Her Very Own Angel

There once was a woman who lived in a shitty trailer park, off of a rural country road right down the way from a very small town with exactly one stop light.  Her name was Ruth.  She had at least four children, two boys and two girls.  The oldest boy and girl were born both mentally and physically handicapped.  The Doctors said it was environmental, not genetics, that caused the physical and mental defects in the children.  The other two children were intellectually gifted, but would take very different roads in the lives that they would lead.  We will get to that later.  Back to our story.

I am not sure what the motivation was for Ruth to drink alcohol and take drugs while pregnant with her children.  Maybe it was the late 1970s and early 80s mentality.  Maybe it was the white trash breeding.  We will never know. 

As the narrator of this story, I firmly believe in God.  I believe that for every right there is a wrong.  I am a strong believer in karma, meaning that if a person sends good out into the world, good will happen for them.  For Ruth, I am not sure the reasons for her karma, but her oldest daughter was an angel on Earth.

Patricia Susan Childress was the mentally handicapped daughter of Ruth and Ernie.  Ernie was in the Navy, found out about the baby and high tailed it out of town.   Ruth was a terrible mother.  She neglected her children and eventually abandoned them to her elderly, alcoholic mother.  Soon the state workers came to take them all away in a terrible scene that included screaming and crying.  All four children had different fathers and none of them wanted the children either.  The children became custody of the state and soon found their way into the foster care system.

Patricia and her younger sister Kathy were luckily able to remain together.  Many sibling that enter the foster care system are not so lucky.  Many are split apart, never to see one another again.  Many find homes where they are abused worse than the homes they originally were taken from in the first place.  This was not the case for these two two sisters.

Being that Patricia was mentally and physically handicapped, her sister Kathy took it upon herself at a very young age to be her protector.  Kathy looked after her sister, protected her from kids that bullied her, helped her with her bath and washing her hair.  She also helped her learn to read and write.  Patricia would never mentally grow any older than 10 years old, no matter how many years she lived.  Her physical disabilities included severe muscular dystrophy, so it was incredibly hard for her to grip anything, much less learn to tie her shoes.  She was constantly knocking things over due to her bad coordination.

Patricia had nothing to fear.  Kathy would always be there for her, until they took her away.