A Story to Tell

Abt the Johns Hopkins University Hospital Debacle

There, I met a Nigerian psych tech named Sylvester–you know, like Sylvester the Black Cat in Disney World.

He looked at me with disdain as I watched an African film about violence in the culture in Africa but then for some reason he looked at me differently, I was crying. A woman with a damaged eye was pictured. After that he took an interest. (I had been getting eye spasms and was going cross-eyed. I have never fully recovered.)

I haven’t pointed out lately that my ex-husband is a Scottish Clan of the Cat person, so, my son is also.

In Florida, at the women’s shelter I went to, I wrote a poem, it’s pretty simple: “Ebony rainbow.” That’s it. I do write poetry, conventional poetry. Not a lot of it, but some.

When I was a young girl I read a storybook about a one-eyed black cat. I looked all over online for it and I couldn’t find it.

My ex and I went to England and left my son at home. I refused to go but he threatened me. The evening of the day that I got there we got the news. A close friend of Ian’s, who he was supposed to be staying with overnight the first night we were gone, had thrown a dart at him and it hit him in the eye. 15 years later I am calm enough to discuss this. And able to cry. Everything is all coming out in the wash.

The motel half an hour south of the Airport in Atlanta is one of the places I have still been stuck in in my mind. Where I had to connect with the flight to Manchester, England. We had been landed by a storm, my suitcases went another way, I was stuck in the motel with nothing but my briefcase full of medications–thank God I at least had those! I went through a horrible moment that I still do not understand, it felt like having a miscarriage or spontaneous abortion–is there a difference?–a jarring within my womb. It was a horrible feeling and I just had to keep moving through it. I was not pregnant. And it’s a long story, I had gotten on the plane in Tamps without a shower and I didn’t have any clean clothes to put on after I took a shower in the motel room. It was a desperate situation. This was one of my abortions being processed.

And now I am being reminded of the time when I was at the Shelter and they had had to release my son to his father because I had been removed to the psych hospital and got on a bus to go to a Walmart and got lost at a bus depot way the heck in the middle of nowhere, countless buses and I didn’t know how to get back to the Shelter.

Finally I did find the right bus. I had bought a cassette player and, when I got back to the Shelter, all of the women were disgusted. But they let me stay.

But my ex had taken my son and I had to go back to our home and that didn’t go well for me. My mother was involved. I was lost after that. I had lost my son. My mother had gained supervisory custody.

So, that’s the nightmare I have been living ever since. It just never went away.

But it calmed me to take a huge step back backward and remember the one eyed black cat and that life has a plan and it isn’t always pretty. God has a plan and it isn’t always pretty.