Great idea for a thread and I can see the parallels.
BBM...thinking about Terri as a "master of deception"...do you think her own Mother believed... all these years... that BIZARRO Fairy Tale of Terri as the fabulous friend who helped 0ut Desiree and moved in to care for her child?
That is a long, long time to keep a lie alive and with your own parents!
Terri like Scott seem to have a need to be viewed as perfect. Not humans that make mistakes, but perfect.
Terri had a fantasy perfect life and marriage going on her Facebook page. She needed people to believe that.
But to keep such a whopper lie going with her family for over 7 years? Did she think her parents would never accept the real way they met and came together?
Noting your understandable doubt that a person could maintain a central fiction about an important facet of their own history with people as close as one's own parents I can only tell you that in my experience it is perfectly possible.
I had an extremely rough (though ultimately enlightening) experience with an extreme narcissist who was the former wife of my boyfriend. They had two children, one a preteen with some pretty serious problems of her own when I arrived on the scene.
This woman told the most bizarre and easily exposed lies about herself and everyone around her pretty much every time you spoke to her; yet my boyfriend (her ex-husband), her parents, the neighbors and of course the poor baffled children believed all of it and repeated it like well-known family lore:
Mommy was a choreographer for the LA Lakers Girls
Mommy saved a person who was drowning in a pool
Mommy lead all of the horses out of a burning barn
Mommy almost died from a spider bite
Mommy worked as a teen and supported both of her parents (laughable)
Mommy was an extra on the set of a movie and the star picked her out of a sea of hundreds of extras personally to work improvised lines with him but they were cut from the movie (fantasy)
Mommy had a boyfriend in Florida who gave her a Lamborghini car (she was a teen run away and I'm pretty sure a prostitute)
Mommy pulled a dying man out of a car crash
Mommy was a volunteer firefighter
Mommy is related to the English Royal Family
and worse:
Daughter one "almost died" when she was a baby and Mommy saved her (never happened)
Daughter two has a rare disease and only because Mommy recognized it is she alive (the child had no disease)
She had her former husband convinced that:
She had had a child who died (pure fiction)
She herself had a rare blood disorder (laughable)
She had had a sister who committed suicide and that she had found her in a bathtub (having slit her wrists) but that they must never speak to her parents about this because they were in denial that it ever happened (no such person ever existed)
You might think that this was because these people were all very stupid, but they weren't. Her parents were just weary of trying to get through the maze of lies that this person had been telling all of her life, ever since she was a small child. They were used to her exaggerating everything, everything being a life-threatening drama with her and they felt responsible. I saw some of that weary resignation is Terri's father.
Both the parents and the ex-husband also simply did not want to believe that a person that was close to them, that they loved could lie about such significant things and of course could not quite bring themselves to be so self critical as to acknowledge that they had someone in their lives who was so dangerous and spiteful and ... well ... insane.
The almost two years that I spent with that man having to deal every single day (she would show up whenever she felt like it, call and email constantly) with that insane woman were very difficult because I exposed her easily as a liar in the very first conversation that we ever had (though she certainly kept trying ~ lying was literally the only form of conversation that she knew). Ultimately, it cost us our relationship and I'm of course better off not being with a man who is so obtuse, but at the time it was hell.
This is all by way of saying that I totally believe that Terri Horman had everyone believing different and extreme things that she was fabricating over years and years because I have seen that kind of person in action.
Do I think that Terri told her mother that absurd fairytale (Jane Eyre) about having been hired as a governess and having the lord of the manor fall in love with her instead of telling the truth that she entered a relationship with him while he was still married and in fact while his wife was with child? Yes absolutely I think that she told them that and the mother seems to have a screw loose that causes her to believe this stuff.
