 reading and talk about mothering, opioid addiction, and family attachment with Dr. Sharon Lamb, author of The Not Good Enough Mother, and Linda Johnson from Prevent Child Abuse for Mutt. This is the beautiful book. It is a memoir of Sharon's own work as a psychologist who evaluates the fitness of parents when their children have been removed from their custody. She also finds herself reassessing her own mothering when her son falls victim to the opioid crisis. This is a topical subject with the opioid crisis affecting many Vermonters. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in 2017, there were 114 drug overdose deaths involving opioids in Vermont. That's a rate of 20 per 100,000 persons in the state of Vermont, which is higher than the national rate of 14.6 overdose deaths per 100,000 persons. The book does not deal with overdose deaths, but I just thought that was an important factoid to see how staggering this crisis is. It is a staggering epidemic, and we need to share stories and hear from experts like Sharon and Linda to curate discussions that will help spark solutions. The not good enough mother is such a spark. Chelsea Edgar of Seven Days says, with the perfect ratio of warmth and exacto precision, lamb cuts to the tender pink of everything that can go awry in the parent-child covenant. It's an important and beautifully written book, and I urge you all to pick up a copy tonight. Sharon will be here to sign books after the talk. Dr. Sharon Lam is a professor of counseling psychology at UMass Boston. An experienced clinician, she sees children, adolescents, and adults at her therapy office in Shelburne, Vermont. She's the author, editor, and co-author of many books and articles about children, women, and trauma. And Linda Johnson, here tonight, who has served as the executive director of Prevent Child Abuse, Vermont for more than 33 years. During that time, she has been responsible for the statewide expansion of the nurturing parent programs and circle of parents support groups. Linda conceived, created, and managed the publishing and distribution of Vermont's Vermont Parents Home Companion and Resource Directory, now in its 30th edition. We do have some copies here, as well as some other literature about Prevent Child Abuse, Vermont. You're welcome to take some home with you. She is a member of the National Coalition for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation and was appointed by the governor to be a member of the Vermont Council for Children and Families Prevention Programs, the Vermont Domestic and Sexual Violence Prevention Task Force, and the Citizens Board for Child Abuse, Vermont. I have no idea how she makes time for anything else. We're lucky she's here talking with us. She lives and works in Montpelier, Vermont. Please help me welcome Linda Johnson and Dr. Sharon Lee. This is unrehearsed, as you can tell. I had thought we decided you were going first. Would you like me to go first? Oh, go right ahead. Well, thank you so much for being here. Thanks to Fair Pond and especially Sam. And thank you, Linda. I'm eager to hear your response. Thanks to old friends, old students, very old friends also for supporting me. I'd like to make my first comment about the people who know something about me in my life. This book was finished almost two years ago and the final copy editing was finished in June of 2018. So I guess I want people who slightly know me to understand this book reflects my life in the past and the pain and suffering on some of the pages is also in the past replaced by new pain and suffering. Those who know me know there was a tragedy in my life after the book was finished, but that has little to do with this book. So I want to go back in time and answer the question that everyone asks, which is why did you write this book? And the short answer is I wrote the book because I had to. On my sabbatical in London in 2016, I was in a writers' group and there was a woman there named Michelle and every time I would pass around a chapter for the group members to read, she would say, you need to be in therapy. And my wise writing teacher would say, maybe this is therapy, Michelle. And so it was. But the longer answer is that I'm a child psychologist. I've been working in Vermont doing these evaluations for almost 20 years. I'm hired by the Lawyers for Parents for DCF Lawyers and DCF for some of the toughest cases where mothers and children in very tough circumstances where children have been in foster care for two or three years and mothers or fathers are about to have their parental rights terminated because they weren't making the improvements that DCF had been asking of them. So when I would come home from like a parent interview or an observation of a mother and child or a full day of testing, I just felt like I had to write. I had to, but I couldn't write my regular professional voice kind of report that I was going to be writing for DCF or the court. I needed to express the enormity of what I was witness to that day and just the enormity of my feelings afterwards. I might have heard that day. One mother telling me she was kept in a cage by her father or another mother telling me she was kicked out of her house at the age of 10 and her mother put all of her belongings in a big black plastic bag and locked it on the porch and shut her out. There were stories about alcohol and increasingly there were stories about opiate addiction. And as a psychotherapist too, I've been trained to show empathy and I was empathic. I felt like I was on their side when I was listening to them. But then I had to make sense of the new feelings that came up when I met their children. And sometimes these children have been in foster care for years and years because their mother had relapsed time and again. They were in jail. Maybe they lied to DCF. And as I write in the book, I would feel myself turning on them, wanting to protect their children. And I didn't like that feeling. There was a part of me that always said, who am I to judge? But that part grew even stronger when I discovered my oldest son had an addiction to opiates. So these two stories form the basis, the back and forth of the book. I learned what a braided memoir was from a writing teacher and a great writer herself in Cambridge whom I first went to see when I was thinking about writing this book. And she told me what I wanted to write was a braided memoir. And in between the individual stories I wrote of the parents and their children and descriptions of what I do to evaluate them, I inserted pieces describing what it was like to discover my son Willie had an addiction. And then just how incredibly hard it was to navigate that experience which can involve Al-Anon, rehab, family weekends at rehab, relapses, and rescues. And there are short chapters on all of these things. So given this was a braided memoir, I found that I needed to weave in more braids. I needed to weave in information about opiates and addiction and treatment. And then there was another strand that just kind of appeared. And this was on Vermont itself. It centers on socioeconomic class, the rural poverty in Vermont, something that's rarely written about in our state. It's idyllic Vermont always. But doing these evaluations and visiting the homes, there were always these long roads to nowhere that I would need to take. And I wanted to tell a story about my own transformation from fear to appreciation. And if you, to read the book, tell me if you can see, you can recognize the chapter where I'm going on a very, very long road and finally getting to your house for dinner. Then there was also a strand about attachment theory and the real attachment I was asked to assess between parents and their kids. Kids who are often pretty tightly ensconced in a protective loving foster family. Were they now attached to these substantial parents? Maybe. And then to be honest, an honest narrator, I had to look at my own attachment to my own mother. So my story as a mother, my guilt, my self-blame, my judgments about myself and my parenting were all interwoven with my evaluating other mothers and some fathers to grandparents. And I guess the reader will determine whether or not I had the right to judge other mothers. But most important, I hope readers will begin to see the parents and the children through my eyes with empathy and see how heartbreaking and confusing this whole enterprise is. That readers will recognize themselves in my own self-doubt, aware of the enormous pressure we put on ourselves to do everything right. And I hope they'll be moved by the stories of children I like to call lost and then found either by their own parents or a loving family who will hold them tight from now on. So I think I'll let Linda speak and then if there's time, there's a lighter weight chapter I might read for you. Okay, thanks. Well, you wondered what my response was to the book and it was heart filled with empathy for you, for the children, for the mothers, the fathers, the grandfathers, the lost fathers, the lost mothers. And the generations sometimes, the generations. And I'm an old home visitor. Even before I came to prevent child abuse for month, I directed the Loyal Family Center for seven years and I went on many a long road and over little bridges that I wondered would it hold my car or not. And in two homes that had dirt floors and mothers of toddlers with marks around their necks, the mothers had the marks who'd called for help about toiletry. So there is a hidden Vermont, if you will, that the tourists don't see. And it's a little state unto itself, if you will, without a whole lot of nurturing culture, if you will. And understanding of what is a child, I had a mother say to me, why would I talk to a baby when a baby doesn't talk? You know, sort of what, there's no reciprocity for me. Why, they don't talk, why would I talk to them? So just so much risk and so much debilitation before there's even a chance. And where prevention comes in now is to get there early, just as quickly as we can, to teach parenting skills to people who really are mostly eager and open to learning because they want to succeed with their child and they fear DCF like the lion outside the door that could be called into action at any moment because they're poor, because they don't have money and they don't live in a nice little house or a nice big house. Even though we know perfectly well that there are lots of parents in beautiful homes who use cocaine, but when it gets too much, they go on vacation, they take a cruise. But the neglect of their children is the same. Though it is helpful and comforting, as you point out, to have a larder full of food and perhaps a nanny and some caring grandparents or older siblings or there are things that money and tradition and culture give to a child. I was so moved by every one of your descriptions of every family you were ever called to evaluate. And by your honesty and self-reflection, you ask many times in the book, which is worse, a neglected child, a child who's left to fend on her own and find her own way, even a toddler left to explore his or her own environment without a parent right there with them watching, observing, interacting all the time. Thank you so much. I just wanted to say that when I evaluate families, I often call the instructors of the parenting or the therapists, whatever you call them in your parenting programs, and they make a huge difference. People really learn from them, so you're providing such a wonderful service. Appreciate your saying so. I will say this, we have never lost one child in 44 years of these programs, not one. Yeah, yeah. So Sam, do I have time to do a little bit more of that? Okay, so some of the chapters in the book describe the trauma and they're triggering and or too vulnerable to read. And there's some, I just want you to know, there's some chapters that are lighter, more fun, like I try to do a lighthearted chapter about the rehab we went to down in Texas, using some of those Texas witticisms faster than a sneeze through a screen door. I guess I don't have the accent, y'all. They're also painful chapters about my son's addiction that I don't really want to read out loud. So I chose an observation visit with a mother. It's called Mother and Child at the Beach, and there's a social worker from DCF who my called Kara, who maybe somebody even knows her, but she's often the person I named this social worker after is named Kara, and she's a social worker from Vermont, but this social worker wasn't called Kara. She was the actual social worker for a child in foster care for a while, a mother who had supervised visits with her daughter, maybe twice a week, and me. Typically these visits are done in church basements, maybe at a parent's home. This one starts out at the mother's home, and as I drive up, I'm greeted by a child whom I call Ridley. We're going to the beach. Ridley yelled out when she saw me. Thin and jittery, she approached, then retreated, then approached again, meeting my eyes. She was yards away from her mother who stood constrained with a fierce smile carved into a flat face. This mother had been clean for six months and wanted her daughter back. Standing next to Ridley was their DCF social worker who seemed to approve of this plan. A walk to a beach for an observation visit isn't too unusual. Houdings give me a chance to evaluate a mother's ability to plan ahead. And planning ahead is one of those things mothers are supposed to do. Before visits, the mother's social workers advise them to be sure to provide food and other necessities their child might need during visit time. I can then evaluate how well this coaching has worked. Does a mother remember the diapers and wipes for an infant? For a toddler, a bottle, and a hat to shield his lovely tender head from the sun. For an older child, water, snacks, a few toys, no mother remembers everything. But given the importance of the visit, the performance of being a competent mother who remembers everything is what's required. When I require mothers to have one of their visits at my office for a second observation after having observed them at their usual place, they typically arrive with big backpacks and floppy overflowing shopping bags. Children who are used to the visit routine hug their mothers quickly and then dive into the bags as if it were Christmas morning. Will there be a present or a favorite snack? I've seen a child collapse on my office floor in disappointment when a snack she had asked for wasn't there. I recall another child obsessing for the entire visit about the promised snack that didn't arrive. How many times have I told you to bring the white cheddar cheese cheezus? You never listen. But they didn't have any at the gas station on the corner. You should have gone shopping on the way. One child wailed and hit his mother on the chest. Having had to plan for himself in the past when under her care, he may have become a better planner than she ever was. Whether or not he had the ability to carry out the tasks. Ridley, this woman is here to watch us be together. Ridley was already in the house looking in the refrigerator to see what was there. Cheese sticks, good. You did good, mom. They packed the cheese sticks in the cooler and the four of us left. As we walked to the beach, Ridley and her mother skipped ahead swinging the cooler between them. Mom had packed towels, water, and suntan lotion. Nice planning, I thought. I, on the other hand, had none of those. But preserving a boundary, I didn't want to ask to borrow anything even later on the walk when I felt my nose starting to burn. When the lake was in sight, mom ran into the water, splashing sparkles of water up around her like a silver aura. As the water got deeper, she switched to swimming, moving far away from all of us to the deep end of the swimming area, marked by a three-sided dock. We watched her swim beyond earshot until she reached the dock and, holding onto its edge, waved to the three of us on land. Ridley stood at the shoreline in her baggy bathing suit like a lonely figure watching a boat disappearing on the horizon. She dipped one toe in and withdrew it. Then she entered the water step by step, letting the chill come and then diminish on each vertical inch of her body until she was neck deep. How could I do my observations sitting on the beach so far away? It was a challenge to interpret what might have been their particular mother-daughter dance. Ridley taking her time, mom enticingly waiting with sparkles and joy in the deep end. Was I wrong to expect what I would have preferred to see? More encouragement for the hesitant little girl who did seem without encouragement to know exactly the way she wanted to approach the water and was doing so. Mothers must perform for me. They must perform the roles of encouraging mother, helpful mother, patient mother, authoritative mother. What kind of mother during her performance of motherhood would swim away from her daughter and enjoy herself all alone in the deep? Her feet now up in the air as she attempted to handstand. A fun mother. Her long braids were dripping wet down each side of her bathing suit. She had come to the beach to play. We all perform motherhood in front of other mothers. As my own mother would adopt a certain attitude of restraint around other mothers, I too learned to look as if I were under control when I was insecure, giving other mothers my child psychologist tips on infant sleeping or making insightful remarks about the uniqueness of another mother's child. Underneath I confess there was envy, judgment, admiration, but also sympathy. All of it. Ridley was finally in the deep, holding on to the dock. I rolled up my linen pants to above my knees and waded in so that I might hear the two of them talk. Leaving my notepad and pen on the towel, it would look strange for me to stand in the water in front of all the mothers and children there that day taking notes. I tried to be discreet but had to yell, can you come in a little closer to shore? They were in a huddle bobbing in the water, heads together as if plotting their escape. I waited and shouted again. Mother swam over to me to let me know that it was better for me to observe them from afar without hearing them. She explained that it would be to my advantage to obtain a different perspective than most observations. A better perspective by just watching and not hearing. Then she abruptly turned raised one arm high and brought it down in a superior crawl. She beautifully executed back to Ridley. I chatted with the social worker on the sand while keeping an eye on the pantomime. When mom and Ridley finally came back on the beach, mom spread out their picnic lunch. I hadn't brought anything for myself. I watched them eat their cheese sticks and ham sandwiches and then take turns burying each other in the sand. Mother's inclination to keep her child from me far off in the water or buried in the sand was a good one. What do they matter anyway? These little moments about food, about encouragement, about listening when a child is upset. What do they matter to the whole of motherhood? No mother has the right food for the child all the time. God, the lunchbox items my kids tossed away. No mother always praises her child. I recall a time Willie showed me a drawing and I stared at it blankly, my mind elsewhere, until he said, don't you like it? No mother listens to her child whenever he speaks. Mom, mom, mom! I can conjure that plaintive impatient cry that occurred whenever I was on the phone. These observations mean nothing on their own. I put down my paper and pen, closed my eyes, and rested my head on my handbag that was substituting for the towel I didn't have. Fuck being prepared. What mother could ever be prepared enough for what her children bring her? Sharon, come find me, come find me. I opened my eyes and looked over and saw Ridley's head emerging from a sand tomb. Kara, come take a picture of me on your phone. Ridley wanted to include us in the circle. When Kara, the social worker supervising the visit had taken a few photos, Ridley asked her to send them to her foster mother, Diane, another mother to include. I remembered what it was like as a child to be buried in the sand of that first panicky moment of not being able to budge, not knowing if I would ever get out, and then finding that moving a finger made a small crack in the cocoon. I remembered burying my own children and they're directing me. More here, get my toe over there. How trusting and intimate an act. What did it mean that Ridley brought to the experience three other caregivers? Me, her social worker and her foster mother. Did this make her feel more secure? Was it a way of reassuring herself that she would be seen even when her mother tries to take her away to the deep end or capture her in the sand? Does she wanna know after all the years in foster care if she goes back to live with her mother that the rest of us will still be here? Is she asking if so, will I be safe? At home when the lunch not eaten at the beach was laid on the table with some extras, Ridley cried out in disgust. I had that last time. You're a terrible mother. Her mother stared blankly. It was clear she didn't know how to respond to such strong and unexpected disappointment. Her daughter proclaiming her worst fear that she was a terrible mother. She knew how to play with Ridley, but it didn't seem to be part of her repertoire to enforce a silly rule that so many mothers enforce. Eat your lunch, that's what we're having. Or those words are unkind, apologize, and then eat your lunch. What might I have done? I probably would have looked through the cabinets to find something different to make. I would have taken the kinder rather than the stricter route. I might have rolled my eyes and mocked my child saying, yes, I'm such a terrible, terrible mother because I serve the same lunch twice. But a performance of motherhood means setting limits, and Ridley's mother stood still, not knowing what to do. There is sometimes a moment when a mother wants to look at me or her social worker and just ask us, what should I do? What's the right thing to do? You must know, I don't know what I'm expected to do. This can come in a moment when a mother would normally have yelled at a child or remove the plate and said, go ahead and starve then. But a smart mother knows that during a performance, those responses won't do. Ridley rescued her mother from the deep end and took a bite. And about halfway through the sandwich, she got up and went to her mother and kissed her on the cheek. She then began singing a little Disney song to herself from the movie Frozen. Let it go. Thanks. Sure, for either of us. In parenting, you're always teaching critical thinking and judgment, and critical thinking and judgment is a good thing. So we talked about wanting to, wondering if you had the right to judge, but judgments can be really empowering and healthy. In writing the book, did you ever find that you reclaimed judgment as a good force or as a positive force? Thanks, that's a great question. And I have to say that even though I questioned my judging and felt too powerful at times, I also was ambivalent about it because I had strong opinions sometimes. So I don't think I needed to reclaim it as much as to feel okay that I, as a mother who felt inadequate as a mother, could judge somebody else. If I could separate that out and just be my psychologist self, sure, I felt okay about making some of those judgments, some of the time. But of course, there are so many of these times when you don't know if you're making the right judgment and it always comforted me to know that it was really up to the judge, but it wasn't up to me. I was just making a recommendation, one that most judges tended to take, but it was on the judge. So that was helpful. Thanks. Sorry. I have a question in the excerpt that you just read. It's just so many elements of power that are involved. Your power as an expert, sort of people being disempowered because of their socioeconomic status. And then I wondered, is there some part of, either through the coaching or classes or your interaction with people that parents are empowered as opposed to being judged? I've seen really great DCF workers and therapists and parenting teachers and addictions, specialists, all of the wraparound services try to empower, and lawyers, lawyers for the parents totally. And I've seen judges too work in that way. That I don't find as my role so much, I think that. And I've been called out by lawyers too in the courtroom about advice that's been of a therapeutic nature that I've given to clients as a way to sort of undermine my expertise, like you're there to do the evaluation, so don't you try to give some therapeutic advice that I can't resist. But yeah, I mean, I think that's what, I think that if people can take advantage of all the resources they're given, especially in Vermont, I think we have a lot of great service providers who have that sort of power understanding, power differential understanding in mind. Sorry, I forgot to say something. I was thinking, I'm retired now, but I had an instance where a young girl got pregnant and was put on methadone, but when the child was born, she was too young to be on methadone program, so she was cut off. What goes on, is that still the case? Do you mean the mother was a young person? Young girl, yes. How old was she? Well, she wasn't, she wasn't, I don't know if she was, maybe she was like 17. Oh, that shouldn't have happened. Well, maybe things have changed since then, but I just, I think they've changed a lot. Are you a doctor? I am a doctor. Yeah, okay. Could I ask her about that? I mean, although Linda complimented my chapter on describing opiate victim, I consider that my funny chapter because I start talking about all the different metaphors that doctors use to describe the brain and how they drive me crazy. Yeah. And the stuff. I don't know if I got right. Yes, this is less a question and more a couple conversations I want to encourage to have happen. I don't know, do you and Elizabeth, does either of you and Elizabeth carve in her song down a dart with no one another? So you should get to know one another. I teach a class for psychiatry resonance on cultural competence of various kinds every spring. And Elizabeth came and spoke to the class because she's an anthropologist who spent about 10 years doing basically participant observation of world families living in poverty who were associated with the Upper Valley Haven down in White River, which is a very creative and very innovative people serving agency. But anyway, so she came and spoke to my group about the work she was doing but she just did beautiful, and she did some really beautiful, very respectful research about people's lives at the end of the dirt road. And just listening to both of you talking, thank you, I think you would like being in conversation with one another. And the other person I was going to say, whether or not you notice, do you and Morty Strauss know each other? Because if you don't, you should. You mean from New Hampshire? Yeah, well, she's done, she's done at Browler. I know. She's had Antioch now. He died. Murray Strauss, you're talking about. Morty? Morty, no. Oh, no. She's just an immensely creative, funny child psychologist. She's very interested in attachment and has written a number of extremely readable books. But for a while, she was also doing basically parental fitness exams for various people. But that's just another coverage. It would enrich and enlarge the conversation for you guys to be in conversation with one another. Thank you. So, hook us up. Yeah. We'll do that. I'll go back there. I'm gonna go there. Hi. I was interested in, you said you'd talk a little bit about the attachment issues that you see. And I was wondering if you have anything to say about what you observe in what you would consider a child that could form, you mentioned Ridley having, does she have an attachment to the foster parents that she's been with? Can you tell us about what you see in a child that can form those attachments and a child that is maybe gonna have a much harder time forming those attachments later? So, the book kind of describes it on, because I do a lot of observations of, and I say what I'm seeing in them. But I'm wondering if I actually do describe more what the mother is doing versus what the child is. But I describe the three attachment categories or the three kinds of insecure attachment. There's a lot of research on avoidant and resistant and then disorganized attachments. So it's the disorganized, attached child one that fits that, like the ones that they form those. It won't form an attachment to, say, a new family or- Well, it's harder. I don't wanna say won't. I would say it's just harder because those are the kids who are most disoriented by care, like they don't know they find adults and carrying adults really unpredictable and they might accept it, they might reject it, they're just discombobulated by that sort of thing. And so, that's not to say that it's a lost cause, but that's the hardest kind of attachment categorization to overcome. And that's really crucial to understand. If the parent, when well supported, reasonably healthy parents work over a long period of time with the child, most children will eventually form an attachment even if it looks at the beginning like everything that could be wrong is wrong. There's probably such a thing as a child out there who is not gonna form an attachment, but that's not most children, including children who've been very badly traumatized and neglected and had their attachments greatly disrupted, but it's gonna depend a huge amount on what the parents or foster parents are able to do and how well supported the parents or foster parents or adopted parents are. How have you dealt in your long career with your own burnout at some time? I mean, how do you... Because you're a professor. So I'm mostly a professor that teaches and I see three or four people in psychotherapy and I do two of these evaluations, maybe three a year. Oh wow. So this is not my main thing I do. I don't know how others could do this all the time. The burnout doesn't come from the evaluation as much as the lawyers in the court, the lawyers on the other side that attack you, right? But yeah, I really like the collaboration with other, at DCF or with if the parents' lawyers have hired me. I like that collaboration. I like to feel like we're working together. It doesn't burn me out, it's more of that. And also until, as you'll read in the book, I hope, I felt good because my advice was often almost always taken until you read about the judge that didn't take my advice and how angry I was and then the child who had been in foster care since a baby and then at three years old was returned to her biological parents against my recommendation and was abused there and then was returned again to the foster parents. Traumatized, that happens sometimes now. So that burns you out. That's what makes you feel like I can't do this anymore kind of thing. Yes, Lori. Sorry. The Vermont theme, which is so beautifully developed in that part of the brain. It's almost like a character, you mentioned it too much. So I'm just curious for both of you, is there something particular about Vermont culture maybe because it has this picture postcard, mythical kind of persona and that the invisibility is more pronounced here than in other places, I don't know. I mean, I guess I'm looking for comparison to other places. I like that. I mean, I like that idea that that might be. I don't know. There's almost more shame in it. I mean, I think I wanna say that there's, you know, that my own journey to use a cliche, which I kept out of a book. No cliches in the book though. My journey was about sort of appreciating the trailers, the people who live in trailers, the poverty, the guys who lived out of their car, but who knew the woods, you know, like the back of their hands. It's another cliche. Not writing and talking, so it'll help me do it. So I think that was, you know, maybe that doesn't say anything about Vermont, but it had a, you know, there was some growing appreciation of what Vermont meant to the non-tourists, the people who've lived here and lived in poverty here and their connection to it. I would say I've always been so struck by sort of the cultural blending of kids who've grown up in foster care and have their family roots, their original family roots as well as the culture and the family life of their foster family or adopted family and how that plays out in their own parenting now and creativity and abilities nurtured and I just think that that's an aspect of the story that is not often told, but that we saw a lot in our parents' anonymous and circle of parents' support groups. Almost all of those mothers had been sexually abused and physically and emotionally abused growing up and were determined to not let it happen to their children, though in some cases it already had, but they were warriors for their children and wanting to get it right and we're exceptional in so many ways. So there's a lot going on under those roofs. You, Andrew. I think this should be the last question now, right? Because you need to close it. When I was four years old, lived on a farm in Lindenburg, dad had a farm because that's the only way he could, I'd get any money for the work he did. He was a lawyer and they paid him in cows and hay, one thing or another. So he came home one night, mind you, I'm just four years old. I could tell that he wanted me to go to bed a little bit early, but I went down the hallway and I left the door open and I listened and he started to tell my mother news that wasn't available to the average person in the United States of the terrible atrocities that Hitler was up to. I couldn't talk with him about it to get any relief because I wasn't supposed to be listening. I didn't sleep that night. In the morning, when I put me in a snow suit, I went out and instead of doing something constructive, I was pounding the snow and the hired man came by and he used quite a lot of adjectives that I can't repeat but when something like this, hi George, what the hell's wrong with you? Well, I just heard dad telling my mom about Hitler. Said, don't worry about Hitler. He said, we're gonna do something to something, throw him in the door pot. That fear was transferred to a fight that I figured I was on the right side and then we were all gonna fight against him and I went to sleep. He went into my subconscious and it didn't come out on 25, 30 years later but I had dreams. So when I read the article on newspaper, I wonder whether or not you use that information to fight back because you were sick and a living with something like that all by yourself. After all, your mother was a member of the human race. George, do you have a question about the book for the author? Pardon me? Do you have a question about the book or else we have to move on to this. That's right about the book. I've never read the title of the book. I think that the order of it was different. If I would like to have said that I was fighting back in some way that way but I think the order was that I was maybe, I wouldn't say overly confident but was confident in my ability and then sort of became unconfident if that was a kind of different order than your experience. No, not an experience of fighting back, of experience of being mostly confused.