It seems a strange thing to write our story right plop in the middle of this blog, but that's precisely where it belongs- in the centre of our adventures; the life we eventually created.
What I have written is an 'origin story' as my friend Patti Elledge describes it:
"What is an Origin Story? They are stories of how we came to be who we are and include elements of loss, betrayal, hardship and survival—as well as love, transcendence and the brilliance of the human heart. They typically include tales of family tragedy, plot twists, quirky spins with odd outcomes and hilarious truth-telling of secrets long well kept. Origin Stories help us make sense of who we are and connect those dots, often stirring the pot for new growth and self-emergence. When we hear one person's origin story, it helps us wonder about our own. "
“But there’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin.”
Mitch Albom, For One More Day
And when you think about it, that's entirely true.
"But behind all your stories is always your mother's story..."
That's how legacy works. A river runs through our lives- a river of legacy.
Stories lived, stories told, secrets kept and consequences.
In April this year (2024) we visited my great grandparents resting place at Kelvin Grove cemetery in Palmerston North.
"I have a distinct memory of visiting my great grandfather (Grandad Ab) in hospital before I was even 2 & there were knitted rabbit slippers. I feel so sad to realise now that he died just before Christmas in 1963- my mother adored him & had spent much of her early childhood with him when her own father was away during WW11. At that time she found herself stuck with me & a marriage to my father, in a place far from her family- they had all moved to Dunedin on a bank transfer. Grandad Ab taught children to ride (horses) & play polo, in his earlier life in the South Island. He worked for the Public Trust & was instructed to go to his farming colleagues to ask for their horses at the beginning of the first world war. 10,000 horses were sent from New Zealand at that time, horses that were vital to the farming life of our nation. Only 4 returned. My great grandmother Grace Sanderson Thomson was one of the first woman to graduate with a degree in teaching from Otago university. Unfortunately, Grace was diagnosed with a brain tumour at 61. My grandmother Edna left her young family in Wairoa (my mother, the eldest, was 15 at the time- no fridge in the house), caught a train (no license, no family car & no other public transport) travelled all the way to Palmerston North to gather up her mother & then journey to Dunedin where Grace was operated on, but later died. In time Grandad Ab lost a leg to diabetes & subsequently had his Morris Oxford adapted & painted canary yellow so that other cars would see him coming round the corners. I came along, all these decades later, bearing wild flowers & heart shaped kawakawa leaves & gratitude (FB post)."
As I mentioned my mother went everywhere with her beloved Grandad and came to adore him.
When her father returned home there were lots of adjustments to be made for everyone- the world was a very different place and life in those days in New Zealand was simple, you got what you got and made the best of it. Grandad got a job in banking and was sent off to Wairoa where they lived at 10 Kopu road. My mother met my father Jeff Whittaker via Wairoa. The Whittakers lived at 68 Campbell street, Pa working for Dalgetys, a job he also came home to after the war, although he worked in Frankton and Whakatane before ending up managing the store in Wairoa for 24 years.
My father's words: "Now, my grandfather Whittaker came from the docks in East London. His father, and his father before him, were sail makers, and Frank was twelve years old when both parents died. They didn’t know what to do with Frank, so decided since they were in the … sort of the shipping business, they would send Frank to sea as a twelve year old cabin boy. So Frank really had no formal education, and he sailed out of London, he sailed the world, finishing up as a ship’s cook. He came to New Zealand and then worked the coastal shipping from Auckland to [the] West Coast and Nelson. And one of the things that he remarked to me was that there was a dolphin that used to guide the ships through the channel when he was in the South Island. I always thought that he referred to [the] Tory Channel, but one day I was sailing through French Pass and I suddenly realised that that was where the dolphin had guided the ships; and the reason for that guidance was quite clear when you saw the currents.
....And my grandfather used to tell me endless stories about how he led that ship, and how he’d make sure they missed the whirlpools. I never realised until I actually did it myself. He went to Wellington; he left the ship, signed off. He was [had been] on the ‘Penguin’, and the ‘Penguin’ took a new cook, sailed out of Wellington and sailed into the rocks – can’t think at the moment of the reef that they struck. And I think it was something like two hundred and sixty people lost their lives, including the ship’s cook. So had it not been for grandfather signing off, I wouldn’t be here."
I have come to understand that this dynamic of post-war adjustment played out all over the place and served to shape our nation in ways that most of us have never quite come to terms with. Putting lives back together or mourning the losses and starting over, managing through deeply uncertain times was huge for everyone. After two years at the bank in Wairoa Grandad was moved on to Hamilton- that was the pattern that would continue for the whole of his working life- moving on again and again every few years. My Nan was a Jeffery, her father had been a chemist in Te Awamutu in the Waikato. Nan in turn entertained grand designs for my father to become a chemist like his grandfather and his father before him and so she pragmatically sent him off to school (also in Hamilton) as he "needed" latin which they didn't teach in Wairoa. He boarded with his grandmother Jane 'Granny Whittaker' there. He would later regale us with stories of how unsupported he felt by his parents, how his sisters got special treatment and that he had to fend for himself. It was in this period he determined to make a successful life for himself, through blood, sweat and sheer hard work. By the time Granny and Grandad (Ed & Arp) and the two boys Pete and David got the call to head to Dunedin, my mother stayed on in Hamilton to complete her high school years and subsequently started training as a nurse and somewhere in all that, hanging out with my father who was by then undertaking his pharmacy training. At this point they discovered that Mary was pregnant and life changed for us all forever more. Having warned Jeff Whittaker to stay away from his daughter, my grandfather was furious at the news and chased my father around the couch insisting that Mary have an abortion. Feeling that he had to man-up my father also insisted that he would "do the right thing". They were married the next July. My mother cried all through her honeymoon. Oh deary me what had she done.
My parents before they were married.
And here am I. Tuppence, Tup, Tuppy.
And with my father's parents. My Nan and Pa.
My mother...& me.
My father's first pharmacy job was in Te Aroha. We spent a year there before we had to shoot through after he caught out the pharmacist in an opium addiction. Incredibly, in that year (even though he was working in the pharmacy, he also worked at the service station through the weekend and grew vegetables at home) my father managed to build a boat. As it happened, there was an opening in Hastings at the Urgent Pharmacy in Queens street and so we moved to live out the back of the shop and on that journey to Hastings we stopped for him to launch his boat for a sail on lake Rotoiti- which is really quite out of the way when travelling from Te Aroha.
By now, my father's burning ambition to better himself and build a life that he felt proud of was a driving force in our lives. He soon moved us to Havelock North and opened his own pharmacy, joined Jaycees, stood for council and by 32 had become the Mayor of the Havelock North Borough.
"Jeff Whittaker – Havelock North Borough councillor from 1965 to 1974, then mayor from 1974 until 1983"- NZ Herald.
Before I was 2 my mother lost her beloved grandfather, 2 days before Christmas 1963. Still separated from her family and with a husband that was self obsessed and ambitious and who soon began to work long hours & attended meetings of one kind or another most evenings, it would have been difficult for her to have made friends in Havelock North in those days and so she began to become depressed. My father always said that nothing he did made Mary happy- mmm. If all that busy-ness and ambition wasn't enough, he decided that he wanted to see a Havelock North ski lodge built up on Mt Ruapehu (the Hawke's Bay one evidently wasn't good enough or big enough), so he liaised with the local architect Len Hoogerbrug and that's exactly what they achieved. "The Havelock Ski Club was formed at a public meeting held on 12 July 1966. Jeff Whittaker was elected the first President, Geoff Jones-Prichard the first Treasurer, and the late Barry Bowman the first Secretary, at the original public meeting and today there are still a number of foundation members active in the Club." The journey was arduous, the Taupo road still seriously windy and unsealed in those days so there was much car sickness and boredom, yet we made that journey again and again before I was 7. My mother found herself assigned in the kitchen cooking for everyone while my father went off skiing and that's where he met his solution to get himself out of this mess- Helen, the 'I've found another mother for the children', who would have been about 19 at the time. She was also engaged to be married to someone else, yet the betrothal, was dismissed and from there they devised a plan to get rid of my mother as my father felt he couldn't cope with her anymore. No wonder we went skiing such a lot! I hated the cold and the smell and prickliness of the feather sleeping bags. By the time I was 6 things were well in play and I had a brother called Tim who was 2. Dad began picking me up from school and we would head home for lunch. Why he thought it was a good idea to take me with him I do not know. He'd told my mother that she had to leave and without her children. She responded with extreme distress, rage and threats of suicide. So that particular fateful morning she had taken loads of pills and by the time that the ambulance arrived she was clinically dead. Working on her, they managed to revive her and get her to hospital in time. It was still a criminal offense to 'commit suicide' in the 1960s. All my requests to visit my mother were met with the same answer- "children aren't allowed in the hospital". My mother never came home and I never saw her again. My mother having nowhere else to go (sadly, she tells an entirely different story about this period), went to stay with her parents who, by then, were living in Auckland. That next Christmas (or perhaps it was the following one) we went all the way to Auckland for us to be deposited with Granny and Grandad, how hard that must have been for them. My mother came to the door and peeked through at us, then left.
During the two years after that I accepted that my mother was sick and not coming back and that was that. Nan had Tim (Timmy) in Wairoa for 6 months and dad got a boarder called Geoff. I think they were probably quite useless together 'cos they let me cook a sultana cake unsupervised when I was 8 and when I asked them if whole eggs meant everything (shell and all) they said they didn't know. They ate the cake. Next time I cracked the eggs and removed the shells first. Helen came and went on weekends in her fiat bambina all the way from the King Country where she was working as a school dental nurse. There was more skiing. It was in this interlude that I felt the happiest of my whole childhood- my father was kindly towards me and everything was a lot more peaceful. Two years you had to wait for a divorce and then there had to be just cause. Someone had to be to blame. My father plotted to go all the way to Auckland to photograph my mother in bed with another man to prove her infidelity, not sticking up his own hand, of course. The custody battle was hideous and ended in the high court, my mother on lithium and my father proclaiming to the judge that he was going to be the Prime Minister of New Zealand one day. In 1990 he was elected as a Member of Parliament for National and served one term. He informs me he has never forgiven me to this day for not sitting in Parliament, to hear in person, his maiden speech. Never mind that I had a baby and two other small children, that Rob was working and at EIT having started his nursing studies, that neither he nor Helen had visited us in our new home nor come to meet David and see if we were doing ok!
I bonded with my father because he was the only parent I had. Later, I found I had few memories of my mother. Helen and my father were married in July 1969. Helen adopted me but in the early years before her sons were born was often resentful and cruel and beat us and screamed at us and kicked us in the head in fury and frustration when dad wasn't around. Never mind that she'd put us to bed in the same room in broad daylight at 7 pm. She hated cooking and I felt like I was dying from lack of nourishment on every level. The food I had loved was gone, there was no laughter (until after Michael was born), no radio, no happy television watching, few books and no kindly conversation. There were egg shells everywhere. I wasn't allowed to have needs or a voice. I became a 'good girl', but it was never, ever enough.
My father's abuse began in my teens when he would unload his volatile marriage woes on me for hours on end one minute and the next, he would bully and berate me with a list of the last 20 things that I had done wrong- most of them untrue. "And don't you dare answer back!". There was a great deal of cruelty, silent treatment for weeks on end, meanness, blame, shame (constant fat shaming), ridicule and no love. I became more and more unhappy until I was so utterly miserable that I would cry all the way to and from high school. Neither was it a happy household.
During this time my father made a great friend James White. Jeff and James would play practical jokes on each other and there were many dinner parties and get togethers between the two families. James and Judy were relaxed, fun and friendly and child inclusive. It was in the time where I was riding and in those days we had permission to visit "The Redwoods". Now everyone in the world visits them, but in those days they were "mine". James White was a local photography and arranged to do a photoshoot in the Redwoods when I was 15.
James and Judy also presented me with a bottle of bubbly when I passed school C. I didn't know what on earth to do with it- I wasn't used to being treated with respect and certainly not celebrated or appreciated. I recall so clearly a heated debate he and my father engaged in one evening- James insisting that you talk to your kids and reason with them and give them respect and dad fiercely defending his stance that no- you just tell them what to do. Later James offered his E type Jag for our wedding day and took and gifted us our wedding photos. Sadly he died at 54 of cancer.
By the time I 'left home' I had two more brothers- Michael was 10 and Paul 7 months old. I decided that I quite liked the idea of being a school dental nurse, as Helen had been - being part of a school and helping children, so I applied to study at the Willis street dental clinic in Wellington. The counter pressure from Nan and my father to go in to pharmacy instead was huge. I loved living in Wellington those two years, yet I was deeply homesick and lost and couldn't make sense of what had happened to me. During that first year my father decided that I should join a Youth for Christ team that was heading to Western Samoa to build a house. I wrote home and explained that I didn't really know what being a christian was all about so they sent me a couple of music tapes. I had no idea where Samoa was and had to save the $600 for the airfares out of my student allowance. The clinic wouldn't allow me to take a full month's leave at Christmas so my father cornered the local MP and got 'special dispensation' for me. I still had no idea why I was going but took myself off to some YFC rallies in the town hall and started attending a church called Abundant Life. I met the 'team' in Wellington in the November and that's where I met Rob- the Baptist church in Miramar over the election weekend of 1978. I was 17. We fell in love in that month in Apia, much to my father's disgust. He informed me fairly recently that I was supposed to have had the same transcendent experience during my visit, as he had when he went on an earlier preparation for the build expedition.
When I graduated as a School Dental Nurse Helen and Dad came down to Wellington and as soon as it was over off they scooted leaving me without checking I had money or a car to get to Manaia (where I'd been posted to) in South Taranaki. Thank God for Rob who had a license and was old enough to hire a car. He got me there and he stayed with me. Within a week my father had written me a letter telling me that the road to hell was indeed wide and how disgusted he was that we had "shacked up" together.
This was our little Yarrow's flat in Manaia. There were great antique shops in Taranaki in those days.
Rob and I were married on 6th December in 1980.
My father balled me out the night before for not sweeping the driveway properly and helping out enough. I cried myself to sleep. The next day he couldn't look at me. It was the day his only daughter got married and he couldn't say a single nice word.
With my mother's parents. My Granny and Grandad.
These patterns continued on through the years, as did his relationship failures. He got married a lot which created a constant sense of stress and upheaval in our lives as he moved from one relationship and situation to another &....built another house. During the many tumultuous transitions he would always turn up on my doorstep wanting support and to endlessly vent. Of course he was always terribly convincing, I should have turned him away but what do you do- he was my father. Our children were still small when Jeff and Helen came to grief after 23 years of a pretty challenging marriage. He'd already found another 'love of his life' across the parliamentary floor and of course never pausing to take stock of things he ploughed through an acrimonious divorce and head long into a whole new life with a young family. Jude had three children all exactly the same age as ours. David and Sophie were four years old (1993) when Rob was sent to Wellington to collect up all their things and move them to Hawkes Bay. Jeff and Jude were married in the Woodford House chapel the next November. All the children were great friends which should have been ok for us all but my father soon regressed to treating me (& Rob) with contempt- as the cycle goes. He and Jude brought land out at Bridge Pa and planted a vineyard- these were the winemaking years. With every wife he would build another home from scratch, never being content to live in someone else's dwelling. I liked Jude a great deal but her volatile, unstable, jealous & fiery temperament made for further chaos, & trouble & the marriage crashed & burned rather badly after a decade. Then there was Trish from Wellington for several years soon after that, but in the end she declined the inevitable proposal, even though the carrot had been large, as she had no intention of moving to Hawke's Bay. Then came the Rock & Roll club period until eventually he hooked up with Beverly and she's kept him and that has finally brought some stability.
It wasn't until my fifties and menopause kicked in that I decided that it was me or him, otherwise I just wasn't going to make it. I also stumbled upon information about narcissistic personality disorder. The more I read, the more I realised that none of what had happened to me was my fault and that I really could choose to not be bullied anymore. In the early days the information that was emerging seemed odd and sketchy, but these days there are some amazing people teaching about these things. It's no accident that Dr Karyl McBride's books are entitled "Will I ever be good enough?" and " Will the drama ever end?" And the answers are no and no. Just recently I came across a survey "Do you have a narcissistic parent?" You can find it just here. I marked yes to 27 out of 33 questions. Another list of 57 things that narcissistic fathers say left me with three things that I didn't hear because they weren't quite relevant to our situation. You can find the list here.
"A narcissistic father is like the sun in his own solar system, with everyone else orbiting around him. He sees himself as the most important person in every room, always deserving of the best and superior to everyone else. Picture a dad who takes credit for his child’s achievements, always turning the spotlight onto themselves. Having a narcissistic father often leads to miserable childhoods.
A narcissistic father uses statements that are abusive, selfish, grandiose, attention-seeking, dictating, and manipulative. A comprehensive list of 57 examples of such statements offers a real-life glimpse into the verbal patterns of these fathers.
Children of narcissists suffer effects like low self-esteem, perfectionism, and difficulty trusting, shaped by growing up walking on eggshells to avoid emotional explosions. Dealing with a narcissist-dad requires setting boundaries, self-compassion, and sometimes cutting off contact for self-protection."
Of course, back in the day we didn't know about concepts like controlling or toxic people and we'd never heard of a boundary; the right to say no, the right to a voice; to respect. And there was never anyone to stick up for me. The thing about the narcissist is that they never change, wake up or grow & they never, ever apologise. Things usually solidify as they get older. There's a lot of grief and resignation to process as a child of a narcissistic parent for all the things that will never be and all that you should have had, or been given, but never will be.
Last year Rob came across an interview held in our local Knowledge Bank. If you google Knowledge Bank Jeff Whittaker you'll find it.
Headed "Today is 25th September 2015. I’m interviewing Jeff Whittaker of Havelock North and now of Eskdale, to talk on the life and times of his family in Hawke’s Bay."
There are two references to me:
"I was married during my apprenticeship, which was a mistake."
"Catherine, Catherine came here as a baby. Yeah it was a real mistake. I should have done what they did in those days and walked, but I didn't and that made life pretty difficult."
"And your daughter?
"My daughter....well, she's a house person."
“Shame and humiliation are common tactics that keep family members walking on eggshells ensuring that the parent remains in control. A narcissist's fragile ego and self-loathing drive their need to project those humiliating feelings onto others. Shaming and humiliation are forms of emotional abuse, and they can be manifested into a verbal put-down, a mean look, a gesture, or by simply dismissing the person by walking away.”
These can be tough to share, what did the narcissist in your life do to remain in control at all times?
(Quote from p. 29, Will the Drama Ever End? Untangling and Healing from the Harmful Effects of Parental Narcissism by Dr. Karyl McBride).
I think that I've probably lived my whole life with a dysregulated nervous system. My body has carried the story- my mother's story, everybody's story; all the consequences of unprocessed emotions, events and disasters. As a child I felt that no one 'saw' me- ever. There is a howling loneliness in feeling so bereft and odd and alone in the world; to not be liked or loved by those that brought you into this world, yet expect so very much from you. I now recognise that I have experienced multiple significant traumas from an early age. One trauma would have been a traumatic event- seeing my mother carted off in an ambulance and never coming back at the age of 6 would have been more than enough, and especially if I had been loved and talked to and helped to remember my mother I might have had a chance at resilience, but when the story became more and more complicated I started to drown in grief, lack of self worth and hopelessness. The relentless trauma through every single year of my existence lead me to many patches of suicidality myself- 'Will I ever be good enough? Will the drama ever end? Yes, in death. Through incredible happenstance along the way, despite the 'trouble', I finally found my way 'home' to my authentic self and have created a life where I am seen, held, heard, safe, healing, learning, living for joy and being truly, fully imperfectly me.
What happened to my mother. She had a complete break down and lived with her parents for a good while in her recovery. Several times she cut her wrists in the shower. Eventually she found her feet and shut and locked the door on the past as if it had never happened, but then she met Roly and fell pregnant again. At 7 months she tried to take her life and that of her unborn baby. But she didn't die. She gave birth to Carolyn and then gave her up for adoption. She locked that door too. She married Roly and became a flight attendant with Air New Zealand and travelled, a lot. I visited them when I was 18 as Rob was living in St Heliers in Auckland at that time as she was. After the visit she wrote to me at the dental clinic and told me she didn't want a relationship with me, but she was there if I ever really needed her. After we moved here to Hastings 35 years ago, Annette Hildershiem, an old friend of my mothers, knocked on our door on a mission to reunite us both. She had her work cut out, as Mary rejected her vehemently and repeatedly, until one day she relented and came to visit. I can't say that things were peachy over the years (what happened to her was shocking and she's in denial of much of it), but she is now in her early 80s and has fairly recently lost Roly. We have nice conversations by phone every few weeks and I think we have made our peace as best we can.
I often reflect that had I died young I would have died never knowing who I really was; never having a chance to be 'me'. Don't get me wrong, I loved living in Havelock North as a child and I was very happy at Havelock North primary school. I found joy every spring in discovering the blossom trees in bloom on Te Mata road and at 10 insisted on knowing what the buttery yellow wild rose was that I found spilling down the bank in the rumpty car park at the back of the pharmacy. I had fallen in love with Banksia rose. I adored all the fragrances in the old gardens of winter sweet, daphne, freesias, jonquils etc and I was fascinated by sparaxis and ixias in spring. I tried to make perfume one day at Duart road from white mandevilla flowers and water. I was heartbroken when my concoction rapidly became brown and pungent. We sucked the nectar from jasmine flowers and hunted down banana passionfruit and loquats. I spent a lot of time at Nan and Pa's in the school holidays and although Nan was a real matron of a woman who stuck to spartan rules of necessity: literally 2 inches of water in the old clawfoot bath (no one ever had a bath deeper than that ever!) Her house was always spik and span, she was on the vestry of the local Anglican church, supported plunket and gardening groups- an era when once married wives didn't work. There was a general paucity of emotional expression that didn't do any of us any good. Things that should have been discussed never were. Of her three children there were four pregnancies 'out of wedlock'. However, in her care I got to make sand saucers and mossy gardens, to create pearl necklaces by threading naked lady seeds onto cotton with a needle, to eat guavas and strawberries from the garden and later spent many hours pouring through Nan's old cook books and helping make puddings.
Later, once Helen and Dad had bought a 10 acre property up Te Mata Peak road I was given a pony and made to learn to ride. Everything I did I did well, so I was eventually quite a good rider. Those years included pony club, treks, camps, sports days, shows and gymkhanas and even hunting through the winter. I rode in the pony club champs three times. This naturally took us all around Hawke's Bay in to all the rural nooks and crannies. It also meant that I was out on the land most days attending to horses, having biked 4 miles to school and back. We rode around Chamber's Walk every day for a year and that's where I first discovered Ongaonga and Karaka berries. We would roam the hills for blackberries every March coming home finger stained and scratched to bits but thrilled with our foraging spoils. One day I found asparagus growing wild in the grass verges coming home. I bet no one else has ever picked wild asparagus from Te Mata Peak road since. A couple of autumns we could see horse mushrooms in the field across the gully so I traipsed all the way over there to bring them home. They were the size of dinner plates. So why am I telling all this- because sometimes the patterns of a life are right there and offered to us, they just might not have been delivered in the ways we were expecting. I think I was given seeds to work with- seeds that looked like nothing of importance in my hand, but really they held the pattern of my life, the way it was meant to be for me to be me. I think perhaps my father still inadvertently delivered me a place to stand in this world, it just wasn't in the form he had in mind.
I'm so grateful for the patterns and the seeds that are mine though. I planted them and nurtured them. Now they have become my life. This in itself is a miracle considering the on going family chaos and constant reconfiguration that happened from the early 1990s. I often wonder what Nan and Pa really thought of the life that their son had forged for himself. Considering that his sister was sent away twice for discreet birthings, I can't believe that they weren't also ashamed of some of the appalling choices that he made through the years- like what he did to my mother & the way he went about getting rid of her & while still married to Helen, falling for Jude in the parliamentary era. Jude with three children exactly the same age as his own grandchildren.
November 1978. I walked across the city from the Dental Nurses' hostel, up the stairs of Miramar Baptist church & "saw' Rob for the very first time (he was a qualified telephone linesman in those days, working for the P&T in Auckland). In that moment, both our lives changed forever. Our romance was improbable & according to all and sundry, entirely ill advised. But we soon recognised that we had been given something unique and precious and that was all that mattered. After spending the month in Apia, Western Samoa with the Youth for Christ team building the house for Alison & Tavale Matai through January of 1979 we returned to our lives in Wellington & Auckland but knew that we wanted to be together.
I had turned 18 on our way home from Samoa and in the February found myself taking an overnight, 13 hour train journey to Auckland, to meet Rob's family. His mother took a vehement (but covert) dislike of me from the moment that she met me. That first evening she insisted that we all go to the movies together, which would have been ok if I'd been invited, but it was all decided around me- we would be going to a double billing screening of two science-fiction movies: Saturn Five & Piranha. I abhor science fiction & horror movies and I said so and that I would rather just stay home while they all went out together & I was very polite. No one considered that I had just travelled all that way from Wellington & that being out until after midnight might be a bit much for me. However, I was pressed ganged and silenced and off we all went. I later learned that they had never been to the movies together as a family ever before. I had nightmares for a very long time after that. The next morning I woke to find that I had been bitten on my eyelid by a mosquito while I slept and my eye was so swollen I couldn't see a thing out of it. When Felicia saw it she smirked. But I had fallen in love with a man, not a family and I didn't think much more of it on my return to Wellington....
Finally moving out of home after we met, Rob flatted with a friend in Turua street over in St Heliers & burnt a few pots learning to cook. Yip- had a few VWs & all.
We continued to travel to see each other for 18 months by train & plane
(the Silver Star)
I moved to 291 Tinakori road from where I was flatting at 3 Crief street, to fill in for some uni students over the Christmas semester period & stayed on there until I graduated in March 1980.
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Back in the day Tinakori hotel sat on this site. Who knows what happened to it (no doubt it burnt down) but in 1928 the building that the Tinakori antique centre now occupies was built here & in 1980 there was a commercial kitchen down stairs on one side & a flat on the other. I hated the scary gas that I had to cook with & the gas contraption that heated the hot water- boom! But I also loved staying here. I bought myself an old oak treadle sewing machine & began to make my own clothes. Rob feeling pretty challenged about leaving Auckland managed to come off his motorbike & break his leg, so he arrived by plane to stay with me for a week- somehow hopping up & down the stairs & not breaking the other leg. We woke up that November 28th morning in 1979 to the news of the Erebus plane crash. We also found that the house next door was abandoned & we had an amazing time looking through it & hoping we didn't fall through the floor. We gathered up an old picture & a bentwood chair out of the decay.
It was while I was listening to an LP of America that Rob had introduced me to, one night- that as the song Donkey Jaw began to play that I had a truly remarkable experience- a transcendence (so not like me, but no I wasn't stoned or drunk)) where I saw a reel unfold before my eyes where Rob & I were together & there was a river, bordered by weeping willows (just like the ones in the background picture of this blog) & the smell of fresh baked bread & perfect nourishment & gracefulness & effortless love making & a baby that was entirely peaceful & there was no stress whatsoever- everything was amazing & so beautiful.
Then suddenly everything changed & I could see the city all closed in & concrete. The cacophony of construction & traffic & there was my father all hot & red in the face & he was building furiously, but as fast he was forcing progress everything was crumbling & breaking down.
And then that was that.
Rob eventually made the leap & moved to Taranaki where he got a job in the Hawera hospital laundry & later as an orderly in Ward One with all the oldies. He stayed in the male staff quarters above the kitchen through the week for a while.
After we were married on 6th December in 1980 Rob and I soon fell in love with a wee run down house in Hawera with a large overgrown garden that friends from church were renting and we managed to purchase it from the Barleys for $14,000!
I can't believe that we didn't realise that all the onion weed down the back of the garden was edible- what a waste of good food!
We lived a simple life and 'grew up' in those nine years living together in Hawera. Anna was born in 1983 and I felt strong and confident as we started a-fresh, creating a family of our own with wholesome values of love, nourishing food and a make-do-and-mend approach to life. I joined La Leche League (& also became a leader), fully, happily breast-fed and made lots of lovely friends through the AOG church we were attending.
And then Matthew was born...and there was yelling.
This poor little boy arrived in to this world and he hated it- everything about it.
And everyone said- "It's got to be the mother's fault". My father said "Just give him to me for the weekend & I'll fix him". But of course, he never did.
He was still a lovely boy but he irrevocably changed our family dynamic.
After months of being on call day and night & with very little respite, I was exhausted & starting to see the first signs of depression set in. At church I was instructed to breastfeed in the toilets only if I was going to insist on nursing my baby past 9 months. I was soon labelled rebellious for not submitting to the authority of the Pastor's wife! Things deteriorated from there and we soon realised that it was time to leave Taranaki. "They" gave our marriage 6 months.
Rob wanted to remain in hospital work and had applied three times to do the one year enrolled nursing course while we were still living in Taranaki & each time had been rejected. He bravely enrolled in a night class & upped his English skills by passing school C & then later UE English. By the time we moved I was pregnant with David. Once we arrived here in Hawke's Bay, Rob was soon accepted to the full three year nursing course at EIT. We had imagined that being in Hastings would be a good thing as my step mother had been kind & helpful when our first two children were born, however, this was not to be, as she & my father had fresh ambitions & headed off to America for a 6 week holiday over the time that David was born. We were clearly inconvenient & worse than annoying & found ourselves utterly rejected & unceremoniously dumped- all of us. David was still a little when my father decided to stand for Parliament- having not ever visited the new baby, I suddenly found myself being castigated for not getting out there & door knocking in support & was emphatically told, that if I did indeed want to know him as my father, I would have to get involved (fully) with whatever he was doing & start pulling my weight like the rest of the family. Having not had a single settled night's sleep in Matthew's first three years of life, now looking after a new baby & all the changes that our move had wrought, this landslide of rejection was just all too much for me & by the time that David was 18 months old, my health completely collapsed & I was to lose my entire prime adult life to ill health & emotional trauma from that point.
Compounding all this was Rob's naivety in believing his mother would be a support & asking her to come down to help out when David was born. She arrived by bus 24 hours after I gave birth. I ended up cooking dinner that night- roast chicken and chocolate sauce pudding. She refused to help in anyway (feigning that she didn't know what to do), took the children to the park without coats in the middle of winter (even though she remembered to put one on herself) and sulked when she couldn't have Rob's full attention at all times, like it was supposed to be a special holiday just for her. Rob had to ask her to leave. And she never forgave me for the humiliation.
When David was 4 we found a nice little church where we liked the people & the people liked us, but tragically, what we did not realise, was that we had arrived at a time in the church history where the whole thing was about to collapse & we ended up being caught in the rubble & the consequences, some years down the line.
My father continued to get married a lot and my brother's first two marriages failed as well. The endless turmoil & instability; the endings & losses & heartaches caused us all a great deal of distress and had a huge impact on us as a family.
Peg Streep talks about the five things that the unloved daughter feels in childhood over here.
She says that these are common feelings experienced by the daughters of unloving mothers (fathers) & are all part of the emotional legacy:
~That she is unlovable.
~That she is isolated & alone.
~That it's her fault.
~That she might be crazy.
~Deeply fearful & insecure.
I am quite sure that these feelings are also commonly experienced by anyone who has been exposed to (or been part of) a disordered or dysfunctional family. So although the traumatic events that I experienced as a young child & the subsequent loss of my mother & the divorce of my parents deeply affected me alone, the patterns of disorder only grew deeper & became more complex as the years went by, culminating most intensely in the decade where Rob was working as a registered nurse in the Children's ward, our children were navigating adolescence, my health remained severely challenged, there were peculiar dysfunctions in the churches we attended & every part of the various family affiliations escalated in to unfettered chaos. It was during this time that chaos & deep distress became part of the fabric of our own family & then weird & awful things started happening that could not be explained.
It was as if a dragon was stirring. Our world became a scary, turbulent & unsafe place to be.
Reactions to life & me, began to arise in Rob that hadn't been present before & I knew we had to address them if any of us were to survive. Katie (the wee innocent one) was utterly terrified & confused & became increasingly distraught as we'd been here before in life. Catherine, was determined to unearth the truth & find a way to safety for us all, but it was to take many, many years.
Rob was born to English parents Roy & Felicia.
Rob as a baby- probably only known as Baby Reeves at this stage as for some mysterious reason Felicia had enormous trouble thinking of names for her babies. Eventually she connected his little red checks to a bird & named him Robin. In his mid 60s he changed his name to just Rob, by deed poll. Also struggling to name her third son, she chose Colin Graham, after the doctor that delivered him. Colin later changed his name to Cole- awkwardly also his known drug dealer name. The first child was a little easier (but more confusing)- he had the same name as his father- Roy & was soon known as Freddy.
Felicia's mother Patricia/Patsy came from money- The Brownes, and her father Fred Alcock was a mechanic who died when she was 14. Rob's father's family has been described as 'rough'. Roy's mother was Florence Umpleby & he was her 9th child. His father died before he was born.
Both Rob's parents fled England (for their own reasons) after the war, Felicia with her siblings & mother (along with a new, much younger, French husband Louie in tow), Roy, with two elder brothers (that were avoiding conscription & escaping the post war mayhem) & they all randomly arrived in Kenya in the late 1940's. Felicia & Roy met in Nairobi, married on 25th August in 1951 & had two sons four years apart, both born in Nairobi hospital.
John, Patsy, Roy, Felicia, Bill & Marie.
Roy worked for the railways while in Kenya. His temper manifest itself well & truly one day when having picked the boys up from school, found the exit road blocked by a wheelbarrow- in a wild rage he got out of the car, marched up to the wheelbarrow, hefted it over his head & threw it out of the way while screaming abuse at the African workers & breaking his back in the process.
The family & Nang/Patsy (grandmother) left Nairobi after the Mau Mau uprisings & took passage on the Oronsay from Aden to Sydney then the Wanganella from Sydney to Auckland to subsequently arrive in New Zealand with all their worldly possessions in 1963. After a time in a caravan park & rented housing, they built a house in West Auckland & had another son 10 years after Rob. Rob's elder brother Roy didn't stay with the family long & soon shot off to sea at the age of 16. He eventually encountered a woman who was a working 'ship girl' called Linda & married her & made a home in Western Australia with her & her troubled son Dallas. The tragedy of her life remains too much for me to bare even now- although we were never friends. Her German father died of a fatal heart attack at the age of 54, her mother soon after, walked in to a river & drowned herself. At 22 her only son died of a drug & alcohol overdose & all through this time she received one tragic personal health diagnosis after another, while also losing the battle with morbid obesity. She barely reached 60 before bowel cancer ended her life too. So when Rob's brother died so suddenly at the age of 64 in late March of 2017, that just added more sorrow to the deeply tragic story.
The younger brother Colin was born "not quite right" & never managed very well at school. He was pretty amiable & was enterprising enough, but took the brunt of his father's unceasing cantankerous angst- whose health had also collapsed as he had scoliosis of the spine & was becoming increasingly drawn in to a fascination with the might & power of the Third Reich. A great deal of hate, anger & rage swirled through the family home. When Rob was 17 both he & his mother "got saved" which was to divide the family rather effectively. Rob joined a church, a youth group & a christian band (music became a huge part of his life) & as he became very close to his mother, his father continued to add to his array of Nazi memorabilia, which he stored in the roof (attic) of the house. It was around this time that Felicia's friends began begging her to leave Roy as his behaviour was so difficult & destructive, but as she had become a christian she didn't feel she could & chose to see it out.
A couple of years in to the christian gig Rob had met Sue Walton & they were an item for 18 months or so & he adored her, before she dumped him without explanation & headed off to India on a mission to find herself, along with Alan from World Vision. Sue had lost her mother at a young age & ended up becoming the "daughter Felicia never had", leaving Rob out in the cold. Felicia & Sue continued to see each other for years after the dumping, Felicia even being invited to be the guest of honour at Sue & Alan's wedding. Then years later Sue visited Felicia again asking for Rob's contact details as she was having a moment where she was making amends in life. That might have worked if she hadn't still had feelings for Rob. We found ourselves in a very tricky time as the lid came off the unresolved past & guess who was slap bang in the middle of it all- Felicia Reeves. I spoke to Felicia at that time & told her that I had always felt/known that she would have preferred Sue as her daughter in law, "Oh, um, but...you're the mother of my grandchildren", she spluttered.
Colin married young, had three children, began attending church with his mother while also using, growing & selling cannabis over a 20 year period. Eventually Bobbi-Lee left him- the lies, manipulation & abuse were just too much. Everyone around him was traumatised by the breakup of the family, yet his mother continued to protect & defend her precious, faultless, impeachable son.
In the early 2000's it suddenly surfaced that there was much more going on in the broader family dynamic than met the eye. We woke up to realise that an attic full of Nazi stuff was a dangerous & toxic thing not just a harmless hobby, especially in light of all the hatred & chaos that had become part of the family interface & so we tried to initiate a conversation with Rob's parents about the situation. Our attempts to communicate were stone-walled & we were labelled trouble makers. It didn't take long for me to be made the official family scapegoat & I was ostracised at every turn. Felicia offered to share a secret with Rob about an opinion another member of the family held about me if he promised not to tell me. Nobley Rob said he couldn't do that & that was to become the turning point for him waking up to what his mother had become & her sneaky, manipulation (triangulation) of all family members.Years later my (ex) sister-in-law shared with me that our mother-in-law had "trained them all to hate us" over many years- & they did! It was at this juncture that a pattern settled in to our lives where every birthday was sabotaged, every holiday ruined- as Rob would return to work only to find that in his absence a complaint had been made about him & he now had to face disciplinary action. He became the target of an intense bullying campaign by the charge nurse & was eventually forced out of the hospital (even though he won the subsequent mediation process), after he returned from annual leave to find that on his father's birthday, the 2nd October, three complaints had been made about him. At this point I had to scoop up my broken husband, quite literally out of the gutter & try & put him back together after a complete nervous breakdown.
But I run ahead of myself.
Quite early in our family life Felicia began writing corrective letters of judgement with scriptures included & books about how to submit to my husband. At first it was just upsetting & rude, but as time went by the letters would announce themselves with a burst of chaos in our household & the letter would be found delivered in the next day or so. It got so bad when our kids were teenagers that I would peg the letters in a tree until Rob got home & then we would burn them. There was so much other weird stuff that went on through the years: cars stolen- one even used in a ram raid & then burnt- that one even made the local paper. Eventually we pleaded with her to please stop sending things as we were so scared & distressed, but she refused to listen or even discuss it & insisted that we were victimising her with our "accusations". It was at this point that her campaign to get rid of me started in earnest & she began to feed all of our correspondence to Rob's older brother & when she had riled him up enough she set him on us like a rottweiler.
Colin, Roy & Rob in Hawera together.
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Somewhere in all this Felicia's heart started giving her trouble & she eventually underwent a quadruple heart by-pass at the age of 73. That means everything- every thing was so blocked up, her heart simply could not function without immediate surgical intervention! She also went on to suffer from atrial fibrillation for the rest of her life. Tragically there is soooo such more to this story but I will just summarise the last bits- Rob's father died as he had lived- badly & painfully (having had 3 hip replacements & suffering from angina for many years) after much time in hospital & many surgeries; with a colostomy bag & little dignity. He passed away 16 years ago on the 19th May- Matthew's birthday. We arrived home from a wee holiday in Raumati to the news & had to turn around & head to Auckland only to be treated with utter contempt by Roy & Linda. It was only after weeks of searching, that the will (that Rob had organised for him) was discovered- scrunched up in the bottom of an old cardboard box. We thought that we might find peace, after he was gone & things did shift in some ways, but there was more to come, that we had no idea about.
The year that we realised the destruction that Rob's father's obsession with Hitler had wrought in all our lives & we tried to bring it to light & talk about it our daughter ended up in a near fatal accident & her car was written off, Matthew was admitted to hospital with suspected meningitis (6 days after Felicia's heart surgery)- but it turned out to be HSP, his cousin Jesse almost died from an actual meningococcal infection, David broke his leg, Rob was facing these continual unsubstantiated complaints at work & I was utterly terrified as my teeth kept blowing up.
Rob turned 46 in 2002. It was an era in his life where he had had an epiphany about his time in Nairobi & he was exploring an important part of his life journey. Since he was busy with work & life & disinclined to write letters to his parents, I took over the role to be kind to everyone & wrote to them both suggesting that since they struggled to think of suitable gifts that they might like to give him either some water colour paints as he was considering doing some art, or perhaps they might like to contribute to a night stay in The caboose in Taupo- a new hotel run by another Rob that had also grown up in Kenya. Felicia replied saying that they liked both suggestions & thank you very much for writing. That was the last I heard from her. Rob's birthday came & went & we did go & stay at the Caboose.
Rob had a wonderful time connecting with the owner & learning about the "lost boy" syndrome of those British boys who had grown up in Kenya but somehow got lost in life ever after. I had a sharp debilitating pain in my upper back all weekend as if I had been stabbed with a knife. Months later I wrote to Rob's parents asking what happened that I never heard from them. Silence. I paid for the stay myself out of my gardening money. Months went by. Finally Rob rang his mother to ask what was going on & she said that she had wanted to give him something that he had wanted. But that's what I wanted mum. He never got a thing.
A few months later one of Felicia's investments came to term so she decided to shout everyone a holiday to the Gold Coast. It was November & Anna had 6th form exams, Rob couldn't just magically take time off work, the kids still had school, we would have had to travel all the way to Auckland at our expense with nowhere to stay in the transition & then pay for plane tickets & passports for the 5 of us, also at our expense & then get all the way home again. We declined & then got bollocked by Roy (Rob's brother) for ruining Felicia's nice little "family reunion."
Right at the beginning of 2017 Rob had some unexpected contact from his elder brother Roy. Unexpected because...the last time he wrote to Rob, 12 years previously, he had a great deal to say (without ever having talked to his brother, I might add) as he had been riled up once again by his mother. The earlier message included:
"I may have backslidden somewhat, but I can assure you that I have more Christian values in my big toe than you have in your entire body, in fact, your entire family. I am ashamed to call you “My Brother” and in fact, the creature that you have become is no longer my brother. The real Rob, the brother that I loved, the young boy in the picture below, is Dead. I will get a china urn and fill it with ashes from my next camp fire, and I will put your name on a plaque to be hung around the neck of the urn, to remind me of the brother who was. This urn will take its place next to the urn and box containing the ashes of our dog “Silo”...
Needless to say, there was no response we could possibly make to such bizarre abuse.
But here Roy was in early 2017, contacting Rob after all these years & announcing that he forgave him (well kind of- with conditions), having recently re-dedicated his "life to The Lord" (for the third time) & with some pretty sharp-pointy-stick prompting from his best friends- he had arrived on the email doorstep. Then with some straight talk & grace on Rob's part, a civil conversation was begun, a Pacific cruise taken by Roy (with his mother) & a Church conference attended in Auckland. Whilst sitting through the weekend, Roy began to complain of a sore back. Eventually, with his mother's insistent prompting, he agreed to head to the hospital to have himself checked out, where-upon he was instantly admitted, soon suffered a massive cerebral seizure & at that point was rendered unconscious; only to die 3 days later. He did have a history of recurrent melanoma so it wasn't entirely a surprise, but none-the-less abrupt & unexpected, especially if you haven't "seen" him for well over 17 years. After Roy died then came the next shock wave of betrayal as Rob was confronted with lies, secrets & a scary hidden agenda- his mother had colluded with his elder brother for years. He was the perfect 'flying monkey'. This could not have been more clearly spelled out than through Roy's will- of the $1.6 million dollars of his estate he left large chunks as an appeasement to many & various woman, $150,000 to his mother & $150,000 to his younger brother & $10,000 to Rob. Felicia lied & lied & lied about knowing anything about the will, but in fact she knew all along as she had schemed & manipulated to achieve exactly what she wanted- a manifest demonstration of Rob's value in the "family" & more money for herself= more control.
The money itself didn't bother us- it was the pointed message that was so cruel especially as in the early 1980s Felicia came in to a bequest of 200,000 pounds that was left to her by her mother's cousin Doris. Doris never married and was dedicated to serving the church missionary society at some stage in her life, after giving away loads of cash in every direction she could think of, she still had more (what to do!) which is when she thought of Felicia, so the last lot was passed on to her with the proviso that she used it for church missions. This was the worst possible thing that could have happened in the Reeves family, as from that moment on the money was used to manipulate the entire family & still is to this day. Yes, she paid for some of her grandchildren to attend a christian school (although we found out today 11/7/24 that even this was a lie)- her ultimate goal in life was that all her family would be 'saved'. Due to the corruption and abuse that ensued through the years- the lies & scheming & so much not-love (as it turns out) not one of us wants a bar of church ever again.
Having created some significant buffering for ourselves over the last decade, from family dynamics, we were unprepared for the impact that Roy's abrupt death brought to our lives & found ourselves navigating some bumpy weather- plenty of unpredictable & unexpected emotions & some very peculiar situations thrown into the mix. When Rob made his way back to his family home to be with his mother & younger brother & to say goodbye to Roy, he suddenly found that there was no room in the inn- as a strange woman (that he'd never heard of in his life before) was sleeping in his old bedroom. She announced that she was his brother's "adopted" daughter (with 6 children of her own) & set about organising everything & everybody- as if she'd, in fact, been a part of the family all along. So, within the whirling dervish of chaos that this death has wrought, we find ourselves uncomfortably facing the past, the present, the unresolved, the things we never knew, the things we will now never know & the bare-faced truth about a disordered family that was set on a path of self-destruction so long ago.
As a christian of 45+ years standing, Rob's mother has always had her little mantras like "God never fails" & "Trust in the Lord with all your heart & lean not unto your own understanding", "Oh, I can't explain it to you as you wouldn't understand. God only tells me these things." & "Always look at the beautiful person inside" (although that one never applied to me). Then, of course, if any one liked anything about me- like my cooking, she would announce loudly "If you like that sort of thing". But it wasn't until Rob's brother died in March & he was back in contact with his mother & the ghastliness started up all over again- itchy rash, seriously sprained ankle, painful teeth, awful feelings, outbursts & jittery stuff that we realised (as I had always known) that some human beings are capable of asserting their will, energy & agendas on you even from a distance & it can cause great harm. I think secretly she must have been to Hogwort school- truly!
It is not surprising then that whenever Rob went anywhere near his parents his behaviour would become bizarre, erratic & even violent & he would turn all Jekyll & Hyde on me (& himself) & suddenly I was the cause of every problem & always, always to blame. No amount of reasoning reached him & it would just have to take it's course. There were occasions in that long journey to Auckland that I decided that I had to leave, at all costs. I now recognise the narcissistic grooming of his mother that caused this truly deeply entrenched & disturbing behaviour. It's all there in the narcissistic lists. I knew that this craziness was not his authentic self- that the genuine, kind, gentle & loving Rob was still in their somewhere. And I never gave up believing that one day we might find freedom from this tyranny. And every day I did the work to unpack the mess & discover the truth.
And we made it- the transformation in Rob is luminous, extraordinary & thorough.
He's the only one that made it out.
Now here we are in 2024 and we have journeyed on further.
The last four years or so have been even more bizarre than all that came before.
Soon after turning 90 and having already created joint ownership with Colin for the family home 20 Sunray avenue, they decided that they would sell up with great fanfare. It was an old neighbour that made secretive contact with Rob to ask him if he knew that his mother and brother were selling the house. Of course he had no idea & Felicia had told the neighbour that she would never tell Rob and she didn't. So how bizarre it was to see the fantastical drama unfold before our eyes on public television. You can see the performance here. The dream was to be free and reborn in the country & to keep 200 chickens.
Rob phoned his mother & chatted & she happily invented a story of how the family were moving in with her, until Rob said but aren't you selling the house? Oh...you know! Silence.
After that there were more and more lies. They refused to say where they were moving to, even insisting that they didn't know long after the purchase was finalised. Rob's mother also declined to give him her cell phone number, yet complained to UK relatives that he was ignoring her. Not long before all this upheaval Colin married Sam and soon there was a baby called Jack and that's the last we heard, other than one phone conversation between Rob & Colin when Rob asked what was going on & Colin replied that "If Mum wants to give me everything I'm not going to stop her." Rob then asked "So how do I fit in?" & the adamant retort was "YOU DON'T". And that was that. Quite soon after that twins appeared but no one said a word until a relative passed on the fact & we picked up on national media that one of the babies had a serious heart condition and that he needed open heart surgery, but the baby's parents were making a global hullabaloo and refusing to allow a blood transfusion & therefore the surgery to save his life unless it was guaranteed to come from someone who was unvaccinated. He became internationally known as Baby W. The case was covered here. Colin's performance was recorded here. Felicia says that Will is now weaker than his brother Jethro and clingy because he was "stolen". There is another update here in July 2023. And another in February 2024. It's interesting that Sam & Colin's focus is all about following your own truth, what's in your heart & demanding freedoms of choice, "we leave no-one behind", "we always stick together"
And so time went by with wild dramas and crazy stories unfolding publicly, until the last straw was receiving this invitation in early April this year.
What wasn't mentioned was that it would be a joint birthday with the twins.
And when Rob asked what the story was with the photo, no answer was forthcoming.
For all the reasons above we declined to attend.
Just as well, since on the 11th May (Felicia's birthday) Rob received a call from her saying that she had had a stroke, that she was in Waikato hospital, she felt that God was taking her home and that since it was her birthday she would like to talk to him one last time- well how could you decline. Rob spoke to various staff members in the following days & asked to be kept updated, but later found out that his contact details had been erased. The only person decent enough to contact him directly was the consultant who was delighted to hear that Rob was a registered nurse who worked in eldercare and that he was the one talking sense. All medication had been stopped and Felicia was assessed to be palliative, but suddenly it was all on again as she had changed her mind & now wanted to live. She stayed in the ward for 5 weeks, unable & unwilling to do a thing for herself or get out of bed on her own, but absolutely determined to go 'home' to her Baptist church hall where she has been living these passed few years. She rang Rob one night again wanting to know if he worked in a hospital or a rest home (he left the hospital 15 years ago) and demanding to know if he went to church as it was important to her. The only thing that mattered to her.
It wasn't until this year that I realised that there are many forms of narcissistic personality disorder and if just one family member has such a condition the whole family is screwed. All forms of narcissism are highly toxic & incredibly destructive. With covert narcissism and especially religious covert narcissism everyone is assigned a role and the game is played in obscurity. To me this is a true form of the occult (syn concealed deep hidden magic mystic obscure psychic unknown veiled weird); darkness masquerading as goodness in plain site.
There is an excellent article here in Psychology Today with a list of 52 traits of the covert narcissist.
I would hands down give Felicia a 49 out of 52 & only because the other three aren't relevant. When you add 'religious' to this profile you end up with a highly destructive & controlling human being. Felicia was determined that all three of her sons were going to become pastors, she moulded each of them in to "mommy's boys". I would often ask Rob why on earth he put her on such a high pedestal. A mother sending her son a birthday card saying in big printing "to my handsome son", doesn't feel good to his wife, I assure you. She had such a hold on all her sons that it destroyed their ability to take responsibility for themselves (she turned a blind eye to every outrageous behaviour & ensured that they never had to take responsibility for anything in their lives, ever) and therefore impeded their capacity for genuine connection, intimacy & emotional balance & wellbeing.
Even after Linda died and Roy had found a new girlfriend Jenny that he loved dearly (shame that she had a brain tumour!), Felicia (in her late 80s) insisted that she be taken along on a cruise with them and slept in the same cabin. She refused to have them sleep together at her house as they weren't married so it would be a travesty. And later when Roy died at 64 she withheld personal items and lied about having them to prevent Jenny from proving relationship with Roy and so that she and Colin could have all the money (along with Kirsty the "adopted" daughter who received $240,000). Jenny got nothing and her personal belongings still havent been returned. When Roy died his mother cried bitterly, not for the loss of her son, but that she wouldn't be going on another cruise ever again. When Rob later asked what had happened to his brother's ashes she said she didn't know & didn't care as he wasn't here he was with the Lord. Then she moved on to Colin, signed over half the house (as I have mentioned) and bound him to care for her for the rest of her days. One of the hardest things was discovering years later that my sister-in-law and her daughter had experienced Roy (the older brother) as a sex pest without knowing he was being inappropriate to us all. He had no idea how to respect women, not even his brother's wives nor his own niece.
In every correspondence over the last 17 years Felicia insists that she always prayers for Rob & all the family. This is a problem, as her prayers have caused us great suffering and harm. I read a meme the other day that said that praying for someone was like wrapping them in a blanket of God's love, well I can tell you now I would rather poke my eyes out with a stick than receive this kind of "love". Through all the years there came so many letters with so many tales of chaos & tragedy & all wrapped in scripture & prayer, yet for all the zillions of prayers that Felicia prayed we never saw a single good thing come from them. Not one person was healed, or didn't die, nor was a single bad situation resolved or improved, ever. No, not once. God's honest truth.
Those living out of narcissistic personality disorders never change, nor will they let you go & so even though the human being grows older, the energy becomes denser, more concrete and more entrenched. It was during this period that I started hearing a drip in my bedroom. Rob hunted everywhere to find the leak. He even disconnected all the irrigation right around the house, but to no avail. In the end we realised I was hearing the paranormal, a clairaudience of sorts. Narcissism is one of the lowest forms of energy and attracts dark energy- somehow through the power of her unceasing prayers Felicia had bound us in a perpetual state of persecution. I often have nightmares & sleep very poorly almost all the time no matter what I do to help myself. It's now been 45 years...when will it ever end? And will we ever be free?
It's been fascinating researching narcissism again as I write this. This summary of the narcissist family- between our two families we could surely tick every single trait in one way or another.
Narcissistic homes have unspoken rules of engagement that dictate interactions among family members:
1. Acceptance is conditional- to gain acceptance, children must comply with the family narrative and value system. Expressions of difference are rejected and pathologized.
2. Submission is required- everyone is expected to submit to the dominant narcissist’s authority, no matter how ignorant, arbitrary, cruel, or destructive it is.
3. Someone must be blamed for problems- when something bad happens, from a lost job to a spilled glass of milk, someone must be blamed for it. Typically there is a family scapegoat who is made to bear the main burden of the family’s problems, frustration, and unhappiness, as well as the dominant narcissist’s projected self-loathing.
4. Vulnerability is dangerous~ mistakes, accidents, and weaknesses, even ones you take responsibility for, are cause for shaming treatment that can persist for years.
5. You must take sides- just as there is always blame and shame, there are always sides, and if you are not on the dominant narcissist’s side you are wrong. Children often feel forced to choose between parents, siblings, and other family members.
6. There is never enough love and respect to go around- renewable resources in healthy families, love and respect are limited to the narcissist and whomever else is deemed worthy, usually a favored "golden" child. Respect for one person means disrespect for another.
7. Feelings are wrong- the feelings that make us human, help us connect and get our needs met, and protect us from harm are selfish and must be repressed. Only the narcissist has free rein to express feelings, have emotional reactions, and make demands.
8. Competition, not cooperation, rules the day- one-upmanship, favoritism, and constant comparison create a harshly competitive environment that undermines trust and breeds hostility and betrayal.
9. Appearances are more important than substance~ even if everyone is suffering, they must smile for the family photo.
10. Rage is normalized~ everyone is expected to swallow and endure the dominant narcissist’s irrational, explosive, and perhaps also violent rage. This may be magnified by other forms of mental illness and/or addiction.
11. Denial is rampant~ to sustain the dominant narcissist’s control over the family, there is denial of:
- abusive incidents.
- the continual atmosphere of fear.
- the ongoing mistreatment of the scapegoat.
- routine forms of neglect.
12. There is no safety~ although the scapegoat is targeted with the most abuse, everyone is on hyper-alert because no one is safe from blame and rage.
Adapted from The Narcissist in Your Life: Recognizing the Patterns and Learning to Break Free, by Julie L. Hall, Hachette Books.
So what became of Rob's relationships with his brothers Roy and Colin? Exactly every single one of these things:
- Dismisses your feelings and opinions.
- Blames you for family conflict.
- Blames you for your parents’ abusiveness toward you.
- Acts as a flying monkey for your narcissistic parents.
- Doesn’t ask about your life.
- Contradicts and corrects you.
- Insists on being right.
- Constantly competes.
- Interrupts, monologues, and interrogates.
- Projects his antagonism onto you.
- Acts bored or irritated when you speak.
- Expects attention, agreement, and/or caretaking without reciprocating.
- Is reactive to disagreement or perceived criticism.
- Is verbally and/or physically threatening or abusive.
- Is judgmental of your choices and lifestyle.
- Disrespects your partner.
- Respects your partner over you.
- Withholds family information from you.
- Allows your narcissistic parents to triangulate your communication.
- Denies and gaslights you about the family dysfunction.
- Plays the cool rationalist.
- Says or implies you’re too sensitive when you react to abuse.
- Sets you up for sabotage.
- Does not acknowledge your experience, knowledge, and accomplishments.
- Displaces his anger at your parents onto you.
- Participates in your parents’ smear campaigns against you.
One of the most tragic aspects of life in a narcissistic family system is the erosion and loss of sibling bonds. Narcissistic parents deliberately sow division among siblings as a way to destabilize family members, exert control, feel powerful, and feed on drama. Children who adopt their parents’ narcissistic patterns lose or fail to develop empathy and internalize the belief that vulnerability is weakness, love is conditional, and rights and respect are reserved for a chosen few. Often a golden child builds their identity around feeling superior to a subjugated sibling, creating lifelong alienation and cruelty. From the narcissist family files.
None of the boys were given the role of family scapegoat- that was reserved for me. I observed a regular rotation of golden child status for each of Felicia's three sons through the years, until somewhere along the line Rob was shunned by them all.
It's so sad that when you are living amidst a narcissistic family dynamic you have no idea why everything is so wrong and uncomfortable but it is painfully obvious to me now when I pick up on defining characteristics of the narcissistic family like these three that I can see that we never had a hope as both sides were tarred indelibly with this brush:
- Lack of Effective Communication. The most common means of communication in narcissistic families is triangulation. Information is not direct. It is told through one party about another in hopes it will get back to the other party. Family members talk about each other to other members of the family, but don't confront each other directly. This creates passive-aggressive behavior, tension, and mistrust. When communication is direct, it is often in the form of anger or rage.
- Unclear Boundaries. There are few boundaries in the narcissistic family. Children's feelings are not considered important. Private diaries are read, physical boundaries are not kept, and emotional boundaries are not respected. The right to privacy is not typically a part of the family history.
- Negative Messages. Children are given spoken and unspoken messages that get internalized, typically: "You're not good enough"; "You don't measure up"; "You are valued for what you do rather than for who you are." Dr Karyl McBride.
Bethany Webster states: "Many see the act of examining one’s childhood to be avoiding adult responsibility and pointlessly dwelling on the past.
Yet, the epitome of not taking responsibility is refusing to deal with the pain of your childhood and then unconsciously projecting your unprocessed pain onto other people.
This can be very challenging for those of older generations who were rewarded for being silent about the truth of their pain. In generations past, the very definition of honor and responsibility involved hiding painful truths–and this worldview is still quite dominant in our world today.
Some parents may unconsciously expect their adult children to be silent about their feelings because this is what was expected of them. That was how family loyalty and honor were defined.
Children were to be seen and not heard. And adult children who examine their histories may be viewed with suspicion, distrust, or outright scorn.
Due to the belief that silence is honor, the old form of “honor thy mother and father” has allowed for inter-generational pain to fester and to be unconsciously passed along for centuries.
I really like this chart that I found recently, so simple & easily understood. And it applies very nicely to the predicament we found ourselves in- embroiled in our dysfunctional narcissistic family dynamics. It has really helped us to clarify why we have never found a space in life to thrive as we didn't have a hope of establishing robust emotional regulation (even in our own family) while still being tied in to such toxic family distortions, therefore we ended up living in the red zone most of our adult lives. No amount of soothing compensates nor has a lasting impact within the narcissistic stress dynamic, and our drive systems often lapsed in to procrastination or stuckness for the same reasons- mostly feeling bad about ourselves and ashamed of being treated so badly by so many people. It is nigh impossible to have dreams and goals when you are in perpetual fight, fright, freeze or fawn mode. Yet, the epitome of not taking responsibility is refusing to deal with the pain of your childhood and then unconsciously projecting your unprocessed pain onto other people.
This can be very challenging for those of older generations who were rewarded for being silent about the truth of their pain. In generations past, the very definition of honor and responsibility involved hiding painful truths–and this worldview is still quite dominant in our world today.
Some parents may unconsciously expect their adult children to be silent about their feelings because this is what was expected of them. That was how family loyalty and honor were defined.
Children were to be seen and not heard. And adult children who examine their histories may be viewed with suspicion, distrust, or outright scorn.
Due to the belief that silence is honor, the old form of “honor thy mother and father” has allowed for inter-generational pain to fester and to be unconsciously passed along for centuries.
One of the major taboos in our culture is that conflict is bad,
Yet, conflict that is in the service of transformation is necessary.
If we avoid all conflict, we avoid growth, greater intimacy, and deeper understanding.
We must re-envision how we approach conflict and discomfort, not as a form of personal attack or victimhood, but as a necessary step in creating greater intimacy and understanding."
Yet, conflict that is in the service of transformation is necessary.
If we avoid all conflict, we avoid growth, greater intimacy, and deeper understanding.
We must re-envision how we approach conflict and discomfort, not as a form of personal attack or victimhood, but as a necessary step in creating greater intimacy and understanding."
Living immersed in this state introduced a melancholy in to our lives comprised of layers and layers of grief.
This is 20 Sunray avenue in Titirangi- the home that Rob's parents built almost 60 years ago. This was when it was all tidied up for the sale in 2020. For all the years that I ever visited the place was an absolute dump with multiple cars permanently parked on top of each other beside the house and crap all over the place, stairs rotting and fences falling over. The downstairs area behind the plants has a tiny window & only a dirt floor. Rob's father stashed loads of old car parts in their for decades and it stank so badly it would make me gag. The laundry was on the other side and smelled just as vile and the downstairs flat wasn't much better. Rob's grandmother Patsy lived in the flat until her death on Christmas day in 1985.
So, how surprising it was to receive a message telling us that the neighbour who had bought the house had spent thousands of hours radically renovating the entire property. There's a redemption in there somewhere that feels pretty amazing. 
"Survivors of narcissistic abuse have basically endured psychological warfare."
Perhaps it's simply the absence of love- a 'not-love', a failure to nourish, a failure to thrive, a poverty of 'not-family'.
And that is the great tragedy of this story of origin as there was no part that was loving, except Rob's early life & perhaps his parents relationship with our children when they were young.
It wasn't until I began to read the many articles listing the common patterns of narcissistic personality disorder that I finally realised that we weren't alone in this horror, it wasn't even really personal. The one that got us the most however, was the lying- a symptom known as mythomania or pseudologia fantastica. I don't imagine that any of us expect to be born in to a family where we find ourselves continually betrayed, misled, controlled, gagged & lied to. Even this week, as the story has taken a new turn, we have uncovered further lies, cover ups, distortions & omissions.
I didn't imagine as I began writing this post that the conclusion would simultaneously arrive.
Definitely happenstance in action, or perhaps a Godwink.
Last Thursday Rob woke with pain in his right kidney (kidneys hold our mauri, our life force). I went off to work for the afternoon leaving him with Kawakawa tea, a wheatie & resting in bed. When I returned he was in considerable discomfort & distress. Kidneys are not things to be taken lightly so we decided that we had better head down the road to the medical centre. They had trouble finding him in the system as we visit so infrequently. We were well taken care of & there wasn't even much of a wait. The doctor diagnosed renal colic & prescribed a huge amount of pain relief & another nasty medicine that had us perplexed. By the time we got home Rob was feeling much better & continued drinking Kawakawa tea that I had now added parsley to. Rob was also signed off from work for the weekend. Whatever it was had now resolved & he was fine again so a good rest from work was most welcome. By Monday our David ended up in hospital in Lower Hutt with rapid pulse & anxiety- a reaction to a medication. He was kept in overnight for observation. I had the scariest night with nightmares anxiety & feeling as if I was dying. We had to pull ourselves together as we had a meeting here with the new Watties EHS at 11am. Half way through our chat both our phones started pinging- messages to say that Felicia had returned to hospital & had hours, perhaps days of life left. By 12.05pm she had gone. Finally she was dead. 45 years & at last her iron grip is broken. But that doesn't mend a family, or put people's lives back together, nor does it return our children to us.
Colin txt Rob to let him know their mother had died. And then there was another with the basic details of when & where the funeral would be. Even an old neighbour received a phone call. There was no invitation for Rob to participate in any way.
We will not be going to the funeral. Why? Because of all of the above.
There is much sadness, but it is entirely for ourselves- the terrible grief of being treated so badly (& utterly unnecessarily so) for soooo many years- all our prime adult lives.
Vulnerability doesn’t mean telling others what happened to us from across a cafe table or from behind a microphone
vulnerability means allowing your human heart blanket to get sewn to other heart blankets
it’s about connection
we don’t share for status
we do it for synergy
we don’t confess for clout
we do it to build community
we tell our tale
to invite others
to tell theirs
it’s the sacred cycle
of storytelling
we gather in a circle of trust and
say “here is my journey”
then we listen to
the other journeys
that are shared
we take space
then we give space
we pour
then we absorb
we speak
then we listen
we are storytellers
then we are witnesses
vulnerability isn’t just about
grave digging in our past
to expose our skeletons
it’s about sewing quilts
here is my patch
here is your patch
here is their patch
here is us
On the 9 th July 2024 Felicia Reeves finally died at the age of 95 at 12.05pm. On the 16 th July 2024 she is being farewelled in Cambridge as I write this. She will be cremated this afternoon. I now publish this story at 12.05pm in the hope & belief that we will now finally be free of her tyranny.
But there is another chapter to this story: From Hoha to Hikihiki & that chapter is a true miracle, given what we've been up against for so long.
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