For Jaycee in your time of terrible sorrow

Jaycee, your story makes me cry every time I come on this site because you make me think of my mother, and if I were your daughter I would tell you how much I love you and that you are more precious to me than gold and that you and I are going to get through this together and that means I will be here for you every moment of every day.

I want to tell you a story about a woman, the most beautiful woman who ever lived both inside and out, more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor and Angelina Jolie combined, more talented the sweetest songbird that ever flew, funnier than Don Rickles and kinder than Saint Mary, and this woman who had every potential to get away from a terrible narc but didn't is now a bitter, mentally ill, sick, addicted old lady living in hell. That woman is my mother, Jaycee.

When my mother was 28 years old she already had the five of us. She met my father at fourteen and married him at eighteen, had my brother Martin at nineteen. Her mother abandoned her and her younger siblings to re-marry and her father loved her but was an alcoholic. She ate her way through her childhood and sang professionally. She should have been Deanna Durbin - Julie Andrews - that's how many offers she got to be in film, on stage, etc. But my father, this insanely talented and charismatic narc who was at the top of his field in the 50's stole her heart, and of course she had no parents who wanted her in their house, so she flew to my father. Within one week of their marriage, my father went into a dark room and did not come out for a week, did not speak a word to my mother except to order her to get food or drink for him. She saw then that he was bi-polar but did not know how to label it then. When she was 28 I was born in the midwest. My father was clergy and we moved every two or three years because he had developed a prescription drug addiction as well as a severe obsession with cheating, and he fucked up one job after another, dragging my mother and all of us down with him wherever he went. I lived in 10 states by age 14.

Six months after I was born my father came into our house with a woman named Bonnie. He and Bonnie sat my mother down in our living room and Bonnie said to my mother, "your husband and I are getting married, and I have $10,000 here to pay you for your five children whom I would like to have in exchange for the money". Your mouth is hanging open right? My father just sat there with his head hanging. He didn't stop this woman. My mother told her to fuck herself and she then packed and took FIVE children under the age of nine to Brooklyn to one bedroom, at my grandmother's who did not want her or us there. My mother did not have money, family money or any self-esteem despite her many charms and talents, and my father hoovered her like hell and she took him back. She has told me many times that she never loved him after that and in her heart he was dead. But she could never, ever leave him because her sense of her own worth was NIL - ZERO, and he died at age 53 leaving her nothing but her memories of their shared good times, horrific bad times and five children.

My mother is now re-married for 22 years to a man who has a good heart but has many, many issues that do not allow them to have sex or any real romance. She has always looked twenty years or more younger than her age. She is now a limping, sick, depressed and anxious woman who still lives in her low self-esteem world of my father. Blaming herself still. Married to someone she doesn't love just so she wouldn't be alone. Jaycee listen to me - YOU HAVE CHOICES. YOU HAVE OPTIONS. YOU ARE NOT 73!!! YOU HAVE YOUR WHOLE LIFE AHEAD OF YOU. Do not become my mother.

I love you.