You can't possibly understand my life for the eight years I lived at Southern State Schoolfor the Feebleminded without me describing what the institution was like. My memories of mylife with my mother are somewhat blurry, maybe because I was so young or because they wereso awful that I want to bury them, but my memories of Southern are clear. I don't know why Ihaven't tried to bury memories from there. Maybe that was the period of my life when I becameaware of the world and I started to think. I became an adult at Southern. During my time atSouthern, I began to care for other people. I looked inward for the first time and found that I wasa good person, a person of value. At first when I got there, I felt like I was a bad person. Howcould you be anything but a bad person if you were a whore? But then I realized that I wasn'tbad. What I did was bad, but I wasn't bad. I was able to separate the evil acts from myself as aperson. My reading of the Bible helped me understand this. At first I thought about this by

myself, but when Judy and I became friends, we talked about this together. I went from being anunthinking child to a thinking adult even though I was just a teenager.Southern was located in Seymour, Illinois, a small town about 200 miles south ofChicago. It was in a rural area surrounded by farms that grew millions of acres of corn. Therewasn't much there - a farm supply store, a few restaurants, gas stations, one motel, a smallsupermarket, and churches. There were more churches than stores, and most were fundamentalistdenominations. The people who lived in Seymour were hard-working, uneducated people.Because they were uneducated and insulated from people who were different from themselves,they were bigoted. To them, Jews had horns and black men were violent rapists who lusted afterthe beautiful white women of Seymour. Yeah - real beauties in Seymour. When there was thegreat migration of blacks from the South to the North, men with guns waited for trains headingup to Chicago so that blacks wouldn't get off at Seymour. But they saved most of their hatred forthe residents of Southern who they considered freaks unworthy of being treated like humans.Since Southern was where most of the jobs in Seymour were, they tried not to show their hatredfor the residents too much.

Southern was huge - it was on hundreds of acres just outside of town. There were lots ofdifferent buildings made of red brick with towers and spires. It looked like something out of the1800's. I think that type of architecture is called Gothic. It was like what you'd see inFrankenstein movies. At its peak I think there were 4 or 5,000 residents plus hundreds or maybeeven thousands of workers so it was like a small city. It was totally self-sufficient with a powerplant, kitchens, a bakery, a laundry, and of course a hospital.

Southern was like a jail because the residents couldn't leave, but it was also different.There were no fences on the outside, and on the inside, the corridors weren't lined with cells, butinstead were lined with retarded people sitting on benches or in wheelchairs. They would belooking down into their laps or they would be staring vacantly into space. Some would moan ormake guttural noises, but most were silent. At first, I looked at these people, but after a while Ididn't. I'm ashamed to admit that I ignored them. They became like wallpaper. But the memoryof them came back to impact me years later when I worked in the community. Memories of thosepeople haunted me and I became committed to never letting people I worked with vegetate likethat.

Women and men were segregated, but not the babies and children. And even though theadults were kept separated, the higher level residents found ways of getting together, and therewere always babies being born. There were babies produced by the residents with otherresidents, and also the residents with the people who worked there. Most of the sex wasconsensual, but there was also rape, maybe not a lot, but it was definitely there. Rape played abig part in my life, first when I was a prostitute and then when I was a resident at Southern.Not only were the residents grouped by sex, they were grouped by age and level ofdisability. There were infant wards with very severely disabled babies. Some werehydrocephalic. That's water on the brain. They had these huge heads and looked like littlemonsters, but monsters with empty eyes because they were all severely retarded. The extraspinal fluid had washed away their brain tissue. Today we don't have kids like that becausedoctors do shunts to channel the extra fluid out of the brain and flush it out of the body. What amiracle of medicine! And there were children who were microcephalic. These kids had tinypointed heads where it looked like it was impossible to have a brain, and unfortunately theydidn't have much of one. Some of the attendants openly called these kids pinheads and thehydrocephalic kids fatheads. They didn't think it mattered that they used this insulting languagebecause the kids didn't understand what they were saying, but it did matter because it showed thedisdain they felt toward these people. There were severely twisted spastic children whose legswrapped around each other in such a way that only a contortionist could imitate. Their arms wereheld high at shoulder level and their heads were tilted sideways. Most of these kids were severelyretarded, but sometimes I'd look into someone's eyes and I'd see something in them. I thinksome of them were normal kids trapped in those bodies. Can you imagine that? There was noway to find out; there was no way to communicate with them back then. Today there are ways ofcommunicating electronically, and even using eye blinks to send messages. Just think of StephenHawking, the brilliant scientist, and how severely physically handicapped he is. Hecommunicates with his computer. He speaks with this spooky electronic voice, but the words heutters are priceless. Anyone who was as physically handicapped as Hawking who would havebeen at Southern would never have had a way to communicate, and his intelligence would haveshriveled up and died. Again I'm thankful to live in an age where medicine and technology havehelped so many people with disabilities have better lives. But THE most important thing inimproving the lives of the handicapped has been the change in the attitude of society. There is

more respect for the disabled now, and recognition that they deserve to live full lives just likeeveryone else. Acceptance of the disabled is more important than all the medical andtechnological advances. Things aren't perfect yet, but we're light years ahead of where we werewhen I was at Southern. A lot of the progress is due to the activism of the disabled communityitself. And of course the Special Olympics and the Para Olympics. Seeing people withdisabilities perform like we ourselves could never do is inspirational.Quite a few of the residents had grand mal seizures where they would fall down andshake violently. At first, I was frightened when this happened, but I got used to it, and helpedpeople by making sure that they didn't hit their heads or hurt themselves. Again, thank God forthe medical advances in anti-seizure medication. Not only did it help stop the seizures, itprevented people with constant seizures from having whatever intelligence they had reducedbecause of the damage the seizures did to their brains.

There were also infant wards for the less severely disabled. Most of these babies hadDown Syndrome because in those days doctors told parents to institutionalize any baby who wasborn with a visible handicap. Those poor babies. They were just fed with propped bottles andleft in their cribs with no stimulation except for a white ceiling to look up at. The brain growsfastest in the early years, and yet there was no food for these babies' brains. They were mentallystarved to death. Kids with Down Syndrome were called mongoloids. In fact, they still are. Wecalled them mongoloids because their slanted eyes made them look Asian. Today they're said tohave Down Syndrome, named after Dr. Down who first identified the syndrome. And modernscience found that Down Syndrome is caused by an extra chromosome. That's why they lookalike.

And then there were the children's wards where many of the kids had Down Syndromebecause the more severely disabled infants died out and because more kids were institutionalizedas they got older. The kids with Down Syndrome had little or no speech, and whatever speechthey had was almost impossible to understand. Most eventually learned to walk and some to evenfeed and dress themselves. There was no school for these kids so even if they could learn, therewas no one to teach them. Today, there's intensive preschool education and good specialeducation in the schools, and they all achieve at a much higher level than kids in institutions.They live successfully in the community and hold jobs. That was an impossible thought in the

days when I was at Southern. But the one thing many of these kids had was sweet personalities.Even in a cruel institutional setting, their sweetness came through. They smiled a lot and wantedto hug, but there wasn't anyone willing to hug back so eventually their needs for love andaffection weren't met and they lessened, but they never completely died.There were separate wards for young, middle-aged, and older residents. The young andmiddle-aged residents were separated into different wards for the milder and the more severelydisabled. There weren't too many residents who survived into old age because they died frommedical problems that were part of their disability or inadequate medical care. Those who didsurvive were often like the infants on the baby ward because they had dementia added to theirdisability. They were bed-ridden, and everyone just waited for them to die.Many of the people in the young persons' wards were mildly retarded. Like me, theywere institutionalized when they were adolescents because of social or legal problems. Todaythese people would be in public schools and integrated into regular education classes, but inthose days they were placed in institutions because they were from poor or dysfunctional homesthat couldn't handle them, or they had no homes. There were quite a few mildly retarded peopleat Southern who wouldn't even be considered retarded today because their diagnosis was basedsolely on having a low IQ score even though they had normal self help and social skills. Thesewere people who could repair motors or lay bricks or plant trees, but couldn't read or write or domath. Their talents helped Southern run efficiently and cheaply since residents didn't have to bepaid.

And then there were people like Jennifer who was a few beds down from me during mythird year at Southern. Jennifer was at Southern because her family didn't want her, and theydidn't want to pay for her to be in a private institution which they could well afford. Yes, it waspossible to just dump kids at Southern. It was like the town dump, only for humans who wereconsidered useless trash. Jennifer's family wanted her at Southern because it was free and opento all residents of Illinois. Jennifer was placed at Southern when she was 16. Before that, she'dbeen in a high school special education class for mildly disabled kids. Jennifer seethed withanger and aggression, probably as a result of being hated and rejected by her family. She scowledand yelled at people who tried to interact with her. No one, not even me, was able to get close toher. She had mild cerebral palsy and was marginally retarded. Maybe she wasn't even retarded

at all because she had great language, especially for swear words. I heard more swear wordsfrom her than I heard on the streets of Chicago. She would have been pretty, but she had severeacne. And she had a great figure which was apparent despite her mild cerebral palsy.Jennifer was a throw-away kid. Her father despised her. He beat her, but when she toldher special ed teacher and a counselor and even the principal, no one believed her. When sheshowed her teacher the bruises from his beatings, her teacher asked the father about them. Hesaid they were from falls. Everyone believed the father, especially because he was a wealthybusinessman. Such a man wouldn't beat his handicapped daughter. Oh, no. Not him. One day hedrove Jennifer to school and when she was having trouble getting out of the backseat of a two-door car, he hit her with a wooden hanger. She was stuck and he kept hitting her and screamingfor her to get out because he was late for work. He was in a rage and didn't stop hitting her untila teacher took the hanger away from him. At last social services got involved. They tried to workwith the family, but the family didn't want to be worked with. They wanted her out. So Jenniferwas encouraged to run away, maybe they even threw her out. Her parents didn't report hermissing, but the police found her walking the streets in a town 100 miles from Chicago. She hadhitched a ride from someone, and no one knew if anything happened on that ride. At last, herfather got his wish. Jennifer was placed at Southern State and, of course, the family never sawher again. I didn't get to know Jennifer because after she was there for about two months, she ranaway. I don't know how she got out, but she was smart enough to find a way. She was foundwalking on a highway and brought back. Although she was watched carefully after that, she stillmanaged to escape again. This time when she was brought back, she was placed in a lockedward. I never heard about Jennifer again. My heart breaks when I think of her. Sometimes I thinkif I had known her better, I could have helped her. Just imagine - Jennifer locked away for therest of her life. If that had happened to me, I would have lost my mind. Maybe that's whathappened to her. Oh my heart breaks just thinking about Jennifer.Violent residents were placed in locked wards. I never found out how many of thosewards there were. I didn't want to know. We were afraid to have anything to do with thesepeople because they were dangerous. I remember going to the building where the locked wardswere. I don't know why I was there. I was with my friend Judy. I think she wanted to show meall of Southern. I looked in the window of a locked door at a large room where naked men were

running around. Some of them were throwing feces. They were screaming wildly. And some ofthem were banging their heads against the walls until blood came gushing out. I wanted to rushinto the room and hold them to stop them from hurting themselves. These were the people thatthe public thought were retarded, but they weren't. I think today some of those people might becalled autistic. In those days autism was just being recognized as a disability. There were somewealthy people who had autistic kids and wrote books about them, like Josh Greenfeld's "AChild Called Noah." People who had money kept their autistic kids at home and placed them inprivate schools, but people who didn't have money put their autistic kids in institutions and someended up on the wards for the violent residents. Today we have all these kids with milddisabilities who are called autistic, but in my days at Southern and afterwards working withdeinstitutionalized retarded people in the community, only people who didn't talk and didn'tinteract socially were labeled as autistic.

I think a number of the violent people at Southern were mentally ill as well as beingretarded or maybe they were just mentally ill and got placed at Southern instead of an institutionfor the mentally ill. These were the days before medication so there was no way of controllingthese people. The reason the men were naked was because they kept taking their clothes off orbecause they smeared themselves with their feces. The attendants hosed them down to cleanthem. It was like watching animals being cleaned at the zoo. I know they were hit by theattendants, but how else were they to control them? You couldn't reason with them. Youcouldn't try to restrain them gently. I'm not trying to defend the attendants or their use ofviolence, believe me I'm not. But I don't know what I would have done if I had to work withviolent people like them. I couldn't control them by talking to them or touching them gently.Today many people like this are controlled by medication. Again, thanks to modern medicine fortranquilizers and anti-psychotic drugs. They sure have made people more manageable, eventhough some people turn into zombies. At least they're not hurting themselves or other people.So this was my world for eight years. Sometimes I think of what my life would have beenlike if I hadn't been released. Or if I had been placed there 20 or 30 years earlier, I probablywould have lived my whole life there. What would have become of me? I can't begin to imagine,but whatever, it would have been tragic. There would have been no happy ending to my life. Infact, I might have killed myself as the only means of escape. Who knows? Who knows?

Back to Southern. I was placed in a ward with mildly handicapped young women. Mynew home was a long room with 30 beds lined up on each side - 60 young females lying innarrow beds squashed together. There were huge windows which let in the sunlight and gave theroom a cheery feel on sunny days. But there were no shades so they showed the total darknessthat blanketed Southern as soon as night fell. At night, the outside was scary, especially if therewas a storm and the wind was howling. Being in a ward with 60 women was somehowcomforting, not that they could protect me from the dangers I imagined lurking outside.I was outfitted in the Southern State School uniform. They gave me a new pair of brownlace-up oxfords with these stubby little heels. Why lace-ups when few of the women could tielaces? I don't know. Of course, there was no Velcro then. And two pairs of socks, two pairs ofunderpants, two bras that were too large for my breasts which had quickly shrunk when my milkdried up, and two dresses that would have fit a woman 20 pounds heavier and six inches tallerthan me. It's hard to describe those dresses because you would never find them in stores. Wellmaybe you'd see them in stores in Seymour where years later I actually did see some womenwearing dresses similar to the Southern State uniform. They were made of stiff cotton when theywere new, but quickly became thread-bare after repeated washings. They had buttons goingdown the front and they had designs on them. You could imagine a 90 year wearing a dress likethat, not a 13 year old. Lower level women wore these gray sack-like dresses that were pulledover their heads. It would take too long for an attendant to button dresses if they had dresses likemine. Then I had an itchy sweater for cool weather. I wore that a lot because the rooms werecold, maybe because they were so big and had high ceilings and maybe because they didn'tprovide much heat. That sweater became ratty after a few years, but it was never replaced. Judyknitted me a beautiful sweater, but I saved that for special occasions and since there were veryfew special occasions, I rarely wore it. I still have that sweater in a trunk in my basement. I couldnever part with it because it was the first nice piece of clothing I ever had. I don't count my partydresses from my years of whoring as nice pieces of clothing. They were my costumes. I had athin coat because I worked in another building so I had to walk outside. The coat didn't give memuch protection, but it was real big and reached my toes and when I put the collar up, it coveredmy ears so it helped. I looked like a cartoon character with only my head and feet showing.When I was a hooker, I was disguised in a party dress, and now I was disguised as an old lady.

All the higher functioning women wore similar dresses so we had no individuality. Tall,short, fat, skinny - we all wore the same dresses, only the patterns and colors differed. We hadno personal possessions to distinguish us - no jewelry or makeup. We were all the same. Noindividuals. Just retarded people. We were like the herds of animals you see from flyovers in theAfrican wild. There are these herds of zebras that all look alike. Just like us - indistinguishableone from another. We had a comb and soap and shampoo and towels that we kept in our bedsidetable. We also had kotex pads for when we got our period. I had to help a lot of the girls on theward when they got their periods. They had trouble cleaning themselves and putting on theirkotex belt and hooking the kotex pad onto it. You probably don't know about that since todaywomen use tampons, but years ago before tampons, having your period was a mess, especially ifyou didn't have the coordination to put the pads into the hooks. I remember getting my handsdirty with menstrual blood from the girls who couldn't manage themselves, but believe it or not,I didn't mind. Remember, I was used to cleaning up blood from nursing my mother.A few of the girls had some personal items, mostly dolls. These were propped up ontheir pillows waiting to be tightly hugged at night. At first, I thought that the girls got the dollsfrom family members, but later I learned that they got them when they had a baby. These dollswere substitutes for babies that were taken away from them. Before I had you, the nurses used togive women dolls when they were discharged from the hospital. I've never decided how I feltabout this. I would have liked to have had a doll to hug as a reminder of you, but then again, thatmight have been a constant, cruel reminder of my loss. The nurses stopped doing this becauseover the eight years I was at Southern, there were three girls who returned from the hospital afterhaving babies and they didn't have any dolls. Like me, they only brought back the sorrow ofhaving their babies stolen from them.

There was no need for money at Southern even if we could get some because there wasnothing to buy. There was no canteen. And although many of us worked someplace in theinstitution, we were never paid. It was just expected that we would work, just like slaves. Thenormals and the mildly retarded residents staffed the institution. And working wasn't badbecause it kept us from being bored. I would have hated to just sit staring into space like thelower level women who were thought to be too retarded to work. And if we had any money or

anything of value, it would have been stolen. Not by the residents, but by the attendants. Theywere like vultures always looking for something to take.

Let me tell you about the attendants. They were uneducated local hillbillies. The majoritytreated the residents as if they were animals. They weren't cruel, and in most cases didn'tphysically harm the residents; they just looked through them. They didn't see them as people, asindividuals. They didn't talk to them unless they had to, and often this was a harshly spokenorder to do something or not do something. There were a few attendants though who weredangerous and brutal. They mostly worked with the violent residents. Who else would want towork in conditions where they had feces thrown at them and where they were physicallyattacked? They're the reason I went back to carrying safety pins for protection. And there were afew attendants who were nice, like Cora Jensen. They were especially nice to normals. Maybebecause they realized that we weren't too different from them. In fact, I was probably a betterreader than most of the workers there.

We showered once a week so I washed thoroughly every morning. I felt cleaner than athome, but still not as clean as I wanted to be. Our hair was cut short monthly to avoid lice and tomake it easier to wash. The girls had institutional haircuts with bangs across their foreheads. Itlooked like a barber put a bowl over their heads. Again, this made everyone look alike. Becauseof my curly red hair, I looked different. I couldn't have bangs because my hair wouldn't stay flat.I stood out because of my hair color and my different hair style. But there were times when evenI looked like everyone else, and that was when they found lice and shaved everyone's head. Howugly we all looked!

Remarkably, we were fairly bug-free, except for the occasional outbreaks of lice. Maybebecause the ward was kept clean. The floors were washed everyday and the sheets changedweekly. This was done by the higher level girls who were trained to clean, and they did a greatjob. There was a heavy, almost suffocating smell of disinfectant everywhere. There was constantconcern about contagious diseases so everything was disinfected. Sometimes I thought the foodwas disinfected. I can understand the need to disinfect everything because when one person got acold, almost all the rest of us got it. We slept inches from each other so it was easy for the germsto jump from bed to bed. When the flu hit, it hit hard. Many of the residents had poor immunesystems related to their disabilities. There were always people dying of the flu. I hated when the

stomach flu went around because the toilets were always full and they were always clogging upand overflowing. Oh by the way, there were no stalls in the toilets. They were open so there wasno privacy when we went to the bathroom or when we showered. The showers had these shortwalls that came up to our knees to prevent the water from getting out of the shower, not forprivacy. That was one of the most dehumanizing parts of being at Southern - the total lack ofprivacy. It was like being an animal in a cage at the zoo. You could always be observed.All the girls in my ward were ambulatory so we went to the cafeteria for our meals exceptfor the girls who worked in the cafeteria, and there were lots who did. They prepared the food inthe kitchens and washed dishes, pots, everything. I remember seeing Ethel, a girl from my ward,getting trained to dry trays. The trays came dripping wet out of this automatic washer, and Ethelwas being trained to wipe them with one sweeping motion. The first day I saw her she wipeddifferent sections of the tray taking a long time on each. A few days later I saw that she hadmastered the art of tray wiping with one sweeping motion. Whoever said that the retarded can'tlearn never saw the look of satisfaction on Ethel's face as she worked quickly to keep up with theautomatic tray washer.

Now let me describe the 58 residents of my ward who were retarded. Why 58? There wasanother normal, Judy. Because of the sameness in clothing and haircuts, it was hard to tell thedifference between the girls, but I vowed to learn each of their names and a little about them. Idon't know why I was interested in them. Maybe because no one else was. Maybe because I'man outgoing person who likes mostly everybody. I never got to show my outgoingness when Ilived in Chicago. Other than my clients and a few neighbors, there were few people in my life.Now there were loads of people in my life. It was hard to learn everyone's names at first, buteventually I did. To help me remember, I grouped the women by hair color, size, bed location,and personality. As I learned their names, I called them by their names when we sat together atthe cafeteria table or when I was near them in the day room. And I taught them to greet me. I'dsay, "Hi Helen." Then I'd point to me and say, "Say hi Mary." And with time, most of them did.I also taught them to smile when they greeted me, and later to smile and greet each other. Iwanted the girls to become individuals to me and to each other. And for most of them, thisworked. At the end of my eight years at Southern, many of the girls were the same ones who Istarted with so I knew them well. Not only did I know their names, I knew their likes, their

dislikes, and their fears. Over my eight years at Southern, there were three girls who died andnine who were transferred to a lower functioning or a locked ward. No one was released. Onceyou were placed at Southern, you were there forever until deinstitutionalization came along. Newgirls were added for the ones who were gone, and we accepted them like they were newmembers of our family.

Over the years, I learned to give the girls presents, especially if they were having a hardtime for some reason. I drew a picture and gave it to a girl, like a Hallmark greeting card. On thepicture, I'd write the girl's name and then I'd sign it "Love Mary." I especially remember Carolafter she came back from the hospital empty handed after having a baby. No Hallmark greetingcard could have helped her cope with what she was going through. She was totally devastated,and of course, I understood how she felt. I spent a lot of time hugging her. I think my wordsconsoled me as much as they did her. I had forgotten about you, but when I saw Carol's face, Iwas filled with memories of how I felt after you were taken away from me.After my first year there, I started teaching some of the higher functioning girls. I don'tknow what motivated me to do this. Maybe I wanted these girls to share my love of reading intheir own limited way. I'd write their names on paper and teach them to read and write eachletter. I wanted them to experience joy like I felt when I wrote my name in first grade. I think allthe girls were eventually able to read and write their names. I taught some of them to read wordslike dog or cat for a picture I'd drawn. I was able to teach some of the girls to read simplesentences that I wrote, like "I am a girl." And there were two girls who I taught to read quitewell. I think they probably learned to read at the second grade level after a few years. I taught thegirls some math too. One girl learned to count to 100 and three others got through most of thebasic addition and subtraction facts. Just think of what these girls would have been capable of ifthey had a real teacher and if they lived in the outside world. The girls looked forward to whenwe had school. I loved playing the part of the teacher, acting how a teacher should act, and notthe way some of my former teachers acted. I felt like I was playing school like I did when I wasin first and second grade back in Chicago, but now I wasn't playing. I was teaching real students.I felt proud when a girl read a new word or got the answer to a math fact right for the first time.The look of accomplishment on their faces was like being paid a million dollars.

I also taught the girls to walk differently. Judy never noticed what I called the retardedwalk of many of the girls in our ward. It was a slow walk where the girl bent over and lookeddown and shuffled her feet. I think a lot of the girls walked like this because they imitated otherswho walked like this. It was the expected way of walking. I made the girls stand straight andwalk faster like they had a destination to go to, even if they didn't. Judy laughed at me for doingthis. I was like a soldier training other soldiers to march in a parade, but after a while she sawthe difference. She said that the girls looked less retarded, and she was right.I also made the girls talk more. I think a lot of the girls were capable of fairly goodcommunication skills, but because they didn't use them, they never developed them fully or theylost them. But I was able to get them back or teach them to talk more. Over time, I saw realimprovement in my girls. We started to show affection. We hugged each other and held hands.The human contact transformed the girls. Some of them acted like robots before, but when theylearned something new or touched another person, they were changed. They showed pride andsatisfaction with themselves, emotions that they hadn't experienced before. I had Judy help mewith the teaching, and we did all this during the two hours after supper while we were in the dayroom, except when there was a T.V. program we wanted to watch. Fortunately, no one wanted towatch wrestling which was on T.V. a lot of the time so we had lots of time for teaching.You probably ask yourself why I did this. I ask myself that too. I was fighting SouthernState the only way I knew how, and that was by making each and every girl a unique individual.I was treating them with respect which they were entitled to as human beings, as children ofGod. I was treating them in the way that I wanted to be treated. It was when I started living mylife by the Golden Rule, something I've tried to do ever since.

Let me tell you about what it was like when I was transferred from the hospital to theward after having you. I was disoriented from being pregnant, having a baby, and having mybaby stolen from me. Although Judy was an angel who was trying to help me adjust to Southern,she was at work most of the time. I spent my days laying around, staring into space. After a fewweeks, I was given a job, and that was a life saver. I now had a reason to get up every morning.Mr. Henderson, who was in charge of placing residents on different jobs in the institution, cameto see me. He heard that I'd comforted sick and dying people when I was in the hospital ward sohe decided to have me help in the infant ward with the severely handicapped babies. There

weren't many residents who wanted to work there or who could work there. A lot of people wereafraid of the severely handicapped babies, but I wasn't. I don't know why people were afraid ofthem - they were totally helpless. They were grotesque to look at and maybe people secretlythought that, "Except for the grace of God, there go I."

My job was to do the dirty work - change diapers and clean vomit and drool. This didn'tbother me because I had cleaned up my mother's messes for over a year. After a while, they letme wash the babies and change their clothes. The very best thing they let me do was feed bottlesto the babies. After I cleaned or fed someone, I always kissed them on the forehead. I didn'tknow if they would respond to my touch, but I knew that a kiss would get through, and it didbecause my babies seemed calmer after I was with them. I'm sure these babies had never beenkissed before, but they responded because it is in our DNA to respond to affection. We need it asmuch as we need air and water and food. Even though the nurses and attendants on the babyward complimented me on how I treated the babies, they didn't change how they treated them.They continued to treat them as inanimate objects. I'll never understand why they couldn't showa trace of affection or respect for those human beings.

I worked seven days a week in the baby ward, usually for eight hours, but I always hadenough time for my meals which I ate in the cafeteria with Judy and some other girls from ourward. Our meal times were like lunch tables in a high school. We talked about what happened atwork and we gossiped. "Did you see that Charlotte dyed her hair? What a color. It's like anorange...Did you hear that we're going to get muffins for breakfast on Sundays?... Did you hearabout that cute new attendant on the older men's ward? He looks like Matt Dillon onGunsmoke."

I started to realize what the outside world was like when a T.V. was added to the dayroom. Everyone looked forward to the night I Love Lucy was on. For one half hour, ourhumorless lives were filled with hilarity. It was so therapeutic to laugh at crazy Lucy stuffing herface with candy or stomping on grapes to make wine. And then there was The Donna ReedShow where a beautiful mother had a perfect family which was something none of us had everexperienced. The attendants let us stay up late on Saturday nights to watch the best program ofall - The Hit Parade. We had our own sock hop and clumsily danced with each other. Iremember feeling ga-ga over Snooky Lanson, the guy who crooned the love songs, and someday

I wanted to have a white, sheer blouse like Dorothy Collins, the strangely prim singer of lovesongs. It's funny how I vividly remember those people who nobody else probably remembers oreven heard of. Everyone criticizes T.V. these days, but to us, it created emotions we couldn'texperience any other way. We experienced the joys of laughter and music.But there was also a down side to T.V. It showed me the life I was missing on theoutside and filled me with bitterness. My life was being wasted changing poopy diapers. I beganto wonder if I would live the rest of my life at Southern. My daily conversations with God werebecoming increasingly passionate pleas to get me out of Southern. I prayed to Him to stoppunishing me and set me free and give me a normal life. And He did answer my prayers, but ittook a while. God can't be hurried. He has his own timetable.

I've complained bitterly about living at Southern, but again I have to go back to someconversations I had with Dr. Warner after my release when he raised these questions, "Whatwould my life have been like if I hadn't been sent to Southern? What would have happened if Ihad been sent to a school for delinquents? To survive, I would have become friends with thekids there and they would have become my role models and I would have become like them. Iwould have learned to live a life filled with violence, anti-social behavior, cruelty, and ugly sex.I might have grown up to be my mother - a professional whore - because that would have beenthe only thing I knew how to do. Sell sex. And most importantly, I wouldn't have been able tofind God and I would never have found the good that I was capable of because the good couldn'tcome out in that environment. So maybe being sent to Southern was God's way of saving me.