I can’t say that I recall the reuniting or much of life for a while after that point… Just bits and pieces here and there like wisps of memories floating through my mind from a long forgotten dream.
I don’t recall if at this time I had yet become hyper-sensitive/hyper-vigilant to my moms behavior.
I don’t think I had yet, but I seem to recall becoming concerned when she started acting strangely again.
I don’t recall how long she and I were together this time before the orphanage had me again and I don’t recall being taken.
Since I was at the orphanage on 3 separate occasions I wonder if maybe I was a bit younger than 4 when I first went.
It’s hard for me to say since all of the players are dead and there is no one to ask, so all I can do is paste the pieces of memory together as well as I can.
All I seem at present to recall about my 2nd return to “Brightside” is that when I saw Brian again I was at first happy to see him since he was a familiar face, but then I quickly became disappointed when I realized that he didn’t seem to remember me and also that he had changed big-time.
The best way for me to describe the change in Brian is that he somehow had “gone wild”.
I don’t know why that would be but I found it confusing that he had changed so much.
He was like a kid on over-drive. Bouncing off the walls and just plain hypered out.
The Brian I had known was gone.
That’s about it. Just some smatterings of broken memories.
And then somehow back to live with mom again.
By this time I had definitely become sensitive to my moms moods and changes.
She was on medication and she had told me that if she started acting strangely that I was supposed to ask her if she’d taken her pills.
Apparently it was stopping her medication that had put her back in “No-Where Land” and me back to Brightside.
(Years later she was told by the doctors of her day, that what they were calling her “nervous breakdowns”, ‘visions/hallucinations’ were linked, they believed to a concussion/head injury that she had suffered while falling down a flight of stairs, before I was born, but by the time they had figured all that out, it was many years too late and the damage had already been done to her body and mind, by the drugs they had put her on, Thorazine being one.)
I began kindergarten but I don’t recall my first day of school.
I just recall that at some point I decided to stop going to school so I could better watch out for my mom.
My mom would wave good-bye to me from the window of the apartment, so I would pretend to be going to school and then I would come back and just stand in the entryway to the apartment building until I finally saw the kids from my school walking back by and then I knew that kindergarten was out and I could go back home.
My mom became aware of what I was doing because sometimes she would find me in the entryway and then also I think maybe the school must have called too.
So then it got harder to skip school cuz she would wait at the window until I had crossed the street with the crossing guard.
I didn’t like school.
I’m not sure how I would have felt about it if I hadn’t felt like I needed to be home to watch my mom.
But the reality was that there were plenty of times when I just wanted to run out through the big doors of the school and go home.
A few events from that time period that I recall are:
One day the teacher wrote my name on the blackboard. I saw it and new it was my name but I didn’t realize that I was supposed to say anything, so I didn’t.
So she erased my name and wrote another name and the kid whose name it was said it was his name and so he won the prize of getting to clean the chalkboard erasers.
I felt disappointed that I missed the opportunity. Cleaning erasers was fun. I just didn’t realize that when she wrote my name on the board that I was supposed to say anything.
Another time I recall the teacher was standing in the classroom talking and suddenly without thinking I dropped to my knees & started picking up the trash on the floor.
She looked at me in surprise, and then said that that’s what she was just about to say to the class. She was about to ask us to start picking up trash off of the floor. She then directed the class to follow my example.
One day while walking home from school I saw a kid slip on the ice and fall down and start crying. I saw the kids around him start pointing and laughing. I didn’t understand why they thought his misfortune was funny so I asked my mom about it later.
I forget what she said but I’m fairly sure that it was true enough and compassionate.
One day she started borrowing my toy stethoscope to listen to her heart beat and I started wondering if this might mean she was starting to lose it again.
I asked her about it and she said she was alright, but I was concerned that maybe things were messing up again.
Sometimes she would make little round doughnuts. That was fun.
Sometimes she would bake cookies. That was fun.
Sometimes I would light things on fire in the kitchen. That was fun.
I had permission to light things on fire as long as I controlled it by putting the box or whatever I was going to burn, into a metal pan and then made sure the fire was out when I was done. I guess that might have been a sign that she was losing it again but to me it was just fun.
Once when we were eating pancakes I was excited and moving my arms around as my grandmother came by with the hot pan and I burned my elbow on it. I seem to recall running and screaming from the pain and shock of the burn.
Well… the day finally came when my mother went back to the hospital.
I don’t recall her leaving, but I definitely recall that I didn’t want to go back to the orphanage and I knew my grandmother would soon be calling the authorities to come and collect me.
I remember on the day my grandmother said they were coming I put on my favorite pair of green jeans and I headed out to the main street in front of Gerrish Court and started walking down the sidewalk.
I was going to run away. But I hadn’t traveled very far down that sidewalk by-myself before and it quickly became extremely apparent to me that I really didn’t know where to go or what to do.
I ended up going back to the apartment and somehow climbed up into the top shelf in a closet in the bedroom and hid there.
I remember hearing my grandmother and the woman from the child welfare dept searching for me.
They finally found me. I said I didn’t want to go and the woman from the dept tricked me by saying she would take me to the zoo first.
Yup it’s true. I loved going to the zoo so I said okay.
Well she hadn’t lied completely. She drove to the zoo, but she just drove in one gate and out the other. We didn’t stop.
I don’t recall what came next, but I’m quite certain that I wasn’t feeling happy about it.
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“I Pleiades” The True Story. Click the FOLLOW button today and watch the story unfold.
~PREVIOUS RELATED LINKS BELOW~
Link to I PLEIADES - An Autobiographical Work - The Beginning - 1.
Link to I PLEIADES - An Autobiographical Work - Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep - 2.
Link to I PLEIADES - An Autobiographical Work - Mountain Climbers - 3.
Link to I PLEIADES - An Autobiographical Work - John - 4.
Link to I PLEIADES - An Autobiographical Work - A Monster In The Night - 5.
Link to I PLEIADES - An Autobiographical Work - Days Of Future Past - 6.
Link to I PLEIADES - An Autobiographical Work - Once upon a time in a valley far, far away - 7.
Link to I PLEIADES - An Autobiographical Work - Brightside - 8.
Link to I PLEIADES - An Autobiographical Work.
Link to Looking For Followers -Autobiography-.
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