January Exercise
Find a Conversation
| Tue, 01-08-2002 - 7:50pm |
January Exercise
Nine Lives
“I was walking in the crosswalk when the driver hit me from behind.”
Seventeen times I’ve told her and seventeen times I’ve seen her type it into the high-end laptop computer she takes with her everywhere.
Social services don’t screen their social workers for intelligence anymore, I’ve found. They ask the same questions over and over. And when you’re through with one, you start all over with the next one, like they don’t share the notes they take when you’re talking with them.
“Then what happened?” she asks.
“I flew up and hit my head on his windshield. Then lost consciousness.” I’ve repeated the words of the medical doctors so many times I can actually picture the event, even though the last thing I remember was screeching tires on the pavement outside the A&W. It was a clear day, no snow, no black ice, and no reason for that stinking truck to be driving through the crosswalk. Speeding through the crosswalk.
“And where was your son?” she asks, still typing in my words to the previous question.
“Inside the restaurant, playing with the dragon toy he got with his kids meal.” It was a pretty good quality toy too, for a kid’s meal prize. He flew it around the table and pretended it breathed fire on the fries and ketchup. It kept him so busy that he didn’t think to eat his meal – and when you’re as hungry as we are most days, that’s something pretty astonishing.
“Who was watching him when you were outside?” she persists.
Ah, the cincher question. The one they use to determine parental responsibility and suitability. The one they used as an excuse to take my seven-year-old son away from me. Like if you go away for one second you’re a bad parent. Like if you take a bath and the kid is watching TV in the next room, they get all huffy about supervising children. If you send the kid to school without lunch because you don’t have anything for the kid to take but crackers and mustard, they get all huffy about proper nutrition. Like they’ve all got super happy shiny families, yeah right.
“I can’t remember,” I reply. I have another one of my screaming headaches, the ones where a shrill voice in my head shrieks in my ears nonstop for hours and hours, and I drop my can of Coke on the social worker’s carpet. My hands don’t always cooperate with my brain now.
It happened on September 24th, a Wednesday. I remember this clearly because I had checked the calendar that morning to find out how many more days I had to stretch the Mr. Noodle and Oreos until the welfare check came. Dylan had been bugging me to go to A&W because they had this cool dragon toy that had come out, a toy based on a movie that his god dad had taken him to see. I think it was called Dinosaurs, or maybe Jurassic Park, I don’t know, I don’t keep track of kid movies. Steve had tucked my boy on the back of this hotwired motorcycle – borrowed, not stolen, he assures me – without even a helmet for my boy, but he tells me the theater was only four blocks away so nothing would happen. Now I know what can happen in less than four blocks.
“Can you still not hold things for long periods of time?” she asks as the custodian mops up the stain below my chair.
“Huh?” I watch the thick cloths soak up the Coke. The light brown stain snakes across the fibers until nearly all the cloth was stained.
“Do-You-Still-Drop-Things?” she asks like I’m in kindergarten. I nod.
My social worker picks up the phone. “I want more brain scans and motor movement tests…. Not Monday, today!… Fine, 3 pm.”
She turns to me and smiles. Her halogen desk lamp reflects off her shiny perfect white teeth and my headache grows worse.
“Honey,” she begins. I hate when people call me honey. “We need to do more tests, to determine how your brain injury is progressing, okay?”
My brain injury. They don’t call me retarded or handicapped, they call me a person with a brain injury. And Social Services says a single mom with a brain injury can’t take care of her child, so they took Dylan away form me and placed him in a foster family. The cycle starts again. I know all about how it works, with living with foster families, the beatings, the yelling, the rules, the drinking, and the suicide. The feeling you’ll never be good enough to go home, the feeling home will never be good enough to move back to.
“You can just wait outside my office and someone will come at 2:30 to take you for testing.” She sets her laptop aside and closes the file folder she never even looked at. Apparently our interview is over.
Testing. Yes, please, more testing. When they first brought me to the hospital they shaved my head to do brain scans. MRI. ABC. NFL. Something like that. My hair has started growing back all fluffy, I can’t do anything with it. I look like the freak I know I am inside.
“Can I call Steve to let him know I’ll be late?” I ask her like I’m eight years old.
“Who’s Steve?” she asks, returning to her laptop and typing away.
Steve was Dylan’s father’s twin, and only a few years older than me. Other than hotwiring vehicles and occasionally driving without a license, Steve was a pretty good guy. He treated Dylan real good – took him to movies, brought him the latest toys, and watched him when I was high. Sometimes he even brought us food, to get us through till the cheques came. He gave me the cash to go to A&W the day of my accident.
“And what can you tell me about Dylan’s father?” she asks.
Only the same thing I’ve told social workers for the last eight years.
Dylan’s father was another story, much different from his twin. Dylan’s father wore tight jeans and heavy metal band shirts. He feathered his hair. My mother brought him home and introduced him as her boyfriend. He was, like, ten years younger than her. He had a problem with me, said I dressed too sexy, said I was asking for trouble.
He trafficked heroin most days, and robbed banks for kicks. He’d been out of jail only two days when he trapped me alone in the room I shared with the broken washing machine.
When I told my mother what her boyfriend had done to me she threw me out of the house.
“I can’t have no liar livin under my roof. Get out!” she screamed, reeking of cigars and vodka.
Steve found me shivering outside the 7-11 that night. He took me to his place so I could have a shower. I ended up living there most of two years. He brought me milk and multivitamins when I found out I was pregnant. “I’m gonna be an uncle, that’s so cool!” he said. I didn’t bother to tell my mom I was pregnant. Steve told his twin, and let’s just say Dylan’s father wasn’t exactly a proud papa.
“How long had you been living with your mother?” my social worker asks, as she sips tea from her chunky stoneware mug. I have another Coke now, in a tumbler that resembles a toddler’s sippy cup.
I’d only been living with my mom for four weeks and she had brought home eight different men that she called boyfriends.
Social services had told me mom had cleaned up enough for me to go back and live with her. I was sixteen and had been in foster care since I was five. I actually got a little excited to be living back home with my mom. When I saw the state of her place, I begged my social worker to send me back to foster care.
“How did you get back on your feet?” she asks me.
Steve was the biggest help. He didn’t exactly work much so he could watch the baby when I went to work at Reitman’s. Yeah, it was a crappy retail job but it put food on the table. Then Steve got a real job and I got pregnant, so I had to quit my job and go on welfare. I lost the baby at seven months but then I got pregnant again. Lost that one too. Dylan has been my only for seven wonderful years.
She glances at the oversized digital clock on her desk. “We’ve run over. Call your friend and then look for the aide to take you to your medical tests. Thank you for spending time with me, Monica.”
She stands and extends her hand. I stand and drop my sippy cup, but it doesn’t spill this time. I clasp her hand for a second before my arm twitches free. I use my other arm to pull it down into place. She leaves the room and I call Steve.
Then I go to yet another anonymous waiting room to wait for yet another series of tests. I catch my reflection in the mirrored closet door. Every hair on my head is three months long and stands out like the bristles on a designer hairbrush. I could use the bags under my eyes to shoplift cigarette cartons. My clothes come from Salvation Army.
How did I get like this?

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It really had that effect? ...
Thanks for your encouragement. This story haunted me until I wrote it down, so I slipped in the exercise words and posted it as the Jan exercise.
Thank you for mentioning the parts you liked :)
Have a great day, Eyewrite
A sad situation indeed...
there are people who get all the bad breaks in life, and fall through the cracks in society. This story is darker than most I've seen posted here so I was interested to learn how others reacted to it.
Thank you for your comments and I'm glad you loved the story. I always enjoy your stories posted here :)
Have a good day, Eyewrite
Hi, Eyewrites...(m)
I found that your piece brought back a lot of memories, since I'm one of those "lucky" people who's been on the other side of that proverbial fence with Social Services. And I chuckled with Monica's comment that: "Social services don’t screen their social workers for intelligence anymore, I’ve found. They ask the same questions over and over. And when you’re through with one, you start all over with the next one, like they don’t share the notes they take when you’re talking with them." Boy, that is so true, so true.
This piece evoked emotions in me that I thought were long gone, so as the writer you did your job well. Your descriptions are excellent, the voice of an uneducated woman came through very effectively.
But, I too, was confused in places. One of the other posters, El, I believe, said the same thing I was sensing as I reread through this. What holds it together in the beginning, seems to fall apart towards the middle, kind of like a train derailing. Although all the information you give us is important to the story, I felt that towards the middle, it felt that you were just throwing info in. I'm sorry if that's not the case, but that's the general feel I had to this. The only suggestion I could make to this affect, (and remember this is a suggestion only, feel free to chuck it right on out the window if you like), would be to copy this into your wordpro or wordpad, which ever you have, and experiment by moving the sentences around. See what can improve the flow of this piece to your satisfaction.
I think you did your job well as the writer here, causing all kinds of emotional responses. I'm looking forward to reading more about Monica. Thanks for sharing this, Sammi
This was fabulous...
You took a character who could have easily been unlikeable, mindly repugnant and witless and made her into a dynamic, interesting and loveable person. I was rooting for her the whole way, and wanting to slap around that useless Social Worker.
The twins were the most intriguing part of the story - the way she talks about Steve as though he's only a friend and a brother, yet since she gets pregnant again, he must be more. It really lends to her credibility, actually, because she isn't swooning over him.
I loved the way you worked the elements in for the exercise - absoulutely seamless!
My only confusion was the timeline. If she had this accident and she was probably in the hospital briefly, when did they decide to take her son away? Did the hospital make the referral to Social Services? It sounds like she had test run three months ago, but it also sounds like he's been in the system longer than that...
Great job here...you'll have to share any rewrites with us!
Wendy
Terrific feedback, thank you! (m)
Indeed this piece needs a brillo pad and serious rearranging/editing/reworking/deleting. I wanted some early feedback and other people's reactions to the piece and so I didn't edit much before posting .
I value your comments and will use them for rewriting. Thank you for reviewing. :)
Eyewrite
Thank you Wendy...
I'm glad you liked the story and grew to like Monica. I enjoyed your comments - thank you. I hoped the exercise elements fit into the story.
I don't know were I came up with the twins part. The yin and yang? It just... happened.
For the timeline, I figured that Monica was hospitalized for about two weeks, and that her son was taken away on the day of the accident. I felt that Social Services had had an eye on Monica all along, first for her as a child/teen, then for her as a parent. This accident was the straw on the camel's back, the excuse SS could use to call Monica an unfit parent and take her son away. As if SS had no faith in Monica, had been just waiting for this type of event.
Thank you for reviewing and commenting! :)
Eyewrite
I have to echo the other comments
This was terrific. You really brought her to life. I felt so bad for her that it was happening. At the end, I felt a little cheated that we didn't get to see what happens next. Does she get her son back? What happens with Steve? I *loved* the MRI, NFL, ABC thing. That was great.
This was a great story! You did well. :-)
Michelle
Michelle, co-cl for The Writing Life
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