TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:
THERAPIST: Can you still make 15 minutes? Does that work for you? Okay, good.
CLIENT: I think my ride won’t pick me up until 4:25.
THERAPIST: Okay.
CLIENT: They said (inaudible), “We’ll pick you up from Austin Street at 2:17, and then we’ll pick you up for your return trip at 4:25.”
THERAPIST: How are they with the time?
CLIENT: They’re either early, or they’re late. We have a lot of days that we wait, and we wait, and he’s 25 minutes late.
THERAPIST: Okay.
CLIENT: We have those days. We have takeoff. I had a big fight with them Monday. I requested VN (sp) at all times, because trying to get into a car – they put you in the backseat and I have to lay down in order to get into the car and lift the leg up, and it’s hanging out like this, and then work myself in. [00:01:21]
THERAPIST: Yeah.
CLIENT: Same way getting out. You need to lay down. If there’s even another passenger in the backseat, I may as well just forget it.
THERAPIST: Oh yeah, right, if there’s more than one, sure.
CLIENT: Can I sit in the front? “Well we’re not supposed to have people in the front.” One guy just came out and said no. Didn’t they send a car for me come Monday, going to the doctor’s? So I refused to get into the car. [00:02:01] It took 45 minutes for another van to come get me. I got to the doctor’s office just exactly almost 3:30, on time for my apartment, after I had to call and say I might be a few minutes late, and he said, “That’s fine. Louise can come in whenever she wants.” So I got there, had my feet done, waited downstairs. My pickup time – you have to give them an hour, even if your appointment time is only 15 minutes. You have to give them an hour.
THERAPIST: Oh, between drop off and pickup?
CLIENT: Yeah. So even though your appointment’s only 15 minutes, you still have to wait. We say 3:30 was my appointment, and they pick me up at 4:30. Quarter past 5:00 – they sent a car, I refused. I called them up. [00:03:05] They said they’d send a van. Quarter past 5:00 I was still (inaudible). So I walked across the street with my walker and got on the MBTA bus, got to the end of my street and I just had to walk down my street, the length from here to there, your end there.
THERAPIST: How was it getting on the bus?
CLIENT: It wasn’t bad because he goes – he lowers it down so you can get into it.
THERAPIST: One of those kneeling buses.
CLIENT: The only thing is I have this, and some lady got on with a baby carriage, and she’s trying to get by me, and I’m lifting this up. I wouldn’t mind but those seats, the first three seats rise up so you can put a person on a wheelchair there. [00:04:04] You think the guy would do it so the lady could put the carriage in that space? Oh no. She had the back door blocked. I had the front door blocked. I says, oh, he was real nice, this driver.
THERAPIST: I’m sorry, what did they do?
CLIENT: The MBTA driver, he could have lifted up the seats so you could put a wheelchair there or she could put the baby carriage in there.
THERAPIST: Oh, okay.
CLIENT: But no. She blocked up the back doorway with the baby carriage, and of course I’ve got this blocked up at the front because I’m the first seat there. I’m like, I don’t give a fuck. Just climb over it. (laughter) At this point in the day, let them climb over it.
THERAPIST: You have to feel like you’re blocking up the whole deal there.
CLIENT: I don’t give a shit. When I was leaving the doctor’s office and going out the door, they had a handle inside you press to open up the door. [00:05:08] This lady from physical therapy just cut me right off. I said, excuse me too, you fucking bitch. (laughter) A mood I was in.
THERAPIST: She was from physical therapy?
CLIENT: They had therapy offices where my foot doctor was, and they had one from Spalding, no, two from Spalding, and one from hospital, but she just got on my nerves. She’s lucky I didn’t take the God damn thing and throw it at here. I’ve been in rehab for long.
THERAPIST: You’ve had it, huh?
CLIENT: Yeah. I had my cousin all day Saturday. [00:06:05] I had her yesterday, she slept over.
THERAPIST: Really?
CLIENT: Yeah, she slept over the day before that.
THERAPIST: Not liking the new place?
CLIENT: Well she got in the new place, but she got no cable, so if you don’t have cable, why stay home?
THERAPIST: When Cousin Louise has it.
CLIENT: I can go to this person’s house or that person’s house. Why not? Saturday it was the worst. I had both her and her son—
THERAPIST: Jodie?
CLIENT: Jodie. I don’t know. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a little going on between the two of them.
THERAPIST: What do you see?
CLIENT: She’s on the couch, and he’s standing by her on the couch, and she’s got her hand up his leg, rubbing his leg. [00:07:07]
THERAPIST: Is that right? Whoa.
CLIENT: Then she’s on the couch laying down, and he’s behind her laying down.
THERAPIST: So she’s laying down—
CLIENT: She’s laying this way and he’s laying right behind her.
THERAPIST: Like they’re spooning?
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Oh really? Wow. Huh.
CLIENT: I’m like, uh-huh. It got to the point where it was sickening. I had to walk out of my house because I couldn’t take it. The two of them, I said, you’re nothing but a bunch of perverted assholes. I said, if I ever saw – if someone ever saw me and my son doing that, they’d want to know if my son was a fag, you know?
THERAPIST: Yeah, what did you think of it?
CLIENT: I think it’s gross.
THERAPIST: Did you think it was more him than her or her than him? [00:08:01]
CLIENT: Her. It’s her. He just feeds right into it.
THERAPIST: He does?
CLIENT: “Oh mommy. Wubee wubee wubee.”
THERAPIST: Uh-huh.
CLIENT: I’m beginning to think they’re screwing each other.
THERAPIST: It feels sexual.
CLIENT: Yeah, very, very, very sexual going on. I says, so when Darla gets here, the two of yous can’t be here at the same time, because you don’t know enough to stop.
THERAPIST: So they’re really close, and intimate, and petting.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Sexual with each other. [00:09:00]
CLIENT: Mm-hmm.
THERAPIST: It feels sexual.
CLIENT: Oh yeah. She’s got her hand up the leg of his pants and is rubbing. It was unreal.
THERAPIST: Both of them kind of – sounds like both of them have a real hunger for touch and they’re using each other.
CLIENT: A lot of touchy feelsies, a lot. Oh, she’s rubbing his feet, and his legs, oh yeah. She massaged him, and, “Did you want a massage on your back, honey?” That’s where I said, uh-huh. No-no. We don’t do those things. [00:10:04]
THERAPIST: That must have been something to see, huh Louise?
CLIENT: I w tell you—
THERAPIST: Just disgusted by it?
CLIENT: Yeah. I won’t tell you how many times I just left the house. Of course with Mark a few times, and then I wound up having a big fucking fight with him.
THERAPIST: I take it one of these times you just wanted to leave?
CLIENT: Yeah. We had gone to the store, and I put $10.00 worth of gas in his car, then we went to get a steak and cheese sub, but we wound up getting pizza. He took the whole pizza home with him. I had a clean slice of cheese pizza, he did too, and the other pizza he took home was a chicken and bacon pizza, large, mind you, so that wound up costing me $25.00. [00:11:01] Yeah.
THERAPIST: What did he do, take it home to feed his family?
CLIENT: I have no idea. Keisha wasn’t home. She was in Lizzy for the night. She was staying over at a friend’s house. Deborah wasn’t home either. So he went home with the pizza. I went back to my place. After about a half hour he calls me and tells me to meet him outside again. Like an idiot I did. We wound up going over to his friend Trevor’s house, which I stayed in the car, he got out. Trevor and some girls were up on the porch, but we wound up taking his friend Trevor to Stop and Shop to get barbeque sauce, because Trevor was having a cookout. So that was all right. We left there.
THERAPIST: Did you go to the cookout? [00:12:00]
CLIENT: No. So we left Trevor’s house, and that’s when he went into the liquor store with the $10.00 I gave him, came out and says to me, “I have to go to my mother’s house. I have to put on the water for the outside of the house. So I said, all right. He dropped me off at home, an hour, still no Mark. So I called him up, and I could hear a big party in the background.
THERAPIST: Oh.
CLIENT: I said, where are you, over at Trevor’s? He said, “No, I’m over at my bro’s house.” He said, “I’ll be there.” I said, don’t bother fucking coming. I says, you want to be with your fucking friends, stay with your fucking friends. I called him a fucking black nigger bastard. It all came out. (laughter)
THERAPIST: Hmm. [00:13:03]
CLIENT: So when I go to call back, he picked up the phone, hang up on me. So I take my phone, just leave him a (inaudible). Oh. I was just off the fucking walls, you know, after having Jodie and Mary all fucking day, then having to put up with fucking Mark. It was like a (inaudible).
THERAPIST: Yeah.
CLIENT: In fact I think one of my things was, when you come home I’ll be sitting on your fucking steps, so whoever comes home first, you or Deborah, will get to know an awful lot about you.
THERAPIST: Get to know a lot about—
CLIENT: About him. I said, if Deborah gets there first—
THERAPIST: Oh, his Deborah.
CLIENT: Yeah. I told him I was going to go sit on his front steps.
THERAPIST: You did?
CLIENT: Yeah. So he called, “Oh, I was so looking forward to spending the night again, having a sleepover.” [00:14:10]
THERAPIST: And then—
CLIENT: He goes and fucks up. You know?
THERAPIST: When did he say that? When did he say he wanted to spend the night?
CLIENT: Early in the morning, when he was over at 9:30 in the morning.
THERAPIST: And he said, “I want to spend the night tonight.”
CLIENT: Yeah. Keisha was going to her friend’s house, because she wouldn’t be home.
THERAPIST: So you must have been looking forward to that, spending some time together.
CLIENT: Yeah, because Mary thought she was going to sleepover, and I said, no, you have to leave. Then fucking asshole doesn’t—
THERAPIST: Oh gosh, no wonder, Louise. You must have been really hurt.
CLIENT: Oh yeah, still am. [00:15:03]
THERAPIST: Yeah.
CLIENT: Took his number out of my phonebook again.
THERAPIST: Was he drinking? Did he start drinking at the end of the day?
CLIENT: Oh, he was plastered by 1:00.
THERAPIST: 1:00 in the afternoon?
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: No wonder. There you go.
CLIENT: That’s when he got back, came to my house, must have been 2:30 and he was shitfaced then. Where have you been? “I took Keisha up to” – I said, fuck you, you took Keisha up to the thing. I said, you might have done that, but where the hell did you stop and get shitfaced?
THERAPIST: Yeah. Then he goes into borrowing more money, more money, so he can drink some more it sounds like.
CLIENT: Oh yeah, that and scratch tickets.
THERAPIST: The scratch ticket addiction. [00:16:01]
CLIENT: Oh yeah, that’s his other addiction.
THERAPIST: How much does he play? What does he spend on it?
CLIENT: Scratch tickets, he’ll spend $50.00. You give him $50.00, it’s gone. He gets a scratch ticket, and he won’t even win, or if he wins, it’s like $2.00. He’s got to buy the $5.00 tickets. Good luck to you.
THERAPIST: Yeah. He’s compulsive about it.
CLIENT: I says, if it’s not the scratch tickets, it’s the booze. Okay.
THERAPIST: I guess what I hear is this is all in the context of Mary and Jodie being over, and being kind of – well, one, being just disturbed by all that. [00:17:05] And I know also – I imagine in some way you must have wanted some normalcy, some way of getting out of that house and having something that felt kind of – boy, if you’re really disturbed by something you see, you want something that brings you back down to earth.
CLIENT: Even Mark said he couldn’t believe what he saw.
THERAPIST: He did see it?
CLIENT: Oh yeah.
THERAPIST: Wow. That’s insanity, and then you get instead Mark really—
CLIENT: Yeah, then Jodie left to go somewhere, and Deborah had made stuffed peppers, and when I say stuffed, these things were humungous. So she gave one to Mary, and she ate it, then after that she made me a fried egg sandwich. [00:18:05] She left the (inaudible) with the fried eggs. Mary’s standing over my shoulder. “Are you going to eat the yolk?” I said, yeah, I save that for last. I eat all the white stuff first. “Oh, all right.” So then I ate it. She says, “That really looked good.” I had to make her a fucking egg sandwich. Before she came Deborah had already taken the cream over to the lady next door’s house and put it away, because Mary takes the cream and puts it in tonic.
THERAPIST: Does she use a lot of it or something?
CLIENT: Oh yeah. Ugh, you know? [00:19:01]
THERAPIST: Cream in tonic?
CLIENT: Oh yeah.
THERAPIST: I haven’t heard of that one.
CLIENT: Then she took her Lucky Charms and hid those. Mary just sees it, and that’s it. That’s the end of it.
THERAPIST: Boy, these hungry relatives of yours that want to eat everything you’ve got.
CLIENT: She don’t eat. She’s got no food in the refrigerator, and she’s got no money, and she got her car towed because she didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to park out in front of the street in her building. Had to pay $173.00 to have it towed. When Mark had come over that morning—
THERAPIST: She’s back to using again, isn’t she?
CLIENT: Oh yeah, big time.
THERAPIST: There’s where the money’s going to. [00:20:00]
CLIENT: Yeah. Mark had come over that morning. He said to Deborah, “We’re all set for Six Flags.” He said, “Keisha said she’d go.” So it’s supposed to be me, Mark, Deborah, and Ivy, and Darla going to Six Flags. I said, looks like Six Flags ain’t happening now, Deborah. I don’t know what to tell you. I can get Mary’s car for the day if you want to go up.
THERAPIST: Oh, because Mark has a car?
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Right. Well it’s a long summer.
CLIENT: Yeah. Okay. Today’s conversation with Darla was she wanted to commit suicide. She’s just not a happy camper. She tries to talk to her father about it and he doesn’t want to hear it. [00:21:08] He just misses her to death. He wants her to apologize to Pat for treating Pat the way she did or doing the things she did. Darla says, “I’m not apologizing to her. Why should I? She’s nothing to me?” So Darla’s set on that, but we tried telling Darla that Pat did love her, and Pat’s been in contact with us almost every other night, or day. She’s completely moved out of her father’s.
THERAPIST: She’s over at the grandparents?
CLIENT: Yeah, took the bed, everything. Everything that belongs to her is over at her grandmothers. [00:22:01] I said, why don’t you talk to Nana Margie about this and let Nana Margie know how you feel about your father. Maybe Nana Margie can talk to him. Why don’t you talk to Uncle Bobby, or Papa Joe? He loves my Deborah. Darla said to Papa Joe, and she’d have that car right there the next day. That’s how much Joe loves her. Of course now Deborah wants to call her brother and talk to her brother about Darla getting emancipated and coming here to live with her mother permanently. [00:23:05] I said, where you going to live, Deborah? It has been two years, almost three years, that you’ve been here, Deborah.
THERAPIST: Is that right? When did she move in, more or less during the summer or something?
CLIENT: Winter. It was winter, Christmastime.
THERAPIST: 2012.
CLIENT: Which she called him up on the night of her birthday, and he lives in Gloucester now, and he came all the way from Gloucester—
THERAPIST: Bennett?
CLIENT: Yeah, and picked her up and took her home with him so she could get laid for her birthday, which I knew, because I said, if that’s what you want to do, go ahead and do it.
THERAPIST: How did you feel about it? What did it mean to you that she did that? [00:24:03]
CLIENT: Knowing how I feel about him, but then again I know how she feels about Mark. She hates Mark. I hate Bennett. Yeah.
THERAPIST: But that was it? That was the end of the two of them?
CLIENT: That was it. He dropped her off the next morning.
THERAPIST: Gloucester, Vermont?
CLIENT: No, Gloucester, Rhode Island.
THERAPIST: Oh, up the shore?
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Is it?
CLIENT: I don’t know. Gloucester.
THERAPIST: Is that Vermont?
CLIENT: No, that’s Rhode Island, over by Peabody and (inaudible).
THERAPIST: Okay. Yeah. [00:25:00]
CLIENT: Just hasn’t been a fun week, couple of weeks, and Silvia’s still not talking to me. I called her up, and her answering machine answered, and I said, if you want to come over for birthday cake and a cup of coffee, you’re more than welcome. She never answered. I said, okay. She’ll be outside talking to my next door neighbor Annie. I go and open up the door, she sees me, she leaves.
THERAPIST: What do you make of her doing that?
CLIENT: Well I think she’s very immature, and it’s none of her business.
THERAPIST: It’s about Mark though?
CLIENT: Yeah. She wants to go up and ring the doorbell at Mark’s house and tell his wife, or tell him off. [00:26:00] I said, you don’t know what goes on in his life. Deborah goes, my Deborah goes, “You either believe all the shit he tells you or you don’t.” I know he was at that cookout. There was probably younger broads there. I know no younger broads are going to put up with his shit.
THERAPIST: I think what was just upsetting was – I think first of all looking forward to that night and how it sounds like that day was kind of real crushed for you, and it still stings, what happened. I think particularly it’s Mark just is one person that you seem – you really feel you get something from. [00:27:12]
CLIENT: Yeah. I look forward to seeing him.
THERAPIST: You look forward to seeing him. Your heart beats fast. All that stuff.
CLIENT: Oh yeah.
THERAPIST: Boy, he can really crush your spirit, but you get some real good stuff for yourself, and that’s something. (laughter) A lot of the time you’ve got Deborah which is a real difficult – it’s a lot of work.
CLIENT: Oh yeah.
THERAPIST: Then Mary, and Mary and Jodie, all this stuff going on.
CLIENT: You’ve got to make sure you hide your medications. So when she said she was coming and said she was going to sleepover, I said make sure you bring your meds for the day, because I’m not giving you any of mine, because I don’t have any. [00:28:09] So I went to check on my – I had one of those cases where you do your pills, Monday, Tuesday, so forth. I went to do one of my pills, daytime thing, and I was missing an Neurontin, and I’m looking in the box, and there’s more Neurontin’s that are missing from every other day or something. I’m saying to myself, shit, either her or her son took them. I don’t know why they call them Johnnies now.
THERAPIST: Neurontons?
CLIENT: Yeah, and they buy them for two bucks a pill.
THERAPIST: You can’t get a high off it though, can you?
CLIENT: I says, what the hell? [00:29:02] I don’t have any. So I call up the drugstore and said, I don’t know if I’m due for my Neurontin or not. Because if I’m not due for them, somebody must have taken them from my house. She says, “No, you’re due for them today.” Okay. I don’t know if my head’s screwed on tight or not.
THERAPIST: You’ve got people who are desperate for money and drugs. You must of course be confused like, did you take them today?
CLIENT: Right. Then yesterday Mary was (inaudible). She’s sitting on the couch and, sit back, Sue. “Okay.” [00:30:07]
THERAPIST: She’s doing the nod?
CLIENT: Yeah. Then my cell phone rings. It’s her son, Jodie. “Will you tell my mother to call me?” Yeah. Mary, call Jodie. So she picks her phone – it’s a little bit bigger than that, and it’s got all these things on it and stuff. She can’t even see the numbers across, the right numbers. I get a phone call back from this kid. He loves to text. “Will you tell her to call me and have her call me soon?” I call him back. I said, Jodie, she’s gone. She’s on the fucking couch. You can shake and rattle pots and pans and she would still be—
THERAPIST: She’s using. [00:31:06]
CLIENT: So Deborah has to pick up her legs, throw her on the couch, and throw a blanket over her, because she’s cold. We had the air conditioners on. You’d freeze your ass off in my house. Susan doesn’t like cold. She likes heat.
THERAPIST: Is it heroin?
CLIENT: It’s funny. I know she was taking Suboxone, and then I asked Jodie if she had had any heroin, and he said, “I don’t know. I didn’t take her to buy any. I don’t think anybody’s going to buy the (inaudible) to give her any.” I says, you don’t know, Jodie. [00:32:00] I go in the bathroom and there’s white stuff all over my counter. You don’t know if it’s a crushed up pill or not, and there was a little baggie in the trash that had all white residue on it. She can’t do this. When is she going to learn her lesson? You’re no better because you do the drugs with her.
THERAPIST: That stuff has got such a grip on her, it is, got such a grip on her.
THERAPIST: I said, she did so good, then downhill.
THERAPIST: Really clenched it’s jaws on her.
CLIENT: She lost her job over it. She lost her nursing license over it.
THERAPIST: Her place, her car. [00:33:06]
CLIENT: She doesn’t have a license to drive. Now he’s got the car, her son.
THERAPIST: Oh.
CLIENT: The crazy whacked out kid who will drive 100 miles an hour down (inaudible) street. Yeah. You get in the car with him and you just close your eyes and pray you get where you want to go. Tomorrow he’s taking me for a haircut on Rhode Island Ave and Armherst.
THERAPIST: Is that right?
CLIENT: That’s where I go to get my hair done.
THERAPIST: Where do you go?
CLIENT: Great Cuts.
THERAPIST: Great Cuts.
CLIENT: Supercuts.
THERAPIST: Over near North Armherst?
CLIENT: Yeah, by (inaudible). So it’s like, okay.
THERAPIST: So that’s not terribly far, but it’s far enough. [00:34:02]
CLIENT: (inaudible) would take the ride, call up and take the ride there. I would go there to get my hair cut. Of course Mark says on Saturday, “I would like to take you to those appointments you go to during the week, but I get up early as usual, then I go to the gym, then I go home and go to sleep and pass out.” But he says, “I can take you places on Saturday and Sunday.” That didn’t happen this week. (laughter)
THERAPIST: He was going to do that, take you to get your hair cut?
CLIENT: Yeah, he’s going to take me one day to get my haircut.
THERAPIST: Some way, a promise of being taken care of, even in a small way, is lost.
CLIENT: So yeah. Now he probably won’t talk to me for another – last time was five months or God only knows. [00:35:06]
THERAPIST: But you guys have gotten – you guys usually make – sometimes it will be five months but sometimes it will be two weeks.
CLIENT: Yeah, five months was the longest, because of all the drama. There was an awful lot of drama Saturday night.
THERAPIST: That’s right. It’s about being disappointed. It matters to you – it’s not like you get mad because you’re wanting to give him a hard time. It’s much more that it’s deeply disappointing to you. You wanted to see him, spend the night with him, have a night to yourselves. Ivy’s gone. Sounds like Deborah was gone. Sounds like he just saw it as a way, a free day to get really plastered. [00:36:05]
CLIENT: He’s always plastered on the weekends.
THERAPIST: Is that right?
CLIENT: Oh yeah. Such an exciting life. So I went and saw Elliot yesterday, and everything seems to be going okay. I only had three days of physical therapy, then they said I was fine. He says, “Make sure you still do your exercises and walk with the walker.” I says, fine. “Don’t go distance.” When I go distance, I get short of breath. He says, “You’re going to be carrying an oxygen tank around.” [00:37:06] The major question was – I’ve been smoking marijuana something fierce.
THERAPIST: Is that right?
CLIENT: Yes.
THERAPIST: How much?
CLIENT: Like Deborah, maybe one or two joints.
THERAPIST: A day?
CLIENT: Yeah. We share it, pass the joint around. I was going to ask my doc yesterday, if I get medical prescribed marijuana, can I still get my pain pills? I forgot to ask him that.
THERAPIST: What does the marijuana help with?
CLIENT: The pain. [00:38:02]
THERAPIST: Where mostly? Where do you notice it alleviating?
CLIENT: This here.
THERAPIST: The side? The rib?
CLIENT: Yeah, and I still have my coccyx area, it’s called DuoDERM, a sticky foamy thing. I have that in the crack of my ass, my coccyx, because it still hurts like hell.
THERAPIST: It’s not healing, right?
CLIENT: No.
THERAPIST: Is it getting any worse?
CLIENT: It’s getting better. Maybe in a week or so I’ll be using this stuff. They changed the thing yesterday. Only take it off every three days, then gave me some DuoDERM for myself to take home and use it. [00:39:02]
THERAPIST: I would say boy, you’re not only facing the pain of your body but the pain of all of this you’re describing. It’s a lot.
CLIENT: I know, and do I have Deborah call up her brother? “Why should I call him?”
THERAPIST: Yeah. Tell me about the emancipation thing.
CLIENT: Well like I say, Darla can go to court and get herself emancipated, and that’s what she wants to do. She doesn’t want to go back to her father’s, and she’s not looking forward to staying at her grandparent’s. She wants her mother. I said, Deborah, I don’t know how I can have the two of yous here.
THERAPIST: That’s the thing, the mother that she can’t have, a mother that she didn’t really have. [00:40:00]
CLIENT: She can’t get a job because if she gets a job, she owes child support payments. She owes child support. Then she went to dental school and took out one of those student loans, and that hasn’t been paid. So the moment she gets a paycheck, bye-bye. I says, I don’t know what you’ll do Deborah. You go and say, “I’m homeless and I now have custody of my daughter. Where do I go from here?” Are they going to give her money? Are they going to give her a place to live?
THERAPIST: Darla’s 16 now?
CLIENT: Yeah. She’ll be 17 in August. [00:41:01] Yes, Deborah? Listen, I’m in with Donald. (inaudible). No. Yeah, he’s running around the office stark naked. Bye. I thought you (inaudible). 15 minutes. I’m sorry.
THERAPIST: Oh, that’s right.
CLIENT: She’s in the bag right now from the marijuana.
THERAPIST: That’s why she sounded happy.
CLIENT: It’s so much fun. Maybe I should be one to just commit suicide. (laughter)
THERAPIST: What made you say that? What are you thinking?
CLIENT: I don’t know. My life sucks. [00:42:00]
THERAPIST: A lot of pain.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Awful lot of pain, and Darla’s saying suicide, yes.
CLIENT: You just want to reach out and go through the phone, and grab her, and bring her back.
THERAPIST: What I hear is the pain of a lot of things, a lot of real pain, a lot of pain in the body, a lot of pain of loss here, an awful lot of people that have lost a lot, and I think also a lot here of people not having the care of a mother around. I think Louise, you know, one thing that occurs to me is of course you miss your mother terribly, for a lot of reasons, but among them it was a woman who really thought about you, and cared about you, and really – before she declined herself was somebody that really had you in mind a lot. [00:43:33]
CLIENT: Yeah. My mother was the best.
THERAPIST: And Darla wanting a mother, not just Deborah, but a mother, someone who sees that she’s special, and loved, and cared for. In a lot of ways what I hear in her is the pain of – she wants a mother. Yeah. [00:44:02]
CLIENT: She doesn’t want Pat pretending she’s her mother.
THERAPIST: She wants the real deal.
CLIENT: It’s been hard on her.
THERAPIST: Oh yeah. Evelyn and Mindy, they get to go to their father’s every other weekend. I don’t get to go to my mother’s every weekend. Guess who paid for the plane tickets? Heath paid for the plane tickets.
THERAPIST: What did you think of that?
CLIENT: I was in total shock.
THERAPIST: Yeah, you said he paid for it.
CLIENT: When she comes here she wants to go shopping in thrift stores. I said, my granddaughter wants to go shopping in a thrift store? I says, I’ll kill her. She got all As and Bs on her report card. [00:45:03]
THERAPIST: I think she not only though misses her mother, but misses being mothered.
CLIENT: When she was small I would just take her to the store, and let her pick out what she wanted. Deborah never went, you know? It was at the point that Darla was my sidekick. When I used to take her to see Deborah because Heath had custody, it tore my heart out, doing it.
THERAPIST: That’s pain.
CLIENT: Oh yeah.
THERAPIST: Your daughter fell down on the job, (inaudible). [00:46:02]
CLIENT: Yeah, my Deborah really – she had gotten pregnant a couple times before by Heath, and she ended up having abortions, but I think this might have been the third time around with Darla, and I said, no, I’m not giving you any money to have an abortion. So of course I got the blame for her having to give birth to Darla because I wouldn’t get her an abortion. I said, not up to me to pay for it.
THERAPIST: I think it also speaks to her feeling – Deborah’s feeling that she felt completely – I don’t know how complete it is, but feeling she couldn’t be a mother.
CLIENT: Well you know how some people definitely know they don’t want kids?
THERAPIST: Yeah.
CLIENT: Deborah was that way. She never wanted kids. [00:47:04] She just wasn’t into it. I did foster care, then I babysat.
THERAPIST: Wasn’t for her.
CLIENT: Yeah. Some girls just, “I want 10 kids when I get married.”
THERAPIST: Not her.
CLIENT: No. I would come home from work and she would be screaming in the other room, and Deborah would be high as a fucking kite.
THERAPIST: Hmm.
CLIENT: It was Nana who fed her, Nana who changed her, Nana who did everything, and I hated to go to work days leaving Darla alone for eight hours with her mother. [00:48:01]
THERAPIST: Yeah. I bet. She needs a (inaudible) mother in Deborah.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Wow, a lot here. So she’s coming up next Wednesday.
CLIENT: Yeah. I can come the following Wednesday.
THERAPIST: Okay. How do you feel about her coming up?
CLIENT: I’m excited, looking forward to it.
THERAPIST: How is she feeling about it?
CLIENT: She really wants to come and she don’t want to go back.
THERAPIST: It’s a big summer then.
CLIENT: I says I don’t know (inaudible). I can’t afford to go into a regular apartment and have three bedrooms. I can’t afford it. [00:49:00]
THERAPIST: Yeah, emancipate her, have her call up, then what?
CLIENT: All three of us will be sleeping out in the street?
THERAPIST: It will be something if she wants to really do that, you’ve got to have those – you’re right to have the conversation of what are you going to do?
CLIENT: She could go live with Heath but the only problem with Heath is if she came up here under guardianship.
THERAPIST: Oh yeah.
CLIENT: So it would be under his rules. You don’t get to see her.
THERAPIST: Yeah. Who knows. It could be like your father taking over.
CLIENT: Is that worth it? No.
THERAPIST: Well you’ve got some time to figure it all out. [00:50:03] Okay. A lot here.
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