Get Me Out of Here (37 page)

“It's none of his damned business!” he exclaimed. “Who the hell is he to plan our family?”

Tim disagreeing so vehemently with Dr. Padgett was a rare event. As a matter of fact, I couldn't recall if he had ever done so before. Having a third child, however, clearly meant a lot to him. I wasn't used to feeling thrust between two men I loved and respected. I was even more surprised when I found myself making some of Dr. Padgett's points, the same ones I had bitterly disputed just hours earlier.

“Maybe he's right,” I said. “Maybe I'm just not ready yet. I did reach the decision pretty quickly.”

“It was
our
decision,” Tim said, still visibly upset, “not just yours. And Padgett shouldn't have a thing to do with it.”

Despite Tim's persistence in the intense discussion that followed, we both came to see that the third baby was not going to happen, at least for now. Tim spoke of “our” decision, but he would be ready when I was. Thus the true weight of the decision rested on me. Ultimately, as irritated as he was by Dr. Padgett's uncharacteristic intervention, Tim would not press the issue if I had reservations for any reason.

Had it been early on in the therapy process, I might have followed through on my threat, told Tim to forget the condom, and conceived just to spite Dr. Padgett. But I'd known the man for over three years now. He wouldn't venture into the realm of direct advice unless he had strong convictions. Right or wrong, I had come to realize that he had been sincere in saying his sole motivation was my own best interests. He also had an uncanny knack for being right, even when I fervently wished he wasn't.

Our plans for conception were tabled indefinitely as I sought to tame the insistent baby cravings and focus more on the underlying issues, particularly that of termination.

The time had come to seriously consider life without Dr. Padgett. In addition both Tim and I needed to accept the fact that the two children we had might well be the only children we were destined to have. We also needed to accept that they wouldn't be little forever and that someday our home would be an empty nest.

Even aside from conception worries, I decided it was time I was weaned from the Effexor. It had been more than three years since I'd coped without the aid of medications. As daunting as the prospect was, the choice was a tangible sign of my progress, one of the final stops on the route to termination.

Gradually tapering the medication, I was drug free by the end of September.

Much to my surprise, I still felt emotionally stable. The depression and suicidal thoughts had not reappeared as I had feared. We hadn't set a termination date, but I was much more comfortable discussing the possibilities. Instinctively I sensed that in a year's time, I would no longer be in therapy with Dr. Padgett, a situation that didn't disturb me nearly as much as I'd expected.

But, for now, I was intent upon savoring every session.

Neither Tim nor I were of truly urban origin—he a small-town native, I a born suburbanite. However, we had developed a strong loyalty to the city and to its preservation.

The subtle changes in our own neighborhood—a slow but steady increase in crime, a growing number of absentee landlords who didn't seem to care about the condition of their properties—had begun to make residents nervous. More and more were trading their city homes for the haven of suburbia.

Jeffrey and Melissa were forbidden to ride their bikes on the sidewalk without us or to walk down the block to a friend's unaccompanied. Even when they played in our own backyard, we were vigilant, constantly checking to make sure they were safe, concerned about the street people who wandered the alleys in search of cans and other discards.

I'd been running late all day. At seven o'clock the skies were already dark, and I was hustling to put away the bag of groceries I'd just bought at the store down the street. I still had hope that dinner might be on the table by 7:30.

“Mom!” Jeffrey ran into the kitchen, breathless with excitement. “I can hear a police radio and see flashing lights outside!”

I dropped a box of Apple Jacks on the counter and rushed to the front door. True to Jeffrey's account, two police cars were parked directly in front of our neighbor's house. I ran outside to see four uniformed officers in our neighbor Norma's backyard surrounding the elderly woman. She trembled, still in shock, as she described the encounter amid stunned tears.

“Two of them. They came up behind me. ‘Where's your purse? Give me your purse!’ Something sharp shoved in my back. I didn't want to turn around. They shoved it into my back even harder. One of them says,
‘Get on the ground, bitch!’”

The police were listening intently and taking notes. Norma continued to repeat the last phrase over and over again: “Get on the ground, bitch!” She was a kindly lady, much slowed by advanced years and arthritis. There wasn't a soul in the neighborhood who didn't like her. I doubted that anyone had spoken to her in such fashion before.

“Ma'am,” an officer said, “I'd suggest you get your son to change your locks. Maybe you can stay with him tonight.”

“I'm not leaving my house!” Norma cried. “It's
my
house!”

“You need to be safe,” the officer continued. “Locks on the doors and windows. And from now on, you really should get your grocery shopping done in the daytime and stay indoors at night. For your own protection.”

I gasped. The grocery store. Norma must have been followed from the grocery store. I felt a pit open in my stomach. I'd left the same place with Jeffrey and Melissa just a half hour before. And the armed robbery had occurred only twenty feet from the Little Tikes play set we'd just assembled for our kids.

“It's sad,” said the youngest officer, the first time I'd heard him speak. “I live in the city too. I grew up here. But it's going to hell, and it's hard to keep up. It just isn't like it used to be.”

I was surprised at his candor, but I had to agree. Unless there were police officers stationed on every corner, this kind of thing was destined to go on.

Norma's son showed up, and I went back to the house to fix dinner. Tim had come home and had tried, futilely, to usher Jeffrey and Melissa back inside. It was next to impossible, however, to keep the naturally curious kids away from such excitement.

We managed to get both youngsters into bed at nine o'clock. But before Tim and I had a chance to discuss the evening's crisis, Jeffrey appeared at the bottom of the steps. At first he began to complain about all kinds of minor things that had happened at school that day. But it soon became obvious that he was trying to stay up with us. We listened for a while and let him watch a sitcom rerun with us. At half past ten we attempted to put him back to bed.

I tucked him in and turned off the lights. I was about to leave the room when he asked in a small voice if I could stand by his second-story window and watch for a while.

“You're afraid, aren't you, Jeffrey?” I asked gently, sitting next to him on the bed. “It's okay. What happened tonight is scary. But Daddy and I will keep you safe.”

“What if they come back?” he asked, his eyes wide in fear.

“They got what they wanted,” I assured him. “They got Norma's purse. They have no reason to come back. We've got locks on the doors and the windows. We'll be okay.”

“They had guns, didn't they, Mom?”

“Norma said they had something, but she didn't turn around to look.”

“Were they guns?” he persisted.

“I don't know,” I admitted. “They could have been.”

“Don't go downstairs!” he cried in a panic. “Please,
please
stay here!”

It was painful to see his paralyzing fear. As placating and calm as I tried to be, the incident had disturbed me too.

“Jeffrey,” I said, pulling him close in my arms, “Daddy and I will protect you, no matter what. We're your parents; we will keep you safe. You know those books you read about the jungle, how the mother tigers will fight to protect their young? Well, that's what Daddy and I will do too. There is nothing we wouldn't do to protect you.”

“What if they came up to you with a gun and wanted your purse?”

“I'd give it to them. To protect you, Jeffrey, I'd not only give them my purse, I'd give them my car keys and give them everything I had. You kids are the most precious things in the world to us. We'd give up anything to keep you safe.”

“Anything?” The thought was beginning to appease him.

“If it would keep you safe, Jeffrey, we'd give them the deed and the keys to our house. I guarantee you we would do absolutely anything to make sure no one even so much as touched a hair on your head.”

Jeffrey smiled sleepily and snuggled into the covers. I'd succeeded in comforting him. Tim and I, on the other hand, had a very late night.

In my afternoon session I immediately told Dr. Padgett all that had happened and everything that Tim and I had spent most of the evening and early hours of the morning discussing.

“How do you feel about it?” he asked me.

“Angry, very angry. And scared. Pissed off that a couple of punks do this stuff and get away with it. Disgusted that the cops can't do a thing about it. It seems that unless someone gets killed, it's just another routine report. Armed robberies are nothing in the city anymore.”

“Do you see it getting any better?”

“God, I don't know. We've fought so hard. So hard. The politicians have had meetings with us. They talk big, but nothing seems to get better. Things just keep getting worse. The cops? Well, I guess you can't blame them. They have their hands full already. But it's really obvious to me that we can't count on them to protect us anymore.”

“So what do you intend to do?”

“I don't know,” I said. “If we leave, where do we go? Neither of us likes the suburbs. There's a few we like, but there's no way on earth we could afford them. We're trapped, Dr. Padgett. There isn't much we can do.”

“You're trapped if you want to be trapped,” he said. “You have to make a decision. Either you stay in a place where you don't feel safe and live with the chances that something might happen, or you move somewhere else. It's up to you.”

“I can't think of a place in the world I'd want to go, unless it was a small town. A long time ago we talked about a small town.”

A small town. The thought hadn't occurred to us last night
.

“There is this one place that we've visited before. It's absolutely beautiful, lots of historic stuff, straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. It's about an hour's drive into the city, but some people do commute. Whenever we visit, we leave thinking that if we ever had to leave the city, we'd move to Nottingham.”

“So you aren't trapped. You can choose to stay in the city. But if you don't, there is someplace to go.”

As obstinate and stubborn as I could be about a cause, as adamant as I was about being right, I realized some things in life were more important. By the time Tim came home from the office, I'd made up my mind.

“Tim, I think we ought to move to Nottingham.”

Tim, as avidly as he, too, had fought the city battle, had always longed for the lifestyle he'd had growing up in a small town. He readily accepted the idea. He had been prepared to wait it out if I had really wanted to, but he was relieved that I wanted to move now.

We immediately set about preparing the house for sale, scouting out the real estate in Nottingham, and deciding how to break the news to the kids.

Tim and I, meanwhile, stumbled on our dream home earlier than we had anticipated. Our city house wasn't ready to go on the market, but we knew that this house was perfect and we needed to act immediately.

By mid-November we had the house under contract with no contingency clause for selling our present home, a tremendous risk that could mean the temporary burden of two mortgages. But our kids' safety was worth the risk.

We worked diligently readying the house for market, investing some of our savings to make sure that it was absolutely perfect. In a tough city real estate market, we had to be competitive. In January we accepted a contract on the city house.

By a truly remarkable coincidence, both the Nottingham and the city houses closed on the same day. Our faith had paid off.

Although Nottingham was definitely not suburbia, the commute was short enough for me to continue seeing Dr. Padgett if I chose. I had already been considering termination but decided, amid the hectic pace of home improvements, packing, and moving, to delay it until we were settled in our new home. We had a leaseback provision in our sale contract that enabled us to stay in the city house until the end of May so the kids could finish out school.

I didn't want to leave therapy in the middle of such a major upheaval in our family's life. But I realized that, given my newfound emotional strength and the practical considerations of time and distance, I could not continue therapy indefinitely.

So Dr. Padgett and I agreed that we'd take the first step toward termination: we'd reduce our sessions to once a week beginning in January 1995. We also agreed that I'd set a termination date by the end of the summer.