Margo had known since childhood that her parents, especially her tyrannical father, had something to hide from her, but it wasn't until many years later that she understood what those secrets were.
Before Margo was 7 years old, she lived with her parents in a penthouse suite in Manhattan, Uptown, New York.
At that time, Margo's parents, Arden and Lilyan, also looked very charming, and his father, Arden, always dressed neatly, often had a handkerchief in his chest pocket, polished shoes, neatly trimmed nails, and fixed an elegant hairstyle with hair oil.
Margo's mother, Lilyan, also had a lot of elaborate and beautiful dresses, and every night Margo's parents would drink a few cocktails and then wander between the opera house and the cinema.
However, after Margo was 7 years old, her life changed dramatically, the family suddenly changed their surname, and then began to move at an unusual frequency, sometimes they did not even have time to move the furniture, they had to pack a suitcase in a hurry, and left the unfamiliar home.
After several relocations, the Margo family moved from Uptown New York to Mexico to settle down. As a result, one day, their house was invaded, and the whole house was turned upside down, but nothing was lost, as if someone was deliberately looking for something.
Seeing this, Margo's mother collapsed, "How did they find us?" No one should know we're here. ”
After that, it was another natural move, and the family squeezed into a taxi and set off for the Bahamas.
Margo's parents never explained the reasons for these sudden disturbances, and they seemed to rarely talk about the past, and the only clue for the children to know what had happened was fragments of conversation and overheard quarrels in their parents' mouths, among which the letters f b i often appeared.
Margo said, "It's very confusing to us, but almost all of us who have been deceived have become detectives." ”
Even one day, when Margo came home from school, one of her sisters asked her, "Did you see Daddy?" He was beaten so badly that his nose was blue and his face was swollen. But her parents never explained why he had been attacked, nor why, from that day on, there had been a strange bodyguard sitting in their living room.
All along, Margo and her siblings lived in a family full of suspicion and deception, and their father even asked them to do the same externally.
Arden asks the children not to tell anyone about their family life, and Arden even teaches them some tricks to deal with the probing of others, "If someone asks you a question you don't want to answer, you just need to give them an answer to another question." ”
It was such a family, with parents wary of children and whole families wary of outsiders, that margo and her siblings had an unusually terrible childhood.
Although they always had a place to live, food to eat, and smooth schooling, they never got the love and care of their parents. Not only did Arden and Lilyan always forget the children's birthdays, but what was even more frightening was that when Arden came home from work, he would always take turns putting the children on their knees and beating them with a ping-pong ball to punish them for their mistakes, and at this time, Lilyan was always watching from the sidelines, looking like a great revenge.
At Margo's 13, something worse happened.
When the Margo family moved to the Scottish city of Glasgow, Arden called Margo into the living room and asked her if she wanted to look more beautiful. Arden sat in front of Margo, holding a shiny black cigarette butt in his hand, smoking a cigarette, with his golden lighter and onyx ashtray at his side, looking as if he were an upper class man.
But beneath Arden's flamboyant exterior, he spoke the devil's language, saying he had taken time out of his busy schedule to visit a specialist in London who had agreed to give margo a cosmetic surgery to shrink her nose before she stopped developing, and Arden had made an appointment for the operation.
However, for Margo, who is still developing, plastic surgery is a very risky thing, and Margo, who is only 13 years old, does not feel that she has the need for plastic surgery.
So despite Margo's fear of her father, she refused the nose surgery until her closest sister came to her room.
Margo's sister was crying, rubbing her hands anxiously, and begged Margo, "Please, please, please do this operation, if you don't do it, Daddy won't let me leave this house." ”
Yes, Margo's siblings were desperate to run away from their parents, and Margo couldn't bear to stop her sister, she said, "I'm starting to get numb, I just want to protect her." ”
Finally, Arden took Margo to the Plastic Surgery Hospital in London, then left Margo behind and flew back to Glasgow on his own.
Three days later, Margo, 13, returned to her home in Scotland on her own, her nose still bandaged and her eyes swollen and blackened.
It didn't take long for Arden to announce another move, telling the kids that London was a better place to expand. When Margo's brother asked him exactly what kind of business he was doing, Arden used the answering technique he had taught the children, "Don't forget to bring your sweater." ”
Within months of arriving in the new city, Margo realized she was in big trouble, so she called her sister, who had managed to stay in Glasgow, sobbing and saying, "He's going to kill me." ”
As soon as the words fell, Arden's voice suddenly appeared from behind, "Who will kill you?" He pulled the phone from Margo's hand, grabbed her hair, and twisted her head to the side until Margo spat out the truth.
On her last afternoon in Glasgow, Margo sneaks into a pub to find a friend she wants to say goodbye to, only to receive a drink from a bearded stranger before her friend arrives.
The worst happened, Margo was taken back to the stranger's apartment, and after the man took drugs, he raped Margo on the cold bathroom floor tiles.
After this, while the man was asleep, Margo fled home.
But a few months later, she found out she was pregnant.
Hearing of everything, Arden shouted Margo's name and punched her in the abdomen, questioning her about the origin of her child and asking her to go for an abortion.
Margo didn't want to have an abortion, but like nose plastic surgery, she had no choice.
Her mother pushed her into a taxi and threw her a duffel bag, which was margo's only help when she went to have an abortion.
Although the Uk had introduced laws to legalize abortion in 1967, even so, people were equally discriminatory about abortions by underage girls.
In a hospital in south London, Margo was placed in a ward and told not to speak to anyone. In the ward, she could hear laughter, chatter, the crying of newborns, and nurses muttering in low voices, "slut."
After several tortures, Margo finally left home at the age of 16, and it was because of the shadow of childhood that Margo began to self-destruct, she frequently changed boyfriends, stole into other people's homes, promiscuous, drug use...
Until she was 19 years old, she was diagnosed with cancer, Hodgkin lymphoma, and could easily die.
When he heard the news, Margo decided to change, "I know I want to live, I really want to do something for myself." ”
So when she made a miraculous recovery, she began to try to change her life.
Margo never contacted her parents, and the farther away from them, the better Margo felt. But her disastrous upbringing has always bothered her.
It wasn't until a few years later, when Margo's sister wrote a letter to The New York Times and published it, that Margo began to learn the truth about her parents.
At the time, the letter was noticed by Arden's sister-in-law, a family member margo and her siblings never knew, Arden's sister-in-law explained that the FBI was looking for Arden and interrogating all those with whom he was involved.
By 2007, the margo brothers' wife had found Arden's death certificate, which Arden had died 3 years earlier in Eastbourne after a series of strokes, and on the death certificate Arden's occupation was "retired economist.".
When Margo sent the death certificate to the FBI and asked them to provide Arden's file, she received a 100-page document detailing Arden's criminal career from the 1940s.
When such a file was placed in front of Margo, Margo was shocked like never before, "like the discomfort in your stomach when a fast-moving elevator suddenly hits the ground." ”
The archives show arden was intertwined with the New York mafia and was counted by the FBI for bankruptcy fraud, and the amount involved was as high as $140,000, which is roughly equivalent to $1 million today in terms of purchasing power at the time.
Arden tricks people into investing in things that don't exist, such as in Scotland, arden sold a stake in a whisky company that didn't have even a drop of whiskey.
It turned out that Arden had been on the run with his family all his life and was an international fugitive.
Margo suddenly felt dirty, "My father's profession is to steal money, he is a bandit, he really likes to bully people, he is a despicable villain. ”
But why would Arden force Margo to have a rhinoplasty?
According to Margo's own speculation, Arden was hiding the fact that he was Jewish, fearing that Margo's big nose with Jewish characteristics would betray him.
Throughout their childhood, the Margo family's children knew nothing about their race, and although people around them always said that margo looked Jewish, this topic has always been one of the topics that margo's parents avoided.
Eventually Margo concluded that Arden thought her nose might undermine the fake identity he had established for himself (anti-Semitic surges arose in both Europe and the United States in the 20th century).
Margo said, "I feel sick when I think about this, it's so cruel. ”
Margo, now 64, has made many memorable achievements, and although she left school without a qualification, she eventually became a writer and taught creative writing at universities and colleges in the UK and the US.
She loves children, but she never has children of her own. In her opinion, the experience of being forced to have an abortion at the age of 14 has traumatized her, which is one of the reasons why she did not become a parent.
She also helps the prison inmates write, which she didn't care about, but when she started teaching the prisoners to write and write poetry, she found that she really identified with the men and women who were imprisoned, because that was how she felt when she was a child, and she grew up under the supervision of her parents.
Margo said, "The violent men made me see that there was humanity in their hearts, which made me very happy. I felt their love, but I never got that affection from my father. ”
As she helped the prisoners write, she also began to be able to face her past and accept those encounters.
Today, helping others overcome trauma has become at the heart of Margo's teaching, and healing stories are at the heart of her three books.
Margo's father is a sociopath, and her mother is also unusually "twisted", but Margo is completely different from them.
As her therapist had always told her, she was completely different from the two people who had brought her into the world.
Margo, who returned to the United States in 1986, said:
"I have a very loving relationship, I don't use violence and I don't blackmail people."
"I should look back on my life and be satisfied with myself and satisfied with everything I have gained by hating them."
People's lives always have to go through all kinds of tribulations, and not every kind of difficulty is worthy of our gratitude.
But these catastrophic encounters can always remind ourselves not to grow up to be the person you hate the most.
Source: British Stuff