Musician and artist Tim Tobias of Las Vegas tells of doing exactly this with his own abusive mother, and recounts the freedom it has given him to be a good father to his own children. “I used to think I had a bad mom,” he says as he recounts a drug-addicted woman who was an angry and physically abusive, manipulative drunk. One of nine children, he had to watch others suffer as often as he himself was victimized. “About fifteen years ago I found out what circumstances had shaped my mom,” he says. “She was abandoned by her mother when she was eight years old, left to raise her two younger brothers. The authorities placed them in orphanages. The woman who took her in was extremely abusive and unimaginably cruel.”
