Finding Me (7 page)

After being abused for so many years, I was still on the fence about God. Did he exist? Did he not? I wasn’t 100 percent sure. But if he did exist and was good enough to give me a child to adore, then I decided that might be enough to make up for the hard stuff I went through during my first eighteen years. Each night before I went to sleep I rubbed my belly while singing a little song I’d once heard at that Baptist church: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,” I’d recite. “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” It was a simple prayer, a beautiful melody. A call to a God I hoped was real.

A few weeks before my due date I started thinking of names. I picked out one that I really liked—Juliano. But when I mentioned the name to my family, they didn’t like it. “Don’t give him an ethnic-sounding name,” one relative told me. That’s how I ended up going with another name I liked just as much—Joseph. For short, I’d call him Joey.

My son came early—by an entire month. I was sitting in the bathtub one evening when my water broke. My mother rushed me to the hospital. The labor was long; as hard as I kept pushing, the child just didn’t seem to want to come out. But finally I heard his cries. A nurse cleaned him up, wrapped him in a white blanket and handed him to me.

I looked down at my new baby boy. He burped, and then opened his tiny eyes. “Oh, my goodness, he’s so gorgeous,” I said. He had my face and his father’s small nose. I let out a giggle. “How are you, little Joey?” I asked. I loved him from his very first burp.

On October 24, 1999, I finally settled something—there had to be a God if I could have been given a gift like this. I will always think of Joey’s birth as the happiest moment of my entire life.

M
Y
LITTLE
HUGGY
BEAR
—that’s what I called Joey most of the time. Every time I cradled my son close to my chest he just felt so warm and snuggly. So when I lifted him from the bed, I started saying, “Hello, my little huggy bear,” and the nickname stuck.

Joey was the sweetest baby. Unless he was hungry or wet, he hardly ever cried. He and I shared a small bedroom on the second floor, and within just a couple of months he was sleeping through the night. I didn’t have enough money for a crib, so I kept him with me in the bed, which was a twin-sized mattress stuck into a corner of the room. After carefully wrapping Joey in a blue blanket, I’d sing to him as I rocked him back and forth. One of his favorite melodies seemed to be “I Will Always Love You,” the Whitney Houston hit. Whenever I sang that song, his eyes would get so big.

Joey grew fast. Because I wasn’t working, I depended on Social Security checks; when I turned eighteen, they came directly to me. It wasn’t enough, but at least I had a little money to buy diapers and formula. I wished I could have just breastfed Joey, but because of some medicine the doctors put me on after his birth, I couldn’t.

Not long after my parents parted, Ma began seeing other men. Over time one Latino man seemed to be around our place a lot. I’ll call him Carlos. He seemed like a decent enough guy—at least at first. When Joey was about six months old, Carlos moved in.

A
S
J
OEY
WENT
from cooing to crawling to walking, the two of us had so much fun together. He loved
101 Dalmatians
, so we’d watch that together. And he loved to sing along with me; I was always teaching him songs. He really liked “The Wheels on the Bus,” so I sang that to him a lot. One evening he was playing with his toy pot and stirrer.

“What are you making, honey?” I said, smiling.

“Sketti!” he shouted, trying to say “spaghetti.” Then he lifted his spoon up in the air and clapped it against his left hand. We had a joke that whenever we ate spaghetti and meatballs, he’d try to steal one of my meatballs and I’d pretend not to know where it went. He’d laugh hysterically as I looked all over for it.

Later on that night, after I bathed him, put lotion on his body, and started fastening his onesie pajamas, he jumped up and pranced around the bedroom to the beat of a song on the radio.

“Come here, huggy bear,” I called out. He came back toward me so I could finish snapping on his PJs. “You’re such a silly little boy!” He just grinned.

I absolutely loved sharing the holidays with Joey, especially because my family never really celebrated. During Christmas 2001 Joey was two. I took some of the money from my Social Security check and went to the local Family Dollar to buy him some presents. He kept asking for a tree. To be honest, I didn’t quite have the money to purchase gifts
and
a tree, so I tried to make a little tree myself by gathering branches and leaves from the street and attaching them to a pole with super glue. It was pretty pathetic looking, but at two, Joey didn’t really know the difference. “Pretty!” he said when I attached the last branch a few days before Christmas. We both just stood there and admired it.

I didn’t wrap up Joey’s presents until the night before Christmas. He was so excited, so I knew he’d try to sneak and open them. At midnight I began wrapping his gifts downstairs in the living room. A little after 1 a.m., I finally put the presents under the makeshift tree and cozied up next to him in bed, wondering how early he’d try to get me up.

Less than four hours later, at 5 a.m., Joey was wide awake. “Mommy, Mommy!” he said, bouncing up and down on the mattress. “Christmas!”

I turned over and buried my head underneath a pillow. “Yay, it’s Christmas!” he continued shouting. “Jingle bells, jingle bells!” he sang. A couple of minutes later I dragged myself up, rubbed my eyes, and put on my glasses.

“Okay, huggy bear,” I said. “Mommy is awake now.” Just seeing his face so lit up was enough to get me out of bed.

We sang three verses of “O, Christmas Tree” together first—Joey just repeating the song’s name over and over—and then I let him open the presents. There was paper all over that room. He screamed when he opened the first package. “Helmet!” I nodded and smiled as he put on the football helmet.

“Yes, baby,” I said. “I knew you’d like that.”

Then he went totally nuts when he opened another box to find a football. “Wow!” he exclaimed, widening his eyes. “More football!”

I had set out to give Joey the best Christmas ever—and before the clock even struck 6 a.m. it seemed I had pulled that off. “Thank you, Mommy!” Joey shouted as he threw his arms around my neck.

“I love you,” I said, cupping his chin in my hand. “I want you to always know that.” He was in total bliss, and so was I—at least until January rolled around and I realized how little money I had left after the holidays.

7
______________

Losing Joey

I
N
THE
SPRING
of 2002 I began searching for a job—
any
job. I looked every day. I was tired of being broke, and I was done with depending on my SSI check.

“Ma, will you watch Joey for me?” I’d ask so I could go pick up some applications. Sometimes she’d agree to. When she did, I went to every fast food restaurant in the city, applying for jobs. But when you’re four foot two and can’t even reach the cash register or the coffee machine, nobody wants to hire you. I was willing to take any kind of position, even one that paid me under the table—I knew my options were limited because I hadn’t finished high school. I scoured the streets of Cleveland for weeks, but by the beginning of summer I still hadn’t caught a break.

One afternoon in early June, after I’d been out looking again, I dragged myself in the front door. I’d come up empty-handed, so I decided to walk home early, around 4 p.m. When I went into one of the bedrooms on the second floor, I saw my mother’s boyfriend, Carlos. He was so drunk that he was slurring his words. My mother, who I’d thought was watching Joey, was nowhere in sight.

“Come over here!” Carlos said. He lunged at me.

“Mommy, Mommy!” Joey screamed. He was so panicked that he began peeing on himself. Carlos saw this and grabbed Joey by the right leg. In one quick motion he fractured Joey’s knee.

The details of what happened next are too painful to describe, so I’ll just explain it briefly. After I got Joey to the hospital, I wanted to tell them the truth about how he was injured, but I was terrified that he’d be taken away from me if they thought he wasn’t safe at home. So I said that he had fallen in the park. Not long after I checked him into the hospital a couple of case workers from social services huddled together in the hallway. I could hear them whispering.

“Can we talk to you, Miss Knight?” the short, fat, blonde one asked. The other had dark brown hair and looked down at me over her glasses.

My breathing slowed down. “You’re going to take my son away from me, aren’t you?” I said.

They didn’t answer right away. “We know what happened to Joey,” the blonde woman finally said, looking directly into my eyes. I began to weep. The case worker then explained that Carlos had admitted what he’d done. His sister had called the hospital and told them the true story. As she spoke, my crying intensified. “Please … don’t … take … my … baby!” I managed to say through my sobs. “It’s not my fault!”

Not long after, I got the horrible news from the hospital staff: once my son was released from the hospital, he would be put into foster care until they could determine that his home was a safe place for him to live.

I couldn’t stop weeping. “Don’t take my son!” I cried, doubling over in the hallway. The nurses looked on with pity in their eyes. I stopped crying long enough to take in the only piece of good news I heard that evening: “You can stay with him one more night,” a nurse told me. Then she led me to his room.

Joey was resting in one of those high beds. His little leg was wrapped in layers of white bandages. “Mommy, Mommy!” he called out when he saw me.

I went over to the edge of the bed and squeezed his hand. “I’m right here, huggy bear,” I whispered.

The nurse, sensing that I was reluctant to hold him in case I might hurt him, turned to me and said, “You don’t have to be afraid. It’s okay if you put him in your lap. Just be careful.” I nodded, and she left.

I didn’t have the heart to tell Joey that this would be our final night together, but I knew I needed to tell him something.

“Mommy is not going to see you for a while, okay?” I said in his ear. I used the back of my hand to clear away a tear that snaked its way down my left cheek.

Joey gave me a worried look. Somehow I sensed that my son knew the reality, that “a while” could turn out to be forever. Later that evening I pulled Joey close to my chest as I lay next to him. I could feel his heartbeat as he slept.
Thump. Thump. Thump
. In the dark I cried as quietly as I could.

The following morning I took Joey to the hospital’s playroom. We drew a couple of pictures together as I held him in my lap. After an hour I heard the staticky sounds of walkie-talkies in the hallway. The police had come.

“Ma’am,” said one of the cops, “you need to say your good-byes.”

How do you say good-bye to a child who has at one time lived in your body? How do you just walk out the door? How do you explain to your son that days, months, and even years may pass before he will live with his mother again? I gave Joey a gentle hug, trying to keep my tears from spilling over onto my face. As I stood up to go, Joey began pitching a fit.

“Don’t leave me, Mommy!” he howled. “Don’t leave me!”

“I’m just going away for a little while,” I said in the most calm tone I could muster. “We’ll be back together soon.” I tried to settle him down by cradling him in my arms, but he kept screaming.

“Miss, we’ve really gotta go,” the policeman said. By the way he and the other cops had been standing aside and allowing me a little extra time, I could tell they sympathized with me. I leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. The officers then escorted me from the room.

“Mommy! Mommy!” Joey cried as I followed them down the hallway. My huggy bear was pleading for me—but I couldn’t even answer.

I had been abused by a family member for years. I’d lived in a garbage can under a bridge in all kinds of weather, like an animal. But nothing could have prepared me for losing my child. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, ever, in all my twenty-one years. I spent the night crying, aching for my son. I wondered if he was being treated well in his new home. I wondered if he was afraid, if he was calling for me, if the foster parents would be kind and understanding, or if they would be cold. It was torture not knowing where my child was sleeping or how he was being treated. Finally I crammed my fist into my mouth so I wouldn’t keep everyone else awake with my sobs.