Our Sister’s Song

“Not only had my brother disappeared, but--and bear with me here--a part of my very being had gone with him. Stories about us could, from then on, be told from only one perspective. Memories could be told but not shared.” ― John Corey Whaley, Where Things Come Back

We are the love child of a narcissistic mother and an emotionally immature father, who is the step-son of a pedophile. Growing up, our childhood felt like a series of disconnected snapshots, each fading into the next like a worn-out photo album. We daydreamed, retreating into a world of imagination whenever life became overwhelming. Our memories mix laughter and shadows, bright moments clashing with darker ones that we still struggle to piece together. 

Our gender transition kick-started our healing. When we began to feel good about ourselves, we started to remember why we lacked confidence. We could see where our belief that we are completely worthless and worse, unlovable, stems from.  This is when we started to hold Ellen accountable for the pain and suffering she caused.

.There were days when we ached to feel loved, surrounded by the warmth of family and friends, and nights when we were alone, but the walls still felt too close, and we learned to dissociate, to drift away from the hurt. It was like pressing a pause button on our emotions, creating a safe space in our minds where the chaos couldn’t reach us. We would close our eyes and imagine we were somewhere else, somewhere safe and happy, where love was the norm. We created an army of Lost Boys to cope with the severe and prolonged abuse.  We are The Chorus, we are Denise's big brothers, and this is Our Sister’s Song

We started therapy with one rule: everything must be on the table, but never talk about Ellen. We did this again, writing this. We wrote an entire book and still hadn’t discussed Ellen and why we are not inherently broken, and she bestowed our brokenness upon us.  We think a complete level of betrayal has made this hard to broach. 

We can open this with a story that will tell you a lot about Ellen. Terry and Dana were graduating from nursing school. After all of the pomp and circumstance, some of our extended family and family friends gathered, and Ellen had offered to have their graduation party at her house. My grandparents, Ben and Hazel, my dad and his wife Linda, were there. Ellen's family was in the family room, James’s family was in the dining room, and the friends were outside with us at the BBQ on the patio. 

Ellen was entertaining as usual. Part of her shtick is to tell stories about us that make us look dumb and clumsy in a way that makes the people around her laugh with her. Three parties are happening in her house at the same time.  She was in her element. Moving from one room to another, she told each room the same stories, getting positive reinforcement from everyone. She comes to the friend's party outside. She sits down tittering. She tells everyone outside that Ben said, “She was the prettiest of all three of James’s wives.” This is when the whisper starts, and she tells them, “he said it right in front of Linda.” 

This wouldn’t be memorable under any other circumstance, but Ellen has told this story whenever someone mentioned our father. We are not exaggerating for dramatic effect.  Eighty is coming up fast upon her, and if you called her right now and asked her about my grandparents, she would tell you the Ben story. Her second favorite story about Ben that she will tell you is about how he always helped her with us, and that she would hand us to him in the bathtub.  This started when we were still babies.  James and Ellen divorced, but we still had to spend weeks with him in the summers, and nothing changed with Ben and the bathtub as we grew up; he just changed the venues.

Being raised by a narcissistic mother often results in a lifetime of mistreatment and shame for things you never did. Toxic shame arises from being told that you are not enough, leading to feelings of worthlessness and unlovability. Children of narcissists learn that love can feel like abuse. The narcissist teaches them that if someone displeases you, it is acceptable to harm them and label it as love. Recognizing that we are not responsible for our childhood deprivations and are entitled to feel anger has helped us begin to put it in the rearview mirror instead of being controlled by Ellen.

We maintained the relationship with Ellen, and she gave very little in return.  She told us that we were the most important thing to her.  She acted like we were the most important thing to her in front of others. A few years ago, she decided to show affection by putting her hand on our back while we watched TV, and we still flinched 50 years later. She jerked her hand away. On some level, we always knew that we would be the easiest to give up out of all her other relationships if her way of living was on the line. Her husbands, after my dad, were horrible. We made a lot of excuses for her.  Her dad was a collaborated asshole; she married my dad to escape her father, then she turned around and married him over and over again.

One of the challenges faced by adult children of narcissistic mothers is the widespread myth that every mother is giving, nurturing, and gracious. This notion is false and remains a taboo topic globally. Many adult children are scolded by society with phrases like, “But it’s your MOTHER!” Even though we have spent a lifetime suffering from chronic mental abuse, rejection, criticism, and scapegoating at the hands of our mother, most people do not believe us and do not understand our experience. To survive our childhood, we suppressed our traumatic experiences.  However, recovery begins by acknowledging them.

If, from a young age, you are constantly told that you are no good, not smart, incapable, lacking a personal opinion, unable to choose the right friends, or not dressing appropriately, you begin to internalize those messages. Unloving narcissistic mothers cannot recognize their behavior as abusive and avoid confronting this reality; instead, they deny it to themselves, their families, and the broader world to evade guilt, avoid making changes in their lives, or shield themselves from the painful awareness that they are unloved.  When we were with Ellen, we felt like trophies—objects to be displayed in front of her friends. When we were out of the public eye, we felt ignored and forgotten, like an item left on a shelf.

Our original sin is blindsiding her with harsh criticism using harsher words. That is the only sin we have ever committed against her. It turns out Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden for telling God she was a fucking cunt. She could not put down a bed of coals for the lie she would have to tell people why it’s us and not her.  We have been poisoned, and it can not look like she has brought this on herself. 

Yj had been telling us how horrible Mike was and that he scared her.  We gave her the same excuses for him and Ellen as we gave ourselves.  Top of the list was, “Well, at least he doesn’t beat her like Dennis did.”  A very low bar of expectations. We put up with Mike for as long as we did Dennis, but he came along after Dennis, when we were in our very early twenties; we were adults. After Dennis died, Ellen got a large sum of money that she tossed into Cancun and Corona, where she met Mike. Mike is not worth another sentence on anyone’s page; he is just a necessary tool of reference now. He’s dead, and my mother is wealthy and happy about it.

She resented Shaye throughout his childhood because Mike was kind and thoughtful to him, and treated her with contempt on the best days. She would comment that Mike paid for Shaye's braces out of pocket, and she had to beg and be denied a dishwasher and a fake fireplace for two decades.  Every Christmas, she would complain that he had spent so much money on Shaye and had only gotten her flowers. Shaye is the only person Mike has ever given a gift to, and he lavished him with them. Ellen's love language is gift giving, so this was another point of boiling resentment. When Shaye had legal issues, Ellen distanced herself from Shaye because he did not reflect well. She didn’t have a use for Shaye until after Mike died, and Shaye stayed around and helped her run Mike’s business.  Compared to Kelsey, he has gotten the short end of the stick for her petty jealousies. 

We had been lying to Yj since we moved back to Washington.  When we planned a visit to see Ellen, we planned for it to fall on a date when Yj could not get off work.  That way, she didn’t have to feel bad about not going to support us, but, more importantly, it kept her away from Ellen.  Except for my grandma, Ellen has never been kind to anyone we’ve ever been close to. She created wedges in all of our relationships.  She talks so horribly about Teri; now Teri is all of us that she has left.  Teri has managed to stay on her good side because she is thoughtful. Remembers holidays and remembers to give her presents. 

We recalled watching August Osage County with Meryl Streep.  There’s a lot to unpack with that. Still, the punchline is that the narcissistic mother played by Streep drives both of her daughters away, and she ends up dying of cancer alone with the Native American housekeeper whom she looked down her nose at the entire time she worked for her. Teri is the abused helper, and Ellen needs to look like she has maintained some ties with us.  She keeps Quinn around, knowing he would give her anything in the world, and she tosses him chump change to appease her guilt. We have intentionally not poisoned the well with either of them because it would break their hearts. 

Yj has a kind heart and is no competition for our mothers' divisive cruelty. Mike was just a filthy, old, fall-down, pissing-in-the-closet drunk who was a crass asshole on his very best days. He would slam doors and belittle her in front of other people. Right before he went into hospice, he pushed her in front of him, and she almost fell down the stairs by her front door and cowered. Ellen had great disdain for him, but could never live on a retail employee's wage; she would bemoan that she couldn’t afford the healthcare insurance that Mike depended on. 

After Mike died and we had successfully skipped his funeral, we took Yj with us to my mom’s house again.  This time, we all had a wonderful time.  It was fun and friendly. She was alive again. She was happy as a pig in shit. She let all of her husbands treat us like shit and dared to let her husband scare my wife. There was not a single time that we allowed any of our people to treat her with disrespect, let alone intimidation and terror. We were pissed. 

She wasted years with us. She has always had a reason she could not be bothered to visit us. She never had the time or the money. In 18 years, she came to see us three times, one time so that we could be tour guides for her and Karen to Southern Utah. They paid for half of their trip and bitched about the shitty accommodations and the shitty company they were forced to keep. 

Dan and I lived in a remodel of a weird house. Our bedroom was originally the garage, and Dan’s bedroom was the shop.  Only one room was proper, and the rest were 1970s add-ons.  Dan's bedroom had four walls made from cinderblock and had only one open window. We never had the money for an air conditioner up there, so Dan stayed downstairs and slept with us. We lived there because the rent was $650 a month, but more importantly, it was a place where we could raise our kids safely, away from Ellen’s constant micro criticisms.

Before Ellen and Karen got there, we saved up and bought a $175 air conditioner. Karen also made us check the air conditioning in the van before she allowed herself to be driven around by us. We paid for the coolant refill. The one time Karen and Ellen stayed with us, they bought us a carpet cleaner, not an air conditioner or a new bed for Dan. We deserved to be clean but not comfortable, and we’d better take care of ourselves.

We are left sitting here with all of the consequences of Ellen’s bullshit choices, and she's back drinking Coronas in Cancun, but this time, we told her we were pissed, and we waited until we were very, very drunk to let her know how badly she had hurt our feelings.  If you ask people what we did to her that was unforgivable, it was publicly criticizing her while calling her a horrid name and openly wishing for her to die soon. It was mean and it was intended to be mean.  Mean is Ellen's love language before gifts.

She will boast to you that she kept us in line and respectful because the one time we ever stood up for ourselves and called her a bitch, she chased us into our bedroom and gave us a black eye. She adds the part where she is so fast on her feet that she traps us in our room before we know she’s there. We called her names and said she was a bad mommy, and she has never spoken to us again.  

We wrote something personal about what we endured with Ellen on our social media. Our family friend publicly responded with something close to, “She’s your mom, and you called her a name, and that's unforgivable,” so we are not guessing at what she has told anyone, nor that they believe her. 

“Harlow observed that when his baby monkeys grew up, many things were wrong with them. Instead of the normal range of responses, they swung between clinging attachment and destructive aggression, often tearing at their body or shredding bits of cloth or paper. Even as adults, they had to adhere to soft, furry things, and did not seem to know the difference between living and inanimate objects.”― Tom Butler-Bowdon

Harry Harlow studied maternal separation, dependency needs, and social isolation in experiments on rhesus monkeys. Harry Harlow's experiments included creating inanimate wire and wood surrogate "mothers" for the rhesus infants. Harlow investigated whether infants had a preference for bare-wire mothers or cloth-covered mothers. Even when the wire mother held a bottle with food and the cloth mother held nothing, the baby monkeys overwhelmingly chose the cloth mother, with or without food, only visiting the wire mother who had food when needing sustenance.

When Ellen feels like she is being held accountable for Denise’s homelessness and squalor, her favorite thing to say is, “I may have been a shitty mother, but I was always there.” We're not sure if she has said it so often, she believes it, or it's some weird euphoric recall, or deflecting that she is indeed a shitty mom.  As far back as we can remember, we have felt like an inconvenience—the constant reminders of all the sacrifices she made because she had us. She played this game with us anytime we cost her anything, including her time, telling us our part of the bills and how we couldn’t pay for ourselves. The actual cost was that we believed we had no value; we were a weight around her ankle, and she never wanted us.

She would say that she was on birth control and still got pregnant with our sister and us.  I’m not sure why that was so important to her.  It seems like it’s in line with her putting us in school with Dennis’s last name so that people wouldn’t know she was divorced. Whenever the fight got bad enough for her to grab my sister and us and leave for a friend's house, she would talk about leaving him, and we would get our hopes up.  After a few glasses of wine, the whine came.  She couldn’t afford to raise the two of us alone.  She would tell them that Denise would be fine with Dennis, but she would have to take us.  Part two with snot and tears, she would say, “I don’t want to be a twice-divorced woman.” She kept us living in terror because she was too vain to leave. 

She worked two jobs after she and James parted ways to support us, but she was only home between the jobs, and she closed at the bar where she was working at night.  When she was at work, there was no one at home. When she was home, she said she was tired and gave us a time when we were allowed to bother her.  We’d get up in the morning and watch PBS Kids shows. Ellen would always put a bowl of cereal on the counter and a glass of milk where we could reach them. After Sesame Street but before Mr. Rogers, we were supposed to wake her up. There were mornings when we took the blue blanket from our bed, wrapped it around the pillows on the couch, and pretended someone was holding us. We were a very dependable alarm clock.

“You didn't ask to be born, you didn't make the world as it is, you didn't make yourself as you are. Why torment yourself? Why not take life just as it comes? You have the right to; you are not one of the guilty ones. When you aren't rich or strong or powerful, you are not a guilty one. And you have the right to take life just as it comes and to be as happy as you can be.”― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

We would never fit into Ellen’s desired mold, a little version of her. She needed us as a complementary accessory, like a Coach purse or a Gucci belt.  We were never that and never would be. After years of feeling inadequate, we've learned to accept that it’s not our fault for not meeting her expectations. It’s her fault for having such specific expectations for us. She doesn't even know the real us. After a lifetime of walking on eggshells, ensuring never to rock the boat, we've learned to hide our true selves. 

Denise was the only person we shared being multiple with.  She shared it with a trusted friend who mentioned it to Ellen. We attacked Denise's friend for outing us as being dissociative to Ellen. We knew she was aware of the movie Sybil. She was never going to read about it, and all she would see is that the only road here is via severe and prolonged childhood trauma and how that was all about her.  We didn't want her to feel guilty for letting Dennis beat us and our grandfather to molest us. She was Dennis’s victim, and there was never room for anyone else but Ellen. 

When we developed our minds, started making our own choices, and no longer fit her dream of being her “little girl,” our relationship turned invisible.  The stories that make us sound clumsy or foolish revolve around what she could not change and what she believed made her look bad.  We knew we were boys. It wasn’t something we learned about ourselves in high school; it was very deep-rooted. We knew we were boys before we knew what made a boy different from a girl.  It had nothing to do with anything physical.  It had to do with toys and friends.  We preferred to hang out with boys.  We had girlfriends, but they had things like Barbie Dream houses and Easy Bake Ovens.  These things just weren't fun. 

Our all-time worst Santa gift was a ‘Baby Alive’ doll. It was the same year my sister was born; somehow, this was supposed to smooth it over.  This did not do that.  You gave it a bottle and some weird-looking slimy food in a tiny spoon.  You pushed a button, and the thing would make this sucking motion.  You couldn’t leave the slime inside the doll, so it needed a water bottle after the food. Then you needed to squeeze, and the thing would defecate the same green slime you put into it.  We don’t know what the fuck they were thinking when they thought that somehow a sucking, shitting doll was going to fix anything. I already had a sucking and shitting little girl living in my bedroom with me.

We didn’t mind Denise from a distance, but had grown tired of her constantly needing to be fed and changed, especially in the middle of the night when Dennis and Ellen were sleeping.  The first night, she sat in her crib crying loud enough that dogs were barking down the street, but no one came.  We put our head under the pillow, trying to drown it out, but then we thought a skunk was in our backyard. The smell was horrible; it made our eyes water. We lived in Southern California in the middle of the city, and we had never smelled a skunk, but it made more sense than the baby sitting in her nasty pants. Changing a diaper in the 70s required much more dexterity, or you could impale the child's groin with a pin. We were four, and we impaled the baby with a pin many times.  We sincerely wondered why they called it a "safety pin.” 

We got home from school, and Ellen had taped a note to the door telling us not to come in.  The first time we were 14 and Denise was 10. We had to go to the social worker at Carondolet ourselves with our sister, and put ourselves both into foster care.  Showing up like that, they did find a place for us to stay.  There were three sets of triple bunk beds in the two rooms, one for girls and one for boys.  They also had seven biological kids.  It wasn’t that bad. The parents were good people, and there was always chaos. This was also good because we had never seen nice parents.  It felt safe, and we preferred foster care to home. Another time, we were put in the house with one of our classmates.  We did like her, we just ran in different circles. The humiliation of not being wanted was harsh, but our classmate didn't say anything to anyone about it.  

We would cry ourselves to sleep for a week because Ellen made us come back. Dennis somehow always charmed the social workers; a couple of times, he convinced them we were the problem and forced his hand. We’re sure she would only demand that we be returned because people would start asking where we were, and telling people that we are living across town with another family would severely tarnish her image as the self-awarded “Mother of the Year."  

We don’t understand why she chose to have children. Today, she still talks about how hard it was to get by, the struggles she faced raising a kid in poverty, and all the “luxuries” she had to do without. We want to tell her this: We never asked to be born. She doesn’t know how taxing it is to feel like you’re to blame, even when you never had a choice.

We used to apologize for disappointing her whenever we misbehaved. One step down from hitting was the “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed, it will take a while to earn my trust back.”  We let guilt creep in, wondering if we were the ones in the wrong. Now we know that this is part of her narcissistic personality—being a master manipulator.  We don’t recall when she apologized to us for anything. The words “I’m sorry” don’t exist in her vocabulary unless she says, “I’m sorry, but you made me do it.” Whenever she realizes she is losing an argument, things get terrible. In the best-case scenario, she backs away from the argument without admitting defeat. The worst-case scenario always involves a threat.  

When we were small, the threat was, "Wait until Dennis gets home.” We were in hell waiting for him to get home.  If we fucked up two seconds after waking up, we would be terrified all day long of what he was going to do with us when he did get home.  If he didn’t get home right after work, it just added more and more anxiety; he would rip us out of bed and start the interrogation of why we licked the spoon during breakfast.  It lasted for hours. We learned quickly to say that we did it, got our ass whooped with whatever he decided to use, but then we got to go back to bed. What was worse was that sometimes she wouldn’t tell him, so we never knew what would happen to us.  

If things aren’t going her way, she lashes out. She can never take responsibility for her mistakes. It’s always someone else’s fault. We can’t have any relationship with Ellen now because of her constant need to play the victim whenever she gets hurt or held accountable for her choices. She intentionally splits people to limit how many people know something.  

For the longest time, we thought this was normal. We would go to friends and be in shock and awe when they argued with their parents, and they didn’t get a backhanded slap and a bloody lip. That always seemed foreign to me. Surely, those couldn’t be regular occurrences? Where were the arguments? The guilt trips? The silent treatments? The anxiety and the beatings? How could any child want to spend time with their parents? I slowly began to realize that our situation was not the norm. It’s not normal to have so much turmoil and verbal abuse and still consider it a healthy relationship.

Ellen has always cared more about what others think about her than she has cared about our thoughts or feelings. We can no longer have any contact with her. It’s because of her judgmental personality and ability to hold grudges for a lifetime. No matter what we have going on in our lives, somehow she manages to make every conversation about herself. We needed help providing hospice care for our best friend and Ellen had two take aways, first she said it was the most compassionate thing she had ever seen and didn’t know if she could do that for Bonnie and she had made a lasting impact on Teresa’s life because on her deathbed she remembered the body wash she grabbed out of her closet and gave her as a Christmas gift and thanked her for it again. 

She has a very specific M.O., and her motive is to protect her vanity and justify her greediness. She would have first distanced herself as far away as possible.  That would mean it was going to be Yj’s fault.  She will tell a dramatic story and make fun of her so that people will laugh with Ellen and at YJ.  She gets to be on stage for this part; she loves it. She will tell the story of Yj cutting herself when she was trying to help cook dinner, or when we burned her eyes with expired eye drops, and how both times Yj cried out in pain.  She grabs her eye and over exaggerates the “Boo Hoo My Eye!” This is to deflect the drama that is happening to YJ. She uses Yj's pain against her to gain a platform to stage herself as the victim.

Next comes a series of loose connections. We need to be brought into focus while still not bringing the focus close to her. Yet. Now, Yj is the problem, and that is why we pulled away.  She will be called jealous and will need all of our attention. Followed by the hook, she bought a pair of unicorn slippers for Yj’s unsophisticated, ungrateful ass. She has cued up for the finale.  It is essential for this to be our fault and have absolutely nothing to do with her.  She will claim that she needs to set a healthy boundary, that she can’t possibly allow herself to be disrespected this way and still have any respect for herself. She will tell them she is too old and feeble to live any more of her days with regrets and plans to slide into home base yelling, “YOLO.” She pulls off both martyr and pariah in one cover-up. 

Ellen and her Sister Karen call each other every day and shit talk every single person in their lives, even people they consider to be good friends. This allows them to absolve themselves from any public problems they’ve made or will make for themselves, and it keeps things insular, rather than tarnishing their image.  They are very mean, and if people knew that, they would stay away from the knife that was going to be stabbed in their back by the end of the day.  

Karen was unapologetically horrible to YJ over politics.  YJ had posted a liberal political post on her own social media account.  Yj and I flew to Arizona to spend our birthday with Ellen.  As soon as we landed and started unpacking, Karen entered the room we were staying in and entered Yj’s space, asking me if she “was a Republican or her Dear Auntie.” She said, “Dear Auntie.” We’re unsure how much more “Mommy Dearest” this could be. She went on and on, ranting about publicly posting a different opinion. We froze and went right into a trauma bond response and started apologizing to her for abusing us, but Yj’s autonomic response was to flee.  She grabbed all of the bags and ran out the front door.

Yj had never been there. She had all the suitcases, no jacket on, and her phone had died. It took their cousin and me two hours to find Yj sitting on a curb in a public park with a 900-year-old security guard. When we got back, Karen had packed her crap up, called her friends to come pick her up, and left so that she wouldn’t have to face any of the consequences of her horrid behavior. She was safe and warm.  She would have never done that to her daughter. Had Ellen done that to Kylie, Karen would have slapped her across the face and never spoken to her again, but Ellen just sat there like a turnip and did nothing. We didn't let that end our relationship with Karen and Ellen, but it did end all of our respect for both of them. Later, confronting Karen with being a bitch poured gas on her thin skin, and we became tinder for her to gaslight Ellen with.

Ellen and Karen did not even have a relationship with each other until they were the only two females left alive in their family.  Karen and Verna held a lifelong grudge over a stolen boyfriend during their adolescence. They never spoke again, and Verna was old when she died. Verna had made Ellen her ally in the Shenfield Sister Cold War against Karen and Janice. My first notions of Ellen being an addict were from overhearing Janice and Karen bad-mouthing Ellen behind her back.  

Ellen did not hold back, either. She would tell people she was just as pretty as Karen but skinnier. She discussed going to Walmart and who could squeeze into the most petite pants. She would laugh with Denise and tell her friends what anatomy was visible under the pants. Karen had no use for Ellen until Ellen could give her proper homage, which also required Ellen to have money. Ante, put on your armour to play in the Karen and Ellen games.

We remember learning what an “Alcoholic” was by the time we moved to California. They also said she was involved with heroin, but that does not ring true.  Ellen has had many opportunities to become addicted to other substances, and we have never seen her abuse any other drug. Last we heard, she still had not missed a single evening of imbibing, so she’s at least on a 56-year daily streak. Ellen’s refusal to acknowledge that alcoholism is an addiction, the same as Denise's, is the way she can distance herself from Denise’s only true crimes of criticism,  defiance, and substance abuse. She was able to be a slobbering drunk because she said she had a job, and she only drank at night, so it didn’t count.  You have to be day drunk to be considered a real drunk. She tells people she is a "functional alcoholic.” Denise could not let this irony go and would rub it in repeatedly. Ellen struggled with damage control, and Denise pointed out Ellen's blatant hypocrisy at every opportunity. 

When we finally launched the bomb by pushing Ellen's buttons, which we had taken note of for over half a century, we included Ellen’s sister in our angry texts because she is just as narcissistic as Ellen and supports her in continuing to be mean. This caused them to circle their wagons to save face, even with each other. As they started to poison the well with our close family and even close family friends, we began to include those people in a giant group of texts, so at the very least, they would get my side firsthand.  Now we kicked the hornet's nest with the two of them because there was no way to manipulate people with inflammatory lies about what we were texting them; everyone knew what we had to say.  This went over like a turd in a punchbowl, and no one has spoken to us since then. 

“See, I think there are roads that lead us to each other. But in my family, there were no roads - just underground tunnels. I think we all got lost in those underground tunnels. No, not lost. We just lived there.” - Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster

We are the oldest of five children. One of our brothers is an asshat, but we have seen him less than a dozen times. We spent some serious quality time with his mother and even more with his father, and if my cousin called and told us that he was just arrested  for being a serial killer, we’d be like, “Valid.” James has two more boys.  It’s circumstances that have kept us from having a relationship, not hard feelings or traumatic bonds.  They are 14 and 16 years younger than us, and we only saw them for a few summers. Our only hard feelings about them are that Linda is very kind, and they have had her as a mom all their lives.  Linda never left those boys alone with Ben. She made our father a better man; by the third set of pancakes, he had learned and did better by them. We have tried having a better relationship with James, but it’s ‘Cats in the Cradle’ now. 

Denise is far more complicated.  It's only been in the last couple of weeks that we've realized how difficult it is.  We grew up in the same house. Twins remember things differently about the past; we’ve understood that for a long time.  Our house was split into Team Ellen and Team Dennis. Ellen would boast to her friends about how overprotective she was of us.  We believed that.  She would tell people we were her favorite and Denise was Dennis’s. She said it loudly and publicly enough that we remember where we were sitting when we first heard her.  This did ingratiate her with us.  Looking back, that had to be horrible for my sister to overhear.  

As an adult, Denise would cry out that she had been abused, and from our perspective, she had a cake walk. She was Dennis’s daughter, and he was fond of her.  He did not come after her the same way he did us. She would give him lip and live to see another day.  I wasn’t exactly sure what she was crying about; she had it easy and had us to protect her. She wasn’t alone.  This is where things go quite sour.  It had never occurred to us that the person that Denise was terrified of was our mom. To some extent, Ellen was innocuous for us. We could charm our way out of trouble with her once we were taller than her; she just doubled down on the disappointment, but Denise could do no right with her.  

Denise had guts from the get-go.  She was a monster, no lying about that. She was willing to give Ellen the bird whenever she felt like it, and Dennis's threats were useless with her.  The first time Ellen threatened danger to Denise by using Dennis was when Denise was three.  She had pissed off Ellen one time too many that day; the last straw was her getting into the flour after Ellen had mopped the floor. Dennis got home, and they sat her at the kitchen table, which she could barely see over, and he told her to apologize to Ellen. Denise refused, and with every demand, she just dug deeper.  It was a solid hour or more, and she still hadn’t looked at Ellen and said she was sorry. Dennis caved in, and it was Denise for the win. 

We’re pretty sure it was that long ago that we perceived Denise was better off; it wasn’t just that Dennis let things slide, it was also that she seemed stronger than we were emotionally. Ellen also made sure to use this to divide us.  She would say that we were too afraid of the dark and too dumb to come in from the rain, and we needed her protection, but Denise was street smart and didn’t need anyone's help. This not only made it okay for her not to protect Denise, but it made us look like we were too weak and stupid ever to be able to take care of ourselves. 

In every other way, Denise was a hot mess, but she did not have qualms about standing up for herself or us.  We were at a gay club in the way back, and she had come with us. We both went out to smoke, and a car of fools drove by with their homo comments.  We had long since gotten used to it, but she took out the car window with a bottle of beer.  We just giggled while remembering the look on the dude’s face when Bud Light became his backseat passenger. 

We were responsible for everything emotional with Ellen, including fostering her relationship with Denise. They are both aggressive in different ways. Ellen would play the two of us, and her alcoholism made her a very poor historian. We are the family’s fixer. We would end up in a dog fight, trying to get everyone to be friendly.  Being nice is not difficult; most of the time, being nice is just complying with social contracts and holding a door open. They could not be nice.  I preferred Denise not being nice, though.  No guessing, you knew if she was pissed at you, and she made sure to let you know what you did—no game, just balls, admirable. 

We had moved to Utah just before Denise and her husband, Jeff, split up, and just before cell phone data was unlimited.  Long-distance phone calls were still expensive even with a cell phone.  Denise was financially dependent on Jeff, so she became vulnerable quickly.  This is when we quit being able to triangulate the information between the two, and Ellen had money for phone calls.  The misinformation turned very toxic at this point.  Ellen kept Denise around because she was afraid of losing contact with Denise's two kids. Once Ellen had manipulated those children from my sister’s life, she no longer needed her and threw her quite literally in the trash.  

We heard all about her abandoning her son after she lost her daughter.  She was also homeless without anyone’s help.  That information was accurate, and we hit up our ex to help her since we were not in a position to help much. We weren’t doing any better and had little else to offer, but she had a roof and food.  Soon, the information leaked that Denise helped my son hide drugs right before the police got there.  She had finally crossed our line.  The part of the story my ex and Ellen left out was that it was my ex who was the one bringing cocaine into the house, and Denise was hiding it for her. This is new information from last week.  

We were told she was walking the streets of Kennewick near a cemetery, talking loudly to herself. Ellen also said she was checking on her and bringing her fresh clothes, food, and cigarettes. She has told people that Denise lives in one of her dealer's bedrooms. It was harsh and painful to find out that this was a lie. Denise has been squatting in a house where a man still lives upstairs. She waits for him to leave during the day and sneaks in through a basement window so she can sleep in a closet.  She has to walk around all night while he is at home.  She doesn’t have a place to pee legally, so she wets herself and sleeps in it.  The man is a murdering type of fellow, which further complicates matters.

Ellen lives in a four-bedroom house with a shed like a small motel on a multimillion-dollar property. She buys cat food from Costco for feral cats, feeds them twice daily, and even names them. She makes sure she overreacts about the cats when she has an audience, so they have a part to play on the Ellen Show. People would throw her off a cliff if she left her cats hungry, sitting in filth, sleeping at the bottom of the cage during the day. Ellen even knows where Denise is.

“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.” - Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Denise is so much more than what she will go down in history for. Her story deserves to be told, and we hope more will be written about it. It has been several years.  Denise's birthday came and went. We have always posted Happy Birthday on her social media account and looked at it to see when the last time we heard from her was.  We re-read many of the things she posted, openly telling everyone about her heartbreak over losing her kids and family. Her heartbreak at losing us sank in hard. If she is alive, she has told people that she thinks that we are dead. From our newfound perspective,

In kid years, four years might as well be forty regarding shared interests.  Denise and I are fundamentally different creatures, and we were placed in the same cage at the zoo because our proper habitats were still under construction. We worked hard to sew our cloak of invisibility.  Two things are required for the cloak to work correctly: first, you need to hold still, and second, you need to keep your damn mouth shut. Denise can do neither of those things. We just saw something on the internet a couple of days ago that says, “If I am ever murdered, take comfort in knowing that I ran my mouth right up to the bitter end.” That’s Denise. 

Denise is fearless. This is usually an excellent quality, but you do need to have the ability to pump the brakes on that a little bit, or it’s just a death wish.  Denise did not just let her mouth overload her ass into her problems; she let her mouth be our problem, too. The police would tell Denise she had the right to remain silent, but she could not do that. We feel confident she has never had a legal driver's license, so we were Uber before Uber for Denise.  We were getting pulled over for something we already knew we had messed up on right after it happened. She got even more squirrelly than her usual police jumpy. Her boyfriend exited the vehicle voluntarily to talk to the WHP, and we could see him pulling out his best suave for the officer in the rearview window. 

Then Denise does her thing when she needs us to understand something that she doesn’t have time to explain, but we'd better get the fuck on board and roll with it right that second.  She stares at us hard, talks through her clenched teeth, and tells us to do something. She isn’t being scary, just very intense.  We have long ago learned to trust her when she does this, even knowing we’ll probably smack her down for it later. Denise's frustration is knowing that we don’t lie well, and it will take us a second to put our’ innocent face’ on. 

This time, she told me that Dave’s name is Ryan Youngblood and that he lives in Yakima, not our back bedroom. There’s no real time to learn why we are about to lie to a law enforcement agent.  When the knock came, she doubled down on the hard eye. Dave had the officer smiling by the time he knocked, and he said to watch what we were doing next time. We thanked him for the warning, then we hollered out the window. “Dave, get back in the car, we're going to be late!” Now it is a triple down on the hard eye, and we whispered smoothly, “I mean Ryan.” A hard eye turned into an eye roll.  You’d think this story was about Denise and Dave being on the lam and dodging the FBI.  No, she and Dave had outstanding warrants for not paying driving violation fines.  

Our father is 6’2” and her father is 5’2”.  We have always been huge next to her, which only worked to our advantage in hand-to-hand combat.  We were big, but she was scrappy, so stopping her also required us to be able to catch her, and she had the clear advantage.  She hit our last nerve that day when we were chasing her around the coffee table, and we couldn't catch her. We attempted to stun her a little by throwing a green apple at her head. The apple missed her but went through the sliding glass door. She even looked like, “Oh shit!” this time. She and I tell the story this way to other people. The part we leave out is that Ellen always left us alone, and we’d get mad at each other instead of her. That part of the story was just for the two of us.

We were a little bit ahead in our readings at school. The solution to us not bothering everyone else around us because our work was done was to send us to the kindergarten to read to them.  This seemed like a great honor and privilege until I remembered that Denise was in Kindergarten. She could not sit down and let us read a book at home, so why do they think we would have the power to help her read at school?  She did not behave any better there. 

There was something else at school, though. When we lost her in class, and they sent us after her, she usually played alone outside; she wasn't the whirlwind of destruction when she could be. We would yell at her to return, and she would keep playing. She would get startled when we touched her.  She didn’t know we were behind her; she couldn’t hear us, so we had scared her. They finally listened to us after she still wasn’t improving in school, even after being held back.  We told her teacher when Ellen wouldn't listen, and they found out she could not hear. She could hear after the surgery, but the damage had been done. 

We wonder about all those times Ellen whooped Denise for “not listening.” Way back, when she was three and unable to see over the dining table when Dennis and Ellen were demanding an apology, we wonder now whether or not she could even hear what they were asking her, let alone say what they wanted to hear. Toddlers have few regrets about anything they do; the request was unreasonable.  We can’t tell you how often Ellen spanked her for not complying with her demands. Once, Ellen spanked Denise for splashing water from the bathtub onto the floor. She hit her wet butt with a breadboard because she did not listen to her. It broke so many blood vessels that her skin looked like cake confetti.

The thread holding the fabric together on the invisibility cloak is that you must be as self-sufficient as possible. Do not bring any attention to yourself. Besides being able to keep our thoughts to ourselves, we had an advantage; we did well in school, and Ellen only had to be involved in our lives for parent-teacher conferences and dinner once we could walk to the bus stop alone.  

Denise didn’t just have hearing issues; had they known then, she had ADHD and probably a myriad of learning disabilities that were just compounded by having Fetal Alcohol Effect from Ellen drinking when she was pregnant. Even Ellen commented that Denise and Droopy's eyes looked like those of a popular doll that was out at the time.  Denise did have bilateral ptosis that she outgrew. 

Ellen had to attend school at least twice a month, often a few times a week.  At one point, she had to pick Denise up herself instead of us just walking her home. That way, the school knew she knew how Denise was progressing. Denise took up too much of Ellen's time by needing help. Denise's learning disabilities were very inconvenient for Ellen, which just added to Ellen's resentment of her. 

Even as an adult, Denise struggled with news articles and magazines. She struggled to solve Wheel of Fortune puzzles, even with all the letters turned over. We were watching Vanna White, and then she asked us what a ‘doog’ out was. We glanced at the TV and said: It’s ‘dug’out, not ‘doog’out. This is where Denise was the best: she laughed her fucking ass off at herself. She could do this, so when she laughed, we knew she was laughing with us, not at us.  Ellen will never have that gift.  Her laughing at herself is some odd version of a humble brag. Giggle: “I’m so absent-minded that I left my new marquis diamond ring by the cash register at work.”

Denise was also the Coach Purse and Gucci Belt Ellen wanted us to be.  Denise was small, agile, blonde, pretty, and funny, all of the things that Ellen wanted to be but had to either work at or fake.  Denise outshone Ellen in many ways, and the insult was that Dennis was more invested in his daughter than he was in Ellen.  Now, Ellen's resentment was not only deep, but it was festering.  Denise stole the shine in Dennis’s eye in a way that Ellen would never have. When Ellen would go after Denise, we thought that was normal.  She was Dennis’s favorite, so he did not hit her; he hit us.  We were my mom’s favorite, so she went after Denise, not us.  It was fair.  

Shortly after Ellen and Mike got married, Denise ended up sick in the hospital, and Mike picked her up from the hospital.  She had some menstrual issues, and he brought her home and helped her get cleaned up.  This is remarkable because Mike told this story repeatedly, and as a way to say he tried to establish a relationship with Denise. The real problem was that he had established a relationship with Denise, and Ellen would have none of that.  She had ended things with Dennis, but Mike's affection towards Denise sent her into a full-blown alienation campaign.  

Dennis died when Denise was 19. She had just had our niece a few months before.  She cried for a very long time and on many occasions.  Again, we were like, you can’t seriously miss the cruel, ugly bastard, so we dismissed her tears about him. When he died, Denise was left without any parents to help her. She had done so poorly in school that she had given up, which spilled over into her job opportunities, directly impairing her ability to support herself. 

Denise tried to work a few times, but Ellen was a bitch about helping her with that.  She was trying to go into healthcare and was doing pretty well, but she needed a front from her first check for the shoes that were part of the dress code. Ellen publicly and loudly lamented over having to help her with a side dish of making a point to tell people that she did buy Denise shoes, with double emphasis that she didn’t even make her pay her back.  Ellen makes sure that you know when she’s been put out by you. It is successfully humiliating. It feels like shit to feel like you are worth less than a pair of shoes. Denise and we only asked for help from her when there were no other options. 

Between being able to keep the peace, pay our bills, and knowing how to charm our way out of being punished harshly, we appeared to be her Golden Child. It was because we learned how not to rock her boat. She hadn’t had much use for us socially, except for punchlines and to bring home our friends, so she had someone to hang out with in the evenings.  She eventually had a use for us. She holds us out as proof of her educational success. She put our degree on her wall, literally. Ellen used this against Denise backhandedly.  She would tell her friends, “Look at the one I raised: dutiful, respectful, and successful.  It made Denise’s addiction and legal issues Dennis’s fault, not hers. 

 We were at school when we started getting a lot of misinformation from Ellen about Denise. She and I did not have the money to talk to each other, and we could not ask Denise what happened. This is also when my sister turned the corner into addiction. She had been accused and punished for sneaking out at night when she had not, so why not just do it? Denise had only been smoking pot, a normal teen misbehavioral offense. Ellen says that Denise was being defiant to spite her. It never occurred to Ellen that drugs were the only way for Denise to drown out the voice in her head that was always telling her she was never good enough.

Denise’s addiction has always hung around her head. It’s Ellen’s only excuse for why Denise has been forever shunned. Denise's consolation prize is that Ellen gives her an out for being mentally ill; addiction caused that, too. She says she wasn’t like that before she became involved with illegal substances. Denise only smoked cigarettes while she was with both Kelsey and Shaye. She smoked like a fiend, but only smoked; we didn’t even see her drink then. Those were probably the most extended periods she had been clean; it was 11 years. 

Ellen brings up our sister's addiction to cover any potential allegations that Denise's troubles could have been her fault. She demonizes Denise, using her drug use as an excuse to her friends and family for why she has turned her back on her child. This is preferable to admitting to her being so horrible to Denise that she had to escape the pain by self-medicating. Denise has been too bad off for the last ten years to acquire drugs; she can’t buy cigarettes, so she smokes butts from the ashtrays in front of a 7-11. 

Denise cannot get to Ellen’s house due to transportation issues, so there is no way she is the violent threat that Ellen claims. She tells people that Denise makes her fear for not only her own safety and well-being, but now she also has the grandkids and a great-grandson to think about. We don’t know whether to laugh or cry at her finally grasping the concept of protecting a child and what that should look like. It’s mostly still crying, but the laughter will come.

We have a brood of beautiful, exceptional children, but they do not reflect as well on her as Denise's two children. We still don’t have shiny polish, nor do our kids, but more importantly, they will never be hers genetically. Therefore, she has nothing to gain by investing in my family except when she wants to count how many pairs of Christmas Pajamas she needed to buy that year and how much they cost with and without the slippers. 

Ellen had a big Christmas Eve shindig every year. She would then bring up Christmas gifts she got for the kids and how she spent an equal amount of money on each.  She would tell her friends that no matter how they were related, she treated them all equally.  She would count off our kids, then both of Denise's ex’s kids on her fingers, holding her hand high in the air, then say, “And I only have two,” and then individually subtract each kid until she got to two fingers. She said it in a way that made her look magnanimous. Denise knew that was bullshit, too.

It was super funny the year she was flaunting $100 bills by saying she needed to hurry up and put them in cards. At some point, the cards ended up in the garbage.  She had been unapologetically pushy all night about keeping up on emptying the trash, including the bathroom cans. Denise and I both decided that losing $900 was an Ellen problem. We revisited that memory of Ellen together often when she was being over the top about money she didn’t earn herself. She is pious about her perceived success. 

Ellen likes to show people around her house and brag about the money she saved because something was on sale.  It’s always an intended slip that ensures people know how much she paid. She let them beat her and treat her like shit because she was too weak to leave them and didn’t have enough of an education ever to get a job that would even cover bills. My dad finished her senior high school classes, so she has a diploma that she didn’t earn. She would never have the things she struts about on her own.  She has gotten four inheritances to accrue wealth without having to earn it herself.  She hasn’t achieved one single point of self-improvement after high school, not even a managerial workshop.

Her house and Mike’s multimillion-dollar property are a trophy for selling her body, her dignity, and our safety. Karen earned her trophy the same way. Kelsey has had an inheritance and, with Ellen's help, lives in a half-million-dollar home, and Shaye is driving a $35,000 truck in a new house in Kennewick. She is allowing Denise to live on the streets.  She can easily pay Denise's rent for the three months it will take for her to get her social security money and health insurance, which would enable Denise to get into a safe and warm home. Denise was already approved for and was getting cash from SSI and Medicaid, but she needed an address and a bank account to get the money. Ellen spends thousands of dollars every month.  She gave away Mike’s boat and let her daughter live like she does.  No human deserves to be treated this way.

It’s sour grapes because we have been given zero, and that's what we have, so we don’t look good.  Karen and Ellen both make it clear in silent judgment. The only time that Ellen and Karen came to visit, their gift to us was a carpet cleaner. If you go to Karen's house, expect a grand tour that ends with her bidet toilet so she can show off being able to clean her asshole by herself when she gets even more feeble. 

The grandkids are in a new car and house, which sparkle for her to show off. We feel confident that everyone in her life knows about Kelsey’s and Shaye's houses and how generous she is. She was born very literally on the bad side of the tracks. She had seven brothers and sisters in a two-bedroom concrete house.  She and Karen would still be there if they had any self-respect. They both stayed with men who publicly cheated on them for the money that would come to them at the end of the day. They were incapable of earning their money on their own. 

She only gives gifts to create an obligation and demands undying gratitude from people. She quit giving Jeff’s daughters any gifts because they didn’t call to thank her for them. She bashes her best friend for not giving her a financially equitable gift.  She pulled out a piece of art that her best friend Bonnie had made for her birthday and turned up her nose, saying what she had done for Bonnie on her birthday and why it was better than the one she received. She also only gives the gifts she thinks you should like.  We ended up with a dozen pieces of dollar store shit that danced in the sun, and we graciously thanked her, then threw them away. She rarely gives cash because she can’t control it; she prefers to give gift cards because she can decide where the money is spent. Taking gifts from her means a lifetime of obligation. 

Kelsey had replaced Denise, and she had become the new accessory for her ensemble. She had moved on to her shiny new "Look, I’m a Grandma.” Point of reference, we had never heard the term MILF or Cougar; she added those titles to the end of the self-awarded “best grandma ever’ trophy.  It was gross then, and hasn’t aged well in this story. If she had done wrong by Denise now, Denise would have had the choice to keep Ellen away from her children.  If Denise knew where this would go, she would have packed up both kids and run far away. Ellen knew this. Denise had power over something that Ellen needed to capture people's eyes. 

When Dennis died, Ellen had not nurtured a healthy relationship with Denise. Denise no longer threatened Ellen’s relationship with Dennis after Dennis died, except that she knew that Denise could keep the grandkids from her if she kept doing wrong by her. She had told us so when Kelsey was very young, and she and Denise got in a pissing match.  We don’t know if Denise would have been better off not having Kelsey and Shaye. Ellen adores those two kids and now Kelsey’s son. Kelsey’s son has become the new marquis diamond in her wardrobe, and she prances him around like a trained seal and gathers his applause as her own.  He is already a ‘look at me’ mini Ellen. Last time we saw him, it occurred to us that this is how confidence turns toxic. 

Denise did not abandon either one of her kids; Ellen physically excised them from Denise and then emotionally hijacked them. Denise was vulnerable after Dennis died. It wasn’t just that she didn’t want to support herself; she had minimal resources. Denise and Kelsey’s father broke up when she was a toddler. Ellen only helped Denise with an apartment because she had Kelsey. This was another giant trap Denise fell into; now, Ellen felt she was entitled to meddle in her daily life.  She was the one paying the rent, and that gave her free access to the baby whenever she wanted. 

We got a call from Ellen at work saying that she had dropped by that morning to drop off diapers and food for Kels, and when she got there, the door was open. She walked in, and the baby had gotten into something that she still couldn’t clean off her hands, and had been eating out of the garbage.  She said she couldn’t wake Denise up and had to take Kelsey home. We called Denise, and she had fallen asleep, and Kelsey had gotten into her mascara and knocked the garbage over. She said she also woke up to Kelsey being gone after dozing off. She was freaking out bad, bad, bad, and called Ellen to ask what she should do.  That's when Ellen told Denise she had Kelsey—we would have let Denise go full-on pit-bull if she took off after Ellen this time.

We were very much up to our armpits in alligators with our own lives and didn’t need another layer of bullshit added by Ellen and Denise. We felt the same about Kelsey as we did about Denise.  She was cute from a distance, but she was not our problem in any way.  My sister and I knew how to keep children out of our lives. People make choices, and people make babies. Denise was a grown-up. We were only obligated uncles and could give the baby Cracker Jacks and Dr. Pepper for breakfast because we forgot groceries. 

Ellen was tapping at my front door in Richland, holding Kelsey's hand.  She said that she needed to go to work.  We told her we were on our way to school, so she would have to figure that out.  We don’t know what she said, but we ended up working full-time, attending school, and having a two-year-old child.  We tried to stay true to the cause, but we weren’t even sure why.  It had gotten too old after a couple of weeks; we hadn’t had access to childcare, and no one was bringing us food and diapers.  She had fooled us once by having to raise Denise, so she would not do that again with another baby.

We had a plan this time. She would march Kelsey around the store, showing her off to people for their admiration. Their gushing over a toddler was the equivalent of them gushing over her. Kelsey was like a little grinder monkey picking up coins of praise for her grandmother's emotional coffers. We took Kelsey to the Clinique counter of Macy’s, where Ellen worked. She had become this new ‘Sexy Grandma’ person there.  

We took Kelsey to the store with all her life-sustaining equipment in a bag and waited.  Ellen went into autopilot. “Look at me loving my grandchild. Isn't she as much of a doll as I am?”  Then, we went in.  We looked at our pager, handed her the baby and the bag, gave a frantic look, and said there was a medical emergency at work and we needed to cover stat! She had to take her.  It was a hook-shot from the top of the key and all net, three points for the win.

The next thing we know is that she can’t take care of Kelsey by herself.  She says that she can’t raise her because she just knew that at her age, she would be way too lenient or harsh, and Kelsey would walk all over her, and she would end up being messed up. Ellen had already shown she couldn’t be trusted to be an adult, let alone a parent or grandparent, so that we couldn’t argue with her.  We were confused, though. She had a mother who wanted and loved her, and she just lived up the road. She even wants to take care of her for free. Give us the car seat, and we’ll drive her home and pick her up a Happy Meal on the way. This is not a complex problem. 

The next thing Ellen said was that she was taking my niece to her father. This, too, seemed to be a valid option under the circumstances. That's probably why God gives animals two parents; having a backup plan is good. Ellen didn’t just take Kelsey to Mark, though. She helped him with his rent and brought food, formula, and diapers because he wasn’t financially stable. Mark was a failed meat processor and part-time pot dealer. She also paid for the attorney to represent Mark in a custody case.  Ellen signed the declaration lying about finding her eating from the garbage, and because she was the maternal grandmother, the decision was based on this. Later, she would tell Kelsey that when she looked at what a wonderful person she turned out to be, she regretted nothing about taking her from Denise. 

If there is nothing else we can ever do for Denise, it will be for Kelsey and Shaye to know that Denise loves them deeply.  Now that Kelsey has a child, she may know how deeply Denise feels. A little while back, Ellen was dabbing the tear she could squeak out, dramatically flapping her hands to keep her mascara dry, and with big, pouty lips said that Kelsey had told her that every year on her birthday, Kelsey wonders why her mother abandoned her. We couldn’t figure out why my sister left her either; she hadn’t. Ellen had poisoned the well with Kelsey so severely that when she saw Denise on the side of the road, she drove past her. They both said it was because Denise was too scary for the baby.  The baby is Denise's only grandchild. 

Our sister fought tooth and nail to spend time with her kids.  She would try to see them both on the holidays and birthdays, and Ellen always found a reason she couldn’t be invited. Denise had always committed some grievous crime at the last event she attended, so she never deserved a second chance. It got to the point where we also had to fight to be able to see Kelsey. Ellen says the Cracker Jack and Dr. Pepper breakfast made Sonya deem me an unfit uncle for us to babysit Kelsey ever again. This reeks of Ellen. It severely limited our ability to help Denise see Kelsey. Ellen may have said she wasn't emotionally available to raise the grandbaby, but we had no resources.  We knew we had no business raising a child. We knew that, and we chose that. It was bullshit that Ellen put us in that situation, too.

Denise slept under Shaye’s bedroom window at night after she and Jeff broke up.  They both have told Shaye that it happened because she was a druggie loser who couldn’t keep a job long enough to get an apartment.  They said to him that because she couldn’t get a place to stay, she was dangerous, so they could not allow him to stay with his mom. Denise had a place to stay then and a car to sleep in.  Denise slept under Shaye's window because she wanted him to know she was still there.  Jeff called Ellen and asked her what to do.  She told him to call the police and have her charged with trespassing. 

Denise didn't leave either of her children by choice. We would go with Denise to sit in her car in the parking lot at Kelsey and Shayes's school so that she could get a glimpse of them. She was afraid to see them because Mark, Jeff, and Ellen would have called the police, and then she wouldn't be able to see them at all. She would go home and sob. 

My sister was at Ellen's mercy. We want to tell the kids about this side of their mom and her story. We are sending them a copy of this book so they get to know their mom a little. They both know that we went from being the Golden Child to a random person non grata overnight, so it is not hard for them to do the same thing to Denise. It might be worse for Kelsey and Shaye to hear about their mother and realize they have been robbed of a mom who dearly loved them.

Denise didn’t lose her mind because of an addiction.  Ellen took Denise’s kids away, made sure Denise was utterly alone, then turned it around and blamed her emotional devastation on her.  Denise didn’t lose her mind; Ellen took her soul. Denise was always Ellen's last thought. We hope that Denise is the last person Ellen thinks about when she dies, too.  It’s an easy way out compared to what she has sentenced our sister to

Every one of our inside boys told her how very hurt and angry he was, and our tweens and teens were the ones who dressed her up and down, which also meant she got several drunk texts from a group of potty-mouthed boys.  Not only did we criticize her, but we made sure to hit every trigger she has, and we have been noting what they are for half a century without ever launching a single missile, and one of those triggers is vulgar words.  We had been married to Yj for about 6 years.  When we set the boundary with Ellen, we had been a dutiful lap dog to her for five decades.  Her response was, “I hope you enjoy your new family.” There was not a single question from her or any of our family on her side about why we finally bit her.

A narcissistic mother is unable to offer her child unconditional love. She cannot be selfless, devoted, warm, mature, or attentive. Instead, she expects undivided attention, admiration, praise, and loyalty from her children, demanding they fulfill her unreasonable needs.  Narcissistic mothers have an unhealthy need to dominate their children, exhibiting behaviors such as bullying, terrifying, neglecting, suffocating, indulging, humiliating, overprotecting, or abusing them. 

According to Ellen, testosterone is a reason why we no longer talk to each other. She has to become a victim of gender dysphoria as well. She reminds everyone how supportive she has always been of our queerness, but behind closed doors, she has a caveat: “I don’t care if you're gay, but I don’t want to see it.” This also kept all of our affection focused on her. When Yj and I visited, she would knock on our bedroom door in the morning if she was awake and we were not looking at her. Being Trans is something that we do get a pass on. We were born this way, so Ellen can avoid people thinking that she contributed to our unbecoming differentness because there is a chance that it is also James' DNA and not hers

Being raised by a narcissistic mother often results in a lifetime of mistreatment and shame for things you never did. Toxic shame arises from being told that you are not enough, leading to feelings of worthlessness and unlovability. Children of narcissists learn that love is synonymous with abuse. The narcissist teaches them that if someone displeases you, it is acceptable to harm them and label it as love. Recognizing that we are not responsible for our childhood horror and that we are entitled to feel anger is helping us move past it instead of being controlled by it.

Narcissistic parents have excruciating psychosocial tools that they use to sway public opinion to support their emotional needs. The price for being included as her child is our loyalty and compliance, effectively turning us into puppets. As Tracy Malone notes, “The reality of being a narcissistic mother is that your children may find solace in the freedom that comes with your passing, allowing a smile to grace their faces.” 

It’s been over two years since our guys had something to say to her. Her response was first to tell us we needed to get over it. We recently got married, and we have eight kids.  Ellen told us to enjoy our new family.  This ended up being prophetic. She did manage to convince everyone that she was the victim of our truths. The only contact anyone in our family has made is her brother.  He messaged us and said she had lung cancer last summer, and we couldn’t care. We also went into trauma mode and overly apologized to Floyd, and we regret it. We have nothing to be sorry about. 

We've heard you know your choice to cut someone out of your life was right if you don’t miss the person. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt; life is just easier without them. Our life now is an order of magnitude better without worrying about her feelings all the time.

We can only hope that one day she looks back and realizes how she treated us, but after 56 years, there is not a snowball's chance in hell for that to happen. She'll never admit to any wrongdoing. We’re learning to accept this, and we’re starting to heal. As part of our healing process, we are no longer allowing ourselves to be burdened by her guilt trips. We no longer allow ourselves to believe we are worthless and beholden. This isn’t just about our relationship with her anymore; We have to think about our relationship with ourselves and our homemade family. We need to be mentally healthy, and we cannot let her hurtful words and actions weigh us down any longer. It’s our turn to hold power. It’s our turn to take control of the situation. 

Our homemade family is vast, alive, supportive, and safe. It was more than we thought we would ever have and more than we deserved. Our people give each other grace when we mess up, and we work to repair our relationships. When communication goes sideways.  We tell dad jokes, and our kids humor us with legitimate laughter. We cry and share stories, even the hard ones. We try to figure out how to care for each other from four states. We can ask for help. We tell each other how much we appreciate each other. We remember to say I love you. This is the first time in our lives that we have been given the gift to have fun, be happy, and feel loved. 

"That's the best revenge of all: happiness. Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good fucking life." - Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club