Mother and Caregiver: The Call
Every situation and every illness is made up of variables that can change outcomes and society. We don’t look for a cure for the one illness that can change the landscape of society, mental illness. Instead, we flood the market with more and more prescriptions with multiple side affects and prescribe pain meds for a
cure all. We create a new brand of doctor, The Pain Doctor. We hospitalize and drug patients for two weeks at a time and send them home cured, with no follow up, for them only to return weeks later. What’s wrong with this picture? Families cry out for help but there is no help in sight.
Monday, February 13, 2006 around 1 pm in the afternoon my cell phone rang, it
was my daughter, she had an accident in Rutherford, N. J. She side swiped 2 cars.
She says she will call me back after the police come. The phone goes dead. I try calling
her back, no answer. A cold shiver goes through my body as I try to get in touch with
her. I try again and again and she finally answers and she tells me she is being taken to
the police station in a police car, she hangs up. I call the Rutherford Police station and
they will not tell me what’s wrong. I leave my cell number and they said they will call
me. I go find my husband and we both wait for the call. The police call me ½ hour later
to tell us to go to her apartment, in Lyndhurst, to be with her 3 children, ages 11, 14 and
17. They say they will call us in about 2 hours to discuss her case. We still don’t know
what happened or why she was taken into custody by the police for side swipping 2 cars.
As we are driving to Lyndhurst from Hillsdale which is about ½ hour I decided
to call the Rutherford Police again. This time I talk to the sergeant who tells me
my daughter is being held on DWI charges. Again a cold shiver goes down my spine
and I feel numb. I ask was anyone hurt? They say no. They will call me at her
apartment when she will be ready to be picked up.
We arrive at her apartment and we find the apartment in total disarray. I was here
a week ago and everything was neat and clean. What happened to my daughter in the
last week? Our 2 grandchildren were trying to clean up the dirty kitchen, the dog was in
his cage, my 17 year old granddaughter was in her room with her boyfriend. Then it hits
me, my daughter has been telling me what is wrong, I was not hearing her. The shivers
now become like stabbing knives in my body. What am I going to do? My whole
world collapsed in that moment because I know what I should have done, but I didn’t.
I know now what she was telling me. So many times you hear people can’t get better
until they reach rock bottom. I don’t think that is true in every case. I think you reach
rock bottom when there is no place left to go because no one hears you. Even if they
hear you they don’t understand what you are saying. She was crying out but I did not
hear her. I did not understand the cry. When a baby cries you know he/she is wet,
hungry or needs to be loved. When a 43 year old single mother with 3 children
cries you listen, and try to help her function on her own. You can’t live her life.
The call finally comes from the police station about 3 pm. My 11 year old
granddaughter, 14 year old grandson comes with us to pick up their mother. My
17 year old granddaughter stays in the apartment. My husband drops me off in front of
the police station and he stays in the car with the kids. I enter the police station and I
am met by a policeman who tell me I have to sign a paper putting my daughter in my
custody for the next 24 hours. He tells me her car has been impounded and I can pick
it up tomorrow. I sign the paper and they bring my daughter out. Immediately I
realize she is not herself. I tell her I am taking her to my house and she does not want
to go. She wants to go home to her house but she is really not lucid. The policeman
helps me get her into the car. I decide at that moment to take her to the hospital at
Bergen Regional. We start riding on route 17 and she tries to open the car door and
jump out. Her son stops her. Then we know we are in trouble. We pull up to Bergen
Regional about 4 pm and I realize this is not the right place to take her. We are about 5
minutes from my house I decide to go home. Once we get her in the house she keeps
asking for more pills. Now I know we are really in trouble and I call 911. They look at
her pills and we determine she took an overdoes of clonzapin and percocet. My
husband tells the 911 team she tried to kill herself and they take
her to the nearest hospital emergency room. We follow the ambulance.
At the hospital they examine her and tell me she is fine and will sleep it off.
They see this all the time and if no one is here to take them home they put them in
a cab and send them home drugged. It is about 8 pm at night now. I am being told my
daughter is drugged, and she will sleep it off and I should take her home. I can’t believe
this. Not knowing what to do, knowing my daughter tried to kill herself, I called to talk
to the head doctor and said I am leaving. I told him to call a psychiatric team and
evaluate her. If anything happens to her I will sue the hospital. At this point
I find my husband and grandchildren and we go home. About 2 in the morning I get
a call from the psychiatric nurse and she advises me they are keeping my daughter. She
spent the next 6 years in one hospital after another trying to recover from an illness due to
genetic disease, mental illness, and lupus. The medical profession treated her with pain
killers creating a dependency on them and drugs. Each time I picked her up I saw a
small improvement. But she was far from functioning on her own but not fighting me
any longer. There seemed to be a peace about her I never experienced before. Later on I
discovered the peace was drug induced. In the mental hospital they must keep the
patients at a level of calm.
Immediately, I moved my daughter, 14 year old grandson, 11 year
old granddaughter to my house for the 2nd time and enrolled the children in school high
school and junior high school respectively. My 17 year old granddaughter chose to live
with her father and commute to high school in Lyndhurst since it was her senior year.
My 17 year old granddaughter was very angry with me since I made her boyfriend leave
the day her mother was taken to the police station.
She was angry with everyone and decided to stay in the apartment in Lyndhurst
and not go to school. The High School could not reach her father. The call came to me
because the father and I had just met with the high school and the elementary school
and he signed a letter stating the grandparents would be responsible for my grandson and
my younger granddaughter and he would be responsible for the older granddaughter and
her finishing high school in Lyndhurst. Her father had not made my older granddaughter
move to his house yet and the high school wanted to know why she was not in school. I
told them they had the letter making her father responsible not me and they had to
continue to try and get him. The high school said they would contact the authorities.
They not only called the authorities but they contacted the police who found the father
and went to the apartment. Since my daughter was being accused of a DWI at the time,
she was the one now being investigated by the authorities as the neglectful
mother even before the DWI was tried in court. We, the grandparents, were being
investigated, since my grandson and younger granddaughter were now living with us.
The father was interviewed by the authorities and even though
he was responsible for leaving my older granddaughter in the apartment herself, signed a
letter to the school he was responsible for her, the authorities never followed up with
him. This is not surprising because in the courts, the father walks on water. If the father
pays any child support at all, he is a knight in shinning armor even though a family of 3
are starving. In one of the many child support negotiations with this, college educated
father, a judge ruled “ poor is poor.” The law says for poor people there is a different
matrix to determine child support. The ex-husband makes minimum wage and my
daughter is not working but it was ok for his parents to hire an expensive lawyer to come
up against my daughter in court who is trying to negotiate child support, pro se, because
she could not afford legal representation. The court does not assign a lawyer in child
support cases.
Why didn’t the father call the school back? Why did he, the, father leave the
daughter in the apartment alone? Then again why should we be surprised that this
happened. He never took any responsibility toward the children in the past 17 years why
should he start now.
The authorities never looked at all the circumstances concerning the incident.
History of an incident needs to be done so the child is not put in the wrong place.
The authorities never researched the incident until I contacted them to inform them the
DWI was dropped because the Public Defender proved the police never read her her
Miranda rights. The case was dropped. I insisted an investigation of both mother and
father be done and it was proven my daughter was a good mother, the children were
never neglected and when she was ill the grandparents took care of the children. The
authorities sat in my living room and spoke to my husband and myself and my
grandchildren. They told me the father spoke so highly of us, what good grandparents
we were. I guess you can tell by this time what a liar he is. He and his parents
did everything in their power to get expensive lawyers and constantly berating my
daughter and my husband and myself. They would even tell my grandson, who looks
like my husband that he does not belong to their family. My daughter had to get a court
order to call the x-husband’s house since his father sent her a note threatening her never
to call there. The father had very little to do with the younger granddaughter since he left
when she was two. The college educated father did pay minimal child support each
month never even wanting visitation of his children.
Again, wants wrong with this picture?? The hospital and medical profession
evaluate my daughter as a drug addict based on their knowledge of others with these
symptoms and want to send her home to her kids in a cab. The authorities do their
best to protect the minor children, but you can see how many details are involved in this
one incident how can you evaluate an incident on face value and thrash through the lies?
The courts want to stroke the father as long as he pay’s something in child support. As
a mother, I am blind to all of this until I walk through the darkness to light. It wasn’t
until my husband said out loud “she tried to kill herself to the police,” did I see before
me the torture my daughter was faced with. Only I could put together all the variables of
her life, the life of her children and the symptoms of my mother.
