2004, Meridian, Mississippi

By Richelle Putnam

My house is quiet, an exception rather than the rule. Normally, at six in the morning, I hear little feet skittering into the room and feel my side of the bed give as a 2-year-old climbs in to snuggle up for a few more moments of sleep. I do the same. He still smells of his nightly bath, and the whirling fan above us causes his fine hair to tickle my face. When he wakes again, he pulls the sheet and bedspread off me, grabs my hand, and yanks hard.

“Mone, Mamaw,” he says. “Eat.”

He leads me as if I don’t know where the kitchen is. He touches first his highchair and then the spot where the chair should go. He does this at every meal, like my mind goes blank from breakfast to lunch to dinner. He opens the refrigerator, says, “Juice.”

We are partners in the morning, before his 5-year-old brother rises. I pour dark roast beans into my coffee grinder and the aroma wakens me even more. Around 7, I go to their bedroom to wake the oldest with a made-up morning song.

It’s time to get up. Time to rise.
Time to sit up and open your eyes.
Little one, Little one, rise and shine.
Little one, Little one, won’t you be mine?

I know, pretty bad, but those corny songs start my 5-year-old grandson’s day off with a boyish grin, especially if I add a little hop, skip, and jump over to his closet to lay out his clothes for daycare.

His brown hair looks frightened atop his head. “You’re funny, Mamaw,” he says.

“Funny looking,” we both add in unison.

But this morning my house is quiet. Not quiet. Silent. Today, I rise alone and am dressing for somewhere I never thought I’d never be going.

I enter the front glass doors of the building, place my keys in a plastic bowl, and walk through the metal detector, praying I don’t go off. Enough eyes have been on my family lately. I take a seat and thumb through an outdated Ladies Home Journal like I’m at the doctor’s office waiting to be called. A young man dressed in a dark gray suit comes into the outer room and let’s me know it’s my turn.

My turn.

As if I’ve been anxiously awaiting this hour.

The juvenile center’s courtroom is a large, square room in dire need of another coat of bland beige paint. The district attorney and social service workers chat at the scarred wooden table to my left.

The DA wears a genuine smile that is out of place in this atmosphere. His black hair is neatly groomed, his white oxford almost too starched, but his tie is lively and fun, bright red with royal blue swirls. From a thick photo envelope he proudly removes his daughter’s wedding pictures and shows them to whoever is close enough for him to grab. He does this one by one, not caring that a few pictures are all anyone needs to see of any wedding, including his daughter’s.

And here I sit, shame spilling over me like I have walked under a doorway where a rigged bucket of ice water falls and drenches me. Everyone points and laughs and there is nothing I can do but stand there, soaking wet, wondering why someone would do this to me.

To the right is another rectangular table and leaning against it is the appointed attorney in the matter of the guardianship of two minor children. He has never seen these two children, in or out of the courtroom, and I wonder how he could possibly have their best interests in mind, how he could possibly care. He is another one too starched and stiff, but his brown tie with tiny gold diamonds is as boring and unattractive as his unsmiling, pockmarked face.

In the center of the room to the back, sitting high above everyone and everything, dressed in a black robe, is the judge. He is young. Too young, as far as I’m concerned, to understand the situation I am in.

I am in this room because my daughter is a drug addict, a junkie hooked on dilaudids, a potent drug administered to cancer patients in the last stages of their disease. She smashes up the $40 pill, mixes it with water, and then sucks the mixture up into a syringe. She searches for a vein that is not blown, inserts the needle into it, as if the blood running through the vein is not enough for her.

Each dose only lasts a few hours. That’s all. A few hours of euphoria, and then it’s back to the streets to buy, beg, steal, whatever it takes for another pill. She will lie, cheat, rob her friends, family, even her children, whoever has what she needs to get another bang.

I am here in this courtroom because my grandchildren were living in a drug house, not one of those run-down shacks on the wrong side of this Mississippi town, where if for some reason you have to drive through, you lock your car doors and clench your cell phone, but a $300,000 home in an upscale neighborhood by the country club, where Mercedes, BMWs, and Hummers are parked on long winding driveways, where inside that house the floors were sticky from spilled drinks, where fast food bags from days before beckoned flies and other crawling insects to feast upon the leftovers, and dirty clothes piled higher and higher and never made it to the washroom where the washer and dryer sat waiting to be noticed, where cartoons played on the television twenty-four hours a day. I am here because sometimes no one bothered to pick my grandchildren up from daycare. I am here because I’m the one who reported the neglect of my grandchildren to the Department of Human Services.

I love my daughter.

Seeing these words on the page, I have to read them again and again.

I love my daughter.

I love my daughter.

Because over the past months I’ve placed my love for her on a high shelf, way in back, so it won’t fall off and break, but also so I won’t have to look at it. I can’t. It hurts too badly, like I’m watching her slit her wrists or hold a gun to her head, one shaky finger on the trigger.

Right now, I cannot afford to act and react on emotion, even the love for my daughter. Love is powerful, but it can also be blind to the point that it deceives and leads astray, to the point that it evolves into obsession or pride or control. I carefully feed myself information on addiction and addictive behavior so I can function properly in this situation, so I don’t further enable the addiction. When it comes to my daughter, I have become a self-sustaining robot.

Now, my daughter has two drug charges hanging over her head, charges that might send her to prison, but she doesn’t care. She has no fear of being busted again, no fear of charges piling up against her, and even walked out of detox to chase another needle. Out on bail, she lives from hotel to hotel, running, hiding from everyone, the cops, her family, but mostly from herself and who she used to be.

And, after I take the kids to daycare, I drive from motel to motel searching for her car, wondering if she is lying dead in one of the rooms. I park by her car because I don’t know what room she is in. Wait. For her to come out. Wait. And wait. Until it’s time for me to pick up the boys.

As I sit in this courtroom I am wondering how to stop my daughter from sticking the next needle into her tired, bruised vein. As I wait for the judge to award me legal custody of my grandchildren, I am wondering how I can save my daughter’s life — on the side.

My husband is close to retirement. So am I. We have come to cherish our freedom, having older children that are now independent so we can travel, go out with our friends, and simply relax, doing absolutely nothing.

Now our house is loud and energetic with two preschoolers. Sometimes they whine and fuss and pee in the bed and spill juice on the carpet and break glass trinkets when they run through the house wearing flapping towels on their back like superheroes.

Now I spend my evenings pushing swings, reading stories, giving baths, nursing scrapes, refereeing sibling rivalry, and trying to explain why a mommy and daddy have disappeared.

Now, the atmosphere in my home has thickened like water and cornstarch bubbling over high heat, and there is a stressful silence between my husband and me, even in our king-size bed.

Now, I find myself searching the classifieds, seeing what jobs are available for someone my age and how much two-bedroom apartments are running these days.

Now, I am wondering how I can fix my daughter and my grandchildren’s lives when mine is falling apart. Everyone seems to want to abandon this sinking ship. And I don’t know anything about sinking ships. Nothing.

The judge looks down at me from his box and asks, “Are you willing to accept full, legal custody of the minors?”

I try to manage a firm, “Yes,” but the word quavers.

He must hear the uncertainty in my voice because he says, “Are you sure? This is a big undertaking for anyone, much less a woman your age.”

The social worker grabs the box of Kleenex from her table and brings it to me. I thank her, grab a few tissues and wipe my face. Right now, I am the center of everyone’s world, all eyes on me, some judging, others empathizing, but all waiting. On me. And now I don’t know what to say. I don’t know if I can start all over with two young boys. I don’t know if I can handle the building stress in my home and the battles ahead. And what if my husband says, “It’s me or them?” What will I do then? What the hell will I do?

I close my eyes for a moment, press a thumb and forefinger into each socket for some kind of relief that doesn’t come. Then I see it — the small glass vase filled with clover on my kitchen counter.

“We picked these for you, Mamaw.”

The tissue is soaked and tears apart in my hand.

“I’m sure,” I say, and suddenly I am, as if that sinking ship has stopped taking on water and is somehow staying afloat — for today. Today. But today is all I have — all anyone has, even the bragging attorney with his daughter’s wedding pictures, and the guardian attorney, and the judge who sits above us.

At night, when the house sleeps, or during the day when I’m alone, I sneak into that closet, reach way in the back, and take down the love for my daughter. I have missed it terribly, like the arms of my own mother when I’m lonely and hurt, feeling helpless. I pray for my daughter’s full recovery so hard that my heart feels swollen and infected from disease. I envision her as she once was, a good friend, a devoted wife, a supportive sister, a laughing daughter.

But most of all I see a mother cheering her children on at backyard games of baseball and kickball. I hear her singing The Itsy Bitsy Spider and Puff the Magic Dragon, and reading Dr. Seuss and The Night Before Christmas. This is when I allow myself to break, like one of my cheap glass trinkets.

In the morning, I will put myself back together with whatever glue I can find. And it’s OK if the cracks and hairline fractures are still visible.

The glass vase of clover on the kitchen counter has a chip along the lip. I go over, run my finger over the jagged edge, and turn the vase around so everyone can see the flaw.

Richelle Putnam is a writing instructor and published author in both fiction and non-fiction in adult, young-adult, and children’s literature. She is the founder and President of Mississippi Writers Guild.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, January 29th, 2007 | Email This Post

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