motherless child

I just wanted to finish up telling you about my mother since the experiences I had and the experiences she had and the experiences I had with her were the motivation for me getting involved in the anti psychiatry movement.

What I have yet to tell you is that when I was adopted the social worker told my adoptive parents to watch for signs of mental illness when I was around 20 since my mother was mentally ill. When I was 20 I came home from college that year in 1967 with an ounce of marijuana.

As many people did that year I wanted to go to San Francisco with flowers in my hair for the summer of love but my parents found the pot and construed it as the sign of mental illness and sent me to a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist that they to send me to happened to be the deputy director of Rochester State Hospital so he knew my mother and had my records. He was an old school bastard and son of a bitch and tortured my young brain with thorazine and stelazine and put me through hell for 15 months.

I eventually got away from him and went back to Syracuse and graduated in 1969. I went to Woodstock and the Friday night of Woodstock my adoptive parents had a terrible car accident. When I returned home my mother gave me the combination to the safe in case they died and the one thing I got from the safe was my adoption records.

Using these I found my mother in Rochester State Hospital but here is where the fun begins. Because I had been to that shrink and because my mother was an in patient, the staff determined that we were both too unstable to meet but I was told that if she were ever sick or died they would notify me.

The next year I came to Vermont and eventually got myself into my own kind of trouble and in 1972 ended up in the state hospital here. My parents came to visit me and brought me my mother's obituary. The staff had contacted them and not me to say my mother was sick and dying.

The rest is, as they say, history. I never got to meet my mother. I determined that the state hospital here was the closest I would ever get to her and I was committed here. I got out in three months, went to Florida and was a substitute teacher and came back and went to the Newhouse School at Syracuse for a Master's degree in television radio and film in 1977.

I immediately came back here and set up a television studio in the state hospital in 1978 where I had the patients produce their own television shows and then joined the movement in 1980. Still the biggest thing in my life is being a motherless child.

the end of my story

I got a phone call yesterday from someone I have known for 45 years. She said I should knock it off with my story and start living in the present. OK I will. I am sitting in the living room with my laptop watching Ted Kennedy's funeral. I just found the blog of the person I was most involved with when I was in the anti-psychiarty movement. She lives in Boston and is in hospice care and is blogging about being in hospice. She has COPD.

She recently had her own funeral. I thought that was an interesting approach. Have your funeral first and then die later. I wonder if she gave her own eulogy. I think about dying sometimes. I have always thought that I will die when I am 83. I will be very surprised if I die before that. I have thought this since having the spiritual experiences I had in the early 70s which I cannot tell you about because they are "my story". Blah, blah, blah about my story. I know it is only a story and I know "my story" is the problem and I need to let it go but everyone has a story and not many people think for a moment that it is a problem.

Is anybody out there?

I have tried blogging before and that same thing is happening. I write for a couple days and nobody reads it and I lose interest. You've got to admit that it is not very interesting or inspiring to write if no one reads it. Alas, what am I to do? This is exactly why I told you that I don't write novels.

I have discovered one thing though and that is I know now what I want to be. I want to be a star. I want to be a rich famous television star. Now how am I going to make that happen? How does one go about becoming a television star? I certainly have the credentials with a Master's degree in television from the Newhouse School. I also know that much of television happens with independent producers. I have also produced a lot of stuff starring myself over the years.

Most recently I had that prostate cancer series. I did it on our local educational access channel and it was quite successful. I interviewed health care professionals and cancer survivors about prostate cancer issues. I wonder if RETN still has those in its archives. Before that I did years and years of things on mental health including satellite town meetings, almost a hundred interviews, documentaries, teleconferences and even a series inside the state hospital produced by the patients.

For a while I had my own television production company called White Light Communications and we had a large three year federal consumer demonstration grant that was instrumental in advancing the cause of the disability rights movement. We also had state grants and grants for the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the van Ameringen Foundation. I was almost famous then. I was being considered as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow but wasn't chosen. I did go to the White House and the Carter Center at that time. Someone once even asked me for my autograph. That was from the late 70s to mid 90s.

It seems that I only communicate when I get worked up enough about an issue that actually affects my life directly. Perhaps something will come along again. Right now I don't feel it at all. This is a time of doldrums where I am spending myself into a hole that I will never get out of unless I do get rich and famous.

I suppose I shouldn't jump ahead in my story but I have always felt that I have a mission here in Vermont but I don't know what it is. The only consolation I get about this is that everybody is always doing their mission and I am as well. I am also encouraged to leave Vermont, forget about my mission and live someplace where I can be happy.

I promise I will return to my story when I do the next blog. Just not today. I don't feel like it at all today. It did occur to me that I have a lot of 60s stories to tell and that I need to include them in my life story and I also probably have some interesting Vermont stories from over the years.

My favorite little quip about Vermont comes from when Stub Earl was the state representative from Eden and Johnson, where I lived, to the state legislature. In a town hall meeting one time he said that he was opposed to the Australian ballot being used to vote because he didn't want foreign influences in Vermont elections.

Barack Obama

I am sitting here listening to a webcast of Barack Obama talking about health care reform. I am all for health care reform. I hope we end up with a system like Canada for universal health care, education and day care. Hey we might even get totally radical and join the rest of the world in using the metric system.

My niece who has dual Canadian-American aboriginal citizenship and lives in Vancouver is having a baby. She was telling me the other day on the phone how great it was to go to the hospital there when she was having early contractions. She said they were absolutely wonderful to her and gave her fabulous care. She was in the hospital several days and of course all she had to do was show them her health care card.

I have about the same kind of health care in Vermont. I have VHAP which gives me unlimited access to health care with no deductible and costs me $7/month. I suppose that is the difference between Vermont and Canada. In Canada there would be no $7/month premium and there would be no means testing. If I make very much money this year I will lose VHAP and then I don't know what happens. Without VHAP I would be paying over $300/month for COBRA.

So where were we in this blog? I had just told you that the cops took me from my mother's breast where I had been nursing and put me in a foster home where I was starved and had malnutrition and rickets when my adoptive parents got me. After that thinks improved dramatically for me.

I had a happy childhood with a very nice couple who were childless and could not have children. I grew up as an only child and was the apple of my parents' eye. I went to a Catholic elementary school where the nuns loved me and I loved them. I did very well in school and was among the top two students in the school.

As an only child I had everything given to me. In fact, I feel I was spoiled and was not prepared to meet the harsh realities of life. My dad built a cottage in the 1000 islands and we went there almost all summer every summer. My mom was everyone's favorite mom and she and I were very close. I learned to cook by watching her after school before my father would come home.

I always knew I was an adopted child as long as I can remember. I do not remember them ever telling me. It was just something that I grew up knowing. I remember once asking about my mother and my parents told me she was Polish. I remember seeing her once when I was about four when she brought me a little pair of corduroys with yellow ducks on them but really don't remember thinking anything of it.

After getting all As in the elementary school I went to a Catholic High School in the city. I had to travel each day on a school bus from our suburban town to catch the city bus downtown for the high school that was in another suburb. I had been in elementary school with a bunch of guys that were all great pals and we all went to the same high school together.

well hello

Well here I am blogging. People have always told me I am a good writer and that I should write a book but I have never wanted to because I like direct communication. I like to feel that I am actually writing to someone rather than just writing in a vacuum for later publication.

I have a lot of things to write about. I could tell you my life story which definitely is not your usual life story. I have had a lot of experiences that most people never have. I also have done, as they say. a lot of work on myself and have tried to understand the experiences that I have had and have tried to make sense of them.

Let me give you an example. I was born at home or at least someone's house. I don't know if it was our home at the time or not but I was born there. Six weeks later while my mother was living in a welfare hotel with me and my older sister and brother, the neighbors called the police because I was crying and us kids were alone and the police came and took us away from our mother. Or at least this is the story I have heard.

I was nursing at the time and was taken from my mother's breast and was put in foster care along with my sister and brother. I hesitate to use the word care because I was not cared for at all. In fact, so the story goes, the foster people took the money they got for me and spent it on beer and cigarettes and didn't feed me at all.

By the time I was six months old when the people who eventually adopted me got me I had malnutrition and ricketts. My sister and brother did not fare any better. They were in other foster homes where my sister was forced to stand out in the snow in her night clothes as punishment and my brother who was older was used as a farm laborer.