If this was a matter for the court system, we clearly needed help navigating those waters, and so on the advice of friends and a therapist I was seeing for the sake of my own sanity, I hired Alex Borden, a Torrance-based attorney specializing in this area of law. My husband sat next to me during our first meeting and calmly filled in details when I was overcome by emotion. I kept bursting into tears—I couldn’t help it.
Although fairly young, Alex nodded as if he’d already seen too many cases like this. Indeed, he was way too familiar with such gnarled family situations. He said such stories were more common than most people realized. It was then that I heard for the first time the words elder abuse, a term that he said described any knowing or intentional neglect or harm to a vulnerable adult. It could be physical, psychological, sexual, or financial. It was, he added, on the rise.
“It’s exactly what’s happening to my dad,” I said. “What can we do?”
His response was interesting. He spoke about legal measures and fighting for conservatorship, but he emphasized that the best tactic would be to try to resolve the problem out of court, or to use the threat of a legal battle that could result in serious consequences to encourage an outside arrangement. We went that route. At the end of April, we had our first court hearing, at which Alex and my father’s attorney, Alan Greenfield, worked out a deal for my father to meet my brother and me, without Kevin present.
It seemed simple enough. All I wanted was my father back. For some reason, though, he failed to show up. Another meeting was set up. My brother and I were to meet my father at noon outside a Mexican restaurant in Ventura. After he didn’t show up again, we called his attorney, who said Kevin had changed the plans and now wanted us to meet our father in front of a hotel on the pier.
There were several police cars in front of the hotel when we pulled up. They were, it turned out, waiting for us. Kevin had phoned them, fearing we’d steal my father. After we didn’t see my father in front of the hotel, I walked one way down the pier and Mike walked the other, looking for him. I found my father on a bench, sitting by himself. He was like a pawn in this twisted war. How sad.
“Dad, let’s go into this restaurant and talk,” I said.
Mike joined us as we went inside and got a booth. My father started by saying that he was well but Kevin was dying of testicular cancer and needed $400,000 for treatment. I gasped at the news and asked what could we do, what kind of help did he need? My brother noticed my father was unusually nervous and uptight. He asked who’d diagnosed Kevin’s cancer. My father said, “I did.”
“You diagnosed testicular cancer?” Mike asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Don’t you trust me?”
It was a strange response, and the rest of the conversation, while brief, was no better. While we talked about getting a second opinion, my father focused on Kevin’s need for the money immediately. When we suggested finding a specialist, my father said they preferred to treat it on their own. Watched by the police, we were able to drive my father back to the hotel.
In the car, my brother turned on a song that he thought my father might relate to, as if it would snap him back to reality. But the moment it came on, he asked Mike to stop, then reached for the door handle and said he had to go. We watched him disappear inside the hotel, where we were sure Kevin was waiting for him. Mike said something about Dad not being Dad anymore. I agreed. That wasn’t the man who’d raised me.
We reported everything to Alex, who called my father’s attorney and said we wanted Kevin examined by specialists at one of the large Los Angeles–area hospitals. A few days later, Alex called back with disturbing news. He said that, through his attorney, my father denied ever having claimed Kevin was ill.
In May, we returned to court for another hearing, and outside the building we had a brief family talk wherein we decided upon mediation so we didn’t run through everyone’s money paying for attorneys. Kevin looked fine, unchanged. When I asked him about the cancer, he said, laughing, “Oh, that was a misunderstanding.”
A month later, we were in Oxnard for our first mediated hearing, the goal of which was to gain access to my father. My brother and his son Brandon were there, as were my husband and I, my father and Kevin, our respective attorneys, as well as the mediator. Before the session began, my father passed all the adults, attorneys, and mediator copies of a letter he’d supposedly written. We doubted its authenticity. Still, it created a dramatic moment.
The mediator left the room to read it in private. The rest of us went through it, horrified, in the room.
Over twelve pages long, the letter detailed why I was mentally incompetent and not to be believed or trusted in any capacity. It started out describing my mother as a woman who threw knives and plates at my father, and it went on to say that I suffered from syphilis like my mother, was addicted to cocaine, and continued to take mind-altering drugs. It was heinous.
Yet there we were, a group of adults—family—reading this vile attack on me. My husband’s anger was visible. I knew what he wanted to do; thank goodness he didn’t. My attorney rolled his eyes. I looked across the table at Kevin. His face was a rapidly changing series of angst-ridden grimaces and contortions, as if he were at war with some internal demon. Everyone saw it.
Finally, the mediator returned, sat down, put the pages of the letter in front of her, looked around the table, paused briefly to take in Kevin’s unnerving looks, and in a calm, firm, and dismissive tone said, “Okay, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s get on with things.”
After several hours, all parties agreed to appoint an independent trustee to oversee the family trust. We also agreed, though not in writing, that my father would be open to counseling and regular visits so we could be a family. All I want is to talk to my father alone in a room, I told the mediator. She said absolutely, pointed to a room, and my father and I went into it. There, as if molting out of his strange skin, he hugged me, cried, promised to go into therapy with us, and said, “Maureen, I’m so sorry about this. Isn’t it great we’re working this out? I love you.”
For a moment I had my father back.
Then suddenly he pushed me back and said we’d spent enough time together. Then Kevin asked for equal time alone. Through the wall, I heard him, and I think everyone else also heard him, say, “Dad, she’s the sick one! She’s the one who needs therapy. She needs a lifetime of therapy.”
I doubted those sessions would ever come off, and they didn’t. Neither did any of the agreed-upon regular visits.
It wasn’t long after this that I was lying in bed one night with my husband, unable to sleep, as usual, because I was thinking about the situation. We were literally in the Twilight Zone. I couldn’t believe I’d gotten my life together just to end up in this mess. I muttered something along these lines simply to provoke Michael into talking about it.
He reminded me that I hadn’t done what I did just to be able to fight Kevin, which was true, but then he said, “God gives you enough strength to fight the battles you need to fight.”
Great, I thought, but does He give you strength enough to win?
What did it mean to win? What was the point?
The fighting was taking a terrible toll on all of us. Denny, the easiest to overlook, was hit the hardest. My father and Kevin visited him once or twice. I saw him every other week, attended every meeting at which the staff provided updates on residents, and had Denny stay with us many weekends and on holidays. After almost a year in the facility, he still didn’t understand the arrangement. Every time I saw him, he asked if Mom was really gone and where Dad was. Those were the hardest conversations.
“Is Mom really gone?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“When am I going to see my dad?”
“I don’t know, Den.”
“How is my dad?”
“I’m sure he’s fine, Den. He’s with Kevin.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“We don’t have his number, Den. We don’t know how to reach him.”
After a few rounds of this, Denny stopped asking questions. He looked at me with a confused expression as he tried to process the answers. He looked the way I felt. I always drove away from those visits in tears.
Natalie turned sixteen between Kevin’s fake testicular cancer drama and our first mediation. One day I was having lunch with some of my girlfriends at a restaurant in the neighborhood. These women were the bedrock of my reality, the people I relied on for sound advice, good times, and honesty. This was one of those casual lunches of white wine and laughs, until one of them asked what I thought about Natalie’s tongue piercing.
I didn’t have any opinions one way or the other, I said, because my Natalie didn’t have a pierced tongue.
Well, that wasn’t what she’d heard from her daughter. Even though I knew we had few family secrets after living as neighbors since our kids were infants and watching them progress from diapers to their driver’s licenses, I insisted she was wrong.
“It’s not possible,” I said. “I see her every day.”
“Do you look at her tongue every day?”
“We had an agreement,” I said. “When she got her ears pierced, she promised not to get anything else pierced.”
“Well, you should check it out,” said my girlfriend.
I excused myself from the table and went home. Natalie was in her room. Unable to restrain myself, I yelled upstairs, asking if she’d had her tongue pierced. I was halfway up the stairs when I saw her dart into the bathroom from her bedroom and lock the door. I stood outside the door and asked the question again. Slowly, she opened the door wide enough for me to see the middle of her face. Then she opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue.
“Oh my God!” I said. “Nat—take it out. Then meet me in your room.”
My initial reaction foretold the worst kind of knock-down-drag-out, but our talk ended up being pivotal to both of us, and that’s because, to my daughter’s credit, we actually did talk about it. She came into her bedroom knowing she’d broken our agreement, and she told me everything. She had had her tongue pierced after my mother died. It had been a lark, she said. Amid the chaos that followed my mother’s funeral, I’d failed to notice that she’d asked for soft food in her school lunches.
When Michael got home from work, he joined the two of us. Natalie shared more details on her life, things I should’ve seen or known or wanted to know about my daughter but hadn’t because I’d been distracted by the issues with my father and Kevin. As for the piercing, I understood the idea of a good girl wanting to be a little bad. But some of the other stories she told scared me to death. Some brought tears to my eyes. Her openness and honesty impressed me beyond words.
I never shared like that with my parents. It was only after I’d gone home in need of an abortion that I began to open up to my mother, and then it took another twenty years before we really started to talk. I didn’t want to go that route with Natalie. I didn’t want to imagine the pain I’d feel if she closed the doors to her life to me. Nor did I want to imagine her keeping secrets and battling fears the way I had.
I saw in Natalie a beautiful girl who had a chance to develop into an even more beautiful young woman, and in talking to her, I realized she was even more extraordinary on the inside. Somehow she had survived my faults and lapses. I think all women see themselves in their daughters, or maybe they see an idealized version of themselves. I know my mother lived vicariously through me. In Natalie, though, I saw my baby girl growing up into someone much better than me—stronger, more mature, more together.
And I wanted to keep it that way. At the end of the day, raising a child was the most important thing I’d do in my life, and as we sat there, talking, yelling, crying, and hugging, I thought I’d better get it right, or at least try to, at each juncture. If piercing her tongue was the worst thing she did, Michael and I were going to be two happy parents. But we were a family in turmoil; that was the reality, and it was affecting everyone in different ways, including Natalie.
We needed help. I’d been going to therapy since my mother died, and it had kept me together. I suggested to Natalie that the three of us go to counseling, and she agreed. We went several times. With a therapist directing the conversation in a nonjudgmental and caring manner, we talked calmly and openly. We hit big issues, got beneath the surface, and discovered feelings that might never have come out.
For example, I brought up the hurt I felt upon learning that Natalie had kept a secret from me. Through talking about it, though, I realized I hadn’t been hurt as much as I’d been frightened of her keeping secrets the way I did and my mother did and her mother did. As I said, I didn’t want her to be like us.
Until then, Natalie didn’t know about the sordid family history. Once the door opened, though, I filled in the blanks and provided the backstories. It helped having the therapist there; I think it gave me courage. Without realizing it, as I told the story, I glossed over the details of my own life. I wasn’t fully aware of what I had been avoiding until the therapist suggested I tell Natalie about some of the problems I had growing up.
On the one hand, I was like “where do I start?” On the other, I was horrified of exposing all the truly rotten, self-destructive things I’d done and admitting that I wasn’t the perfect person I wanted to be for my daughter. At that point, the therapist asked if I really believed she thought I was perfect. I looked over at her. She made the cutest face and shrugged, as if to say, “Mom, you can stop pretending. I know you aren’t perfect.”
Part of me wanted to laugh at all the effort I’d wasted pretending to be someone I wasn’t, especially since it was obvious to everyone but me that I wasn’t perfect, and another part of me felt what it must be like when you jump out of a plane when skydiving for the first time. My stomach was in a knot, and I wasn’t sure I really wanted to take the plunge, yet I knew I’d be better off for it.
It came down to Natalie. This was my chance to break the pattern, to put three generations of secrets, shame, and personal shit on the table so she would be aware of it, make better decisions, and ultimately be spared having to go down the same self-destructive avenue. So I went for it. I told her about my fear of syphilis, the drug abuse, my two abortions, and more. It was as if I opened a box of keepsakes, but instead of trinkets, glass beads, ribbons, it was filled with pain, misery, anger, embarrassment, shame, and grief.
Telling my daughter those things was one of the most painful experiences of my life, and also one of the best and most profound. When I finished, I felt like my soul was exposed and vulnerable in a way it had never been in front of my child. All the pain, fear, and self-hate I’d ever tried to escape was flapping in the breeze, like laundry on the line. I’d claimed every bit of it. Then I looked into Natalie’s eyes for a response. They were as wet and red as mine. Unprompted, she got out of her chair, walked over to me, and gave me the hug of a lifetime.
“Mom, I know you shared all those stories so I wouldn’t have to go through the same things,” she said. “I understand.”
“You do?”
She nodded.
“I just want to say thank you so much. And I love you even more.”
That left just one person whose love I needed, and I was working on her.