When Rhonda awoke, her throat was sore and her eyes felt like they had been glued shut. She wanted to ask where her children were, but she couldn’t speak. The next time she woke up, she was able to ask the woman standing over her what day it was. It was Tuesday. When Rhonda asked where she was, the woman responded, “Snapper Five. The psychiatric ward of Brookdale Hospital.”
Rhonda knew it was exactly where she needed to be at this moment in her life.
CHAPTER TEN
What’s the Lesson When You Are a Motherless Child Raising Children?
Remember this: Every decision you make stems from what you think you are, and represents the value that you put upon yourself.
A Course in Miracles
WHO WOULD THINK THAT LIFE on a mental ward could be such a thrilling experience? Who would consider coming to a mental ward when one is desperately in need of rest, clarity, and peace of mind? Rhonda had never once considered the possibility, but now she was convinced. Everything around her had been painted the color of pea soup. There was a pungent aroma in the air that was making Rhonda’s head spin. There were thick cuffs of some kind attached to her wrists and just above her. And the drugs that were flowing into her arms from the glass bottle hanging over her head were making her sick to her stomach. But that was not the thrilling part. It was absolutely thrilling, though, to see herself floating above her self on the ceiling of the pea-green room. Rhonda kept trying to get down from the ceiling, but since she couldn’t get her lips to work, she went back to sleep. When she woke up again, there was a man standing beside her bed, and the room had changed colors. Now it was battleship gray.
“Do you know where you are?” he asked.
“Yes.” Rhonda’s lips were working now.
“Do you know why you’re here?” She knew, but she was too embarrassed to respond. She ignored him and the question. “Do you know that you tried to hurt yourself?” There was no way to avoid this one.
“Yes. I think so. I mean, yes. I tried to kill myself.”
“Do you know why?” he snapped. He was being persistent. This was no longer wonderful. It was becoming painful and annoying, embarrassing and difficult. Keep it simple, she thought.
“Yes. Because my husband, I mean my boyfriend, told me we were going to move, but he lied, and the baby was crying.”
“You want to tell me about it? About moving. About the baby crying.”
“Babies cry when they are hungry or scared or cold,” Rhonda said. “They cry when they think they are alone, or when they think someone is about to harm them. If you make loud noises when they are asleep, they will wake up crying. If you don’t kiss them before you put them to bed, they will cry themselves to sleep.” Rhonda wasn’t sure she was making sense, but she continued anyway.
“Babies cry when their mothers die and when their fathers leave them. They cry when you lock them in closets and when you beat them. A baby will cry when it believes that you love all the other babies more than you love them. And if you do something mean to a baby, but tell it not to cry, then the baby will …” Rhonda’s voice trailed off. She was headed toward the ceiling again.
“What happens when you tell a baby not to cry?” The doctor’s voice anchored her back in the bed.
“Then the baby will end up in a mental institution.”
“Like you?” The doctor was following her.
“Yeah. Just like me,” Rhonda answered.
Once you scratch the surface, everything you know will spill forth. Rhonda was talking fast, just in case her lips stopped working before she could get it all out. She told the doctor about Ray and his asthma, about Nett having to work overtime. She told him about wearing a wig and about dancing. Just to impress the doctor, she threw in the fact that she worked all day and went to school at night. Then she started to cry and told him that she was ugly and fat and that she ate too much all the time.
She did not tell him about the rainy Saturday in the basement with Uncle Leroy, or that he had raped her because she stole his money. Or that at that very moment, a part of her was floating on the ceiling. She did not tell the inquisitive doctor about the beating Daddy gave her on Halloween night, or that he would ignore her when he drove by with a woman in his car. Why bother mentioning anything about the woman in the mirror—Carmen? Or the woman in the white dress who had been following her all of her life. When Rhonda had told the doctor everything she thought he needed to know, she looked him dead in the eye and asked, “Who in the hell are you? Where exactly am I?” The doctor paused a moment and considered his response before he spoke.
“I think you’ll be staying with us for a while.”
She had already figured that one out on her own. And she was grateful. When the doctor stood up to leave, she indicated the straps and asked meekly, “Can you please take these things off?”
As if every fiber in his body had to be readjusted in order for him to answer, the doctor took at least three minutes to ask, “Are you going to hurt yourself again?”
Rhonda was insulted. “No! Of course not!” she said curtly. “What do you think? You think I’m crazy?” This time, the doctor didn’t respond. He turned and walked away.
Several minutes later, another wonderful person entered the room and gave Rhonda another shot of the thrill-inducing narcotics. When she awoke, her hands and feet were free, and she remembered where she was.
The first telephone call she made was not to find out about her children. It was not to Nett, nor to her father. It was not to John. The first telephone call Rhonda made was to Gary, her son’s father. She told him where she was and asked if he would come to see her. Within three hours, Gary was walking across the day room toward the woman he had not seen or spoken to in a year. The woman who lived right next door to his mother. The woman who had given birth to his son.
Rhonda and Gary talked more that day than they had since they met in high school. He went so far as to say that he was sorry to see her in this place, although the other inhabitants of the day room looked quite normal. He asked what had happened, and then he admitted he already knew. He knew that Rhonda felt like she had nowhere to go. He didn’t quite say he was sorry, but he did say that when she got out, he would do what he could to help her. Gary talked about his new job and explained why he and his wife were no longer together.
When he stood up to leave, he bent over and kissed Rhonda on the forehead. As she walked him to the door, he held her hand and told her that he knew she would be all right. “You can do it. I know you can.” Rhonda did not see him again for five years.
Nett declared that she could not and would not visit Rhonda in “a place like that.” Every time they spoke, Nett cried, so Rhonda stopped calling her. It took Daddy three weeks to get there. When he came, he told Rhonda that he and his “wife” were looking after Damon and Gemmia, and that John had taken the baby.
“You look fine,” Daddy said as he peered around the room.
“You mean I don’t look crazy?” Rhonda shot back at him.
“Nobody here looks crazy, but people have problems.” Daddy knew he had better quit while he was ahead.
“Nett sent you some clothes and other things.” Daddy handed Rhonda a plastic bag. “Do you need money in this place?” he asked.
“No.” Rhonda was peering into the bag. “My friend Ruth Carlos cashed my checks and brought me the money yesterday.”
“How much money?”
“I don’t even know. I didn’t count it. As a matter of fact, I don’t want to keep it here. Would you hold on to it for me?” Rhonda asked her father, not remembering his financial situation.
“Yeah.” Daddy was trying to hide his excitement. “Do you need me to pay anything for you?”
“No. Just hold on to it. I’ll need it to try to get another place when I get out of here.” Rhonda excused herself to go back to her room. When she returned, she handed Daddy a paper bag full of dollar bills. He promised he’d be back to visit her on Friday. The next time Rhonda saw Daddy was six
weeks later, after she’d been released from the hospital. She never saw the money again.
Often, we fear solitude. We mistake it for loneliness and attempt to fill the emptiness, the silence with activity and noise and people. But the solitude of Snapper Five provided Rhonda with the silence she needed to hear herself think. She was able to become still and allow her feelings about herself to surface. Through the silence, she became aware of her fears as well as her strengths. She learned that she possessed faith, and she learned to trust the power of that faith. The solitude of Snapper Five also brought Rhonda much-needed clarity. She became clear about what it was she specifically wanted in her life and what she did not want.
Rhonda was a model mental patient. She always took her medication. Actually, she would hide it under her tongue and then take a nap so that the nurses would know it was working. She also made an earnest effort to answer the dumb questions Dr. Miller asked about her life. When the medical staff wasn’t bothering her, she sat by the window and remembered. What she remembered, she wrote down.
She remembered the adults in her life who had taught her to be afraid; afraid of them and afraid of what they could do to her. She wrote about the pain of what they had and had not done. She remembered all the ways they had hurt her body and her feelings. She wrote it all down. Then she wrote about the things they said and the lies they had told to her, on her, and about her. She remembered how she had trusted them to take care of her and protect her. She wrote about how they had not done that. She decided that she could no longer trust people. “People,” she wrote, “do not care about you.” She also decided that she was not going to be like any of the adults who had raised her. She wrote that down, too. Then, she wrote about herself and how she wanted to be.
Rhonda remembered many of the things she had done and said and felt. She was trying to remember the reasons. She remembered being scared most of the time. She remembered feeling sad that she was always so scared. She remembered being angry a great deal of the time. She figured out that it was the anger that led her to lie to people and to steal things from them. She tried to remember all the lies she had told and all the things she had stolen, but she stopped when she realized that it would take her all day. She had done those things, she concluded, not because she wanted to, but because of something she wanted. She couldn’t remember what it was, but she knew she wanted it badly.
Maybe, she thought, what she wanted was to be loved and to be pretty and to be acknowledged by Daddy. Perhaps she just wanted to be more than the s——her grandmother had condemned her to be. What she really wanted was for Nett to be her mother and for Ray to stop drinking. She wanted money and a nice place to live. She wanted to know the truth, the real truth about her real mother. It’s hard to be a person when you don’t know the truth about your mother. And Rhonda wanted very badly to be a person, not a punching bag. She wanted to live a normal life. The way she was living, and had lived, was not normal by any stretch of the imagination. People thought she was normal, and she knew that was what made her situation so dangerous.
If you do the things people think you should do, the way they think you should do them, they mistakenly believe that you are okay. Rhonda knew that she was not okay. She wasn’t crazy, but she was neither normal nor okay. What she did not know was who cared about her. She did not know what was wrong with her or why it mattered. Rhonda really wanted to matter to somebody.
Then she remembered that she mattered to her children, her precious babies. It was only by the grace of God that she found the strength to take care of them. It was only by his mercy that she was able to give them something she had never had. Love. But did she really love them? Yes. Rhonda knew without a shadow of a doubt that she loved her children. Admittedly, she did not want them at first, but she loved them. If you have never been loved, have never known real love, how can you love? Rhonda pondered the question for a moment, then decided that unlike the adults in her own life, she loved who her children were. They were three unique personalities who possessed qualities she could love.
She loved their beautiful faces and the warmth of their little hands in hers. She loved the way they smelled after she had bathed them and put them to bed. She loved to comb Gemmia’s hair and kiss her neck. She loved the way Damon always made her laugh. He was such a little jokester. A real showman. They were smart, too. Damon could count to one hundred by the time he went to kindergarten. He didn’t like to do it, but he could do it. Gemmia was an artist. She would draw with anything, on anything. Gemmia was fragile and delicate, just like Nett. Rhonda’s eyes filled with tears when she thought about her baby, Nisa. She was only six weeks old, and they hadn’t gotten to know each other yet. She wouldn’t even let herself consider that Nisa was not being cared for, or that she might be wet or hungry or missing her mother. She decided that she would know and believe that Nisa was just fine and knew her mother loved her.
She didn’t cry until she allowed herself to remember the frightened faces of her children when John was beating her. When she was crying about John not being there, it frightened them. When she remembered their faces, she also remembered her own fear, and that made her cry. When you are a patient in a mental ward, you cannot be seen crying in the common areas. If you are, it is believed that you are having an “episode.” Mental patients who have episodes get drugged. Rhonda did not want to be drugged. She felt as if she was getting clear for the first time. So she learned how to cry on the inside, without shedding tears. She taught herself how to remember and feel and cry in her heart, maintaining a perfectly normal appearance for the outside world. As a matter of fact, she thought, that’s what she’d been doing all of her life. She thought they called it “acting.”
Every day, Rhonda would write a letter to her children. Most of the letters were apologies for all the things she had not done, all the places she had not taken them. She apologized for never telling them that she loved them. She explained that no one, not even Nett, had ever looked her directly in the eyes and said “I love you.” She apologized for yelling at them when she was angry, and for not always having dinner ready on time. She made big promises to her children in those letters. They were promises she wanted to keep. They were promises she didn’t know how to keep.
She had to do better, just like Gary said. But how? How was she going to learn how to do better? Who was going to teach her? The people who had had the opportunity to teach her, to tell her what she needed to know, had not done a very good job. She had to learn how to be better by herself. She had to learn how to be a better mother, but first she had to learn how to be a better person. Rhonda believed that she was not a whole person. She was something else. Something broken and battered and hopeless. She felt she was hideous and ugly and dirty. She had to figure out a way to get whole and clean and beautiful. Gary had said that she was too beautiful, too smart. The smart part was easy. But beautiful? She would have to think about that for a while.
She could only think of herself as beautiful and brilliant for brief moments. What did that mean? Beautiful like who? As brilliant as what? She didn’t feel beautiful. She had never seen brilliancy demonstrated. How can you be beautiful when you are angry and confused and afraid? Rhonda admitted that she was afraid of what her anger, confusion, and fear would do to her children. They might turn out to be just like her. Oh my God! What a horrible thought! She knew she had to do something quickly. Dr. Miller and his colleagues thought they were treating her because she had lost her mind. Rhonda knew she was really there to find it. She was on a quest to find her beautiful self and her brilliant mind. Sitting in the window, in the day-room window of the Brookdale psychiatric ward, Rhonda remembered how to pray.
“Prayer can do things that you can’t do,” Grandma always told the other mothers at the church. “It can fix things that you didn’t even realize were broken.” There is little you can do when you are in a state of mental fatigue and exhaustion. There is little you can do when you feel that no one loves you or cares about you. It re
nders you incapable. When you believe that you do not matter, you may be tempted to stop even trying to do better. But somehow, Rhonda remembered that when you can’t do anything else, you can pray. It started as a mantra: Please, God, please help me. Please, God, please help me. It became a bit more definite over time: Please, God, please help me raise my children. Please, God, please help me understand who I am. Please, God, please help me get away from John. Please, God, please help me feel better.
Rhonda would pray all day. She would pray while she was bathing and getting dressed. She prayed while she was eating. She would pray while she helped the other patients find invisible things and dead things they told her were hidden in their rooms. She prayed while she was talking to Dr. Miller. Once while he was counseling her, she prayed out loud.
“Do you see Jesus or some other religious figure?” he asked.
It was true. They really did think she was a nut! Rhonda knew she was a little off, but she wasn’t crazy enough to answer that question. With all the sincerity she could muster, and without laughing in his face, she said, “Dr. Miller, you can’t see Jesus. He’s in heaven with God!” Dr. Miller wasn’t convinced.
“Do you hear voices? Do the voices tell you to hurt yourself?” Rhonda lied. She did hear voices, just not the kind he was talking about.
“No, Dr. Miller. I do not hear voices or see lights or eat invisible bugs.”
“Are you angry?”
“No! And I am not crazy, either.” The old feisty Rhonda was back.
Yesterday, I Cried Page 16