As I said previously, when I arrived at Dora’s house I soon realized that she was in the process of being neglected by her criminal son. In my view anyone who neglects their elderly parent is a criminal. I called my mother to come over and help me since I had managed to land myself smack dab in another bad situation. Once again finding out that my neighbors down the street hated my previous landlady should have been a clue to me to not move in with their grandmother. Even though Dora’s grandchildren who previously lived 3 houses down from me found out that my mother and I were good people, Dora’s son had never met us prior to moving in with his mother, and he automatically assumed we were like our prior landlady. Or more specifically, Dora’s son I soon found out held the view that all people were like him; a deceitful manipulative criminal who felt that rules and laws didn’t apply to him. As stated previously, all of Dora’s disabilities became more and more apparent to me. I would catch her eating old food that could have been in the refrigerator a month and had even turned colors. When I tried to intervene and stop her she would become violent and even physically abusive with me. My mother and I would both try to bathe her in the morning, each of us struggling to hold on to her, and she would fight us then. We learned from one of the neighbors that Dora picked up a skunk one day outside her front door thinking it was the neighbors cat, and luckily the merciful animal did not skunk her, but did scratch Dora pretty badly. Dora was lucky that she did not get an infection or rabies from the incident. My mother and I just about lost our minds during the day listening to Dora’s television which had to be turned almost all the way up so that she could hear it because she refused to wear a hearing aid. When my mother and I asked Dora’s son to buy external speakers which could be placed near Dora so she could hear the T.V., he callously refused. Also all this was going on while Dora was enduring a fractured back that she had gotten from the fall she had before I arrived to stay at her house. Also during all of this Dora’s son kept telling the neighbors that my mother and I were tenants paying rent for two of the rooms in the house. He continued to lie to the neighbors about the extent of Dora’s health condition and denied that she actually needed real health caregivers.
As time went on it became more and more apparent that Dora’s son wasn’t really interested in providing his mother with the care she needed, but he was only interested in keeping her going well enough and deceiving the neighbors well enough to not be blamed when she eventually died of neglect and or abuse. I also figured out that it was convenient for him to have my mother and I there with Dora as an easy alibi if she did . He could just blame it on us. However I was already catching him in his own game. If we were just tenants there to rent rooms from his mother to have extra income, how could he justify limiting our ability to leave the house? By this time he was telling my mother and I that we could only leave the house maybe a couple of times a week for only a few hours at a time, and he was reluctant to even give us that. It was so bad that my mother and I found it difficult to do our own personal shopping and pay bills. He did not have the net or wifi in Dora’s house so that we could pay our bills that way. And any attempt that my mother and I might make to have a social life away from Dora’s house was completely out of the question. We basically had to be there twenty four hours a day, once again as indentured servants/ slaves. Also did I mention that I was also operating a small tractor to mow the 3 acres of property that Dora owned every week. Dora’s son was imprisoning and enslaving my mother and I. Also not only was he getting away with all this, he was still getting me to pay rent.
I know that this was no time to get philosophical, but I was trying to understand how Dora’s son could be so evil and think this way to abuse vulnerable women his mother included. Dora’s son told my mother and I that Dora had been extremely mean to him growing up and that non of the other family, except for one granddaughter, liked her. He stated that she was basically getting what she deserved. So my interpretation of this was that my mother and I were innocent by-standers who were unfortunate enough to get caught up in the process of Dora’s abuse. I have to admit that in the process of taking care of Dora I learned that she could be mean, condescending, and insulting, so I tried to imagine growing up with her. An example of this was her insistence on referring to me in the masculine gender to tease me about wearing a baseball cap (which happened to be pink), and driving the tractor to mow the lawn which I guess she considered to be a man’s job. When people would ask her where I was Dora would say, “He’s mowing the lawn.” Or if she wanted to know where I was she would say, “Where is that boy at?”, even though I was a 43 year old woman. I just ignored it figuring it was part of her dementia, but to tell you the truth it was also probably her being mean as well. Anyway I didn’t have time to take it personally since I was being taken advantage of by her son in so many other ways. Once again my thoughts went back to Dora’s son and his personality. He was a sneaky individual with the attitude that everyone, including his own family, was there to be taken advantage of and exploited. To tell you the truth he was really a despicable character and he probably did inherit a lot of his personality traits from his mother. Dora could be callus and conniving, and her son was that way as a rule all the time and completely disconnected from other people’s feelings. Actually he was basically a sociopath with no empathy for others, although I don’t have the training to make an official diagnosis.
I remembered Dora’s granddaughter telling me that her family owned a “skip-tracing” business. I had never heard the term before, but it was definitely strange and fringe sounding, but it went to the back of my mind as I was dealing with all the other issues. LESSON #2: When people use a word to describe their family that you don’t understand don’t ignore it. Look it up as soon as possible because you will probably need to know what it means for insight into how that family operates. I do remember asking someone on one of my rare trips when I was allowed to go to the library if they had ever heard the term “skip-tracer” before. And I believe that it was one of the male librarians that said it was a bounty hunter! Although I was startled by the definition at the time I still didn’t take it seriously like I should have relating it to my situation at Dora’s and how I was being treated. I was being treated like a presumed criminal by a man who was himself a criminal abusing his own mother. Remember I had learned that people often project their own personality flaws onto other people. These people think, “Well if I’m despicable, the rest the world must think and be as despicable as I am.” My other theory is that despicable people find it almost impossible to function around innocent or otherwise nondespicable people. So the despicable people will usually try to make the innocent people appear despicable despite all kinds of evidence to the contrary. In the world and thoughts of the despicable person everything is very twisted, dark, even perverted, and nothing that appears good or innocent is to be trusted. Furthermore I believe that despicable (criminal) people, because they do not easily get along with more normal people, seek out lifestyles and vocations where criminality is an asset. Jobs for instance like skip-tracing, which require individuals to think like criminals in order to track and trace criminals to bring them to justice. However in my recent investigation I found out that skip-tracers do far more than just bounty hunt. I found out that skip-tracing involves everything from doing background checks, checking credit reports, calling people who know the individual being skip-traced to find out the individuals whereabouts, checking loan and job applications. Skip-tracers also look up public tax information regarding an individual, they look up court records, utility bills, phone data-bases, contact vehicle registration and drivers licence departments. They even look up air travel records which could impede an individuals ability to travel. And the last most disturbing fact, but definitely not the least about skip-tracers, is that they will even use social engineering to track people. What is social engineering you might ask, well I looked it up to get and official definition, and this is what I came up with; Social engineering (in the concept of information security) the use of deception to manipulate individuals into divulging confidential or personal information that may be used for fraudulent purposes. The site: BountyHunterEdu.org is a site you can visit for a wealth of information on this subject. As I uncovered all this information I started to wonder if I or someone close to me was being skip-traced, and if that was the reason I was being treated like I was.
STARTING OVER AGAIN PART THREE: continued in next post