Artists and Vagabonds: How I Escaped My Mother's Narcissistic Personality Disorder

By Lorena L. Sikorski

My mother was batshit crazy. Later in life, I realized that she suffered from narcissistic personality disorder. As a child, there was a feeling that if I didn’t serve or please her, she wouldn’t love me. I recognized from an early age that her love was very conditional. I became the court jester; I made her laugh to avoid her vengeance. She was physically abusive and thought nothing of hitting another person, relative or stranger. She covered my basic needs. To her, that was all that was required. She relocated me all over the country, pulling me in and out of schools at her whim. As an expression of her enmeshment, she violated me as a child, which continued well into my twenties. I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone about my homelife, or she would become violent and immediately move to another town. I began to hate her. Hating her made me feel very guilty. All the warm TV moments and societal norms said that one was to forgive and love their parents. My father was inept, and my mother was the devil incarnate. There wasn’t much to love. As I became an adult, I realized I was a lesbian. That was when all hell broke loose!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662468483

Book preview

Chapter 1

Granny

Jean Scouts was born in 1880 in Missouri. Her family was very poor. Her father, Nythen, died when she was two years old. Her mother, Megan, having three other children, struggled to make ends meet. Finally her mother, Megan, met a man who was also a widower. Megan and James married in 1884. James had two children of his own. They were tenet farmers and worked on the farms in the fields of Missouri and Tennessee. A lot of the time they were truly starving, and looked for any kind of work. Finally, James decided that they had too many mouths to feed. The five children of the blended family were costing too much, and they just couldn’t make ends meet no matter how hard they worked. So in 1885, at the age of five, Jean was left at an orphanage in Saint Louis, Missouri. She was being given up so the family could balance their budget. Megan fought James on leaving her daughter there, but James insisted. There wasn’t enough food to go around. James had never cared for Jean as she was an outspoken child who didn’t know when to be quiet. She often laughed at James when he didn’t think it was funny. She wanted attention and didn’t like playing with the other children who were suddenly her siblings. Megan knew she couldn’t make it on her own without James, so in a tearful goodbye Megan agreed to give up Jean and left her with the sisters at the orphanage. James agreed for her to be adopted by another family and had no plans of returning. Jean was never adopted and spent her entire childhood in the orphanage. At the age of eighteen, she was released without financial or educational support, beyond her schooling from the orphanage. Eighteen years old, on her own, with only a few bucks in her pocket, life was overwhelming. The sisters had made arrangements for her to have a room for a week. Then she was on her own. She immediately started looking for a job. The pickings were slim for a person with no skills in the year of 1898. She took what little money she had and bought a third-class ticket on a steamboat down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. She heard there was work there. The flavor of New Orleans was alluring to a young woman struggling to stay alive. Everyone was friendly and happy, and most were poor. People helped people, and she finally got a low-paying job in the French Quarter waiting tables. She met others and soon had a friend she could stay with, and start discovering life on her own. She attended the Catholic St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square where she noticed a very handsome dark-skinned young man. He was there with his large family, and his father wore special clothing—sashes across his chest. It made him look important to the untrained eye. It turned out that the man with the sash was the vice counsel from Spain to the US. The handsome young man was his oldest son, Dart. Jean made sure that she moved in their direction so she could catch Dart’s eye. Jean was very pretty, and Dart was intrigued. Dart asked her out, and they started dating. His father, Eduardo, thought it was a lark. Dart was already committed to becoming a priest as he was the oldest son. This was a Spanish tradition that dated back centuries. So he thought whomever Dart dated was for fun and companionship and wouldn’t become serious. Dart had a reputation of being a ladies’ man, a playboy. His father thought he was sowing his wild oats before the seminary. It only took a matter of months for the relationship to blossom, and Dart and Jean wanted to marry. Jean had become pregnant. Eduardo was furious with Dart. He forbade him to marry anyone but especially someone so poor and common. Jean’s family was English, but of course she had been abandoned, so she had no family history or inheritance to offer. The family was determined that Dart was to become a celibate priest. Dart was determined to marry. The family arguments got heated and became more so. Finally, Eduardo said that if he married, he would be cut off from the family fortune. No money, no help. Never come back to the house. Dart stormed out and found himself in the arms of Jean. They talked it over, and she said if he was willing, she had always been poor. It wouldn’t be new to her. The problem was that Dart had no skills. Jean had her low-paying job, but they’d need a place to live that didn’t involve Jean’s roommates and friends. So they rented a room of their own and started looking for work. True to his word, Eduardo cut Dart off completely the day Dart married Jean. He forbade any of the other relatives to have anything to do with Dart, so Dart was truly on his own. Jean lost her low-paying job, and Dart hadn’t found anything yet. The pattern was repeating itself. No money, no job, soon no place to live.

Life had never been this hard for Dart. In desperation, Dart went to see the Catholic priest at the cathedral. He offered them some food and a place to stay for a couple of nights. In the meantime, the priest asked Dart if he’d ever painted anything. Dart said no, but he wasn’t above trying. So he told Dart and Jean to get a statue down from the church and take it to a back room. He said he’d buy the paint, and they could paint it for him because it looked terrible. So Dart and Jean got to work figuring out how to paint statues. They found that they had a talent for it. The brushes the priest had were much too big for the details around the eyes, so Jean took some branches off a tree and used them for the delicate work. They loved doing it, and the priest paid them. They now had a career. The priest told other priests, and they had an abundance of work. After they ran out of recommendations from the priest, they started going around to other churches in other towns to see if they had statues that needed refinishing. At first they took taxis to the jobs. Eventually, they saved their money and bought a car and had their own paints and equipment. A business had been born. However, riches were never to be theirs, as having no business training they would often spend all that they made. When there were no more churches in one town, they would move on to another. Moving from town to town became their life. After spending a great deal of their early life in boarding houses and renting rooms, the development of the travel trailer in the 1930s easily lent itself to their lifestyle. They saved up and bought the earliest models. As they went from priest to priest and town to town, some of the priests became dedicated to their form of artwork while others found them unscrupulous and not trustworthy. The only alternative at that time for art restoration was to ship the artwork back to the original factory or manufacturer. So even if their prices were high and the artwork not quite beautiful enough, it was better than shipping it off for months at a time. In 1901, they had Jean Jr., the first of many children.

Chapter 2

The Family, the Work

As they traveled from town to town, they started having more children.

Jean Jr. was born in 1901, followed by Velvet in 1906, and Dart Jr. in 1909. Then Dart Sr. had his first affair that Jean became aware of. She was furious at him and kicked him out of the quickly developing family. She continued painting without him, as well as caring for the three young children. Because of traveling from town to town for painting jobs, the children were rarely put in school. At this time in the early 1900s, compulsory education was a new requirement and often ignored. However, caring for three small children while traveling and working was often difficult. So Jean would drop them off at boarding school for short periods. She was free to work. She found this to be especially helpful if she was working a large geographical area. When she finished, she would go back and pick them up. At least this way they got a smattering of an education, even if it was a lonely time for the three small children. After boarding the children and picking them up, over and over again for several months, Dart returned to the home. He claimed repentance at his behavior and was welcomed back because life was simply too hard alone. The painting business consisted of convincing a priest to allow Jean and Dart to paint their statues with the paint of the day. Eventually, lacquer became the paint of choice. After the artist and priest decided on a price, Jean, Dart, and eventually the children would unload suitcases of paints into a sacristy or vestibule of the church. They would lay down drop cloths so paint spills would not be a problem. They then would smooth the statues with sandpaper, prime them usually with shellac, and then repaint the details. The artistry came in the painting of the details. Often, the eyes or faces were distorted until they got their style and artistry perfected. Depending on what paints were available locally and their prices, some statues would last for years, while others would have a paint peel problem more quickly. It didn’t matter because the freshly painted statue looked beautiful and so very different than it had in the past. If the paint on the statue peeled too quickly, it could always be blamed on the humidity. Often, if they had gotten a good price for their work, they would embellish the statues by placing 24k gold leaf along the edge of the statues’ outer robes. A job of two to four life-size statues usually took four days. Smaller statues took longer. They would also paint the stations on the walls or the actual altars that the statues sat upon. Later, they branched out to include refinishing the wooden pews and other pieces of art around the church or the church residences. Then they would pack up the stuff and put it all back into the car and move on to the next church. As the children got older, they were given more of a critical role in helping with the actual painting and eventually in making sales to the individual priests. So the family unit was quickly turning into a clandestine clan with little to no outside influence on their lives. Education was unimportant.

In 1911, Ellis was born, then came baby Petunia in 1912. The baby died at only six weeks old after suffering from pneumonia. After the death of his daughter, Dart had to leave. He wasn’t prepared for life to be this hard. He had been raised in privilege, and money wasn’t a problem until he had married Jean. Now every day was a struggle to survive. So once again, he left and found comfort in the arms of another woman. Jean now had teenagers living with her and helping on the road. When they couldn’t find artwork, she would send them out to do odd jobs. They were circus entertainers, animal caretakers, farmhands, and black-faced vaudeville dancers. Any job that paid, preferably one that included performance art, was one they wanted to have. Again, they’d had a spotty education and lived by the seat of their pants. With Dart gone, Jean became the ruling matriarch. All the jobs taken by the teens were done with the understanding that they could quit at any time that their mother decided it was time to leave and go to a different town. Permanence would never be a part of the lifestyle. Anyone who got too close to the clan was viewed suspiciously. At one point, Jean found out who the girlfriend of Dart was. She was a waitress at a local lunch counter. She took the kids and went to the diner and sat in her section where she knew she would run into his lover. When the waitress came over to her, she introduced herself as Dart’s wife and the children as his. The waitress was stunned and told Jean that Dart had said he wasn’t married. That ended one affair, and Dart again returned home. All the moving around led to a very irresponsible lifestyle. If they didn’t like someone or they thought they were an easy mark, they would take advantage of them. Prices were