My Golden Ticket

“What do you remember about the courthouse?” he asks me.

Films always depict sensory responses to the most minute of details but for me, millions are forever lost.  I wish I could recall every fragment of my own first experience of walking into such stateliness as a Provincial Courtroom or laying my eyes on a bona fide Judge.  It could’ve been like when Willy Wonka first opened the doors to the Chocolate Room.  In the original 1971 film, the producers purposefully kept the Chocolate Room set sealed until it was time to film that scene.  The wonderment the cast exhibits is totally genuine – they’d never seen anything like it before, and as the audience, we really see and feel why Charlie Bucket’s Golden Ticket is so unspeakably invaluable.

There were no chocolate waterfalls in the courtroom I landed in, or lollipop gardens or happy Oompa Loompas running around singing pithy maxims via delightful verse – this I am certain of.  Beyond that, I remember only enough to have a sense that it was a really large space, that lots of other people were in it, and that the walls had an indescribable energy of tension.  In my adult years I have come to know this energy with a vengeance.

All other specifics thoroughly escape me. My mind has filled the space with imagined bodies hurrying, clothed in the penultimate representation of such a place – dark suits – and faces represented only by oval blurs.  Even the Social Worker I was with – a woman I would’ve met with weekly for six months to a year – even she has now become no more than a nameless, faceless blur in a dark suit.  The Judge could’ve been Santa Claus for all I know.

I know I kept my mouth shut and my eyes glued to the floor: my natural baseline stance in the world at the time.

I can’t remember if I had to stand up at any point, but do know that I stayed at the Social Worker’s side. I remember absolutely none of the dialogue that occurred until the Judge addressed my mother directly: “Is there anything you would like to add?”

~~~

“Yes I do. I do have something to say Your Honour.”  Her lips are pursed with lines drawn tightly around her mouth, a result of years of clenched jaw and grit teeth.  Her face is a violin string, taut and at the brink of snapping.  Her voice cuts, disingenuous tones dripping with bitter civility and obvious rage a hairpin below her throat.  Her posture is military-perfect, eyes narrow slits of the darkest black.  She is “you could cut the tension with a knife” personified.

And then she begins.  It has been rehearsed, this speech.  For how many days, weeks, months… years?  This onslaught of angry verbiage, who knows the likely countless ways and means the words and sentiments have spiralled in her mind. Rolled and kneaded, tossed and turned… and how many vengeful edits took place along the way, to get the sermon just right?  “Do I have anything to say?  Damn right I do!”  Her voice is clear and controlled, not overly loud but raised enough to slice through the large room, her words the scalpel.  The legal ritual requires everyone in the room to remain silent.  We are all of us “a captive audience” personified.

“I’d just like to let the record show, Your Honour, that I’ve done nothing but worked hard to provide and care for that girl.  I’m the one who has given her food, clothes and shelter for all these years. I’m the one that changed diapers over sleepless nights when she was a baby.  No one has ever helped me – not anyone!  And certainly not her father.  That deadbeat took off years ago and who’s had to clean up his mess?  Me, that’s who!  And without any child support, I might add – not one red cent!  I’m the only one who has taken care of her, and it’s not easy, let me tell you! I buy her things, and she loses them and then everyone blames me for her not having stuff.  She loses her scarves and gloves, and then it’s my fault that she’s cold. I make her lunches and she doesn’t eat them, and then I get calls from the school with ‘concerns’ that she’s hungry.  It’s not my fault the government cut the school lunch programs! And she’s always wanting stuff – wherever we go it’s ‘can I have this’ and ‘can I have that.’  It’s not my fault everything is so expensive!  I keep a roof over her head and feed her every single day and she’s still so ungrateful!  She lies, steals, picks at her face and nails, runs away all the time and is constantly in trouble – and then I get criticized for it… ”

She is going off.  I’m possibly more desperately uncomfortable than usual, even. I’m aware that people are watching, can feel untold numbers of eyes behind us moving between me and her as though following an invisible tennis ball shot in straight steady lines between her mouth and my face. My head is heating up and the knot in my stomach is the size of a football field.  Familiar nausea laced with pounding echoes oscillating between my ears, an incessant drumbeat recalling 1920’s racist, stereotypical images of white actors in blackface portraying heathen ethnic cannibals or other assorted non-white “savages” – DUM dumdumdum DUM dumdumdum DUM dumdumdum… my skull shakes and expands with each beat like a Drum n’ Bass track vibrating through a subwoofer.

The lines in the hardwood floors are vast brush strokes on infinite canvasses, black sashays through long narrow valleys of earthly hues, each grain an endless palate with a sky’s worth of respite.  With enough concentration, I can retreat into one of them until this is over, whenever the hell that will be.  Failing that, I’ll find some skin somewhere to pull at. There is microscopic relief to be had in the sharp sting of a pulled hangnail, or the smoothness that follows removal of a scab, however premature. More calm in the hurt of bodily wounds unhealed. She’s still going off.

“…I have done nothing wrong here and furthermore, I’ve been treated absolutely disgracefully.  These people with their fancy clothes and master’s degrees and job titles have no interest in telling you what I’ve been through, what I’ve endured through all this, and for years!  How hard it’s been for me to have to deal with them on top of everything I’m already dealing with because of her – their constant phone calls and meetings.  And always about what she needs… what about me? No one is interested to help me!” Each enunciation is increasingly saturated with venom. “This whole thing is a sham! It’s so one-sided!  The entire system is biased against me and women like me!  There’s no help for us – these people just barge into our lives one day and take over!  There’s no respect or dignity!  It’s completely unfair!  I have done nothing wrong, Your Honour.  I want the record to clearly show that I’ve endured a horrible injustice today.  Thank you.”

My mother’s tirade has concluded. I may have suspended my breath for the duration. She tidies her papers and returns them to her briefcase, and then sits back down.

As it has from the moment she entered the room, my mother’s gaze does not stray from her target, and it is almost possible to smell smoke from the obvious hole her eyes have burnt into the wall just behind the Judge’s head.

The scene in the courtroom is “you could hear a pin drop” personified.

~~~

“And that’s pretty much what I remember,” I tell him.  “That’s when I became a permanent ward of the court.”

“What do you remember about any feelings after that, right after you left the courtroom?”

A minute passes while I try to remember. “I don’t think there were any feelings,” I conclude.  “I was pretty numb a lot of the time back then anyway – way more than now.” I snicker, adding, “Knowing me, I was probably drunk.”

He smiles. “If you could guess a feeling, what would it be?”  He is a good therapist and as such, he challenges me.

“Fi-nuh!” I joke, feigning adolescent resistance.  I look at the floor to concentrate. After a bit of thought I look back up at him and say, “I think I would have felt mostly relieved.”

“Why relieved?”

“I knew that was the final hearing and I wouldn’t have to live with her again.  I didn’t have any idea where I was going, but I knew for sure it was not gonna be with my mother.  I knew they could never send me back to live with her ever again.”

“How old were you?”

“Thirteen.”  I pause. I’m in a thoughtful place.  It’s been hard to try to recollect the experience. 

“Yeah, I guess it all gets kinda blurry after that.  I know it was right around then that I started drinking more heavily… couple of different foster homes and then, you know, I was pregnant three years later. And that was that.”  I chuckle, imagining myself as the poster-child cautionary tale for a Reagan-era abstinence campaign.

He pauses.  He’s frowning as he formulates his next question.  “Did your mother ever ask for you back?”

His words confuse me. “What do you mean?”

He explains.  “I mean, you were there because the Ministry was permanently removing her custody of you, right?”

“Yeah – I’d been in temporary foster care for two years before and I was a ‘permanent ward’ after this hearing.”

“And your mother knew this, right?”

“Yeah.  I still don’t get the question.”

He leans forward and rephrases. “Did your mother ever once demonstrate care and concern for you by asking for you back?  Did she exhibit any distress at all at the thought of being separated from you?  She went to all the trouble of preparing a speech for everyone in court to hear, but did she ever actually state or show any interest in keeping custody of you or wanting you to come back and live with her?”

“Oh. Right. I never really thought of it that way.”  Another pause.  “Uh, no… no, I guess not.” 

It’s an odd notion to consider, defying every molecule of cultural conditioning we have about “Motherhood.”  Imagine Solomon’s Two Mothers, and the birth mother, with righteous tones and raised nose, saying, “Whatever, you can have him. Just for the record though, I’d like to say I’m extremely pissed at how inconvenient, unfair and embarrassing this has been for me.”  Doesn’t quite have the same ring, does it?

“That makes perfect sense, then,” he says.  “Everything that happened after that – dropping out of school, the drinking and drugs, the teen pregnancy… the bad relationships.”  His frown is gone. “Right up until the very end, your mother defended her self and her own ego, but never indicated to you, the court, or anyone even once that you were important enough to want to keep, or that you had any worth.”

I’m nodding.  I’m getting it. “Disposable,” I add.

“Right.” He leans back in his chair. “So you learned you weren’t important enough to care about.  You learned you had no worth or value.” He pauses for emphasis. “And you acted accordingly.”

I’m smiling as his words land.  “Yeah… I guess that does make sense after all.”

This moment: my Golden Ticket.