Countdown to Eviction

5/4 days.

I forgot about everything just for a few hours on Day 5. Until last night when it was time for me to go to sleep. I wrote about all those drawers I stuff my emotions into every day - they all emptied out last night. If emotions were paint, you could see inside my brain, there were a lot of blacks and grays spilling out like swollen streams and rivers from their individual compartments inside my head.

One of my best friends said I need more color in my life. She told me that I've let these horrible people steal my joy. She told me I've lost my color. She told me I've lost the light in the eyes.

She's right. I look in the mirror and I don't see anything but pain and fear and uncertainty. I see worry lines cropping up on my face every day. I still don't eat write because there are days when I am just so sick with sorry that nothing stays in my stomach for very long.

I see failure as a mother which transcends everything. I see despir because of the mountain of debt I've incurred trying to survive and raise my son alone. I see hopelessness because I don't see a way out of this awful place.

Another one of my best friends said "you don't belong there. You're educated, your extremely intelligent and you could leave."

She doesn't understand that in order to get to B,C,D,E & F, you have to A. And that's money and family and networks of support.

I don't have any of that. I have a mother who is in a financial position to have gotten my son and I into a safe place but she refused. I never asked her for anything. And the one time I did - this past summer when this nightmare began - she refused. I finally got the courage to write to her and ask her why.

She has not responded. I do no expect her to because I don't think she knows how to answer that question. I thought she would see only her grandson - my son - and think only of his safety. I thought she would know that getting us out of here and into a home where I am not burdened by income limitations, lease violations and drugs and guns and psychopaths - I thought she would not even blink when I asked for her help.

I was wrong. And knowing that - my own mother would not help me - is right up there are feeling like a failure as a mother myself. Perhaps inside of my mother, she feels the same kind of failure herself because all four of her children - including me - ended up in varying degrees of failure at something. The only exception is my brother who fled our family when he was 18 and never looked back. But he carries around a burden inside of him because he never speaks of what our family was like. He never speaks of the lies my father told, of how my father treated our mother, how my father became a millionaire but wouldn't get his own children braces because he thought it was a waste of money, how he didn't have the time to take us to different colleges and find out what we wanted to do. No, our father crushed all our dreams. And my mother stood by and never said a word.

So who is to blame? One or the other? Or both?

Perhaps my mother is too afraid to admit she too, failed, and resists the temptation to admit same but simply refusing to help me because she feels entitled to what she earned as a result of a 55 year marriage that ended in divorce and "she got what she deserved."

I've been in therapy for nearly three years now trying to find out why all four of us - all grown adults - never got what we deserved when we were kids. We never went to summer camp. We didn't get to play Little League or taking swimming lessons or music lessons or do normal kid stuff. My mother didn't drive because she drank. And when she did get her license, she still wouldn't drive because she knew she'd have to give up alcohol. She chose to keep drinking.

My father was never home and when he was he was, he buried himself in his work and spent more time talking to his business partners and employees than he did with his own kids. We all lived individually and we all fended for ourselves. We had no tools to work with so we grasped whatever we could find outside our house.

None of us ever had a chance. My oldest sister - she ended up a Rx drug addict. In and out of rehab for 20 years. I think she's clean now but she's slid back so many times I don't know if she will cave in again. We talk once a week now and her voice sounds clear and her speech is not slurred by the zombie-like quality of too many drugs.

My brother owns his own, highly successful business - he is a CPA. He does taxes for celebrities. He owns three homes. His wife makes six figures at a hospital in Miami as its CEO. He made sure his daughters found the colleges right for their chosen career paths. He did all the right things for his family. I think when he met his wife he learned what family really meant. And he started acquiring the right tools to become a good, decent, caring, unconditional loving father.

He doesn't speak to any of us. He is ashamed of his father because he knows the truth. And I think in some deep dark way, he is also ashamed of his mother for not standing up for herself - or for her children.

I wandered through life all during elementary school, through junior high, through high school. I just wanted to play baseball or be as close to the sport as I could get. I loved the game. My father told me I could never play because I was a girl. I wish I had known then what I know now - I would have sued my father to make him pay for me to play Little League.

I had straight A's in school. I discovered I had a talent for writing - writing was the easiest thing in the world for me. On a piece of white paper, I created a new life for myself. I created colors that Crayola would envy. I created people that didn't talk, and animals that could. The universe became the center of all my stories because it doesn't have a beginning and an ending - I did that myself.

But baseball was the game I loved and I wanted to know more. And I wanted to write about the game and tell about the players, the hits that snuck through for a single and scored the winning run, the strikeout with the bases loaded and the sheer frustration of a talented hitter, and the joyful elation of the pitcher. I wanted to write about the fans, the coaches, the umpires, everything relative to that game. I wanted to understand why a curve ball curved, why a breaking ball broke, and how a human being could rear back and throw a little white, red-seamed ball 100 miles an hour in what -- 1.5 seconds if that?

I was mesmerized by the science of the game. Baseball became a passion.

But to my father, it was a waste of time. When I got a job with a newspaper, he had no interest in reading my stories. Nevermind I had to beg my friends and their parents for rides to games just so I could cover those games.

There was no encouragement, no support for my talent. And when it was time for college, my father said I"m not paying for you to go to college and go into lockerrooms. Find something else to do."

And that knocked me off my road and while I spent many years as a reporter, I ultimately left journalism because I didn't have a college degree. And when I did get my college degree, it was in criminal justice. Journalism and criminal justice are entertwined: Both careers deal in truth and facts.

And the truth was, I will always be a writer. And I will always think like a cop.

The truth. And the facts. And supporting evidence.

And on November 18th - I hope with all my heart I get a chance to tell the truth and state the facts and show my evidence to the judge.

And I hope the judge sees that this eviction case against my son and I is bogus and ridiculous and rule in my favor so that I can continue to keep a roof over my son's head.

I dream about that white knight rescuing my son and I. I dream about having a home where my son can laugh loudly anytime, where he has a place for his friends to meet and they too, can laugh loudly without worrying about being evicted for causing "serious disturbances."

Where I can plant flowers of every color imaginable and maybe have a few dogs to curl up with me on a couch.

A place where my son can still have some of his childhood and be a kid.

Where is our rescuer? Or am I just too jaded and too cynical and too destroyed by what's been done to my son and I to actually hope and believe that someone like that exists?

I don't know right now.