A dear friend of mine said that this blogging would be theraptic for me but DAMN!!!!
My day started off slow. I woke, washed up, got dressed and headed out to hopefully meet with another social worker about my case. I spoke with her for apporximately 5 mintues than headed out the door on my way to my job. As I stepped in the car my phone went off and it was a coworker asking me to have her back on another case that she was heading to at 11am. It was only 9:05am so heading to work would be pointless when I have to drive back to my neck of the woods where this person stays. So I decided to hang out with my dear friend from an hour or so, to past the time.
He was up working on his lecture discussing African American poetry and music and the the "spark of a new revolution". He's brilliance never ceases to amaze me and I only hope that I can make it to his lecture tonight. Its at 7pm so if I take care of business here, its a go! We'll as time processed it came near to heading out to help out my coworker with her case.
I was a little familiar with the area so it was clear to me where we were headed, but she's from the burbs and I didn't want her to get stunted like many do when rolling through the hood,especially a hood that I am familiar with and one that carries with it its own rep and police escort. As we neared the block and drove up to the home, and I noticed my coworker in my in my reveiw turning the block. With her eyes wide shut we narrowed to the home of her new case and introduced ourselves. She looked a little confused, probably wondering why so many people were walking up to her door step and "Assessing the situation" as we are taught in bullshit state of Michigan training.
As we entered into the home. Ms. K started expressing her feelings on us coming to her door. Tears started flowing as she described the night her son got shot almost 17 times and lived to tell us about it, and now CPS was at her door telling her she was an unfit mother, with a possible drug addiction. Tears fell from her face as she explained that since she was 15 years of age she had been on her own as a child, Married a man that beat her ass, and verbally abused her for nearly 25 years, raised three boys and one girl, and nearly 10-15 more young folks throughout the neighborhood that needed a roof over the head or food in their stomach. She stated that she saw herself at 15years of age, wondering the streets, turning tricks just to get by. Married the first man she had a child with and is the only man she had four children with. Physical and verbal assualted on a daily basis until she said enough, and now this. She talked about how the day she left him he said to her in a drunk slur that she would never amount to anything, and that all her life would ever be about was this. Her tears seem to carry with it not only this current pain of having her two youngest children taken from her, but the pain of a man she loved more than herself yet he only spoke of hate toward her. The pain of a woman tired of fighting and being judged by a society that looks to her as some unfit mother when she was taken on the role of so many mothers that were to busy fighting for their lives and now this. Now here we stood attempting to "Improve her parenting skills", and "Address concerns of drug addiction".
Weed is considered the gateway drug but based on the evidence of a woman that has fought for some many reasons both good and bad, a puff of weed from a life of not knowing where the next meal would come from and if the utility bills would get paid, this seem to be her only escape. This seem to be her redemption. "It was this or death", she stated. "I chose this and this is all I have". Ms. K represents that mother that screams out at the funeral home laying across a son that had so much potential and life, loved basketball, and had a baby on the way, kicked with his boys on the weekend, and loved fried chicken. She represented the teenage mother just giving birth to her first child wondering how she will do it,without him, there needs to be a plan. I need to be different than my mother, I need to be,yet I don't know how this is done.
There is no blueprint for first time mothers that never had a stable home, a father,a job, an education, a real chance. The odds are not just against this woman that are against the sons that come from her womb. They are their worst enemy and fear is the leading suspect. It is fear that takes their lives not each other, it is fear that robs them blind in bright daylight, it is fear that breaks a mother down after so many years of holding on and being strong. She bares it all, all the time.
Those must be those dusty, dark rivers creeping in on us and her soul, her soul is empty.
