I'm not a fan of country music, but after seeing a young singer/songwriter, Chely Wright talk in very honest, insightful and sincere terms about her life and her coming out of the closet experiences on the Oprah show, I zipped over to Amazon.com and listened to a few cuts from her new album. I love singer/songwriters and her personal insights on the Oprah show were echoed in the music, so I bought a copy of her her new CD "Lifted off the Ground". I saw that she also had a book out and since it was a cheap, fast, $10 download to my Kindle and I am very fond of instant gratification, I bought a copy.
As I began to read I noticed form the beginning that a lot of her soul searching reminded me of mine. She also refused to defend herself against other children's comments and displayed a strong innocence around people, even when they clearly wanted to hurt her and might be dangerous. She also felt that everything bad that happened around her was somehow God punishing others for her sin of being gay.She attributed all of this behavior to being gay but as the book wore on something else emerged. She had a weak father who sometimes drank, and was frequently ordered by the mother to savagely beat the children. Chely constantly tried to please her by doing every chore "perfectly" but her attempts at getting physical affection were spurned. She attributed this to her mother being in pain from polio...always she excused or blamed herself. And then came the event that nearly knocked me out of my chair!
Her sister was overweight, something the mother could not stand. She said that she would simply not have a FAT child. So one day her mother forced her to put a leash around her waist, tied her to the back bumper of the car and forced her to run behind it down a public road!! Looking back over what I had read and other incidents in the book, it became quite clear...this poor girl was the daughter of a mother with NPD.
Luckily her mother and father divorced and she now has the love of her father, but like so many stories of daughters of N's, she write at the end of the book that she hopes one day her mother will love and accept her! Sadly, because she attributes so much of the person suffering to her inability to come out in the country world, it appears that she has yet to start the process of realizing the hidden roots of some of her behaviors.
