Madison Shifflett
December 2, 2014
Core 1
Cancer, Lies, Drugs, etc.
It all started when I was around six years old. My mother and my father got a divorce when I was only five years old, but I don’t remember much of the impact it had on me due to my young age. What I do remember, though, is my “mother” manipulating me to believe lies and make me stick up for her, even when she most certainly didn’t deserve it. Although, I didn’t know it at the time. I thought everything she said was the best option and that I should listen to her every desire. When I was around eleven, I started to realize this wasn’t true.
After my parents had got a divorce my dad had lived in the basement for a little until he mustered up the money to move to an apartment. While he was living with us, though, my “mom” Tammy still worked night shift at the hospital. One night, before Tammy had left for work, she went downstairs to tell my dad that she was leaving for work and that I was asleep upstairs. I was only six at the time, therefore having no reason to know what is going on around the household. After Tammy had left the house, instead of going to work she went outside and called the police saying that my dad was drunk, that he had a loaded gun with him, and that he said “he wasn’t coming out alive.”
Naturally, the SWAT team showed up to my house in the middle of the night while my dad was downstairs asleep. When they were yelling at him to come out, he could not hear them, so eventually they had to enter with smoke bombs because they thought he was an actual threat. I was brought out and was placed in the car of my mothers friend, whom I had never met before, around three a.m. The police and SWAT found bullet holes in the ceiling of the wash room which was right underneath the bedroom I was sleeping in, but the police later found out it was my mother who put those there earlier in her life. My dad was placed under arrest and charged with the felony of “endangering the welfare of the child”.
Later on, after my father had moved in with my great grandmother, my mother’s boyfriend, Jere, moved in with us. We lived at that house for another year and a half before we had to move into an apartment together. That was around the time my mother turned to drugs and was re-diagnosed with breast cancer. I, being a young child, would help her as much as I could, even if that meant doing things that eight year olds are too young to be doing on their own.
Her drug addiction got worse. I started meeting the people she was dealing with, and she started doing drugs with my best friends mom. Since that sort of lifestyle was all that I have ever known, I thought this was normal and didn’t think anything of it. She was my mother, I did anything to protect her and keep her with me.
When I was around 8, CYS (Children Youth Services) became involved. They would come around our apartment maybe once or twice a month to see if there was food in the house and if there was certain aspects around the home. One of the deals of CYS, though, was that my mother had to go for monthly urine testing to see if she was still on drugs. Normally, there is no way around that, but she figured something out.
She used me. Since I was her daughter, we had the same blood type in the urine sample. Therefore every time she had to go for testing, she would have me pee in a cup that morning and she would use it on her drug testing. She would hold it to the inside of her thigh and just pour it into the cup the doctors would give her. I guess only the mad can get away with the unlikely.
I can recall one time when Jere, my mothers boyfriend, and her were in a fight over who knows what. I remember waking up at around 6 a.m. to screaming coming from the living room and my first instinct was to defend her. I did exactly what she told me and called the police as she attempted to keep Jere from leaving, which didn’t turn out that well. When I turned around she was chasing him down the hallway and out to his car. She tried to get into his car multiple times to prevent him from leaving but he just continued to push her out and he drove away. Tammy, my “mother”, then came back in and told me to help her flip the furniture over so that it would look like he did it.
I remember a different time, probably before that event, where she left at around midnight and said she wouldn’t be back until morning. I was confused as to why she had a baseball bat, but I let her go. Turns out she walked all the way to Jere’s house and smashed all of his windows. I later found out from my stepmother that Tammy had called her that night crying and saying that she was going to be arrested and that she needed her to come to the apartment to pick me up. Unfortunately, Jere did not press charges and there were no consequences for her.
She was almost always under the influence of drugs. There was one time where I was going to church with my best friend, Joellie, when Tammy chased me out of the house screaming profanities and other nonsense. Out of that nonsense she was also insulting Joellie because she was Puerto Rican and screaming extremely rude things. After Tammy went back inside, Joellie came down the stairs; she had heard everything. My “mother” was insulting two 9 year olds because she was on drugs.
Back to earlier when I mentioned how my mother had done drugs with my best friends mom. It was Halloween 2010 when Joellie told me her parents were getting a divorce and that her dad had just left. I told my mom since the two adults had been friends earlier in the year, and her initial reaction was “just let me get ready and we can walk over there”. While Joellie, her 6 year old sister, and I were in the living room, both of our mothers were in the bathroom doing drugs.
Then comes her new boyfriend, Jeremy. He was always nice to me, he taught me how to play the guitar, he treated me like his daughter. Only bad side at first was that, the only reason the two had met was because Tammy had some “friends” over for a drug deal. He was one of the main reasons why I was taken away from my mother, but it was bound to happen regardless.
One time I was at the park with my friends and Jeremy’s son. This other kid who lived directly across from me was there too, and him and I had hated each other for as long as I can remember. During the time we were there, the kid who lived across from me had the audacity to punch me in my jaw. That wasn’t a good idea on his part, considering we lived in a bad neighborhood which meant the children were bad too. Jeremy’s son filled a sock full of sand and hit him repeatedly with it, along with other details that are a little blurry.
The kid then proceeded to go home and call the police. Nothing really came out of calling the police other than our hatred for each other to grow. Neither Jeremy’s son nor I got in trouble for the fight, but we did have to explain why it happened in the first place. The kid who lived across the hall played a minor part later on, which I will get to later, but it is not very important.
Tammy would always sell my stuff. She sold my bike that I got for my eighth birthday, she sold my first laptop, and then she would lie and say it was lost. She had me so wrapped around her finger that I actually believed that I had lost those items myself. That was until my things kept disappearing and I finally began to question where everything was going, she had no choice but to tell me the truth.
I recall this one time when I nine someone had “broken into” our apartment in the middle of the night but only took the most puerile items. I had believed that they had broke in due to my sleepy state of mind, but looking back years later I realize that was also a lie considering we had always locked the deadbolt. I figure she just needed an excuse for our things to go missing.
As an example of how much my “mother” continuously lied to me, lets use my birthday for an example. For my tenth birthday my dad and stepmom, Jamie, offered to take me and my cousin to Hershey Park. My mother then proceeded to use my phone to tell them no and told me that they just blew me off. I don’t know what was going through her head as she did this, but I didn’t know the truth until one or two years later.
When I was in fourth grade and still living with my mother, I received a letter from a certain program offering me the opportunity to study in France for the summer. I had discussed it with my mother and she was all about letting me go until she found out that if my dad and stepmom were to pay for the trip, she wouldn’t receive child support for the months I was gone. I had to miss an amazing opportunity because she was too selfish when it came to money. She didn’t even tell me I wasn’t going, she just let the subject drop and I never heard what happened until Jamie, my stepmom, explained what happened.
The last, most memorable memory I have of her was on December 22, 2010, which was the last day I spent around her. It was just me, Jeremy, and her in the apartment, but her and Jeremy started fighting for some reason I don’t remember. My mother, of course, was out of the right mindset due to drugs, and didn’t care that he left what-so-ever until I mentioned that he took her drugs.
She immediately started to leave and run after him, which was a bad idea considering she forgot shoes and a jacket in the middle of December, on the same day someone in the retirement home across from us had died. Someone from the ambulance saw my mother trip and fall but get up and continue to run, yet I guess he suspected something was wrong because they then proceeded to call the police.
I, being dependant on her, also chased after Jeremy and her trying to get them both to come back to the apartment. I couldn’t get Jeremy to come back, and by that point I couldn’t find my mother. I went around looking for her, and eventually found her behind a tree and she mentioned something about her sneaking back into the apartment and that I need to go back home. The police were outside of the apartment building by that point.
I was in my living room talking to a police woman when I excused myself to go to the bathroom. While I was in there, though, I found my mother hiding in the bath tub. I couldn’t hide the secret very well, and they eventually found her. I was taken out to the police car so that they could take me to CYS and have them contact my dad and tell them to pick me up.
While I was sitting out there, though, I looked up to see the kid from across the hall smirking down at me from the window, and my immediate reaction was to flip him off. I was caught off guard though because that was the point when my mother was brought out from the apartment building screaming, kicking, and spitting at anything in her vision. The car I was in started to drive off around that point, and I was stuck at CYS for about three to four hours.
By the time Jamie got to CYS, I was just about out of emotions. It was extremely cold by that time of night, so I didn’t find it odd how closely Jamie was holding her jacket to her chest until she started to get closer. I then noticed that she had a pitbull puppy, that she had just picked up, in her jacket. The few months after that night, I still believed that my mother would do no wrong and the tears never seemed to stop. Then I slowly began to realize the truth about those five years of my life, and I slowly stopped caring about my relationship with my mother and soon after I gave up trying to communicate with her at all.
