If I change but one life for the better with this post, I will be content. A true story.

My mother was a sadist, hit me, screamed at me instead of just speaking. If people had known what she did to me (you can read my Featured story under my Profile) she would've spent years in prison even then back in the 1950s.

She would wake me up in the middle of the night and interrogate me about who I talked to and what I did, threaten me with torture (described in detail), then give me something to drink that would send me back to sleep and make me forget the interrogation sessions but still remember the threats subconsciously.

Obviously, if I am telling the truth (and I am, though I realize some will not believe me), these drugs did not work perfectly. Because I did consciously remember some of these sessions. And they filled me with fear.

The problem with anyone trying to do anything about this was:
Everyone was terrified of my mother, and with good reason. She could end their life, or life as they knew it, with a phone call. No one wanted to bell the cat.

My mother had a very successful career going. She was....a child care expert! No, I'm not kidding. She was a director of a nursery school (where she was known to treat each child with kindness and respect) and she did an excellent job of running her school. She was written up in our local newspaper twice during my miserable childhood with multi-page articles and photographs. Everyone always told me how grateful I should be that she adopted me (at birth). Everyone knows that child care experts are the gentlest people with children, and everyone knows that adoptive parents, with their rescue children, are the most loving of parents. Wasn't I lucky?!

I remember one Saturday when our baby sitter had an emergency and couldn't show up and I was forced to go with my mother to one of the parenting seminars she gave. I was quietly angry as I listened to her tell parents in very emphatic and dramatic tones to never shout at their children or hit them because you fill the child with fear and bring out the worst in them.

As the seminar broke up, people kept telling me how lucky I was to have my wise and wonderful mother. Then we left to go home. As we began the ride over Laurel Canyon, a high winding mountain road, I got too angry to remain silent. I said, "If all those parents had any idea how you treat me they would never go to your seminars."

My mother backhanded me across the face. I was in a very defiant mood, so I screamed, "You're MEAN!" She hit me again, harder. And drove faster. I screamed louder, "You're MEAN!" Each time I screamed, I screamed louder, and she hit me harder. And drove faster.

It quickly became clear to me that, the speed at which she was driving, on that high mountain road, was about to kill both of us. I decided I hated her enough to not care if I died. I knew we'd go over one of those cliffs at any second, but I didn't care, I had to keep screaming out the truth I lived with silently every day. And she obviously felt the same; she would rather die in a car accident than stop hitting me.

As I screamed louder and she drove faster, a policeman pulled up behind her on a motorcycle, turned on his siren and pulled her over. He asked her if she'd been drinking alcohol, then told her to get out of the car, walk a straight line, count backwards etc. He told her she'd been on the verge of a serious accident. His final words to her, as he handed her a ticket for reckless driving, were: "It is not my job to tell you how to discipline your child. But it is my job to tell you that you cannot do it in a moving motor vehicle."

We were both quiet all the way home. I think our brush with Mr. D and the law had sobered both of us although we'd been high on rage, not alcohol.

Years later, a guy who'd once worked as a cop for the LAPD told me they'd never allowed cops on motorcycles in Laurel Canyon. The cop who stopped us saved both of our lives. Was this really a cop? Or was it an angel posing as a cop? I'll never know but I know what I think.