Fear the Blue Dot

After the manic photo purge in 1972, Mom started getting paranoid.   Following our nightly drives to eat dinner at various places, she deviated from her normal route home to take us past the Hillcrest Receiving Home. It was located on Third Avenue, in the part of Hillcrest that is now a major medical complex. It was stationed between Mercy and County hospitals and was within walking distance from Eagle Street. A sprawling county building behind very high chain link fencing, it housed children who had been taken into protective custody because they were abused at home or without  someone to care for them.  Usually they would stay there on a short term basis until the courts figured out what to do with them.  Most ended up in foster homes, others ended up back with their families. Mom would drive slowly past this children's shelter and tell me about all the terrible things that happened to kids who were put there.

She told me that big sister Susan was taken away and put there because she told her school counselor lies about her life on Eagle Street. While inside those walls, she caught head lice and got pregnant. And she never got to live at home again.  The picture she painted for me was terrifying.  The last thing I wanted was to get locked up, get lice and have a baby.  So when Mom started to warn me that there was a possibility that my two younger siblings and I would end up there, I wanted to know why.  Mom finally told me that Tim had gone to court to declare her an unfit mother, and wanted us kids taken away from her, but he didn't want to take us.  He just wanted us locked up.  That, she explained, is the reason she chopped up all the photos of Tim and burned them a few months earlier.

One day, a county vehicle drove past our house as we were sitting on the front porch.  All county trucks and cars had a distinctive round blue dot on the front doors. 

A present day blue dot.  They still make me nervous for a nanosecond

Mom pointed this symbol out and hustled me inside the house.  She warned me that a car with that same blue dot would stop at the house and take us kids away.  She instructed me to grab my siblings and run to hide whenever we saw one of those cars. So for the next several months, I went outside with my stomach in knots.  I stopped to watch every car or truck that ventured into our neighborhood to see if it had the blue dot, and a few times it did.  It never stopped at our house, but I ran inside anyhow. And I made sure I never complained about Mom or anything else to my teachers at school, because I didn't want a blue dot car showing up there to snatch me out of my classroom.

During our frequent evening drives past the Receiving Home, Mom would tell me that I needed to know how to escape the place and how to find my way home, so she would always drive the same route from the Hillcrest Receiving Home to Eagle Street so that I would know how to navigate my way back home on foot.

Fear is a effective tool of control, and Mom knew how to use it to her advantage.  Thanks to her stories about Susan's Receiving Home experience, and the constant threat of the blue dot cars,  I wanted nothing to do with Tim, had no trust for authority figures, and really felt like it was our little family of four against the world. I learned not to trust teachers, cops, counselors, or anyone else.