{{{Simon}}} has asked me if I would share some of my story of how I got to where I am, what I have been through to get *here*. So this is a little bit of it. Many of us are under the illusion that we have done the work required of the process. *Illusion*, I say, because most of us haven’t even started. There are issues still to be faced. Issues of co-dependency, issues that make smothers and fodders, SMOTHERS AND FODDERS.

I had a smother. I also had a fodder. Smothers usually raise little smothers and fodders raise little fodders. But in my family, my older brother became a smother, which left me the role of fodder. Smother/fodder, that was me, after both my smother and fodder had died.

My fodder died first, delegating to me the role of fodder for my smother, which in turn, meant being fodder for my older brother and sister, too, since they both lived off smother, being smothers themselves. Each one of them claimed the freedom to do whatever they pleased, feel however they pleased, believe however they pleased, and then turn to me to make everything in their lives work out the way they wanted. Just like they had done to fodder.

I was the family’s fireman, spending most of my waking moments running around putting out the fires they had started. At one time in my life, I was taking care of a baby born deaf, taking care of a smother with Alzheimer’s, and maintaining three houses, which also consisted of paying all the bills on those three houses. “Look at me, aren’t I a heroic fodder?”

I had no life of my own, and no role or meaning in it, except for being at smothers “beck and call”. But I wasn’t my smother’s fodder. I also wasn’t my siblings fodder. But like all co-dependents, once our fodder was gone, they looked to me to fill in for him. Seems like being a codependent was all the reason they needed, to demand sucking the energy of my life from me. Using the very idea that I would not jump at the chance, to prove how much I loved them, as the basis for all their demands on my time and energy. “Prove you love me, make me happy.”

Time passed, with smother’s Alzheimer’s steadily progressing. The very worst time for smom, was when she still retained enough of her functions to know that everyday she would wake up knowing less and less. It was both mentally and emotionally torturous for her. We spent many afternoons talking and that’s when she shared her own personal hell. For she expressed there wasn’t a moment that went by that she didn’t spend in regret and remorse. She was soooo sorry for what she had done over the years but could not apologize, because fodder was gone. But he had been right and her wrong. And now she knew it.

My smom could boohoo at the drop of a hat. As she often did when things did not go her way or her idea of the way things were suppose to go. That’s when she’d hit us over the head with guilt trips for “making her cry.” The very worst possible trouble we could get into with fodder, was upsetting smother. And what she admitted to me, is that what she had done all her life, was use guilt trips whenever she was unhappy, especially on fodder and especially when it came to my older brother. The sibling that had returned ‘home’ right after fodder’s death and been living like a leech off smom ever since. Forty-five years old, with two college degrees and had never earned a living in his lifetime.

This all stopped the moment that smom handed the reins of the family to me. For I lifted the burden of regret off her shoulders by promising I would take care of my brother and do what fodder would have done long ago. If she hadn’t manipulated him. I made a promise to clean up her mess. And told her not to waste one moment of her life feeling regret for me, for placing this burden on my young shoulders. I had broad shoulders, I could carry the load. I had been raised the youngest child after all, following behind two irresponsible nitwits. I had been the “garbage can” child of the family. Whatever the family’s garbage, it fell to me to deal with it.

Many thought of me as “tough” but my fodder had been the one person that *knew*. I wasn’t “tough” at all. I simply knew how to ACT “tough”, just like he had shown me. Just like is expected of all fodders in our Society.

I was made Steward of our family’s values. And I *knew* what my parents had wanted of me. I was their only hope they said, their only child that would ever have any kids of my own. They asked me to heal the family of our dysfunctions and pass along the Values they had, as parents, always striven to teach. On their respective death beds, both my smother and fodder asked me to become a mother and father, instead. “Find a way out of our box”, they instructed me. Knowing all along my penchant for finding loopholes in boxes.

I don’t get along very well now, with either smothers or fodders. For what makes us a smother or a fodder is being a co-dependent. And the very energy of codependency is what is no longer being energetically supported as a viable relationship pattern. Quite honestly, because it sucks and at its very foundation is a belief that is disrespectful towards humanity.

My smom sucked off my fodder. Exactly like the way my brother sucked off her. I realize many smothers and little smothers contend that the ‘feminine’ has been “abused” by the ‘masculine’ but this is not so. Smothers are the very ones responsible and accountable for the cultivation and nurturing of the debilitating pattern of “abuse”. Without any smothers, there would be no fodders, for one is the cause and the other, an effect.

Smom had tried her tricks with me after fodder died. They didn’t work. “I don’t want to talk about that; it makes me upset” she would say. And I would respond that we have to talk about it and to get over it, meaning her upset. My brother would also try the same tricks. Try, being the operative word. “I’ll walk out of this house and you’ll never hear from me again”, he would say. Just like he had threatened smom all her life. And I would respond by asking him if that was a promise, for it was my intent to hold him to it.

After smom was safely in a care facility where she could receive constant around the clock care, I informed my brother that if he wanted to continue to live in the ‘family home’, he was going to have to start paying the bills. He was going to have to get a “job”. He was going to have to provide the fuel for his own life, rather then expecting anyone else to pay for the costs of his choices for him. So with 2 college degrees to his credit, both bought and paid for by ‘the family making sacrifices for him’, he went out and got a job, finally, as a frozen food stocker at the grocery store.

I knew this brother of mine. I knew his excuses for avoiding responsibility. He would say ‘just tell me what to do that will please you’, then wail in self defense that he would only be doing ‘as he was told’. So I undermined his escape hatch, by simply telling him he was free to make his own decisions, of course, he was also going to be responsible and accountable FOR all those decisions and choices. Then I waited. Waited for him to leave of his own accord, because I wasn’t going to give him any ammo to use against me in the future, that I had ‘kicked him out’.

After finding another woman, a smother, that he could suck off of, he finally vacated the house. Just what I had been waiting for. I knew my smother’s lovely home had been trashed. I also knew that it was futile to try to restore it, so long as my brother was still in residence. Just as a house trashed by animals, has to have the animals removed before any real clean up work can be done.

We had to wear face masks as we first started to clean it up because of the fumes. The wall to wall carpet was soaked in urine as we carried it out of the house. We had to use snow shovels to scrape the carpet pad off the foundation, as it had started to rot and decompose. The parquet floors had been left in standing water and they had to be removed. And we had to use a small jackhammer, to break up the imported tile, since all the grout had been permeated with urine, too. Litter boxes were over full and feces were all over the place. Gaping holes had been chewed in the walls, and a houseful of antiques, gnawed beyond recognition. We took the house down to its very bones, then rebuilt it back again, from foundation to roof.

When my brother got kicked out, the woman finally catching on to what kind of cad he was, he called ‘me’, trying to weasel his way back ‘home’. I’m getting “all my ducks in a row”, he said. And that’s when I told him all his ducks were dead. He was owed nothing and better count himself lucky that I didn’t sue him for damages. That’s when Reality sunk into him, that I had truly meant what I said. That I WAS going to hold him responsible and accountable for all his choices. And his days of sucking off of family, were OVER. My foot came down right across his throat. For I wasn’t a smother and I wasn’t a fodder by that time.

I no longer believed nor supported the moral code of smothers and fodders. I found the role of parasite or the role of the fresh meat that all parasites live off of, unbecoming, which basically means, not something I was about to even try to become. Smothers had no value for their own lives, where I did.

The idea that made my smom into a smom, was the idea that the greatest value she could achieve in her life, was to lay down that life, for those she loved. It was a pitiful ideal. Of course, “pity” was what she counted on to feed her role of martyr. And while I had compassion, after all I had been through, I was fresh out of pity. I was fed up with castrating men into becoming fodders for poor pathetic smothers.

As a mother, I considered fodders unattractive and uninteresting. When it came to sharing my bed, I felt no desire for sharing it with an emotional child. I had no Oedipus complexes.

Over a period of years, every so often a smother or a fodder has tried their little game of trying to suck the energy from my life in order to feed their own. One time a young couple needed help, so we extended it. We gave them one month’s worth. At the end of that month, the young lady stood in my kitchen, yelling at me for not lying to her parents when they called. Don’t I know her parents worry about her?

“Well”, I said, “of course I do. It’s your game to make them worry. Every time their lives don’t revolve around you, you pull some stunt to make them snap to attention. Worrying about you is what you count on. If you REALLY didn’t want them to worry, then you wouldn’t choose to lock yourself in your fodder’s bathroom, and pass out in the tub, after swallowing a bunch of pills. You’d go swallow your pills some where they wouldn’t find out about it.”

“They worry about me dying!”, she shrieked.

“Of course they do and it is what you count on to manipulate them every time. But it doesn’t work with me. If you want to die then I respect your wishes. Go right ahead. I’ll do nothing to stop you. I simply ask that you do it someplace else.”

“You don’t care if I live or die?”, she asked, extremely perplexed.

“Of course I CARE but I’m not in charge. You are. And if your own life isn’t worth your own effort when it comes to surviving, then what makes you think it is worth mine? What makes my life worth less then yours? Nothing, that’s what. I love life. I cherish it. So much that I’m not about to throw mine away on someone who has none. Your life is your own. Go ahead and trash it. Throw it away. Just don’t expect me to trash mine, in any attempts to save you from yourself.”

She took off walking and I haven’t seen her since. I’ve heard about her, though. She’s a tweeker, heavily into meth, whatever that is. She’s a dealer for her fodder, who uses her dealership, as a way for her to show how much she loves him and he, her. She’s still leeching out a life from whomever buys into her pitiful story and game. Which sure as hell isn’t me.

I’ve learned the lesson of co-dependency: Don’t be one.

For those of us who haven’t yet learned this lesson, prepare for your life to start falling apart. “Aversion therapy” is what I think it’s called. For “our family home” which is our planet, has been trashed the same way as my brother trashed my smother’s lovely home. Irresponsible, emotionally self indulgent drama queens, willfully choosing self sacrifice and trashing the value of their own lives have been in charge: “smothers”.

Well…”Mother” is back in town and she in not pleased with the way her home has been treated while she has been away. She’s cleaning house. All of us who don’t know any better then to enable dependency patterns will learn – the hard way. As ability TO enable is taken away.

Every single one of us that has thought to drain other people’s lives in order to serve our own, will now find the living energy being drained out of our lives, instead.

I might be considered “rough” and “rude”, especially to some women, but I’m a cream puff compared to what is coming. Just consider me like a shot in arm. An immunization shot, for the purposes of jump starting our immune systems, so they will be ready to survive what’s coming. It isn’t a “good” time to be caught being a smother or a fodder. And the very best and most loving thing we can do for ourselves, our world and humanity in general, is to drop the whole idea of “laying down our lives for the love of another”. For there is NO Love in the ideal at all. None. Nada. Zippo. Nor any Honor or Self Respect either. There is only Need and an irrational wish not to be accountable for it.

Life. We’re in a cycle now of learning to love it or die trying.

All ‘animals’ are going to be housebroken or are not going to be allowed to enjoy our “family home” at all. It’s not fair nor respectful for family members to have to live with the filth, that those who know no value for family, create in their wake. Nor is it fair for some to have to keep cleaning up the messes of others. For it is by cleaning up our own messes, that we learn the wisdom to stop making them.

“Take up your bed and walk.” – Christ

Sincerely,

“Mother”