Escape to Malibu, Part 13

A white-clad bespectacled man greeted our ambulance at what looked like a wooded cottage. I later learned this was "the Annex", the place where you went to have all your freedom restricted. No comings or goings allowed without someone in charge leading you in & out like a caged animal which, when you were an inmate of the Annex, you were. Although I've seen animals at the Smithsonian Zoo in Washington treated with more respect & love.

A woman with dark short hair & almond-shaped, dark, Mediterranean eyes cloaked in a long hooded brown wool cape glided noiselessly by my chariot, as if in a somnambulant trance. I thought, "this is a peaceful retreat" to myself, but that thought was quickly quelled by the rough handling I received in being admitted to "the Annex".

Several grown people grabbed me out of the ambulance & stuffed me, in the same clothes I had chosen that fateful morning, into a small room with a window looking out at the grounds covered with heavy metal wire, & a door which had a tiny square window, again coverd with heavy metal grid. They slammed the door & locked me in. Footsteps & keys dangling & jangling faded as they withdrew. I was alone, in pain, & trapped.

There was a small, hard bed & nothing else in the room which was a grimy tan in color. I paced, & then recognizing the futility of this, lay down.

"Endure, I must endure" is what I thought. There was nothing else to do but try to sleep & store up some energy for the scenes to come.

I lay down, but my breasts swelling painfully would not let me, & the grief of being away from Adelaide broke over me & through me as waves. I wept & moaned & groaned in my agony, tenderly touching my breasts which leaked milk all over my blouse, whose hot veins stuck out like a relief map, throbbing, aching.

From whence would my help come, Oh Lord? I prayed. Praying helped to focus my mind somewhat. But the awful reality was too much to bear.

"I am Anne Boleyn" I told myself. I am not Charity Queen at all I am Anne Boleyn & I have Henry the VIII for a husband."

I thought this must be what it felt like to have an arrogant egomaniac for a husband, someone who had not one iota's worth of compassion or understanding of woman's work & worth in life; a complete misogynist.

My sense of time & isolation were interrupted by an overweight lackey who came barging in to take my vital signs.

"What about my clothes?" I asked. "I don't have anything but these & they are soiled." My Boy Scout boots were splattered with mud, my blouse was soaked, my hair disheveled, my skirt akilter & definitely the wrong fashion statement.

She grunted & withdrew, returning shortly with a johnny, one of the hospital gowns that makes one just another anonymous patient, one that will not hide your crack in the back as there is only one or two ties to close it in the rear. But it was clean. And it was loose. My postpartum figure was screaming & squirming from the tightness of the skirt waist that had fit me in New Zealand once I had reached my ideal weight at Weight Watchers.

I put it on.

The attendant left. I laid down again, my breasts painfully weighing down my chest. O God, what am I to do, how am I to get OUT OF HERE I screamed silently, inwardly.

This was the last place to share visions & out-of-body experiences. They would think I was loony for sure. Desolate, abandoned, despairing. This was my miserable state. My mother came in, with my X, who brought us together, where we were allowed to visit as civilized humans in a small lounge area, & withdrew.

"Oh Mom", I cried & cried. "Please get me out of here, please, please don't leave me in this horrible place!" I begged her.

She nervously looked around at the other inmates & lit a low tar cigarette. She looked at me in her anxiety-ridden, nervous way & tried to explain to me the inexplicable; how a family which supposedly loved you could put you & your daughter through such inhumane torture in the name of medicine, in the name of healing.

"They are doctors & nurses here, who will take care of you", she managed to fearfully, anxiously mumble.

"Take the medicine they want you to take dear", she said in the same simpering, cajoling manner everyone else this horrible day had used. She worshipped the god of prestige, status & MONEY. Her brother-in-law in Maryland had been coaching her.

"Take the drugs, take the drugs" was the strategy this gruesome, coercive team had unified around.

Never mind about poisoning my daughter's milk supply. There was a MAN-made formula to replace that insignificant contribution. Anything a mother provided from her very essence was able to be synthesized in a lab & reconstituted. This she-child had no real use for the immunity passed along in my milk anyway. No need of MY touch, MY voice, MY heartbeat, MY lullabyes- I was replaceable. I could be removed from society & made over into a walking, docile zombie. This was the plan. My mother was in collusion with them.

I don't know why, other than the primal bond a mother & daughter supposedly have, that I thought she would help me this time Since Joshua had been born my Mother regressed in relation to me. She & I, since I could walk, had reversed roles, a typical & now famliar dynamic to me which is a usual characteristic in an alcoholic family.

My parents had trained me to be their fixer-upper, emotional support, & intellectual sparring partner, as well as go-between & peacemaker through myriad mini-skirmishes which made up our domestic climate growing up.

When I became a mother she could not tolerate the competition with my son, & was not better at it now with my daughter's advent. She competed with them for my attention & affection. She was incapable of being nurturant for me. It was not that she had no desire to help me. She simply had no idea in the world of how to go about it. Although she was the physical vessel which brought me into the world, she had been my daughter for so long that she was incapable of mothering me.

Her addictons were her true love. The nightly drinks & daily smokes. Her material existence mattered more than my crisis. Really, deep down inside what bothered her most about this whole day was the untidiness & messiness of it all.

I was crying "Like a five year old" she would later relate to anyone who would listen. She couldn't hang with that. She shook me off like a pesky insect. And walked out the door, leaving me running desperately after her, my hope deflated.

The guards, the keyholders held me back, spoke to me, cajoled me, pointed out the futility of trying to escape their "treatment". I was no longer a well educated Bostonian professional nurse with credentials which matched or in some cases exceeded theirs.

I was their "patient". I was their prisoner. My cold, logical, thinking left brain clicked into action.

"You will only get out of here by playing their game", I told myself. "There is NO other way out. Huit Clos. No exit.

"This is your personal version of 'I Never Promised You a Rose Garden', this is Charity Queen's 'Snake Pit', 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', 'Sybil'. They will not bring your daughter to you until they have poisoned her nourishment. They will not be satisfied until they have obliterated your uniqueness with a psychiatric label. You are amongst the greatest of all enemies, spirited adversaries, & ALL you can do is survive. If you survive, you may in the future overcome. But only if you can survive now. It is your very soul that is being battled over now. The stakes are the highest in the world. If you do not choose to battle for yourself, battle for the sake of your children. Remember, you CHOSE to have them. You longed for them. You prayed for them. They are here. They need you."

I realize now it was my Higher Self talking to me.

"Take the medicine, take the medicine", they chanted. General Hospital was on in the patient lounge. Fiction mirrored reality. Soap opera inside the screen. Soap opera outside the screen. "Just a little orange juice, you may be thirsty", a wheedling, needling nurse's voice said.

There was no choice, no exit, no hope anymore. I drank the damned juice. It was laced with Haldol.

A half hour later the chemical straight jacket descended over my aura like butterfly net. It crawled through my veins, it seeped into my milk ducts. It took my fight away. I was a zombie like all the other inmates. They were victorious. They had broken my spirit.

There was an interview with my psychiatrist, Dr. Heifer. My cunning was circumvented. I spilled the beans. About all the bizarreness leading to this encounter between she & me.

About Mary & Joseph & the vision. Later, I read in the hospital record, "patient believes she is Mary, mother of God." But it wasn't that at all. She labeled me delusional, a woman suffering from "psychotic post-partal reaction."

She had no understanding of the difference between lies & truth, delusions & visions. I am in the world but not of the world as His disciple as He instructed us to be.