Nothing’s more important than my four kids, my mother always claimed. My life is my kids. And she believed it. As did my father. That she was the center of our family was certain, but I was never convinced we were her center–her happiness, that her love was as pure and complete as she insisted...

With an ambivalent mother as the barometer of mood and well-being (often it’s opposite), our home was a threatening place. She knew all and saw all, and though there’s still a part of me that wants to refute it, her responses were violent. But the young Joan didn’t know that; in fact, this is the first...

As unpredictable as my mother was, my father was that predictable. He was a devoted father who worked hard and spent all his free time praying and helping neighbors with various plumbing and construction projects around their homes. (My parents emigrated from Ireland each at 18, just weeks before the Depression,...

The effects of having an ambivalent mother and passive father resulted in lifelong trust and intimacy problems for me and my siblings, and our mother’s demand for devotion often resulted in emotional triangles. She insinuated herself into virtually every relationship we had. The most painful of these...

My older brother S was the first of us to leave home. Not in body (none of us did that until we married) but he bought a motorcycle—a Harley Davidson. He was eighteen. When Dad and Mom refused to give their permission, he got our older sister to sign for it. He needed someone over twenty-one to sign...

One would hope that in a dysfunctional family, the siblings might band together thereby gaining support from each other; perhaps even offer a more positive mirror through which to view themselves, but this didn’t happen for the most part in my family. My older siblings were convinced that I was Mom’s...

I’d been single for over eight years and complained bitterly to my therapist that the only men I met were either unavailable or competitive: committed to proving they were smarter than me, when he suggested that I attend a psychology conference going on that weekend at NYU where I was studying for my...

Just as there is no universally correct way to live a life –i.e. in a committed relationship or single, so also is this true for the decision to have or not have children. The choice is individual and varies with the needs and wants of each person. One of the most critical decisions one makes in a lifetime,...

As I’ve explored in the Roadblocks series, the root of my family’s dysfunction was my mother’s insatiable need to possess us, exacerbated by my father’s passivity. Though conversation between me and my father over the years clarified much about him, this was not the case with my mother. Closure for me...