MONSTER & THE DAUGHTER WHO LOVED HER: a true story

by Linda Ford Ayres

This book is about being raised by a cunning, mentally ill mother and a father in denial, and

my road from hate and distrust to understanding, sympathy, love, and ultimately unexpected

forgiveness. Written with voices alternating between my own voice and my mother's voice, her

mental illness becomes more fascinating than terrifying and mystifying. Strangely, I was her

confidant. I had access to her thoughts, plans, deeds, and disturbed reasoning behind what

usually would be seen from a moral point of view only as evil.

My story begins with my first memory...my mother stomping my turtle with her foot until

she killed it. My mother's voice begins with her belief that she died in childbirth which resulted

in her trip to heaven and back, the Virgin Mary having given me to her to raise on earth. I

brought my mother the only joy she had ever known until I went to school where her sadism

worsened and escalated to her attempt at murdering me in my sleep at age eighteen as I was

about to graduate from nursing school.

Leaving Ray, the boy I had fallen in love with, I escaped to San Francisco and studied

creative writing, supporting myself as a nurse. I "dropped" acid, ending my faith in the only

solace I had left, the Virgin Mary. Falsely accused of killing a patient, my depression deepened,

landing me in a locked-down psychiatric ward and released to psychotherapy. "I wanted to save

lives like Dr. Bauer had saved mine." I returned to graduate school and became a successful

psychotherapist in New York City for many years.

I married, adopted my son, and divorced when he was three. I eventually did marry Ray,

the boy I deserted forty-nine years before, who had retired as a Marine three-star general.

In the end, my mother and I made our peace. "Just like love, and maybe even because of it,

forgiveness mysteriously just happened."