In April 1982, I became a ward of the state while attending an alternative high school. For years, I struggled with the question of how it all came to be. Did my parents willingly give me up, or did the state take me away? Then, out of the blue, the answer hit me like a bell in the night. My mother surrendered me, and my father went along with her, of course. One morning, I overslept, and for some reason, she was unusually eager to get me up and on my way, even though I told her I didn’t feel well. That was the day I wouldn’t return home for many months.
Initially, I was taken to a crisis center where I stayed for a couple of days. One night, they gave me a sleeping pill that caused strange hallucinations. I was already on the path to becoming a heavily medicated guinea pig, with the risk of developing Tardive dyskinesia, a permanent side effect that causes muscle spasms, particularly in the face and neck. By the time I was eighteen, I’d been on half a dozen different psych prescriptions.
My social worker was Arlene, a black woman with her hair dyed a brilliant gold, though she wasn’t much help to me. Another person involved in my case for a while was Chris, a man with a hook for one hand. I later ran into him at the Social Security office in my early twenties—he had switched careers by then.
After leaving the crisis center, I went to stay with a couple in their fifties who owned a cluster of halfway houses. Their names were Anne and Harry. I liked them very much, but I didn’t care for their grown son Freddy, who struck me as a bit mean.
They had a massive German shepherd named Max, trained to serve and protect. He guarded the place after Anne’s mother was robbed at gunpoint before she died. Max was left on a leash attached to a long runner during the day and brought inside at night to roam the ground floor of the main house. Anyone living there, or who might come into contact with Max, was formally introduced to him so he wouldn’t go for their throats.
Anne and Harry owned seven houses, all at the end of one street. One was the main house, another was the “respite” house for new arrivals, and the rest were rooming houses for mentally or physically challenged adults. I was the only minor there, likely because no one else wanted me with my odd behavior and scarred forearms.
One day, Anne confided in me that she’d been married to Harry for twenty years after leaving an abusive man who had beaten her and Freddy when Freddy was just a baby. Later, she delighted me by telling me I was going to stay with her until I turned eighteen. I was thrilled. I’d already started calling her “Mom” because that’s what she felt like to me—the mother I never had. Harry was “Dad” too.
But it wasn’t to be. Someone, somewhere, messed that up for me, likely my folks.
I’m not exactly sure what triggered me to cut myself for the first time since arriving at the group home but I did. Maybe it was because I somehow knew or sensed that after just a few months, I’d be taken away. I just didn’t know it would be in such a twisted, cruel, and unfair way.
I was at the DSS building. I think I was talking to Arlene, or maybe someone else, but my memory is foggy about that day, so I can’t recall many details. All I remember is seeing two or three men in white coats.
“Are you going to Northampton State Hospital?” I asked them (I guess I suspected they were there for me).
One of them nodded, and I took off running. When they caught me, they strapped me to a stretcher and threw me in an ambulance bound for Northampton State Hospital, about forty minutes from Springfield.
To say my experiences in Northampton were hell on earth would be a total understatement! Why I was put on a ward with adults as a sixteen-year-old is beyond me. I was there for eight days, surrounded by every kind of loony imaginable. Even some of the staff seemed crazy! In the mirrorless bathroom, which had three-foot walls between the toilets like in jails, I was pummeled by a pocketbook belonging to a toothless old lady with gray, stringy hair that obviously hadn’t been washed in days. The woman across from me in the four-bed cubicle I was in would masturbate as she stared me down.
At one point, I was strapped by my wrists and ankles to a bed in a tiny room—all for crying about having to be there. Not for harming myself, not for harming anyone else, just for sitting there crying, wondering how I’d ended up in such a nightmare and how I was going to get out of it.
Northampton never ran out of horrors. One girl screamed as she was carried naked—save for a sheet draped over her—by her wrists and ankles into the shower room for the shower she’d been refusing to take for God knows how many days…or weeks. A guy in the day room gave me a cigarette, then happily threatened to kill me.
Those without cigarettes were given one once an hour, compliments of the state. I doubt this ritual still exists now that so many people are concerned about the hazards of smoking.
The hospital’s licensed drug dealer, who was supposedly a psychiatrist, was the most pathetic excuse for a shrink I’d ever encountered. How someone like him could get a license to practice anything was beyond my comprehension. There was no communicating or reasoning with him. Whenever I’d start to make a comment or answer a question, he’d interrupt me. He rambled on as if he were on speed.
On the eighth day of this nightmare, Arlene came to pick me up, informing me that my pet guinea pig had died and that I wouldn’t be returning to Anne and Harry’s.
Writing this autobiography has jarred my memory, and the reason I was taken away from Anne and Harry might have been because my mother found out where I was. I know Anne and Harry didn’t give me up willingly—or at least, I don’t think they did. For some reason, I called my mother while I was there and I guess we weren’t supposed to have any contact and no one was supposed to know my whereabouts. I don’t remember what was said or if that was the real reason I was pulled from them, but I do know that Anne wasn’t happy about my calling her.
I don’t remember if I was allowed to return to Anne and Harry’s to retrieve my belongings or if someone else went for me. I know I visited a few times afterward since my new foster home was just a couple of blocks away.
The next place I ended up was totally different. My new foster mother was a stout, fortyish black woman named Dotty. I don’t know if she owned the whole house or just rented the ground floor. It was a three-family house. Her brother lived on the second floor, and a Colombian woman with two young kids lived on the top floor.
Dotty was a habitual liar, and her friend Valerie was crazy. Valerie was a huge black woman who was every bit as mean and scary as she looked. She threatened me a couple of times, but fortunately for me, they were just threats. I would have been totally defenseless against the bitch.
There was hardly ever any food in the kitchen, and I lost even more weight. Every now and then, Dotty would get us something from McDonald’s. As big as she was, she had to be keeping food somewhere—she just didn’t believe in sharing!
I don’t remember how often she was home. It seemed like she and Valerie were always there. I’d hang out in my room most of the day, listening to records and smoking cigarettes.
When five-foot, nine-inch Shelly came to be my foster sister, I felt a little safer, though Val could’ve broken her in half just as easily even though Shelly was much tougher than me. Shelly and I would often hang out in the Colombian woman’s apartment while she was at work and her kids were in school, and we’d sleep in her bed until late morning since neither of us was a morning person.
During this time, I met Bill. I saw him at a bus stop and thought, “Now, if I were into guys, this would be an interesting character to seek out.” He was a pretty good-looking kid with long hair, in his early twenties, and definitely wired wrong, though harmless. I liked Bill. I even felt bad for him because he had one of the wackiest mothers I’d ever met. Once, when he took me to his house, his mother completely flipped when she saw me.
“She’s just ten years old!” she screamed. (Most people always thought I looked five to ten years younger than my real age.) Whenever we’d talk on the phone, she’d be screaming in the background, and he’d try to calm her down every other minute. Despite his slight retardation and strange ways, Bill held down a good job at a well-known toy company in Springfield. I only saw him a few times, and not once did he hit on me for sex. Maybe he was gay; I don’t know.
One humid August day, Dotty lied to me again, telling me she was going to let me use two rooms in the new house she was buying—one as a bedroom, the other to hang out in.
Little did I know what she really had in mind at the time!
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and then Add to home screen.