Phone at 7:30 AM, Saturday morning. Everyone is asleep. I wake up and answer it.
" 'mornin'"
What I heard next woke me up like a bucket of ice water applied to my head.
The mother of the children living with me, who needs relief from the stresses of taking care of them, three months of relief at last notice, had taken the medication that is prescribed to give her a horrible reaction to drinking alcohol. She'd taken it along with a quart of vodka.
That medicine must have done its stuff because she'd clicked the LifeLine thing she has and told the operator that the combination she'd just dosed herself with could kill her. The operator sent paramedics who had--with difficulty--talked her into into going to the emergency room at the hospital. I was notified because I've been listed as her sister. Yikes! That's not a role I've accepted, having some instinct for self-preservation. But I thanked the operator for the information and hung up the phone and let my head rest on my pillow as I considered what I'd just been told.
I will never really understand that woman. I can understand little scraps of what motivates her and what hinders her, but I am not able to put all of my convictions aside to really know her. I see the results of her choices and while I hope that she succeeds someday in being an adult, I don't believe she ever will. She loves her children, I suppose. She can't quite bear to have them with her, though, other than her eldest, one night at a time, no more than two a week. The girls are in a kind of bewildered state, knowing as human young know that they need their mother and not understanding why they cause her to be sick. What a burden that guilt is! It's in the eleven year old's eyes when she asks me, "When do you think we will go home?"
I don't have an answer for her. Or maybe the answer is that she will never go to her old home and stay there for a long time. I don't know. Neither does the social worker who will make the recommendation to leave them with the mother or remove them. The social worker has been working with the mother for five years. Before that there was a different set of officials in a different county. The mother is talking about shedding herself of the current social worker, claiming she doesn't do enough. The social worker certainly puts her time in. On Saturday she called around trying to locate the mother from her own son's basketball tournament. I could hear the crowd in the background three out of the five times I talked to her on her day off. I believe the mother knows that the social worker has shifted her primary focus from sympathy for the mother to looking out for the children.
Telling the children what had happened was difficult in a way, but easy in another. The news should have stunned them, but it didn't. They knew why the social worker couldn't reach their mother, even though I hadn't told them that she had tried and failed.
Stacy reviewed the routine, talking as she thought through it.
"Let's see. First they'll take her to the hospital. Then to Walkshaw Psych. She won't be able to talk to anyone for two days, and then we'll hear from her."
They've been through this--how many times? I don't even know. A dozen? More? Yes, probably more.
Why does Stacy steal and drink and lie and sneak around? Why do the three children never find a focus during their ramble around my house? Why does Tillie have a sore throat and an invisible cut on her finger that needs attention each day and why does the girl need so many stuffed and alive animals to love? Why does Kris never bond to family and only escape to his friends to relax?
Hard questions, easy questions, and all the same.
