The excerpt is a first‑person narration by the father in O.A. Matthews’s memoir A Mother’s Lies: How a Father Lost His Daughter to a Bully’s Vengeful Plan. It recounts a chaotic night when the mother, Lindy, escalated a domestic confrontation into a violent, theatrical showdown involving the father, the mother’s older daughter Sadia, and the younger daughter Kia. After Lindy leaves the dinner table, she calls the father to help Kia, but soon the bedroom door slams shut and Lindy begins screaming that the father is beating her. The father is locked in the bedroom while Lindy drags Sadia into the kitchen, where a physical struggle erupts. Lindy repeatedly accuses the father (and later Sadia) of having sex with her as a means of intimidation. The fight escalates, Kia’s terrified screams fill the house, and Sadia eventually calls the police. The father reflects on the impossible choice between telling the truth—risking losing custody of Kia—and staying silent, noting how the mother’s pattern of false sexual accusations and threats to the family’s legal standing kept the father trapped. The passage ends with a call to read the full memoir on Amazon, hinting that the night’s events are part of a larger, sinister plot involving alleged murder attempts and a bullying scheme.
Chapters
An excerpt from A Mother's Lies: How a Father Lost His Daughter to a Bully's Vengeful Plan by O.A. Matthews, available on Amazon.com. This true story chronicles a series of events that by themselves seem relatively harmless. 6 years after a horrific breakup, The Pieces Fall Into Place. While trying to figure out why his family life went to hell, a father discovers an awful truth. He thought destroying the relationship with his daughter was the mother's motive for years of harassment and courtroom drama. In truth, she was covering up a failed plot to murder him. A Night of Terror. Some weeks later, Lindy's oldest daughter, Sadia, was in town for a few days and stayed with us. The PCA wasn't with us on this particular night, but Sadia was. The four of us sat down to dinner, and Lindy either took a call or made a call, but in any case, she left the dinner table to continue her conversation upstairs in the master bedroom. When Kia finished eating, she decided to hang out with her mom and headed upstairs too. After about 5 or 10 minutes, Lindy called down and asked me to come up and take care of Kia. She sounded frazzled and was already in a strange mood. Apparently Lindy was still on the phone And by now, Kia was taking a bath in our huge jacuzzi-style bathtub in the master bath off of the bedroom. She was so tiny she could almost swim from end to end in it, and she loved to try. While I was helping her out of the tub, we heard the door to the bedroom slam shut. After making sure that Kia was safely out of the bathtub and drying off, I went to the door but couldn't open it. At about the time I realized that someone was on the other side holding it tight, Lyndie began to scream. While she was holding the door, keeping me locked inside the bedroom, she was yelling down to Sadia. She was shouting that I was beating her and she needed help. Suddenly, the door handle was released and I opened the door in time to see Lyndie stumbling rapidly down the stairs, side to side from one banister to the other, pretending to have just gotten away from me. Still at the open bedroom door, I stood dumbfounded, wondering what was going on. When Lyndie reached the kitchen, she breathlessly described to Sadia the nightmarish beating that I had supposedly just given her. For me, time stood still. I was seeing something I just couldn't wrap my mind around. Not only could I not understand what was taking place before my very eyes, but I also couldn't understand why. In what could only be seen as a blessing from God, Sadia said she had seen everything. The shouting had caused her to peek up the staircase, and so she witnessed this theater of the absurd. But the drama wasn't over yet. When Lyndi wasn't able to get Sadia to agree to lie for her, She turned on her daughter. Voices became raised, and by the time I reached the kitchen, Lindy was shoving Sadia toward the back door. I could see things were going to get ugly, so I pushed my way between them to protect Sadia. I had seen Lindy get mad plenty of times. I knew her anger was about to ramp up to full-on nuts, and nearby objects would become missiles. For the life of me, I can't remember what they were saying to each other, just that it was loud and getting louder. Each one reached over me in an attempt to hit the other, a mother-daughter slug match that Jerry Springer would have been proud of, only none of their punches landed. That is, until Lindy started hitting me. At that, Sadia yelled for her to stop hitting me. Her reward for coming to my rescue was to be accused by her mother of having sex with me. Of course, we must be lovers for her to plead that her mother stop hitting me. That made perfect sense in this Twilight Zone. That would become an ongoing theme with Lyndi for the rest of the night. In later years, whenever someone would not agree to lie about me for her or get involved with our situation, Lindy would accuse them of having had sex with me. This happened to Kia's godmother as well as our court-appointed guardian ad litem. During the melee in the kitchen, we had completely forgotten about Kia, who now got our full attention by screaming at the top of her lungs. Attracted to the commotion in the kitchen, she was now standing on the lower steps, going out of her mind with fear at the sight of her family in a free-for-all. Her screams froze us in our tracks. I rushed to pick her up, held her tight, and told her something to calm her down. Then I took her upstairs, back to the master bedroom, where I tried to settle her down in front of the television. Moments later, from the open bedroom door, we heard footsteps racing up the stairs, rounding the corner, and running down the hallway. Lindy had chased Zadia up the stairs and now a war of hair pulling had ensued on the floor near the back bedroom. Again, I left Kia to rush to the aid of Sadia. Without being slapped again, I was able to pry Lyndie off of Sadia long enough for her to get away. The shouting attracted Kia, and once again, her horrific screams filled the house, drowning out our yelling. With the fighting hopefully done for the night, I attempted to console our frightened little daughter. Sydia had managed to call the police somewhere between the kitchen and her race up the stairs, but I had no idea she had until the doorbell rang and I saw flashing lights outside the window. Lindy was quick to convince us that if we told the truth, Kia would be removed from our custody. I didn't know that for a fact, but I was certain that if I were to tell the truth, Lindy would counterattack with a lie that would be 10 times more convincing. I had mere moments to think this all out. If I told the truth, would Sadia back me up, or would she side with her mother who had just been at her throat? If it came down to one of us being taken to jail, I figured that a daughter would stick up for her mother no matter the case. It wasn't worth the risk. This was confirmed in the years that followed. I discovered that a daughter's love for her parent would cause her to remain silent when a second truthful voice would have been a blessing to me. To read the full story of A Mother's Lies: How a Father Lost His Daughter to a Bully's Vengeful Plan by O.A. Matthews, go to amazon.com.
