Tonight, another bleak and self-absorbed post about my unhappy childhood. I’ll hide the body of it behind the fold, so as not to bum you out too much if you’re not interested in going on.

But I should mention that this won’t be a war story. I’m talking statistics and news reporting tonight.

The Salem Radio Network has replaced the Laura Ingraham talk show with the Mike Gallagher Show. I wouldn’t say it’s an improvement. Aside from the fact that he’s a heck of a lot less good looking than Laura (not that that matters a whole lot on radio), I don’t think the adjective “thoughtful” has ever been applied to Gallagher.

But he had an interview last week that I only caught on a re-broadcast on Sunday morning. In it he interviewed a guy named Glenn Sacks, who is a Fathers’ Rights advocate. And Sacks said something that I’d never heard before. Never thought of before. Never even had an intimation of before.

According to Federal statistics, mothers abuse their children far, far more frequently than fathers do.

Here are the abuse statistics.

And here are the murder statistics.

And here are more statistics from another site, providing further details.

Even considering the fact that more single mothers than fathers have custody of children, and that mothers generally spend more time with their children than fathers, the differential is significant. And almost completely unreported.

Can you imagine what this (suppressed) information means to me, a childhood victim of maternal abuse?

All my life I’ve thought my family was an anomaly, a one-in-a-billion singularity.

Turns out there are thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—of people living around me who had the same sort of experience.

Doesn’t really change anything in my life, but it makes me feel a whole lot less lonely.

(Note: No offense is intended to all the good mothers out there. I have no doubt that the vast, vast majority of mothers are doing a good job. That’s my whole problem, in fact. All my life I’ve heard people rhapsodizing about how wonderful their mothers were. It’s some comfort to know there are other people out there, like me, who can’t honestly join the song.)