DEAR YOGESHREE Tammy acts out her messages

DEAR YOGESHREE

This letter has to be read as a part of the previous Tammy tales I have told you in the past few letters....poignant moments when she spoke some special truth about her life situation.

It was very dramatic, I remember it well. It was a Sunday evening.

Tammy had been taken out for the weekend by Mom and returned at the designated time that Sunday evening. As Mom released her hand to leave the screaming started. Tammy clutched at the wall pushing herself against it and clawing at the wall with her finger nails. Then the expected escalation in vehemence and volume started. Mom stood, silent and quite unmoved. I had come to recognise this in Mom, it was a feature which I called 'emotionally flat'.When we did see some kind of show of feeling I always thought that it was a role-play, not real, designed to heighten her message and not a response to what was going on in her world.

I said" It would be better if you left now and leave me to handle this". Mom beat a hasty retreat.

All I could really do was to follow this screaming,clawing child around the room. She pushed herself slowly to the left raising her arms high, outstretching her fingers like a cat with its claws out until she had worked her way around the wall from on corner to the next, moving across the length of two long dining-room walls. I followed behind, talking, talking talking. The idea was to at very least give her a re-assuring tone because she surely couldn't make sense of my words.

 My first thought was that this had to do with separation, that her return after the weekend with Mom was in itself the trauma. But the journey around the boundary walls of the dining-room became a journey of discovery.I haven't yet been able to work it all out, but as the screaming, her loud yells of 'No", the wailing and the intensity of the outburst rose and fell, I discovered that we were having a type of conversation. What happened over the weekend we will never know, but it started to dawn..... this was a pattern,. Tonight's most dramatic outburst was pure desperation. It was asif Tammy was saying to me. " Can't you guys work it out? Are you all that stupid that you can't get it? It's like you are all part of the problem and you don't seem to get it. So, maybe you will get it now!!"

 "Do you never hear anything?  I tell you that the staff here have their own agendas and that they don't contact with me in my human condition. I tell you that there is no human being in my life who gives me a connection I associate with ownership. I try to lay claim to you Mr Lodge, you you don't lay claim to me. You keep on with this thing that my mother must fill the things central to my life and only now you see that she can't return any warmth.."

" I can't tell you what happened this weekend and I probably never will, but surely tonight I've screamed it at you like I've never done before.

"I don't want to be here, my needs are not met here and I don't want to be out there. My needs arn't met there either. My being and my longings are trapped."

That Sunday night a neighbour heard Tammy's powerful screaming and called the police. She said that the staff must be abusing a child in the Home.