Activity and experience

Dear readers, associates, contemporaries, colleagues, friend and family of Lydia A. H. Smith: permit me to begin my long and tortured comments by filling a shocking absence in this, my biological mother's obituary, an absence so typical of her selfishness and aggressively arrogant self-worth, her many true and meaningful achievements notwithstanding: the very names of her children. I am first: I am John Andrew Smith, and my younger siblings are Marjorie "Bonnie" Hurd Smith, Emilie Everett Smith Caruso and Kenneth Hasbrouck Smith. The quality of Lydia's relationship with us ranged from worst to best: worst with me, poor with Bonnie, good with Emilie and best with Ken; while I am quite opinionated as to all four relationships, and of course that with our father, Alan Adelbert Smith – also never mentioned after their marriage from April, 1959 until his death in 2003! – for the sake of brevity and to allow the others the first comments, I reserve my time and space here for comments about Lydia's relationship with me. I intend here to reveal the real Lydia Smith: awful witch, horrid bitch, vengeful hater, superiority-complexed egotist, manipulative and misanthropic dominatrix, arrogant narcissist and fervent keeper of perceived-royal appearances. . To be sure there is ample basis for her arrogance, superiority and association with royalty: a detailed read of this obituary certainly reveals that she was a pioneer in education, a published author, a well-respected academic, etc. I have also confirmed independently as best I can statements about her family tree, e.g., that her great-great grandfather fought the Battle of Bunker Hill, that we are related to President Calvin Coolidge, etc., although not yet that our ancestors came to this continent in 1635 or that we are directly descended of King Robert the Bruce of Scotland. Origins for her misanthropy are plentiful as well: she had as siblings only brothers, women's rights in general hardly existed during her childhood and adulthood, she told of harassment by her boss at a radio station where she worked, and she always used to watch the Senate and House on TV, especially during the Watergate era, and comment, "All men!" – nothing, strangely enough, similar to "All White men" – and at the time she was correct. Finally she achieved straight As from freshman year at Radcliffe to the attainment of her Ed. D. at Harvard with a specialty in childhood psychology. But it is this last achievement, truly a noble one, and the title of the book to which it gave birth, To Understand and to Help, a fine treatise on that subject, to which I must demand that you readers keep firmly in mind as I reveal to you her God-awful treatment of her "special" (read, "black-sheep"), eldest son, yours truly, which I offer in chronological order: . Lydia had always thought of me as crazy, and had hated me, since before my birth – yes indeed, as I was a fetus kicking around inside her. When I was age 10-11, by which time she had already openly called me a bully, a parasite, crazy, etc., and had been painfully physical many times over, to the extent that I had contemplated suicide many times just to spite her, then reconsidered, because I thought she'd probably prefer me dead, and I would not allow that, she actually bothered to tell me the story of her pregnancy with me. Again she thought I kicked around far too much, and so, since I was her first child and thus had no prior pregnancies of her own to which to compare that with me, she had only the two pregnancies of my biological father Alan's first wife, Julie, those with my half-siblings Duncan Emerson Smith and Lucinda Smith, with which to compare hers with me. These comparisons were valid in her warped mind because they were all three by the same man, Alan. And since I kicked around more than Duncan and Cindy inside Julie, I was automatically, "scientifically" and indelibly deemed crazy. For the record Lydia was a woman of medium build and height 5'6", and I was born weighing 8 lbs., 2 oz., so what comes to my mind is a quite reasonable, simple, and above-all benign explanation that perhaps I was disproportionally large inside her, again as her womb's first occupant. . Lydia had told me – among many others stories with which only to malign me and "prove" my insanity – that when I was her only child, i.e., before Bonnie was born, I ate well enough, but, when she was born, and she came of the age to eats solid food, I had attained the age when I could hold and manipulate a spoon myself. So innocently and practically enough, she started feeding only Bonnie, leaving me to my own devices, but, rather than eating myself, I became jealous of the attention given Bonnie and stopped eating, even pushing my bowl of food onto the floor, despite being so hungry that, as she described it, my face was as gray as the overalls I wore. Ivy-League child-psychology specialist and academic that Lydia was, she was familiar with the current works of Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose famous book covers this very situation, a book she owned and had read and referred to presumably many times, certainly over the five years during which Alan and she produced us four children. Nevertheless she was oh so puzzled and disturbed – again the notion of my scientifically-proven insanity firmly burned into her mind – that she felt it necessary to call her family doctor, one Dr. Whitfield. Only his professional medical opinion with accompanying credentials he had to share with Lydia for her to do what almost all other mothers, even those of the most modest educational backgrounds, commonly do: actively feed her son. . Lydia constantly reminded me to my face how she felt; I still retain flashbacks of her asking me, "Don't you know you're crazy?" with an extra breath of emphasis on that adjective, her calling me a parasite and a bully, and much more. Even my favorite color, purple, not shared by anyone else, to her was a crazy kid's favorite! Often I would simply sit on my bed and look out my window, saying and doing nothing, because I simply couldn't think of anything to do or say that she wouldn't use to supplement her "proof" of my craziness… and she'd use that very absence of word and deed as supplement! These were among my more suicidal moments, and they were many. All my life in her mind I was wrong unless proven right, bad unless proven good, guilty unless proven innocent, and most of all crazy unless proven sane. I could have recited the six Laws of Physics, and she'd disavow them only because they came from the mouth of a proven-crazy kid, even calling simple logic "your logic", Aristotle and 2,500 years be damned. I was always on the other side of a wall, one that was clear and thin enough to see and hear through, but nevertheless impenetrable: her side of that wall included those humans who deserved the most basic levels of human respect, including freedom from the occasional corporal punishment. Another flashback from about my age 6 or so was Lydia twisting my arm in front of me and threatening to twist it out of its socket. And she loved to make me angry and blame me for being angry, using it to further prove I'm insane – her favorite was to move something I had left lying around the house, and then "forget" where she moved it. Over and over again I pleaded with her to leave it there or ask me to move it so she could yell at me to get her satisfaction in that regard and then not have to remember where she put my thing, leaving me and only me to remember where my things were or to blame for losing something, a position one would think she'd enjoy. And so every time she did that I'd scream and yell louder and louder just to punish her more and more, and I loved it. All this from a Harvard-educated child-psychology specialist – clearly she thought of me as so much less than human. . Lydia became so falsely concerned for the safety of her human children, Bonnie, Emilie and Ken, that after I was deemed smart enough to skip third grade at Concord's Ripley school, but then had to stay back for fourth grade at Alcott, she decided to institutionalize me at Baird Center for Children in Burlington VT, for two years. She tells me Alan drove me and her there, and she cried all the way home. I simply don't believe that story: she must have been laughing or sighing relief. Baird was a harsh place, full of kids around my age (9-10) that already had serious criminal records, whose tempers and misdeeds were unlike anything I'd ever seen, even from Lydia and at Ripley and Alcott. The supervisors there disciplined children with pinning and submission holds borrowed from wrestling, they'd literally wash kids' mouths with soap who uttered swear words, and occasionally they'd place a kid for hours within either the Quiet Room or the Nursery, rooms with nothing but four walls, the Nursery being totally dark as well. I was one of the better-behaved and smarter kids, but I didn't totally escape all these forms of punishment. I still remember the names of about a dozen or so kids and supervisors, because I formed friends easily enough with people who hadn't erected the aforementioned clear wall between me and them. Worthy of note is that it was at Baird when for the first and final time I completely stopped loving my mother to any and all degree, and in addition, because she was also the most spiritual in the family – Alan called himself "agnostic" and never attended church – that I also stopped believing in God or anything spiritual at all. I shun, despise and belittle religion as actively as possible to this day, now that I've examined plenty of reason and science. Note, believer-sheep: I've been on both sides, believer and now atheist, so that makes me the open-minded one who has fairly examined both sides, unlike Lydia and all the rest of you galactic morons! Lydia hated me even more for refusing to go to church, where I had been a member of the choir before being Baird-institutionalized – after all she must have thought Baird would "cure" me! So she took the trouble to tell many family members and church friends of my transition, including her priest brother, my uncle John Coolidge Hurd, Jr., named after her father. So now I was an outcast to my entire family for yet another reason, besides clearly my insanity, and quite a meaningful one. Family and friends alike proceeded to call me insane, an incomplete human being, devil child, demon seed, and so on, due to their believer-cult-inspired insecurities. I quickly reasoned – I choose that verb carefully – that indeed they were so insecure and fearful that facts, logic, math and science, which I champion and uphold to this day as all I can ever truly count on, would prove them wrong, that they all erected the same wall as Lydia had: that clear, not soundproof wall that separates humans from monsters. . Lydia in her mind probably made the mistake of a lifetime when I was to enter 6th grade, but in her never-ending quest to separate monster from humans, since I had aged out of that cold institution that is Baird, she enrolled me at Concord's own Fenn School for Boys. But not because of its exemplary records of academics, achievement and support since the year Lydia was born, rather because it is a boarding school, so she could have me out of the house for up to three more years, supervised by someone else besides my parents. Once again it's likely that Alan had absolutely no say in the matter, not only because he wasn't the educator and child-psychology specialist she was – he wasn't even Ivy-League! – but because in pretty much all matters regarding their marriage and their kids her word was law. He was there only because Lydia was never the businessman / accountant / financier Alan was, so his existence was reduced to shutting up and shuffling the papers to get the bills paid, and to do so he kissed ass within the context of both his entire career and his entire marriage. And yet it turned out that Fenn was where I grew, improved and learned so much at that very special place with very special people, that even Lydia once admitted, and even to my face, that I had done a great deal of growing up. Well, I would reply to myself, when people respect you as a human and work with your unique talents and quirks, even if they themselves give birth to them! By that I mean that it was at Fenn where I started doing computers and music, two mainstays in my life, for which I can't possibly be more grateful. I became quite good with computers thanks to math teacher William I. Maxwell, and at music too, thanks to band director and former neighbor Davis S. Huston. . Lydia then relented with Fenn a bit after one year of my boarding there, not as likely because in her mind I had grown up sufficiently as that Fenn/boarder tuition was quite expensive, for she enrolled me there for 7th and 8th grades as a day student, i.e., one who lived at home. Yet she continued to send me to psychiatrist after psychiatrist, completely oblivious to the fact that, frankly, it's all her fault as not only the adult but the child-psychology specialist between us. And they all did nothing and said nothing. I saw doctors from earliest childhood until high-school graduation, and none said anything or did anything. I was told they said I'd never have a girlfriend and never marry, which, of course, are wrong. But even long before my first girlfriend, let alone marriage I have long concluded, from the examples set forth by Lydia and all those doctors, that all of psychiatry and psychology are complete and utter pseudo-science, and I hold this opinion dearly and strongly to this day. If ever I were to see a psychiatrist, I would unleash upon them decades of anger I hope at this point you readers find understandable, to the extent that they'll partake in their favorite sports: locking me up and playing with my mind for money. Lydia constantly reminded me how many thousands of dollars she spent on me, but it was all to replace her absolute refusal to accept me as human, which costs practically nothing. She was good for four things: food, clothes, shelter and money, but even those all to keep up appearances in her New-England WASP British-royalty-descended tradition. These appearances were shattered one day, when she called the police on me – get this, readers – because I had thrown a snowball at Ken, I had hurt him, and I had shown no remorse at all, instead complaining about the truth in the differences between Ken's and my relationship with her: he'd cry and cry to Mommy, pathetic little favorite baby that he was, and she'd get angry with me and punish me. . Lydia then enrolled me in regular schools for the first time in two-thirds of my childhood, namely CCHS, Concord's public high school. Having never attended Concord public schools since fourth grade, and having come from Fenn, which only a handful of kids had, I knew practically no one I should have grown up with. And yet I thri