Category: Boundaries

Trigger Warning:
This post contains honest discussion of suicide attempts, psychiatric hospitalization, substance use, pregnancy loss, custody loss, and mental health crisis. Please read with care and come back when you’re in a safe place if you need to.

Two years and some change. That’s how long I went without my children. And if Part 1 was me owning the chaos I created, Part 2 is me sitting inside the consequences of it.

The first thing I did was what any completely unqualified person does when they’re desperate: I tried to become a lawyer. I studied family law like a madwoman. I was convinced that if I just read enough, learned enough, filed the right paperwork, I could represent myself and fix this. Ha. Fat chance. There is a reason lawyers go to school for as long as they do, and I learned that the hard way. And even if I could have navigated the legal maze on my own, the filing costs alone were way beyond anything I could manage. I had no job, no savings, and no idea how deep I was already in.

Meanwhile, Christina and I were still at it.

I know. I know. 

I told you we broke up for good eventually. And we did, I assure you. Spectacularly, as always. Just our style. Just not yet… Bear with me.

Losing my kids had sent me into a spiral that I couldn’t pull out of, and instead of getting quiet, the fighting between us got louder. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I cried constantly. After one particularly bad fight, she walked out and didn’t come back until the next day.

When she did come back, she told me she’d had sex with a man that night and she just knew she was pregnant.

I thought she had absolutely lost her mind. Who knows that? The day after? I was flabbergasted.

About four weeks later, she took a pregnancy test.

She was pregnant.

I didn’t know what to do with that. 

Six months into the pregnancy, things between us hadn’t improved at all, if anything they were worse. Then she went in for an ultrasound and got news that stopped everything: the baby’s major organs were developing outside its body. It was not a viable pregnancy. When the baby was born, it would die immediately. 

She was too far along to terminate in Oklahoma, but her mom lived in California. So that became the plan. Her mom came and got her, and Christina left.

I don’t have words for all that was wrapped up in that goodbye. I still don’t.

I had been given a court date when I was served, and I held onto it like it was a lifeline. I hadn’t done anything wrong, not really, not in the way that should cost a mother her children, and I genuinely believed I had a chance of getting the ex parte order thrown out. 

My sister and my best friend came with me. I didn’t walk into that courtroom alone, and I will always be grateful for that.

What I wasn’t prepared for was everyone else who was there.

Steven and Rebecca had brought what looked like an entire army. I recognized her parents, but most of the faces were strangers to me. A very large family, I assumed. I started to panic before I even reached the stand. The tears started before I could stop them.

When it was my turn, the judge looked at me the way people look at something they’ve already decided about. She was not moved by my tears. She was, in fact, annoyed by them. She told me I needed to control my emotions. I told her I just wanted to be with my children.

She said that wasn’t going to happen.

She gave me more time to find representation, kept the ex parte in place, and sent me home.

I walked out of that courthouse with my sister on one side and my best friend on the other, and I had never felt so small in my life.

There was no way I could afford a lawyer. We all knew it. Steven and Rebecca had resources, a support system, and a plan. I had cardstock and photographs.

That’s not a metaphor. I went home and I obsessively wrote my children’s names on cardstock and made collages from every photo I had of them and hung them all over my apartment. I needed to see their faces. I needed to be surrounded by them in whatever way I could manage. 

My sister moved in with me for a while because she could see I wasn’t safe to be alone. I could barely sleep, barely eat, barely function. A neighbor of mine, a stripper named Stacy, needed someone to watch her toddler while she worked nights. She paid me fifty dollars a day. That became my income. That became my purpose. Showing up for someone else’s child when I couldn’t get to my own.

Seven months in, my sister decided I needed a reason to get out of my own head. She threw a small party at the apartment. Just a handful of people. One of them was our mutual friend Richard, who asked if he could bring a guest.

The guest was Keith.

He was tall, six-four, with long black hair and a t-shirt that said “I Like Their Old Shit”. He was quiet in the way that some people are quiet because they’re actually paying attention. I went to put on music, something I was sure no one would recognize. The opening notes of “Both Hands” by Ani DiFranco came through the speakers.

From across the room, Keith said, “Hey, Ani DiFranco.”

I whipped around. No one ever knew Ani DiFranco.

I sat down next to him and we started talking. He listened the way people rarely do, with patience, with stillness, without waiting for his turn to speak. I overshared, because I always overshare, and because my children and everything I had lost were all I thought about. At some point I looked up and realized everyone else had gone home. Keith stayed. We talked until the sun came up.

He became my lifeline. I held onto him accordingly. 

Keith had a serious drinking problem. Gin, specifically. He’d wake up and take a few drinks just to get rid of the shakes before walking the mile and a half to my apartment, he’d had a DUI years before and refused to risk another one. 

I understood addiction. I had my own history with alcohol. So instead of keeping my distance from it, I drank with him. That became our days. Music, drums, drinks, noise complaints from the neighbors. On the hard days, when the grief swallowed me whole, I needed to be alone, and Keith understood that too. He was the same way. It worked, in the imperfect, cobbled-together way that things work when two broken people find each other at exactly the right moment.

Then the apartment manager decided she was done with me. She wasn’t renewing my lease, still punishing me, I think, for all the chaos Christina had left in her wake.

During one of my depressive spells, when I hadn’t left the apartment in a couple weeks, she called a tow company and had my car removed, claiming it had been abandoned. I walked out to go to the store and it was just gone. The tow yard wanted twelve hundred dollars to release it.

I didn’t have twelve hundred dollars. I lost the car.

My last day was approaching fast and I had nowhere to go, nowhere to put anything, and nothing to do about either of those facts. Keith and I are both bipolar, which means sometimes we could be a bit impulsive, and when my older sister, different mom, same dad, was going through something hard (her mom passed away) and I said I wished I could be there for her, Keith didn’t hesitate.

Let’s go, he said. We can take my car. So we did.

We came back to a lock on my door and a note from the sheriff’s office.

I called. They gave me fifteen minutes the next morning to get what I could carry.

Fifteen minutes to collect the pieces of your life. I stood in that apartment and tried to decide what mattered most. Keith told me I could store a few boxes in his dining room. That he’d let me stay a couple nights a week. We hadn’t been together long. It was one of the most generous things anyone had ever offered me, and I took it, because I had no other choice.

The rest of the time, I was at my mother’s. So that became my life, a few nights a week with Keith, the rest with mom, all of it suspended somewhere between surviving and drowning.

What I didn’t expect from Keith was what he taught me just by being himself. Where I had spent years tangled up with people who had no idea where they ended and others began, Keith had boundaries. Real ones. When he needed time alone, he just said so. Plainly, without drama, without making me feel like a burden for existing. It was so foreign to me that at first I didn’t know what to do with it. I had never been with someone that honest about their own needs. It was, quietly, one of the most important things I had ever witnessed.

On the nights I stayed over, we’d go to bed watching Casablanca. We’d talk for hours, the kind of talks that wander and double back and end up somewhere neither of you expected. I’d get lost in it. In the music he’d play, in the sadness I was still carrying, in the grief of missing my kids, and underneath all of it, in the slow, terrifying feeling of falling in love again. It was a strange thing to hold all at once. Grief and love, side by side, neither one canceling the other out.

I applied for disability during that time. The depression was bad enough that working consistently wasn’t something I could count on myself to do. And the dark days were really dark. The kind where you can’t locate a single reason to believe anything will ever be different. I started doing the math in my head, the worst kind of math, if I couldn’t get my kids back, they’d be eighteen before I had any say in the matter. And by then, who knew if they’d even want to know me. 

Rebecca had offered to give me updates if I called, and I did call, occasionally. But I’m ashamed to say I didn’t call as often as I should have.

Because it fucking hurt. Every single time.

One afternoon while Keith was over helping his mother, the pain got to be more than I knew how to carry. I took forty-seven Klonopin and twenty-four Ambien and decided I was just going to go to sleep and stop hurting.

When Keith came home, he could tell immediately that something was off. He called COPES, a local mental health outreach here in Tulsa, but the medication had already started working faster than help could arrive. He realized what I had done and called 911. COPES pulled up just as the ambulance was pulling away with me inside it.

I spent a week in the hospital, followed by a week in the state psychiatric facility. Which is, I want to be honest, much more like jail than like healing. It was awful. My roommate got hold of a safety pin and carved up her body with it while I slept, then painted our room with her blood. I woke up to that. 

They fed me a low-sodium diet, plain pinto beans, a piece of bread, a vegetable. Every single day. I would not wish it on most people.

But somewhere in there, I started to feel a little better. Stabilized, maybe, is the more accurate word.

And then, remarkably, something small and good happened. Years before any of this, I had put my name on the Section 8 waiting list and completely forgotten about it. It was my turn.

I got an apartment in downtown Tulsa.

It was a shoebox. The roaches were the size of Cadillacs. Only a twin bed and a dresser fit in the bedroom. But it was mine. And it had a beautiful view of the Tulsa skyline, which I would sit on the concrete ledge outside my 8th floor window and look at on the nights I didn’t know what else to do with myself.

By this point, my kids had been gone a year.

I was starting to build a life without them. Not a life I wanted. Not one I had asked for. But the alternative had already shown me what it looked like, and I was still here.

So if I wasn’t going to die, I had to figure out how to live.

For a whole other year, I tried.

That’s Part 2. Not the worst of it, I know that’s hard to believe, but it’s the truth. What I can say is that this was the year I learned I was harder to kill than I thought, in more ways than one. I was still standing, barely, in a shoebox apartment with roaches and a skyline view, trying to figure out how to want a life again.