"Let's Go!"

Let’s Go!

“Her dad told her to be ready in ten minutes or else him and her sister would be leaving without her…” 5. Prompt: time is running out

Child abduction is a serious crime. Although what happened in my case, to myself and to my sister, happened before the AMBER Alert notification system was designed (America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response) depending on the geographical area and on the particulars of any case in Kentucky specifically- child abduction is prosecuted as Custodial Interference which is a Class D felony. The names have been changed in this story. The AMBER Alert notification system is a rapid public notification system designed to assist law enforcement in locating abducted children believed to be in imminent danger of serious bodily injury or death. Personally, I am just now beginning to understand the seriousness of the violation.

After my parents’ separation my mom packed up our new burgundy Toyota Celica and then we were off to College Heights apartments, our new apartment home. It wasn’t very far away, only twenty minutes. Straight across Hwy 77 to Slasham Rd. As we were driving away from our family home, my sister said something upsetting, I yelled at her, she yelled, my mom yelled and then the car started spinning; and we crashed- backwards into a huge oak tree. I’m guessing it must’ve been an oak tree, the tree was the kind of tree it would be impossible if it were just one person trying to put their arms around it, but if a circle of friends were to try to hug the circumference: a hug accomplished. The car was totaled; the trunk was smashed and could not be opened. I am in disbelief of the name of that road “Slasham"; it’s like something out of the “Scary Movie”. “What’s up? " My mom ran so fast for help down that country road, I remember her holding me in her arms sitting there on the cool earth beside that big, old, oak tree, I could feel her heart pounding in her chest. The accident required a detour to the hospital emergency room and x-rays; fortunately, no bones were broken.

The next thing I remember was my mom driving my sister and I to Donahue, our new school. We were driving in some 1970’s, box car looking, pine green colored automobile. My mom was sick with disgust that she had to drive it, the Celica was totaled. —As we pulled up to our new school in the pine green colored automobile, hoping that no one would see us getting out of the car, for fear of shame and embarrassment; my mom stopped short of the entrance. She was like that (blessed with empathy)-sometimes I didn’t’ even ask her for what I needed she just somehow magically knew. So, when she pulled the car up to the curb: my sister and I both quickly jumped out and shimmied our way along the sidewalk hoping to go unnoticed towards the doors of the school entrance.

As sure as cotton candy is sweet, my mom got herself a job at Captain Ds on Meighan Boulevard with my aunt Ruby. My mom was a stay-at-home mom and housewife for ten years, she’d never worked outside the home; but my dad taught her how to be tough, and so did my granddad. The apartment my mom found for us was not ghetto, but it was close to ghetto compared to our house in Southside. Everything there was sad; or maybe it was just my mom. I missed the hill of woods behind our house in Southside; me and my sister would ride bikes at the apartments with some of the other kids in the neighborhood. I remember staying over at a friend’s house from the neighborhood, and when it got time for bed, she said “we got bugs”, I’m pretty sure she and I were both afraid. I knew nothing about bugs; my whole family were clean freaks.

My grandmother, Eileen is the most trustworthy woman I know; I can still see images of her sketched in my memory like memories in an old photograph album. There were only three of us grandkids at the time, myself, my sister Farah, and my cousin Amber June, we loved spending time with our grandmother. Our grandmother, had her routines, and we all knew when she told us she was getting ready to start mopping, you needed to make a decision right quick as to whether you were going to stay inside or go outside and stay until the floor was completely dried. The woman understood discipline and self-discipline. My grandmother was the perfect image of a grandmother, she was strong, strict, clean, beautiful, soft spoken (mostly), and modest, compassionate, wise, and very kind and oh so generous.

After my parents’ divorce, I had managed to make a few new friends at school. There were only three weeks remaining before school was to dismiss for summer break. I was in the third grade, and for goodness’ sake experiencing acute stress and trauma was not high on my priority list. I was enjoying school; perfect attendance, tag at recess; chasing the boys, not so much enjoying the paddling for chasing boys; feeling a bit silly and embarrassed for not letting go and ripping one of the boy’s shirts, but it was tag and hey I tagged him! But there was no one around to talk to about the emotional pain, no student counselor to probe for it, no one to talk to my parents for me; to suggest to them both or at least one of them perhaps to say, “Excuse me, your child is struggling mentally and struggling emotionally to process whatever the hell just happened with you two”. I can imagine a child thinking to him or herself, “somebody please explain to me how to process these emotions, this hurt that I am feeling: the betrayal, blame, deceit, dishonesty, the lies, the disappointment, the grief; can someone please tell me what this pain is and why it hurts so much.

It was different living with divorced parents. I don’t understand how my mom could have been so casual with dietary choices after losing two of her siblings to Cystic Fibrosis. One of my favorites for family dinner night was Campbell’s vegetable beef soup with a grilled cheese sandwich add pickles and mayo; served on a TV tray, in front of the console TV; and that was the 80’s American Style in our house. It all seemed to happen so fast as if that particular section or moment in time were being played in fast forward. I barely remember attending my 3rd grade class. Of course, there was drama I assume everyone experiences drama, some more than others especially when going through a divorce like my mom’s and especially when fighting over property and the children become part of the property.

Our occupancy there in East Gadsden included four trips to the emergency room, one for a tetanus shot, due to a rusty nail, followed by a bike accident requiring five stitches, and two stitches to the bottom of my foot after walking bare foot at Noccalula Falls park, where my mom’s softball team was playing ball.

It was a beautiful weekend afternoon and my dad had just dropped my sister and I off at my grandparents while he went to work his shift at The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Plant which is just the other side of the Coosa river and not far from North Gadsden where we were. In agreement with the custody order, my sister and I were visiting with my dad for the weekend. I’m not sure if my mom planned the heist or not. Her and her new woman frenemy had stopped by my grandparents’ house on their way out of town; my mother said they had stopped before leaving for Kentucky, so that she could say good-bye to me and my sister.

From what I recall, her woman frenemy stayed in the car, seated in the passenger seat. I didn’t recognize the car. With the Toyota totaled, and the car my dad had helped her to replace it with the 1970’s box car looking pine green colored automobile, where was it? That’s not what she was driving either. Whether or not my mother had intention or not, she and her homosexual partner manipulated, deceived, and betrayed my grandmother and the family altogether that day. I am aware that I struggle with authority figures to this day from the incident, and I usually recoil at commands. And it was a command: but usually when a parent gives a command; the child obeys. On that day in 1980, my mother instructed my sister and I to; “get in the car”.

Well, not so much a fairytale anymore to my mom, I’m sure. Clearly, and most times unexpected, from that year and that moment in time, I can see my mother and her agonizingly rude, self-centered, uncaring, arrogant, bitch of an ex-girl-frenemy at the curb in front of my grandparent’s house in that car. And believe me, it’s not okay: it’s not OK for me to be having flashbacks of that terrible moment. That experience has interfered with my education, my career, my spirituality, my relationships, and has been a constant aggravation to my mental health. I used to feel afraid each time the memory came to mind. As myself in the memory, being the young girl in the experience, I think about how afraid I must have been, and what I felt was fear, worry, sadness, and loneliness.

Zilch, bumpkins, notta; I needed something, some type of acknowledgment for the stress I was experiencing; hello?#%! Children experience stress too; the fight or flight response is not just confined to adults. Hello, I understand you were born that way; but hey, I was born this way! My body was releasing stress hormones in the event of danger. I was being high-jacked. I needed my mother to explain to me more about what was going on; as if a nine-year-old girl should be feeling as if she would be safer to jump out of a moving vehicle? I felt as if I wanted to cry, but nothing was happening, I felt frozen, but not cold. What was happening? I needed some type of response other than, “I’ll buy you a watermelon” which is what Bea and my mom said as we drove away. That is the only thing I can remember they said. If we’d gotten pulled over, I bet they couldn’t have passed a breathalyzer test. I was going to miss my perfect attendance award, for nothing but a beastly watermelon! I wish I could go back in time, and scream at my mom to stop the car, to cry profusely, to beg her not to take me; I wish I could go back in time and explain to her how bad my feelings were being hurt.

It’s part of the human experience, as it has been explained to me by behavioral health professionals- for a person to experience a fight or flight response to a perceived threat or danger. Ask Ronnie Van Zant of the band Lynard Skynyrd about the bands song: “Give me three steps.” My mother’s attention wasn’t focused on my emotional response or my reaction, that day. In my experience, the fight or flight was put on hold, I just had to sit and wait. Woof! Fawn. Flop! freeze? How did my sister and I respond to the stress of what was happening in that moment, of being treated like dogs to obey, and uprooted from our home; treated like property, not a women’s equal rights moment for me. Everything we knew, our house, our home, our family, my school, my dad; the shock.

The autonomic nervous system (ANS for short) works with the endocrine system to prepare the body for fight or flight, and mine was prepared, but my ANS seemed to be stuck alternating in “fawn” and “freeze” communicating to my 3rd grader brain, malfunction! My grandmother not being able to stop the car with the threats from her broom—Eileen hurried back into the house, to call my dad at work and then called the police.

When uncle Paul, my dad’s brother-in-law, got the call he was there in a hurry and was riding with my dad to Kentucky to help locate me and my sister. I’m not sure what was going through my dad’s mind, with his temper- it could have been anything. My mother must have been really hurt to have inflicted such grief and anguish onto my grandparents like that. My grandmother Eileen went to fetch a a glass of water for my mother, and as my grandmother walked toward the house and as generous as she always was; my mom gave me and my sister the instruction, “get in the car”. As I look back, I can still see in my memory the car pulling away from the curb (like a movie reel playing in my mind) and I can see my grandmother, her porch broom lifted high frantically waving it at the car as if to say, no don’t go please stop!

Eileen is my grandmother’s name and my favorite first cousin’s is Amber June, not that that really matters right now but they are important to me. That house was my second home. My sister Farah is the oldest and she was in the back seat of that car with me behind the passenger seat or was it the other way around she was behind the driver’s seat? My sister and I were so close.

It felt more like a disconnection, I wasn’t all there but was expected to act and behave as if I were. So I learned to act like the girl my mother wanted, not the 10 year old hurt little girl that I was. Without having a family, life stank; literally for my mom since she was working in sewage. A new school, a new mom, not meaning the other woman had become our new mom, because it was clearly obvious the woman did not have the slightest inkling as to how to make and intelligent decision when it came family discussions much less how to help a single mother raise two children. My mom was different. A different path, and this was not one that I ever imagined, I imagined fairy tales and puppets, Sesame Street, and the Electric Company, but this path was ACDC , this was a “Highway to Hell”. Yes, we were on what felt like a highway to hell— Two young girls that had just been taken from their family were now in the backseat of a strange car helping two homosexual women to make mixed alcoholic drinks. As far as I can remember they took Interstate 59 North, to I 24 East, to Interstate 65 North to Hades. Thank you to the Australian band AC DC for verbalizing the type of emotional turbulent experience of that day and time in my life, so perfectly with their song “Highway to Hell”.

I believe it’s necessary these days for a person to understand scientific lingo in order for them to describe for themself how they are feeling. The transition from Southside to Louisville was a culture shock; taking into consideration that Southside’s population is currently 9,000 and Louisville’s is approximately 298,694.

I was a bit dismayed and frightened, hastily looking for the perfect pair of shoes to accent my new outfit: royal blue knickers and a puffy, short sleeve, yellow mid-drift top with an oval neck-line. It was the color of the sky on a sunny day, and the outfit belonged to me. I was back home, in Southside. I was gasping for air crying for help. Crying for help from my sister, “which shoes?’ I asked frantically, wishing my mother was there. The only thing my sister said is “wear those.” In my mind though, my thoughts were still racing, and I didn’t know how to accept what my sister was saying.

I heard the door slam. There was no mistaking which door it was; it was the door leading out to the carport. I hustled to grab the shoes that my sister suggested, put them on, and rushed to the door. As I reached for the door, it took almost all my strength, but as I reached for the handle- I grabbed the knob, and with my just turned eleven-year-old hand, turned the doorknob- pulled the door towards me-opening it to see the carport where the family car usually was, and there was only air. I pushed the door back closed, locked it, and turned towards the telephone.

“A desire’ to kill, is not something that if is said to any law enforcement official is going to be taken lightly. Yet for revenge, which is an intent to harm, no one seems to bat an eye. I am not, nor have I ever been a therapist, but I have been a client for more than a decade, two to be honest, so I guess you can say I’ve shared quite a bit with a few therapists’ and a few therapists have shared some things with me. And yet from my experience the subject of desire has been taboo in therapy and in behavioral health counseling in general. A “desire’ for revenge, or to punch, curse, kick, or whatever; a desire to kill” speaking strictly from a biblical expression, of course. I believe if it were discussed more openly, it could prevent and reduce the number of shootings that occur each year in the United States. And maybe it was my mom and homosexual partner’s desire that believed that it would kill my dad for them to hi-jack me and my sister if they ran away with us to Kentucky the way they did.