Following the post on 29th April, the second Julie Gregory book, that is to say the first written of the two books, has now arrived from Epsom Library and been consumed. I am pleased to record that having turned up at the library without any change, they were quite happy to trust me to bring in the 50p reservation charge at some point in the future - and they have yet to remind me about it. I must pop in to clear the debt.
The book itself is much like the first, with the same defects of writing, although I think I would have done better to have read them in the right order. There is background and explanation in this book about the mother which would have helped when reading that about the father. The father book, I suppose, being something of a sequel, written to capitalise on the success of the mother book.
So we have a daughter with a mother with the Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome, a mother who needs to invent or create all kinds of problems to take her child to the doctor with, a rather unpleasant variety of attention seeking. There was also a moderate amount of moderate violence (of a non sexual variety). But I think that the syndrome, while unpleasant, is rather difficult to diagnose. The mother is all sweetness and light when it comes to talking to the many doctors that she sees about her daughter's problems and most of the time they believe her, or at least go along with her (a problem which we used to have in our own mental hospitals when dangerous & mendacious patients would sweet talk the official visitors). There is also the way of health (which we seem to be heading for in our old Etonian hands) according to which doctors are paid by the test, so they have every incentive to do lots of tests. Some of which were, in this case, unpleasantly invasive; abuse by any other name.
I am not sure what child protection departments take away from all this. Some parents do fuss a bit about the health of their children, but I am not sure how you can easily tell when they are fussing too much. Some parents buy far more clothes and shoes for themselves than they will ever use (as this mother does), but is that a reliable indicator of child abuse? Lots of people live in trailers in the States. There is also the angle that the daughter was born prematurely, weighing three and seven ounces - not a very good start in itself in my very limited experience of such things. She looks remarkably normal as an adult considering, in her photographs at least. My point being that one would expect her to be a bit sickly when young: it takes a while to catch up from such a dodgy start. So maybe some overworked and underpaid social worker missed a few beats on this one - but I am not surprised. We might have a bad outcome, but that does not mean that there is a good process to stop it happening again.
I should add that both mother and father appear to have had pretty dodgy parents themselves.
I also find that my poor short term memory is starting to get in the way of reading books like this. I forget what I have been told on page 10 by the time that I get to page 20 and I think it would help if I built a spreadsheet as I went along with key topics across the page and time down the page. Excel is really very good for this sort of thing and going its way I would keep much better track of what was going on. Such a proceeding has certainly helped me get a grip on the odd Shakespeare play in the past. But do I really want to do my recreational reading with a computer to hand, taking notes? Do I want to spend quality time on this? Maybe I shall have to start to be a bit less eclectic in my reading to make things a bit easier for myself. Focus the fading powers a bit on the things that really matter to me.
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