A Knock At The Door

​ Sometime after my birthday at twelve years of age, late one evening just before bed, I heard a knock at the door, right in the middle of the goodnight song for the Lawrence Welk show. My Ninny descended the stairs to answer the door, while I sang the “Goodnight Song”. Ninni opened the door and was completely taken off guard by three grown men pushing her out of the way. I heard a scream then heavy footsteps ascending the stairs. I then heard voices of men that sounded like they were searching the house for something. I was very afraid and hid behind the brown mohair sofa. Huddling there I could hear my heart beating, I tried to hold my breath and I held my favorite stuffed animal, Kanga and Roo, as tightly as I possibly could. I heard the men getting closer and closer to me, could they be looking for me? I held my breath even harder, my heart felt like it would beat so hard it would soon burst, then all at once the sofa moved to reveal me huddled in a fetal position holding my Kanga and Roo. I screamed and cried for my Ninny as loud as I could, I did not know she was still lying at the bottom of the stairs. I was carried out of the living room into the hall and down the stairs to the foyer, where I caught a glimpse of my Ninny laying on the floor. It was at the moment that all my innocence left and I realized how fragile my Ninny really was. I never learned the identity of the men who removed me from my home, but their faces are etched into my mind to this day.

​I had never seen my Ninny as old prior to this moment, age was not a consideration in my brain but it was like time stopped for a moment and I saw every wrinkle, every swollen knuckle from arthritis, as well as every strand of grey hair. My Ninny was fragile? The thought had never occurred to me that my Ninny, my mother figure was old, I only ever saw her through my eyes filled with love. But at this moment, I saw lying on that floor a frail old woman, and because I was being carried out I could not help her, all I could do is hope that the girls living in the downstairs apartment would find her on that floor and help her. For now all I could do was cry and scream as I was placed into the car, and driven away. I do not know what happened to my Ninny after that other than weeks later I visited her and she looked no worse for the ware and the incident was never to be spoken about again. I found out later in life that she had spent all the money she had to hire a lawyer to fight to regain custody of me. I do remember going to court at this age but my mother dressed me up in a beautiful frock, and placed a flower in my hair. She warned me with a whisper prior to speaking with the judge, that I was to tell them how happy I was with her and that I wanted to stay. Little did I know that by following her orders I would seal my fate and waste all the money that my Ninny spent to save me from such an awful fate.
​The city I moved to is known as Somerville, it is not as cultured as the Alston Brighton area of Massachusetts, and my home life went from being a wonderland to the equivalent of hell for me. I now had a mom and a dad, many people would say that was better than a single old woman raising me, those folks would be very wrong. I wish a million times that I could live this time over and tell the judge the truth rather than the lies I was fed by my birth mother. I would have told him about the many days we spent walking in Boston Commons, how we rode the swan boats, watched the tree lighting ceremony downtown Boston during Christmas. How I got to walk to school and talk to my Ninny every day on the way to school and on the way back. How I got to have dance school, learned how to play solitaire while that old woman listened to me chatter about anything I wanted to talk about, weather she was interested or not. I would tell that judge about my large back yard that had loads of grass to play on, that the old woman raising me pushed a revolving human powered mower that she painstakingly sharpened herself every year. How she did all of this for me, and how I was loved by my Ninny and “needed” as a pawn by my mother rather than loved.
Adults fighting like children

​ My birth mother and step dad where always fighting both physically and verbally over one thing or another, and all I could think about was going back home. Little did I know, this new place was going to be my home. Although, I would not call this place home by any stretch of the imagination, sure I had my own room, a rather large one at that, and more toys and things than I ever imagined having, I even had my own television in my room, but the environment was not conducive to raising a child. When I was brought back so was my brother Bruce who had lived with his father’s parents for a time.

​ My step dad tried to make it fun for both my brother and I, by playing around with us and taking us to his parent’s weekend home in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. This place in New Hampshire was magical as well, because we were right on the lake, and my aunties spent a lot of time with us, teaching us how to swim, water ski and even driving the boat. But none of this made up for the fact that I was missing Ninny and my only wish in the world was to return home with her. She tried to regain custody of me but failed because of the lies I told for my mother, and she was getting older so the courts sided with my mother. (Sometimes newer and younger isn’t better, sometimes it turns out to be a lemon, that can’t make lemonade.)
​My mother and step dad always knew how to polish my brother and me just right to make it appear as though we were living a great life, all the while we were huddled together on many occasions when my mom and dad would fight. I remember calling the police because an argument would get out of hand and blood would be shed. I don’t know why I wasn’t sent back to my Ninny’s to live where I was not only happy but also safe from harm. My bed was still there, as where my clothing and toys, but most of all my imagination was left there. I understand now that this was the time in my life where I ceased to be a child and became a quintessential adult, because I learned at that time that the world was an ugly place.

​ I made new friends in my new neighborhood (Kim and Gina) but visited with my old friends any chance I got. I was never told and to this day still do not know why I was taken from my Ninny in such a violent way. She has since passed on, my mom and dad are divorced and neither wants to discuss it. I once ran away from home not long after I had been removed from my Ninny’s home, out of an act of desperation and desire to go back to the way things were. I got up early in the morning, packed a suitcase with wheels and a handle that I could pull it with and walked the nearly 26 miles from my mother’s house in Somerville to my home in Alston Brighton. My uncle who is five years older than I found me walking about a mile from my (Ninny) home. I was picked up and taken back to my mother; my punishment was being banned from seeing my Ninny for a very long time. My mother would go over and speak with her in the home we shared for so many years and I would know she was going so I would cry and scream begging to go. Once when my mother left the house to go and locked me in my room, I kicked at the window so hard that it broke and glass shattered all over the car my mother was in, in the drive way. She came up to my bedroom and hit me over and over and over again, left me laying on my bed sobbing and locked the door behind her. I remember thinking at that age that I wish I could just escape. I felt like a prisoner in a place that I was supposed to call home. It isn’t that I didn’t stay with my mom from time to time prior to my twelfth birthday as I had for many weekends, and summers, a few months at a time sometimes. None of the time at my mother’s was a happy time for me.

​ I do not have an understanding why I was passed back and forth the way I was, all I remember was that my mom would send me back when it wasn’t a good time for her to have me around. Little did I know that she was battling mental disease, you see my mother has dissociative personality disorder better known as multiple personality disorder and manic depression.

​I wish my mother’s problems didn’t turn into my problems. My mother had a drug problem, and was known to prostitute herself to pay for her habit. In many cases my brother and I were brought along as she had no one to watch us, so we would watch TV while she was handling her business. As I got older and grew a figure, I was turned into part of a “package deal” that got my mother more money. I remember crying at one point because my “girly parts” didn’t look right, so I asked my mother to take me to the doctor. Rather than take me to the doctor she looked at it herself, stimulated them and said “they seem to be working fine you are ok, go get your bath”. On another occasion I was at my friend Kim’s home and was asked if I wanted to go to the local pool. I of course wanted to go, but didn’t have a suit with me. My mother was sitting at the table with Kim’s mom and brother, smoking dope. Our house was only a few doors down from Kim’s but my mother insisted that I have Kim’s brother take me home to get my suit. I didn’t know he had already paid her for time with me. I got home expecting him to wait outside while I ran up got my suit on and then went back to Kim’s to go to the pool. WOW was I wrong! He followed me up the stairs to my room, I got my suit and said, “ok lets go Ill change at yours house” feeling a little strange about the way he was looking at me. But he told me that my mother said it was ok for me to change at home, and for him to stay and watch. I tried everything I could to avoid contact with him, so much so that I went to the bathroom to change and got stopped mid way there and dragged back into the bedroom. Then (I will never forget the smell and sounds of this incident) Kim’s brother leaned me back on the bed so that my legs were spread apart and he entered me, right about the time he was about to be done, he pulled out and made a mess out of my chest and belly. I ran to the bathroom and jumped into the shower and scrubbed till I couldn’t scrub any more or I would have no skin left. The smell would not go away. We left the house, after what seemed like hours and then Kim and I went to the pool. I never told my friend that my mother had sold me to her brother, for the pot and coke that our mothers were doing on the kitchen table.

​I never told anyone until I was much older that I was a money maker for my mother as well as a pawn in her marriage to the only dad I would ever know. As I recount this part of my life, the tears are flowing so much that I have to write at night time, so my own children will not be exposed to this ugly part of life and how sad it makes their mom. The only way my dad (step dad John, my brothers birth dad) found out about my mother’s escapades is because she was sleeping with his father, and got angry at him for something so she left a message on his home answering machine for my grandmother to find, it shook the family like a tsunami. Every week my grandpa used to come to my house and tell my brother and I that he had to “talk” to my mother in her bedroom, they would lock the door and be gone for hours on end. It was understood that we were not to interrupt them for anything, not even if the house was burning down. On this indiscretion I blame both my mother and my grandfather, she shouldn’t have been sleeping with her father in law and he shouldn’t have been sleeping with his daughter in law.