My skin is crawling because I feel like I was just contacted by a scary ghost from the beyond.  I haven't spoken to anyone from my biological family of origin since Christmas of 2010.  That's when my father kept up the family tradition of hitting me.  It hurt even though I was 52 years old by then and he, at 76, didn't pack the punch he used to when I was 14 and he was 38 and he used to bounce me off my bedroom walls with his fists.  

Christmas of 2010 was his second chance to have a relationship with me without violence.  We had been estranged for 8 years before that already once because he had gone after me at Christmas once before.  He is has untreated bipolar disorder and PTSD from living in 4 war zones abroad, so he's dangerous when he loses it.  He goes into black rages he doesn't even remember later.  The reason why the estrangement was not just from him but from my mother, too, was that she has untreated borderline personality disorder and enjoyed provoking him to hit me.  She'd stand behind him watching with a weird grin on her face.  Nutty, huh?  

Today I was minding my own business at home when my phone rang and it was an attorney from across country.  I didn't even know if my parents were dead or alive at this point.  The last I'd heard from them was when they'd hired an ex-FBI agent to tail me at work and I'd had to report him to Human Resources.  That had gotten him to stop.  My parents are quite shameless.  Believe it or not, the front behind which they hid their madness was that they were missionaries in war zones.  They were missionaries in Peru but got involved in some financial church fraud that got them kicked out of their church by their church board. 

I'm not sure what it was all about, but it involved a Peruvian congressman who joined their church.  He may have laundered cocaine money through their church, gotten caught, and then cut a deal for his charges to be reduced if he turned state's evidence against my parents ,the foreigners.  In any case, their ordination as clergy was yanked by their bishop back in the USA.  Then they were deported back to the USA by the Peruvian police as persona non grata.  They were driven to the airport in a police car and put on a plane with a warning never to return again.

This attorney from across the country on the phone today told me my parents were setting up their will and that we had a piece of property in common with my name on it.  I had no idea; I don't own anything on my own or, to my knowledge, with anyone else.  Since my divorce, I've been a renter.  When I hastily left their house on Christmas of 2010 after being hit there for the last time, my sister who was visiting said goodbye by way of crowing that now she would not only get her inheritance from our parents, but mine, too.  That's the last I knew of them, and I took my sister at her word that I would now be cut out of the will.  That was fine by me, I prefer being independent to being codependent anyway.

As far as the will goes, I'm probably still cut out of it, this lawyer's call wasn't saying one way or the other. What he needed in representing my parents' business interests was for me to sign over my portion of that property to them.  That's easy for me to do since I didn't know I had any interest in any property to begin with, where theirs or anyone else's.  What's hard is to deal with the flashbacks I'm having at even this indirect and formal contact with them.  They truly are so toxic that being in touch with them at all feels like having to process a lethal poison.  These are truly bad guys, my parents.  I say so, their former church says so, their former bishop says so, and the Peruvian police say so.  It's really chilling to hear from them, like a creepy episode of Tales from the Crypt.  Support welcome.