The Day Innocence Died

 

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”
~ Maya Angelou ~

He showed up at my house at one of the most vulnerable moments in my life.  I had seen police in my home before as a child, neighbors used to call them to intervene when the sounds of my dad beating my mom would disturb the relative peace of our little corner of our apartment complex in Astoria Queens.  I learned early from those experiences that the police could be verbally abusive to victims of domestic violence with impunity, especially if those victims were black, female and foreign.  For these reasons it didn’t even occur to me to call the cops when at 18 I became the victim of a brutal sexual assault, but he showed up anyway, someone else in my house had called 911 when they saw the state I was in, clothes and underwear torn open, both eyes swelling shut and bruises and scratches from head to toe.  Thirty something years later it still boggles my mind the mistreatment I suffered at this man’s hands.  He was a master at the use of cruel, demeaning, misogynist and racist language, consequently when I review the events of that day I feel more violated by him than by the man who had hurt me physically because at a minimum I should have been able to trust the police.

I was lying in my little sister’s bed, from that position I could not avoid my reflection in the two big mirrors on her dresser on the far wall, I literally watched as inflammation set in and changed my faced into something unrecognizable, more like raw meat than a human face.  Needless to say I felt panicky, lost and overwhelmed.  I found out later I was screaming uncontrollably when I thought I was crying softly, I can’t imagine how scary that must have been for my family.  My little sister tried to help me by pouring a splash of white rum in a glass, she gave it to me and I gulped it down tasting alcohol for the first time in my life, it burned as it went down and the room started to spin, but the surprise of that wore off quickly as I started to panic again, of all things I was worried about what my mom would think, at that time we did not have a good relationship, in fact I was under the distinct impression that she disapproved of me entirely, in large part because I look like my father who had terrorized her mentally and physically for many years before she finally left him.  It was strange, I was still afraid of something that had already happened; scrambled memories of the attack from that morning were swimming through my head making me feel crazy, I feared being haunted by those memories for the rest of my life.  I was more aware of the nightmare scenario playing out in my head than what was going on around me.  I wished that I were dead.  At some point my mom was in the room with me telling me that this had happened to me because I wasn’t a good Christian, I was hurt but not surprised, she was interrupted by the police officer hovering at the bedroom door.  He seemed huge, oversized next to all the dainty little fixtures in the room.  He spoke to my mom briefly, barely glancing at me and then he directed her to leave and close the door because I was 18 years old, an adult.

I feel like I never caught his name but more likely I blocked it from my mind at some point.  He was white, middle aged with a small beer belly and thick black hair that fell over his brow.  He paced around the bed for a few minutes before he spoke.  Finally he asked me over his shoulder if I wanted to get arrested.

I tried to talk but I started crying instead.

“Look… Ms. Hewitt… I’m not here to take a report; I’m here to talk you out of filing a report.  As I was saying, a woman your age…, from Jamaica… it wouldn’t surprise anybody if I found contraband in this house, maybe in this closet or this dresser.  And then I would have to arrest you.”

By this he had squeezed himself into a decorative white wicker chair and daintily crossed his leg.  I was flabbergasted, my mind grappled with the threats he was making.  When I could finally speak I asked him why he was doing this to me.    He sighed heavily as he settled into the chair, as if he was annoyed or disgusted.

“Sir… what contraband are you talking about, I don’t drink or smoke… what are you trying to do to me?”

“Ms. Hewitt, don’t get smart with me, you are drunk, I can smell the alcohol on your breath and you were screaming when I came in, nobody’s gonna believe your story…”

“Sir, look at the state of me… I’m black and blue all over, my eyes are swollen… my sister gave me some rum to try to calm me down, I was screaming because I saw how my face was swelling up.  Look at me, isn’t this proof that something happened to me?”

He finally turned and looked at me properly.

“Ok, I’ll be honest with you… yes you were obviously assaulted, that’s enough to get the guy arrested but he’s only going to spend one night in jail and then he’s going to come back here and kill you and your family.. Is that what you want?”

I felt like I was in a bad dream, my whole body hurt, my cheeks and jaw felt stiff and it was hard to talk due to a deep gash on my bottom lip.  My reflection in the mirror across from me was horrifying, red bruises on my face were turning purple and green.

“Why are you doing this to me? Do you know the guy who did this to me?  I don’t understand why you’re treating me like this; I was raped and beaten sir.”

He was up on feet again, pacing the tight space around the bed, sighing heavily in utter annoyance, both thumbs in his big cop belt on his waist.

“Ms. Hewitt, there is no proof that anyone forced themself on you, what they’re going to say is that you had sex with him and then you regretted it and made up this ridiculous story.  Women do it every day.”

“What about my clothes and underwear that he ripped up?  What about my injuries? There’s no way I could have done this to myself!”

He bent down and opened the brown paper bag I was pointing to, he rifled through and pulled out the torn underwear and scrutinized it carefully before putting it back in the bag.  My jaw dropped, I was mortified to see him handling them, even smelling them.  I wanted to disappear.  He stood up again and the expression on his face seemed to change, he looked almost sympathetic which turned out to be a ploy.

“Look, ok… say I believe your story… I’m still not going to do anything about it because if you’re really a victim then you would want to avoid this going to trial.  Have you been keeping up with that rape case in the news, how that woman’s underwear has been passed around to all the lawyers and jurors?  Now if you’re really an innocent victim like you say you are… why would you want that to happen, huh?  An innocent person would want to stay as far away from that as possible.  Think about how embarrassing that would be for you and your mom.  They would put you on trial, not him.  You’re Jamaican… nobody is going to believe you.  I just don’t want you to get hurt.  I’m trying to help you here.”

“I don’t understand this sir… shouldn’t you be taking pictures of my injuries… this is so confusing… and what does my being Jamaican have to do with this?”

He was sitting down again, making a steeple out of his fingertips and peering at me over them, he was back to being annoyed and impatient.  In the silence the ticking of his oversized silver watch was as loud as a drumbeat.

“Look, I suggest you not mess with me Ms. Hewitt… You’re Jamaican, you’re over 18 and you are drunk.  I don’t believe your story and it is within my power to have your house searched and have you arrested.  Now look… it’s obvious you’ve been through something, if I were you I would get myself cleaned up and relax and stop all of this.  Trust me, a search of this house WILL turn up something…”

I was sobbing hopelessly by then.  I felt small, invisible, dirty, guilty, unworthy of justice and full of hate for this man.  I wasn’t sure if he could really have me falsely arrested but I didn’t want to find out and clearly he was through with me and I truly was at a loss as to why.  It occurred to me that I hadn’t even told him the name of my attacker so my theory that they knew each other made no sense.  The smell of my sister’s perfume wafted up to me from her sheets, reminding me of where I was, like someone snapping their fingers in my face.

“Sir… just so I understand you correctly… you’re refusing to arrest the man who did this to me but you’re threatening to arrest me?”

He got up and sauntered to the door, turned around to inform me that he would be back tomorrow to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid.  I was just lying there, forcing my heavy, huge tongue to stay still and not form anymore words so this criminal in cop’s clothes, Orlando’s finest, would just leave me alone and get out.  I looked at him briefly and quickly turned my head to stare straight ahead at my awful reflection.  It occurred to me, in my tortured thoughts, that I had just been brutally attacked for the second time that day.

The Bigger Picture

“When the skies are grey and all the doors are closing
And the rising pressure makes it hard to breathe
When all I need’s a hand to stop the tears from falling
I will find him, I’ll find him next to me”

Next To Me ~ Emeli Sandé

The amplified sound of my heartbeat filled my ears as I walked from the testing center to the library; I flashed a fake smile at a classmate as they passed in an effort to hide my disappointment. I had just made an abysmally low score on my midterm, just like that my overall A average in the class dropped to a B.  Needless to say the perfectionist in me was crushed and inconsolable… until later that night when the healing power of music reminded me that there was a bigger picture.

The night before as I reviewed the Civil War, WWI and everything in between, I received a phone call from my girlfriend Alex.

“Hey what’s up?”

“Hey what’s wrong Dawn, you don’t sound like yourself…”

“Yeah, I’m kinda stressed, studying for a midterm.”

“Oh Dawn, I know it’s hard but you will do well, you’re so smart.  I wanted to remind you that tomorrow night is the Emeli Sandé concert, I already have the tickets so don’t worry about anything and I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

We hung up shortly after that and I was excited about the concert even though I hadn’t remembered the date.  I nervously continued trying to stuff American History into my brain.  Each minute that passed made me feel more and more distracted, what I was reading meant nothing and what I was supposed to know already was turning into a big, white blank.

The next morning I continued studying on the bus and in the school library until it was time to check into the testing center.  I was signed into the computer and started taking the test, but the questions… The multiple choice answers were almost word for word from the practice quizzes but many of the questions were odd, better suited to true and false answers.  With only 38 minutes to complete 50 questions there just wasn’t enough time to figure out what was going on so after wasting the first few minutes I dived in and just did what I could.  The test was graded within a few seconds of submitting it… I blinked as I saw the score, 72… I had dropped a full grade down to a B and I had no one to blame but myself.

I got up from the computer station feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders.  In between my own loud heartbeats I heard the sound of computer keys clicking away and smelled the slightly dusty smell of books and papers in the library, I wished I had never thought of going back to school, my sensitive nature might not allow me to survive it.  I asked myself why the ridiculous over-reaction?  The answer was clear; this test was just the latest in a line of failures, including not having found a job in quite a long time and before that being fired from the most horrible job in the history of jobs.  I reminded myself I was not a winner, except in school; so if school was not coming easy to me then things had certainly taken another crappy turn.  I got on the bus to UCF where Alex would pick me up for the concert.  During the long ride I called my friend Tomeisha and cried on her shoulder for a few minutes.  I meant to take out my laptop and use the ridiculously long ride to do some writing for this blog but my mind was a blank.  I arrived at the campus and a little while later I was in the car with Alex and after navigating some crazy traffic we arrived at the venue and miraculously got a good parking spot.  During the drive we had talked about a recent car accident Alex had been in, she showed me a huge burn on her hand and we discussed neck damage she had sustained, none of which were stopping her from her daily workouts, complete with running and weights.  This had a profound effect on me, you never want your friend to experience anything like that but it also made me realize that my test score was not even a real problem.  I began considering letting it go…

After waiting for quite some time in the bustling crowd at House Of Blues (where the air conditioning was set to ice age/total destruction), Emeli Sandé made her way onto the stage looking adorable in a fitted denim jacket, floaty mini skirt over leggings and sneakers.  She sang her uplifting repertoire with strength and conviction.  Each song sank into my pores like medicine as I started to remember why I had enrolled in school this summer.  Initially it hadn’t been about grades, it was meant to relieve the terrible isolation I had been experiencing as a result of having left the majority of my friends in New York and Miami when I moved to Orlando in 2010 and after being fired from my job a year later in 2011.  The inside of my apartment was turning into a prison, my own constant company was a form of torture, my family interactions were deteriorating and in the midst of all that my creativity was dying, I couldn’t sew, draw or write because I had dedicated what little energy I had to total and complete self-loathing.   Finally, in August of 2012 I found a counseling program in my neighborhood and started working with a wonderful therapist.

These thoughts washed over me as she sang these words from her song “Heaven”:

“Baby we’re a little different, there’s no need to be ashamed.

You’ve got the light to fight the shadows so stop hiding it away…

I wanna sing, I wanna shout, I wanna scream till the words dry out,

They can put in the papers, I’m not afraid, they can read all about it…”

We were singing and swaying along with the crowd which at that moment seemed so full of fellow gentle souls and it felt like that song was written for me, about all I had pent up inside that needed to be expressed.

Next came her song “My Kind Of Love” and the verse that struck me says:

“… Cause when you’ve given up…

When no matter what you do it’s never good enough…

When you never thought that it could ever get this tough,

That’s when you feel my kind of love.”

Emeli was playing the drums as the music rose to a crescendo and I was having an epiphany.  Being in school had quickly changed my whole existence; I was around people, smiling and laughing, practicing public speaking in front of a supportive teacher and classmates, once again concerned with my appearance, even the daily routine of waking up early every day and walking to the bus stop was a refreshing change.  If I lost sight of that I would endlessly find myself caught in the familiar weeds of self-hate, where every exposed root could cause me to trip and fall from the path of accepting all things with grace and humor.  Thank you Lord for using any situation to teach us.

Being in that moment was right where I needed to be, I felt like I had woken from a hot, miserable nap, not only by the profound and soul-touching lyrics, but by how everything had taken place that day, failure turning into deeper understanding, I also felt humbled and happy to be there in such good company with Alex, a generuos and true friend.

One week later my history professor sent an email to the class in which he explained that the questions for the mid-term had been entered incorrectly into the system and that he was therefore going to add 15 points to everyone’s score.  Just like that my overall average went back up to an A… and I enjoyed a very good laugh, cause at the end of the day… you just can’t make this stuff up!

Lenore & Me (Part 3)

A young girl in scrubs poked her head into our room, looked at Lenore and spoke in a soft voice: “Ma’am, I’m a nursing student… Do you mind if I sit with you today to observe?  “Observe… what do you mean…?” Lenore asked suspiciously, her frog eyes bulged as she looked the girl up and down.  “Ma’am, I just want to sit with you and take notes on what happens when the staff comes in and interacts with you…, if you don’t mind of course.”  She smiled, which lit up her pretty face.  She was petite, fair-skinned with hazel eyes and thick black shoulder length hair.  Lenore seemed convinced and pointed to the chair on the right side of her bed, “…Ok, you look normal, please sit down…  Now, I wanna ask you something, can you please get my doctor?  They operate on me last night and now they wanna operate on me again, they trying to fool me because I’m old but I know they wanna charge me for two surgeries…”  The young lady sat down and listened as Lenore ranted, her eyes growing wider, “Really..?” she asked, “that doesn’t sound right…”  Lenore finally had someone’s full attention and this seemed to pacify her.  She lowered her voice and bent her head toward the nursing student, who did the same, Lenore confided in her, “They got all kinda people in here, foreigners pretending to be doctors…, you gotta help me, I need to talk to my doctor, please get him for me…”  The girl stared at her and then looked down into her lap, “I think you have the wrong idea…, I don’t work here, I’m a student at the nursing college, I don’t know your doctor or anything about your case…”  Lenore narrowed her eyes as if she was seeing the girl for the first time,

“…What’s your name?”

“Oh, my name is Mina, Ma’am.”

“Mina!  What kind of name is that?!”

“Mina is an Indian name Ma’am…”

“Indian! Jesus Christ, I’m surrounded by foreigners!  I thought you said you were a nurse!  Oh, Jesus, oh Joseph, oh Mary, deliver me from these foreigners!”

Lenore was sobbing, staring at the ceiling when another woman walked into the room.  She was tall and beautiful with blue eyes, her blonde hair neatly pulled back into a classic French chignon.  She acknowledged us all by nodding her head in our directions and politely greeted us, “Ladies…, how are we today?  Mina are you going to be in here today…?”  Mina answered, “…I’m not too sure about that…” Lenore sputtered as she looked at the tall blonde, “You look so normal!  Can you help me, are you a doctor?  Can you get me my doctor?  Please, you look so normal!”  The tall blonde answered, “I’m sorry Ma’am but I’m a professor from the nursing college, I don’t work for the hospital, I’m just here to oversee a class project which the hospital allows us to work on here.”  “But you’re so normal… so white, why won’t you help me?”  Lenore sputtered while choking back tears.”  “…Listen, I’ll see what I can do, ok, I’ll talk to the nurses and ask them to send your doctor to see you, I can’t promise anything though.”  She walked out, looking nine feet tall in high heels, pencil skirt and a white lab coat.  During their conversation, neither her nor Lenore noticed that Mina had moved to my side of the room and was now sitting in the chair by my bed.  After her professor left, Mina asked me, “Would it be ok… if I sat with you today, just to observe…?”  I smiled and nodded my head at her, I smiled because I was still amused by Lenore’s reaction to her being Indian but I was in too much pain to talk and was trying to fall asleep again. I nodded again as she took my hand and patted it.  She smiled back and I fell asleep for a little while.  When I woke up, Mina was still there, by my side, having a peek at my chart.  A searing pain was tearing through my waist, and it was not from my incision, as I thought about it, I realized that it was because my underwear were getting smaller as the area was swelling with post surgery inflammation.  As Mina looked on, I tried to pull off the covers to remove them but I had no strength in my arms.  “Can I help you with something?” she asked.  “This is so embarrassing, but can you help me take off my underwear…? They are squeezing the hell out of me!”  “Of course, It’s ok, let me help me you…”  Mina lifted up my gown and gently pulled off the panties that were viciously cutting of my circulation.  She was really compassionate, I thought she would make a great nurse one day.  “You were crying in your sleep, did you have a bad dream…?”  “Did I really…?  I keep dreaming about waking up from the anesthesia and the pain…  I remember thinking I was dying…  I was so scared and confused.  As I told Mina the story, her dark eyes opened wide.  I tried to imitate the doctor’s Russian accent, I think it confused Mina that I found anything funny about what I had just told her.  She made some notes in her schoolbook and resumed holding my hand.

Next to us, Lenore was in a frenzy again.  “Doctor, doctor, you have to help me!  She shouted this when she caught glimpse of the blonde nursing professor as she walked past our room.  The professor turned back, poked her head in the door and announced “I spoke to your nurse and she is getting your doctor for you.  They should be here shortly.  Ok?  Everything all right, Mina?”  Mina nodded her head at her teacher as Lenore continued ranting, “Mina…, she’s not even a nurse, she try to trick me, she think I’m a stupid old woman… Oh Jesus, Joseph and Mary, deliver me from these foreigners!”

Mina sat with me for another few hours, ignoring Lenore’s racist remarks.  I dozed on and off, trying to escape the pain of my incision and the voice of my awful roommate.  I woke up at one point when Nurse Shawn from the previous night came into the room to check up on me, she took up my chart, read through it then spoke.  “So what’s up pretty girl?  How are you feeling today?  Hope your making up for the rest you didn’t get last night…?”  She smiled as she tilted her head in Lenore’s direction.  “It’s not funny, she kept me up most of the night with that nonsense! She’s a horrible racist, she thinks that I work here because I’m black!”  I whispered loudly.  “No Dawn, she’s just a confused old lady…” Nurse Shawn was laughing, “Anyway, she’s going into surgery this afternoon…”  She was still smiling, I knew I would eventually be laughing about it myself but at this moment it was a nightmare for me.  “Miss Dawn,… you look a little pale there, are you feeling ok?”  Nurse Shawn talked as she straightened up my covers and adjusted my pillows.”  “No, my head is spinning, my throat hurts, I need to take a shower and wash my hair and I want to be moved to another room, away from her!”  But she was still smiling.  “She’s not that bad…” “I know! She’s worse!  She has full on dementia, I meant it and I’m never going to recuperate with her thinking that I work here!”  Nurse Shawn continued chatting with me as if I hadn’t said anything, “You’re going to be starting a liquid diet tonight, then tomorrow you can start on solid foods, so just relax and try no to worry about anything.  I’m off tomorrow, but I’ll see you the next day, ok?  Take care Dawn.”  She gently placed my hand back onto the bed before turning around and walking out of the room.  Mina had let go of my other hand and started up slowly as if she regretted leaving me to my fate of another long, tortuous night of verbal abuse from crazy Lenore.  Mina heaved a huge sigh as she adjusted my covers, neither of us spoke for a while until she was done.  “Miss Dawn, I’m going to get going, I hope you get well soon and thank you for letting me sit with you today.”  She was holding my hand again, patting it tenderly, I said goodbye to her, thanking her for keeping me company and for being so kind.  She let go of my hand gently, turned around and walked past Lenore and out of the door.  I watched her back as she walked into the distance, past the nurse’s station and enjoyed the last few moments of silence before the inevitable…

Nurse Shawn walked into my new room, her caramel skin and perfect smile brightened up the dull hospital as if a light had been turned on in a dark room.  I smiled back at her as she walked toward me.  “You look better, she exclaimed, your cheeks look rosy, thank God, I was so worried about you!”  “You were… why is that?”  “Dawn… I had a day off yesterday and all I could think about was how pale you were the last time I saw you.  I never saw a black person look gray before… it was scary.”  “Well,” I said, “they basically forced me to have a transfusion, 3 pints, they said they wouldn’t release me until I agreed to it…”  “I know, I read your file before I walked over here just to prepare myself… But they did the right thing Dawn, you look like you have blood in you, you look robust.  I’m happy to see you look so well.”  “Wow…” I said, “I’m kind of flabbergasted… I felt like I had been railroaded into doing something I didn’t approve of.  What if the blood was tainted or if my body rejected it somehow… The whole idea made me so nervous!  The only reason I did it was because I thought they would have released me today, which is still not the case…”  I shook my head in confusion as I let the realization wash over me that the blood transfusions had been a good move after all.  I started to relax then as Nurse Shawn led me back to my bed, tucked me in and began patting the back of my hand.  I had been so lonely for the past day and a half, since they moved me away from Lenore, my crazy ex-roommate, and Nurse Shawn had taken her day off work.  “So how did you end up in this room all by your lonesome?”  “I made them move me,” I told her, “I had no choice, I had to get away from that old lady!”  Nurse Shawn gave me an indulgent look as if she still thought I was exaggerating but would allow me to go on just to amuse me.  “I’m not making this up!  She would not let me close my eyes because she thought I was being lazy by lying down and resting!  Her family came to see her, and one of her sons pulled me to the side and apologized to me for her behavior.  He was choked up because they had never seen her so confused before.  She told them that I was supposed to be looking after her and they couldn’t persuade her otherwise.  Later, her grandson dropped in just as she was lifting a pitcher of water to her mouth.  He said to her, “Ma, what are you doing?”  “What do you think I’m doing?  Drinking water, I’m thirsty” she answered, rolling her eyes.  “So why don’t you use the cup then?”  At which she poured water into the matching plastic cup from the pitcher and still continued to drink from the pitcher.  “Ma, I’m worried about you, I never seen you like this before… you’re supposed to drink out of the cup, not the pitcher!”  “Oh that…” she answered, “the cup don’t work, so I use this instead.  What’s the matter?”  She announced this between sips while water slid down either side of her mouth, down her throat and wet the neck of her hospital gown.  I felt so bad for her family, her grandson walked out of the room, shaking his head in a daze, with tears in his eyes.  The last time you visited me, Nurse Shawn, I guess she got our names mixed up and she started pleading with me, “Shawnie, Shawnie, do you love our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and all the holy saints?  If you do then get up and help me, NOW!”  By the end, she was crying and screaming, it was unbearable.  She thought the little clip on her finger was an IV, so she kept taking it off and insisting that she was going to “starve” herself until I got up and started working.  She kept threatening that she was “a gonna jump outta da bed and break her other leg so she could get to me and make me do my job.”  She continued to complain to the holy saints that I “didn’t look like any patient she had ever seen before,” clearly because I’m black.  Shortly before they came to move me, she demanded from your Indian nurses aide that he “get her doctor immediately,” after she begged the Virgin Mary in a thick Italian accent, to deliver her from these foreigners.  She followed this up with a benevolent thought, “…ah, I guess those God-damned Indians gotta live too…”  Right at that moment, in walked two tall, thin, elegant Indian men in lab coats, carrying clipboards and talking to each other in hushed voiced.  Lenore’s eyebrows raised to the ceiling as her mouth dropped open at the sight.  When she caught her breath, she said to them in a panicked voice, “Excuse me…, excuse me…, can you please get my doctor for me…?”  The two men were looking at her chart and one of them held up a finger to her, indicating that she should wait until she was addressed at which she started gasping for air in surprise.  When they had reviewed her file, they walked to her bedside and announced to her shocked face, “Vee are your doctors, M’am…,” in posh voices lilting with combined Indian and British accents.  I couldn’t have been more tickled!  The thing she wanted the most, a white doctor to “deliver her from these foreigners” was the opposite of what she got.  Her doctors were Indian and snobby on top of that!  I heard them explaining to her that she had not had any surgery yet, that they would be operating on her later on that day, after she had been prepped.  At this point I was attempting to walk with my IV to my new room as two nurses aides pulled my bed from it’s spot behind me.  They informed me that I was to lie down in the bed as they wheeled me down the hall about twenty feet away to this empty room and that was that.

Nurse Shawn was laughing at my story by this point, I stopped talking to look at her and she explained, “its your delivery Dawn, your very funny, I’m sure you know that!”  I smiled genuinely for the first time in three days, despite everything I had been through I always like it when people found me funny.

Lenore & Me (Part 2)

“A Hospital is no place to be sick. ” ~ Samuel Goldwyn

A woman was crying, the sound of it drifted aimlessly through thick, antiseptic air and flickering halogen lights.  The sound was pathetic, it indicated pain and fear, it whined and begged for help but was hopeless at the same time.  I wanted to help her, but my brain was filled with fog as I tried to remember where I was, what day of the week it was, something that would tether me to the real world.  My eyes were so tightly shut that it hurt to pry the lids apart, and as they opened a flood of hot tears fell down my face as a tearing sensation ripped through my belly.

“Why are you crying?” A woman’s face was close to mine. She had short bushy ash blond hair, blue eyes and wore a white lab coat. She repeated the question, “Why are you crying?” as she tapped my cheekbone, my chin, my wrists. I slowly realized I was the one producing that mewling noise. It came to me in a flood of memories. I remembered being prepped for surgery that morning, my mom at my side making jokes with the anesthesiologist about how I had always been scared of needles from a little girl up to now. I recalled that the woman tapping my cheek was one of the student doctors that had participated in my surgery. I couldn’t answer her because the tube they ripped out of throat left it sore and scratched up. In a thick Russian accent she said, “Well, you probably have more pain than usual, because we originally thought you only had one fibroid at the back of the uterus but once we started the surgery we found that you had 22 fibroids and one ovarian cyst. Basically, we performed what is called “female reconstructive surgery,” which means we had to dissect the uterus, remove the tumors and clean up scar tissue and then reconstruct it, not to mention the abdominal cut, which we just opened the scar from your previous surgery. So you have many more sutures than we could have anticipated when we started.

Now, we sent the cyst in for a biopsy and everything is fine, you don’t have cancer so don’t worry about that, it would have gone away on its own, even without surgical intervention. I believe we only gave you enough painkillers for a single myomectomy, which must be wearing off by now, which would explain why you were crying in your sleep. Don’t worry, I’m going to get you the right amount of pain medication so you can rest and recuperate properly.”

“Hmm.., sleeping on the job again? Jesus Christ, I never seen anyone so lazy as you! GET UP AND HELP ME! Don’t you work here?” The sarcasm and nastiness woke me up unceremoniously from my dream as Lenore’s words bombarded me through the open curtain. My mouth was clammy and throat was dry. A heaving cough made my sutures vibrate with pain. My skin felt greasy and sticky, I craved a nice hot shower, but knew they wouldn’t allow it until the bandage was removed from my incision. I was confused, I thought I had been talking to the Russian doctor, but quickly realized that I must have been dreaming about my conversation with her yesterday after my procedure. Through all these thoughts, my crazy old roommate was shouting at me, “You’re not a patient here, I never seen a patient look like you! Now, get up and help me!” As best as I could, gripping my stitches, I yelled back, “ I don’t work here Lady! Leave me alone!”

The Nurse’s Aide from the previous evening, a short, dark skinned, Indian man with a receding hairline, walked into our room pushing a cart in front of him. The sight of him made Lenore gasp, she stared at him with her mouth open as he bought his cart to a stop at the foot of her bed. Slipping a pair of disposible gloves on, he took at thermometer from the cart and then placed a plastic sheath on it. He held it daintily between his fingers as he walked towards crazy Lenore. She started to squirm and shrink down into her bed, as if this would make her disappear. The C.N.A. bent over her and directed her to open her mouth so he could take her temperature. Lenore let out a high pitched scream, which made the poor man jump back in fright. “What’s the matter ma’am?”, he asked her. “You’re not a doctor, so why you trying to put something in my mouth? I been asking for my doctor for 2 days now, they operate on me, they want to do another operation tonight, now you trying to put some medicine in my mouth… Jesus Christ! You don’t look like a doctor to me! I never seen a doctor look like you! Where you from, anyway?” In response to her tirade, the nurses aide tried to explain, “A thermometer is not medicine, ma’am, it takes your temperature, also you have not been here for 2 days, you just got her last night and you have not had surgery yet, so please calm down ma’am. “Where are you from?” Lenore demanded again. “I’m from India ma’am, now can I take your temperature?” “India! You’re a foreigner?”, she asked in total disbelief. “Get me my doctor, NOW! No, I’m not opening my mouth for a foreigner, I want my doctor! You trying to give me medicine to put me asleep so you can operate on me again! No! I want my doctor!” The little man began putting away the thermometer, throwing away the sheath and the disposable gloves as if she wasn’t carrying on like a madwoman. I was impressed by his reserve. He rolled the cart to my side of the room, drawing the curtain closed as he did so, which barely muted Lenore’s confused mumbling. He shook his head and smiled at me as he took my temperature. He announced that “… today you are going to eat something, is there anything you would like me to get for you…?” I told him that I needed to clean myself up, at which he took from the cart a small kidney shaped plastic dish which contained a cheapie toothbrush, travel sized toothpaste a washcloth and 2 folded up hospital gowns. He took the stuff out of the dish and filled it with water from the tap and placed it on my bedside table with a cup of water. “Please to wash (pronounced as “vash”) yourself with this vater and brush your teeth with this vater, vhen you finish brush teeth, please to spit into this bowl, not the cup, vhen you pull the curtain I come back, ok?” He left and I started to “vash” myself, remembering three years ago when I was in St. Mary’s Hospital in Brooklyn that I had been given sponge baths by a female nurse’s aide so that I wouldn’t have to strain myself while recovering, after my first multiple myomectomy. The energy it took to clean up almost made me faint. I pulled the curtain open to let him know I was finished freshening up and he appeared with his cart again to collect the dirty gown, washcloth and used toothbrush.

Lenore finally leaned back into her pillows and sighed as if she had run out of the steam she needed to continue making my life a living hell. The silence from her side of the room was so encouraging that I turned on the TV and tried to find CNN.

(To be continued…)

Lenore & Me (Part One)

“A Hospital is no place to be sick. ” ~ Samuel Goldwyn

“Nooo!” I croaked through my dusty throat, which made the old woman pause in mid-jump, her wrinkled white thighs suspended over the gunmetal steel of the hospital bed railing, as she turned her head in my direction. “I’mma gonna figure out how to get outta this bed, and when I do… God help you!” She threatened this in a thick Italian accent as a small bluish light over her bed illuminated her creased face. As I stared at her, my right hand scrambled to find the nurse call button before she could really injure herself. I cleared my throat, wincing with the scraping pain of it, before saying to her,“Don’t jump out of bed, I’ll get the nurse to help you, just relax…” This seemed to work, she let her hips and legs slide backwards over the railing, onto the mattress as she loosened her grip on the metal pole. Finally, her face slid out of the little blue track light as she clumsily settled her body back into bed. She was mumbling something that I couldn’t hear because the nurse was finally responding to me through a tiny speaker over my right shoulder. A bored voice asked, “Can I help you, Ms. Hewitt…?” The question squawked through the little speaker two more times, but I couldn’t answer through my scratched up throat. Finally, one of the nurses decided to get out of her chair and walk the twenty feet into our room from the nurse’s station to find out what the emergency for themselves.

The nurse was a pretty, petite, young, black woman with a perfect toothy smile, wearing a trapezoid shaped cap which was pinned neatly to her short dark hair. As she walked over to me, she passed my roommate whom by now was perfectly calm and asked the nurse if she would kindly get her doctor for her. The nurse acknowledged her by nodding her head in her direction as she pulled the curtain closed between our beds and turned her attention toward me. “Hi Dawn, my name is Shawn, and our names rhyme, in case you didn’t notice…” She giggled at her own corny joke as she fluffed my pillows and peeked under my gown at the sutures on my belly, not realizing that I was trying to talk, unsuccessfully. “Your incision looks good, girl, nice and flat…, you’ll be back in your bikini in no time!” She was smiling and shaking her head. “I had the same surgery for a pedunculated fibroid, but my stomach went all flabby afterwards…, so I’m jealous girl!” She was holding my right hand in one of hers and patting the back of it with her other. “Now, you are going to have to go back to sleep young lady, or else you’re not going to recuperate properly… Can I get you anything, are you in pain?” I was, but it seemed more important for me to get her to help my nameless roommate. I moved my mouth, which made her lean in closer and closer, until she could hear my hoarse whisper. “That lady… she thinks I work here and she tried to jump out of her bed…” The effort of talking made my throat, neck and shoulders hurt as if I had done some rigorous exercise and the stitches in my belly felt as if  they had torn through my skin, my body convulsed as a layer of greasy perspiration popped out on the skin of my forehead. Nurse Shawn pivoted on her heel as she whipped the curtain back to face my roommate, “Are you bothering this nice lady? She’s very sick and needs her rest! I don’t want to hear about you bothering her again. Are we clear?” Turning around, she whipped the curtain closed again, winked at me and turned the lights off on her way out.  The closing door made a soft clicking sound. Immediately, the old lady resumed her shouting. “She’s sick? What about me? She works here and I’m just an old lady with a broken leg!” I closed my eyes and tried to block out the noise and confusion from the other side of the curtain, mostly because the pain from my belly and throat made me wish I could just pass out until the pain disappeared. “Son of a bitch! You had to rat me out to the nurse cause you sooo lazy to work? Imma gonna freak out if you don’t get up and turn on the lights! Did you hear me?! I’M CLAUSTROPHOBIC!”

My heart raced erratically, but I kept my eyes closed, faking sleep. Tears slipped from the corners of my eyes, across my cheeks, down my neck and collected in the hollow of my collarbones before rolling down the slope of my shoulders and wetting my pillow. I had never been so exhausted, in so much pain and so alone. The metal rings of the curtain scraped violently against the metal rod they were suspended from, at which I opened my eyes in the darkness and saw my crazy old roommate again. She had propped herself up on her elbow and jerked the curtain backward with her free hand while she screamed, “How dare you! You know I’m claustrophobic!” “I’m calling the nurse again!” I screamed hoarsely back at her, “I don’t work here lady! Leave me alone!”

“Oh, so now you don’t work here, right…? That’s a new one!” She laughed bitterly at her own attempt at sarcasm, her white wrinkled face glowing garishly in the darkness. I repeatedly pressed the button for the nurse but didn’t hear any response. The old lady’s nasty laugh was ringing in my ear and that’s when I knew, it was on between her and I. Whatever sympathy I had felt for her was gone, I wanted to get away from her or get her out of my room as fast as possible, by any means necessary! My anesthesia was wearing off and pain was now tearing through me like hundreds of daggers, but I made a decision to get myself out of bed and walk to the nurses station to tell them about the old woman and to make arrangements to change rooms.

Slowly I rolled my body until I was lying on my right side, then I swung my legs off the right side of the bed and when my feet were on the ground I used my right arm to prop my upper body off the pillows. Next, I grabbed my I.V. pole and using it as a cane, I pulled my body up until I was standing. The salty sweat pouring from my scalp blinded me momentarily, I waited for a moment until my breath evened and my heart stopped skipping beats before I dragged myself out of the room the few feet to the nurses station. As I passed the old lady’s bed, she tried to sit up as she yelled, “Get over here and help me, you lazy son of a bitch! Turn on the lights, you know I’m claustrophobic!” I was barely standing, I didn’t have time to search for a light switch in the darkness, I glared at her as I kept moving past, taking pleasure in being spiteful.

“What are you doing out of bed, Ms. Hewitt?” The nurses looked horrified that I was standing in front of them. “My nurse call button is broken!” I almost choked on the word as I tried to catch my breath, mopping my sweaty face with a tissue. Nurse Shawn dashed around the desk and put her arm around my waist, holding me up as she guided me back to my room. “I thought you had gone back to sleep… what happened? “It’s that woman!” I answered. “She keeps trying to get out of her bed and threatening that she’s going to hurt me if I don’t help her… I can’t take it, every time I close my eyes she starts!” By this time we were passing the old witch’s bed and she stared at us with her mouth open. Nurse Shawn pointed at her, yelling, “I’ll deal with you in a second!” As she guided me back to my bed, sat me down while pulling the curtain closed and then lifted my legs onto the mattress and adjusted my pillows under my head and neck as I slid forward until I was laying down again. “I’ll be right back, you try to relax, ok? She patted the back of my hand again before pulling the curtain back and taking a step to the other bedside. “Now, did I not just ask you to leave Ms. Hewitt alone? Why are you bothering her? She’s a patient here, she just had surgery and she needs her rest! Leave her alone, do you understand?!” The old lady blinked and gasped like a fish out of water. She sputtered in disbelief, “She just had surgery? What about me, they operated on my hip last night and now they wanna operate on the other one tonight, but I told them I only broke da one hip so I aint gonna pay for another surgery. I’m an old lady, so dey try to scare me, but Imma gonna call my son, so he canna get me outta here! And whadda about my doctor eh? When I’mma gonna see my doctor…? I been here for twenty four hours, gotta da surgery and still I can’t see my doctor…? Why? You people think I’m a stupid old woman, Imma gonna sue all of you! Watch me! “Nurse Shawn shook her head as she picked up the woman’s chart, flipped pages and read. After looking up to the ceiling and drawing a deep breath, Nurse Shawn started talking. “Lenore, is that your name? First of all, you just got here five hours ago, second, you haven’t had any surgery yet, your surgery for your hip isn’t even scheduled until tomorrow afternoon. Finally, your surgeon will be in tomorrow morning to meet you and discuss everything before your operation. So please stay calm, go to sleep and leave this nice lady alone! Hear me?”

Nurse Shawn turned to my side of the room as she drew the curtain again. I whispered to her, “I think that she has some form of dementia…, my mom works with elderly people and I have seen it before, when you turned off the lights earlier, she panicked, I mean full on…” As I talked I held onto my abdomen, each word caused my sutures to pull. Nurse Shawn walked to the foot of my bed, pulled back the covers and looked at my hands gripping my stomach. “Dawn! You’re bleeding! Why didn’t you say anything, didn’t you feel your stitches tearing?” “I’ve been in such pain since that woman woke me up, I can’t differentiate one sensation from another, everything in my ody hurts like hell!” “Ok, ok… fair enough… You probably tore them when you walked to the nurses station. Luckily, your incision is pretty much intact, we’ll clean it up with some betadine, put a fresh bandage on, and as long as you stay in bed, you should be fine.” She walked out of the room and finally silence settled in like a cloud of fog.

I couldn’t believe how quiet it was, I felt myself starting to relax and was vaguely aware of  Shawn and a male nurses aide lifting up my gown, removing the bandage, cleaning me up, putting another bandage in place and injecting more morphine into my I.V. Then they were gone, the lights had been left on this time and the door was cracked open a few inches through which both Lenore and I had a clear view of the nurses station. As I dozed, I looked over my left shoulder through the window and saw a snowstorm layering thick ribbons of snowflakes on the street below in circular gusts. The thick glass blocked out the sound of the storm, which made it look as if the street were being softly coated with cotton candy. Feeling as if I could finally drift off to a nice, fluffy sleep, the last thing I remembered was trying to pull up the extra blanket folded over my feet, before I finally drifted off to sleep.

The Little Red Sewing Machine

“Hush now child, and don’t you cry, Your folks might understand you by and by.  Move on up towards your destination, though you may find from time to time…
complications.”

Move On Up ~ Curtis Mayfield

The conditioning started early in life, I was born with a multitude of dreams which were vanquished one by one until I didn’t know what I was meant to do with my life and stopped thinking of myself as having gifts or a future.  When I realized that dolls only came with one set of clothes, I starting hand-stitching pieces of dust rags together so that my dolls could have a change of outfit. That led to me learning how to use a sewing machine very early, I wasn’t good but I was absolutely in love.  One day as I was happily making my clumsy back-stitches by hand, my mom looked over my shoulder and spat out “What is that supposed to be? That’s foolishness; you need to be a lawyer or doctor when you grow up!”  As she walked away I felt the usual tears welling up, and I felt like my heart had been slapped really hard.  I finished making Barbie her little shift dress but the dream was drying up like a healing blister.  As that year came to a close my birthday, December 11th, came and went and since I had been forbidden from using the big Singer machine, I had nervously asked my parents for a kiddie sewing machine for Christmas.  Just the thought of it made my belly feel hollow with anticipation, I thought it wasn’t likely that I would get one, but I hoped just enough to make it seem possible.

We had a cat named Spanky who decided to climb both the Christmas tree and the gifts underneath it; her back claws tore the wrapping on the gifts open just enough that we could see one of them was a little red sewing machine in a clear cellophane box.  Wow!!  It was almost worth it when my siblings and I got blamed and beaten for Spanky’s hijinks   I had glimpsed it, red and metallic with a polished wood base, that peek had made my heart pound more wildly than anything ever had in my 6 or 7 years of life.  I waited the few days until Christmas which turned out to be a very unhappy day.  As usual my dad had beat up my mom and stormed out the night before to spend the night at another woman’s house.  Before he left they had argued loudly about how he hadn’t contributed to the gifts or food or anything for the holiday.

On Christmas morning everyone was tense, we ate breakfast and were not allowed to open our gifts until much later than usual.  Later my mom sat me and my older sister Judy down at the kitchen table and suddenly smiled a really happy smile and presented the box that contained the sewing machine to my sister, not me.  My sister, who had no interest in sewing and was like a little mother to the rest of us, was giving me a sad look.  My mom kept asking “what’s the matter Judy, don’t you like it?  It’s a sewing machine!!”  I don’t remember if I said that I was the one who had asked for it, I do remember my mom saying that it was Judy’s and I wasn’t to touch it.  Saying I was hurt wouldn’t begin to describe how I felt.  Later that day my mom had Judy try to sew a little scrap of fabric and almost immediately the bobbin got knotted, the needle broke into the dog feed and that was the end of that, RIP little red sewing machine.  At the time I it didn’t occur to me that this could have been the innocent mistake of a battered wife and over-worked mother, rather I believed it was a very heavy handed way of telling me that I was never going to be anything other than invisible.  Like so many of my childhood interactions with my mother I was too young to understand that she hadn’t meant to hurt me and she was struggling with too many issues to understand how she came across to me.   Along with everything else that was awful in my life; this event started my lifetime of perpetual self-doubt.  Confusion also took root that day as I racked my brain to figure out what I had done to deserve this painfully ironic outcome.  If I learned anything that day, it was the incorrect notion that hope could only bring crushing disappointment.  I wish I had known that my mom had given the prize to my sister to compensate for her giving up her childhood to be an auxiliary parent in place of my father, maybe with that perspective I would have turned out different.

Many years later, at the age of 42, I found myself walking across the stage of the Miami Performing Arts Center to receive my diploma in Fashion Design with honors, my mother was on her feet in the audience, when my eyes found her in the crowd and I saw how happy and teary she was, the memory of the little sewing machine quickly flooded my mind, followed by the thought “A dream deferred is NOT a dream denied…”

The Stutterer Moves On…

“And don’t condescend to me, take your leave, take your leave, take your leave of me… Disappear, through the air,  I wish you gone and I don’t care…”

Stevie Nicks ~ The Planets of the Universe 

I was a very odd child, I had a lisp and a stutter; I was too tall, too skinny, so awkward that even a kind look in my direction could bring me to tears, I was ambidextrous,  clumsy, ate too slowly and suffered from headaches and nosebleeds and needed braces on my teeth.  Not exactly the perfect Jamaican child that my parents wanted.

I was also an artist, drawing was one of the few things that made me feel good about myself and my life, one of my teachers even wanted to enter me into an art competition, until the day another one of my teachers noticed I was writing with my left hand.  By the end of the day she handed me a note for my parents to sign and return to her.  When I got home and showed the note to my mother, I learned that I would no longer be allowed to use my left hand.  That’s the day I stopped drawing and began to hate writing.

My family doesn’t seem to remember that I had a serious speech impediment back then, but when I was little having both a lisp and a stutter made me stand out for all the wrong reasons.  The lisp combined with my Jamaican accent was bad enough but when I started to stutter, that was like the end of the world to me.  Even at the young age of 6 I knew the stutter came from fear and the more stressed out and worried I was, the more my tongue would get twisted in my mouth.  I used to console myself with the thought that I didn’t want to talk anyway, didn’t want to be noticed, invisibility being easier.  Home was a scary place and school was like a foreign country, I was very rarely happy and my poor tongue paid the price.  I was pulled out of class one day and walked to a janitorial closet.  Inside were stuffed 4 student desks and a chair for teacher.  This little dungeon was where elocution classes were to be held.  I would repeat tongue twisters all day until my speech became acceptable.  Funny thing about this class was that I was the only one who was there for speech therapy, the other kids were in some form of detention and they found my little problem very entertaining.  I can’t remember how long the class went on but I know by the time it was over I could speak without stuttering and I no longer had a lisp or a Jamaican accent.  I had given up my cultural identity in exchange for un-stilted speech, which made me even more of a misfit around Jamaicans; I no longer had a speech impediment but now I was labeled “American” which was not meant as a compliment.

This drove me further inward and made me more conscious of the fact that I didn’t fit in anywhere.  I was born in Jamaica but apparently that was just a place I went to in the summer that I had no right to call home.  Luckily I grew up in Astoria, Queens, a mostly Greek neighborhood, where I observed Greek kids my age, some  of whom had never even been to their country, nonchalantly claiming their heritage and it occurred to me that I had that right too.  An elderly teacher’s aid in my class used to pull me into the hallway and tell me that she hated “immigrants and blacks” and I just couldn’t figure out why I was the object of her contempt.  All throughout my school years and into my working life I was constantly being scolded that I shouldn’t call myself Jamaican because I had no Jamaican accent.  I finally started to understand that being both black and an immigrant is too much for some people to comprehend unless you’re kissing your teeth and speaking patois.  Meanwhile almost every time I find myself speaking more than a couple of minutes I’m reminded that there’s a skinny, awkward, stutter inside who can take over at any moment.

Thank God in the years since that janitor’s closet I’ve only gotten tongue tied a handful of times which has helped me keep my stutter a kind of secret.  On other occasions when I am called to speak in front of a group in my capacity as a health coach, there were times I started out weepy, emotional and sweaty, until I make it through the first couple of sentences and then I’m able to breathe… and to shake off the memories.

The Wedding Of His Dreams

Happy moment from my 2004 Wedding.

It was the night before my wedding in Jamaica, in the church where the ceremony would be held the next day, the wedding party, pastor and decorator were all up in arms over a thousand different things. Which door would the bridesmaids walk through, was there enough time to change the decorations from balloons’ to fresh flowers, the list of hassles went on.  A few times throughout the night I stepped back to wonder how I had gotten roped into this, not the marriage but the wedding, it just seemed like an expensive, time-consuming farce.  I was having cold feet, specifically about the wedding red-tape.  If I plan an event, it has be uncomplicated, life is crazy enough as it is, to invite more problems makes no sense to me.  But what could I do, guests were on the way from all over Jamaica, some were even coming from the States, my maid of honor had come all the way from England.  This thing was going down, full of complexities, with our without my full enthusiasm.  When my husband proposed to me I immediately counter-proposed that we elope, the thought was absolutely thrilling to me but not to my fiancée Rohan, he was appalled and offended and wondered out loud what his family would say about that idea.  He spent the next few months talking me into the wedding of his dreams, finally I realized even though I had never dreamed of a wedding, he had, it wasn’t right for me to deny him its fulfillment, so we went full steam ahead.  My biggest fear about the wedding was that it would be obvious that we were operating on a shoe-string budget but I need not have worried, things worked out, friends and family helped and everything turned out more beautiful than I could have imagined with one exception, the cake was a hot, tacky mess but I was the only person bothered by it.

The morning of the big day my maid of honor and I found ourselves at the printers, rushing to get the wedding programs done.  Panic was setting in as the time flew by.  By the time I got back to the hotel, showered, did my hair, put on make-up and finally my gown I was almost an hour late for the church.  Thank God my maid of honor Nike was keeping things light-hearted and reminding me that everything was ok.  I had asked my mom to give me away but at the last minute she suggested I ask my brother and uncle to each walk me half way as they are two of the few men in my life.  By the time I was walking down the aisle with my brother he was whispering to me that our dad should have been the one giving me away, if I really had a dad who cared about me that might have been a touching moment but I felt I was better off not having that stranger at this intimate affair.  The service was long, Pentecostal style, exactly the opposite of  what I had discussed with the pastor, but it was pretty, the guests were attentive and emotional and later that day my husband and I and the wedding party walked into the open air reception at the water’s edge in Montego Bay, just as the sun was setting.  My aunt and the decorator had set back up the arch from the church, its ribbons were floating imperceptibly in the warm, salty breeze.  I peeked at my husband, he was smiling from ear to ear and everything, all the drama was worth it.

As the night went on, various things went wrong but no one knew, I heard over and over again how beautiful a wedding it was.  After the speeches relatives kept teasing me that they never knew I had it in me to either get married or to talk with such ease in front of a group.

Two years later the marriage was over, I found out about his multiple infidelities in one day,  it was crushing but I never regretted the marriage, just the way it ended.  For the first time in my life I had followed my heart and it led me to this short marriage that was only meant to exist for a season.  The lessons that came from that experience are many and profound: how to love, how to share, how to lose with grace, how not to lose yourself in the fray, how to hold the special memories apart from the ugly ones and how to be strong when you know you’re right. New Years of 2006 was the last time I saw my husband.  I channeled my anger into going back to University at the age of 39, and graduated from the fashion design course with honors.  I silently thanked my husband for giving me that push and sometimes even imagined him being married again; having babies and hoping that he had learned something from what happened between us.

In late October of 2009 found out that Rohan had been killed almost a year prior, after the shock wore off the first thing I thought was that at least he had had the wedding of his dreams and thank God I had been there to witness it.

When I was planning my wedding I didn’t invite my father, it was deliberate but not vindictive, I just don’t know him very well nor do I think very highly of what I do know of him.  It was more and issue of quality control than anything else, him being an unknown quantity whose presence could possibly ruin the event.  Looking back I still think it was the right thing to do.  In thinking about how much I’m willing to give away for the comfort of others as opposed to my own, I never have that dilemma when it comes on to my father, I’m clear that I must put myself before him to protect myself from his immense selfishness.  Having said that, it was still a surprise to learn that after hearing about my wedding from his older brother and being asked by the same if he was going to attend, my father was crushed to learn that not only was I getting married without his knowledge, but I had no intention of inviting him and it was not an oversight.

In the end I understand that I had the strength to leave my husband when I found out about his infidelities because my whole life I have never wanted to end up with a cheater like my father, so I guess I should silently thank my dad for that.

The Truth About Daddy

My father has two other children with his second wife, their names are Akyl and Jamillah. They are both athletes, he goes to all their games, takes smiling pictures with them, he even threw Jamillah a formal sweet 16 ball last year, she has pictures of it on Facebook, her father dressed in a tuxedo, dancing with her in her floor length, silk gown and tiara, a look of joy and mutual admiration in both their eyes. Her father seemed perfectly lovely, even civilized. Looking at the pictures I was so happy for her to have a doting father who tells her how beautiful she is, who goes to all her volleyball games, who cooks for her and knows her every want and need. Jamillah is a daddy’s girl.  

My father on the other hand, was a monster.  The memory of his brutality still keeps me awake at nights and if I do sleep he still haunts my dreams. My father is 73, I am 46 and Jamillah is 16.  I have never met her in person, we became facebook friends just over 2 yrs ago.  I knew about her but was never interested in her until I saw her picture and saw our resemblance.  Wow, I had a little sister out there… what if she needed me?  What if anything had she been told about me?  Did she even know that I existed and that I was old enough to be her mother?  I waited on pins and needles for a week until she friended me back and then immediately I sent her an inbox message “This is kind of awkward, but do you know who I am?” Her short reply read “Of course, your my sister.”  That was it, no questions about where I had been all her life, she seemed totally cool.  But I wasn’t cool by any stretch… the memories had started flooding in.

In the summer of 1989 when I was 22, I left Central Florida and moved back to New York with my father, his girlfriend and my younger sister.  I hadn’t lived with my father since I was 9 or 10 years old and wasn’t sure what to expect.  Shortly after moving in my father and sister fell out and she moved, then there were three, me, daddy and Sessing.  My father revealed to me that they were expecting a baby and would be getting married.  

Shortly after the birth of their beautiful baby boy, Akyl, I found myself sitting at the kitchen table with my father, giving him the third degree.  “Why did you beat my mother…?”  Breathing out a huge sigh, he answered “I never BEAT your mother per se… we used to fight. You know your mother was the only woman I have been with who wouldn’t leave me alone when I asked her to…”  It was my turn to sigh in frustration at this outright lie.  “Daddy… she was the only one  you were married to and had a family with.  And I know what I saw, I was there, you used to beat her, right in front of us.”  At this point he was staring daggers at me, the blood was pounding in his temples and his breath was ragged.  I thought, wow, he’s really hurt and indignant and I’m not impressed, for the first time in my life I literally had him right where I wanted him.  Finally, pointing a shaking index finger at me he spat out “I don’t know what you people want from me… but I wish you people would leave me alone… I have a family now!” The ticking of the clock on the wall sounded like booming heartbeat. I walked upstairs and started packing my things.

If Akyl and Jamillah ever ask me why I stayed away all this time, I have no idea if I will tell them that it was their loving, long suffering father who had vanquished me into the shadows, maybe that’s not a burden they need to share.  My little sister Jamillah is tall and beautiful, she wears braces and designer clothes, she’s greatly admired by her peers and seems happy and confident.  At that age I was filled with self-hate with hardly had any friends and wondered every day why my father didn’t care if I lived or died, I needed braces too but my mom couldn’t afford them with 4 kids to feed and a house and car to maintain all on her own.  Worst of all memories of the violent beatings he used to give my mom have always prevented me from sleeping.

I ask myself if that brief interrogation I gave him could have shamed him into to be better with them than he was with us?  Probably not… but I won’t ever find out.  My father is incapable of introducing me to their father.