Repeatedly thrown to the dogs by my own mother

KOFF! HACK! *CHOKE* KOFF KOFF! HACK HACK! KOFF! HACK! *CHOKE*

I'd never heard such a deep, rumbling, resonant, otherworldly cough, and I grew up with a heavy-smoking parent with one functioning lung and COPD. The Mexican peasant in front of us was never taught the art of responsible coughing. Icy wind caught his aerosolized spittle and rained it back on us. Later, we overheard that he had tuberculosis - it's apparently pronounced the same in Spanish.

The Dallas County health clinic is a truly forlorn place, especially in the winter predawn hours. This February 2009 morning was no exception. They only see 50 patients a day, so one must arrive very early and get in line. If you're #51 or later, you can try again another day. We arrived at 0510 and turned out to be #42. The tuberculic Mexican was #41.

Lisa paled with pain and fatigue standing in the wind. No fucking way was she going to make it to 0700. I insisted, against her protests, that she wait in the car while I held her spot. Few in the line spoke English, and most of those who did were not my type. So, there was little conversation, even among the Mexicans.

Everyone was just so sad.

Coughing, groaning, and rush hour traffic filled the air. The pounding pain in my knee thumped like a drum in my brain. I hate standing in line somewhere pleasant, much less in this nightmare. I should have dressed warmer. Wait....if I'm cold, why am I sweating so? Ugh. Feeling sick and dizzy. Don't start sobbing. Just don't. *Sigh*

Rock Motherfucking Goddamn Bottom
People generally remember the lowest, most hopeless and miserable moment of their lives. That was mine, freezing my nuts off with my fellow forgotten souls in a county health clinic parking lot in the world's wealthiest nation. Amazingly, things were soon to get much worse. Still, that morning at the clinic stands tall, a singular dreadful quality about it.

Three miles away, my millionaire parents slept.

What's the fucking point of “coming from money” if THIS is where you end up? I had been thrown to the dogs by my own mother, and not for the first time. This one was, however, the first time as an adult.

Kee-Rash!
In July, 2008, my partner of 7 ½ years, Lisa, was in a bad wreck. An idiot turned in front of her on a flat, straight highway in daytime amid light traffic and perfect weather. It was truly a senseless shame. I was packing for our much-awaited road trip to Glacier National Park when the call came.
This set in motion a veritable orgasm of tragic failure lasting 8 years that destroyed our lives. From the ER at now-defunct and resoundingly ill-named Renaissance Hospital in Terrell to a doctor I'd known for 30 years to my own mother, nothing wanted to work out right. Words can't describe the agony and bitterness that resulted.

The ER said it was a sprained ankle. Soon it became apparent that was not the whole story. Dr. Goldberg, our longtime family orthopedist, diagnosed a broken heel while decrying the ER's incompetence in failing to see it on their x-rays. We knew this guy for 30 years. My Aunt Betty was his nurse for many years. His partner heroically saved my rifle-mangled leg 28 years before.

If anyone would fix us up, he was the guy, right?

Well, after 6 weeks in a cast plus rehab, recovery proved elusive. She spent 6 months working part-time while wearing an orthopedic boot, but that became impossible. Goldberg didn't pay enough attention to her symptoms and just kept prescribing narcotics.

Salvation
10 months after the wreck, we found a specialist, Dr. Royer, who quickly diagnosed damage to the ankle while decrying Goldberg's incompetence in failing to diagnose it. We negotiated a very favorable arrangement with Baylor for a $4200 down payment and the rest tended to at favorable cash rates when the legal part of the affair was settled. Royer assured us the odds of a full recovery were very high.

Problem was, I didn't have $4200. We went into the sudden crisis with 8 months of living expenses set aside, but it was depleted. Goldberg charged us top-dollar for his ineffective care and flat cleaned us out. We were a two-income household before Lisa got hurt, so times had become tough.

There was no way we could settle the case until the medical part was resolved. The suffering and loss of income and quality of life had gone on too long. I looked Lisa square in the eye and promised I'd see to it that she was taken care of. I mean, it's not like it was $42,000, right? Just $4200. And it's a loan, not a gift - when the case settles, I'll pay it back.

All I knew was that the beautiful person I'd known for many years was vanishing under a smothering blanket of suffering and I was getting run to death running the household alone on a leg that looks like it belongs on a meat hook. We had to do something fast.

We scheduled the surgery.

Lisa scoffed, though, looking at me like I was nuts - "Your mom is NOT gonna help me."

I would hear none of that. "She'll be helping us, not just you." Again I guaranteed immediate success.

To any civilized person, it's gut-wrenching to have to call someone and ask for over four thousand dollars. I had no worries that I wouldn't succeed, though. A member of the family was seriously injured and the matter could be put to rest with of ease. It's very simple, right?

Un-Salvation
It was a hot day. I pulled over in a parking lot, called Mom and told her we finally had a solid diagnosis on Lisa, almost a year after the injury. She seemed to not care. I explained the situation to her and when I got to the end, she cut me off, snapping, “I don't have it.”

I'd not even yet told her how much!

Stunned, I could answer only “Oh.”

But then, she asked how much. Yes! Things are looking up!

I answered, she deliberated for a couple of seconds and repeated that she didn't have it. I suggested she could easily find that much money, and likely considerably more, with a quick dig about her coffers. And yes, they take credit cards, too. Surgery was three weeks away, so no panic. And, again, it's a loan until the case settles.

The closest thing to something encouraging she said was that Obama would rescue us, but that's not quite what we needed at the moment, considering the ACA didn't go into effect for 5 more years. It was a woefully ridiculous and frustrating conversation.

Whatever You Do, PLEASE Don't Shriek "What About ME?!?!?"
I made very clear the gravity of the situation and the harm we were suffering. She let me speak my peace without interruption, a rarity with Mom, so I was encouraged. Her reply was less than encouraging, though:

“WHAT ABOUT ME?!?!?” she shrieked. *SIGH* Our lives had revolved around Mom's litany of maladies for about 30 years, so it's not like they were being disregarded.

I growled in response:

What about you? What aliment do you have ruining your life that can be resolved for the cost of a cheap used car? Why is our problem contingent on your problems?

“Aaaaahhhh! Antipathia!" she yelled. Mom often responded to effective rebuttal by cursing at me in Turkish.

An antipathia is someone so disgusting and devoid of goodness that they deserve no pity whatsoever, ever (anti + pathos). Really, it's a very harsh and vicious term. Mom could get really mean when crossed.

This was not going well. The seriousness of the matter was reiterated, to no avail. Somehow, I refrained from blowing my top.

I ended the very tense conversation by sarcastically apologizing for bothering her, then reminding her we had three weeks. Sitting in the Lowe's parking lot, I'd never felt lower. The nightmare was just getting started, though.

Those weeks I watched the phones like a hawk. The call never came. The result was a catastrophe that almost killed us both, cost about $40,000 to partially resolve after an eight year trip through the gates of hell, and cost hundreds of thousands in lost earnings.

Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy/Complex Regional Pain Syndrome
To vastly condense a story that could be its own book or website, the additional delay in treatment after the misdiagnoses (plural) spawned a RSD/CRPS disaster. Neuropathic hypersensitivity. It was always bad, but periodically it would flare to up ludicrous levels of unstoppable pain and burning. 17% of patients are dead within 5 years. Never have I seen anyone suffer so much.

It must be noted that my relationship with Mom, while jam-packed with high strangeness, was mostly close and pleasant and often very good. As the lone authentic intellectuals in the clan, we were kindred spirits, yet also mutual nemeses who butted heads regularly.

Lisa had never made a problem in the family. Mom was well aware of her excellent character (which actually pissed her off) and how massively she elevated my quality of life. The previous Father's Day, she made a fine Greek meal for Mom and Dad, plus The Flozberks including Aydin, hobbling around on a fracture boot serving them while gulping painkillers.

So, it's not like we were on bad terms. There was simply no reason to cast us away like that.

In the first 6 months after the RSD diagnosis and the collapse of our lives from what started out as an ankle sprain, not once did Mom ask how Lisa was doing and Neila didn't once contact us. We simply didn't matter.

Lisa was in terrible shape. The Social Security Administration ruled her disability on the first try, a rarity in our quite-stingy district. At a national park months later, they took one look at her and forked over a Golden Access pass without even asking for ID, much less the ostensibly-required proof of her permanent disability.

An Interesting Exchange
A couple years later as Lisa and I fought our way through the nightmare, I was visiting and Mom, who now talked about little other than how awful John was after essentially banning criticism of him for decades, bemoaned how she and Dad were being treated by him after "always being there for our children."

I bristled at that falsehood, immediately pouncing, flat-out telling her that the two times I most desperately needed them, one pretty fresh and one very old, she pretty much told me to go fuck myself.

Mom didn't like that, and I'll never forget her reply: "Are you saying Lisa's injury is my fault?"

I offered rebuttal:
RSD is a disease caused by injury. Yes, you carry some blame. There is much blame to go around on this one, but when I needed your help, you lied about not having $4200 and turned your back on me. Ultimately, I take full responsibility - I should have taken out a home equity loan instead of counting on you and staring at the phone waiting like a fool.

Her response to that was a doozy that opened the door to some hard truths:

Then you would have lost your house.

Mom talked out her ass a lot, and I mean A LOT. Many problems with that one:

No, I wouldn't have lost my house over a loan for a few thousand dollars requiring payments of around $115 a month. After surgery, the case was settled for the policy limit of a half-million dollars, of which we received about a quarter.

Did you just tell me you would have sat here and let me lose my modest home over peanuts amid a medical crisis after Dad, MY FATHER, stood in line month after month to pay AYDIN'S SON'S much bigger, insatiable gluttony-based note? Is that what I just heard?
From Mom's mini-memoir:
Charlie went monthly to (13 times) to pay his (John's) $2,200 approx mortgage so that he wouldn't lose the house.

I wasn't quite done yet:
I would burn my fucking house down a million times if it would get Lisa her leg back. If you had to choose now between this house and Dad's leg, what would prevail? Which one???

Mom looked down at the floor, silent. She was incapable of fessing up in a healthy, open way, so in a situation like this she'd present either withdrawal or a flurry of disingenuous self-flagellation intended to guilt her attacker into regretful submission. I found the first option, a far lesser of two evils, easier to swallow.

A Grimmest of Realizations
Years later, as the RSD battle raged on and Dad became the boss. I, his point man, dug into the books to discover Mom was sitting on nearly a million in cash in two money market accounts, a million in her stock brokerage account, and that The Flozberk "Twins" had nailed Mom and Dad for hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars while brewing a conflict that cost hundreds of thousands more.

Learning this, I went freaky tingly-numb fer a spell. My head felt Novacained. My hands felt just like two balloons. I actually had to hold on to things for balance. Reminded me of the first and only time I tried chewin' tobaccy.

So, after all those years and years of sheer lunacy, THIS is what it actually felt like to be negatively flabbergasted to the core, saddened and disgusted to the peak of human capacity.

I didn't seem to much care for it, and, sadly, that wasn't the first time I'd been thrown to the dogs by Mom.

About 30 years before, The Golden Psycho John got into the seasonally-varying habit of drowning or choking me to near-unconsciousness, then backing off, then repeating. I was 7-10 years old, he 21-24. Let's back up a bit right quick-like:

A Child Gradually Broken
Perhaps three years before the choking and drowning started, John tried to scare me with some cheesy vampire teeth from a box of Count Chocula. He flopped due to a lackluster performance and bad props. What did he do next? He refined the character, getting much better fangs and adjusting his performance from clumsy to chilling.

It worked - he scared the bloody hell out of me and got a big kick out of it. Mom, between giggles, told him to stop, but I must say I found her support of my well-being on that one lukewarm at best. One thing's for sure - I've long been leery of men who enjoy causing true deep fear in women and children. To me, that has more red flags than a Chinese honor guard. Through Mom's rose-colored glasses, though, the red flags looked merely like flags.

Overall, though, we had a very close relationship in which he successfully conditioned me to idolize him. But, I grew older was influenced by other things as my sense of free will developed. I started pushing back against his domineering, narcissistic, exploitative behavior and he detested that, responding with the torture of choke holds and near-drownings.

Shakedowns
Later, he augmented that abomination by manipulating me to give him my allowance and half of my lunch money to buy a video game console while also grooming me to help him scam Mom and Dad into giving him money for a bigger, better house.

I went to Mom for help with the violent abuse and, after talking to John, she blew me off. He pleaded he'd done nothing wrong and I was just a sissy buttercup overreacting to normal rough-and-tumble play. Once, she even caught him drowning me, but he was able to explain it away as I coughed and sputtered, hanging on the edge of the pool, calling him an asshole.

When it came to pulling scams and getting away with it, the guy was like a wizard.

That dark triumph emboldened him and he made it damn clear that if I ever went "crying to mommy" again, the consequences would be beyond my worst nightmares. Even though it seemed like we were already there, I believed him.

Even with his grooming me to help him scam Mom and Dad, which caused me massive stress, Mom failed to step up, shrieking, "What do you want ME to do about it?!?" I suggested, "How about telling him, 'Hey, asshole, stop fucking with my kid's head, you sleazy lowlife, you!'"

His browbeating of my parents over both his McMansion dream and his aim to use them as free babysitters so he could ditch his kid and go skiing got so bad that we had to take the phone off the hook nightly to get through dinner in peace.

A Bit Much, Perhaps
Between the torture from John, Mom throwing me to the dogs, Mom's health disasters, Mom's endless harping on her health disasters, Mom's velied threats that she could "up and leave anyone at anytime," Mom's much less-veiled threats to have me removed to the State School for Boys with just a phone call, The patently INSANE Shit Pimp incident, the snap decline of my idyllic school into ghetto mayhem, and the collapse of my beloved Grandpa Theo into dementia and death, I, for some odd reason, didn't much feel at home in the world late in my elementary school days.

So there we have it. Both as a child and a man I got thrown to the dogs by the one person of the billions on Earth most expected to look out for me. Dad simply went along with Mom in all matters, so he was not a factor.

More Antics From Mom
At first, Mom vigorously disputed the chokings and drownings occurred. Given that the smell of chlorinated pool water actually made me anxious and ill after the many episodes of torture, I asked her if she found it odd that I went from swimming hundreds of times a year to almost zero.

Unable to conjure up a pile of bullplop she was willing to try and pull on us (Dad was sitting there, silent, soaking it all in), Mom moved the goalposts and derided me for being so weak. John isn't around any more, no longer welcome. Go smell that pool water and be a man!

That opened another door Mom likely would have just as soon kept closed.

Gar-licked
When Mom was a very affluent child, she, not feeling well, went to the kitchen to see what the chefs and servants were up to. There was garlic being sauteed in oil and the smell sickened her. Due to that one instance in the World War II era, garlic was largely banned from our lives. We almost never went to Italian restaurants and our household seasonings were salt and pepper, with occasional oregano.

I crucified her on that one. A whiff of garlic, very long ago, altered the course of all our lives forever. Yet, repeated episodes of much more recent truly terrifying torture had no business altering anything. The disparity is, obviously, exponential. It was yet another bizarre instance of one set of rules and standards for The Istanbul Bunch and another for the rest of us.

She then shifted gears again and wailed that she deserved to be hung and skinned alive for that wacky ol' parental shortcoming drowning thing. I could only say that how she ultimately interpreted it was up to her, but I considered it a significant failure that had a terrible effect on my life and still hurt badly. I then asked if her wish to be hung n' skinned alive meant she had suddenly abandoned her borderline-evil position that the abuse never even took place.

Boy, she did not like that "borderline-evil" shit. And so began more cursing at me in Turkish.

Rather than all that hangin' n' skinnin' n' and cursin', a simple, earnest, clean apology would have much sufficed. A couple of sentences could have made a world of difference for the rest of my life. Instead, she just made it worse.

??? WTF ???
I'm a failure analysis maven. As the observant son of an electrical engineer now deeply involved in tech and horticultural pursuits/research, I must know when, how, and why things went wrong. One little thing out of place can trash months of hard work.

As with the Dog Food Follies, a family member needed help, I acted, and the results fell way short. Why? Somewhere in there was a way to a better outcome, but I missed the bus. Whassup?

Instead of being laser-focused on the goal, ego and petulance took over. A confrontation, not a resolution resulted. The suffering was extended so I could bask in the decidedly finite glory of once again calling Mom out on her foolishness. Talk about a bum deal.

I was supposed to be the official family genius, the sane and enlightened one, but instead I guided us into insane darkness. I'm certain I could have fostered a much better result with a wiser approach. Surely there was a way to inspire Mom to reach into that mountain of money and temporarily part with a tiny speck of it to keep her son's life from imploding.

Tragically, I lacked the wisdom and character to find it. That failure was very costly, and the meter continues to run to this second. Hard lesson learned, indeed.

To this moment, being repeatedly thrown to the dogs by my own mother rips my heart to shreds. I'm afraid I'll never understand it or get over it.

Never. Ever. Ever. Ever. Again
When Dad took over in 2015, we both took measures to ensure nobody in my household would ever again be thrown to the dogs. That triggered Neila to embark on an insane campaign against me that ruined my health and further mangled the end of Dad's already-Flozberk-trashed life.

And, here we are.

Return to Prologue

Thrown to the Dogs