One Fragile Egg

Mother, Judy and I had been living with my aunt and uncle in their small two bedroom apartment on Walcott Street for five years when Hazel, a lady Mother met at church, promised a better life. Aunt Gracie's natural tendency to be in control of her environment and everything in it was beginning to create tension between the sisters, so Hazel's offer to rescue Mother from what she believed to be constrictive living conditions was a prayer come true.

When I heard what Hazel and Mother were planning to do, I informed everyone that I would not be joining Mother and Judy in the move. There was no way I could leave Uncle Jimmy. Aunt Gracie was the stability in my life, but my uncle was where I went for attention, affection and adoration. Aunt Gracie was the one who put Humpty Dumpty back together again after she fell off the wall, but it was Uncle Jimmy, the prince who plucked me up out of the broken chaos and carried me away to safety. It was in my uncle's arms where I felt the most loved. He was big and strong and no harm could come to me with him as my protector. I couldn't leave him. Nope! No way! Not gonna happen! Not going and you can't make me!

We moved to a one-bedroom duplex at 17th and New Jersey first, but when the landlord discovered the new tenants came with children, he evicted us. A promise of a better life took us to another one-bedroom apartment at 16th and Broadway where Hazel's natural tendency to be in control of her environment and everything in it was beginning to look and sound familiar. Mother was once again not in control of her life or her daughters'.

After we moved away from Walcott Street, my times spent with my favorite aunt and uncle were narrowed down to holidays and birthdays. My young brain was incapable of understanding why I went from being their child whom they loved on a full-time basis to a niece they saw a few hours a year. The emptiness, loneliness, the longing, the dread that I carried with me for years after we moved in with Hazel was combined with her excessive use of corporal punishment and her natural tendencies to withhold love and affection, and if you mix all those toxins together inside one fragile egg and put it on a wall, it might fall and break into a million pieces. And if that happened, who would put those pieces back together again? Not Aunt Gracie or Uncle Jimmy; they're gone. Not mother. Not Judy. And definitely not Hazel. With no one left to protect me from crashing to the ground, I had to steady myself, all by myself, on that damn wall and wait and wait and wait for seven long years before being rescued by not my Prince Charming but Mother's.