
No Momma's Boy
By
Dominic Carter
- Chapter 1, Page 6 and parts of Page 8
On May 28, 2003 a few years after Dominic's mother, Laverne, passed away, he requested her extensive psychiatric records from mental institutions around the country. This was the first batch of nearly 700 pages that arrived from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York – the very same hospital where Dominic was born. The following excerpt details his trip to the post office where Dominic received the shock of his life as he read for the first time how his mother tried to repeatedly kill him. He also discovered her diagnosis.
My heart was racing because I didn't know what I would find, but whatever it was, I knew it would be captivating. This was the biggest story of my life, and it was based on my personal experience. It was a story that would change my life forever, only I didn't know it at the time. I carefully opened the package, handling it as carefully as I would a newborn baby.
Some of the 620 pages were typed, and some were barely legible, the writing scratched in various doctors' handwriting. Those pages contained my mother's case history. The fact that it was so voluminous made it that much more intimidating. I wanted to read those facts one page at a time. I walked away from the clerk and over to a side table, feeling that I was in for the shock of a lifetime. I picked up one sheet and put the other 619 pages on the post office table. The dim, fluorescent light was not as bright as the morning sun that shone through the thick windows. But as my eyes scanned each line on that first page, the information somehow came more sharply into focus and made my skin crawl.
On June 20, she beat him so hard that she raised welts on him. However, she wants to be a good mother and is quite alarmed by her recent angry outbursts and thoughts of strangling her son. On one occasion while feeling "strange and dead," she put her hands around his throat before he awakened, and she was frightened by his crying. She has more recently reported that while in a state of depersonalization, she has had frightening thoughts of pushing her son out the window and has heard a voice tell her to "do it."
Psychiatric Summary Report on Laverne Carter, Dr. Robert Humphries, Mount Sinai Hospital, June 21, 1966
That page, that report, was talking about me! Reading the words quite literally took my breath away. With my wife peering over my shoulder, I read on, my mouth hanging open as if I were reading a suspense thriller. I thought to myself, I am the "he" in this psychiatric report, and my mother is the "she."
I had absolutely no recollection of ever being beaten or nearly strangled. Until that moment, the information that I'd been nearly murdered by my own mother had never been revealed to me. My eyes opened wide as my mind struggled to create a picture of what I was reading. Frozen and numb with shock, I went deaf and blind to anything else going on around me. All I saw were the papers in front of me—the documents that showed me the lyrics to a sad song, a story that no one in my family ever wanted me to know. This was only part of the information they had shielded from me all those years.
Chapter 1, Page 8
I momentarily put the papers down. Why had Laverne tried to kill me? Now I really felt like crying, but, as I have always done, I fought the impulse to feel sorry for myself. Why had Laverne tried to kill her own defenseless, innocent child? I wondered what I could possibly have done to provoke such rage. I tried to make sense of the report as I read about a life I never knew. I flipped to another page, which said at the top,
Diagnosis: Chronic Paranoid Schizophrenia 295.3 with possible dyskinetic reaction second day to Prolixin.
That diagnosis was a real eye-opener for me. Finally, a justification for all of this insanity. Paranoid Schizophrenia. Wow! I didn't know much about mental illness — but I knew schizophrenia was one of the most serious illnesses. All of those years that I spoke with my mother, and I swear I'd never have guessed she suffered from schizophrenia.
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