I was late to the party when it came to The Sopranos. I don’t know why I put off watching it. I love movies and books about gangsters. The Godfather is my favorite, unless The Godfather Part II is. Goodfellas, A Bronx Tale, Donnie Brasco, American Gangster—I eat it all up. Never mind the violence, the murders, although I do respect the creativity of a horse’s head in a bed; a bullet-proof vest packaged with a fish to send a Sicilian message; a cold-blooded shooting in the street followed by a calm return to a café, coffee still hot. All of that violence made for good Family entertainment, but for me, the criminality was beside the point. 

     For me, family values were the true heart of those movies and books. These stories centered men who stepped up and took care of their families. In some cases, the dons and capos had no families to speak of when they were kids, and as men, they made or found the families that they had always needed. Vito Corleone, for example, was an orphaned immigrant who grew up into a loving father and a community leader who fiercely protected and defended those who called him Godfather.

     The Sopranos ran from 1999-2005, but I didn’t get around to it until January 2026, after a generous sabbatical from my university Creative Writing professorship enabled me to spend nine months in intensive therapy, often seeing three therapists in a week: a talk therapist with a Divinity degree from Harvard, an EMDR-certified trauma specialist, and a recently retired Creative Writing professor who had also retired from a side hustle as a Beverly Hills Marriage Counselor. 

     I hired the latter, not as a therapist, per se, but as a writing coach. When I first approached him with the idea, he protested that his therapy license had expired. I told him that I already had a therapist, two in fact. The memoir I was writing, based on what I was learning in therapy, was being clawed out of me, one word at a time, and I needed the support of someone who understood both creative writing and psychology.

     What had brought me to a place where I felt the need to dive headlong into therapy? In short, I have Mommy issues. Or Mommie issues, much like Christina Crawford, who wrote Mommie Dearest. The book in your hands is going to make Mommie Dearest look like a Hallmark Movie. 

     For as long as I can remember, my mom had severe mental health issues. Or a personality disorder. About a decade ago, my therapist at the time, Kathy, said that it sounded, to her, as if my mom had a personality disorder. 

     “What’s the difference between a mental illness and a personality disorder?” I asked.

     “After you spend any amount of time with someone who has a personality disorder, you feel like banging your head against a wall,” said Kathy.

     “Ohmigod, that’s it!” I said, rising from her comfortable couch as if launched onto my feet. “I feel like that every time I see her.” Essential oils from Kathy’s diffuser punched my nose with this soothing blend of frankincense, lavender, and orange scents. I sank back into the couch. “Yes, like banging my head against a wall. It feels like that every time.”

     My mother, Deanna, embraced the diagnosis of Bipolar I but bristled when my younger sister, Shirlena, suggested that Deanna had many of the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). At the time, Shirlena was enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Psychology at Seattle Pacific University. She wrote a thoughtful essay, well-received by her professor, and showed it to me and to our older sister, Melissa. Unfortunately, Shirlena no longer has that essay in her possession.

     According to Jerold J. Kreisman, M.D., and Hal Straus, in their book I Hate You—Don’t Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality, the DSM III required a patient to have at least five of the following symptoms in order to merit the diagnosis of BPD:

1. Unstable and intense interpersonal relationships. (Check.)
2. Impulsiveness in potentially self-damaging behaviors, such as substance abuse, sex, shoplifting, reckless driving, binge eating. (Maybe. Yes to the impulsive, self-damaging behaviors, anyway. Not sure about these examples.)
3. Severe mood shifts. (Ohmigod, check.)
4. Frequent and inappropriate displays of anger. (100% check.)
5. Recurrent suicidal threats or gestures, or self-mutilating behaviors. (Check. Did those DSM III writers have some sort of hidden window into my childhood home?)
6. Lack of clear sense of identity. (Check.)
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom. (Probably. Who knows how another person is feeling, though, ultimately?)
8. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. (I think so, but while I can’t speak definitively of motives, I can say for sure that Deanna’s thoughts and behaviors have consistently been very strange, deranged.)

     Imagine how I felt, after nine months of intensive therapy about the effects of having a mother with symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder, when I watched New Jersey gang leader Tony Soprano sitting across from his therapist, Dr. Melfi, who told him that his panic attacks stemmed from the fact that his mother had symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder. I haven’t been able to locate the official screenplay for Season 1, Episode 13, “I Dream of Jeanie Cusamono,” but the scene in question goes a lot like this:

FADE IN:

INT. DR. MELFI’S OFFICE – DAY

Dr. Melfi’s face shows real concern for Tony, who looks tense and impatient, a lit fuse that could go off at the slightest provocation.

MELFI

I say what your mother has, at the very least, is Borderline Personality Disorder.

TONY SOPRANO

Borderline Personality Disorder?

MELFI

Let me read to you from the DSM IV, okay? Definition of the condition? A pattern of unstable relationships, affective instability—it means intense anxiety, a joylessness. These people’s internal phobias are the only things that exist to them. The real world and real people are peripheral. These people have no love or compassion. Borderline personalities are very good at splitting behavior, creating bitterness and conflicts between others in their circle—

Tony stands, enraged, and violently heaves the round glass top from Dr. Melfi’s coffee table. He assumes a very aggressive posture, his face inches from hers.

TONY SOPRANO

You twisted fucking bitch. That’s my mother we’re talking about, not some fuckup in Attica, stab you in the shower…

FADE OUT:

     Geez Tony. And to think, before I went no contact, my mom was constantly saying that I need anger management therapy. She repeated that every time she purposely pushed my buttons to distract from whatever drama she’d been stirring up, whatever irrational behavior I’d called her out on. (My therapist calls this reactive abuse.)

     After all of my years of identifying with mafioso in movies and books, seeing a mafia boss enter therapy to deal with the wreckage caused by the Borderline behaviors of his mother, Livia, felt incredibly affirming. See, I’d been filled with shame by the fact that my five-foot-tall mom, who has managed to convince many casual observers that she’s a sweet, misunderstood super-Christian lady whose kids don’t appreciate her, manipulated and abused me time and time again throughout my life. I felt this most acutely when confronted about it by Ron, a property manager whom you will see again near the end of this book. 

     To help Deanna, thinking that housing stability would lead to mental stability, thinking that kindness directed at her would lead to gratitude, thinking that I could avoid an extended smear campaign and protect my reputation, thinking…oh, I don’t know what I was thinking, I had bought a house for Deanna. It had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a garage, a fenced yard. I’m not a particularly monied person. I went way out on a limb, financially, to do this. I charged her $300 per month in rent, less than 1/5 of market price, less than the cost of taxes and maintenance. Rather than being grateful, she weaponized my landlord status against me, constantly demanding more and more repairs, regularly ducking out of paying rent due to her latest self-caused financial crisis. Finally, in desperation, I reached out to Ron, hiring him as a property manager in the hopes of separating the landlord/tenant relationship from the son/mother relationship.

     “She’s got you,” said Ron, shaking his head. “She’s got you beat. She’s making you clap and do somersaults like you’re her trained monkey.” Ron and I had just met a few weeks earlier, but that was some tough love right there. When I heard that, an ocean of buried shame flooded my consciousness, yet here I was, a year later, watching a mafia boss in the exact situation, handling it no better than I had. This gave me hope.

     Livia Soprano and Deanna Christian are startlingly similar in their behaviors and statements. Here are a few of Livia’s greatest hits: “Oh, poor you….In my day, children respected their parents…. I gave my life to my children on a silver platter—and this is how they repay me?… Depressed? My father came to this country with 17 cents in his pocket and never made a peep. What’s he got to be depressed about? Nobody threw him into the glue factory, and sold his house out from underneath him!…Everybody’s against me…I don’t know what I ever did to deserve this…Maybe you should talk to someone, Anthony. About your anger…I’m just an old woman. What do I know?…Your children will turn on you too, just wait….You’ll put me in a nursing home and forget about me.… Shame? Oh, I’ve got plenty of shame. Believe me, you don’t wanna hear what I’m ashamed of….and if you want my advice, don’t expect happiness….I should have had the abortion…You were always my favorite… no, wait, that was Meadow….Oh, now I’m the monster?…This is how you talk to your mother?…I wish the lord would take me now.”

     And here are just a few of Deanna Christian’s choicest words, just a taste of the verbal abuse that my sisters and I have had flung at us throughout our lives: “This is a small town. People talk — and I want people to say nothing but GOOD things about you…… It might benefit you to take input from someone older who has seen a bit more than you have in life. Obviously your wife does not think you should EVER, under ANY circumstances help your mom….I don’t know Tom, do YOU think you could help your mom a LITTLE? Tom, Ralaina keeps you broke and stressed beyond any wife I have ever seen in my life. But I wasn’t criticizing her when I was at your home…. Do you think I’m lazy? greedy? manipulative? Should NEVER be helped? I’m your Mom. I cared for you children for a third of my life—pregnancy, labor, delivery, nursed you, potty trained you, cared for you, loved you, did my best always even when I was in deep depression…. I’m not seeking your attention and I’m not manipulative. I’m getting older and life is more of a challenge. You, too, will be old one day. You are not going to understand your Mom until then….If you want to talk about me, do it on your knees.”

     Like Livia Soprano, Deanna Christian never did get officially diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. A therapist once told me and my sisters that people with BPD fiercely resist the diagnosis. The therapist said that they often end up diagnosed with Bipolar 1, that their therapists know better, but the meds for Bipolar 1 offer some relief for BPD, so they just roll with that diagnosis. Deanna does embrace the Bipolar 1 diagnosis. My writing coach says that some of her symptoms sound more like Paranoid Schizophrenia. I filled out checklists for BPD and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) in the book, Stop Caretaking the Borderline or Narcissist: How to End the Drama and Get on with Life by Margalis Fjelstad, and I was surprised to find myself checking more of the boxes associated with NPD than BPD. No matter. The diagnosis isn’t the point.

     My son Evan is diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). There’s a saying in the ASD support community: “If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.” I’ve met many people with autism, but I’ve never met anyone like Evan. He has the freshest perspective on the world. He’s like a surrealist poet who doesn’t bother to write anything down because he doesn’t feel the need. He lives in a world of his own, with no self-consciousness, no fucks to give about what anyone else thinks. 

     For the past four years, Evan has worked faithfully stocking shelves, sixteen hours per week, for Gordon Food Service (GFS). This year they named him Team Member of the Year and gave him a $150 gift certificate. He then took separate trips to over a dozen different GFS stores here in Kentucky, in Tennessee, in Alabama, in Ohio, and in Indiana, buying one or two items at each store: pretzels, waffles, cream puffs, and food for his cat, Sarah. He’s been enjoying blasting the tunes (ranging from Mozart to Alan Jackson to Manowar) and “working on my independence.” I would never have come up with a project like that. Most people wouldn’t. That’s what’s so endearing about him. If Deanna’s psychiatric issues rendered her quirky and offbeat, I could roll with them. Unfortunately, they make her cruel and malicious, and I put up with it until I just couldn’t anymore.

     My point is that this is a book about people, not about diagnoses.

     My own psychiatric diagnoses, as of June 2025, are Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), Major Depressive Disorder, and General Anxiety Disorder. Physically, as of November 2022, I’m diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS), Fibromyalgia, and Polyarthritis. Before the physical and emotional pain became so great that I absolutely had to do something about them, my psychiatric and physical conditions were like two legs, walking me straight for an early grave. Now I think of them as two voices, screaming at me to make some changes, get some help. 

     It took three things for me to get to the point where I could go no contact with Deanna and work on healing myself. First, I had to learn that she had control over what she was doing. She would be unbelievably nasty to me and my sisters, while showing a completely different side of herself to other people. I needed to finally come to understand and accept the fact that she was hurting me on purpose, that she got off on seeing me flustered and upset, pleading with her to please do this or to please not do that. It made her feel powerful to know that she could make me feel like shit.

     Second, I had to finally see that I deserve better. That took many years of loving patience from my wife of thirty years, Ralaina, in the safe, happy home that we built with our kids, all young adults who still either live with us or call home several times per week. Now I wish that I had enough self-esteem to break off contact with my mom after she did this or that to me, but if it were just me, I think I would have kept her in my life until her constant manipulations brought me to an early grave and she outlived me. 

     The third thing that had to happen before I sought help, unfortunately, was for Deanna to begin hurting my children the way she had hurt me and my sisters. When my parents separated and then divorced, I was ten, eleven years old and my little sister, Shirlena, was four, five. Many times I tried to shield Shirlena from Deanna’s attempts to make us hate our dad, Tom Sr.., as well as from other forms of abuse and neglect. I couldn’t protect her very effectively, unfortunately, but ever since then, the instinct to protect those around me, from all dangers but especially from Deanna, has been hardwired into me.

     On September 16, 2016, Ralaina and I adopted our daughter, Elizabeth. She was sixteen-and-a-half years old, and she had been in state foster care for four-and-a-half years. She had been greatly neglected and abused. Those facts, plus her borderline IQ, made her a perfect target for predators. For a while, she surrounded herself with criminals. One of her boyfriends was a cocaine user who used to sneak into our house in the middle of the night, wriggling in through the doggy door in the garage. He ended up sexually assaulting her in her sleep and going to prison for it. She’s doing much better now, but my point is that we couldn’t protect her at the time; I felt the same helplessness that I had felt in my youth, trying to protect Shirlena.

     Once Deanna’s behaviors started affecting my kids, it was a bridge too far, and I knew I had to do something different. She did go after my kids, which I recount in some of the later chapters in this book, and as soon as that happened, I realized that a firm line had been crossed, so I sought serious help and decided that I had to make some drastic changes.

     I do not hate my mother. Far from it. I’ve spent more time and energy worrying about her, praying for her, and trying to make her happy than I’ve spent on anyone else in my lifetime. Including my wife and kids. Including myself. This isn’t a story about an ungrateful son going no contact with his mother on a whim, although you can hear that story by tracking Deanna down and asking for her side of things. This is the story of how I did everything I could for my mom until the relationship brought me to the brink of suicide. Many times, actually. 

     This is the story of me trying several times in my life to go no contact with her, seeing no other way to preserve my sanity, but finding, over and over, that “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,” in the words of Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III. Until finally, somehow, I let her go, wishing her the best, forgiving her as best as I know how, but no longer allowing her access, no longer allowing her to cause me and mine to suffer.

     I wrote this book for myself, my sisters, and our spouses. I wanted to make sense out of the many senseless episodes we’ve lived through as a result of Deanna’s voracious appetite for melodrama, crises, and chaos. I wanted to put all of these episodes, or at least a sufficient sample of them, into one document, as a way to discern patterns, and as a kind of self-defense. See, Deanna is a master at stripping away all context, casting her current crisis as a unique situation, in which she is the victim and my sisters and I are the villains. For example, “my back is out, and they won’t take care of me” or “I’m broke, and they won’t give me any money.” To a casual observer, it may seem reasonable for her to ask us drop everything to help her during a time of crisis. But once they learn that she thrives on chaos, moving constantly from crisis to crisis, they abandon her or she moves on to other people whom she can still fool. She’s a master at fooling casual observers this way, and time after time we’ve been left stammering, trying to provide context, when it would take an entire book to provide that context. This is that book.

     I’m also hopeful that this book will provide some hope and comfort to others in a similar situation. To them, I want to say, you are not weak, you are not helpless, and you do not need to be ashamed. Anyone who can take an emotional beating this intense for this long is tough, tougher than Rocky in the first Rocky movie, in some ways as tough as the toughest mob boss around.

     I can’t imagine anyone reading this book for pleasure. I took no pleasure in writing it. I avoided facing these issues and writing about them for many decades. Back in 2011, I was at a poetry reading at Western Kentucky University, where I teach. The poet, Eduardo Corral, had just won the prestigious Yale Younger Poet award. During the question-and-answer period, Eduardo said something that I’ll never forget. He told the audience about growing up in the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and realizing that he was homosexual. He saw the suffering gay men on television and realized how much he had in common with them. Here’s the unforgettable part: Eduardo said, “After all these years of studying the craft of writing, I’m still not skilled enough to write about what that was like.” 

     I felt a lot of sympathy for Eduardo in that moment. I was amazed by his humility. Hearing such an accomplished poet admit that he wasn’t yet skilled enough to write about something so close to his heart, I thought of my struggles with a verbally and emotionally abusive psychotic mother, how that was a subject that I was not yet skilled enough to write about. It took another fifteen years, but I finally wrote about it. Every time I sat down to work on this manuscript, the memories fought to remain hidden. In addition to the usual, run-of-the-mill writer’s block, I had to battle repression, dissociation, and the fact that my mom groomed me and my sisters, when we were children, to hide the truth about her at all costs. Partly this was about covering for her. Partly it was about shielding her from facts about herself that she was too ashamed to face while also protecting ourselves from the inevitable outbursts and mental health episodes that would occur when those facts intruded on her carefully-constructed delusions.

     What follows are four dozen short chapters, each containing a memory, or several memories that my mind linked together in order to enable me to unearth and reveal patterns. Writing it didn’t just organize my thoughts; it restored my sanity and helped save my life. I hope you get something out of reading it.

Tom Hunley

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