Super Taco Love
The courts permanently removed me from my mother’s care when I was 12. By then, we had become accustomed to the joy and sorrow that went with visiting hours. Foster homes, hospitals and mental institutions dictated our visits. The routine was bittersweet. The visits were always too short and sometimes awkward. Mom’s mental state, my mental state, and the long periods between visits, often left us unsure of what to say to each other. So we began to count on food to ease our discomfort. Whether they were 30-min, 1-hr or half-day visits, we ate. It didn’t matter if it was a candy bar from the vending machine outside the hospital or a lunch one of us packed. Since our visits were often unpredictable, I liked sharing food because it was something I could count on to be the same each time and I used it to ease my discomfort when Mom was acting really crazy due to her “manic-depression.” At 12 I still didn’t have a full understanding of what manic-depression (AKA: bipolar disorder) was, but at least I had a label I could apply to my mom’s wild moods and unpredictable behaviors. The fondest memories I have of visits with my mother came after my foster grandmother ended my second stint as a foster kid in her home. She decided she could no longer handle a thirteen year-old “heathen.” Her rejection of me was a blessing. As a result, I was moved hundreds of miles from my foster grandma’s house and into a foster home close to the board-and-care home that my mother was living in. Mom had been placed there following her last stint in a psychiatric institution. It was her first time in a board-and-care home. After her last manic episode, the courts decided she was no longer capable of caring for herself, made her a ward of the state, and ordered her into long-term care. The home provided her with meals, a bed, and medication three times a day. The rules were more relaxed than they had been at any of the psychiatric institutions she had been committed to previously, and as long as she took her lithium and Haldol at the prescribed times, she was allowed to come and go as she pleased between the hours of 8 am and 6 pm… (Break in narrative) When I was finally given permission to visit my mother by my social worker Mrs. Hill, my new foster parents made it clear that finding a way to get there was my problem. I didn’t have a ride but it didn’t matter. I was willing to walk the four miles. I got directions from my new foster mom Iris, a petite dark-haired chain-smoker, burdened by an unemployed alcoholic husband named Bill, 3 drug-addicted daughters, and another daughter on the way to becoming a drug addict. Before leaving the house for my first visit with my mom at the board-and-care home, I dressed in my best jeans and coolest tank top. While I dressed, I wondered what Mom would be like during our first visit. I hadn’t seen her in over six months and I wasn’t sure what to expect. After every hospitalization she seemed to morph into a slightly different person from the one I had last known... (Break in narrative)
When I finally I arrived at the board-and-care home I was hot and sticky. I tried to rub the eyeliner off my cheeks before I opened the gate that led into a courtyard surrounded by a small collection of run down buildings; Mom’s new digs- inaptly named Spring Gardens. Mom had given me instructions to find the room which she shared with another woman. Her roommate had just been released from a criminal psychiatric institution after 15 years of confinement. She had been committed for stabbing her abusive husband 63 times. Walking down the sidewalk that ran the length of the courtyard I was accosted repeatedly by Spring Gardens’ mentally ill residents. “Who are you here to see?” they asked eagerly. Some wanted to touch me or shake my hand. A man that introduced himself as Charlie Chaplin shook my hand the most vigorously. Due to some sort of severe skin condition his hands were extremely scaly and red. I tried to be polite and not jerk my hand away, but I was worried that he might have something contagious like leprosy. While I was trying to extricate myself from his grip Mom came out of her room and rescued me. She was smiling broadly. She rushed up and snatched me from Charlie’s vice like fingers. In spite of everything she had been through, she still looked nice. Her hair was done and she had put on makeup. Talking loudly so that everyone around us could hear, she explained that her daughter had come to visit her. “Isn’t she beautiful!” she said as she guided me past the other residents sitting on door stoops and in the few chairs which sat in the courtyard. I doubted my beauty given my last look at my reflection in a window, but it was nice to hear Mom’s praise of me. I had gotten very little praise while I was living with my foster grandmother and my new foster parents only seemed to notice my presence when there were chores to be done. As we walked towards her room, I looked around. Lots of the residents greeted us as we went past, saying how lucky my mom was to get a visitor (I would later learn that my mother was the only resident to ever get a visit from a family member). Not all of the residents greeted us. Some sat rocking their bodies back and forth while muttering angrily at the demons that lived in their heads. Except for a few of the residents, most had the haunted zoned-out look of long-term psychiatric patients on serious meds. I felt sorry for them. Seeing them made me worry that my mother’s mental illness might be passed onto me. I couldn’t image a worse fate than to be condemned to a life like theirs. When we reached the doorway of a small bungalow on the left side of the courtyard Mom directed me through it. The room was stifling hot even with the door open. Inside there were two small cots with a nightstand in the middle, a small wardrobe against the foot of each cot, and a tiny bathroom to the right of where we entered. Everything looked rundown and the paint was peeling off the walls. “Mabel, this is my daughter.” Mom said nodding towards a woman about 50 with head of ratted gray hair and a ravaged face. She was shifting back and forth between sitting and standing while muttering incoherently, although I thought I caught “Shut up you Mother Fucker!” at least twice. I said hello. Mabel ignored me. Mom leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Ignore her rudeness Baby, she’s crazy.” I turned and looked at Mom unsure how to respond since everyone there was crazy, including her. She looked at me with her big blue eyes wide and at the same second we both burst out laughing. “Come on Sweetie, it’s too hot to stay here. Let’s walk to Jack-in-the-Box and get some food. I’ve been saving my allowance just for your visit.” Walking away from the halfway house, Mom and I held hands. They became quickly sweaty, but we didn’t let go. We were so happy to be together again that the heat and the shitty neighborhood no longer seemed to matter. During our walk I felt more comfortable than I had in a very long time. Curious, I asked Mom if she thought Mabel was dangerous. “Oh, heavens no! It’s the schizophrenia that makes her act like that sometimes. She only killed her husband because the bastard almost beat her almost to death, and not just once. If you ask me, he deserved what he got.” My mother’s answer put me at ease about her safety as Mabel’s roommate. Since I had seen my father beat my mother on more than one occasion, I too thought that Mabel’s actions made sense and were likely to be limited to only that sort of situation. Mom asked about my new foster parents. I explained that Iris was nice. Not wanting to worry her, I avoided talking about the other members of my new family. I didn’t want to tell her about the sheets and sheets of acid that belonged to my foster parent’s oldest daughter which sat in the pool house refrigerator, acid that she had offered me several hits of two days after I moved in. She seemed unconcerned that I was only 13. Nor did I want to tell her about the blowjob I walked in on when I got home early from school one day; a blowjob that my new foster dad was getting in the living room from a previous foster daughter. Later he had her come to my room to bring me beers hoping buy my silence. She explained that she did it because he still gave her money so that she could by drugs. She begged me not to tell anyone and I didn’t. I also didn’t want to tell Mom about the two occasions that the police stormed the house with a police chopper circling overhead to arrest the husband and boyfriend of my foster parent’s two oldest daughters, one for drug dealing and the other for armed robbery. Those arrests would later dictate the only family outings we ever went on; visits to Tehachapi California Correctional Institution. Talking to Mom I avoided those topics and did my best to make her believe that I was happy in my new home. I chatted about the pool they had and how close it was to my new high school. Once we reached the Jack-in-the-Box, Mom and I had run out of safe things to talk about. We stood inside staring at the menu silently. Mom lit a cigarette and then asked if I had ever had a Super Taco. I said that I hadn’t. “You’ll love them! Let’s order four.” she said walking quickly up to the cashier. She placed the order and reached into her purse to get her wallet. While she was extracting the money from it I noticed that her hands were shaking more that I had ever seen before. It wasn’t really a nervous kind of shaking, but more like an uncontrollable tremor. Watching her closely, I noticed that her head seemed to have a similar tremor and her tongue was moving in a strange rhythmical way. The movements worried me. I was terrified that she might have something serious like a brain tumor. After we sat down with our order I asked her about it. I could tell by her answer that she was embarrassed. “It’s nothing. The drugs they give me make me move funny. I was hoping that it wasn’t noticeable. Don’t worry about it. Now go on and eat.” She said crushing out her cigarette in the tinfoil ashtray on the table. She picked up a Super Taco and bit into it. I picked up one of mine. Looking inside I could see some sort of meat paste and cheese that had the consistence and color of Cheese Wiz. It looked disgusting. I took a bite. It was disgusting. “You like it?” Mom asked with bits of taco shell and lettuce showing as she spoke with a big smile. She was happy; happy to be with me, happy to be feeding me. I looked at her face, my mother’s beautiful face, and I knew the Super Taco in my hand was love. She knew that she would never be able to take care of me again and she was trying to love me the best way she knew how. From that moment forward, I loved each and every Super Taco I ever ate, even when I wasn’t with my mom. The Super Taco was our special kind of love. |
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Excerpts from
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A Memoir by Lisa “Jean” Madden,© 2007
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Providing Educational Support, Personal Items, and Luggage to Foster Kids |
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