Gone bad

Parents are the more immediate gods in our lives, the ones who create us in their own image and whose presence decides what we have and have not. They write the code we live by, set the parameters for our morals and can be our intermediary between life and death.

In the early years, most of the things I believed were true, maybe even true enough to die defending, were the things my parents taught me. I trusted them to really know and to be honest with me.

There were a few hitches like when I misunderstood that it didn't take both ten dimes and a hundred pennies to make a dollar and those ephemeral gift givers like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny might not have been literally real, but hey, who can't forgive that kind of mix up?

Less forgivable are insidious misconceptions that come through the generations, but have never been laudable. Someone needs to step in and change them.

Things like gently, sweetly, quietly, deriding everyone in the world but mother and her maternal line. Emphasizing it with clever, sort of funny, stories to make sure it sticks. These things breed a line of loyalty that become a line of demarcation between mother and everyone else.

This type of mother keeps her children close with fear by disguising it as love and it can be unwittingly passed on generation after generation. Just one example of love gone bad.