So this is where I am now. A year without my daughter. Why? Why? Why? What did I do that was SO HORRIBLE that I do not deserve to have my child?
I went into Arbour HRI in Brookline, MA in Jan. 08 because I was literally on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In Aug. 07, my daughter KaRe and I had to leave my parents’ home after living with them for a year because my step-father threatened my life. In court. Directly to the victim rights’ advocate.
What was he doing there? Well….
I had a really stupid argument with my (adoptive) mother that escalated for truly stupid reasons: I was going to miss a dentist appointment because a message had not been relayed to me until just then. Long story short, my mother felt she needed to call the police to come and protect her from me / arrest me for yelling. And that’s all it was: yelling out of frustration. OK, I grabbed the phone out of her hands and told her to grow the fuck up, that she didn’t need to call the cops because I was yelling at her. She glares at me, then informs me that she “know(s) why [I] fled to Maine when [I] was pregnant” and proceeds to spin a yarn about how DSS was going to snatch my daughter the minute she was born, and how my son’s adoptive parents (John Best and Margaret Curtin) told her this.
Then she leaves.
DSS shows up about 30 min later. Five minutes after that, the police show up. Apparently, during the course of those 30 minutes, my mother called my step father while driving to the police station; according to the police reports that I have seen regarding this incident, she ALSO called Margaret for emotional support, crying and claiming that the police ‘don’t care’ what’s happening. Blah blah blah, my stepfather shows up, they go to the courthouse in Leominster to get a restraining order and are told that they cannot seek an r.o. because there is NO DANGER TO THEM PHYSICALLY. My mother is outraged and my stepfather says he can “…solve this problem in ten minutes: I’ll just get a gun and shoot the bitch or get a knife and stab her, then call the police to come get what’s left.”
Cut back to the house, where DSS has just shown up to investigate allegations of neglect filed by Raquel Woodard of Jewish Family Services (agency through which I placed my son) back in the early part of the month. And the Leominster PD has just shown up, too. Then my parents show up, are met by Amanda Walker from DSS and my mother proceeds to tell her that she “doesn’t like [her] already; you have the same name as my daughter.”
Huh?
So I’m inside, one DSS SW is outside, one is inside with me; there are three cruisers outside; my mother is flipping out on everyone; my daughter has no clue what’s going on; I’m attempting to pack up some of our things and basically it’s bedlam. At one point, Amanda W. tries to get the car seat from my mother’s Rav4 and PsychoCyndi starts flipping out that she can’t take that, it belongs to HER, blah blah blah, and, she adds, “that baby is as good as dead if you let her keep her!” She then goes on to demand the name and number of her supervisor so that she can report that Amanda W allowed an unfit parent to keep her child.
Amanda W. ends up locking herself in her car out of fear of PsychoCyndi.
The crowning indignity of the day was my mother cancelling my cell phone service because she couldn’t get the actual phone out of my hands. And she tried, believe me.
I won’t go into detail about living with friends, living in the emergency shelter and getting ganged up on by angry black women, or the issues surrounding my time at Transitions at Devens (what a dump), but I’ll summarise.
Oct 07, I won tickets from ‘FNX (radio station) to see They Might Be Giants. Even though Paul’s case was still open, my mother agreed to watch KaRe so I could go. I ended up getting some bad information from Roy Pastor about whether or not I needed to go to the court date on Oct. 18. HE TOLD ME I DIDN’T HAVE TO GO, that the case would be dropped. I didn’t go. The case wasn’t dropped. My mother calls me up LIVID, screaming at me about how I should have gone and if it weren’t for me Paul wouldn’t have this charge, etc, etc.
No babysitter.
Next day the Resident Manager at Trannies offers to watch KaRe for me and I accept. Then it’s found out by Shakeera McLeod, the program coordinator, and suddenly I’m without a sitter again.
I find a last-minute sitter, a 15 1/2 year old girl who lives on the second floor across from the Resident Manager. She agrees to watch KaRe, I give her my cell number and tell her to call me if ANYTHING goes wrong or if she needs me for ANY REASON. I also gave my number to another adult resident just in case. KaRe’s ready for bed, I have to catch a train, my cab arrives, so I leave.
And a 51A gets filed by Shakeera for neglect because I left my daughter with a 15 1/2 year old sitter.
To be continued…
