Overview

As a sequel to Romance Stew and my quest for chivalric love, adventure, and intimacy, I found this time with a narcissist and his entire clan of takers to be a dark and harrowing trek through the bowels of the Twilight Zone. My marriage opened into an alien landscape - the wife of a man who later presented as bipolar, the perfectionist step-father, his invalid mother with the diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome and just perhaps a manipulator of emotional incest, and a bipolar/alcoholic adult son who brought the baggage of his forever present mother and her drunken and drugged-out sister into the mix. I was ill prepared in my enthusiastic dash for one final chance to have love with all-thetrimmings to face such frighteningly foreign attitudes and failed miserably to ascertain the reality of these people before saying I do. I was blindsided by the close dynamics and tight allegiances of the quicksand into which I naively was drawn, leaving me drowning in never-ending demands and overwhelming presences. Where Had I lost myself? I was no wide-eyed teenager. Was I really codependent and unable to be a functioning individual? Letting all my financial holdings be liquidated, always with the promise of we have the rest of our lives to make this up, and refusing to live in a camper on the folks' property to be at the mother's beck and call, I was left out-in-the-cold when I refused the final pressuring to sell my tiny house. The world of narcissism/psychopathy left me exhausted and terrified - there was no empathy for me as a being. I was only a tool to be used. All the emotions that popped on stage with pretense of sincere caring and connectedness were simply character devices. I had been so bombarded with a perpetual stream of demands, lack of sleep, gas lighting, tests to prove my worth as a wife and for the clan, and almost round-the-clock inundation into their belief systems of using others and the general assemblage of living, I suffered a type of relationship Stockholm Syndrome. When my utilization purposes ended, I was cut from the clan as coldly and precisely as if it were a surgical procedure. I was no longer valuable to these people. It was a long journey back to find myself. The strange morals of the group always left me feeling out-of-focus. There are many of us survivors and we are taking steps to reclaim our lives. I knew Cinderella would still have to clean the castle and that the Prince would be away on exciting travels. I had sought the fairy tale and although aware, knowledgeable, and eager for a new adventure, found myself lost in a panic-filled fun house of mirrors and fog.

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9781470106553

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The author lives in Montana with her cat and two dogs. The daughters she loves and their amazing families live nearby. Grandsons and granddaughter bring radiant joy and hopeful expectation. Becky finds wondrous fascination with ideas of quantum realities and the power of thought, choice, and emotion. Still a romantic after all the experiences and being a member of the over-the-hill and down-the-valley gang, that realm of rapture now transfers to daily living, family, and work on her cottage. Gratitude for this life's many adventures and routes of discovery sing from her love of Broadway musicals and the individualism of her adopted state. A brother and his family remain in North Carolina.

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