Joan Wheeler’s book Forbidden Family – Personal psychodrama, lies and other things that don’t belong in a book. October 14, 2010

 By Gert McQueen, written April 22, 2010

‘Three things cannot be hidden, the sun, the moon and the truth.’…Buddha

 Chapter 15, as Joan is ‘preparing for Liverpool’, to see our sister who lives there, she tells us about meeting our father at work. I’ve addressed this in another post, but for accuracy sake and setting the record straight again, she misrepresents our father’s work situation. He was not a machinist, didn’t work in south Buffalo, at this time, 1976, he worked at the City Hall of Buffalo NY as a civil engineer and part-time at Sears as a sales representative. Our father’s natural way of discussing things is in a straightforward way and yes at times he can be abrupt. I am also that way, as I believe Ruth is. Joan does not understand straightforwardness or abrupt ways of talking that leaves no opportunity for argument. She only knows a sick sense of drama within life, one of arguments and tearing each other up and she got that from having been raised with hatred, rage and paranoia. This is why she ‘didn’t know how to relate to my father’ and many other types of statements that she has put in this book.

 We, the readers, are again subjected to Joan’s inner turmoil and negative self-talk as well as the adoptive family’s torments, paranoia and rage. Is it no wonder that these three people, Joan and the adoptive parents of Edward and Dorothy Wheeler have the medical issues that they had in 1976 and that have plagued them all their lives? This family is a sick, sick, sick family that feed on each other, over and over again. I can’t imagine witnessing a scene such as is on pg 132, adoptive mother throwing a chair at a leader of a public meeting of adoptees. see post Evil is as Evil Does – Joan Wheeler needs to learn that doing evil eventually has it’s consequences.

Why is it in this book? Is it good for sales?

 pg 133 tell us about Joan’s beginning wakeup call that comes with an interracial coupling, that she embarked on, without giving full attention to anything remotely related to the suitable compatibility nor any attention to the real possibility of the violent nature that such a relationship could bring. She should have ended it when she had the chance. Idealism doesn’t work in the real world! Oh yes being the only white woman in a black ghetto can be a wakeup call! But when I tried to tell her to think, I was all wrong! Joan Wheeler – Forbidden Family Chapter 14 – Refutted!   Ruth’s note – Joan states on page 133, regarding Manuel’s mother: “I admired the strength of his mother, a blind woman, who loved her children fiercely and raised them well despite the hardships.”         Excuse me, this woman did NOT do a well job of raising her TWELVE children! They were living in a slum tenement with cockroaches all over the place – and how did she raise her son – to beat up his girlfriend?  And she was blind! With TWELVE kids! I don’t mean to put down a blind poor woman, but obviously her handicaps prevented her from protecting her children from insects and raising her son not to be a batterer with a violent temper.

     Also on page 133 Joan says she marveled at the irony of the condition of an albino black man. What is there to marvel at? Why is she even mentioning this? Why is she mentioning the physical appearance of another human being? Does she marvel at a person who can’t see or hear? Or someone with Down’s Syndrome? Or a white person with red hair? How about a Native American woman with braids? Why the need to marvel at anyone’s physical condition?

 Got news for you Joan – blacks, albinos included, are simply PEOPLE. THIS is why her inter-racial relationship failed, because at her young age, and her being raised in the lily-white suburbs, never learned to see beyond the pigmentation of a person’s skin. No matter how much lip service she gives to wanting “equality for all people,” this little statement shows just what a bigot she really is. I mention Manuel’s mother’s blindness only because I am refuting Joan’s sentence that this woman raised her children well. In my opinion, she did not. Her son’s violence proves my point. 

Then we are subjected to more of the self-induced medical traumas that Joan has, throughout her life, because of her life-style of anger, hate and resentments. She has recurring bladder-kidney infections and wonders if they are related to genetics via our mother. If she ‘cleaned up’ her act and stopped the anger and hate the infections would have cleared out, but she doesn’t see the connection.

“Vibration can calm you down or drive you crazy. It is the primordial essence of creation by which we create and re-invent our lives. Even our thoughts generate vibrational effects. Positive thoughts can inspire you and motivate you to be more than you are, while negative thoughts can depress you and generate dis-ease. ” -  Dick Sutphen

Then she states, on pg 134, that ‘…and a permission note from my natural father, we secured my deceased mother’s hospital records, as well as my hospital birth records.’ This is a lie and has been brought out in other posts by Ruth. Joan’s Insistence on Not Letting Our Mother Rest When our father found out that Joan got hold of the medical records he was furious. We don’t know what the records state about our mother’s stay in the hospital and so I’m stating that Joan’s presentation is highly suspect. Her presentation is full of hype; it sells books! Isn’t that what she is after in writing it, to sell books and make money! Not to present truth.

In Liverpool, now meeting her sister Kathy, on pg 138 she says ‘…I rubbed my thumbs and fingers against (her fingers) as our hands were locked tightly and our eyes stared at each other with tears of joy falling with each blink.’ Gee, I wonder, did she get any uncomfortable feelings here as she did with our brother or myself? Pg 143/144 she says ‘…we settled in for the night and crawled into (her) queen size bed. Mixed feelings came over me…like sisters…we stayed up in the dark…’

I, myself, in 2000, visited London, for religious/cultural business, and took a train across the island to see Kathy. I too shared her bed and we stayed up all night, but I only had 24 hours to be with her.

Pg 145/146 she says ‘…a nightmare, I screamed for her to hold me, I sobbed as my big sister cradled me in her arms…I missed being cuddled by my older sisters and brother…I was ashamed, stunned, by my own behavior…’ She then says that 15 years later, after learning about adoption psychology, she learnt that her need to be held was normal. So if this is the case, why does she state, as I brought out in a previous post, that my ‘affection and embrace’ to her were ‘sexual’? And did I really tell her not to speak about it? Or is that just another one of her attempts to make Gert the bad guy and sell lots of books?

 I asked Kathy to make some comments about this and another Liverpool visit of Joan’s: see her statement for more misrepresentations by Joan. Kathy Inglis’ answers to Joan Wheeler’s caricature of her in the book Forbidden Family

Pg 155 she tells us about the violence in her relationship with the black guy, he beat her several times. Now it is ‘…an unhealthy relationship due to his violent temper, society’s racial prejudice and my growing fear that I’d lose both my families if I kept up this mixed race relationship.’ She’s learnt something! I know about domestic violence, been there, and it does take a long time to learn and gain courage to ‘get out’, so I’m not without sympathy here, only pointing out here that I did try to warn her.

Pg 157/158, Joan relates a visit, Sept 77, with my father’s wife where she learns that Dad is going to adopt one of his stepdaughters. Here is the first time she uses her newfound militaristic crusade against anyone who gives up a child, on paper, to adopt the same child, but she is a tad shy yet. She states that she was ‘…told some rather unusual news…Dad was to adopt his step-daughter…quite a shock…step-mother said

she would have to sign papers giving up her legal right to her own daughter, just so Dad could adopt her.’ Then Joan gives her learned opinion ‘…didn’t think this was correct procedure, wasn’t sure, maybe she signed paper giving permission, didn’t seem right that a divorced/remarried mother would have to relinquish her child, would she lose all parental rights…we were both so upset that we cried.’

Ruth’s note: this makes no sense. Ginette is Eastern Orthodox, and was raised in Europe by a Greek father. She is of the “old school.” She had two girls from her first husband whom she divorced. In 1970, she and my father got married by civil ceremony. In 1980, she wanted to get married in the church. In order to do this, she had to have her first marriage annulled. In the spring of 1980, she and my father went to New York City to present their case to the Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church. The annulment was granted. My father and Ginette did get married in the Greek Orthodox Church where they were parishioners. 

A casualty of the annulment was that in the eyes of the church, my stepsisters, Mariel and Joselyne were deemed as illegitimate. My stepmother calmly told me that she didn’t like that, but it was necessary so that she could now be not “damaged goods” (divorced), and she was now free to marry in the church. My personal opinion of this is that it is disgusting. But that’s how her church operates, that’s how she was raised.

So I have to wonder, if having her 2 daughters now be considered “illegitimate” in the eyes of the church, be over-worried about the stupid red tape involved in the adoption process that had to be gone through over Joselyne in 1977. And the red tape was in the end stupid – first both parents have to “give up” parental custody of the child that is going to be adopted. That meant Ginette and her ex-husband Robert had to both sign the papers. Then, the adopting parents sign papers that they are taking up custody of the child. That meant that my father and Ginette signed papers. So in essence, Ginette signed away her custody of Joselyne, then 5 minutes later, signed papers acknowledging that she was GETTING custody of Joselyne.  In both instances, Joselyne’s adoption by my father and her annulment, and the church now saying that both her daughters were illegitimate, Ginette recognized it all being stupid red tape. She may have complained about the red tape, but she is not the type of woman to cry over it. She is a strong woman.

Remember all of that because Joan will do it again, to me, after she overcomes her shyness she will be very insistent that she is right, everyone else is wrong! But at the present moment in history, Joan doesn’t seem to see that she has done any harm and wonders why our father ‘yelled’ at her for interfering in his business, of adopting his step-child and upsetting his wife. Ruth’s note: and what ever ANY person does in their family is NOT Joan’s dam business! And if she sticks her nose into a  family’s personal business, or deigns to tell a parent how to raise their child (especially when she herself was  NOT a parent) – and she gets yelled at for her interference – well then, that’s too dam bad.

Pg 158 – 161, we are hearing about yet another mother/daughter assault upon each other with hate/rage. What does Joan think she is gaining by relating all those rages? Strange way to honor your mother! All it does is to show a very sick drama of mental illness. Is this Joan’s reason why people should not adopt? If so then all this business about the birth family and reunion is totally unnecessary. see post:  Evil is as Evil Does – Joan Wheeler needs to learn that doing evil eventually has it’s consequences.

Pg 161 shows us an example of Joan’s constant use of cognitive dissonance, which means an inconsistency, lack of consistency or compatibility between actions or beliefs. After we are told about the violence between mother and daughter then we get to see an entry in Joan’s diary where she states; ‘…mom doesn’t seem to be as threatened as she once was…both my adoptive parents are willing and eager to socialize with my natural father and stepmother…watching my two fathers playing with six-year (brother)…my two mothers sit and chat as if old friends…Mom takes a genuine interest in my sister in Liverpool…now we discuss the family situation…’ Excuse me! The two families, birth and adoptive, did not interact with each other! This is just another version of Joan’s ‘Jekyl and Hyde’ way of thinking and behaving! Its cognitive dissonance, believing two opposing ideas at the same time; like how Christians believe. But oh, fear not, the violent exchanges will continue on!

Pg 162, where Joan leaves college in summer 78, funny that she doesn’t mention that at that time I did drive down there to get her, with my children and our father. I also remember a conversation about what kind of a job she would be able to get with a Liberal Arts degree; apparently she doesn’t want to relate that tale. Wonder why? Probably doesn’t fit in with her ‘vision’ of the ‘reunion’.

 Pg 165 she now has her own apartment and the mother/daughter hate-fest starts up again. But after awhile Joan loses a job, and instead of moving back home, the adoptive parents ‘took care of Joan’, they paid her rent and brought her food, while she looked for a job, so much for living on your own, being an adult and handling hardships like the rest of her siblings had done.

I didn’t have a ‘security blanket’ when I left home. I got married one month after HS graduation and within 2 years had 2 children and a no-good husband. There was no such thing as ‘going back home’ or having my father ‘take care of me and my kids’. The school that I grew up on was the school of hard knocks, you made your bed, you lay in it and if you want to be an adult than you take care of yourself because you are an adult. Period. I raised my children that way. I’m not suggesting that that is the best or the only way but that is what I was taught by my parents and Joan was not raised that way.

I remember once, early in my first marriage, I had asked my father to co-sign for a loan so that we might be able to get our finances in order. He did reluctantly. And we were late on a payment and the bank called my father for the payment. My father came directly to where I was attending school and yelled at me for putting his credit in jeopardy. I understood, but it had not been me who missed the payment but my then ex-husband. I never asked my father again to help me. He and I believe that ‘you are responsible for your own debts’. 

When my own children made the decisions to become adults, each in their own way, they became adults. Even though they did so earlier than I would have wanted them to and in the ways that I wished they didn’t, nonetheless they declared their adulthood to me. They got their freedom to live their lives the way they wanted and so did I. That is the usual, normal and right way for children and parents to part ways, not the way Joan and her possessive adoptive parents were.

So what does she do when she gets a job? On pg 169 we find out that she “immediately began saving my money for a trip to Liverpool…’

Priorities! Never ceases to amaze me about people’s priorities. Trips, vacations and luxury stuff long before thinking about long-term security, like a good job, food, rent, utilities, and insurances. I have come to the conclusion that people continue to do this because they KNOW that the SYSTEM will bail them out, be that system some parent who doesn’t want to lose the kid or the society that does not make people WORK for their checks.

Ruth’s note: oh yes Joan has her priorities. I know I’m jumping the years here, but in July 1986, me, Colby and Joan went to Chautagua, NY to see the 60’s rock group The Monkees. In September 86, they added Buffalo to the tour. Joan just HAD to go see them. Then two weeks later, she calls me up, crying – her electricity was getting shut off. So we have here, a 30 year old married, 8 months pregnant woman, with a 3 year old at home, with a shut off notice. Shut off notices don’t come unless you haven’t paid the bill for a few months. But she spent money to see a rock group, not once but TWICE! Oh never fear – Mama Wheeler came through for spoiled little Joanie – and paid the bill.  Oh by the way, when we went to see the Monkees in July – Colby and Joan paid for my ticket – they owed me for long distance calls Joan made on my phone. So if you have money to buy THREE tickets to see a rock concert – why can’t you pay your electric bill? Answer – they obviously didn’t have the money to do both – so like RESPONSIBLE ADULTS – they neglect paying their utility bills and go see a rock concert.  So what’s Colby’s excuse? He wasn’t ADOPTED – no, adoption has nothing to do with this fiasco – JOAN AND COLBY ARE BOTH SPOILED BRATS WHO MOOCHED OFF MAMA WHEELER AND THEN TRIED TO MOOCH OFF ME AND ENDED UP STEALING CLOSE TO $900.00 DOLLARS FROM ME! Anybody who listen to Joan’s whines about how “poor” she is, should wake up and smell the coffee. For someone so “poor” how does she manage to travel all over the place? Wake up people! Joan is crafty at whining about her “poverty.”

On pg 167/168 Joan says that Dad told her the story of how our parents met. Well I’m stating here for the record that what Joan has written on pg 168 is NOT the same story that my father told me. I’m not repeating her falsehood here. Joan’s version of the story includes some pretty bazaar elements and people that I have never heard of and have not idea where she gets some these strange family connections.

Because my Dad is older now I don’t like to question him too much. If I ever find out more information about family connections I shall post them for clarity sake but for now, Joan’s story doesn’t ring true.

I did asked my father in March of 2010 about how he, my father, met my mother and what he told me is essentially the same that he has told me several times over the years and it is not the same as the one that Joan relates. My father’s father Leon and my mother’s father Jacob both knew each from work on the railroads. During a furlough home in WW11, my father and his father where coming home to Buffalo from an army base. My mother and her father where going to Buffalo after a visit in Iowa. During this time period soldiers had first preference to seats on a train. After my father’s father told him that a friend and his daughter were going to Buffalo on the same train my father saved 4 seats for them. This is how my father and mother met. They exchange contact information and that was that and as they say ‘the rest is history’.

Broadly speaking Joan does not know how to ‘take’ our father, simply because he is not the same as the adoptive father who was weak, timid, browbeaten and abused by a dominating wife. Our father also does not engage in useless arguments, like the kind that Joan is so used to having from her upbringing. Pg 169/170 she is ‘…so upset about an incident (with my father) that she sought counseling…to be told that ‘she must be afraid of men because you keep saying ‘my father gave me away’…and you cannot trust men…’ She finds a ‘real psychiatrist…with a sliding fee scale…’ Boy, for someone who has no money and has the ‘parents’ paying rent and food she sure can afford things what most of us can’t like professional help! By her description of these sessions it sounds as if either she is a fool, for paying for such incompetence or she is a fool to think that the readers would believe her nonsense that a psychiatrist would be that stupid! Either way she wins… the fool’s cap!

Seriously now, you know people, Joan is not the only child that did NOT have the father there. All of us siblings did not have our father either, and yes we all have had some difficultly with that issue, but, you eventually have to ‘get over it’ and not wallow in it forever. It’s called growing up and becoming an adult! That’s doesn’t mean that you will never have ‘issues’ over the lost parent or cold parent but at least you can get on with your life. The kind of shit, that Joan writes, does NOT make good book copy. Joan is not a good writer. She can’t tell her life story with any kind of compelling feelings that makes a book good or a classic, like the one I happen to be reading at the moment  (how appropriate). 

“Of Human Bondage” by Somerset Maugham (1915): ‘They seemed to be always on the verge of a quarrel. The fact was that he hated himself for loving her. She seemed to be constantly humiliating him, and for each snub that he endured he owed her a grudge.’ and ‘He thought she might beckon to him, he was willing to forget anything, he was ready for any humiliation, but she had turned away, and apparently had ceased to trouble about him.’

Back to Joan’s book, the episodes where she relates such issues as the bridal dress, which Ruth has addressed in other posts, the truth of what actually happened certainly is not how Joan has portrayed it. An event of a communion party and the inter-relationships between and with birth family that contains a step-mother, step-children and half-siblings, that Joan never knew 5 years before, yet has much ‘insights’ into them, is so out of character to what I actually know of all these people, is to question Joan’s account. For example Joan states, pg 175, that after our father called her I called her. Not true! She states that I ‘yelled at (her) for ruining the party and mistreating (step-mother)…’ and on and on ‘…and by the way, you need to return Momma’s wedding dress to…you have no right keeping it…(I) hung up’. Wrong, wrong and wrong! She seems to have forgotten that at that time, 79, I was busy with my own young family and I had very little involvement with my father’s family and/or with what Ruth was doing.  Ruth’s note: I address the communion party and the wedding dress in a separate post: Ruth Pace’s additional comments of Personal Psychodrama of Joan Wheeler

When reading anything Joan writes you must use the filter called ‘the Joan factor filter’. Joan herself can be quite rude and stupid because, by her own admission pg. 174, ‘I wasn’t taught to clean up. I had no social skills.’ And so, does that mean that everyone in the family or the world must take such lack of training into consideration when dealing with a woman, who at this time period was 23 years old! Was she just hatched? Had she never been to other people’s homes, did she not learn any social skills at college? Oh I forgot, whatever it is, it is never Joan’s fault.  Ruth’s note: and for someone who grew up without a mother, I think I had a lot more social skills than Joan. And later on in the book, Joan quotes her mother who was putting me and my sisters down: “they had no mother and look how they turned out.” Oh yes, Mama Wheeler, Gert, Kathy and I turned out a hell of a lot better than Joan. Just how the hell did you raise her? Not very well as I can see.

According to Joan there seems to be some kind of conspiracy against her by all of the birth family. Far from it, she portrays everyone in such a light as to say that everyone was ‘out to get her’. Dad is always yelling at her. Dad’s wife is upset with her. The stepsisters don’t like her. Ruth and Gert don’t like her. She has the audacity and stupidity to say, pg 176, that she ‘…could picture Dad yelling at my sisters for causing trouble with his second wife and third wife. I wondered if my sisters deliberately caused Dad to yell at me since he didn’t get that chance while I was growing up.’ What an asshole Joan is! Ruth’s note: I address this asinine remark of Joan’s in my post Ruth Pace’s additional comments of Personal Psychodrama of Joan Wheeler

She does not see Dad’s positive sides because she wants him to be some image of a real father that she has concocted in her mind instead of taking him for what he is. Of course he is ‘short’ in temper, who wouldn’t be when dealing with Joan, but of course, the readers of this book have no idea of what it’s like to deal with Joan.

She has zero information about Dad’s 2nd wife, she didn’t live with what we lived with, and she really ought to be ashamed of herself to put into print this garbage. Equally, she really ought to hide her face in the dirt for even suggesting that any of us siblings had any problem with Dad’s 3rd wife! She ought to hide in shame for suggesting it. Truth, Dad’s 2nd marriage was not a good one but we were all very young, innocent children and knew NOTHING about the real grown up troubles that my father had to deal with in that marriage. It is only in my own adulthood that I appreciate the pain that my father went through during those years.

Remember now that my father had been a widower twice before he met the woman that became his 3rd wife, and I was very pleased that he had married her. When he had made the decision to marry he asked each of us, long before we knew Joan, what we felt. Each one of us told him the same; that he should go ahead and marry and do what he feels is right. I was happy for them both. This woman had 2 little girls and I saw how she took care of them and my father and I somehow envisioned that what she did was what my own mother would have done, in order words, she fulfilled a space in my father’s life that was emptied by the death of my mother. How could I possible ever have a problem with this woman? No, never, she has always been a good woman, mother, wife, stepmother and friend. Joan knows not what she writes about! All she knows is how to be a ‘…victim, a pawn pulled back and forth at everyone else’s whims. In self-protection, I turned inward…’ Like everything else coming from Joan, it is from that sick inward self which does not reflect the true world around her.

From “Of Human Bondage”: ‘He talked of getting occupation of this sort so long that he had not the face to refuse outright….at last he declined the offer…it would have interfered with my work he told Philip. What work? Asked Philip brutally. My inner life, he answered.’

Gert – October 16, 2010

Ruth – October 16, 2010