide it or be blamed for it. [snip] i reject people who would tell me that i should always be ashamed and that i am worthless and bad.

Yes. A saying no to negation is a saying yes to a living life, a real life, not some plastic garbage-bag version, where all the "unsanitary" stuff is clumped together, swathed in white, and shoved into a filthy truck. i am human.

Oh, yes. And that in itself is such a deep truth – humanity has worth. Just that. i have many aspects.

Yes, you do. All humans do, I guess the truism would be. But, as a matter of fact, as far as I can tell, you seem to be among the more complex of us – and that, to me, is valuable. A limp word, but I can’t do any better at the moment. i am capable of great good and probably great evil.

I love this statement most of all. I know it is true of myself. Not even the probably part, because I know I have actually done great evil. But, yes, probably capable of even worse. And – thank G*d, capable, probably, of even much better than I have done so far. At least I hope so, and I hope to keep growing in that direction. but what i am taught, and what is expected of me, and how i am loved or hated affect whom i am in the world. i think this is how humans are but maybe it is only me.

I do not believe it is only you. I think it is almost everyone, except perhaps certain saints (of various ilks). i sometimes see some parents who have been lucky to have healthy parents (and we know it goes back in history, just as the unhealthy ones go back to their histories) and are healthy parents to their children. not perfect. sometimes tear their hair out impatient. but they have been given a learning of patience and interest and knowing love that is stuff we didn’t ever have. and their children are pretty healthy from being loved well. not perfect. well. i envy them. both sides of the equation. i wish i could be the child being loved well and i wish i could go back and be that parent to my son.

I think I have seen parents that look like they are doing a better job than I have done, in terms of things like patience and serenity. But then I also think – yeah, but, look, I’m really smart and creative, and complicated, and culturally well-exposed (I don’t mean "Culture" – I mean cultures), and I’m a social radical, and, well, all that counts for a lot – I mean, my son is getting a lot from being my son. And he’s also getting that being imperfect is okay. And that when you mess up, you can say so. I think if you look at yourself and what you have offered your son, not even counting the deeply unconditional love (however sometimes imperfectly enacted), you will see that you stand higher in the heap than you might otherwise imagine as far as the quality of your parenthood. I understand, too, envying people who have come from "happier" homes. But then – you wouldn’t be betsy. I like you, betsy. I am sorry that you hurt and that you have been through all kinds of garbage, but I like you – and I can’t look back in time for either me or you and say "what if." That’s what is known in logic as "counterfactual argumentation" and it is by definition meaningless. I know – you weren’t saying "what if" – you were saying you envy. Don’t yell at me. I really did hear you. people step on others because it is necessary in order for them to keep what they have stolen. this is true for the corporate thugs as well as the street gangstas.

Yup. i do not embrace every criminal. i am no jes*s clone.

Neither am I, heaven knows – though am his follower in the poor way that I am able. i don’t even think i want to be that.

Didn’t imagine that you did. but if people refuse to look honestly at how human beings become criminalized and why they learn to destroy others then it will never never end.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And if you then further brutalize as a response to criminality, it further escalates the cycle. Some other way has to be found to break into the cycle. if you create monsters then you are responsible.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And – further, you are responsible for the fact that you have the audacity to consider them monsters. isn’t that the credo of the lawnorder crowd? that criminals should take responsibility for their crimes? but it always stops at the lowest rung of the ladder. only the poor and the ignorant and the powerless are made to pay for their greed or stupidity or broken lives. the rich buy their way out.

Are you familiar with John Gay’s "The Beggar’s Opera"? It is the basis for Weill’s "Threepenny Opera" (you know, with Mack the Knife, etc.). It is composed using folk tunes of the day – 18th century. Beautiful, trenchant, sarcastic, wrenching. At the end, MacHeath (the Mack the Knife character) is sentenced to die on Tyburn Tree – the gallows outside of the Old Bailey in London – and he sings a long, heartbreaking song from his cell as he awaits his dawn execution. The song is in several parts, using several different tunes – and one part goes like this (more or less – I can’t remember exactly): Since laws are made for every degree To serve fine men as well as we ‘Tis wonder we ha’n't better company Upon Tyburn Tree repeated twice, just so as to break your heart [snip] i think that most people who do damage to the world are people who were broken as children and if we made a world that took care of children and helped families and gave to each other instead of stockpiling riches in a few hands then maybe there wouldn’t be so many broken children who become criminal adults. i could be wrong, but since the way it works now does not, in fact, work, it seems i could be right.

Seems so. We don’t have such things as criminals en masse in so-called "primitive" societies – that is, those in which goods and care of families are more commonly shared and there are no obscenely huge accumulations of surplus. poverty brutalizes human beings. anyone who isn’t sure about that should check into you local homeless shelter for a few months. leave your credit cards at home.

Enough said. b.

Beauty. rest snipped. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – big trigger further on. about rage and violence and children and who is guilty of what…. no spoiler, no splats you read as your choice when my son was two months old he had colic. he cried all nite and slept all day. i stayed up with him every night walking walking walking. singing and patting his back and humming deep sounds that helped him stop crying. we never stopped moving, two four eight hours till finally he would sleep. i would sleep. his male donor (who is so far from actually behaving in any way like what i would consider fitting for the word father) berated me for "getting his sleep schedule all screwed up" and for "being selfish cause now he (the male donor) didn’t get to see the child hardly at all cause of what i "was doing." this was common for the ten years i, lost in my own illness and pain and exhaustion, lived with this person. he is abusive and a bully and a very very ugly sad little human. he says leave the son alone to "cry it out." no. so i am nursing my son and stop eating every food that might be making the colic happen until i am drinking water and eating dry toast for so many days i begin to be unable to stand up but still i nurse him and still i walk the floor all nite every nite and still i hum deep sounds to ease his crying. and still the man yells at me. he never offers to help. that is not his way. then one night son cries and cries and can’t stop and i am having a hard time to walk up and down the stairs and i wrap him in his blanket and lay him in bed and try to walk away. but he cries even more and now it is breaking the heart of us both. but also i am so tired and so weak that i can’t think how i can keep taking care of him and no help and if i could just get some sleep. all this thinking and i walk into pick him up and we go into hall, i lie on floor with him and he cries and cries and suddenly my hands are on his neck and i know that in one more second i will k*ll him. i roll over to face the radiator and feel the rage and horror and sickness and despair wave across me and i shake and shake and shake and i think that now i will die. and i pick him up and we walk and walk and i hum deep sounds to soothe his crying and pat his back and hold him close and he rests on my shoulder and the colic pain subsides like it has every nite this month. time passes. years pass. still living with the male donor who bullies the son and bullies me and spins his hatred around everything until breathing is poisoned with his rage. by now i am so beaten into myself and trying to protect the son from the ugly rage and spending plastic money like i am rich and not a high skool dropout working part time living in a slum apt.

Response:

b. – I haven’t even begun to tell all of the things that hurt me about the history I have w/my son. I couldn’t do that here. I will tell you in private if you want. It hurts me too much, it is too tender to put here. Please do not imagine that you are alone. Please do not imagine that words not said signify actions or inactions that have not existed. And still in all, everyone I know (save that one incredibly destructive person) has always believed in us as a good mother – even those who know a lot of the bad stuff. And I believe in you as a good mother, too. I think that the woman who reported me was too afraid of herself – she was afraid of her own inadequacies, and so she wanted to point a finger at someone she could think was truly abusive (because she had seen me lose my temper w/my son in public – she had seen me let go of his arm when he was hanging limp w/fussing, thus allowing him to collapse to the floor – she called it "dropping him" – she had heard me talk of desperate depression, she had heard me talk about my education and former intellectual involvements and my frustration at being tied to the limitations of entertaining a two year old – she had seen my son in a cast, twice because he accidentally fell – twice, once refracturing the original break – sickening us, sickening us with empathic pain – she had heard us say that he had stopped breathing a couple of times, a condition that was eventually diagnosed as benign, cyanotic syncope – very scary, it looks like the child has died, but everything is really fine, it’s just that the child is overcome w/emotion!!! etc., etc., etc., and she decided – it was all just too scary for her, and instead of talking to us about it, she dropped a dime) – but these aren’t the things that haunt me the most (yes, losing my temper haunts me, yes, not being able to prevent his falling haunts me, yes, everything, everything, everything). I love my child more than my own life – which sounds crazy considering that I nearly ended my life two and a half years ago – which is something I will also always lacerate myself for, deep down in my soul, because at the moment of drinking those pills, I literally had no memory at all – none – that I was a mother. At that moment, I was a frantic 13 year old girl who had just been told she hadn’t a home or anyone to love her anymore – felt she had lost the basis of her very existential being – but I feel I will never fully forgive that moment of loss of consciousness, that complete loss of knowledge of the one person on earth who means more than the rest of the earth put together, including myself. I am rambling on and on and on. I send you bl*ssings and peace – Beauty. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Dear b., I have great respect for what you have written here. as i have very great respect for you and all that i have seen you speak here your comments carry great weight for us. Your son sounds like he is a wonderful person who is growing and healing and maturing. he has his dreadful times too. he is, as you say, growing. it’s ok. what is most ok is that he is learning he doesn’t have to be perfect (the bully father message) and that even if someone gets ticked off with him they don’t stop loving him. I think you have lots of reasons to be proud of how you have been as a mother. ~some~ reasons to be proud. i know too many of the days of lost self when he needed me to be there. i have always been struck by the understanding that neglect is a form of abuse. he never went without food and clothing, but there were times when we weren’t there except as a body. it was neglect of spirit, of heart. I also think your son is very fortunate that you are available to talk to him about mistakes you’ve made, and to help him with his healing. IMO, the context in which ab*se occurs is often at least as important as the act itself. yes. i think this will be very important to him. i realized that if i wasn’t able to see clearly for myself what caused hurt and then to be there when the accounting was needed then i was no better than those who hurt me. he already has begun to learn that when he is furious and lashes out i don’t turn away or lash back. i listen and accept what is true and explain what he gets mixed up and offer my apologies along with some sense of now that gives it a context, i hope. he is learning that i don’t lash out and i don’t try to make it his fault. i think it helps him trust. it hurts. don’t think it doesn’t hurt. for hours and days. but it is his due. it is the very least he deserves to get for all the pain he lived thru. I think isolated incidents of emotional or physical ab*se often are not truly damaging when they take place in the context of an environment that is generally loving and supportive, or a relationship that is generally loving and nurturing. I think sometimes parents beat themselves up for lots of minor things when they’re basically doing a good job. what i told were the big, frightening things. there were too many days of shouting anger and fugue depression and stuff in between that were perhaps more damaging as they were more common. i was trying to make a point that blanket condemnations of humans as "perps" and the desire to erase them from the planet could include millions of people who are not "trying" to perpetrate anything on anyone, but are broken and suffering and living in situations over which they have no sense of control. i know you understand that, i just don’t want to mislead that the things i talked of were the only times i failed to parent well. but i did, in the midst of so much that was wrong in my life and my son’s life, find ways to offer him clear love that he could accept and understand and hold onto to. it is what i am most thankful for in my life. above anything and anyone, that i was able to create a bond that will allow him to find his way out of the ugly places and make a life that will have joy and learning in it. . On the topic of people being born "evil," some research indicates that often people who seem this way have in effect been ab*sed pre-natally through severe drug and alcohol consumption by the pregnant mother (who often was ab*sed herself), and this causes serious damage to the fetus, especially in the areas of impulse control and empathy. I don’t know if anyone has figured out why these two areas seem to be so strongly affected, but it happens a lot. Even in mild cases of fetal alcohol syndrome, major symptoms include impulsivity, difficulty with cause and effect, and difficulty understanding the perceptions of others, all of which can lead to failures in empathy, aggression, and offending behaviors. A number of serial k*llers have been reported to have been subjected to much larger amounts of drugs while in the womb. So what can look like intrinsic evil may sometimes be due to neurological impariments that came from the environment the baby developed in. Just another perspective. -Nancy thank you so much for telling this. i know some about FAS children, and my son had a friend in school who was FAS, tho undiagnosed. i only realized many years later that he was textbook for symptoms and i know his mother drank when pregnant. but i have not done extensive reading on this nor on the pyshology/physiology/history of these criminals. for me this is so important. it makes what seemed like some terrible genetic anomoly that could have no clear sensible darwinian thread or purpose (and so seemed very grim and evil, as if sprung from an alien source… you know? out of context as humans) and gives it a human face. i want to believe there is a reason for human behavior. it reminds me that humans are real and not just jumped up monsters without a reason or context. i want it to make sense, i guess is all. so thank you for telling me this. it helps enormously. and thank you for your supportive words. i understand what i did well for my son. but i don’t ever want to forget what i did badly. and i don’t want to lie about it to make myself seem better than anyone else. if nothing else matters, the truth matters. betsy — Memory is not enough. One needs a mythology, too. – Nasdijj

Response:

I agree with b. – your words are not remotely off topic, and your final stanza is straight from the soul. Wishing you much tranquility – Beauty. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – I haven’t read any of the replies to this post…..I’ve been finding the group draining & triggery lately, but I wanted to tell you that your post touched me, and I read it with tears streaming down my face. I, too, have dark blotches on my soul, if not my "record". And I know that I have caused hurt – unintentionally, regrettably, and with a deep aching in my heart still to this day, though the hurt inflicted was only a slap. I fear, despise and loathe s*x offenders, but I do not condemn them, nor do I hate them. It’s a fine line, and not all of me agrees, but I’m not perfect either…and wouldn’t have been even had I not been ab*sed. Of course, to this my T. would say "You’re so loyal!" and shake his head at me that I can so minimize the ab*se I suffered, and don’t see the difference between my slap and my f*ther’s repeated use of his f*sts(i), and my ncl’s (u, e) "gentler" use of his h*nds… My only response to him, to myself, and to others is that I can forgive myself for my actions, because I have worked hard to make sure I’m a safe person; I’ve paid gladly for th*rapy, year after year, to right whatever wrongs I can in my brain, so I can be happy & safe, and therein lies the difference. My ab*sers have admitted to their cr*mes, but have taken no actions to change their ways. That I cannot forgive. So, okay…I’m competely off-topic; My words are scandalous; My thoughts are disordered… But my heart is true. Peace to you, my friend. dyenths big trigger further on. about rage and violence and children and who is guilty of what…. no spoiler, no splats you read as your choice when my son was two months old he had colic. he cried all nite and slept all day. i stayed up with him every night walking walking walking. singing and patting his back and humming deep sounds that helped him stop crying. we never stopped moving, two four eight hours till finally he would sleep. i would sleep. his male donor (who is so far from actually behaving in any way like what i would consider fitting for the word father) berated me for "getting his sleep schedule all screwed up" and for "being selfish cause now he (the male donor) didn’t get to see the child hardly at all cause of what i "was doing." this was common for the ten years i, lost in my own illness and pain and exhaustion, lived with this person. he is abusive and a bully and a very very ugly sad little human. he says leave the son alone to "cry it out." no. so i am nursing my son and stop eating every food that might be making the colic happen until i am drinking water and eating dry toast for so many days i begin to be unable to stand up but still i nurse him and still i walk the floor all nite every nite and still i hum deep sounds to ease his crying. and still the man yells at me. he never offers to help. that is not his way. then one night son cries and cries and can’t stop and i am having a hard time to walk up and down the stairs and i wrap him in his blanket and lay him in bed and try to walk away. but he cries even more and now it is breaking the heart of us both. but also i am so tired and so weak that i can’t think how i can keep taking care of him and no help and if i could just get some sleep. all this thinking and i walk into pick him up and we go into hall, i lie on floor with him and he cries and cries and suddenly my hands are on his neck and i know that in one more second i will k*ll him. i roll over to face the radiator and feel the rage and horror and sickness and despair wave across me and i shake and shake and shake and i think that now i will die. and i pick him up and we walk and walk and i hum deep sounds to soothe his crying and pat his back and hold him close and he rests on my shoulder and the colic pain subsides like it has every nite this month. time passes. years pass. still living with the male donor who bullies the son and bullies me and spins his hatred around everything until breathing is poisoned with his rage. by now i am so beaten into myself and trying to protect the son from the ugly rage and spending plastic money like i am rich and not a high skool dropout working part time living in a slum apt. with a lawyer who needs to abuse me and my son. i spend money and get crazy with fear and spend more and try to make the world right for my son and probably i am so sick in my mind now that only death would have been a worse place to exist. and i go out with the son and a grown friend of mine and her daughter. and we go to see movie and then friend needs to get some clothing thing. and i make son promise not to beg for "stuff." he promises. then we get to clothes place and he begins to beg and carry on and i say no and he begs more and it is all out of control and i am ashamed he is like this in front of friend and i am ashamed i have been so terrible a parent that he is so messed up and i am ashamed to be alive and i hate me for being a failure and i hate him for making it so obvious. so i begin to scream at him. insane banshee scream arms flying thru the air like i am going to take off like some helicopter on acid. and he cowers and my friend grabs my arm "what is wrong? stop it." she says. what is wrong? what is wrong? there are so many answers i don’t know on top of the ones i do know. what is wrong? what is wrong? so i say these things here because i want to know if i become a child abuser. do i get banished to the land where all the unforgiving people go when jill gets to banish everyone. who decides who gets tattooed and banished and jailed and made into forgotten chunks of shit. i just want to know. in my case no one ever reported me. in my case these were the only incidents of outright abuse. of course there was all the daily dissing and the intense depressions where i couldn’t get out of bed and the angry words spit thru gritted teeth and the times when i shut down and no one could talk and who knows what else cause i don’t even remember. i know that a few degrees more of the hell i was living or the hell i was given as a child and i would have done physical damage to my son. but somehow i was "lucky" enough to be within the degree where my abuse was emotional, not physical. and he got something i could give very well sometimes, he got loved unconditionally. not enough, but some. not loved for being or doing and trying to be some achievement. just because he was lovable. i loved him. so do i get applause? i hope to hell not. but i will tell you that if someone had seen me in either situation and reported me then i would have that record. i would be one of the ones to be banished to the land where only evil resides. which means that my son would not now be a 19 year old who tells me that he can see how much i have learned from being in therapy. who has said he wants to see a therapist so he can sort out his rage and other problems so he doesn’t carry them around for 40 years. i would not be here to tell him that any time any place he wants to talk to me about how i parented and what i did or didn’t do so he can face me and face what and who i am, all of me and in the real. he who has said that he wants to be a child therapist. who, in spite of being a hi skool dropout is working for the ymca at the local elementary skool with at risk kids and loving it and talks about them and is really excited for the first time in years. of course, in the world where anyone with a record gets banished this young man, who has tattoos all over his arms which is his form of si and personifying his pain, who dresses like a greaser cause he still hasn’t grown up, well, this boymanchild has a record. he set off fireworks in the rich peoples neighborhood and got busted. and he swiped a bottle of wine from a grocery store. stupid. wrong. yes. but he is also one of the smartest people i have ever known. and he is an empath in the making. and he is one of the single funniest humans i’ve ever known. and he loves being alive, which i have always envied enormously. and if he goes to college and hones his skills and get thru his own therapy and comes out whole he will be one of the most superb therapists and teachers for children on this sad old planet. now this is just my own personal story. but when i think of the poor immigrants i see at the local thrift store, Cambodians, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Vietnamese, endless numbers of the working poor, and i know that they are here to escape worse at home and they are living ten to a room in apartments run by ‘benevolent’ slum lords who never get cited cause they contribute their dirty money to political campaigns. but these people put up with it cause of fear of reprisals or fear of eviction and they do it in order to stretch their income and send money home to sisters and fathers and cousins and they bring their children here with great hopes that they will get an education and instead their children learn the great american ethos—buy have get. and culture and family and poverty and the sickness of america begins to destroy people and they commit crimes. stupid crimes. pointless, gonna get caught crimes. crimes

Response:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Hi betsy, Your recount of your son’s colic sent shivers down my spine. My son (now 2) had some, though not as severe as yours thank goodness. I am very, very glad those days are over. (We did a lot of the same kind of things but I had a supportive partner which helped tremendously. Still darn tiring though for everyone involved and exasperating.) very glad you have a supportive partner. i can’t imagine what that would be like. i mean that. to consider what my son’s life and my life might have been if there was another person who really cared about either of our needs would have made a massive difference on every level of our lives.

Imagine how well you would have done then. From what you describe what you did is so giving and so nuruturing. Sleep deprivation makes things so much harder, coupled with a crying, inconsolable child is a recipe for a very human response of anger and frustration. From what you say your actions are beyond the pale (is that the right kind of pale?). my son’s colic was the classic, 2 month old to the 3 month old nothing really fixes it kind of colic. if i kept moving and humming and patting his back he could relax enough to lay on my shoulder, awake. if i stopped he would startle awake and his stomach pains would apparently begin again. it was possibly the worst month of my life, as i was helpless to make it go away and no one had any good advice, even doctors, except to avoid every food ever created or stop nursing, and that was no guarantee either.

What an extraordinarily difficult period for you. It’s so hard when the babies cry for you cannot talk with them to find out what hurts or tell them reassuring things or anything. Sounds like you gave so much. I can understand why as children are so important, but nonetheless it sounds extraordinary. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – sorry for the digression. it is easy to go back to that time cause we were so alone and so new to being a parent and so frightened of doing it all badly. What I hope to find for myself is some kind of "real" understanding of who I am and what kind of person I am. Sometimes I feel hideous and cruel, other times wishy-washy and vapid. Sometimes I feel real and like a real mom with real problems but who is self-aware enough to be a good parent. Other times I feel like I have as much self-awareness as a stone. Anyhow, your post touched on something I’ve been thinking about lately in wanting to know how I size up as the measuring stick is constantly moving. (Not for egotistical purposes but sometimes I feel dreadfully and wholly inadequate, as a parent particularly. My son is in day care 10-30 hours a week while I sit home and contemplate my navel (or navel lint as the case may be). But I also know when I am really dissy I am pretty useless. :/ Other times I feel very strong for realizing I need to take care of myself to be a good parent.)) it is a wonderful thing and a the hardest thing of my life. i empathize with all you say. i know many of the mistakes i made and discover the more secretive emotional ones as i grow up myself. the only thing i know for sure that i did very well was that i always saw my son as his own person and i always loved him for being that person. it meant that when i was ok and real he knew that it was him i saw and loved, not someone i wanted or needed him to be.

I think that sounds very good. Very, very good. I hope I can do the same thing. I believe being real is the best we can give our children in that I do not want to "pretend" I am happy/normal when I am not, but I do want my child to know I love him and he has my support as him. even in that context i made some bad mistakes and got stuff messed up and hurt him and it is long and complicated for anywhere but therapy. but it is clear to me now that when we connected and when we connect that the basis is one of trust that i will be real to him and see him as real and there will be no lies and no manipulations. like i said before, at the best of times i loved him unconditionally and he knew it. i believe that, even if there is a huge amount of garbage mixed into a relationship, that if the thread of love is still there, and it is understood to be real and unconditional, then finding your way out of the anger and hurt is, maybe, one step easier. because there is hope. hope was the thing we lost when we were small.

Yes. And I am not sure what counts as "*b*se" and what doesn’t. What you tell doesn’t sound like it to me. It doesn’t sound easy for any of you, but it doesn’t sound like *b*se either. i think it was. i think emotional abuse is as destructive as any other kind.

I think emotional abuse is worse in some ways as it’s insidious and cannot be as easily identified or seen. I am mortified of becoming abusive. Or that I have been without knowing it. But I think what I meant to say is that your response was a very human one regardless of what happened to you when you were small. I can’t imagine how others might not respond the same way under those circumstances. And what does this have to do with it being abusive or not? Probably nothing. <wry laughter but part of the point is that if someone had seen these things happen and decided to call the police i would very easily be someone with a record of child ab*se. and in the world where ab*sers are all shunted off to the island of no return, i would be there.

I think though that defining abuse here is really important. S’x”l abuse certainly has different characteristics than emotional abuse and physical. Least my understanding of it it does. I don’t think they are qualitatively the same. I also think that if we choose to take responsibility for our actions and to "own" them and to take them to therapy, we’re doing a huge amount of work. Not that it’s perfect, for it’s an imperfect world, but we’re doing what we can. Maybe I’m stuck in self-justification land, not sure. I think when a person gets to the point that they damage children s’x”lly, they have gotten to the point of no return. While emotional abuse is really on a continuum and is something we have control over. That might be delusional, not sure. But I don’t think the measuring stick is the same in the two cases. I think too frequency etc. is a lot. What you described is the outcome of a highly stressful situation sustained over days and days without sleep. Finding a way to give yourself a break would have been good, but your action really seems like a human one. I think I am going in circles on this. Need to sleep myself. Well, thanks for having the courage to share this with us. and any healing that i have done or that my son is poised to do would never happen. and the circle of the poison of my family and his father’s family would continue forever down generations. not extreme ab*se, not physical or s*xual ab*se. but constant and destructive and crippling emotional ab*se.

Yes. But not necessarily forever. Each generation has a choice and an opportunity to heal, imo. Not that it’s all black and white (healed versus not healed). i am so glad you have a supportive partner. i think that means everything when you are working on healing. and i am glad your son is at day care. i am one of those folks who is a big supporter of day care for the good health of children and parents. a healthy day care center is really wonderful for kids. my son got so much from his. very nurturing teachers and appropriate socialization and lots of fun. the kids we knew who stayed home all the time had a much harder time transitioning to nursery or kindergarten and often seemed to be easily overwhelmed by the activity inherent in a schooling situation. it helped that my son is a natural, ummm, can’t think of the word. oh, extrovert. from the earliest days he was waving at strangers on the street as i carried him on my shoulders. so day care was like a banquet for him.

Yes, my guy’s like that on occasion. He got indignant at 6-9 months if people didn’t say hi to him and pay attention to him (even on the streets!). ok, i’m prattling. thank you for writing. don’t pick on yourself too much about your navel gazing, or lint picking. maybe if you consider this to be time needed to settle and lessen anxiety and sort and sift instead of just empty wasting time you wouldn’t feel so guilty. you know a lot of people go to classes to meditate and i often wonder whether it is just group lint picking. of course, this may be sour grapes since every time i ever tried meditation we dissed so intensely we started to depersonalize and float outside the body. i don’t care what the mystics say, we don’t find this to be a healthy state, at least for us.

Apparently I read that some yogis actually induce trauma to be able to get outside of their bodies. That’s just wrong. Macademia

Response:

my 3 girls are 27, 29 and 30 now, and the times i disappointed them or spoke roughly to them, or went to a bar drinking and left them home with oldest babysitting instead of all of us maybe having dinner and a movie, this thread has brought back so much guilt for me, and regret, because i was going out to the bar with someone i wanted, and they were bad people, no interest in me so it was all for naught. but the main thing is that the childhood goes so fast–pretty soon the kid is too busy with friends for you, and that whole period of bonding is lost. she grows up moves away and ironically now you need her but she doesn’t need you. i still cry when i remember my middle daughter begged me for ice cream and a visit after a school open-house, but i brushed her off to go visit some friends of mine i really didn’t like that much, but i was just trying to have friends. god forgive me, why did i not spend that time with my sweet little girl? will i always torture myself with similar memories? love, samantha

Response:

Dear shoe – Such a complicated question you ask. I do not believe in innate evil. That is just my own belief. But I certainly respect your question, your wondering. My thought is, when you ask about being raised to be good, what that might mean? Lots of peoples who have ab*sed children have done so, supposedly, by way of "teaching" them to be "good." (Which assumes, of course, that they are "bad" to begin with.) I don’t know. I don’t think in terms of people being bad – I think in terms of actions being damaging – yeah, in some cases, I would use the word "evil." They do evil things. Can a person inherit badness from another generation? Well, again, it depends on how you define your terms. I think that people can teach other people ways of behavior that are damaging. I also know for sure that there are psychiatric conditions which can produce damaging behaviors (I have at least one of them – bipolar condition, and of course DID can do that, too, but DID isn’t inherited genetically, as far as anyone knows, though the propensity for it may be). But to kind of skirt around your question: do you think/fear that you have inherited badness? What are you afraid that you have inherited? What does that mean to you? If you have inherited conditions that make certain behaviors problematic, does that make you "bad"? Keep writing. We’re here. Beauty. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Beauty, sometimes I wonder if there is innate evil. I prefer to look for the good. What if a person who has been raised to be good chooses bad when he reaches adulthood? Is it possible to inherit the badness from another generation in my family? shoe, who has so many children she doesn’t know what to do Beauty: Thank you for this information, Nancy. I have not been one to believe in the idea of innate evil. It is helpful to know that there are some suggestions that there are environmental explanations which might apply in cases which might look to some like innate evil. Beauty. Dear b., I have great respect for what you have written here. Your son sounds like he is a wonderful person who is growing and healing and maturing. I think you have lots of reasons to be proud of how you have been as a mother. I also think your son is very fortunate that you are available to talk to him about mistakes you’ve made, and to help him with his healing. IMO, the context in which ab*se occurs is often at least as important as the act itself. I think isolated incidents of emotional or physical ab*se often are not truly damaging when they take place in the context of an environment that is generally loving and supportive, or a relationship that is generally loving and nurturing. I think sometimes parents beat themselves up for lots of minor things when they’re basically doing a good job. On the topic of people being born "evil," some research indicates that often people who seem this way have in effect been ab*sed pre-natally through severe drug and alcohol consumption by the pregnant mother (who often was ab*sed herself), and this causes serious damage to the fetus, especially in the areas of impulse control and empathy. I don’t know if anyone has figured out why these two areas seem to be so strongly affected, but it happens a lot. Even in mild cases of fetal alcohol syndrome, major symptoms include impulsivity, difficulty with cause and effect, and difficulty understanding the perceptions of others, all of which can lead to failures in empathy, aggression, and offending behaviors. A number of serial k*llers have been reported to have been subjected to much larger amounts of drugs while in the womb. So what can look like intrinsic evil may sometimes be due to neurological impariments that came from the environment the baby developed in. Just another perspective. -Nancy

Response:

thank you Domino. it has been a painful and frightening night of bad dreams and aching heart. we don’t want to know how ugly we can be. but we don’t want to be another one of the lies that fills the world. it is only in true knowing of selfs and actions that this one can become real. if those selfs or actions make others despise us then that is what they have to live with. it is on their heart. it is our heart we work on.

You could not ever be a lie in this world. Your heart is too big for that. I realize that sometimes you might not ~feel~ this is true but remember….feelings are not right or wrong–they just are. Feelings are the felt truth but not necessarily the true truth. It is good to work on the heart. When I can slow my brain’s ramblings enough to concentrate on my heart, I can feel it fill with love for those beings who are close to me. It swells and grows within my chest until I feel it might burst. Then the tears well up in my eyes and roll down my face. Good tears. Happy heart. (I won’t speak of how scary and sometimes foreign that huge, huge feeling of love can be……) peace to you. we are glad you have the big new adventure of the business. that is what being alive is for.

Yes, you are right. I like how you put that. Thank you. Take good care, Domino – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – b. and others — Memory is not enough. One needs a mythology, too. – Nasdijj

Response:

Beauty, sometimes I wonder if there is innate evil. I prefer to look for the good. What if a person who has been raised to be good chooses bad when he reaches adulthood? Is it possible to inherit the badness from another generation in my family? shoe, who has so many children she doesn’t know what to do Beauty: – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -Thank you for this information, Nancy. I have not been one to believe in the idea of innate evil. It is helpful to know that there are some suggestions that there are environmental explanations which might apply in cases which might look to some like innate evil. Beauty. Dear b., I have great respect for what you have written here. Your son sounds like he is a wonderful person who is growing and healing and maturing. I think you have lots of reasons to be proud of how you have been as a mother. I also think your son is very fortunate that you are available to talk to him about mistakes you’ve made, and to help him with his healing. IMO, the context in which ab*se occurs is often at least as important as the act itself. I think isolated incidents of emotional or physical ab*se often are not truly damaging when they take place in the context of an environment that is generally loving and supportive, or a relationship that is generally loving and nurturing. I think sometimes parents beat themselves up for lots of minor things when they’re basically doing a good job. On the topic of people being born "evil," some research indicates that often people who seem this way have in effect been ab*sed pre-natally through severe drug and alcohol consumption by the pregnant mother (who often was ab*sed herself), and this causes serious damage to the fetus, especially in the areas of impulse control and empathy. I don’t know if anyone has figured out why these two areas seem to be so strongly affected, but it happens a lot. Even in mild cases of fetal alcohol syndrome, major symptoms include impulsivity, difficulty with cause and effect, and difficulty understanding the perceptions of others, all of which can lead to failures in empathy, aggression, and offending behaviors. A number of serial k*llers have been reported to have been subjected to much larger amounts of drugs while in the womb. So what can look like intrinsic evil may sometimes be due to neurological impariments that came from the environment the baby developed in. Just another perspective. -Nancy

– For info about this service, see http://anon.twwells.com/help/ or e-mail:

Response:

Question:

ALL REPLIES WERE DELETED BEFORE I CHECKED BACK AT THIS BOARD!!!!!! PLEASE AGAIN, ANY INFO ON HOW CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES SHOULD REPORT THEIR WORK IN PROGRESS NUMBER ON A MONTLY BASIS???? ANY GOOD DESCRIPTIONS FOR THE BEST WAY TO EVALUATE PERCENTAGE OF COMPLETION ON CONTRACT WORK? WHEN EVALUATING THE PERCENTAGE OF COMPLETION NUMBER, DOES ANYONE BURDEN THESE COSTS WITH OVERHEAD? AT THIS TIME I USE (COST X OVERHEAD) LESS AMOUNT PREVIOUSLY INVOICED TO GET A WORK IN PROGRESS NUMBER. IF I HAVE EXCESS BILLING, THEN I HAVE A NEGATIVE NUMBER ADDED TO MY MONTHLY WORK IN PROGRESS NUMBER. THIS NUMBER IS UNDER ASSETS AS AN INVENTORY ITEM. THE OFFSETTING ENTRY IS A LIABILITY UNDER COST OF GOODS SOLD. ANYONE HAVE SUGGESTIONS ON THE BEST WAY TO DEAL WITH THIS ENTRY? HOW WOULD YOU SUGGEST THESE ENTRIES BE MADE ON A FINANCIAL STATEMENT. LITERALLY WHAT WOULD YOU NAME THE ACCOUNTS ON THE BALANCE SHEET AND THE PROFIT AND LOSS STATEMENT???? THANKS AHEAD OF TIME FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE.

Response:

What type of construction compnany are these transactions specifying? Are the construction functions labor intensive, equipment, subcontracts? Do you use AIA G702 forms for payment? Are you calculating this from an accounting function or field production! ALL REPLIES WERE DELETED BEFORE I CHECKED BACK AT THIS BOARD!!!!!! PLEASE AGAIN, ANY INFO ON HOW CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES SHOULD REPORT THEIR WORK IN PROGRESS NUMBER ON A MONTLY BASIS???? ANY GOOD DESCRIPTIONS FOR THE BEST WAY TO EVALUATE PERCENTAGE OF COMPLETION ON CONTRACT WORK?

Depends on your productivity unit, MH (manhours), LS (lump sum), EA(each), TN(ton),etc. This is actually dependent on your est vs you actual quantity or percentage completed. WHEN EVALUATING THE PERCENTAGE OF COMPLETION NUMBER, DOES ANYONE BURDEN THESE COSTS WITH OVERHEAD?

Ocourse, you will probablyuse this for billing purposes, especially if you use AIA. You could break it down but it is not necessary. AT THIS TIME I USE (COST X OVERHEAD) LESS AMOUNT PREVIOUSLY INVOICED TO GET A WORK IN PROGRESS NUMBER. IF I HAVE EXCESS BILLING, THEN I HAVE A NEGATIVE NUMBER ADDED TO MY MONTHLY WORK IN PROGRESS NUMBER. THIS NUMBER IS UNDER ASSETS AS AN INVENTORY ITEM. THE OFFSETTING ENTRY IS A LIABILITY UNDER COST OF GOODS SOLD.

Need more information on "Cost of Goods Sold" in the construction industry. Do you keep an inventory of stock construction material? ANYONE HAVE SUGGESTIONS ON THE BEST WAY TO DEAL WITH THIS ENTRY? HOW WOULD

This entry would be possibly reversed at the end of the project. YOU SUGGEST THESE ENTRIES BE MADE ON A FINANCIAL STATEMENT. LITERALLY WHAT WOULD YOU NAME THE ACCOUNTS ON THE BALANCE SHEET AND THE PROFIT AND LOSS STATEMENT???? THANKS AHEAD OF TIME FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE.

Remember, when you use capital letters readers assume you are HOLLERING!

Response:

What software are you using? – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – ALL REPLIES WERE DELETED BEFORE I CHECKED BACK AT THIS BOARD!!!!!! PLEASE AGAIN, ANY INFO ON HOW CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES SHOULD REPORT THEIR WORK IN PROGRESS NUMBER ON A MONTLY BASIS???? ANY GOOD DESCRIPTIONS FOR THE BEST WAY TO EVALUATE PERCENTAGE OF COMPLETION ON CONTRACT WORK? WHEN EVALUATING THE PERCENTAGE OF COMPLETION NUMBER, DOES ANYONE BURDEN THESE COSTS WITH OVERHEAD? AT THIS TIME I USE (COST X OVERHEAD) LESS AMOUNT PREVIOUSLY INVOICED TO GET A WORK IN PROGRESS NUMBER. IF I HAVE EXCESS BILLING, THEN I HAVE A NEGATIVE NUMBER ADDED TO MY MONTHLY WORK IN PROGRESS NUMBER. THIS NUMBER IS UNDER ASSETS AS AN INVENTORY ITEM. THE OFFSETTING ENTRY IS A LIABILITY UNDER COST OF GOODS SOLD. ANYONE HAVE SUGGESTIONS ON THE BEST WAY TO DEAL WITH THIS ENTRY? HOW WOULD YOU SUGGEST THESE ENTRIES BE MADE ON A FINANCIAL STATEMENT. LITERALLY WHAT WOULD YOU NAME THE ACCOUNTS ON THE BALANCE SHEET AND THE PROFIT AND LOSS STATEMENT???? THANKS AHEAD OF TIME FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE.

Response:

ALL REPLIES WERE DELETED BEFORE I CHECKED BACK AT THIS BOARD!!!!!!

To review the archives, click on the following: — Jim Hudspeth, CPA – http://jim.hudspeth.com – Washington, USA

Response:

ALL REPLIES WERE DELETED BEFORE I CHECKED BACK AT THIS BOARD!!!!!! To review the archives, click on the following:

That didn’t work. Try the following: — Jim Hudspeth, CPA – http://jim.hudspeth.com – Washington, USA

Response:

Question:

That’s what I was afraid of… Oh well, its keeps the SysAdmins busy… Prudy!?!! Yes She’s baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!! Just another DeadHead Computer Nerd

Type 2, Glucophage, diet and exercise Since March 1998

Response:

Trust me on that one wise ass know it all applies right group? Doug – yes I am a father – God help me

Then I wonder something – do you talk to your kids the way you talk to others on this NG? Beanie, Type I (Humalog and Ultralente)

Response:

thank you Doug – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Happy Father’s Day, Happy Birthday Happy day, every day *s* smoooooch Elizabeth today’s Father’s Day and today I am 44. So smile and remember that that colossal asshole Doug is alive and kicking and making some of you smile and even more of you pissed off that I am such a know it all wise ass. Doug In Memory of My Dead Diabetic Dad It wasn’t so long ago that we buried my dad, Dan, who was a diabetic, like his dad before him. The day was dark and damp and my dad, Dan, was dead. Dead as a doornail. And there was nothing any of his children could have done to save Dad. Dad decided his destiny when he decided, as a diabetic Dad, to disregard his doctor and his doctor’s (Dr. Davidson’s) directives. Dad knew what to do. He knew about the diet. He knew the drugs he should be digesting. He knew about the drinking. He knew that by dieting he would be delaying death by diabetes. But did Dad decide to delay his death? Did he make the decision that would have delighted his daughters, his doctor and his dubious dentist? No. I doubt now that he even came out of his depressive diabetic doldrums long enough to denounce his deplorable decision to decline rather than to make a declaration of life. But that’s how Dad was. Since his divorce that previous December, it was like Dad was deaf to his death warrant. All of the deacons at the church he had defected from detected it. So had the others. The delivery man. The dogcatcher. The drill sargent who had been his drinking buddy when they had fought together at the battle of Dunkirk. When we found Dad, dead, at his duplex we weren’t dumbfounded. We knew that our once dynamic Dad had decided to die rather than take the decent route, the dignified due process that he should have taken, but didn’t. He ducked life by dubbing it. He was draped on the divan when we found him. I guess the moral of the story is this. Remember what happened to my Dad, Dan, on that day when he died. Just another dour draftsman who departed this life when he could have detoured his derailment. He left me his old dinner jacket which has helped me to deterge his death. He also left me his ditty bag. And for that, I am grateful.

Response:

actually I’m much more patient with you guys no accounting for your bad genes you understand Doug – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Trust me on that one wise ass know it all applies right group? Doug – yes I am a father – God help me Then I wonder something – do you talk to your kids the way you talk to others on this NG? Beanie, Type I (Humalog and Ultralente)

Response:

Prudy!?!! In Memory of My Dead Diabetic Dad

Type 2, Glucophage, diet and exercise Since March 1998

Response:

Prudy!?!!

Yes She’s baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!! Just another DeadHead Computer Nerd

Response:

Trust me on that one wise ass know it all applies right group? Doug – yes I am a father – God help me – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Doug, New on group so I can’t vouch for you being a "wise ass" but Happy Birthday…and Happy Father’s Day if it applies. Fargo today’s Father’s Day and today I am 44. So smile and remember that that colossal asshole Doug is alive and kicking and making some of you smile and even more of you pissed off that I am such a know it all wise ass. Doug

Response:

Happy Father’s Day, Happy Birthday Happy day, every day *s* smoooooch Elizabeth

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – today’s Father’s Day and today I am 44. So smile and remember that that colossal asshole Doug is alive and kicking and making some of you smile and even more of you pissed off that I am such a know it all wise ass. Doug In Memory of My Dead Diabetic Dad It wasn’t so long ago that we buried my dad, Dan, who was a diabetic, like his dad before him. The day was dark and damp and my dad, Dan, was dead. Dead as a doornail. And there was nothing any of his children could have done to save Dad. Dad decided his destiny when he decided, as a diabetic Dad, to disregard his doctor and his doctor’s (Dr. Davidson’s) directives. Dad knew what to do. He knew about the diet. He knew the drugs he should be digesting. He knew about the drinking. He knew that by dieting he would be delaying death by diabetes. But did Dad decide to delay his death? Did he make the decision that would have delighted his daughters, his doctor and his dubious dentist? No. I doubt now that he even came out of his depressive diabetic doldrums long enough to denounce his deplorable decision to decline rather than to make a declaration of life. But that’s how Dad was. Since his divorce that previous December, it was like Dad was deaf to his death warrant. All of the deacons at the church he had defected from detected it. So had the others. The delivery man. The dogcatcher. The drill sargent who had been his drinking buddy when they had fought together at the battle of Dunkirk. When we found Dad, dead, at his duplex we weren’t dumbfounded. We knew that our once dynamic Dad had decided to die rather than take the decent route, the dignified due process that he should have taken, but didn’t. He ducked life by dubbing it. He was draped on the divan when we found him. I guess the moral of the story is this. Remember what happened to my Dad, Dan, on that day when he died. Just another dour draftsman who departed this life when he could have detoured his derailment. He left me his old dinner jacket which has helped me to deterge his death. He also left me his ditty bag. And for that, I am grateful.

Response:

In Memory of My Dead Diabetic Dad It wasn’t so long ago that we buried my dad, Dan, who was a diabetic, like his dad before him. The day was dark and damp and my dad, Dan, was dead. Dead as a doornail. And there was nothing any of his children could have done to save Dad. Dad decided his destiny when he decided, as a diabetic Dad, to disregard his doctor and his doctor’s (Dr. Davidson’s) directives. Dad knew what to do. He knew about the diet. He knew the drugs he should be digesting. He knew about the drinking. He knew that by dieting he would be delaying death by diabetes. But did Dad decide to delay his death? Did he make the decision that would have delighted his daughters, his doctor and his dubious dentist? No. I doubt now that he even came out of his depressive diabetic doldrums long enough to denounce his deplorable decision to decline rather than to make a declaration of life. But that’s how Dad was. Since his divorce that previous December, it was like Dad was deaf to his death warrant. All of the deacons at the church he had defected from detected it. So had the others. The delivery man. The dogcatcher. The drill sargent who had been his drinking buddy when they had fought together at the battle of Dunkirk. When we found Dad, dead, at his duplex we weren’t dumbfounded. We knew that our once dynamic Dad had decided to die rather than take the decent route, the dignified due process that he should have taken, but didn’t. He ducked life by dubbing it. He was draped on the divan when we found him. I guess the moral of the story is this. Remember what happened to my Dad, Dan, on that day when he died. Just another dour draftsman who departed this life when he could have detoured his derailment. He left me his old dinner jacket which has helped me to deterge his death. He also left me his ditty bag. And for that, I am grateful.

Response:

Thank you Jennifer Doug – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – today’s Father’s Day and today I am 44. So smile and remember that that colossal asshole Doug is alive and kicking and making some of you smile and even more of you pissed off that I am such a know it all wise ass. Doug Happy Birthday, Doug! Jennifer

Response:

Doug, New on group so I can’t vouch for you being a "wise ass" but Happy Birthday…and Happy Father’s Day if it applies. Fargo

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – today’s Father’s Day and today I am 44. So smile and remember that that colossal asshole Doug is alive and kicking and making some of you smile and even more of you pissed off that I am such a know it all wise ass. Doug

Response:

Doug Have a happy Fathers Day! Joe Reardon

Response:

today’s Father’s Day and today I am 44. So smile and remember that that colossal asshole Doug is alive and kicking and making some of you smile and even more of you pissed off that I am such a know it all wise ass. Doug Happy Birthday, Doug!

Jennifer

Response:

today’s Father’s Day and today I am 44. So smile and remember that that colossal asshole Doug is alive and kicking and making some of you smile and even more of you pissed off that I am such a know it all wise ass. Doug

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -In Memory of My Dead Diabetic Dad It wasn’t so long ago that we buried my dad, Dan, who was a diabetic, like his dad before him. The day was dark and damp and my dad, Dan, was dead. Dead as a doornail. And there was nothing any of his children could have done to save Dad. Dad decided his destiny when he decided, as a diabetic Dad, to disregard his doctor and his doctor’s (Dr. Davidson’s) directives. Dad knew what to do. He knew about the diet. He knew the drugs he should be digesting. He knew about the drinking. He knew that by dieting he would be delaying death by diabetes. But did Dad decide to delay his death? Did he make the decision that would have delighted his daughters, his doctor and his dubious dentist? No. I doubt now that he even came out of his depressive diabetic doldrums long enough to denounce his deplorable decision to decline rather than to make a declaration of life. But that’s how Dad was. Since his divorce that previous December, it was like Dad was deaf to his death warrant. All of the deacons at the church he had defected from detected it. So had the others. The delivery man. The dogcatcher. The drill sargent who had been his drinking buddy when they had fought together at the battle of Dunkirk. When we found Dad, dead, at his duplex we weren’t dumbfounded. We knew that our once dynamic Dad had decided to die rather than take the decent route, the dignified due process that he should have taken, but didn’t. He ducked life by dubbing it. He was draped on the divan when we found him. I guess the moral of the story is this. Remember what happened to my Dad, Dan, on that day when he died. Just another dour draftsman who departed this life when he could have detoured his derailment. He left me his old dinner jacket which has helped me to deterge his death. He also left me his ditty bag. And for that, I am grateful.

Response:

Question:

What a sweet reply. I mean the part about the "greatest kid in the world". – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – My ex pays$275.00 each for my daughters. He must work in a car wash. I pay $800 for ONE daughter. The way I look at it, it only costs me $800 to have the greatest kid in the world. Pretty good deal. songoman

Response:

Get a spine. Make those people respect you and treat you with R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Show them that you, too, can upset their lives. It’s time to start flexing your muscles instead of acting like a spineless slug. If they can dish it out to you, you can dish it right back. No more nice lady crap. This is the real world. Take what you deserve because no-one is going to get it for you. In fact, take more than you deserve because you are way over-due. Don’t stand for their nonsense, start flexing your muscles. Give them as hard a time as they are giving you. And, no more sobbing in the bedroom. You have one life to lead. Embrace it and start stomping.

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -Hi all, I have been divorced for about a year. My ex and I did our own divorce, with joint residential custody for our 10 year old son, to alternate each week. Our divorce was final 2/98. In October ‘98, he and his fiance asked if Matthew (son) could stay there full time,with my visitation once a week on Wednesdays, and every other weekend. At the time it seemed like a good idea, Matthew was having lots of problems at school, he’s ADD., and the stability seemed to be needed of sleeping in the same place every night. I agreed to pay $100.00 a month toward my son’s expenses at his Dad’s and we pretty much settled everything peacefully between the two of us, didn’t have the parenting plan amended–just an informal agreement. Now I am having problems with my ex and his soon to be wife. They don’t answer the phone,refuse to use an answering machine, don’t advise me of upcoming school functions, and now they have blocked my emails from being received. It’s basically hit or miss getting ahold of them to talk to my son or communicate between the two households. To make matters more complicated, now my son’s counselor and teacher have both advised sending him to a program such as Sylvan Learning Center, and my ex wants me to pay half when I already pay "unofficial" child support. I have just my income, they have his, plus her worker’s comp disability, and her babysitting money (daycare that she does out of their house). Don’t get me wrong. I love my son more than anything. It reduces me to a sobbing mess when I can’t get ahold of him, when he’s too "busy" with the neighborhood kids to come over and be with me. This really isn’t so much a money issue as it is that I think he’s really screwing me over with this "friendly agreement." Has anyone else been thru this–if so, any advise. Thanks much, Suzzanne

Response:

Suzzanne, your story is so typical of an NCP dad. All the issues and feelings and isolation are the same. The advice for you is the same for them; you’ve got to move on with your *own* life and focus on the new life more than your past one. Yea, you can do some court games and muddle things for a while, but the judge won’t change things too much "in the best interests of the child" and you’ll probably find yourself having to pay much more CS, too, if you cause trouble. Your core issue is lacking a life right now that fulfills the voids your old life did. Your job is to build than new life. – John – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Hi all, I have been divorced for about a year. My ex and I did our own divorce, with joint residential custody for our 10 year old son, to alternate each week. Our divorce was final 2/98. In October ‘98, he and his fiance asked if Matthew (son) could stay there full time,with my visitation once a week on Wednesdays, and every other weekend. At the time it seemed like a good idea, Matthew was having lots of problems at school, he’s ADD., and the stability seemed to be needed of sleeping in the same place every night. I agreed to pay $100.00 a month toward my son’s expenses at his Dad’s and we pretty much settled everything peacefully between the two of us, didn’t have the parenting plan amended–just an informal agreement. Now I am having problems with my ex and his soon to be wife. They don’t answer the phone,refuse to use an answering machine, don’t advise me of upcoming school functions, and now they have blocked my emails from being received. It’s basically hit or miss getting ahold of them to talk to my son or communicate between the two households. To make matters more complicated, now my son’s counselor and teacher have both advised sending him to a program such as Sylvan Learning Center, and my ex wants me to pay half when I already pay "unofficial" child support. I have just my income, they have his, plus her worker’s comp disability, and her babysitting money (daycare that she does out of their house). Don’t get me wrong. I love my son more than anything. It reduces me to a sobbing mess when I can’t get ahold of him, when he’s too "busy" with the neighborhood kids to come over and be with me. This really isn’t so much a money issue as it is that I think he’s really screwing me over with this "friendly agreement." Has anyone else been thru this–if so, any advise. Thanks much, Suzzanne

Response:

My ex pays$275.00 each for my daughters. He must work in a car wash. I pay $800 for ONE daughter. The way I look at it, it only costs me $800 to have the greatest kid in the world. Pretty good deal. songoman

Response:

To make matters more complicated, now my son’s counselor and teacher have both advised sending him to a program such as Sylvan Learning Center, and my ex wants me to pay half when I already pay "unofficial" child support. I have just my income, they have his, plus her worker’s comp disability, and her babysitting money (daycare that she does out of their house).

Well, you have two issues here, it would seem. (Disclaimer: I AIN’T a lawyer, and obviously not an English major/teacher either!) Financial/ child support and visitation/access to your son. First, the financial. $100/month/child seems to be a pretty low amount for CS. To be asked to pay for half of the extra tutoring your son seems to need doesn’t seem like too much to ask for. I DO want to mention your accounting of the finances involved though. Why is it that you seem to think that your ex’s income should matter in this? Both of your son’s parents’ have an income and, IMO, that should be the only thing that matters. Any other income in the house really shouldn’t be a matter to be considered when it comes to income. Would you like it too much if you got married or a man moved in with you and your ex said ‘Well, now you can give us $400/month’? IMO, it’s the parents’ responsibility to support their children, not the stepparents’. As far as the visitation and access goes, you already have an ‘official’ parenting plan/visitation/custody schedule in place. Just because there has been a mutual agreement to change it really makes little difference. You could probably present it to your ex in this manner: ‘I thought that changing the living arrangements would be better for all of us, but now that I’m being left out of our son’s life, we need to discuss the custody again. You can either make sure that I’m kept informed with what’s going on at school and I can talk to our son and see him when I’m supposed to, or we can go back to the official plan or, if I have to take it to court, I’ll see about getting full custody.’ You should probably talk to a lawyer and find out where you stand on this. Good luck

Response:

I would contact a lawyer and see where you stand. We can offer opinions but as far as legal advice, the lawyer is who you need right now. Good Luck to you and to your son! Daisy Visit the ASD "Who’s Who" Web page at: http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Cape/6475/ To include yourself send picture and brief biography to:

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -Hi all, I have been divorced for about a year. My ex and I did our own divorce, with joint residential custody for our 10 year old son, to alternate each week. Our divorce was final 2/98. In October ‘98, he and his fiance asked if Matthew (son) could stay there full time,with my visitation once a week on Wednesdays, and every other weekend. At the time it seemed like a good idea, Matthew was having lots of problems at school, he’s ADD., and the stability seemed to be needed of sleeping in the same place every night. I agreed to pay $100.00 a month toward my son’s expenses at his Dad’s and we pretty much settled everything peacefully between the two of us, didn’t have the parenting plan amended–just an informal agreement. Now I am having problems with my ex and his soon to be wife. They don’t answer the phone,refuse to use an answering machine, don’t advise me of upcoming school functions, and now they have blocked my emails from being received. It’s basically hit or miss getting ahold of them to talk to my son or communicate between the two households. To make matters more complicated, now my son’s counselor and teacher have both advised sending him to a program such as Sylvan Learning Center, and my ex wants me to pay half when I already pay "unofficial" child support. I have just my income, they have his, plus her worker’s comp disability, and her babysitting money (daycare that she does out of their house). Don’t get me wrong. I love my son more than anything. It reduces me to a sobbing mess when I can’t get ahold of him, when he’s too "busy" with the neighborhood kids to come over and be with me. This really isn’t so much a money issue as it is that I think he’s really screwing me over with this "friendly agreement." Has anyone else been thru this–if so, any advise. Thanks much, Suzzanne

Response:

I do not want to seem uncaring to your situation….BUT $100.00 a month is very good for YOU, My ex pays$275.00 each for my daughters. I realize that this informal agreement seemed like a good idea at the time, BUT the issue is NOT about the MONEY, it is about rights. If you want more, then either Stick to your Legal agreement and go back to the schedule that you both got originally OR get a lawyer and amend your agreement to something that is suitable to what you would like. I suspect though he will try to fight this. Do you want more visitation? What is the most important issue here? Visitation? Money? If you want to be more involved in your childs school activities then I suggest YOU do something about it and not expect to be told from you ex when they are scheduled. Call the teacher and ask. BE an ACTIVE parent in the classroom……. There are alternatives. Make it clear with your ex that YOU are being flexible, and unless he would like to go to court to amend the agreement, then please respect you as a parent, return your phone calls and maybe set up a schedule as to when you will call, on a daily basis or every other day. Don’t play the victim and you are less likely to be one. DO something about the things YOU have control over…..

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Hi all, I have been divorced for about a year. My ex and I did our own divorce, with joint residential custody for our 10 year old son, to alternate each week. Our divorce was final 2/98. In October ‘98, he and his fiance asked if Matthew (son) could stay there full time,with my visitation once a week on Wednesdays, and every other weekend. At the time it seemed like a good idea, Matthew was having lots of problems at school, he’s ADD., and the stability seemed to be needed of sleeping in the same place every night. I agreed to pay $100.00 a month toward my son’s expenses at his Dad’s and we pretty much settled everything peacefully between the two of us, didn’t have the parenting plan amended–just an informal agreement. Now I am having problems with my ex and his soon to be wife. They don’t answer the phone,refuse to use an answering machine, don’t advise me of upcoming school functions, and now they have blocked my emails from being received. It’s basically hit or miss getting ahold of them to talk to my son or communicate between the two households. To make matters more complicated, now my son’s counselor and teacher have both advised sending him to a program such as Sylvan Learning Center, and my ex wants me to pay half when I already pay "unofficial" child support. I have just my income, they have his, plus her worker’s comp disability, and her babysitting money (daycare that she does out of their house). Don’t get me wrong. I love my son more than anything. It reduces me to a sobbing mess when I can’t get ahold of him, when he’s too "busy" with the neighborhood kids to come over and be with me. This really isn’t so much a money issue as it is that I think he’s really screwing me over with this "friendly agreement." Has anyone else been thru this–if so, any advise. Thanks much, Suzzanne

Response:

I already pay "unofficial" child support. I have just my income, they have his, plus her worker’s comp disability, and her babysitting money (daycare that she does out of their house).

hmmmm.. interesting…. Disability AND day care? I wonder what kind of disability would enable a person to collect worker’s comp and ALSO to do daycare (which is essentially conducting a home business)? Where ARE those hidden cameras?? I wonder how she got licensed for daycare in the first place, being disabled and collecting compensation… hmmmm… Just some thoughts i want to throw out there…. Don’t get me wrong. I love my son more than anything. It reduces me to a sobbing mess when I can’t get ahold of him, when he’s too "busy" with the neighborhood kids to come over and be with me.

I can relate to your pain there… The "empty nest syndrome" hitting just too darned early.. i especially miss mine at their bedtime when i would be kissing them goodnight or telling a story… and before/after school time, when they are running around excited and busy with so much to say… Picking them up on certain days and going somewhere just isn’t the same as "hanging out" with them during everyday usual activities… I hope things can work out for you to spend more time with your child…

Response:

Hi all, I have been divorced for about a year. My ex and I did our own divorce, with joint residential custody for our 10 year old son, to alternate each week. Our divorce was final 2/98. In October ‘98, he and his fiance asked if Matthew (son) could stay there full time,with my visitation once a week on Wednesdays, and every other weekend. At the time it seemed like a good idea, Matthew was having lots of problems at school, he’s ADD., and the stability seemed to be needed of sleeping in the same place every night. I agreed to pay $100.00 a month toward my son’s expenses at his Dad’s and we pretty much settled everything peacefully between the two of us, didn’t have the parenting plan amended–just an informal agreement. Now I am having problems with my ex and his soon to be wife. They don’t answer the phone,refuse to use an answering machine, don’t advise me of upcoming school functions, and now they have blocked my emails from being received. It’s basically hit or miss getting ahold of them to talk to my son or communicate between the two households. To make matters more complicated, now my son’s counselor and teacher have both advised sending him to a program such as Sylvan Learning Center, and my ex wants me to pay half when I already pay "unofficial" child support. I have just my income, they have his, plus her worker’s comp disability, and her babysitting money (daycare that she does out of their house). Don’t get me wrong. I love my son more than anything. It reduces me to a sobbing mess when I can’t get ahold of him, when he’s too "busy" with the neighborhood kids to come over and be with me. This really isn’t so much a money issue as it is that I think he’s really screwing me over with this "friendly agreement." Has anyone else been thru this–if so, any advise. Thanks much, Suzzanne

Response:

Question:

Stan – Yes, The inventory and Order Entry modules are very strong in the Business Works Accounting Software product. You can print reports for PAID invoices by rep (which is a major difference from others). The inventory allows up to 3 price levels (wholesale, retail, friends) which you can set yourself and then quantity pricing as well. You then have the additional option to create a total discount by customer (which prints in the totals area of the invoice). The multiple warehouses and serial number options are new and seem to work well. The General Ledger is very strong and allows for departmentalization and multi-company consolidation. The Payroll is my favorite because it allows you to separate the Employer Taxes by the Task being performed by the employee. Example – officer salary and officer taxes, warehouse wages and warehouse taxes. This saves you from redistributing the taxes to cost of sales and overhead. You can download a TEST DRIVE from the web site – www.sota.com and try it for 30 days. This is a full working product not a demo tape. Play with it. If you decide, I am a reseller and have stock on hand at the previous price levels which would save you hundreds of dollars. My office is 303-694-9599 and my fax is 303-713-1231. DeeDee Heyne D.B.H. ENTERPRISES – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Can anyone that is using this program tell me if it is any good. I have heard of it but don’t know it it is powerfull enough for a med. size distributor. I need custom pricing levels, in both orders and purchases. Sales rep paid invoice reporting, etc. Thanks Stan

Response:

Can anyone that is using this program tell me if it is any good. I have heard of it but don’t know it it is powerfull enough for a med. size distributor. I need custom pricing levels, in both orders and purchases. Sales rep paid invoice reporting, etc. Thanks Stan

Response:

Question:

Dearest Hayley; My gosh you are sweet. I’m so happy thank you. Yummy!! Back at you in a bit, jelly bean I got same reading to do, I’m gonna have fun, Big bets with the smart ass sisters:-) I have reviews for the next month, thank you, thank you dear. With luv and hugs, spike I like the glowhound!! Cute kid and you are an attractive girl.

Response:

hi spike. as a rule im no longer reading aar, but Buff told me yesterday i should check it for a message from you, so i did via deja and found this lovely post from you Im glad you liked the mags, and i hope you enjoy the licqourich, personally i hate the stuff, and aniseed balls uggggggh. The kid in the pic is my sister Abigail, plus my lovely doggy Billy. well better go. e mail me… Hayley – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Dearest Hayley; My gosh you are sweet. I’m so happy thank you. Yummy!! Back at you in a bit, jelly bean I got same reading to do, I’m gonna have fun, Big bets with the smart ass sisters:-) I have reviews for the next month, thank you, thank you dear. With luv and hugs, spike I like the glowhound!! Cute kid and you are an attractive girl.

Response:

Hi hayley! Yeah i miss you here. Tons! (((Buff))) is thoughtful! *sniffel* Yeah eh well i love it, thank you very much. There is no accounting for taste…i say NO ACCOUNTING FOR TASTE.

Question:

Debbie, The name of the stuff that Ronnie uses in the septic tank is called Septic Care. It’s a powder that we flush through the toilet once a month. He said the company is out of New Jersey, U.S.A. the phone number is 1-800-505-8800. They also have a pretty neat site at http://www.septiccare.com We started using the stuff back in 1989 when we had odors in the system and have used it ever since because the odors hav’nt come back. We also hav’nt had the tank pumped since then so I guess it’s doing what it suppose to. I think we paid $154.00 U.S. in 1989 and when we ordered again in 1995 we still paid $154, although the price increased to $169.00 but they sold it to us at the original price we paid since we were reorder customers. That was for a full 6 year supply, and they even let us pay it off over three months. Best thing about it and I know you’ll love this, is that it’s 100% natural. NO CHEMICALS. Anyway let me know how you make out with the system, and say hello to everyone. Tammy

OH, I’M SORRY, I THOUGHT I WAS IN AN ACCOUNTING NEWS GROUP!

Response:

Debbie, The name of the stuff that Ronnie uses in the septic tank is called Septic Care. It’s a powder that we flush through the toilet once a month. He said the company is out of New Jersey, U.S.A. the phone number is 1-800-505-8800. They also have a pretty neat site at http://www.septiccare.com We started using the stuff back in 1989 when we had odors in the system and have used it ever since because the odors hav’nt come back. We also hav’nt had the tank pumped since then so I guess it’s doing what it suppose to. I think we paid $154.00 U.S. in 1989 and when we ordered again in 1995 we still paid $154, although the price increased to $169.00 but they sold it to us at the original price we paid since we were reorder customers. That was for a full 6 year supply, and they even let us pay it off over three months. Best thing about it and I know you’ll love this, is that it’s 100% natural. NO CHEMICALS. Anyway let me know how you make out with the system, and say hello to everyone. Tammy

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