The proud mother held the lovely pink baby in her arms. When I saw it, I nearly screamed. I saw needle marks on that baby’s pudgy little hands. I saw my Nancy’s baby hands covered with track marks. I saw my sweet-smelling, innocent infant with a pink ribbon in her hair, the infant who had grown up to be a receptacle of unendurable pain. Maybe this baby would too. Some would. Too many. I couldn’t blot out that realization, that fear.
I had to leave the room. I thought I’d get hysterical if I stayed in there with that baby for another second. I tried to compose myself in the dining room. Frank found me in there a few minutes later.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I’m having a … a problem in there.”
“What kind of a problem?” he asked, turning me around to face him.
“If I look at that … at that baby for one more second I’m going to break down.”
Our foreheads touched. He understood what I meant. Somehow he always did.
“We’ll go, Deb. We’ll just go.”
Frank told them I wasn’t feeling well and we left. When his friend asked us over for dinner the following week, Frank told them we were busy. I could not see that baby again. Or any baby. From that day on, if I saw one in the grocery store or being wheeled down the street in a carriage, I was immediately seized by the same hysteria. I began to avoid places where I thought I’d see babies. It was no use. There are a lot of babies in the world.
I gritted my teeth and kept going.
Nancy reached out for help toward the end of April. She phoned me several times, highly agitated, to say the city was getting to her and she had to get out, just had to.
“I’m going to Jamaica, Mom,” she said. “I have money. Saved up. I’m going to Jamaica. Have a round-trip ticket.”
“Why Jamaica?” I asked.
“It’s warm there.”
“It’s warm in New York. It’s spring.”
“I’m going to Jamaica, Mom.”
“Okay.”
I had to be in Chicago then on business. When I got in touch with Frank my first night there, he told me he was about to drive to New York to get Nancy. He said she’d phoned several times, very upset, sobbing, barely coherent. She didn’t want to go to Jamaica anymore, she said. She wanted to come home. She’d begged him to come and get her. He refused, surprised that she was even speaking to him.
“Please, Daddy. Please come. Please.”
She hadn’t called him “Daddy” in over a year. He figured this meant she was pretty serious. He agreed to come get her.
She clung to him when he arrived.
She looked horrible, her clothes ratty, her hair stringy. She was wiped out and ravenously hungry. He took her to an all-night diner, where she wolfed down two hamburger platters; then they got in the car and drove home. She slept the whole way, slept most of the next day. She was barely stirring when I got home from Chicago. She was having a bowl of cereal in the kitchen.
“What happened with Jamaica?” I asked.
“I tried to get the money back. The fucker wouldn’t give it back.”
“Who?”
“The travel agent.”
“But why didn’t you want to go anymore?”
She shrugged.
“Nancy?”
“What?”
“Why didn’t you want to go anymore?”
“I … I got scared.”
“Of what?”
She shrugged, went back to her room, and closed the door. For the rest of the evening she didn’t come out.
“Why is Nancy here?” asked Suzy at dinner.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I replied.
I awoke with a start in the middle of the night. Nancy stood over me. She was tugging at my nightgown.
“Mom,” she whispered.
“Nancy? What is it?” I yawned.
“Do you have any Valium?”
“Any what?”
“Valium. I can’t sleep.”
Now Frank was awake.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Valium,” she repeated. “I can’t sleep.”
“I don’t have any.”
“You must!” she demanded, clutching my nightgown. “You have to!”
“Nancy, I told you, I don’t have any. Now go back to bed. Let us sleep, please.”
“But I can’t sleep. I gotta have Valium!”
“You slept all day,” Frank said. “Maybe you should read a book for a while.”
“Call your doctor!” she cried, wide-eyed now. “Tell him it’s for you! Lie!”
“No,” I said. “I won’t.”
“Then give me the keys to the car. Lemme go downtown. I’ll buy some. On the street.”
“No. Nancy, you’re not making sense. Go to bed.”
“Fuck you! Fuck both of you!” She stormed out.
I heard Frank sigh in the darkness. We turned over and tried to get back to sleep. The next thing I heard was a terrible thumping in the hallway, followed by a strangled moan and then a scream. We dashed into the hall, turned on the light.
Nancy was writhing on the hallway floor.
“Nancy!” I cried out.
Suzy and David rushed out of their rooms, blinking at the light. When they saw Nancy, their eyes widened in horror.
“What’s wrong?” Suzy gasped.
“I’m trying to … I’m tryin’ to …” Nancy rolled around on the floor, clutching herself. “I’m tryin’ to … kick. I’m on smack. I’m tryin’ … tryin’ to get off. That’s why. That’s why I was goin’ to Jamaica. Valium. I need Valium. So I can sleep … I gotta get off. Can’t work no more. Nobody wants me. Keep firin’ me. Guys don’t dig the tracks. Gotta kick!”
I knelt down next to her, felt her forehead. Supposedly, the most obvious drug withdrawal symptom was shivering and sweating. Nancy’s forehead was cool and dry. I was very confused.
“Valium … need Valium,” she repeated desperately.
I had a strong gut-level hunch that Nancy was not actually withdrawing, that we were witnessing some sort of acting job. Possibly she just wanted me to call my doctor and get her some Valium so she could sleep. But if she was really serious, if she was trying to get off, I didn’t want to slap her hand away.
“You have to get me Valium … you have to help me. It’s your fault. Your fault.”
“What’s our fault?” Frank demanded.
“You made me an addict!”
“No way!” I snapped.
“Did!” she yelled.
“You’re down there on the damned floor because you want to be there!” I yelled back. “It’s your fault!”
“Don’t you love me?” she asked.
“Oh course we love you,” I replied.
“Then why don’t you stop me? Stop me! Stop me! Look at me!” She pulled up her nightgown. There were track marks behind her knees and ankles. It was horrifying.
“You have to stop yourself!” I yelled.
“I want to!” she cried. “I want to!”
“We’ll take you to a drug hospital.”
“No! No! I’ll do it myself! No hospital!”
“You can’t!” I said. “You need medical supervision!”
“No!” she cried.
“Nancy,” I said. “If you’re serious about getting off drugs, we’re here for you. We’ll do everything we can to help you. But you have to be serious. You have to want help.”
“I am!” she protested. “I am!”
“No, you’re not,” said Frank, his voice harsh. “If you were, you’d get professional help. Go to a hospital. Not come up with some cockeyed scheme about going to Jamaica.”
“You don’t know what it’s like!”
“I know you’re not doing yourself any good this way,” Frank said. “I’m going back to bed.”
With that, he turned and went back to bed. We all did, except for Nancy. She just lay there alone on the hallway floor for a while. Then she went in her room, threw some things ar
ound in anger. Then she was quiet. At dawn she came in again, tugged at my sleeve, and begged me to call my doctor for Valium. Again, I refused.
She stayed with us for the next day and night, edgy and unhappy, though—seemingly—not suffering withdrawal symptoms. Evidently she had some heroin with her.
“I can’t work, Mom,” she said. “The tracks.”
“Then do something about it, Nancy,” I begged. I felt so powerless.
“I’m thinkin’ about it. Maybe I will.”
“We’re with you, sweetheart. But you’re an adult now. You have to initiate it. It has to be a decision you make. We’re behind you a hundred percent.”
She took a train back to New York after staying with us for two nights. She made some calls to city methadone clinics. She tried to get into an in-patient program, but came up against a shortage of beds. However, she was able to latch onto an out-patient program in Greenwich Village. It called for her to be at the clinic for her methadone every morning at eight. She did it. She went on the program early in May.
A sales award breakfast banquet I put together for Western Union brought me to New York City during the second week of Nancy’s methadone maintenance program. Frank came with me. I had worked hard to make the banquet a success, and it was.
“You did a wonderful job,” said the woman who sat next to me at the banquet.
She was my boss’s wife, a tan, cool, perfect blond in her mid-forties with nice tan, cool, perfect blond children. All tennis players.
“Thank you,” I replied.
“How are your children doing?” she asked me.
Ordinarily I kept my problems with Nancy set apart from work. My work was my refuge from her. On this day it spilled out. I was tired, and I was upset over the death of my favorite aunt the day before.
“My husband and I are about to go see our daughter, Nancy. She’s a heroin addict. Now she’s on methadone. We want to give her as much support as we can.”
She shook her head sadly. “It must be so difficult. You must feel so … so …”
“Alone. We feel very alone. And helpless.”
“I feel so fortunate,” she said. “It’s my greatest fear that it will happen to one of my children. It hasn’t, at least not yet. You must be a very strong person—to cope with it.”
“Not really. You can cope with a lot you never thought you’d be able to, if you’re forced to.”
She smiled sympathetically.
I wished I were her. I wanted so desperately to trade places with her at that moment. She was so calm and cool and in command of her life. She’d gotten what she wanted. I’d gotten something I’d never asked for.
When the breakfast was over, Frank and I checked out of our hotel and went to see Nancy. It was a gorgeous May afternoon, a Sunday. The city’s sidewalks were filled with people out walking, enjoying themselves, enjoying life.
She was much improved. Her apartment and her appearance were neat. She was cheerful. She wore a short-sleeved blouse and I could see that the track marks were starting to heal.
“Hey, I’m okay,” she confirmed. “A guy at the agency said I can come back to work next week. It’s all right. This methadone thing is all right. I’m not hooked anymore. See? Look at my arms!” She eagerly showed me the wounds that were healing on her arms. “See? Look at my hands. Aren’t you proud of me, Mom?”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“Are you really? Are you really proud?”
I hugged her. “Very proud.”
She hugged me back, her eyes filling with tears.
I know that the debate over methadone rages on. Its opponents say it is merely a heroin substitute rather than a cure. They say it is not the answer. I can only speak for one heroin addict I’ve known—Nancy. When she was on methadone, she was able to work, pay her bills, get out and do something besides agonize over where her next fix was coming from. The phone calls, the paranoia, abated. She had a more positive self-image and her overall physical health improved. Methadone helped Nancy.
Admittedly, it didn’t attack the problem of substance addiction. But it couldn’t. Nancy had been escaping life’s pain with drugs from the age of three months. She had been over medicated. Society, as Cott told us, had offered her no other way to cope with her pain. She had grown up drug-dependent; now she was easing her pain through self-prescription.
Nobody had ever gotten to the root of Nancy’s pain, her basic emotional disturbance. We tried. Lord knows, we tried. We spent her whole life—and, seemingly, ours—trying. But we’d been unable to find answers. There was no label for Nancy. She fell between the cracks, somewhere between neurotic and psychotic. She displayed flashes of schizophrenia, then she was fine, then the flashes would come back. There were fireworks going on inside her brain, yet nobody ever found an organic cause for them. I still believe she suffered neurological damage at birth. But no doctor ever said, “I want to know what makes this girl tick. I won’t let her mind be wasted.” And we were never able to help her on our own.
No one cared about my daughter until she was found under a hotel sink with a hunting knife in her stomach, and only then because they perceived her as some kind of freak. Am I angry? You bet I am.
I’m angry at the medical profession. Confronted with a child who fit no mold, doctor after doctor stuck his head in the sand. Each refused to look outside his own parameters. Each rejected her after a few months, told us to “take her somewhere else.”
Even worse was the fact that we were lied to. They didn’t understand what was wrong with her. Instead of telling us that, they told us nothing was wrong with her. “She’s very bright, Mrs. Spungen,” they said. “She’ll outgrow it, Mrs. Spungen,” they said. “Take her home and love her, Mrs. Spungen.”
I’m angry at myself for accepting what they told me. I knew something was wrong with Nancy. She cried constantly from birth. She was acutely nervous and angry. She wouldn’t sleep. But I didn’t follow my instincts. I accepted what they told me. And Frank and I went ahead with our lives as if she were the normal child they told us she was. We had two more children. We tried and failed to have the life we wanted to have, unaware that what was tearing us apart was a decidedly abnormal child. They didn’t warn us that Nancy was disturbed and would require special attention. They kept us in the dark. That was wrong. If we had known what we were getting into with Nancy, we might not have brought two more children into the world. We placed an unfair burden on them. And on each other.
When Nancy reached adolescence, they told us that what was wrong with her was us. It was our fault. We were bad parents. This caused us great anguish. A year later the clinic we’d taken her to revised its diagnosis to one of possible schizophrenia. Did they tell us this? No. We went on through the remainder of Nancy’s life saddled with the burden of guilt for our child’s problems. That was wrong.
We are not alone. Doctors continually lay this horrible guilt trip on other parents. Recently I saw a mother and her three children in a grocery store. Clearly, she was a caring mother. Two of the children were neat, bright-eyed, and well behaved. The third was wrecking the store—knocking merchandise off the shelves, screaming, refusing to listen to his mother’s firm commands. No matter what she said or did, the boy would not be controlled. Finally, in tears, she had to call out for her husband to take the boy out to the car. She noticed me looking at her.
“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” she sobbed. “He’s so … difficult. My others are fine. I wish I knew what I was doing wrong.”
“I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong,” I said.
She blinked, surprised. “My doctor says it’s me. That I’m handling him wrong.”
“It might not be the case,” I said. “Some children are like that and there’s nothing you can do about it. My daughter was like that. I know.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much. You know, I’ve always believed that, but I needed to hear it from someone else. I needed someone to tell me I was doin
g the right thing.”
She needed her doctor to tell her that.
To the medical community I say: Be more open with parents. Communicate with them, share your insights. If you don’t have answers, don’t pretend you do. Say so. Nothing is gained by handing out platitudes like lollipops. Or guilt. On the contrary—much can be lost.
To parents I say: Don’t give up on your instincts. You know your child best. If you don’t agree with your doctor’s diagnosis, press on. Get more answers. See another doctor. Don’t accept what you’re told at face value. My biggest regret is that I did. Demand the truth—even if that truth turns out to be the painful realization that nothing can be done. You’ll still be better off than Frank and I were. Believe me. You won’t torment yourself like we did, wondering what you’re doing wrong. You won’t blame yourself. You’ll know that yours is an abnormal child. You’ll know that yours is a child for whom you can do nothing. Except love.
I’m not saying Nancy’s life would necessarily have turned out differently if I knew then what I know now. Chances are, she still would have ended up in an institution, or in prison, or dead. But we would have been aware of what we were getting into. Maybe we’d have found a place for her, someplace where she could have had her books and her records. Maybe the wounds inflicted on the four of us would not have cut so deep or taken so long to heal.
Something happened to Nancy in the first twenty-four hours of her life. I know it. There was neurological damage. I’ve met parents with children who had problem births like hers—prolapsed umbilical cord, a high bilirubin level. Many of them are just like Nancy: angry, aggressive, in pain. This is no coincidence, and doctors now acknowledge it. At Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, for example, therapists now follow problem-birth babies closely for the first two years of their lives. They observe them at home, test their progress every few months. That’s good. Maybe they’ll get a body of information together. Maybe they’ll improve their ability to detect neurological damage. Maybe they’ll be able to help someone else’s baby. It’s too late for Nancy, a generation too late.
It’s good to see people opening their eyes to this syndrome that has no name. You tend to close them until it happens to your child. There is no such thing as a child who is not worth saving.
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 28
