Guest Blog from my friend John Williams: The Woman You Thought You Knew

THE WOMAN YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW
by John Williams

A true story about real people written in the form of a short story

CAST OF CHARACTERS AND THE REAL PEOPLE THEY REPRESENT

Renee Folger—representing real person Jane the H. of blog entry "Dregs"
Ben Folger—representing real person Ron the H. of "Dregs"
Both influential leaders among Indianapolis "progressives" and "socialists"
Glen Fowler—representing real person George Fish
All long-time activists among Indianapolis "progressives" and "socialists"

Disclaimer: Although a story based on real people and real events, it is still a short story, and should not be taken as a completely true-to-life documentary; however, it is substantively based on the facts and psychologies of the personages as the author knew them, and he’s known each personage depicted for decades.

The story of Renee Folger needs to be told. Through this uncovering of her life, you’ll get to know her and the secrets that were found out. Many of these previously-unknown secrets were expressed only after her passing. Be on guard, read carefully and see what happened, lest it happen to you.

As the story begins, we learn that Renee’s husband, Ben, has a good-paying job in a local government office. He buys champagne and roses for Renee, and provides a good living. Renee rejoices in her husband’s good position, and provides support for him in any way she can. From a distance, it seems their life is good, and that the goodness will never stop.

Ironically, Renee was doing quite well herself financially. She was a nutritionist for a large hospital complex, and her decisions were final, no questions asked. Good money, authority over others, and a husband with a good-paying job. Wow! What else could she want?

For reasons unknown, Renee was the money handler for her family of two; the couple never had any children. As such, she wrote the checks, paid the bills, and made all the financial decisions. Her husband took the backseat completely. This was so obvious that some said the husband didn’t even know how to write a check, even a little one.

Renee needed control over everything, and she got it. She controlled the finances, and developed into what might be called a “helper.” Her life’s mission was to help others and make a beautiful, happy world where she and her friends could live.

But even in this make-believe world some problems seeped in. There was a political shift at work, and her husband’s job situation changed dramatically. Over time, he was maneuvered out of his job. He soon needed help, and Renee was more than happy to step in.

Renee and Ben were of the Quaker faith. Over the course of many years, they regularly attended church services and made many close friends. Renee, of course, was the center of attention, and soon her friends considered her a type of angel. She could do no wrong! She was the perfect example of goodness and correctness—or so it seemed on the surface. This surface appearance of goodness and correctness was so strong that, in fact, had she been a member of a different religion, she would have been up for canonization as a saint.

Ben, now unemployed, gained employment as a Quaker minister. Gee, imagine that! As time went on, the members of the congregation became unhappy with the new minister. It seems he wanted to take his faith-driven purpose in life to the streets. The higher-ups decided that Ben would have to go. Quite frankly, he wasn’t following the rules of Quaker orthodoxy, and was considered somewhat too radical for official purposes and decorum.

Being very close to Ben and his situation, naturally, Renee once again found another place where she could “help.” She did have friends and money, and Ben certainly had a need. Renee, however, didn’t look to Ben to decide what he wanted, but instead decided for Ben that he needed a new direction. Perhaps his message could be better expressed, and his mission better accomplished, as an editor and typesetter who also worked other ancillary journalistic occupations. At least, she thought, here he could have freedom of expression and perhaps make some money.

Next, we find Ben being the editor of a small political newspaper. The title of “editor” is used loosely here, as Ben was editor in name only. Renee knew the finances of the paper and, through knowing such, had control of what was published and by whom. Once again, her decisions were final and not to be disputed, even by Ben.

As time went on, Renee’s helpfulness found a new outlet. She embraced the less fortunate, those people on the street who needed direction and hope. Sometimes she blended politics and religion quite nicely, as they both fit together quite well. Or--at least it appeared that way!

Social issues abounded, and help was needed. Renee and Ben attended meetings and protests to add their input—and their impotence in matters of power to really effect change—to various causes. Dues were paid and contributions were forthcoming. A new cause, a new day. Renee was happy, prosperous, and boy, could she help!

But during this felicitous time something else happened. Something unexpected, something that would have a substantial effect on Renee and Ben for years to come: Glen Fowler entered their lives. He met Renee and Ben at one of the political meetings they attended. For whatever reason, there was an attraction by Glen to what seemed to be a very nice couple. Or so he thought!

Glen Fowler’s background was complex, troubled, and unknown to Renee and Ben. The experiences of his life that he revealed, however, fit in quite nicely into Renee’s notion of the type of person she could really help. Really help! And what did Glen really need? In a word, everything.

For too many years, Glen had been trapped by the circumstances of his life. As a youth, Glen had been forced to accept the dictates of his parents and family. He had no choice, no alternative, no recourse! His parents were members of an orthodox religion that was very authoritative, very authoritarian, and accepted no dissent or rebuttal. It was either “this way” or “the highway.”

The elements of this faith reinforced his parents’ view of child-rearing, which was also quite authoritarian. As Glen got older, conflicts arose within his family. Questions arose, and were not answered. He soon realized that if he were to survive, he needed to “shut up” and somehow “go away” at the very minimum. He did just that because he had to.

Living as he did in a small town under the rule of unquestioned authority, Glen longed for a way out. It came when he left home for college in the mid-1960s.

The 1960s in America was a time of revolution. It was an era of protests, marches, and discontent with the war in Vietnam. It was an unsettling time of new ideas and challenges. Also, it was a time of new-found freedoms.

Glen left home and stepped into a whole new dimension. For the first time in his life, Glen had total freedom, the ability to do whatever he wanted. It was during this time that Glen learned many new ideas, and found out for himself how vastly different the world can be. It was the first time Glen had been exposed to different races, cultures, political beliefs and religions. Here too came his beginning experiences with alcohol, drugs and the opposite sex. Wow, what a beginning of real life!

Life is filled with twists and turns. It seems the great awakening gradually took its toll on Glen. While in college he recognized that something was wrong. He became depressed and somewhat disoriented. Glen sought help at the college infirmary, and this began a most negative and long-term disaster.

For the next several years Glen’s life was literally on hold. He followed instructions from the medical folks. He took his medications, attended his counseling sessions. Little did he know he was on a merry-go-round that was leading him nowhere. But not only that for Glen; Ben wasn’t aware either that he’d fallen into a trap himself—one of answering to authority with no rebuttal allowed. Both had fallen into traps set by Renee by her need to “help” others through controlling them.

Things went from bad to worse. And now Glen was faced with a multitude of unpleasant situations: inadequate housing, unemployment, alcoholism, apathy form family, and many confusing and conflicting feelings.

Ben and Renee, on the other hand, were doing quite well. Ben’s business wasn’t overly successful, but at least he had a private office, regular meals, and a place of his own. And incidentally, he had Renee. Or was it the other way around?

Renee’s need to help soon surrounded Glen. Once again, Glen had accidentally tripped and stumbled into a trap of which he wasn’t aware. He had fallen into the clutches of a most accommodating helper. A trap very similar to living at home but with much more long-lasting and dangerous consequences.

The years passed slowly. Renee’s help came to Glen in various ways. She helped Glen pay his rent and was gracious enough to speak to him and allow him to visit Ben’s office. Wonderful! She even allowed some of his articles to be published.

Glen had learned many things over time. Unable to adequately defend himself against adversity, Glen reluctantly accepted Renee’s help, but suspected that other vital needs and their satisfaction would have to be relinquished in exchange for Renee’s help. His suspicions were soon to be realized, but this was readily dismissed by Renee due to her power and Glen’s lack of influence.

Glen was sounding an alarm. No one listened. He longed to tell everyone about Renee and what she was doing. He wanted others to know of Renee’s pretentious appearance of goodness and “help” she cultivated, while simultaneously treating Glen as unworthy of respect and not worthy of being treated like a human being. His efforts in this regard fell on deaf ears. No one listened or cared. Still Glen persisted, and tried in every conceivable way to tell others.

During all this, Fate stepped in and brought forth an unexpected event—Renee’s health began to wither. She had liver cancer.

As Renee’s health continued to decline, Glen still held on to his message. The timing of Glen’s message and Renee’s failing health didn’t sit well with others. Once again, Glen was asked to be silent and please, go away!

What was Glen’s message? And why was it so important that he felt he needed to write an essay and make it available to mourners after Renee’s demise? Yes, Renee had passed! But now, what of Glen and his message?

What Glen had to say had been learned over a period spanning greater than twenty years. He had paid a dear price for what he’d learned. He hadn’t known that Renee, due to her influence, was socially isolating Glen. He hadn’t known of the criticism of him behind his back to everyone Renee knew. He hadn’t known about the private conversations that had been held to talk about him. He hadn’t even known how phony and obnoxious “helpers” can be. All this he’d found out the hard way.

Additionally, he hadn’t known that when Renee passed she’d saddled her husband with bills for utilities that had been unpaid for the previous three months. Also, that the bulk of her estate had been left for charity, not her husband, who now had next to nothing. Incidentally, he hadn’t even been aware that Ben, Renee’s husband, now widower, didn’t even know how to drive a car.

Glen certainly knew that Renee’s husband was totally controlled by her. But he didn’t know that when Renee died, she’d left Ben as an infant to walk alone now in the woods. In fact, Ben now felt imposed upon when he had to answer the telephone, a small task formerly managed by Renee.

So much to know about someone trying to help!

Glen’s hard-learned message is clear: Let no one control you! Further, his experiences raise certain moral questions that really need to be answered. For instance, is charity always from the heart, or are there “charitable” people who demand repayment for it in insidious, treacherous ways? Can we have good intentions but, in reality, do harm despite them? Lastly, how can we be sure when someone justifies actions such as these that they were, as they state, “directed by God”?

At first glance, Renee appeared to be the personification of goodness. When she passed, however, she left behind a poor child with nothing, and a man who couldn’t forget what she did. Is this the woman you thought you knew?

On Mother's Day: for those mothers who were really "mothers"

...as in that compound word that begins with “mother” and is followed by a second word that begins with “f.” Unofrtunately, that was the kind of mother I had, as will be seen below, and I see no reason to be disingenuously silent about it.

This piece was originally posted on my former Bloomington Alternative blog on Mother’s Day, 2008. The only thing changed is to give it the date for Mother's Day, 2011--GF

Well, it’s May 8, 2011, Mother’s Day. A day to get sentimental about Mother, celebrate fulsomely how our mother contributed so positively to our upbringing as children that she guaranteed our satisfaction and success as adults. But what my mother so fulsomely gave me through the way she raised me—and I’ll be brutally honest here—is simply a deep sense of regret at being born.

Had I a choice in the matter I wouldn’t have chosen either her or my father to be my parents. And I certainly wouldn’t have chosen to be raised in their Catholic religion. Nor would I have chosen to be part of that dysfunctional, authoritarian, repressive Catholic family I was raised in, and which was so very typical of Catholic families, both in its authoritarian lovelessness and in its exercise of arbitrary, repressive power.

My mother had one particular bête noire, and that was men and boys urinating standing up, and thus allegedly dripping and splashing. She was so obsessed with this that any little faux pas on my part would set her off in a screaming apoplectic rage so deep that her face would not only turn beet red, but the veins and tendons in her neck stand would out like mountain ranges as well. She’d screech at the top of her lungs, “All women just hate that!” then go into a ten-minute tirade on how all women were deeply offended and put upon by males urinating standing up, with their inevitable dripping and splashing on the rim of the toilet bowl. (But I never did know another woman who was so deeply offended by this natural male urination the way she was.) These unpredictable apoplectic rages, which could be set off at any time over any issue, were an integral part of not only my childhood, but my adolescence and even adulthood as well. Needless to say, as a good Catholic wife and mother, she never did go off on my father for his urinating the same way I did. She saved the expression of her seething rage at my father (and probably her own father as well) for when he was completely out of earshot. She needed a convenient scapegoat for her rage at my father, and lucky me, I became it.

Of course, that’s fundamentally child abuse, verbal and emotional child abuse that cuts as deeply as any physical abuse does (but which I was not generally subject to, only continuous verbal and emotional abuse). Needless to say, such abusive tirades not only undermined my most basic sense of self-esteem, any sense whatsoever of ever living up to any positive expectation on my part that I would ever please my mother; and their very capriciousness and unpredictability made me grow up with a constant fearful awareness of walking on eggs. With no recourse or avenue of escape whatsoever, for neither church nor society provided for that; they only upheld and reinforced such abuse as within the proper realm of parental authority.

I inherited a less-than-sterling set of genes from both my parents. Those behavioral patterns and mind-sets that have been so troublesome for myself and others in my life—my irritability, moodiness, sudden mood changes, depression and seething rage that suddenly, unpredictably explodes in volcanic eruption—I now see clearly as being integrally part of both my parents’ personalities also. But their power and authority enabled them to completely get away with it. As for me, when I was 18 and a college student, I sought psychiatric help for depression, only to have my life essentially put 40+ years on hold as the perpetual psychiatric outpatient. (Such is the result for most people entering into psychiatric treatment—the “professionals” now take it upon themselves to micro-manage their patients for the rest of their lives, because they’re obviously incapable of ever being more than demented cripples. This is called “curing mental illness.”) The Problem George I was to my parents and to the Catholic Church now became Problem George to psychiatry as well.

My mother’s great fear was somehow not being found quite respectable enough no matter what she did or didn’t do. This according to that tawdry, constricted sense of what was respectable and what was not so assiduously promulgated by the Reader’s Digest especially in those days of my youth, the 1950s and early 1960s. Both my parents read the Reader’s Digest religiously, the only magazine either of them ever did read regularly, or at all (my mother also read religiously the eminently respectable woman’s magazine of the day, McCall’s). Being “respectable” under such conditions meant not only not challenging authority, but also never being suspect or doubted by authority; and for parents, that “respectability” also meant never having children who weren’t also “respectable” by those standards. Alas, I failed miserably at that test. I was simply too bright, too stupidly unable to resist asking the question “Why?” in the Catholic school system to ever expect to pass that test, the test by which “good Catholics” were measured. And, needless to say, a system dominated in the most brutally authoritarian way by priests and nuns, and one never, never, crossed a priest or nun and expected to be considered worthwhile. My father once did so in my defense, and after being firmly rebuffed by the priest who was also the school’s principal, never made that mistake again. As for my mother, she hated those “liberal, questioning” priests that came out of the authoritarian closet in the early, heady days of Vatican II, much preferring those rigid, fundamentalist priests who could comfort her in her sorrowful lot as the Sinful Daughter of Eve, but who was still redeemable as a woman if she kept her nose clean.

Feminism changed (only partially, conditionally, unevenly) part of this. Needless to say, my mother hated feminism as “un-womanly,” and still does. She’s not overly fond of anti-racist (she’d say regularly in the 1960s, “They don’t want equal rights, they want special rights.”) or antiwar attitudes either (she’d say also in the 1960s against my opposition to the war in Vietnam, “No one wants war, but…” and then uphold the Vietnam War in knee-jerk, “respectable” fashion). In the early 1970s she went into a burning rage over the daughter of a family friend who took, along with her husband, a hyphenated surname instead of her husband’s name. As noted above, “male chauvinism” to her was men urinating standing up, to which she took righteous umbrage on behalf of oppressed womanhood easily as great as that that might be expressed (on different matters, of course) by Gloria Steinem. Needless to say, I’m horribly politically incorrect by the standards of contemporary leftism for expressing such thoughts and noting such things; but as I wrote many years ago on structural oppression and the human personality, “While oppression may ennoble in some cases, in the majority it curdles, it sours and makes opportunistic the personality.” I stand by this politically incorrect, yet palpably real, insight 100% today still, even as I wish mine and yours a “Happy Mom’s Day” this May 8, 2011.

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It should be added here that I did successfully confront my mother on her past abuse and moral blindness, following the course advocated by psychotherapist Dr. Susan Forward in her excellent book, Toxic Parents, in which she says the only way to move beyond abuse is to confront the abuser. I did so, and all my mother could say in "response" was to indignantly utter the egregious falsehood, "You never had to clean toilets!" However, I will say positively that when I needed a new car my mother volunteered to take out a bank loan to pay for it. Of course, that was in her direct self-interest also: having a car to go to work and get around here in Indianapolis kept me from moving back with the family, and thus preserved peace on both sides through geographical distance!