Slow Pirouette For The Dancing Girl

I stood with my feet firmly planted in the middle of a mental breakdown. I was seven years old, there was broken glass all around me and half of my hair was cut off. My small body was red all over and my mother was at the dark green metal door to our apartment in the Beechland Street projects of Roslindale, Mass.

Who was at the door? It was my teenage baby-sitter, Jeannie. Jeannie had heard the crashing, yelling and screaming. My mother – she had one ear to the door and she was looking back at me, listening to Jeannie ask if everything was okay and holding a finger up to her lips as if to say, “If you don’t tell, no one will take you away from me.”

Then Jeannie’s parents were there in the hall. They wanted to hear my voice – make sure I was okay. They had heard about the time my brother was taken away. So my mother motioned me over to the door. I looked at it. It was like a warehouse door. Industrial grade. With paint you could scratch off with your fingernails. The door looked back at me.

I walked up to it. I said, “I’m okay.”

Next, my mother and Jeannie’s mother in the hall, screaming. My mother throws a white telephone at their door. Cord and all.
_____________________________________

My mother took me out of foster care at age three, after I started calling my foster mother Mommy.

I was in foster care for the first three years of my life for two reasons. The first reason is that my mother is bipolar. At the time of my birth her diagnosis was subject to debate, as most mental illness diagnoses are.

At different times, she has been labeled schizophrenic. She has had shock treatments. She has been drugged into and out of so many different realities, I’m sure she doesn’t know which parts of her life are fact and which are fiction. I do know that what I have told her of my seventh year she regards as fiction.

“I never did that to you,” she says. “And if I did, it was only because I loved you.”

She was taking Lithium before she discovered she was pregnant with me. Lithium and babies do not mix. She went off the psych drugs, in part for my fetal benefit, but mostly because she fucking hated being on them. The pattern would repeat itself several times over.
____________________________

I wouldn’t stop crying. My mother was cutting my hair. Why? It was so pretty. I had just grown it long enough to wear out of braids in my second grade picture. I remember I wore blue and feathers were involved in my hair somehow. I liked Indians in second grade. I always wanted to be Pocahontas. Mooky’s mom had hot-combed my hair especially for the occasion. I just couldn’t understand why mom would chop it all off with scissors like that when it was finally long. So I cried.

“The more you cry, the more I cut,” she said.

I couldn’t help it. She had just beaten me for no reason. It was Easter weekend. We were supposed to visit Grandma L. in Olean, N.Y., but we had come home from the Greyhound station because Mom had forgotten our tickets. We got home, and Mom just started breaking things.

First it was just her things. Things in the living room. Then she started breaking things I liked – like the little glass figurines that my uncles bought for her. Little blue glass penguins and elephants. And those glass animals – owls – from tea boxes. All of them – she swept them from the white plastic shelves in the hallway. She yelled. Really loud.

She bent me over and spanked me. I don’t know why she did it. I remember crying and I remember her putting me in the tub afterwards and telling me she was sorry. My skin was red. Then she was cutting my hair off. So I started crying again.
_________________________

My mother was skinny as a fishing line when she got pregnant with my brother at age 16. She was diagnosed with a variety of things in her early 20s, necessitating the use of a mishmosh of sundry toxins her doctors thought would fix her up. Lithium fucks with all of your body’s systems, including the regulation of your weight. My mother became obese. She went off those drugs when she got pregnant with me and, as you know, pregnancy does not make you any skinnier. By the time she gave birth to me nine drug-free months later, she had be hospitalized for her mental state.

She was in and out of the mental hospital for those first three years I was in foster care. The other reason the Commonwealth of Massachusetts didnt want me in her care was because they had to take my brother out of her custody after she beat him.

She was off her meds when that happened, too. I was in her belly, growing there, blissfully unaware of what I would be born into. I know my mother danced and sang and read and wrote when I was there in her belly. My brother was adopted by his father’s parents in California, where he moved for good before I was born. We’ve corresponded. We’ve spoken. I think he’s probably the best brother a girl could have. I’ve never met him.
____________________________

Mom went into my bedroom and started breaking all of my things. I haven’t done anything wrong. My mom’s not crazy. She told me she’s not and I believe her. She said they took my brother away from her and she was sorry, but she wouldn’t let them take me, too.

She’s in my room and she flipped my bed over when she was breaking things. I don’t have a lot of toys, but I have enough. Barbie dolls, my stuffed Gizmo doll that my brother sent me for my fourth birthday. But my favorite was my little jewelry box with the plastic ballerina. She did slow pirouettes when I opened the box. She danced just for me and played a song, too. I didn’t just want to be Pocahontas. I wanted to be Pocahontas on pointe shoes.

If I could make myself stop crying, I thought maybe she would stop breaking things before she got to the jewelry box.

I stood with my feet firmly planted in the middle of a mental breakdown. I was seven years old, there was broken glass all around me and half of my hair was cut off. My small body was red all over and my mother was at the dark green metal door to our apartment in the Beechland Street projects of Roslindale, Mass.

Jeannie is at the door asking if I’m okay. I’m sad. My little ballerina is broken now, but her song is still playing. I looked at the door. It looked back at me. I walk up to it and say, “I’m okay.”