The Riddler Speaks - Casefile #0111 (Patreon)

EDWARD: Paradoxmagic said: This is a personal question; however, you always talk about your father but you rarely talk about your mother... what was she like? Or better yet what happened to her? Or well, both of them? Sorry to pry but curiousity is eating me alive (pardon the expression). And, anonymous says: I guess we all know that you didn't have a good relation with your father. But what's with your mother? Do you bear a grudge against her? And, anonymous asks: So I heard you became a criminal because of daddy issues, but what about your mother? Was she in the picture when you were a child? Was she a drunk? Druggie?

Ah, my relationship with my mother; what a Freudian line of questioning. Is this were I confess some sort of deep-seated Oedipal syndrome - that I was in love with my mother, and wanted to kill my father? How delightfully dramatic that would have played out to be. But alas, only the latter was true. My relationship with my mother... isn't. She was a quiet woman with an aversion to violence to the point that, while she never came out and said it, she would subtly hint that perhaps I should speak a little slower around my father, or be not as bright as I was. That way, my father wouldn't feel compelled to beat me. A wonderful thing to be told as a child; that my behaviour was, at least in her mind, the cause of the abuse I suffered. Not that she was married to a Cro-Magnon with a severe inferiority complex, no no no no no. Every child wants to hear that they get what's coming to them simply by being themselves. One could say that could be a reason for my social maladjustment. To basically be told, "you know your father means well when he beats the living hell out of you, perhaps if you try not being yourself, he'll love you more"; the sort of encouragement that makes a boy not come home for the holidays.

Fanciful stuff, really. I recall a certain cinematic psychopath saying, "a boy's best friend is his mother". (laughs) I'm inclined to disagree. As for what's become of them, who can say? I imagine my father drank himself back under the rock he crawled out from, whilst my mother polishes her spoon collection, perpetually repressing the true uselessness that is her existence. Or it could be Bingo Night. Who knows, or dares to dream.