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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."
