In Memorium or The Project's ROCK!

Ironically enough, when Athena quit screaming, so did I. What I'm going to write about takes much courage, but I'm writing, I've decided for the one person who might read this who needs to know they can survive whatever it is they are facing at this moment.
On Memeorial Day Weekend five years ago, I was living alone in project housing on the city's East side. My first section 8 place aquired for me at the hands of the case worker after my childrens father and his brother formally evicted me in civil court. I had spent two months on the street, one month sleeping in my broken down Honda Civic outside an A.A. clubhouse on the Northside, before getting into the projects. The eviction was in part a direct result of my screaming, the other was their shit and their blogs, not mine to tell.
I had nothing but the few items I'd been able to put in my car when I left, and it would be three years before some of my belongings started to trickle back to me at his pace. We were never married, so I had no legal rights to my property. Add to that a formal eviction and it was complicated. My apartment was on the forth floor of the forth building closest to the railroad tracks, and the constant flow of trains after 10:00 p.m. was something I never got used to. I had previously loved the lonesome sound of a train at night, but now in light of my experiences surrounding that time in my life, a trains whistle can pull it all back as vividly as if it were happening right this moment.
Al was with his father, and honestly I can't remember if it was his father's doing, or DHS, or a sick combination, but Al was not allowed to see me except once a week at the supervised visits with Athena. Once a week they would all come to my empty apartment in the projects for one hour. Once a week the case worker, the foster grandmother, Athena, Al, and their father would come there because I had no car. Athena would not leave the foster grandmother's lap, the case worker and foster grandmother would make fun of their father to me behind his back, Al would try to play with his sister then go find a toy and play by himself, their father would spend the visits trying to get Athena's attention in front of Al, and I would sit there internalizing all of it. Week after week this went on and each time we went to court, progressively skewed versions of these visits and ineractions were relayed in the court reports by the case worker, supervisors, service providers and the foster mother. I was in court ordered counseling with a therapist who believed whole heartedly in Gestalt when you'd lost everything that made life worth living. Needless to say our therapeutic relationship was one based on lies, for when the state has control of your children's destiny, the last thing you want to do is be honest with people who are reporting directly to their captors.
The average human being has a breaking point. A point at which they must make the madness stop or so they believe. Some reach it sooner than others, and some, as in the case of concetration camp survivors, amazingly never reach it. Mine came on Memorial Day Weekend in 2001, with a knock on the apartment door next to mine and an indroduction to project housings #1 passtime, the only substance known to man that will drown out the midnight trains, and midnight pains.