My childhood was a failed left-wing hippie experiment. Then my mother turned to QAnon

We lived off-grid and off the land, and shockingly never got botulism from the unsterilized canned green beans that turned into a gelatinous goo. Years later, my hippie parents started watching Fox News — and everything changed

(REUTERS)

This month, I learned that my mother has become an avid follower of extreme right-wing conspiracy theories, secretly following “Q”, joining Parler, and believing that the January 6th Capitol riot was spearheaded by undercover Antifa operatives. I’m surprised that she was able to hide such extreme ideas from me for so long;  I would like to think because she is ashamed of them.  However, it is more likely that she knew how my brother and I would react and wanted to avoid confrontation — particularly given our upbringing. Even now, I struggle to understand how a woman who raised us off-grid with left-wing hippie values has become a Trump supporter and a conspiracy theory devotee.

I am from nowhere. The majority of my childhood was spent where silence reigned except for the occasional yips and howls from wolves or coyotes, and where the stars shone brightly because there were no competing lights in the absolute darkness.  In the winter, the silence was only amplified by the cold; snow-draped trees provided unending whiteness as far as the eye could see.  As temperatures started to rise, we would tap the trees, boiling down buckets of sap nonstop on a potbelly wood stove that sat outside to make maple syrup. With no TV, books were my only friends.  Like Laura Ingalls Wilder, I poured the syrup into the snow to make candy.  

I am from a failed hippie experiment. My college-educated parents gradually started hitchhiking their way east after graduation, rejecting their middle-class backgrounds in California. With two backpacks, two dogs and no destination in mind, they simply floated and landed like leaves on the wind. When they were lucky, people offered them a place to stay, but otherwise they explored life on the road, which included sleeping on the side of it. 

While they were in Arizona, they looked for the green places on the maps to travel to and ended up lost in the Rocky Mountains. They didn’t have much in the way of a supply of food and sustained themselves on corn meal mush while the starving dogs ate field mice. Weak with altitude sickness, they wound their way down the mountain to a set of railroad tracks that led them straight into Silverton, Colorado. They were immediately greeted by what seemed to be a like-mind couple who extended an offer to stay at the place they were squatting and bunked down in a trailer, only to be kicked in the middle of the night by the cowboys who actually owned it.  

After staying at an abandoned mill house, they decided to give Silverton a try. My mother worked at the local grill while my father did odd jobs at the local mill and then took a job as a gold assayer from a local cowboy with a shack he was happy to rent out. It was a job my father said that he was able to keep because he had no interest in anything materialistic. This amazed the miners and cowboys, who were always trying to turn a quick buck. According to my father, he was one of the only ones that could be relied upon to not take the gold.  

My father had bipolar disorder, a condition that lay undiagnosed until I was in college. In a period of depression, shortly before I turned three, he painted a picture where the focal point was light streaming in from a door as he sat in the darkness.  He took this as a sign that it was time to move on and, with his thumb out and accompanied only by his dog Bakief, he set out searching for that light. He immediately caught one ride that led straight to rural Maine — as far as he was concerned, this was a sign that we were all meant to move there. A motel owner overheard him talking and directed him to a relative who was selling a property.  Yet another sign.  And as quick as that, he negotiated a payment plan for $13,000 to buy 40 acres of land with a large barn, on which a rustic house sat which lacked basic plumbing and water.  

The house originally was one room built in the 1800s.  The supports and beams had clear axe marks carved into them and had been cut from the woods on the property.  Over time, we added additional rooms and a second floor. With a single wood stove as the only source of heat, very little of the house held any warmth in the winter. At night, we buried ourselves in as many blankets as possible.

We strived to rely on what we received from the land — but our parents were not very good at it.  Unrefrigerated and unpasteurized thin goat’s milk was stored in mason jars with an inch of fat on top. One of the only vegetables that my mother learned how to can was green beans — and shockingly, no one died from botulism, despite a total lack of sterilization. The green beans lost all form and simply became a gelatinous mush that we choked down. 

A favorite time for us kids was when the animals had babies in the spring. We particularly loved the goats and every year named them the same: George and Georgette, Joseph and Josephine.  The babies always spent their early days in our house in the wood box. These same pets disappeared and reappeared in white butcher paper in the freezer later on — “mystery meat,” we were told, until I eventually worked it out and swore myself to vegetarianism for life.

My mother lived in her own world and was largely absent from her children’s.  During the summer, she wandered for hours around the property, looking at flowers she had planted; in the winters, she read non-stop, curled up in the dimly lit main room. She only became energized when our father came home; all of her attention and affection was reserved for him. We children began to fend for ourselves when it came to meals and we were sustained by government cheese, oodles of noodles, ten-for-a-dollar boxed fluorescent-orange mac and cheese, thrift store bread, peanut butter, and produce thrown out on the loading dock in the back of the grocery store.

I struggled to find and create order and cleanliness in a very disordered and dirty world.  When I was eight, I posted a list of rules on the refrigerator and signed it “The Management.” My father was a great storyteller, particularly when he was in a manic phase, and enjoyed laughing at his own stories as much he laughed at anyone else’s.  Needless to say, the rules were never followed and this simply became another one of his stories. I rebelled further in response, wearing an Easter suit that my grandmother had sent and announcing I was going to be an attorney. I began signing my full name, Dawn J. Post, on all correspondence around the house.

Unsurprisingly, my parents were very liberal.  So it came as a big surprise when my brother told me that in the last few years before my father’s death he became a fan of Fox and Friends.  My father? The one who had introduced me to Def Leppard and Ken Kesey?  Who took us to sweaty contra dances when we were small and when we weren’t that much older to smoke-filled reggae concerts? Who took the youth group from our Unitarian Universalist church to other religious institutions such as a Greek Orthodox, a synagogue and even a so-called spiritualist church where we were introduced to our guardian angels?  It seemed unbelievable — but I wouldn’t know, because we had stopped speaking after we argued about whether he should be back on medication and he told me that I would never understand because I was locked in the confines of my mind.

Of course, my mother was always by his side, listening and ultimately agreeing with him when he rapped or preached about his latest obsession. Later, she simply repeated him.  A believer of one.  

My father passed in 2015 and I never really discussed politics with my mother after that. I assumed that she had her own mind and views that she would be able to separate from my father’s final manic phase. However, after the 2016 election, we all began to realize through her occasional comments that she had voted for Trump. Soon, she was glued to right-wing radio shows, television and social media.  

I thought that the attempted coup might bring her back to reality.  It didn’t.  She now simply quotes the pumped-out right-wing rhetoric and conspiracy theories that she has been viewing in pandemic isolation: the election was stolen, Antifa were at the Capitol, Trump’s court cases were valid.  I asked why she couldn’t believe me, her own daughter, an attorney, on the legal validity of those cases. She simply shrugged.

Since then, I have argued with her about how we were now in more danger from domestic terrorists than at any other time. In one conversation, I warned that we would likely see another Oklahoma City bombing. “How would you feel if I am targeted by virtue of my profession, as a liberal attorney, or by location, now I live in New York City?” I asked. Her simple yet devastating response came: “Well, it’s dangerous in New York anyway.”

My instinct is to cut her off.  My brother’s is to try to ease her back into the fold.  All I can think about is: where did it all go wrong? I’ve come to the sad realization that my mother never really stepped outside of my father’s shadow.  The results of his last manic obsession live on in her. Glued to Facebook, she spends her days absorbing the videos, articles and comments of so-called patriots. She went from a believer of one to a believer among many. And I couldn’t be more scared for her.