May 20, 2014

If you are new to this blog, you may want to read the posts “In a Nutshell” or go to July 2012 and read “Sending out a Letter.” Both of these posts give a brief description of what happened. Emma is a young woman who made up a story about a story about a cyber friend being raped and claimed it brought up her own “repressed memories” of a priest of molesting her. As her attorney was about to file a lawsuit against the priest and the church, Emma accused her mother of physical abuse to stop the suit because she knew her lies were about to be discovered. I am that mother. Emma claims to have toxicology reports showing that I poisoned her with DDT, essentially accusing me of ATTEMPTED MURDER, but refuses to turn over these reports to my attorney. She also claims that while living with her boyfriend’s family in Ohio, her boyfriend’s mother was afraid I would show up and kill her entire family. When I contacted the boyfriend’s mother, she told me that this was “ridiculous.” Emma’s boyfriend/fiance eventually broke up with her when he had his own doubts about Emma.
Emma has accused me of a crime (or two!). I do not take this lightly. At this point, Emma has two choices. She can bring charges against me or apologize. Well, I guess three choices. She can continue to lie about me, and I will continue to write about this journey I am on.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, contact me at: losingemma@gmail.com
This picture is just after Emma got her braces off. See that beautiful smile! I had taken Emma to a basic sewing class, and she started sewing. She made this blouse, and I just happened to have made a necklace some years before that went with it perfectly. Oh, and like every other teen out there, you did notice the cell phone in her pocket didn’t you?

I will get back to writing about our experiences with therapy, but this is what was on my mind today.

Time, Space, and Clarity

Sometime after Emma accused me of abuse, my attorney and I contacted the parents of the girl (On line friend) that Emma claimed was raped and had attempted suicide. (Emma claimed this young woman’s rape brought up her own memories of being sexually molested by a priest.) I had a couple of conversations with the mother of “Lacey” and found out that none of it happened as well as many other things Emma had told me about “Lacey’s” family. There was NO RAPE. There was NO Suicide attempt. Lacey did not call Emma, hysterical, from the ER after attempting suicide. While Lacey’s mom had battled breast cancer, she was never in the hospital, close to death as Emma had claimed. In fact, she was never in the hospital at all from the cancer. She was treated as an outpatient. It was all a big fat lie, so I’m just assuming Emma’s “repressed memories” are a big fat lie as well.

I asked “Lacey’s” mother for any e-mails Emma had sent to Lacey, and she turned them over to my attorney and me. At the time, I was still in shock and devastated by what Emma had done, and I just sort of skimmed over these letters. My attorney read through them and mentioned to me how much Emma talked about control, being in control, wanting to be in control…

Looking through the letters was very painful to me then. There were funny stories about Emma’s church youth group, which made me miss my daughter, and there were a lot of disturbing stories. I picked out a few outright lies, and put the letters away. It was too painful to look at them in 2011.

The other day, I got out these letters again. As I mentioned earlier, these letters are probably the reason Emma was failing her physics class that year. She told her teacher she was failing because she was dealing with being molested, but when I look at the pages and pages of letters that Emma wrote to “Lacey” and she mentions computer chatting with her as well, and I know she was also hand writing letters and texting “Lacey” so I don’t think there was much school work getting done when Emma was sitting for hours in front of her computer.

Someone recently shared the following from John Rosemond. I’ve just attached part of his column, but you can read it in it’s entirety on his site. Someone had written in about a difficult 13 year old daughter, and I am attaching part of his response.

John Rosemond
Rosemond.com

(SNIP) Allow me to speculate as to what is going on here. All too many of today’s young teen girls seem to feel that a life that’s devoid of drama has no meaning, no significance. In the absence of truly valid drama (which very few of them have claim to), they invent drama.

Obviously, there is no real problem here. Your daughter simply has too much time on her hands. With this excess of time, she thinks about herself and conjures up reasons why her misery at being your daughter is justified. It never crosses her mind that she has never had to want for food, clothing, medical care, heat in the winter, air conditioning in the summer, free vacations and so on. (SNIP)

Wow. Does this article describe Emma, or what? I’ve also found that I am not alone in this club of hated parents. There are many members and many, many stories. I’ve also found there are many of us, falsely accused of abuse by our own children.
Emma was always the victim when she was part of a group. The girls Emma rode to high school with on the bus were mean to her. If she was on a team, there was someone that didn’t like her. If she was in Sunday school, she complained about the teacher being a liberal and not letting Emma share her conservative thinking. If she had a problem with a class, it was because the teacher didn’t like her. If she didn’t get a part in the play it was because the drama teacher (Jefferson High School, Mr. Bright) had his favorites. If Emma and I had an argument, when Phill got home, she would completely twist something I said into something that didn’t even resemble what I’d said. (And having a high very IQ, she was definitely good at it. I don’t know what my IQ is, and I don’t want to!)

I thought Emma liked being homeschooled because it gave her time for other activities, but like this article says, I think Emma had too much time on her hands. Phill and I always joked how we liked our boring lives. We’d seen Phill’s brother go through some pretty tumultuous times with his wives, and we were always grateful that that wasn’t us. We liked being dull. I had no idea what was going on in Emma’s head. I guess her life needed meaning. She needed drama!

“The most generous hand is the one most likely to be bitten.” Boy, does that strike a chord with me! It’s not like the case of “Affluenza” in Texas, but I think there are similarities. Phill and I were middle class. Since I stayed home with Emma, we were careful with our money, but Emma never lacked for anything. We all know what mom’s do around the house, and in addition to that, I homeschooled Emma for 5 years. Pretty much any activity that Emma wanted to try, we did: piano, church choir, Gwinnett Young Singers, water color lessons, church camp, dance class, art classes, nature camp, knitting group, library reading clubs, karate, softball, kayacking, spelling bees, drama classes, church youth group, church activities, baby sitting, Red Cross First Aide class, ROTC ……..and the list goes on and on. I don’t know how working moms do it. I did so much driving to get Emma to all her activities, that I can’t imagine working and being able to do that. Then there’s things like the orthodontist, and as much complaining as Emma did about that, I probably thought to myself 1000 times that her teeth weren’ t that bad and I wished we hadn’t bothered with the time and expense, but I will say, she had a beautiful smile when she got the braces off. I never understood all the complaining. I know kids complain, and I’m sure I did my share as a kid, but I remember being really proud of my “tinsel teeth.” (And Emma didn’t even have to wear the dorky head gear apparatus that a lot of us did!)
And what about all those nights we parents stay up with our kids helping them finish a project? One time when Emma was going to Happening, a church teen retreat, she wanted to make a gift for all the other kids. I don’t remember how many kids there were, I think a little under 200. Emma had this idea to make bookmarks, so Phill printed out what she wanted on the computer with about 5 book marks to a sheet. Emma painted each sheet with watercolors and sort of a rainbow affect. Then, the bookmarks had to all be cut out and laminated and then the laminate had to be trimmed on each bookmark. Guess who stayed late cutting bookmarks. Like the typical kid, Emma was rushing around at the last minute, and would not have finished if I hadn’t spent hours cutting bookmarks for her.

While going through these letters again, I found many, many lies and many examples of Emma’s “poor me” syndrome. She often mentions being depressed and states it could be her medicine making her depressed, but this was drama as well because Emma wasn’t on any medicine at that time.

Emma made up a lot of stories that were fairly harmless but made good stories. For example, she claimed a found a friend passed out after seeing a spider. She told funny stories about some of the younger kids at church, and there was a cute one about her friend Jordan”s little brother told Emma that Jordan had gotten into Emma’s purse. Emma said Jordan was trying to send a text message to the boy that Emma liked with Emma’s phone, and how Emma caught on when the voice recorder came on asked if she wanted to send the message to “Edward.” Cute story. Did it happen?

When our neighbors lost their teenage son, Emma wrote about going to her “friend’s” funeral even though she’d never said more than hello to this boy. She also wrote a sweet story to “Lacey” about babysitting a neighbor’s little boys the day after the funeral, and how the children were told that “Oliver” went to sleep and woke up with Jesus. Emma claimed that one of the boys pretended to be asleep and said he wanted to wake up with “Oliver.” It was a sweet story, but Emma never babysat these children, just like (in an earlier post) she never babysat our priest’s children and never had to lock herself in the bathroom and call 911 because the priest’s bipolar son was acting up.

Emma talks about the girls she rode the school bus with buying and using drugs on the bus. I verified with one of the girls that that she never saw drugs being sold on the bus.

Emma mentions the time our inflated pool collapsed while she and Kayla Benifield were in it, and tells about Kayla hitting her head on a tree. Nope, that didn’t happen either. I have pictures of the two girls in the pool as the water drained out of it.

Emma talks about a woman she didn’t like monopolizing the conversation at our church book club, and the only thing is, this woman never came to the book club.

Emma mentioned to “Lacey” that she was making brownies for church and would be murdered if the broke the heirloom platter that she’d put the brownies on, only Phill and I didn’t have any heirlooms.

One day, when I have more time, I will go through each of these letters and tell you exactly what is in them. I can’t really publish the letters, since they are Emma’s, but I can read them and write about them.