I don’t know what I can say about the ongoing trainwreck that is my mother-in-law’s life, but Norma Barton is crazy.
Now, I’m not a psychiatrist, or a psychologist, or even a person who has taken more than Psych 101 (and that’s only if you count AP Psych which I did take, but it was the first year and the essay question was, “Compare and contrast psychoanalysis and behaviorism in 5 paragraphs” which is pretty much all you do in an introduction to psychology, so I’m not exactly proud of the 5 I got, but then again, I think the world of psychology is full of charlatans). But I know crazy when I see it.
My wife’s family has developed a coping strategy from years of dealing with Norma in which they only ever seem to remember the evil things she’s done to them when she’s not around. As soon as she shows up and starts throwing around demands and threats, all anybody can remember is that one time when she took the family to Disneyworld, even if she may have been doing it to impress her girlfriend that she was pretending was just her friend and who disappeared years later under suspicious circumstances just when she was talking about coming out to their church. Or whatever.
And I guess that Norma thinks that the rest of the world has this same problem.
She honestly thinks when she calls me up that we’re all pals and that I don’t remember the time when I told her to stop making threatening calls to my wife and she called my employer to try to get me fired.
Or the time that I went to her house and saw papers from the State of Maryland describing how much money she was getting for baby-sitting my daughter at her day care when Sierra hadn’t been to her house in over a year.
Or the fact that my parents live 1000 miles away and she lived less than 10 and yet my parents managed to see her grandchildren more often than she did.
Or that time when Kellie was looking for some of her paperwork at her mom’s house and found those printed emails talking to her boyfriend from El Paso about how she had only gotten into bestiality (her word) because he said it would turn him on.
So Norma, if you’re reading this, I want you to try to remember something. I’m not your loving son-in-law. More importantly, unlike the rest of your family, I’m not afraid of you. And I’ll do everything in my power to protect the people under my roof from becoming the victims of your plotting.