This one is a hard post. So I will do my best to be objective. This is my daughter Ashleigh. She was born February 10 @ 4:30 pm by c-section. She was hard coming into this world, and hard living as a child. She was taken by c-section because the doctor wasn’t sure whether she was getting enough oxygen to her system and my reaction to the “contractions” (I say it this way because the contractions were related to back labor. Back labor is in NO way alike to your atypical labor. If you’ve never experienced it… just don’t.) I was put under general anesthesia and she was brought into this world.

Initially her biological father, Richard Almy III was in the picture. Richard and I were 6 months apart in age. He was born in July, I, in December. Richard was by no means an easy person to get along with and although at first, we managed… later it became more difficult. Richard and I married 4 days after Ashleigh was born. Yes, on Valentines Day. (Ugh) We were no longer together as of November of that same year. I didn’t move to Green Bay until the following August. Richard moved to Milwaukee in April of 1997, but moved in with me and Ashleigh in October of 1997 when I first moved into my first apartment in Green Bay. We were hopeful. The hopeful period didn’t last long. Richard and I grew resentful of one another. He started showing his true nature during this point. He was so narcissistic (I am not a clinician… these are just general observations) He was the only one that mattered. And for the longest time, he didn’t want to do any paying for Ashleigh and her upbringing. That all fell to me. To be honest, it was more than difficult. I started noticing that Ashleigh was not developing the way that kids typically do. We had a home health nurse watching her development with me and saw the same things. Her speech and her physical developments were slow. Particularly the speech part. When she couldn’t communicate later on (around 1-2 years old), she’d hit herself on the head or she’d bounce her head off walls, floors, any surface really. She would scream or get audibly annoyed. She even bit herself from time to time. I attempted to take a class at Southwest High School in Green Bay to learn sign language if she wasn’t going to develop the skills to speak.By the time she was 2 years old, she was in a Birth Through Three program in Green Bay. That helped her immensely. I remember being at work and writing down all the words she was now saying at one point. I got to a point to over 100 words and I celebrated at my cubicle.! It was a victory!

Things got progressively worse with Richard and Ashleigh. I was told by people involved in our lives at that time that Richard was keeping Ashleigh locked in her room and throwing ketchup packets into the room when he’d assume she’d be hungry. I woke Richard up one morning so I could catch the bus to go to work and when he awoke, he screamed at me. He screamed “No one is more important than me!” (Do you see the classic narcissism now?) And one night when I got back from work, I found a polaroid picture of Ashleigh with ace bandages tying her hands behind her back and her feet together. I was mortified. In the wrong hands, I could have lost my child. And in the right hands, I could see what was happening to Ashleigh while I was at work. And this was just one clue. Not the entire picture.

I took the picture to confront Richard and he indicated that although the picture didn’t show it, Ashleigh was laughing and having fun. That night while Ashleigh slept, I took a bath and cried. This was not right. Eric and I had gotten together again. I initially moved to Green Bay for Eric. When Richard mentioned getting together with me, I thought I had an obligation to try to allow mother and father to be together for the betterment of Ashleigh. So I thought I should try it. Eventually, I realized what a mistake that was. However, Richard wasn’t leaving. Eric moved in and a Jerry Springer-esque lifestyle we were living. Still married to Richard, might I add.

I got pregnant with Darrian around early 1998. Darrian was born in December of that year and a few months into Darrian’s life, she had gotten RSV (a particularly bad respiratory infection). Richard refused to smoke outside of the apartment we all lived in. His only concession was that he would put a towel under the crack of the door to keep the smoke in.

Richard did move out and boy, were we happy. At one point, we had arranged for Ashleigh to go stay with Richard and his father, Richard Almy Sr. Richard’s father was more of a stable sort in the time I knew him. If Richard would have told me he was going to have her by himself, I would have said no and fought him in court. Within a short span of time, Ashleigh was removed from his care by social services. I had to go to Upper Michigan to try to get Ashleigh out of foster care. Apparently someone made an allegation that Richard was smoking pot around Ashleigh, hurting her physically, and having her drink alcohol. The witness was later found to be not a reliable witness and her statement was struck. The prosecutor didn’t like Richard. On his side was the fact that Ashleigh still had a profound speech delay and she was only 3 years old at the time. No charges were sought by the county (much to the prosecutor’s chagrin), Ashleigh was released to Eric and I and we went back home to Green Bay.

Ashleigh’s behavior got worse. Richard tried calling to talk to Ashleigh, but Ashleigh refused to talk to him. And since things had been the way they were, I was not going to force her to speak with him. (He later said that it was me who held Ashleigh back from him.) By the age of five, things had just gotten incredibly difficult. Ashleigh wouldn’t abide closeness and affection. It actually got her quite agitated. She and her sister were at odds usually, although there were times where they loved each other. We enlisted the help of a social worker who got us connected with a neuropsych and he did an evaluation. A very long evaluation. And the result of that was that Ashleigh was diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder or RAD for short. It appeared that the dysfunctional relationship she had with her biological father caused her to not have the bonding to the figures that were supposed to be important to her in her life. She was scared to formulate those bonds and would push people away instead. Ashleigh was continuing her education and potty training took FOREVER! She suffered from nighttime enuresis and she was treated for it after a while, but it was frustrating.

As she grew, her ability or desire to take care of herself (hygeine) and the ability to stay out of dangerous situations grew and grew. She initially trusted people quite easily. When they tried to stay in her life, she pushed them away. The only way she didn’t do that is if they had something that benefited her. And usually she’d take advantage of that. The abuse towards her sister was both emotional and physical and it took a toll on all of us. Ashleigh’s first inpatient psychiatric hospitalization was before she was out of grade school. And the inpatient hospitalizations just kept coming. Eventually it was as if it was our only respites. We could breathe when she was inpatient. When she wasn’t in the hospital, everyone was walking on eggshells waiting for the next shoe to be thrown, not dropped.

Ashleigh tended to scratch herself. Clinicians called her a cutter. She pierced herself. She engaged in sexual relationships that were inappropriate. She wanted to have a baby in the worst way. Fortunately for a time we had her on birth control. That only lasted so long. The onslaught of emotional stress was impacting all of us. None of us were happy. I slept when I was home and if my stress level had gotten too much. Eric was taking the brunt along with Darrian. And when I wasn’t sleeping, I was playing an mmorpg called World of Warcraft. I became hopelessly addicted.

When things had reached a breaking point, Ashleigh had called CPS to report Eric and I for being abusive to her. After everything Eric and I had tried to do for her in the name of love, we now had to answer for what was happening in our own apartment. CPS soon came to learn that Ashleigh was more trouble than we were and things started to change in our world. While we were still in regular contact with the crisis center and the inpatient hospitalizations hadn’t stopped entirely, we were now engaging in at home meetings with therapists and social workers. We had day treatment programs for Ashleigh. My appointment book became crammed with meetings between all of this. And then shelter care became a reality. And then a JIPS petition through the Brown County Court…. And in the end, Ashleigh wound up in foster care because the county realized that there was no way the dynamic in our home was going to improve enough. It was toxic in our home. And we needed way more help to accomplish our goals.

The day Ashleigh was placed in the home with the foster family, I think my mind almost broke. I was jealous, angry, and hurt. My mind was racing about how someone else might be more competent than I was. I was truly not handling this transition well. And although I didn’t disagree with the social workers findings, I just felt like if I had done ONE other thing. Just one, I could have made more of a difference. Ashleigh began going to a different school than the one she had been going to before, and eventually even graduated from said school. When she was 18, she was placed on her own in an apartment of her very own. Eric and I, along with low income resources and her former foster mother attempted to help get Ashleigh what she needed in her apartment to give her a good start. After she moved in, I didn’t visit her apartment. Ashleigh’s willingness to clean her surroundings, let alone herself had been terrible. I knew Ashleigh wouldn’t try, despite having everything at her disposal to do so.

Within a few months, Ashleigh was kicked out of her apartment and it was condemned because of the overall condition of it. Ashleigh now had to figure out what to do. I was still in a place where I was trying to help her navigate living on her own, but she wasn’t having any of it. And I’m not entirely sure when it happened, but Ashleigh eventually became pregnant. And by February of 2017, she was in New Mexico. Pregnant and homeless. Ashleigh had spent a few years being homeless off and on. And eventually she told me she blamed me for her homelessness. That if I had just let her stay with my husband and I, it wouldn’t have been a reality for her. I normally would roll over and take her verbal abuse because I didn’t want to become combative. I had found myself in a position where I had had enough. I raised my voice and told her that I had done my time. She wanted so badly to be an adult for so long, now it was her turn to be an adult. She wound up hanging up on me in irritation and really, hearing the truth.

I stopped talking to her for a long time. It wasn’t until I was on facebook and was messaged by a mutual friend of Ashleigh’s and mine. She told me to watch a facebook live video that Ashleigh had posted on one of her many accounts. I did as she requested and about two minutes in, Ashleigh tells some random stranger that ‘my sister is dead now, yea, my parents did that. ‘ I was completely at a loss. While Ashleigh had physically hit me before, by her saying this to any captive audience – she hit me, below the belt. And this hurt in a way that none of her other abuses hurt before. She was, in my estimation accusing my husband and I of murdering Darrian.

While Darrian was in the hospital, we literally had the Green Bay Police Department’s detectives investigating this happening. They requested drug tests being done on Darrian. Not that Darrian was a drug user, but they wanted to make sure that Darrian hadn’t ingested any drugs without her knowledge. They wanted to make sure that no one hurt her. The detectives came to understand that this was just an unfortunate set of circumstances and let everything else be handled by the physicians and nurses on staff. And her death, while tragically early in her life – was not homicide. But no one really knew that that didn’t know the details. The venom she was spewing was unforgivable. I was… done.

Ashleigh had baby #1, and #2 and both were removed from her custody because neither her or her boyfriend at the time could be trusted. And eventually they were adopted out to another family. My family and I were propositioned by the social worker involved to see if we wanted to raise said children, but I could not. #1 – Ashleigh would find out and she’d find me. My life would become a nightmare all over again when she started to try to harass me over the kids. #2 – I couldn’t afford it. #3 – I was still dealing with depression, anxiety, and PTSD over what had happened raising Ashleigh. What if either or both of those kids started exhibiting behaviors like Ashleigh had shown in her youth. I literally could not, by obligation of family do that to myself again. I knew in my heart of hearts that I loved them, but I needed to become involved when they were old enough to want to find me. The fear was just too intense and I could not be the appropriate fit for those children. #4 – Thinking about it now, Ashleigh needed to realize that not everyone she knew was going to fix her mistakes. That although there may be a very well intentioned person or family to adopt the children, her family was not going to step up and wipe away her errors as if it didn’t exist. We were not going to make it less painful for her. She would HAVE to learn the hard way. The consequences for not thinking before she acted.

By June of last year (2019), I saw and spoke to Ashleigh for the first time in a long time. My brother Tim had made me aware she was being bussed back to Green Bay by a friend of hers. Once I knew she was coming back, I started making plans of action. I contemplated what I would say if I saw her. My place of employment being on the bus line, I told my boss that – if she comes looking for me, I’m NOT here. But then, visiting a friend of Eric’s and mine, Ashleigh saw our car. She knew it was us and walked up the driveway to the door. She knocked for a few minutes maybe and no one offered to get up. Eventually I did get up and go outside to talk with her. All of my pre-conversation planning had gone out the window. I was angry! No, I was severely pissed off. All this rattling off about how we killed Darrian. How I caused her to be homeless. How .. blah blah blah. Lack of responsibility… blah blah blah. Anxiety, depression, worry… etc. Blah blah blah. That’s probably about what she heard. I told her everything negative that I had been feeling. And I wasn’t quiet about it. I had raised my voice. And I didn’t care. In the end, I told her I loved her and what it would require for me to be involved in her life again. That this was not an easy fix. We walked away from one another and I felt like a weight had literally been lifted off my shoulders. I told her EXACTLY what I wanted to say and she didn’t have an opportunity to hang up, she didn’t walk off. And she didn’t argue with me.

Ashleigh has since had baby #3 with the man she’s still living with in Green Bay. My brother Tim is still talking to her and would like to try to get Ashleigh and I talking again. He says that Ashleigh has changed. Or at least for now she’s changed. She’s becoming more mature. She’s working at McDonalds, and she doesn’t hang up on him anymore. They talk and she listens to his constructive criticism. Everything that I hear from Tim, I have to try to factor how maybe the discomfort she’s felt REALLY is how things got her to change, if that’s possible. Her diagnosis are severe (borderline personality disorder, delusional disorder persecutory type, depression and anxiety), but it doesn’t mean that she’s always acting on it if she tries. And by tries, I mean therapy (dbt therapy) – actively. Not just going. She needs to want the help. She needs a support system. For herself and her now grown family. And while it’s hard for me to see that in her, I don’t talk to her right now. So I wouldn’t. I can only see what the past has shown me. And that’s not entirely fair. So in the interim, I have to mentally prepare myself for what might be to come.

Wow…. long post.

I think that catches you up to speed.

Thank you for reading!

Me