Final Analysis - Catherine Crier [49]
The information in the letter was tough medicine, but it contained a number of legitimate complaints. Yet it failed to address other crucial problems, such as Susan’s distaste for authority. Indeed, her openly hostile treatment of authority complicated matters for her and her sons during difficult situations with the police or probation officers. Though she would later deny it, Felix claimed Susan cursed out the principal of Gabriel’s middle school, telling him to “go fuck himself.” She also penned an angry letter to the chief of the Moraga Police Department, complaining about officers who executed a search warrant in February 2002 to collect potential evidence in an assault case against Eli.
In that instance, Susan was furious that officers accused her of interfering. “Officer Harbison announced that I was obstructing the search, twisted my arm painfully behind my back, placed handcuffs on me,” she wrote. “Sergeant Price then led me downstairs and told me to sit down. I was not violent, threatening or getting in the way of the search.”
While Felix and Adam viewed Susan’s parenting and problems with authority as having a negative impact on the family, Susan had her own issues with Felix’s fatherly skills. She detested Felix’s need to single out one son as the “golden” boy, much like his own father had done with his twin brother, John. She observed that in his first marriage, Felix had lavished praise on his firstborn son, Andrew, while his daughter Jennifer received the criticism. Now in his second marriage, the pattern was repeating itself as Felix tended to favor their eldest son, Adam, while being outwardly critical of Eli and simply forgetting Gabriel. In many ways, Adam was more akin to Felix’s twin brother, John. He was smart and athletic, and things came naturally to him—qualities that Felix envied.
In a letter to Eli, Susan confided that Felix’s need to pick one of his children to be an example for the rest of the family members
is a way of maintaining control over the family members. When Dad went to graduate school in England, he studied under a psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, who wrote a book about how “crazy making” families do this: they pick one of their children to be an example for the rest of the family members, to express for the family what they are afraid of, what could happen to them…. The “example nigger” also expresses for the leader of the family…characteristics in his own nature that are not tolerable: for example violence, suicide, impulsivity, feelings of failure, craziness, homosexuality, whatever it is the leader is anxious about or driven by. In a sense, this child is selected as a sacrifice.
Of the three Polk boys, Susan viewed Eli as the most sensitive and emotional. In his teens, Eli displayed anxiety and separation issues similar to those Felix battled as a young man. In a diary, Susan noted that her middle son found it difficult to be apart from his dad. During grammar school, Eli had come home early from a hockey camp in Canada, and on a trip to Paris with Susan in 2001, he became so anxious he boarded a plane for home after just three days abroad. To Susan, it was clear that Eli’s issues were directly connected to his father’s poor treatment of him.
“You have systematically treated Eli as if he had something wrong with him, just as you did Jennifer in your first family,” Susan wrote of Felix in her computer diary. “You seem to have a need to scapegoat somebody.
“According to you, Sharon was to blame for Jennifer’s poor self-esteem. You forget that while Jennifer lived with us, I had time to observe how you treated her. Consistently, you behaved as if her intelligence was subnormal, when in fact it appeared to me there was nothing at all the matter with her except for her poor self-esteem…. I can’t pretend