Jeanie raised her kids ass-backwards. She managed to produce a hesitant mousy male and a daughter who’s always spoiling for a confrontation.

She’d like to blame it on Keith’s genes but it’s environmental. And even though Keith was around more than most fathers, everyone knows it was Jeanie.

She was like a woman on a mission not to let her kids mature. She did and did and did for them, to the point of encouraging the telephone calls from them even in their 20s, about sibling spats, shopping she could do, or whether their sandwiches needed mayo on both slices of bread.

Jeanie acts passive and Keith is a bully, and Jeanie built a home life so isolated that the kids really didn’t know any other personalities. It was no surprise that they each chose the opposite-sex parent as a model.

But this isn’t about those kids; Peter and Stephanie will have to find their own ways even though they’re sadly ill-equipped. Peter at 25 hasn’t finished college and is on his second year of disability for an upper back injury that has always sounded suspicious. Stephanie is three years older, with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, obese, employed as a retail clerk, daily sore in foot and mind. They appear to be close to each other but they are seldom in the same room. Although they grew up in the one house and regularly participated in school and church activities, neither has any friends.

No: this is about Jeanie.

She is now 62 years old. She’s a petite woman who always had bad posture and table manners, so now she has a dowager’s hump and often a bit of food stuck between her teeth or smeared across her tongue. Her once-cute features seem smushed together in a visage rapidly wrinkling. She deformed her small feet by wearing three-inch heels the first decade of her career; it looked great then but was not worth the sight now of bent toes and bunions in fully adjustable sandals.

Didn’t she used to have style? Maybe never. Maybe she was just cute. Thirty years ago there was an eagerness about her, a little obnoxious with bird-like perkiness but bounding forward, meeting her future. There was an aura about her of self-determination; she seemed to be on a path. Thirty years ago we thought she spoke for herself.

If so, she changed. Somewhere along that line she surrendered her soul to her marriage, and for her that meant supporting her husband no matter what. She was long lost five years ago, when she went away for three days to meditate on goals for the rest of her life, and her only conclusion was she wanted Keith to be happy.

She spoke for herself back in 1975. She was a completely submissive spouse by 2000. That’s a quarter century to review. Something happened in there, and if we can find it and defeat it, maybe we can rescue the child-raisers from soul-icide, and thereby redeem our future.

Because let’s face it. There’s more than just theory here. If Jeanie’s decisions had only affected her and maybe Keith, we wouldn’t be considering them. But here are Stephanie and Peter, loose on the world. True: Jeanie made them so dysfunctional they’re less likely to reproduce. But they’re both in prime reproductive years, probably fertile, Peter does booze and coke, and Steph is so lonely she’ll do anyone who reaches for her, so there is a chance Jeanie’s offspring will have the opportunity to damage babies of their own.

Keith doesn’t work and doesn’t come from wealth, so it sure can’t be money. In fact, both their families were blue collar, but Jeanie’s parents had property which she now owns.

Keith was besotted by his daughter and still adores Steph so much that no man she meets will ever match up. He was just as lopsidedly demanding of Peter. He was physically present more than many fathers, but that didn’t make him a good one. Jeanie was consistently critical of him to us, but she never disagreed with him in front of the kids. I can’t believe she kept him for being a good dad.

She always said Keith was intelligent but I never saw any spark in him. Then again, Jeanie often reported having a great time at some social function where I witnessed her standing silently hunched near a wall, diluted highball in her small hand, conversing with no one. Could she really find Keith intelligent? Interesting? I think not. No one is, after years of cohabitation. And Keith would have to be less than most.

That leaves sex. I’ll go there. We all used to talk about it, especially during the years we worked together, and she acted like it was frequent enough (twice a week) and good enough (no toys but lots of positions, just about everything but anal, sometimes a good movie…). But that was when we were in our 30s, still young enough to be libidinous and yet old enough to say enough that we never took our pants off without getting an orgasm for it. In fact, back then neither Meg nor Jeanie was completely faithful to her spouse, a characteristic that may have ultimately led to Meg’s divorce and to Jeanie’s continuation.