It was a dreadful lesson

Get professional help someday.

There are some people I could not trust to be good to a cat, let alone a child. There are unfathomable remnants of cruelty in people who used to seem okay, who could have been so much better. Was this around the time a voice said don't take that card. I think maybe it was.

This is an era of so much mental illness. Sometimes people get by because they have special privileges and clearances and money and sometimes because of their European heritage but only for some of them.