Besides, who reads it? Is anyone even benefiting from the story of my daughter’s horrible illness? I can’t begin to know.

Keira, preparing to leave our hotel room on June 24

In issue 24, I told you Keira left the group home that the CARE Court placed her in on June 24. She packed her things and left in late July. At the time I didn’t know where she was. But not long after, I learned that she had gone to a homeless shelter. About 10 days ago, Keira told me that her fourth phone was gone.

She broke the first one in December. She lost the second one in June. A third one mysteriously stopped working in July, and a few days later someone stole her fourth one. Russian spies, according to Keira.

Of course, she also believes we’re being targeted for genocide because of our ancestry. And our genes are being mutilated, or our DNA stolen, and sold around world. So that other people get our intelligence, our creativity, our money. If the last year has taught me nothing else, it’s taught me that many of the conspiracy theories you read about on some social media site or another are borne of mental illness.

Now she has no phone. Given that she also has no income whatsoever, I’m still trying to decide whether I should buy her another one.

In the meantime, I recently spoke to a friend from West Virginia. She’s read every issue of this series so far, so when she said that readers may not understand how sick my daughter is, I was surprised.

How could I not have conveyed that? Is it that I’m too close to this story?

Her comment came as we spoke about Keira’s inability to keep in touch with her CARE Court team. Or anyone else except me, apparently.

“She has an appointment about housing in September,” I said, “but without her phone, she probably won’t remember it.”

Then I elaborated, relating one reason Keira can’t get Social Security for her disability: I insisted she apply, but she can’t remember to check her email, and she forgets to go to the post office, where her mail arrives addressed to “general delivery.” Thus, she fails to complete and return any of the required government paperwork. And even when Keira has a working phone, she doesn’t remember to check her voicemail. On top of that, many times her phone was only an arm’s length away—but she was so busy talking to the voices that she didn’t even hear it ring.

When it comes to the pain she has at various times, anywhere in her body, Keira refuses to let me take her to a doctor. “No doctor can do anything. This pain in my spine is from the electromagnetic satellite beams the Russians shoot into me.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to think of a counter-argument. “But what if your officials told me that the doctors can repair the damage from the satellites? Would you let me take you to a clinic then?”

Keira turns away and begins talking to people who aren’t there. “Would you please get my mom away from the Russians? She think I have schizophrenia and I know she’s helping them.”

Her intelligence and an uncanny ability to mask her symptoms has turned Keira into a chameleon. No matter what I say, or how I try to reason with her, my daughter twists my word of concern into a nonsensical narrative that makes sense to her.

“Your readers think it’s not that bad. They don’t hear that, what you see and hear. You should tell them,” my friend told me.

Do the scenes I just described make it hit home now? Can you see how very sick Keira is?

• • •

The problem with continuing to write about Keira’s illness is that I skipped from December 2025 to June 2026—which omitted six months of details. Important information about the criminal charges, and the body cam footage that should have exonerated her (had her incompetent-to-stand-trial status not done so). Along with other moving parts, such as the real reason no one wants to involuntarily commit anyone here in California. Not just my daughter, but any person who has a mental illness.

The other problem is that I’m just tired of reliving the last year, every time I sit down to write. And that is why, when approaching a difficult subject matter, nonfiction writers often wait a long time before starting on anything that is painful. The passing of time gives us enough emotional distance so we won’t be triggered once we pick up our pen.

I did that with my memoir, Sister of Silence. I’ve also done it with other challenging episodes in my life—many of which have yet to see the light of day. Many of which may never do so.

Part of me would like to think that I can continue to write this personal series, which is not so much memoir as it is serious nonfiction. Only time will tell. Perhaps I will know by next Monday, as September gets underway—and this medical emergency enters month 13.

You can read Issue 26 below:

Standing on a ledge, until you’re pushed over the edge

Sunday marked the one-year anniversary of my daughter’s downhill descent into paranoia and psychosis. I was still in Hawaii last year on August 16 when Keira was falsely arrested. But I arrived in Southern California not long after. From that day until now, the entire situation has been a huge challenge.

What does “like this” entail? Well, it’s living 24/7 with someone who doesn’t know they’re sick. This is called anosognosia and it’s part and parcel of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Not the same as denial, because anosognosia causes a person to be unaware they are even sick.

Therefore, the sick person doesn’t believe they have anything wrong with them. So why on earth would they need a doctor? Or be admitted to hospital? Or even take a little blue pill?

And living with someone like that, day and night, is what some people would call crazy making. So how did I keep myself sane? What did I do to survive, mentally and emotionally?

It’s simple: during the last year, I’ve gone on as I have my entire adult life. As I’ve been doing ever since I realized I was trapped in an extremely violent marriage, circa 1987. I have 15 practices and habits that have held me in good stead. They are likely why I can still laugh and find joy in life. In spite of living with a weight so heavy that it has, more often than not, left me feeling like Atlas.

Remember him? Atlas is the deity who, in Greek mythology, rebelled against the god tribe. Thanks to Zeus, the top dog—oh, excuse me, god—at the time, Atlas was punished and made to hold up the sky. Forever!

Since then, the famous marble sculpture known as the Farnese Atlas came into being. That amazing piece of artwork depicts Atlas, who bears the entire weight of the Earth on his back and shoulders. If you want to see this ancient sculpture, you’ll need to do so in Italy. (Or you can just buy a much smaller knockoff, at Walmart or Amazon or practically anywhere.)

But I digress. One year of caring for and living with an untreated person whose schizophrenia has made them very sick has left me feeling like Atlas: on bent knee, stooped over, barely able to keep going many days.

To say nothing of the bureaucratic red tape that has made my job one hundred times more difficult. To say nothing of the mostly well-meaning friends who confused their opinion with my reality. And of the people who were prejudiced and not well-meaning at all—and whose interference nearly got my daughter killed.

Actually, the weight of dealing with other people’s ignorance, unkindness, and outright malfeasance has been heavier than the weight of tending to my daughter’s needs. And that other weight has come at great financial cost. Which is really sad, when you think about it.

Thus I’ve had a lot of stress, anxiety, and anger. Emotions that I’ve had to acknowledge, allow myself to feel, write about, and close the book on. Because what else can I do, really?

Share

I hope these 15 practices and habits will help you, too. Especially if you too feel like you’re hanging on for dear life.

1. I don’t let other people’s opinions affect how I live my life, when those people weigh in on my personal business.

   • You will recognize this when someone says, “You should” or “You can’t,” about something that is none of their business. And when you know perfectly well what you should and can do. (There’s been a lot of that going around the last year.)

   • People need to understand when they are overstepping, and inserting their noses into places they shouldn’t.

   • You need to ignore them.

2. I talk to God.

   • Because, like Margaret found out in Judy Blume’s famous book, there really is a God. And he’s alive and well, in spite of what many people believe.

   • Talking to God is also what many people call prayer. I can tell you for a fact that there have been many times I’ve prayed—and within hours or even a day, that prayer is answered. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Neither did Isaac Newton. (And supposedly Albert Einstein.)

3. I ask for help.

   • Forget your pride. When you need help, you have no time for pride.

   • One of the hardest things to do is ask another person for help. I don’t like doing this, but I recognize it’s often the difference between life and death.

   • It’s easier to ask for help if you remind yourself that getting help is the only way you can keep helping someone else.

4. I read the Bible.

   • The Bible has gotten a bum rap. But it covers every topic imaginable—including money, happiness, death, even safety, good hygiene, and how to care for animals humanely.

   • It is one of the best pieces of literature ever written, so if you want to improve your writing, then consider it a good craft book.

   • It has some excellent advice about how to pray, and how to handle problems.

5. I hug a tree.

   • Tree hugging really is a thing—it’s a healthy way to lower your stress and release good hormones.

   • Anything you do in nature can accomplish the same thing.

   • Feeling the sand between my toes, watching a gorgeous sunset, touching the leaves of bushes and feeling the silky petals of a flower as I walk past various flora and fauna soothes me almost immediately. Because nature—unlike electronic devices—does reset our equilibrium.

6. I turn my devices off.

   • Or I change the settings so I can’t receive notifications. For at least a portion of every day. During this time, I take a walk, do chores, or read something that has been printed on paper.

   • Not being tied to my phone or my laptop for every minute of every day gives me a feeling of freedom like nothing else.

7. I have a spot of tea, as the British are wont to say. Or coffee.

   • I don’t do this just to wet my whistle. I do it to savor the flavor. Or the temperature, depending on what the weather’s like.

   • You can set aside a few minutes to enjoy the break, and delight in the pleasure of a delicious beverage. To watch nature outside your window, or dream about the future.

8. I call a friend.

   • These are the few solid friends who truly get you, and who might even be more like your folk than your own biological family. (Or the people you came from.)

   • I have called a few select friends over the past year to vent or to cry. They gave me much needed feedback and helped put things into perspective.

   • They also call out people, attitudes, and behaviors that are hypocritical, reinforcing my own belief system.

   • They also remind me that I’ve gotten through challenging experiences in the past—and I will again.

9. I read a book.

   • Not just any book, but one that gets you out of your own head.

   • Anytime you read a story that transports you to another world, it’s sure to make real life easier, when you must get back to it.

   • Reading a few pages of anything interesting motivates you to keep working hard on your problem—so you can get back to the story the next chance you get.

10. I exercise.

    • That’s one of the reasons I was doing 40-80 flights of stairs at the beach, when I was living in a hotel there.

    • Exercise lowers your blood sugar, which I’ve found makes me less cranky.

    • Working out also releases endorphins, adrenaline, and the growth hormone known as somatotropin.

    • In other words, exercise can burn off stress and make you feel good.

11. I take a siesta.

    • Or not, because sometimes I just lie down on the bed, and close my eyes for a few minutes. This allows me to shut out the world.

    • When your eyes are closed, you’re receiving less external stimulation.

    • Everything feels lighter and easier when I get up, whether I slept or not. And I have more gusto to get back to work.

12. I journal about everything that’s happening.

    • Yes, if you’ve been mean to me or hurt my daughter or cost me money, you’re in my diary. Not in a good way.

    • Seriously, though, journaling is a valuable way to process your own feelings.

    • Journaling about my fear, angst, and every other emotion is one of the oldest habits I’ve had. And it does wonders for improving my mood, and helping to ease the stress.

13. I forgive people when possible.

    • This isn’t for them. It’s for me.

    • Holding grudges will kill you, but it does nothing to them.

14. I let go of harmful emotions.

    • I do this by recognizing that people in the wrong will eventually get their comeuppance. One way or another.

    • That gives me peace of mind.

15. I remind myself that “this too shall pass.”

    • Doing this gives me hope, because it reminds me that nothing in life is forever.

    • This means that one day—hopefully sooner rather than later—Keira will be well again. I am certain of this.

• • •

That’s it! These 15 practices and habits are how I’ve survived mentally and emotionally since I was maybe 24. And how I kept myself sane during the last year. How I could continue fighting the ridiculous red tape the government has used to tie knots in everything, while simultaneously making sure Keira ate and drank.

I keep doing them because I intend to keep laughing. To keep finding joy in life. In spite of feeling like I’m holding up the sky.

You can read last week’s below:

Standing on a ledge, until you’re pushed over the edge

Last year, two attorneys helped me navigate this complex yet ridiculous mental health fiasco; neither one was paid a penny.

The first attorney was the woman I mentioned in issue 17. On Aug. 27, 2025, she told me about something called a mental health diversion.

By then I had only known about my daughter’s paranoia and delusions for two days. Obviously, we had no diagnosis. But even that early in my daughter’s journey, that attorney said the situation was “very serious … it’s really tough because (your daughter) doesn’t have insight yet into the problem. And you can’t force her to do anything.”

In the diversion program, she said an attorney “declares a doubt,” by telling the court they doubt their client is competent to stand trial. If the subsequent psychiatric evaluation finds that a criminal defendant has a serious mental health diagnosis that is related to the actions that led to the arrest, they can then get mental health treatment.

Needless to say, I felt a sense of relief when I heard those words. Because a hospital is exactly where Keira needed to be. Even though I only learned how sick she was on August 25, I knew that she required hospitalization. Because she has refused to take any pharmaceuticals, as well as most over-the-counter meds, for decades. Which is how I knew that getting her to take an antipsychotic of her own accord would be next to impossible.

Another benefit of a mental health diversion is that it wipes the defendant’s record clean. “The arrest would be like it never happened,” the attorney said.

A defendant’s case ends up being diverted when the client is deemed mentally unable to take part in the criminal proceedings. However, most clients are unhappy when their attorney takes this action. Because the client—who lacks insight into her condition, like Keira—thinks the attorney is working against his or her wishes. In other words, declaring a doubt can leave a client feeling betrayed.

That lawyer then told me about another, more extreme option: to ultimately go for conservatorship. The word ultimate is important, because trying to get a person conserved appears to be the last legal action available. It is reserved for cases where every other attempt to help has failed. There are different types of conservatorship, depending on a person needs. Does she need someone else to make her legal, financial, or medical decisions?

I’ve been told repeatedly that it can be nearly impossible to get a conservatorship that will allow me to make Keira’s medical decisions. This is due to the high value the State of California places on someone’s personal freedom and liberty. Far more than any other state I’m aware of. Which is why, to date, every time I’ve tried to go that route, I’ve hit a brick wall.

Apparently I’m not alone. The famous singer Cher (whose amazing voice I tried to imitate, when I was just a kid) recently petitioned the court for conservatorship for her son, Elijah Blue. This was the second time Cher has done so. The court denied her first petition in 2024. Earlier this year, it denied her second petition.

• • •

The second attorney with valuable advice came three weeks later. On September 17. He was with the Legal Aid Society, and told me I could file a CARE petition. The CARE Act is a new program here in California, for people like Keira.

Here’s a brief primer about this civil court program that was specifically designed for mentally ill people who are in dire need of help. And who might die without intervention. CARE is an acronym for the Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment Act, which created the CARE Court. The CARE Court is a team of people from three agencies: behavioral health services (formerly known as mental health services), the public defender’s office, and the Superior Court of California. It became operational in 2022, after Senate Bill 1338 became law. Every county in the state was required to have a CARE Court in place by Dec. 1, 2024.

Unfortunately, I was so overwhelmed by everything that I forgot about the Legal Aid attorney’s advice to file a CARE Act petition until the situation had grown quite dire.

Until Keira had stopped eating and drinking because she believed her food was poisoned, leading to her lose so much weight that you could see her skeletal bones up and down her back.

Until she unknowingly walked into traffic in November, more than once.

Until I discovered that she had stopped buying food because she believed the people who were trying to kill her had taken away her government benefits.

The beauty of the CARE program, according to the legal aid attorney who told me about it, is that CARE “offers wraparound services.” And it can provide a client with housing “in two to four weeks, maybe sooner, depending on what (your daughter) wants.”

Wraparound services supposedly means all-encompassing. I doubt that, given what I’ve seen, but I might be wrong.

At the time, though, I was stunned. I asked if I had heard him correctly. He insisted that yes, housing in two to four weeks was possible, if the CARE Court admitted my daughter into its program.

As soon as I left his office, I began researching. I knew that housing was paramount. That’s because, as I still maintain, anyone with a mental illness must first have stability, before anything else. Housing equals stability. But without housing, these poor souls will never be stable enough to be functioning members of society. So in my mind, housing was just as important for Keira as was getting her medical treatment.

I found a great deal of material from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office, touting what they claim is a novel idea, available only in California. For example, this partial press release is from Sept. 14, 2022:

Even though the program boasts that first responders or anyone else with the authority to do so can refer such individuals to CARE, not once did one of those people refer my daughter to this program. I had to do it. It took me maybe one month of doing nothing but compiling dates with corresponding evidence about my daughter’s behaviors, to complete. To write a cohesive narrative that would give the CARE Court a true picture of just why Keira needed its help. Why it was vital for her to be admitted into the program.

I have a lot of regrets. None of which I can do a blasted thing about. I should have tried to get help earlier, so my brain would not have been so addled by everything. I should have done that because Keira’s mental condition progressed very quickly, leaving her childlike and lacking the cognitive ability to understand reality. Then, I could have submitted the CARE petition sooner. If I had more money, I could have hired an attorney who would have done the bulk of my work for me.

Could have, should have, would have.

There I go again. But it no longer matters, because we are stuck with the status quo. Whether that is good or bad is anyone’s guess, and—as of today, August 10, 2026—remains to be seen.

As it was, given how very sick Keira was, but also because I was trying to give her public defender a chance to do his job, I was unable to file Keira’s petition until December 18. My petition on my daughter’s behalf was 43 pages long, and included this statement:

From late August until now, I have seen my daughter go from coherent to incoherent. She could meet me for coffee or go to restaurants and the beach with me. Now she refuses to do anything, saying she needs to finish writing her report about the torture so she can get it to “the US FBI.”

Since September 17, I have called at least 14 times for a mobile crisis unit or 911 to respond, hoping they will do a 5150 (psychiatric emergency) hold. To date, they have ignored my concerns.

My petition contained ample evidence. I believe that’s why the CARE Court immediately ordered Keira to have a mental health evaluation. When I think back about the two major holidays that occurred during this time, I’m still amazed that the CARE Court acted so quickly. Which told me the much-publicized CARE Court realized just how serious Keira’s condition was.

So I had very high hopes.

Her evaluation began not long after the New Year, on January 9. But it couldn’t be completed—because Keira was too paranoid and delusional when the CARE team arrived for them to finish her evaluation.

And although she was not officially admitted into the program until March, I have to give them high marks for effort. Because they immediately began working with Keira. In fact, just like the Legal Aid attorney predicted, they offered her housing two weeks later. I was on Cloud Nine, especially when Keira eagerly accepted their offer. Packed her bags and let them lead her away in their vehicle. Away from the Airbnb where we had been together.

This is it. This is the turning point I’ve been waiting for!

I finally believed Keira was going to get better. Because she had trained professionals who were helping her. Advocating for her. Taking my place as her confidante, and meeting her needs.

Or so I thought. Because that’s what a program worker told me.

Still, I remained hopeful—right up until Keira arrived at her new home, and found that the other residents living there were in a drug rehab program. Until she called me, whispering in case someone overheard her. Because, she said, “they might be part of the assassination plot.” I encouraged her to stay the night, thinking that with the dawning of a new day, things would look better. Brighter.

I mean, don’t they always? Doesn’t a new day usually help us put yesterday into perspective?

Five hours later Keira showed up on the doorstep of the Airbnb. “It’s a halfway house. They’re either drug addicts or mentally ill,” she said, “and I can’t live with people like that.”

The irony was not lost on me.

(To be continued …)

Standing on a ledge, until you’re pushed over the edge

Before I answer the burning question in everyone’s mind and tell you where Keira is, here is the poem I wrote sometime in March. Oh wait, did I forget to tell you that I dabble in poetry from time to time? I do, but not very often. But this one sums up our life together during the last year, so I decided to share it.

It was purely stream of consciousness, which I wrote in a few minutes, after meditating on the sheer impossibility of the life we were then living, going from one hotel to another. Trapped by each other’s reality: Keira’s illness vs. Daleen’s determination to treat the illness.

Two realities which were diametrically opposed. I’m calling this poem The Trio.

And now, onto my partially compiled timeline for this fiasco. It shows how many times I tried to get someone to treat my daughter. As I pulled this data together, I realized that my numbers were off. I didn’t call 911 fourteen times, as I thought. I was blown away to see that I’ve actually tried to get Keira help at least 20 times. I don’t have the final count, but by early December, the number was already at 15.

As a refresher, or for any new readers to this nonfiction series, here are the pivotal dates from August 16 to Dec. 11, 2025:

August 16 – San Diego County female deputy sheriff falsely accuses Keira of felony assault with a deadly weapon and hit and run; subsequent wrongful arrest, with bail set at $50,000

August 18 – Keira’s van (her home) was released from an impound lot, after paying a $396 fee

August 24 – I flew from my home in Oahu, Hawaii, to support Keira in San Diego, California.

August 25 – Keira’s criminal arraignment

August 26 – A public defender was appointed to represent her.

September 2 – Keira and I met with her public defender for the first time.

September 3 – Her readiness hearing was rescheduled for November 3.

Here is the timeline I promised you, complete with a few details about the first responders, doctors, and police who failed to help Keira during that same time period:

1. Sept. 17, 2025 – The first time I called a mobile crisis unit, and asked them to respond occurred after I realized Keira’s paranoia and delusions were growing stronger. But Keira told them she was fine and didn’t need any resources. She also refused to let the crisis workers talk to me.

2. Nov. 3, 2025 – At her readiness hearing in criminal court, Keira told her public defender and me that she is in a witness protection program for crime victims. The Court subsequently ordered Keira to be evaluated for competency on December 9. After her hearing, outside in the parking lot, Keira said she couldn’t eat, “because they might poison my food.”

   I asked deputies who were on security detail to go outside and evaluate Keira, who sat there on a bench in broad daylight talking to people who weren’t there. They shrugged and said, “She looks okay to us.”

3. Nov. 3, 2025 – Two hours later, I called 911, because Keira was still there in the parking lot, talking out loud to the voices inside her head. She did that for 5 hours. No one ever showed up. In the meantime, Keira got in her van and drove away. I could only pray that she didn’t kill anyone, in her dangerous mental state.

4. Nov. 6, 2025 – I found Keira two hours away in Murrieta, which is in Riverside County, looking dazed and confused. She was still wearing the same clothes she had worn to court. Notably, she refused to eat the fresh fruit and veggies in her hotel room, saying the room was being surveilled and the food was contaminated. So I took her to get a smoothie. I watched her walk into traffic twice, without even looking for cars. I told her to stop, but she kept walking, oblivious.

   I tried calling for CBAT, the emergency psychiatric response team there. But the psych person wasn’t on duty. The two non-psych team members who did respond tried talking to Keira, who asserted her rights. They told me that because of that, and also because she denied being suicidal, they couldn’t do anything.

   “Next time you call,” they said as they left, “ask for the police to come out, because they have the authority to hold her.”

   Keira was upset that I had again called the authorities, and told me to leave.

5. Nov. 6, 2025 (15 minutes later) – I did exactly what they two men suggested: I called 911 again. But the female officer who found Keira at a nearby gas station said my daughter was in a hurry to leave in her vehicle, so she couldn’t really do an evaluation.

6. Nov. 11, 2025 – Keira called me from Los Angeles, said she was being tortured, and that she didn’t think she would survive. I drove straight there. When I arrived, she couldn’t remember the last time she ate. She was afraid to drink from an unopened water bottle that I gave her, saying it was poisoned. I called the mobile psychiatric crisis unit. For the first time, she actually spoke to mental health professionals. At great length, she told them about the paranoid delusions. But when she said she was not suicidal, they refused to 5150 her and told me to take her to hospital. She refused to go.

7. Nov. 13, 2025 – I texted someone with the CBAT team in Riverside County, since Keira had returned to Murrieta. She could not remember what she last ate, or when. It was so hot that for the first time in two months, Keira was not wearing layers of big, sloppy clothing that covered her entire body. She was actually wearing shorts and a lightweight shirt. When I saw her bones protruding from under her skin, I was so alarmed that I took photos, and then sent them to the first responder. She replied, saying that Keira “looks really fit.” Thus why she didn’t think Keira would meet the criteria for a 5150. I then pleaded with Keira to go to hospital, because I was sure she was dehydrated. She refused.

8. Nov. 19, 2025 – I dropped Keira off at Scripps Memorial Hospital emergency room, at her request. I spoke about that negligence in Issue 19. I’m counting it as two separate events because I tried to get Keira treatment twice while she was there.

9. Nov. 20, 2025 – A Scripps Memorial psychiatric liaison discharged Keira, after telling me that without a durable power of attorney or conservatorship, I had no authority.

10. Nov. 21, 2025 – I had to leave Keira in her van, but because of the cold weather and her very childish mental state, I called 911 and asked them if they could keep an eye out for her. A Carlsbad police officer came out, took her photo, and wrote up a report. They couldn’t locate her.

11. Dec. 2, 2025 – Keira asked me to take her to the San Diego County District Attorney, to report the deputy for falsely arresting her. When Keira told an employee there that celebrities and other people were targeting her for assassination, the employee pulled me aside, and told me he was going make a referral with PERT.

12. Dec. 5, 2025 – Someone from PERT finally called and told me they were coming to evaluate Keira. But Keira wasn’t with me, so they couldn’t.

13. Dec. 9, 2025 – The morning of the criminal court-ordered competency evaluation, Keira stood outside yelling and swearing at her cell phone, causing a public disturbance. Then she broke the phone. I was not allowed to be present, or give any testimony to the psychiatrist who evaluated her. Afterward I asked sheriff’s deputies at the courthouse to evaluate Keira for a 5150 hold. They said she was fine. When I said, again, that she was wholly delusional and needed help, they responded like many police officers have over the last year: “It’s not against the law to be psychotic.”

14. Dec. 9, 2025 (30 minutes later) – Keira went missing in San Diego. I called 911. Of the numerous times I’ve called for help in San Diego County, that was the only time a PERT team member did respond. Unlike the Riverside County expert, she was alarmed upon seeing the photos of Keira’s emaciated body. Upon reading about Keira’s clearly dangerous behavior. Which is why area police agencies were notified that she was an “at-risk missing person.” The next day, I spoke to the detective assigned to case. She was very frustrated because she could tell from the records that Keira needed medical help, but no one was willing to help her.

15. Dec. 11, 2025 – The police found Keira two days later. When I saw her, she was more bedraggled and childlike than ever. I suspected she had been eating and drinking little to nothing during the previous days. Nonetheless, the officers with the Carlsbad City Police who found her said she didn’t meet the criteria to be placed on a 5150 hold.

Needless to say, there is much more to cover. Which I’ll do with Issue 25. But first, let me tell you why I said last week that Keira is no longer with me. And how I, thanks to the friendship of another single mom, am no longer living in hotels.

On June 24, Keira went to live in a group home. I wanted to tell you that in June, when it happened. But I couldn’t omit the details that had occurred in the interim. In an effort to streamline everything and write somewhat coherently, I have been crunching everything together, writing more of a synopsis than a detailed account.

Keira’s housing came about through a government program that is far from perfect. But which is apparently the best thing California has to offer. For now. I’m still not sure why that is, but I plan to find out. Because Keira is not alone. There are other people just like her here, equally sick, without resources. At the mercy of a broken mental health system that leaves people like her homeless, fending for themselves.

I’ve already written Issue 25, which focuses almost entirely on that program. I may even post it sooner than next Monday. I’m not sure yet.

However, the housing that Keira moved into on June 24 was, like other housing she was offered months earlier, problematic for someone with her specific needs. Her dietary restrictions, her inability to remember to eat and drink and bathe, her fear of pharmaceutical and street drugs. As a result, it’s taken a toll on her, and last week was fraught with stress and anxiety. In part because the secrecy that goes hand in hand with schizophrenia has now caused Keira to become more paranoid than she was in late June, when she entered the group home.

I only learned four days ago that Keira is no longer there. She left the group home. I truly have no clue where she is now. I just know that she seems to be okay—or as okay as one can be in her condition. I haven’t seen her since last Monday, but she has emailed me a few times. Saying as little as possible, but just enough for me to know that her paranoia and delusions continue. Meaning she remains untreated.

So back to the question of where Keira is … well, it appears that we’re all waiting for that answer together.

(To be continued…)

Standing on a ledge, until you’re pushed over the edge

During the last 22 issues of this nonfiction series, “When a Mother Knows,” I’ve taken you down a very winding road. I hope I haven’t confused you so much that I’ve left you feeling like a pretzel, twisted into a knot. If so, I apologize. This isn’t a story that came with an outline. If it would have, that thing would have been rewritten dozens of times by now. Because my daughter’s story, you see, is fluid and changes from one day to the next.

Some days, it’s all I can do to sort it all out.

In the beginning, I planned to write this in a linear fashion. For example, to list the court hearings we’ve attended. To create a timeline that shows the dates I called mental health workers, and the umpteen times they failed to take action.

I hope you will stay tuned, because I will do that in issue 24. I will return to the legal part of this story—which is ultimately why Keira is no longer with me.

This photo of Keira and me was taken during a family vacation in Texas in 1993.

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Along the way I’ve shared facts that I hope sheds light on why the State of California is nowhere you want to be when you’re dealing with mental illness. I’ve told you about poor policing, mental illness and its connection to homelessness, an overburdened criminal justice system, the dire lack of psychiatric care for people who are as sick as my daughter—and the unwillingness of medical professionals to simply do their job.

Last week I introduced another component, when I told you about April Burrell. How her case led to the discovery that when an autoimmune disorder is involved, schizophrenia can be cured. Learning that carried me back decades, to times and places my mind hadn’t visited in quite some time. To diary entries I had not read in decades. Those memories, those accurate historical records, allowed me to create a medical roadmap of sorts, that I have been carrying with me ever since I read April’s story.

As a child, Keira was sick all of the time. First, with severe food allergies—so I made her special bread and cookies with rice or spelt flour. Then with one fever after another, followed by migraine after debilitating migraine. The kind that made her vomit, and which still do. One autoimmune illness after another, including Henoch-Schönlein purpura (HSP). All of which caused inflammation in her tiny, fragile body.

Our lives revolved around her illnesses, and her three siblings suffered from a lack of attention. It’s something that plagues me with guilt, then and now. But they understood how very sick she was. I know this because my Nov. 14, 1992, diary entry reminded me of that. With tears in her eyes, my eldest daughter told me I should homeschool Keira, because “(public) school takes so much out of her.”

We all believed that Keira would become “the little girl in the plastic bubble.” Just like David Vetter, the real-life little boy whom John Travolta played in the 1976 flick.

Keira bounced back a little, here and there, including in 1993, when she took part in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Some 33 years later, I think everyone has forgotten how sick Keira was.

As I said last week, I don’t believe Keira’s illness has a psychiatric or mental origin. I think hers is biological, like April Burrell’s.

Whatever is attacking Keira’s brain has been doing so for several years. At least since 2013. But maybe earlier. Possibly it was already present when she landed the lead role of Suzanne in her college theatre’s production of “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” a Steve Martin play. (Yes, the banjo-playing, laugh-making Steve Martin.) Or maybe the illness attacked Keira not long after she graduated with an associate degree.

It’s possible she’s been sick for far longer than any of us knew. Maybe, because of her intellect and uncanny ability to be self-sufficient, she just held on to some semblance of normalcy longer than seems humanly possible. Perhaps she was standing on the ledge of a sheer cliff—the perilous pull of schizophrenia—all that time.

If so, then I absolutely believe that the trauma of being falsely arrested last year is what finally tipped the scales, pushing Keira over the edge.

I say that because of The Washington Post article about April Burrell. Her physician, Dr. Sander Markx, said that “underlying autoimmune and inflammatory processes may be more common in patients with a variety of psychiatric syndromes than previously believed.”

Keira has had autoimmune and inflammatory problems all her life. In late August she was traumatized by something. Or someone. So was April, just before the onset of her symptoms.

But we now know that there is hope for people like April. Like Keira.

“These are the forgotten souls,” said Markx. “We’re not just improving the lives of these people, but we’re bringing them back from a place that I didn’t think they could come back from.”

Quite likely, this means there is also hope for many of the poor homeless souls who roam our streets. If we could just get someone to help them.

Or maybe we need to begin doing things differently. Grassroots style.

Because right now, no one is helping. And no one is listening.

Standing on a ledge, until you’re pushed over the edge

I am not a doctor or a scientist. I’m just a mother, trying to save her daughter’s life.

But somewhere along the way, during these past 11 months, I stumbled onto something that anyone with autism or a serious mental illness needs to know.

First, though, a brief recap of my daughter’s story, for any newcomers to this newsletter: after Keira was falsely arrested, I arrived in San Diego on August 24, 2025, for her criminal arraignment. For what I thought would be a two-day stay. By the evening of August 25, I knew I could not fly back to my 2-bedroom, $600 a month house in Hawaii.

I could not, would not, leave my daughter.

Not after I listened to her reality—which would make a great espionage thriller. Not after I realized how very sick she was. I suspected schizophrenia. It would take an emergency room doctor in late November to confirm my suspicions.

Not that I wanted to be right. I would give anything for Keira to not have schizophrenia. Because that’s how bad this disease is.

And yet, I have hope. I have valid reason to hope that she can get better. But time is running out, and the probability that she will improve decreases each day that Keira remains untreated.

Yes, 11 months later, my daughter remains untreated.

But my hope is based on the important scientific and medical research of Dr. Sander Markx. This is why I want to speak to him—because he may be the only doctor who can help Keira.

Dr. Markx was a Fulbright scholar who came to the United States from Amsterdam. His psychiatric genetics research project helped to identify “several novel genetic causes of debilitating psychiatric disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia.”

His work and that of his team is nothing short of miraculous, in my opinion.

I learned about Dr. Markx because on August 26, 2025, I went into default mode and began researching. That’s how I found April Burrell, whose story is a miracle in and of itself.

You see, even though April was valedictorian of her graduating class, she was later placed in a psychiatric hospital due to severe psychosis. This occurred when she was a 21-year-old college student. Her symptoms, which left her unable to talk, among other things, began after a traumatic event. April lived—or rather, existed—in that sterile facility for 20 years. Until Dr. Markx entered the picture.

Due to my daughter’s trauma of being falsely charged with attempting to use her vehicle to run over a police officer—and the onset of Keira’s severe symptoms not long after, I was mesmerized by April’s case. I learned that she once had no hope of a normal life. That is, not until Dr. Markx’s groundbreaking discovery in 2018.

You might want to read that last sentence again. Just in case you didn’t grasp it—because what I’m about to tell you has changed the face of modern psychiatry. Which means it can change your life, or the life of your sick loved ones.

I can only pray that it will change my daughter’s life.

April Burrell’s underlying condition—which led to her schizophrenia—was biological. The lupus diagnosis that doctors had missed is what led to April’s severe psychiatric symptoms. It crossed the blood-brain barrier we all have, which is crucial for good mental health. A filter which keeps the good stuff in, and the bad stuff out.

Except when it doesn’t.

Since its discovery more than 100 years ago, schizophrenia has been known as one of the most challenging—if not the most challenging—mental illnesses there is. The cognitive abilities of its victims decline. So does their IQ. Their behavior changes, dramatically. They experience paranoia and delusions so debilitating that their quality of life is nothing like it was before the onset of the disease. They live shorter lives, on average, than people without schizophrenia. They often die, alone, from suicide. This may or may not be after their families have been left with no choice but to abandon them. As many families have, leading to many of homeless people we see across America.

Schizophrenia is treatable, but many patients refuse treatment. It certainly is not curable.

They learned that some types of schizophrenia can indeed be cured, after they discovered that woman had lupus.

Dr. Sander Markx rediscovered April in 2018. She had been his very first patient, 20 years earlier. He describes her as his sickest patient ever. And in 2018 she was still hospitalized. Still just as sick as when Markx had first met her.

An article in The Washington Post said that April’s symptoms were “clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia.”

And yet …

Lupus is not a mental illness. It is not a disorder of the brain. Lupus is an autoimmune disease. It’s a treatable disease—but not with anti-psychotics and other mind-altering drugs, such as the ones April had been given.

If you’re like me, the mother of an adult child who is so sick you no longer recognize her, you will understand how incredible this is: in actuality, April did not have the severe brain disorder that doctors always believed were synonymous with schizophrenic symptoms.

She did not have the brain disorder that the Cleveland Clinic’s website still, as of today, says can only be treated with anti-psychotics. Information which, according to the findings from an entirely new field of medicine, is as wrong as it is outdated.

No. April had something quite different—she had an autoimmune disorder that was biological in nature. But her autoimmune condition was causing psychotic symptoms.

With the correct, and targeted treatment, April woke up from her comatose state. She was deemed mentally competent enough to check herself out of the hospital in 2020. Today, according to her family, she is back to who she once was, before she became sick more than two decades earlier.

Thanks to Dr. Markx, April’s story is changing the field of psychiatry. You see, Dr. Markx is not just physician. He’s also a scientist. Markx and a worldwide team of experts came together and identified other patients like April, here in the U.S. Then came the creation of an entirely new branch of medicine in 2023: precision psychiatry.

Precision means accurate, exact. In other words, precision psychiatry does not adhere to a rigid, one-size-fits-all diagnosis. According to Columbia University, this new field “aims to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment based on a patient’s underlying disease etiology.”

Dr. Markx directs the program, which seeks to learn exactly why a person has symptoms of schizophrenia. Could it be lupus? Or encephalitis, as has been found in some schizophrenic patients? Or another autoimmune disorder entirely, that’s turning the brains of these poor, suffering people into mush?

Dr. Markx grew up with parents who were psychiatrists. So he no doubt owes his compassion, insight, and intuitiveness to that fact, because he remembers “playing as a child in the long-term psychiatric facilities where his parents worked; he was never afraid of the patients or the stigma associated with their illnesses.”

• • •

I think it’s entirely likely that Keira is sick for the same reason April was. I say this because even from birth, Keira had one autoimmune problem after another. Long before she ever entered public school at age five, her father, siblings, and I used to talk, quite seriously, about the need to put her in a plastic bubble. The sterile kind of enclosure that David Vetter, a Texas boy whose immune system was broken, lived in his entire life.

As a child, Keira looked very much like Vetter. Today, she looks like April Burrell once did. But like April looks no more.

Thanks to Dr. Markx, April’s story can change or even save the lives of others—such as the 200 other patients like her, who have since been found.

I believe my daughter could be the 201^st. Thus my burning desire to talk to Dr. Markx.

(To be continued …)

Five weeks ago in a parking lot in Encinitas, California, a minivan with open windows drove by me. I had just parked, and was preparing to get out of my car. But the verbal violence coming from an angry male voice inside that vehicle stopped me short.

His voice boomed, as he spewed profanities at someone inside the van. His wife, I presumed. Or perhaps his violence was directed at any children who might be inside.

I lingered long enough to see the minivan pull into a spot four spaces over from mine. Then I exited my car, walking in the opposite direction of the grocery store where I planned to grab a few things. Where, from a safe distance, I could observe and see what happened next.

My senses are acutely attuned to scenes like these. Especially given that I grew up in West Virginia, where two people—usually women—die due to domestic violence each month. I began reporting on these stories back in 1988.

When I was still one of those women myself.

Every time I see such a scene, my body goes into fight or flight mode. I feel myself grow tense, and every fiber of my being wants to stomp over, jerk the door open, and tell the batterer that I just called 911 and he better cool it.

While that’s what I want to do, I have never done that. Even though I have, at times, intervened. But that day in the parking lot, inside my head, I knew my daughter, Keira, was back at our hotel, waiting for my return. I couldn’t risk my own safety—not when doing so would place her own in jeopardy.

As I stood there, thinking, I saw the scene and my involvement in it playing out one of three ways.

Which one would you do?

I would never recommend the first one. Well, not unless you’re a man who can hold his own when faced with violence. Or unless you’re a female bodybuilder. Because any man who abuses his wife in public is far more than likely to use more violence against another woman who places herself in the middle of his so-called personal business.

The second option is undoubtedly better. But it, too, carries a risk: what if the manager does nothing? That would simply leave the woman in the same danger she was before you spoke up. Perhaps greater, depending on how the manager proceeds.

The third choice is by far the safest—as long as the woman’s abuser hasn’t followed her into the store. (Ostensibly to make sure she doesn’t blab, run for help, or simply try to make her getaway.)

• • •

That day five weeks ago I watched from afar, making sure no one from the minivan was following the woman into the store. Then, coast clear, I went in search of a manager. But he was filling in for a cashier, and couldn’t be troubled to step away from the cash register. He told me to call 911 if there was a problem.

Yeah, not calling 911. Not without getting more information first.

So I did the only other safe thing I could: I went looking for the woman, and found her in the frozen foods section.

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The last thing she needed was for someone else to frighten her, by approaching from behind. So I walked around, ensuring she saw me before I spoke up.

I smiled at her.

Then I said, “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. To see if you need any help.”

She was very petite, and dressed well, with silver hair. Maybe 70. And at my words, she looked confused. Like there had been a misunderstanding, and I had the wrong person.

“I’m sorry, and I don’t mean to intrude, but I heard a man yelling at you outside. In a van,” I said, “as he was parking.”

And in that moment, she knew I had the right person. So did I.

She shook her head slowly. Woman speak for “Yes, you saw what you thought you did. You’re right.”

In that second, I felt my heart stop. Because I immediately recognized her plight—even though it was far different from mine. But as our eyes met, even though she didn’t know it, we spoke as mother to mother, each of us with a sick adult child.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Because if you need help …”

I saw her eyes glisten, just a little brighter, with what could have been unshed tears. Or maybe it was just the store lighting.

“Oh no, he’s fine. He would never hurt me. He just gets like that sometimes.”

“Okay,” I said. “As long as you’re sure.”

Still, I didn’t move away, in case she wasn’t sure. I wanted to give her another moment to ponder the question every woman who faces violence in her own home should ask: Am I really safe? Or am I in danger? Because the truth is that we almost always underestimate the risk of harm we can come to, when violence occurs behind closed doors. And by the time a man is so accustomed, so entitled to his own violence, that it spills over into public, that danger increases.

I know I certainly did. Many times, over many years. Right up until the time during our divorce, when in 1990, he caught me off guard. He grabbed me, pinning me inside both of his arms, making my struggle to escape futile.

“If I can’t have you no one else will,” he said.

In my mind, as a survivor of domestic violence and as the mother of a calm, quiet, and polite daughter with schizophrenia, the dynamics between the two things are worlds apart. Schizophrenia is a disease. But domestic violence is a choice, which results in a pattern of negative, harmful behavior.

In fact, statistically speaking, people with mental illness (including schizophrenia) are much more likely to become victims of violence—than they are to perpetrate it. Many epidemiological studies bear this out. (When a comorbidity such as drug use is involved, the risk of becoming violent can increase for people who are mentally ill.)

All of those thoughts flew through my brain, as I waited for the silver-haired lady in the frozen food aisle to change her mind. To tell me she was afraid. To ask for help.

Except she didn’t do any of those things.

“Thank you so much for asking,” she said. Her voice was heavy with emotion, and she looked genuinely touched.

We hugged and I told her that if she ever was in danger, to call someone for help.

Then I walked away, hoping she would.

I have been stubborn my entire life.

I know this because of the story my parents used to tell me.

When you were a little girl and couldn’t get your own way, you would clench your fists, stiffen up, then fall over backwards. Until the day you did that inside a garage and hit your head on concrete—the only thing harder than your head. Then you never did it again.

So in other words, I’m hardheaded.

Depending on the situation, my father would sometimes chuckle when telling that story. If we were with friends or family, for instance. Other times, he had a stern look on his face. Such as when he was calmly lecturing me about something—likely about reading too many romance novels.

Once I even remember him laughing outright, as he and my mother sat at the dining room table, over shared coffee and the daily newspaper. I was in middle school at the time.

“You’re making that up!” I said.

“No, I’m not,” my father replied.

I turned to my mother for confirmation. “Mom, I never did that, did I?

“Yes, you did,” she said.

I stared at her in disbelief, unable to wrap my head around the me my parents knew.

“How old was I?”

“No more than three or four,” Mom said.

I was four-years-old when this photo of my mom and me was taken.

Every time I heard my parents tell that story, the calm, cool, and collected me couldn’t imagine the four-year-old me doing that.

I was in denial.

Because the me I know—the girl, teenager, and woman I always remember being, would never do something even remotely close to that. How could I, when I have always (or at least 99-percent of the time) refused to lose my temper in any situation.

Of course, there’s a big difference in expressing your anger toward someone else, versus directing that anger at yourself. I know this because I know those head-hitting-the-floor, little acts of defiance were not just self-defeating. They were self-harm, borne out of anger. Or frustration.

And even though I do not remember a single instance in which I intentionally let myself fall over backwards—much less the circumstances that led up to those childish acts—I do know one thing: it was definitely not about being stubborn.

Even if I am stubborn.

It wasn’t even about being right.

I know that because I know I hate injustice.

Like the way I watched my father sit and drink away his paycheck, week after week, while telling my sister and me that there was no money for the things we wanted.

• • •

Right now, as my daughter Keira and I are about to enter the eleventh month of this soul-sucking saga, I have a growing list of the things I hate here in California. Chief and foremost, the injustice of it all.

My hatred does not extend to the people responsible. But I certainly detest the attitudes that have led them to act as they are.

Lackadaisical. Lazy. Incompetent. Uncaring.

I hate that I am so busy trying to save my daughter’s life, by getting people to do their jobs—something they receive a salary for—that I cannot return to the workforce. Where I could earn a salary myself, which would immediately change my situation (and undoubtedly Keira’s) by allowing me to pay for a decent home. A home that would let me get a lot more done than I do now, because changing locations all the time keeps me from being able to work as efficiently and as fast I normally do.

I hate that greed is what led to the current housing crisis here. Which greatly contributes to the problem of homelessness. A problem that is so dire that some streets in major cities in California are covered with tents, sleeping bags, tarps, food, grills, coolers, shopping carts full of possessions, and the homeless people who live there.

Streets that look like they belong in third world countries.

I’ve seen this with my own eyes on city streets in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Oakland, but I’m sure other cities here have more.

I hate that California is such a liberal state that you can actually die (or murder someone else) before anyone in a position of authority will reach out a hand to help.

My job is to protect my child. Just like any other parent alive. Because no matter how young or old a child is, when he’s sick, you take care of him. It just so happens that in my case, my child is legally an adult. But on a good day, she is mentally no older than age 12. On a bad day, she’s more like a six-year-old.

Which means that she lacks the capacity to make adult decisions. A decision such as voluntarily admitting herself to a psychiatric ward. Or easier still, deciding to take the anti-psychotic medicine that her condition requires.

Very strong medicine she has yet to receive—because no one has been willing to give it to her.

Because she’s an adult, and she has rights, and the freedom to choose!

Give me a friggin’ break.

A photo of me with Keira, who was then age 12

For everyone living outside of this state, did you know that here in California there are some health insurance plans that make it possible for your 12-year-old child to make his own medical decisions? Choices that are life-changing. Irreversible. And which can be made without a parent’s consent.

Not only without a parent’s consent, but without a parent’s knowledge.

I don’t know about you, but at age 12, I was nowhere near capable of making a single life-altering decision. Neither were my four children. If they had been capable, I would have gone about my merry way, doing the things that I wanted to do but which I couldn’t, due to the moral requirements that becoming a mother placed upon me.

Not some court. Not some doctor. But morality. Plain, old-fashioned morals.

If my four children had been capable of making major life decisions at age 12, why did they still need me? Because if their brains (and the emotions that come from that organ) were so fully formed at age 12 that they could have done that, then what else was left for me to do?

They wouldn’t have needed me to remind them to make their beds, to do their homework, or to tell the truth. To own up to their mistakes, to show their teachers respect, to not let other children bully them. To wait until they’re mature before falling in love, to … well, obviously the list is infinite.

If my children had had enough maturity to consent to such life-changing decisions at age 12, wouldn’t that basically mean that I, their mother, could have retired from the job then and there?

What’s the role of a parent anyway, if not to coach your children until they reach the legal age of an adult, when they supposedly can make good choices? To protect them from themselves? To prevent them from making decisions about anything that, at age 12, their psyche is simply not capable of grasping the repercussions of?

Decisions that will not, one, two, or 10 years down the road, fill them with a lifetime of regret.

If a child of 12 can make such immutable decisions, then why is 18 the legal age of consent here in California? (Uh, duh, because it’s illegal to have sex with a minor.)

But also because they lack the mental and emotional ability to truly understand the ramifications of engaging in sex with another human. Consequences such as pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and most of all, the physiological and emotional changes that occur as a result of that act.

Why don’t we let children behind the wheel of an automobile until they’re 16?

Why must teenagers wait until the legal age of 21 to buy and consume (unless a parent permits it, when in private) alcoholic beverages?

All of these things are really about the capacity for consent. Whether a person is old enough, or mature enough, to thoroughly and clearly understand what he’s doing—and what he’s doing may or will lead to.

Now, just for a moment, consider the opposite end of the spectrum, when it’s an aged person. Someone elderly, who is near death. California has something that addresses medical decisions and an individual’s rights. It’s called the California End of Life Option Act (EoLOA). If someone is dying and is deemed competent to make this decision, they can get a prescription for a lethal dose of medication that, once administered, will end their life.

California isn’t alone. Hawaii, New Mexico, Vermont, and a few other states also have laws which support medical aid-in-dying.

The provision being that the patient understands what he is doing at the time the decision is made.

Because my daughter is not refusing the necessary medical treatment that will save her life. Keira is not refusing medicine that will allow her to once again have a life—because she doesn’t even know what she’s doing.

This is an established fact. One which a court-appointed psychiatrist determined in December, and which a civil court judge ruled on not long after.

Why someone didn’t immediately order her to be hospitalized then and there is something that has boggled my mind ever since.

Refusing to seek medical treatment for a disease that is killing her is a decision that my daughter, who has all but gone from me, would never make.

But her illness would. And her schizophrenia is. All while everyone stands around twiddling their thumbs, letting her condition deteriorate more and more.

• • •

This series, this horror story about my daughter’s life, has become increasingly difficult to write. I find myself torn between needing to care for someone I love, and wanting to do what I know I should for myself.

Whether to go down with a sinking ship. Or save myself.

All while trusting people who have shown me, over and over again, that they simply don’t care. People who don’t even follow the laws themselves.

Or, even worse, when it comes to whether a person is competent or has a grave disability, people who ain’t even got the good sense that God gave a goose.

No one is coming to rescue, treat, or help them

I came here to San Diego, California, last August to bail my daughter out of jail, but now I’m the one in prison, here in the Golden State. In a place that has become anything but golden for me.

For either of us.

Keira’s situation is much more dire. She believes she’s a prisoner of war in this small room. While that is a delusion, she is definitely being held hostage by the people who inhabit her paranoid delusions. The voices, which her illness turns into people and situations that are real to her.

I’m a hostage, too. To the schizophrenia that causes her to carry on conversations all day and night long. As she talks to people I can’t see, constantly engaged in negotiations with her “government officials.”

I feel like this room is full of people, and yet I am utterly alone.

On Dec. 14, 2025, two serious but related things happened to strangers living two hours apart: Rob and Michelle Reiner were murdered in their Los Angeles home.

And after I was forced to give up my temporary home, I paid for a hotel room for what I anticipated would be a short stay. Doing that was the only way I could house my mentally ill daughter.

The common denominator between those strangers? A thief called schizophrenia.

Nick Reiner has been charged for his parents’ murders. Keira is so peaceable that I will never be able to honestly tell any 9-1-1 operator that I am in danger.

Both of them are very, very sick adult children of parents who dearly love, or loved, them.

Just like happened to the Reiner family—albeit in a different way—my daughter is running out of time. I am certainly running out of money. And after dozens of unsuccessful attempts to get Keira help, my patience is growing thin.

I cannot tell you how many times I have told myself that if something doesn’t change, I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.

I cannot tell you how many times I have felt like I’ve been banging my head against the wall.

I have called 9-1-1 for a psychiatric emergency response team (PERT), for the police, or for a mobile crisis response team (MCRT, which lacks the psychiatric component) at least 30 times in the last 10 months. From last September until now I have placed call after call after call in three different counties: Riverside, Los Angeles, and San Diego.

In December, someone from the district attorney’s office even made a referral, after seeing how delusional Keira was. That person only knew about her delusions because Keira went there herself, intent on pressing criminal charges against the people she believes are trying to assassinate her.

In response to my numerous calls, emergency responders or mental health workers have shown up maybe half of those times. Each time they seem frighteningly unqualified to do their jobs. Each time they have told me that since I am providing Keira with food, water, and housing in a hotel room, she isn’t in danger.

Then they simply walk away, leaving Keira behind, saying “she’s not homicidal or suicidal, and she has rights.”

This in spite of the fact that, to quote more than one medical professional, “your daughter is extremely sick. She needs hospitalization soon—or she is not going to get better.”

Each call I made was because my daughter is so sick that she requires treatment. Medication to help rid her of the delusions that have taken over her mind. That would stop the irrational fears that have stolen her life. And mine, albeit to a much lesser extent. Anti-psychotics that would allow her to return to the person she once was, so that she can once again have the ability to make rational decisions.

Hopefully. If it’s not already too late.

Twice I have taken her to hospital emergency rooms. The first time, to Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas. On November 19, at her request. The physician who spoke to me four hours later wanted to admit Keira. His psych supervisor did not.

As he explained that Keira could later sue him, he seemed like he was wavering.

“I won’t let that happen,” I promised.

Then he said that admitting Keira meant she would be restrained and medicated.

“I understand. Do it, please. You will be saving her life,” I said.

The good doctor then agreed, saying she would stay there until they found her a bed in a psych hospital.

“If we can find one,” he added, as he turned to walk way.

“Can you?” I asked, suddenly worried.

I know about the shortage of beds in psych hospitals. It’s been a national problem since the 1990s. If not before.

He stopped and looked back at me briefly. “I hope so.”

I left the hospital, and for the first time in three months I felt semi-hopeful. But his last few words were already burrowing into my brain, dropping seeds of doubts that quickly took root, leaving me unable to sleep.

By 7:30 the next morning, I was already back at hospital, determined not to let them discharge Keira. But a cold, dismissive psych liaison did it anyway. After I had spoken to four different medical personnel separately, explaining that my daughter was too sick to be discharged.

“What are you going to do if you discharge her and she walks into oncoming traffic, like she just did last week?” I asked the psych liaison.

She refused to answer, instead ending the conversation by haughtily walking away.

Then she discharged Keira anyway—even though I called the hospital’s patient advocate, begging for her help. When that advocate called me back and said their hands were tied, I sat in my car, head on the steering wheel, and sobbed.

• • •

Last Wednesday on June 17, pop star Sabrina Carpenter’s petition for a restraining order was granted when a Los Angeles judge ordered William Applegate, 31, to stay away from Carpenter, her home, and her family.

According to The Associated Press, Applegate had tried to gain entry into Carpenter’s home 12 times. Applegate told Judge David L. Wasserman in open court that he believes he and the famous pop star belong to a “classified military program” (that requires them to) “be together as soon as possible” (due) to “national and global security.”

While the AP article said that Applegate was “coherent,” I disagree. Because after almost one year in the trenches with someone who can sound perfectly normal for a few minutes, Applegate’s own words show he is anything but coherent. As does every word that comes out of my daughter’s mouth.

Moreover, in their comments, many readers indicate that the public at large remains woefully ignorant about mental illness. As well as painfully prejudiced towards its suffering victims.

Which is why they think Applegate belongs behind bars.

They could not be more wrong: the very last place Applegate should be is in prison.

Two days after Judge Wasserman granted Carpenter’s restraining order, I took Keira to hospital again.

For the same abdominal pain that had, on May 22, caused me to call 9-1-1 because the pain was so intense she was sobbing through her tears, “They’re taking my organs! They’re taking my organs!”

On Friday, June 19, we left our hotel room at 3:15 a.m. after severe abdominal pain left her doubled over, clutching her stomach until she vomited. But she would not let herself cry. Because she knew I would call 9-1-1 if she allowed me to see the intensity of her symptoms.

Symptoms that included abdominal pain—the same kind that caused me, on May 2, to call 9-1-1. But then the four deputies who responded did the same thing as every other emergency responder has. In spite of her own words that betray how delusional she is.

Too delusional to make decisions about her own medical care.

“She’s not homicidal or suicidal and she says she has food and water,” they said, “so we can’t do anything.”

They were apologetic, and suggested I call an ambulance next time.

“How will that be any different?” I asked.

They said an ambulance crew could forcibly take Keira to hospital, based on her physical symptoms.

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When she was sick again last Friday, Keira asked me to take her for a ride. Likely she thought the motion of the car might help her feel better. Instead, I drove her to hospital.

Lying to her all the way there.

I want a soft drink.

I’m just trying to find a place that’s open.

I need to use the restroom.

When we arrived at Palomar Medical Center emergency department in Escondido, she refused to go inside. As meekly as ever. She said she would just stay in the car and wait for me.

I went in alone, and explained the situation. Schizophrenia diagnosis, adult but mentally the age of 12, not medicated. No, I do not have a conservatorship—because that supposedly requires a psychiatrist’s help, after a person is already in hospital.

I said Keira needed to be examined, in case she had an appendicitis or a ruptured ovarian cyst.

One staffer called the charge nurse on duty to ask for direction. Then she stepped away, out of my earshot. But I followed her anyway, listening as she omitted one very important detail.

Her mother says she is fully paranoid and delusional, and therefore incapable of making a decision.

So I said the words. Loudly. Still, I don’t know if the charge nurse at the other end of the line heard me.

Nonetheless, the answer was the same: if Keira wouldn’t agree to be examined, they couldn’t force her.

“What about an ambulance? Can they bring her in, if I call for an ambulance?”

Guess what they said?

Not unless she agrees to go willingly.

So who’s right: the deputies or the hospital staffers?

• • •

To their credit, the four staffers did go outside to my car, where they tried to talk to Keira.

She cut them off before they could, seemingly as rational as if she was a mother and they were small children, trying to tell them that I am the problem.

“I’m sorry you had to come out here. My mother thinks I need to see a doctor because she believes I have schizophrenia,” Keira said. “But she’s been coded to believe that. You see I’m a celebrity asset for the government, but I refuse to let them have my DNA, so they’re sending radiation into my body through distance communication. You all aren’t allowed to discuss that, are you? They won’t let you talk to people about it, will they?”

The team of four, three women and one man, remained mute. Said nothing.

I imagine that in spite of Keira’s words sounding so bizarre that they couldn’t find words to answer her, they, too, would say that she seemed competent. Just like the AP reporter described Applegate.

Neither Applegate nor my daughter are competent. What they are is extremely intelligent. Intelligence which masquerades as competence. Intelligence which confuses trained professionals, keeping them from seeing how extremely sick people like Applegate and my daughter are. How much they need treatment.

Can we please start training every professional tasked with responding to the mentally ill to recognize this common trait, so that people like my daughter can get the help they need? So their families don’t have to turn them out, forcing them to live on the streets and fend for themselves?

• • •

One of the four hospital staff, a nurse, then asked Keira what her name was, and what month we’re in. She answered both questions correctly. But she briefly said “July” before quickly self-correcting, saying, “June.”

They did not ask her who the sitting president is. Although Keira could certainly answer that question correctly. I know she could, because in recent weeks the President’s name has come up often. And she’s told me many times, “Trump is in involved with the people who are trying to wipe out all the Jews.”

So I guess the president has been with us in our hotel rooms, at least through remote distance communication. I wish I could have spoken him, because I would have told him that the mental health system in this state is broken.

Gallows humor aside, we don’t normally call someone in Keira’s condition insane. It’s not politically correct, you see. So instead, we politely say they have mental illness. But due to the very serious nature of what is happening to my sick child, I’m tossing political correctness out the window.

I’ve been trying to pen this for the last four hours. All while Keira is carrying on a conversation with three or maybe even four other people. None of whom are here. In the last 15 minutes, these are just a few of the bits and pieces of her conversations with her own mangled and bloody mind.

“Can I publish my website today?”

“No, you’re not my official. Can my official tell me why I can’t have my images?

“Maybe your official’s not talking.”

“Everyone’s playing with clones in the investigation.”

“No I’m not nervous. I am exhausted though, for real.”

“Maybe I could get out by getting nothing, and just shutting down the conversation?”

“I don’t feel like hearing about clone violence. I feel like hearing that I’m getting a house or a car.”

“Why can’t white men kick it? Why can’t white men jump?”

“Where are they? They’re absorbed in something, I think.”

“Don’t touch me like that. Ever! Ok?”

“Don’t biopsy me. At all!”

“You’re stabbing me again. Taking my things and then I don’t get anything.”

“It’s leaving me depleted of all nutrients and shaking.”

“Stop hitting me in the head immediately.”

“There has to be some kind of guarantor, from your official.”

“You sit there in squalor and we treat you like shit.”

“We don’t know how to work so we make puppets all day long.”

I’m not fine. I have a weapon pointed at my stomach. It’s going to cause problems today. I’m not okay with it.”

“Don’t tell—”

“No, I will tell on you all day.”

“Everybody uses clones, and everybody knows it’s dangerous. How productive is it, really? It’s asking for trouble.”

“We’re allowed to beat the shit out a woman who we want to clone.”

“Please get more people in the room to get their high powers off me.”

“We’re using our powers. It’s the way of the world.”

“Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”

“You do not get to do things to me with Nazism. You do not get to rape me in front of my mother, and cause her to worry about me.”

“I’d like that today. I want my diplomatic immunity.”

“He has no fear from wearing my clone. That’s an autistic gift and he persecutes autistic people.”

“He’s really particular about certain Jewish bloodlines.”

Yes, my daughter now believes she is endangered because she is of Jewish descent. It wouldn’t bother me in the least if we were.

Except we aren’t.

Her cries of pain woke me again today. I looked at my phone. Once again, it was 3:30 a.m. Just like a colicky baby, her pain has developed a pattern.

“Get off my stomach. My entire stomach is being targeted. Get off. Stop.”

I suggest some medicine to reduce the pain.

“No, I don’t take medicine. I’m drug free. I need you to respect that.”

I offer medicine to help her sleep.

“I don’t take medicine to sleep. It’s not healthy for you to do that.”

Her pleas with her captors continued for 30 minutes, then 45. I dozed on and off through her negotiations with the people who are torturing her, like the POW she believes she is. By 5 a.m., when she is still deep in conversation with the U.S. or Russian officials that she thinks are involved in her unrelenting torture, I know that my short night of sleep is over.

I gave up. Got up, and turned on my computer. Went to work, trying to finish this issue.

“They’re pointing a direct-energy weapon at my stomach to cause chaos in families. It is a fully engaged weapon. If it’s engaged, it will go off on me.”

The voices were persistent, causing Keira to become louder, more agitated. But never screaming. Never threatening. The voices interrupted my concentration, causing me to turn and look at her. Before the words were out of my mouth, she held up a finger, as if to stop me.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I have to be more forceful with them because they’re cancer coding me, and punching me in the arm real hard and stuff.”

“It’s okay, sweetheart, but you have to tone it down a little, because the window is open.”

And then I turn away, not wanting Keira to see the worry which I know my eyes will betray.

• • •

I’m calling it “Why My Book Was Downloaded 60,732 Times in Four Months: 10 Marketing Moves From a NYT Bestselling Author.”

If you’re wondering if this is something that will benefit you, this should help you decide.

This workshop might be for you if:

• You’re an indie author;

• You have a book in you that’s just dying to get out;

• You’re on the fence between self-publishing and traditional publishing;

• You’ve already published a book or even two, but the sales are lackluster.

If any of those things apply, then this workshop is for you!

But it’s also for you because what worked for me in 2012 is still in style. It still works in 2026.

What, exactly is it, though?

Several things, as it turns out. Most of which involve boots on the ground—small actions you can take, here and there. Many of which will happen on your social media pages. But not all!

However, whether done in person or online, they will have a compounding effect. And a great rate of return (RoR), when it comes time to announce your new book to the world.

Subscribe now

Here’s a little peek at some of what you’ll get on June 24:

1. Learn what specific steps I took so my memoir, Sister of Silence, would be downloaded far and wide;

2. See how much I earned in book sales, because I’m going to share my financial statements with you;

3. Hear some juicy insider information about what was involved in making the NYT list with my third book, The Savage Murder of Skylar Neese.

That’s right: you will see the charts showing my Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) downloads, and the sales that turned into cash in my bank account.

But that isn’t all. Because in addition to everything I did right, I also want to tell you what I did wrong. Then you can learn from my mistakes—and make much more money than I did.

If any of this resonates with you, then please join me June 24 at 11 a.m. PT (2 p.m. ET) on Zoom for my workshop: “Why My Book Was Downloaded 60,732 Times in Four Months: 10 Marketing Moves From a NYT Bestselling Author”

Annual subscribers get in free; for everyone else, it’s $50. No worries if you can’t make it live. Everyone who registers gets the replay anyway.

Click HERE to register.

• • •

Daleen Berry is an award-winning investigative journalist and a New York Times best-selling author. She has authored, co-authored, or ghostwritten ten books, including Sister of Silence, her 2011 breakout memoir. That book was banned in California in 2012, and led to Ms. Berry’s TEDx talk in 2013. Daleen is a survivor of domestic violence, and is passionate about speaking out so other victims can also break free and heal from their wounds.

My daughter’s story became public knowledge, as so many things like this do, with a Facebook rant.

With my Nov. 19, 2025, Facebook rant.

It was my cry of desperation.

As a bad situation became dire, I found myself staring at the Herculean problem before me: no one here in California—doctors, nurses, emergency responders—would treat my daughter. Even though it appeared her anorexia had flared up again, or she had dementia from early-onset Alzheimer’s.

So I took to social media. There, I begged everyone I knew for help. My post led to outrage on Keira’s behalf, and words of support and encouragement for us both. It did not lead to answers.

That was seven long months ago, when I was still desperately trying to piece the scraps of evidence together into a coherent quilt of sorts.

When I was frantically trying to navigate the criminal justice system for Keira, who is legally an adult. But who is now mentally a child.

When I was so consumed by a mother’s need for answers, for medical help from anywhere, that I took to Facebook.

My Nov. 19, 2025, Facebook post

September 15 had come and gone. I had again cancelled the flight that was to take me back home, to Honolulu. I knew better than to reschedule it again. Because there was no easy fix for what was going on.

Not criminally. Not medically. Not financially.

There was no way around it—I was in for the long haul.

Keira had been arrested and wrongly charged with two felonies on August 16. Looking back at all that’s happened since then, I wonder how she is still alive. How I am still standing. Sometimes I wake up wanting to believe it’s all been a bad dream. Other times I don’t want to wake up at all.

How can I be here now?

How can someone who has achieved so much in her professional life be facing such insurmountable problems?

Quite easily, as it turns out.

Because this is the world in which we now find ourselves, when many families are one emergency away from financial catastrophe. When just one thing goes wrong, causing your life to spin completely out of control—leaving you feeling like NASCAR driver Terry Labonte must have,when Dale Earnhardt sent Labonte’s car into a spin in 1999.

I’m here, at this point in my life, now because two polar opposite things can, indeed, be true at the same time.

Because success in one area of your life doesn’t guarantee success in another area.

Because critical acclaim doesn’t always lead to financial independence.

And because a good mother will do whatever it takes to save her critically ill daughter. Letting all else fall by the wayside, while she struggles to find answers. To find a way around each and every roadblock.

In spite of the growing, mountain-like debt.

Because that’s what love does.

Moonlight Beach (Photo by Daleen Berry)

As I write this, on Sunday, June 15, I am sitting in a coffee shop two blocks from Moonlight Beach. Which is said to be one of the most beautiful beaches around. As the thoughts inside my head turn into words on the page, I have watched at least four homeless people come through the front door.

They came inside to prepare for the foggy darkness that will soon settle upon this area. June gloom, as the locals call it.

Maybe these poor souls simply need to take a load off, or sit down for a few minutes. Get a free drink of water. Or rearrange their bags and backpacks. Doing so will help to redistribute the weight, making their burdens easier to carry. Some of them layer other clothes on top of the ones they’re already wearing. By wearing their extra clothing, you see, they have less weight to lug around. And finally, they will bundle up in scarves, coats, and hoods, before heading out into the long, damp night ahead.

Unlike me, those quiet, harmless, even smiling humans, have no money for coffee.

Because I have credit cards. Five, to be exact. Credit cards which had a zero balance last August. But which are now the only thing standing between me and the street. Like the homeless people who just walked out again, carrying their few remaining possessions—all they have left in the world—with them.

By contrast, I am rich. I have a clean hotel room to return to, when this coffee shop where I have spent the last two hours closes its doors and locks up for the night.

On August 26, I ended up staying with the relative of a friend of a friend. For six weeks. Where I, the New York Times bestselling author, was treated like royalty. But where my daughter was not welcome. A stipulation that was made crystal clear on August 26 when I first called the phone number my friend gave me.

When that number led me to her friend’s relative, whose razor-sharp interrogation made me wonder if it was even wise to go there.

But where else could I go? Another hotel, yes, but that would drain my money so fast it would limit how much I could do to help Keira.

It wasn’t like I even asked to bring her with me. Which makes the fact that the woman brought up the idea of me doing so even more telling.

At the time, Keira was living in her Ford Explorer. Using the big, old cargo van I paid for in 2022 as a storage unit. She was perfectly content to do that. Or so I thought.

If only I had known.

But I didn’t. So there was no reason for me to even consider asking if my daughter could join me in that woman’s big, beautiful house. A house which easily had more than enough space for one, if not four, more people.

A house that was only one-half the size of the one my late husband and I had once owned, before things went south.

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But I was wrong. In so many ways. On all accounts.

I was wrong about what Keira wanted. And needed.

I was wrong about how very sick, frail, and afraid my daughter was. How she was, in fact, terrified. Of the people who were trying to assassinate her. Or who wanted to send her back to jail, specifically to ensure she would be killed. Keira was so frightened that by mid-September she asked me why she couldn’t come visit me where I was living. Where I was dining with friends whose food cost more in one week than Keira could buy for herself in one month. If not more.

I lied, of course.

When she finally asked, “Mom, can’t I come stay with you for the night?”

I would never dream of saying one word about the fact that she wasn’t welcome. Yet even in Keira’s fugue-like state, some part of her brain knew I would never intentionally keep her from being with me, if she wanted to.

I had to lie. But not to protect my new friend. To protect my child.

For how could I tell her that anyone who would befriend me, would not want my daughter to even enter their home? My daughter who, in spite of being homeless, was clean. Well-mannered, kind, and quiet. Who then still dressed like you and me. Whose exotic beauty, if you passed her on a public street, would cause you to look twice. And who, at that time, was still behaving normally.

I couldn’t risk telling Keira that. I knew it would break her heart. If not crush her spirit, causing her to lose faith in humanity. To give up completely.

So yes, I lied.

But then, like so many things I have gotten wrong these last ten months, it turns out that I was also wrong about the food my daughter was eating. About her ability to eat. And to drink. Because the food stamps I thought she had, and was using, were nonexistent. But I hadn’t figured that out yet. Nor could she tell me. Those were puzzle pieces that would take me until early November to fit into place.

When, with growing horror, I realized that unless she was with me, Keira had stopped eating and drinking. And that the $7,000 she got on September 16 from selling her Ford Explorer had all but vanished. It was as if that money was carried away on the cool coastal breezes that Keira loved to feel blowing through her long, dark tresses.

Even now, I don’t know where that money went. Neither does Keira. By the time I figured out it was gone, she was too sick to tell me what she had done with it. But by then, trapped in delusions, someone evil had conned her out of it. Even though she couldn’t explain how.

I do know that the $7,000, which disappeared in the space of three weeks, did not go for drugs or alcohol. I knew that because, except for a one-off in high school, Keira was not a drug user. She rarely even drank wine, and she never imbibed in the homemade margaritas our family used to regularly enjoy together.

As I sit here now, thinking back to September, to when the woman who would become my friend said, “She can’t come here!” I want to sob at her ignorance. Her prejudice. Her discrimination.

At the sheer inhumanity of it all.

I want to scream that any friend of mine would even dream of treating another human being that way.

To be so unkind, so cruel, to a child-like woman whose illness has completely stolen her powers of reason, so that she no longer cares if anyone notices when she walks down the street, laughing and talking to people who aren’t there.

How can you stop writing for yourself, and begin writing for an audience? Or rather, how can you continue to derive pleasure from the art of writing—while allowing everyone with an opinion to read and then critique your words?

I think most writers are like me. At least at first: I was a shy, very introspective introvert. I lived in my own head, a world built for one. And I liked it there.

Writers see things differently than other people. We analyze conversations and situations and our environment, from every conceivable angle. I think we are always taking other people’s words and behaviors and then thinking, “Oh, that would make a great story!”

Raise your hand if you have ever told another person, “Your name would be perfect for a character in a book!”

Raise your other hand if you’ve ever then done just that, by giving one of your characters that real-life name. Or created a character based upon it.

Both hands raised here!

Doing newspaper work in 1991 (Photo by Joe Stiles)

We imagine worlds other than our own—a state or a continent or a galaxy away. And then we create a story for the characters who live in those worlds. Or vice versa. We let them say and do the things they want, or we write what others around us have already said and done, in real life.

This is what makes you a storyteller.

Because really, whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, essay or articles, if you’re doing it right, you’re just telling stories. If you’re doing it very well, those stories keep people reading.

I’ve written for decades. As a rule, I usually only let people read my nonfiction. But I was once a fiction writer. Yes, I have notebooks that are 45 years old, which contain fictional stories I wrote in longhand all those years ago. Not a one of which has seen the light of day. In other words, they remain unpublished.

Perhaps that is why my own writing style is narrative nonfiction, a genre which you may know as literary or creative nonfiction (CNF). For me this just means that when writing about real-life events that I thoroughly researched, like the murders of Shannon Stafford, Wanda Toppins, Skylar Neese, and Nancy Pfister, I’m just telling a story.

I’ve been writing since I was maybe 8. So I really had to stop and think about my path to publication. To when and how I overcame my fear of failure. The fear of having other people tell me that my writing was garbage. Or that what I had written was boring.

Because that’s what my internal voice told me.

What helped me along the way—at every turn in the road, really—were great teachers. Especially my English teachers. They didn’t just correct my mistakes. They took the time to show me how to write better, to explain why one phrase held more power than the weaker one I had written. As my writing matured, they praised it so loud and so long that my cheeks flushed red. Every single time.

Enough, already. I don’t want anyone to look at me. To see me.

I can still remember grabbing my books out from under my desk at age 12. I would then turn sideways in my desk, books held tight in my arms, feet in position, ready to run from the room as soon as the bell sounded, all of which soon became a regular occurrence. And all while avoiding eye contact with anyone who might have been staring at me, as I tried to ignore the teacher standing there in front of the class, reading what I had written.

Sometimes I even hummed to myself inside my head, where my embarrassment was louder than their words.

By high school, that was happening more and more. Except by then I had learned to deflect their compliments with self-deprecating jokes. I would say, “It was nothing, just a dumb story,” or “It was either that or chop and carry firewood at home. At least I won’t get a splinter using the typewriter.”

Me at home in 1980, typing one of my first published articles

In my senior year, I took two classes that cemented my future career as a journalist: journalism and English 101. George Shaffer, my wonderful, jovial journalism teacher, asked me to be our high school correspondent. That meant submitting student news to two local newspapers. Which I had to report on, and then write. I was as terrified as I was proud.

I was also hesitant.

What if someone laughs at me?

I wanted to say no. But the pull of doing something I loved so much—of having my words read by so many people, was too intoxicating to turn down.

No drug could ever have been as addictive.

Susan Hardesty was my English 101 teacher. Probably one of the best teachers I ever had. She returned my assignments with such glowing praise written in the margins of my papers that I began to believe that perhaps I did have a future as a professional writer. Her words were ones I read over and over, smiling to myself on the long bus ride home.

And it was Mrs. Hardesty who wrote about “my ‘lovely use of alliteration.’ I didn’t really care what that was or how I did it, I just loved to write. Somehow I stayed focused enough to do so.”

That quote is taken from my memoir, Sister of Silence. Although this 2011 book relates how I survived years of abuse, and saved my children from more such violence, SOS also tells the story of my love affair with journalism. With words and writing.

Then there was my senior English class, taught by Jo Ann Dadisman. Her skills as an Appalachian storyteller are legendary. Mrs. Dadisman was less liberal in her public praise than some of my other teachers. As I reflect on those days, I wonder if that was because many of my fellow students were equally talented—or if she recognized how embarrassed many students become, when praised in front of the class.

I hope all three teachers know the impact they had on me, because my senior year is when I got pregnant, from the molestation that began when I was 13. As I struggled with such a dark secret alone, my psyche was so weighed down with shame that I felt like a Catholic who is trapped somewhere between a confessional and absolution, all while buried beneath the rubble of a collapsed building.

Without their praise, I doubt I could have kept going. Which is why I like to remind people to thank a teacher. Your teacher, your child’s teacher, or someone else’s. Because teachers have saved many children like me. Like the troubled teen I became, due to the burden I was forced to carry alone.

• • •

Fast-forward to 1981, when I began querying popular magazines of the day: Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook, Family Weekly, Women’s Day, Parade, and Reader’s Digest. All I ever got in return were rejections.

If you’re the same, don’t make the mistake of belittling the value of a rejection letter. Because if you let them, they can force you to become a better, stronger writer. Which is what those letters did for me.

So please, can we get a hallelujah for every rejection letter ever written?

Then came the day when I knew I had to find full-time employment. I didn’t have a college degree then; that would come many years later. What could I do? I thought back, to when I had written articles and editorials for our high school’s newspaper. For the two local newspapers: The Preston County Journal and The Dominion Post. With that, I gathered up some of my old clips and drove to the local newspaper office.

The editor, Linda Benson, remembered my writing—and hired me on the spot. Linda became a mentor long before female mentors were recognized as the true heros they are. And I have always been very grateful for her help. Two years later I was still working at that same family-run newspaper when I took first-place in investigative journalism. That award was for my three-part health care series: “Who Pays When the Patient Doesn’t?”

Part two of that three-part, award-winning series (Photos by Troy Helmick)

It is sad that some of us can only begin believing in ourselves after other people tell us we’re good at something. That it takes public recognition, in the form of a prize or an award, just to get us to realize our own value. Those first two years as a published journalist laid the groundwork, though. They helped me to tentatively begin believing in myself. To see that yes, I am a good writer.

But it was took a state-level award, a stamp of approval from a jury of my peers—journalists and editors throughout West Virginia—to convince me that my writing was valuable.

That was in 1991. The rest, as they say, is history.

• • •

How I learned the true cost of being poor

From August 26 forward, I found myself navigating life in a strange city, living among people whose values were different than my own. As I recalled Keira’s harsh self-criticism during those spring days in Washington, D.C., I wondered if she had ever become reconciled to the many losses in her life.

Chief among them, her siblings. Her sisters, in particular. Because on August 16 when the bail bondsman had called me, the first thing I said was that I didn’t have $50,000 for her bond. When he asked for the numbers of any other family members, I gave them to him.

One of Keira’s sisters didn’t take the bail bondsman’s call. Or return it. Or reach out to ask me any questions. To see if Keira was okay. If she was in danger. If she needed help.

At the time, during that surreal phone call with Keira, the bail bondsman, and me, Keira’s other sister basically said, “You’ll have to suffer the consequences of your actions.”

I didn’t offer my son’s number. He lives in San Francisco, California, where rents are even higher than they are here in San Diego.

My other two daughters’ replies only made me more determined to find the money myself.

• • •

Five months before body cam footage from the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office proved that Keira should never have been arrested—as well as confirmed that her mental faculties had still been intact the day of that arrest—I was trying to find my footing in a world that had suddenly gone sideways.

We were still in August, but September was almost upon us. Keira’s readiness hearing in criminal court was set for the 3rd, just after the Labor Day weekend. Which made me very nervous.

Having covered cops and courts during my journalism days, I knew what that meant: little work would get done. Major holidays like Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter always see people gearing up the week before. Since, in reality, these holidays are usually busier than a normal, five-day workweek.

Work can even come to a complete standstill, as government employees take vacation days before and after, extending what would normally be a three-day weekend into five or more days.

What about when you return from the holiday? Well, suffice to say that after all that “fun,” you’re loathe to get back to the grind. You might even call off sick the first day you’re scheduled back. Of course when you do make it to the office, chances are you’ll need another day or two to get back into your normal routine.

Public defenders are not exempt from this luxury. In fact, given their huge caseload, one might not be surprised to find they are more inclined to slough off on their work, than are other government employees.

I’m not saying they are so inclined. But it wouldn’t surprise me. And I’m not entirely sure I would blame them. Especially when I think back to the first criminal trial I covered two decades ago. Public defenders were struggling to keep up with their caseloads even then.

The problem is far worse all these years later.

Especially here in California, as is proven by a civil proceeding earlier this year. When a judge fined a San Francisco public defender a hefty $26,000, for refusing to represent new clients. ABC News reported that Public Defender Mano Raju began refusing new cases one year ago, in May 2025, citing “a crushing workload driven by increased prosecutions and insufficient staffing.”

This serious problem is not confined to San Francisco, as can be seen by the number of public defenders who filled the court in support of Raju at his own hearing this past March. Those legal eagles and their staff came from all over California.

According to ABC News, Raju told San Francisco Superior Court Judge Harry Dorfman that “the heavy workload affects the quality of representation his office can provide, which violates the human rights of defendants and negatively impacts his staff.”

Raju was also quoted as saying, “People and their families get hurt when we can’t provide the representation we should and our staff suffers the residual trauma.”

Human rights are violated.

Like those of my daughter.

People and their families get hurt.

Like my daughter—and now, me.

Not long after Keira’s arrest last August, a retired West Virginia state trooper warned me about the pitfalls of having a public defender. He also urged me to find a way to come up with the money to hire a private attorney.

“They’re overwhelmed,” my longtime friend said. “You know how our public defender system works, so I can only imagine how it works in San Diego. A lot of times there’s no decision until you’re in court and the judge is seated. Unless you ride them and push to get them to do what needs done, they won’t do it.”

Which is why, one day after Keira’s arraignment, I drove to the public defender’s office. To see if Keira’s attorney had been appointed. He had, but just barely. So he wasn’t available. At least the receptionist was helpful.

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“I’ve got a flight back to Hawaii today, where I live,” I told her.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

“But I can’t leave San Diego yet, because my daughter’s got a hearing coming up on September 3^rd,” I said. “I need to stay and help her, because she isn’t able to help herself. So it’s urgent that I talk to her attorney, and let him know what’s going on.”

We spoke for a few more minutes, and the receptionist gave me the public defender’s phone number. Before warning me that he didn’t have his voicemail set up yet, because he was a new hire.

My stomach did a somersault at her words.

I could only hope that the man who would hold my daughter’s life in his hands had already devoted years to cutting his legal teeth in private practice, before becoming a public defender. I prayed that he was only new there. That he had left his private clients behind due to a noble desire to do good in the world, by helping poor people who can’t afford an attorney.

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride …”

I left a message for him with the receptionist, since I wasn’t sure he would even return my call. Because I wasn’t his client. That person, my daughter, was an adult. At least physically. Not so much mentally. So I could leave nothing to chance. If he didn’t call me back within a reasonable amount of time, I would call him.

Earlier that morning, Southwest Airlines had told me that I could cancel my flight up to one hour before the scheduled departure. And before I left the hotel room, I had even told Keira I was staying in San Diego—but part of me kept hoping I wouldn’t have to.

By the time I walked out of the public defender’s office in Vista, I knew there was no way I could leave her alone. Sitting in the parking lot, trying to make sense of the last two days, I felt like screaming. Instead I opened the Southwest app on my phone, and rescheduled my flight for September 15.

Buying myself some time. Buying my daughter some much-needed help.

During my hour-long drive to the airport to return my rental car, I was strategizing. Trying to figure out how I could afford to stay in San Diego longer. Recalculating my finances, to see if there was any way I could hire a private attorney. But no strategy existed to overcome my finite resources.

There was no one in my family to ask for money. Even though several loved ones had more than enough to loan, they wouldn’t. Not my sister and brother-in-law, both pharmacists. Not my daughter or her doctor-husband, whose medical school debt had long since been paid off—in large part thanks to my efforts to help him do so. Not my other daughter, who after my mother’s death in 2020, bought my childhood home and the 15 acres it sits on, as well as the adjacent homes and land, up and down the street. Where she now owns three—or maybe four—different businesses.

Their refusal to help their sister was made abundantly clear the day Keira was arrested, on August 16.

No, we were on our own. And on August 26, given how sick Keira had become due to the trauma of a false arrest, I was well aware that this was going to be an uphill battle.

I just had no idea how steep the climb would be. Or how many times I would stumble, sliding backward as the ground gave way under my feet. How very precarious the situation was about to become.

The very next day, August 27, I called the number the receptionist had given me. I was surprised when a very young male voice greeted me in a hushed tone.

Red flag number 1.

He said hello, and then said he needed to step outside the courtroom to talk.

That’s a good sign, that he’s actually taking my call during court.

That’s a bad sign, that he’s taking my call during court.

Red flag number 2.

I gave him a quick synopsis of his new client’s mental health. He said he hadn’t looked at her file yet. “But I will tonight, and tomorrow I’ll dig into it,” he said.

I hung up from that call trying to feel hopeful. Not wanting to be nervous at the sound of his youthful voice. Wanting to trust his promise. Praying that he meant what he said.

I decided extra precaution was in order, and then emailed him with more details. Just in case. And to ensure he had my contact information.

He never replied. A bad sign.

Red flag number 3.

Earlier that day I had also hedged my bet, by calling around to a few private law firms. All of which were beyond expensive.

But one of those private attorneys was eager to help. In fact, later that night she said she would be happy to take the case. We never got around to discussing her fee, though. That because after I explained Keira’s mental state, the lady lawyer surprised me.

“That’s a very serious situation. It’s going to be really tough because it doesn’t sound like your daughter has insight yet into the problem,” she said. “And unfortunately, since she’s an adult, you can’t force her to do anything.”

She suggested I try to get Keira evaluated, and then treated. “As it relates to her criminal case, it could be a good thing,” she said.

That’s when I learned about something called a mental health diversion. She said a lot of her clients had gone through that program. That it gets people like Keira treatment. It also causes their criminal charges to be dismissed.

“The diagnosis is related to what happened, and the arrest would be like it never happened,” she said.

We had been talking almost half an hour by then. Based on how knowledgeable she was, I was wracking my brain trying to think of some way to hire her. I even thought about trying to get a bank loan. If I could have offered her my firstborn in exchange, trust me, I would have.

But her next words stopped me cold.

“I’ve had a lot of clients like your daughter,” she said. “The one good thing about being appointed a public defender is the client can’t fire them. But they can a private attorney.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“No, I’m afraid not.”

That’s when I did it—the one thing I have regretted ever since. I gave up. Even though I was sure the lady lawyer was very good.

I decided that if Keira couldn’t fire a public defender, then I should stop trying to find a way to afford a private attorney. Because I didn’t want to risk Keira firing her, and then having to come up with more money for another attorney.

Besides, who was I kidding? Me, a widow living on social security? Me, who had been living in Brazil doing missionary-type work until 2024?

Me, whose only home and guaranteed regular income had been lost in an estate battle, thanks to my late husband’s corrupt business partner. But thanks also to the stupid decision he made in 2009, by letting that crook talk him into financially tying our home to the new partner’s buy-in of what was once a very successful company.

Our home, which his will stipulated would be mine after his death. My home, which would have offered far more collateral than Keira would ever need. My home, which I fought tooth and nail to keep, for three years.

A legal battle the likes of which left me no time to write anything other than legal motions and appellate briefs. Because when you’re busy trying to learn the law so you can go up against six other legal suits, you hardly have time to sleep—much less try to write more books.

My home, where Keira had lived in 2014, before she went missing for five years.

My home, the loss of which I have lamented ever since the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals dismissed my case on behalf of the estate, just before the pandemic began.

A ruling that left me as high and dry then as it has now, when my daughter so desperately needs me.

• • •

Dear Readers, this is the second collaborative post in Silent Bedlam. The very talented Ella Thompson speaks from the perspective of an adult daughter, while I speak from that of a mother. We have been and remain in the trenches, navigating and speaking out about these emotionally-fraught topics. Because what helped us and our loved ones can also help, sustain, and strengthen you.

A Daughter’s Insight

Whether we admit it or not, we spend a surprising amount of our lives trying to earn our parents’ approval. They’re still the faces we scan for in the crowd at important moments. Your first school play. Your last graduation.

We want them to be proud of us. Not in the loud, embarrassing way, but in that soft, understated way that only parents can do. The small nod. The “yeah, she’s doing alright” tone when they talk about you to their friends they bump into whilst summoning their greatest small talk.

Growing up is partly learning how to disappoint your parents in increasingly new, sophisticated ways without it being a complete crisis. The sigh when you turn up at their door after spending all of your student loan on instant noodles and beer. The roll of their eyes when you’re heartbroken over another mediocre male and declaring your life officially over.

It’s going to them with issues, and knowing they will do their best to fix them. It’s being a constant pain in their backside, but them not changing you for the world.

Sure, you may mess up. But you aren’t messed up.

And that distinction is heartbreaking when it becomes blurred.

It wasn’t like that when I was a child. I was never a genius, but I was the kind of ‘bright’ that got mentioned back to my parents. Especially ‘emotionally intelligent’, which feels ironic in hindsight.

What they didn’t know is that being so tuned in to everyone else’s emotions is exhausting. Having intense emotions yourself is exhausting. And it will look like intelligence right up until you’re eighteen and completely burnt out.

Academically I was okay, too. Although it depended entirely on which teacher you asked. Maths? Absolutely not. English? Get her a book deal.

English lessons were my safe place. The place I could drop the masking and just write. I was good at it. I liked doing it. It felt natural to let the words spill out of me like they belonged on the page all long. Like the words themselves were waiting for me.

The same was true in sport. Whatever I was thrown into, I could do it. And, truthfully, I did it pretty damn well. I won national titles, and was looking at representing England in my future.

I didn’t even care that much. Hockey, netball, cross-country, cheerleading. I just … did them. I was good, so I stayed.

I remember that time of my life, childhood, as being very aware that my parents were proud of me. “You’re going to do big things” they would say.

I stopped going to them with issues. I was the issue. And holding me whilst I cried over my newest heartbreak wasn’t cutting it. I became the type of issue that can only be solved through medication and treatment centres. Through tough love and psych evaluations.

Because one day you aren’t sixteen, making mistakes, you’re twenty-three and in your second hospitalisation. Or, at least, that was the case for me. It stopped being ‘she’s young, she’ll figure it out’ and started being ‘you won’t make it another year if you carry on this way’.

I stopped writing. I stopped playing sport. The world started spinning so fast that it gave me whiplash. My fingers began to ache from gripping on too tightly.

I wasn’t trying to die. I really wasn’t. I was just trying to survive.

But somewhere along the way, my parents’ sighs became deeper. Tears began to escape from their eye-rolls. Their friends stopped asking how I was doing. And I started to drown in the feeling that they stopped being proud.

My chest became increasingly heavy with the knowledge that this is not the life they pictured for me. The girl top of her English class. The woman who graduated with a Bachelor of Science. The daughter who had so much going for her, but never could find her footing.

There were no awards to stick to the fridge, no medals to hang on the walls. My world became increasingly smaller, and so did I. It became less of achieving something, and more of surviving the day.

My parents stopped speaking about my future, and started tending to the cracks in the present. As if the horizon had quietly moved out of reach and all that was left was what could still be held together here.

So no, maybe this isn’t the life they pictured for me. But they didn’t picture losing me, either.

And somewhere between those two realities—the life they hoped for, and the one we’re actually living—is where we’ve had to meet each other. Held together by something stronger than pride. Something far more relentless.

Love. The kind that stays, even when nothing looks like the way it was supposed to.

I’m starting to understand that pride doesn’t always look like I thought it would. Sometimes it isn’t in the big milestones, or in the bragging rights to family friends. Sometimes it’s in the fact that I’m still here. Still fighting.

It’s in the way they never gave up on me. Not once. In my mum climbing into my bed after I came home from hospital, as if staying close could keep everything steady. In the way my dad holds me after I’ve done something hard, like he’s quietly marking the fact that I made it through.

And maybe that’s not the life they imagined. But it’s the one we have. And I think that, slowly, it’s becoming enough. Because pride may change, but love doesn’t.

Even when you do.

As always,

I’ll be here

- Ella <3

A Mother’s Insight

Ella is right. Parents never give up on their children. Not even when that child is emotionally fragile. Not even when she has a mental illness.

Why would we? Depression and other emotional problems are no different than having an autoimmune disorder like lupus. Or a genetic condition like Down syndrome.

Children are so utterly precious that parents love them long after they leave home. Long after other, outside influences can cause a child to stop loving her parents. I don’t know a parent alive who truly could stop loving her child. Yes, we may be disappointed in their choices. We may even be frustrated or angry about their behavior.

My children’s teenage years were full of angst. There was more than one knock-down, drag-out fight. Those incidents were fueled by rage leftover from the violence that occurred in their father’s home. Their obscenity, directed at me. The times they hid, and then drank, alcohol. Ran away. Lied to their teachers.

To this day, there are few memories in my life that are as painful as those years. That do not fill me with longing to turn back the hands of time. For a second chance, to change the things I could.

And to recognize the things I couldn’t, so I could just let those troubles go.

• • •

I had remarried. But not for love. At least, not my love for him. I married a police officer, so I could keep them safe from their father’s violence, which continued long after the divorce.

But the minute my second husband placed the ring on my finger, their biological father turned into a rabid dog. Their stepfather had never had children. Imagine the scene: two men, going toe to toe, over four children. Figurative fists raised, matching blow for blow, leaving the minors they waged war over to pay the ultimate price.

The fallout could have been so much worse. But to this day, I still remember how bad the collateral damage was.

Even now, the final act of my second marriage remains indelibly etched in my mind, like permanent scratches in a crystal vase. One very late night, three and a half years after we traded wedding vows, promising to never forsake each other, my second husband could take no more.

We stood together in our bedroom, the only place we could talk privately. He looked at me. I saw the deep furrow in his brow. The unshed tears in his eyes. The tiredness weighing down his shoulders as if he’d been lugging around a heavy bag of boulders for all that time.

Which he had.

“It’s either me or them. Send them back to live with their father.”

And just like that, the stage lights faded to black, and the curtain came down on that tumultuous marriage.

Silly wabbit!

Shouldn’t he have known by then that I would never choose him over my children?

Not even after they acted out, not even after their angst changed the trajectory of my life. Not after I had walked away from the financial security their father’s paycheck provided, because of his violence. Not after I’d left jobs and spent money I didn’t have and given up homes. All of which I’d done to ensure they would make it to their teens—and then survive those years, to someday flourish as healthy adults.

And certainly not after I had sat at their bedsides, waiting for fevers to break. Or carried them in my arms into hospital emergency rooms in the middle of the night. Or visited them behind locked doors in psych wards, holding them as they cried their hearts out for the other human who helped create them—but who would never truly be there for them.

• • •

Even when our children require more than we have to give, most parents keep on giving. Time, money, attention.

We also continue giving up. People. Relationships. Opportunities. We may cry behind closed doors or slap a smile on our face when we feel nothing like smiling—but we will still show up.

Still be there to soothe our child’s worries, long after they become adults. To encourage them. To hug them. To cheer them on and tell them they’re doing a great job, in spite of it all.

Their wounds may no longer be the boo-boos we kissed to make better. Their problems ones we can do nothing to fix. But we still show up.

And we never give up. No matter the cost. No matter the sacrifice.

Because yes, our children may change.

But our love for them never will.

Forever,

-Daleen

On August 26, as I descended an escalator at San Diego International Airport, my head was awhirl with thoughts. My heart was hopeful. My mind was pragmatic.

One month until I could fly home to Hawaii.

If all goes well.

Nine weeks until I could return to Brazil.

Unlikely.

One day until a public defender would be appointed to Keira’s case.

Who knows?

Two weeks until we could see the body cam footage that would prove her innocence.

Or it could take two months.

Ten days earlier

When I answered the phone on August 16, 2025, and heard the words “felony assault with a deadly weapon against a peace officer,” I felt my entire body go cold.

Then, as the reality that the caller was talking about my daughter sunk in, I had only one thought:

Thank God she wasn’t killed!

Because I had seen the headlines, followed the cases in the news. They proved that in today’s trigger-happy climate, too many cops fire their weapon first. Only to ask questions later.

When it’s far too late.

As far as arrests go, the law gives them wide latitude. Even for something as simple as a parking ticket. All they need is probable cause.

So yes, as I heard the story of what had happened to my daughter play out over the telephone, the singular thought that Keira was alive was more than enough.

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However, I am now homeless, thanks to the probable cause that wasn’t. Due to what began as a minor parking ticket at Moonlight Beach in Encinitas, California—and ended with a felony arrest. An arrest that the deputy sheriff’s own body cam footage shows was utterly unnecessary.

I am more fortunate than many homeless people. Mine is not the kind of homelessness that everyone averts their eyes from. The ugly kind that makes people squirm, or which they try to ignore. The kind that exposes me to the elements, forcing me to seek safe shelter, once darkness descends.

Mine is not the homeless plight of people sprawled out, sleeping on dirty streets. Peeing in public parking lots. Holding signs, hopeful for handouts from passersby.

Unlike so many other people, we have shelter that is clean and dry. With running water and TV.

But I am homeless nonetheless, all because I am with my daughter. Trying to keep her safe. Alive. After the arrogant, irresponsible, power-hungry sheriff’s deputy who falsely accused Keira of trying to run her over caused my daughter to lose her mind.

• • •

Throughout my journalism career, I used the word “allegedly” all the time. Because you can’t just accuse anyone of doing something wrong, and then announce it to the world.

The defendant allegedly tried to choke his girlfriend.

She allegedly locked her son in a closet for two days.

Police claim the suspect allegedly broke into the store.

If your news publication printed anything similar without the word “alleged” attached, you better make sure that accusation came in the form of a quote from someone else. Even then, you needed to exercise care.

This was as true for publishing civil records as it was for criminal charges, or even other types of information. For example, back in the day, many newspapers published news about births, deaths, real estate sales, and so on.

One time early in my career, I returned from magistrate court, stenographer’s pad in hand. I had copied, verbatim, the latest civil judgments by hand. Then I typed them into a file on my computer. The typed copy that I created from my handwritten notes appeared in the next edition of the paper.

Before long, my editor called me into her office. She was not happy. She had just gotten off the phone with a very angry man, who was threatening to sue the newspaper because we had mistakenly printed his name as the guilty party in a civil judgment.

I was certain I had copied the words verbatim. Until I began second-guessing myself. But my editor called the magistrate court clerk, who checked, and found that the error was in the court’s civil file.

Because there had already been a judgment in a court of law, it wasn’t possible to allege anything—so the word wasn’t needed.

The body cam footage—5 months later

In January, there was no such judgment in Keira’s criminal case. It was still being processed, working its way through the system.

Regardless, there is nothing alleged about what either the female deputy sheriff—or my daughter—did last August. The 30-minute video plainly shows evidence of their actions. Clearly captures their speech. There is no mistaking what happened.

And what did not happen.

We didn’t get to see the body cam video until January 16. Five months and several hearings later. Even though I had been asking for her public defender to get it since I first met him.

When we did watch it, the video showed conclusively that Keira had done exactly what Renée Good did on January 7, just nine days earlier—Keira turned her wheels away from the deputy, and started to drive away. Very slowly.

In January, ICE agents ordered Good out of her vehicle. But last August the female deputy said nothing to my daughter.

In fact, the last words the deputy spoke were in response to Keira’s question. She said yes, someone would mail the parking ticket to her. But then the deputy didn’t say another word.

Even though on video Keira can be clearly seen, as she tells the deputy that since the ticket would be mailed to her, she was going to leave. Keira tells her that twice.

While her words were spoken as a statement, Keira’s tone of voice tells anyone watching the video that she was asking the deputy a question. Both times.

Not, “I’m going now,” but “Is it okay for me to leave now?”

The video also shows Keira hesitating, respectfully waiting for the deputy to speak up. When the deputy continued silent, ignoring Keira, my daughter did what many other people might do: she assumed she was free to leave.

“Okay, I’m going now.”

More silence. The deputy just keeps on writing the ticket, not even looking up. It’s as if, for her, Keira doesn’t even exist. She doesn’t even deserve the common courtesy of a reply.

Even after Keira gets into her vehicle, and closes her door—which has the window rolled up—the deputy still doesn’t speak.

She doesn’t even say the one thing that anyone would reasonably expect her to say, if leaving the scene was a problem: “No, you can’t go.”

She didn’t say one word.

Not one.

Why not?

You could say that Keira got off relatively easy. And I would—if I could.

Whereas ICE fired shots into Good’s vehicle, fatally injuring her, Keira drove away, relatively unscathed.

At first.

But some injuries take longer to appear. Especially traumatic injuries that harm the human brain.

All I know is this: on August 16, when Keira called me from the Vista Detention Center, I still knew who she was. By the time her August 25 arraignment ended, Keira’s mental state was so unstable I knew I couldn’t leave her alone.

But over the next few weeks, her mental health deteriorated so rapidly I felt like I was watching a remake of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Except, in place of Brad Pitt, there was a female lead—played by my daughter.

Suddenly, everything around me was spinning out of my control. And by October, Keira was so absent-minded that I feared she had early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Then she stopped eating and drinking.

When she stopped answering her phone one day, and that day stretched into the next, I felt like I would lose my mind.

The next time I saw her, I didn’t know who she was. The child-like creature I finally tracked down, after finding her digging through her storage unit, was nothing like the Keira I remembered. Yes, she still looked like my daughter. But she was no longer an adult of 43. This Keira was acting more like a child of 12.

However, this Keira was nothing like the Keira I had known at the same age. That Keira was quite accomplished. At age 11, she had stood on a stage in Washington, D.C., as a contender in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Keira was then only in the fifth grade, and her vocabulary scored in the 99th percentile. She was in the top 1-percent of other fifth graders. Meaning that Keira knew and used twice the number of words as other children her age. By comparison, an average 11-year-old knows 10,000 words.

I can still remember helping her study for The Bee. Every day after work, one of us would record the practice words on a tape recorder. At night, the 120-minute tape would play while she slept.

• • •

Keira’s three siblings were in school at the time, so they couldn’t join us for that once-in-a-lifetime mother-daughter trip. I drove Keira four hours to “Bee Week,” held in the nation’s capital. Thanks to the generosity of the event sponsors, we stayed in a five-star hotel, ordered room service, and enjoyed special events planned for contestants and their families.

Keira grabbed this photo of me at one of the events we attended during The Bee

It feels ironic now, but at the time, I was publishing law enforcement journals for the West Virginia Deputy Sheriff’s Association and the West Virginia Fraternal Order of Police. The local newspaper had asked me to write and then fax daily updates about Keira’s experience during Bee Week. So that week I wore two hats—one of mother, another of freelance writer. What stuck with me was seeing how upset Keira was when she misspelled a word, and left the stage downhearted.

Feeling so overwhelmed by failure that she kept saying, “I’m so stupid. I’m so stupid.” Once back in our room, she burst into tears. I tried to comfort and soothe her.

“You’re not stupid,” I brushed the hair away from her tear-filled eyes. “Sweetheart, you made it all the way here, which is something that very few students ever do. That’s incredible. That’s the opposite of stupid.”

She wasn’t convinced. But eventually she fell into a deep sleep. When she awoke, I had already filed my Bee update with the newspaper office.

It took days for me to convince Keira that her misspelling a single word said nothing about her intellect. That it was no marker whatsoever about her as a person. That to me, to our family, whether she won or lost made no difference—because we loved her for who she was. Long before she became a champion speller.

To this day, I wonder if my words even mattered. Or if she carried that disappointment with her wherever she went. If the pressure she placed upon her 11-year-old self was so great that it inhabited her psyche forever after. Making her more fragile than her siblings.

I will never know.

There are some things I do know, though. For instance, from May 17-24, Keira and I changed hotels 4 times. Not because we wanted to. But because the algorithms that govern Priceline and other online travel sites (OTS) like it cause the prices to fluctuate every hour. So I don’t always know if I will have enough money to pay for the next night’s lodging—until the morning of our next stay.

The only way I can even pay for them is by maxing out my credit cards. Because my meager social security check doesn’t come close to covering our hotel stays.

As I said in Issue 1 of Keira’s story, “I never dreamed that my daughter would become the homeless person whose story I am now telling.”

Even though I can keep her alive, I can’t keep her healthy. The forgetfulness that has become a hallmark of Keira’s condition has stolen everything from her.

Including the one word that she still knew just two months ago, when I last asked her.

Keira’s memory is so bad that she can’t remember the word she misspelled more than 30 years ago, while standing on a stage at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.

• • •

Please note: If you have experienced sexual violence, this article about marital rape may be emotionally difficult to read.

One month ago, the world learned the most surreal and unsettling news about marriage to date. Men are first drugging, then raping their sleeping wives, and then callously posting the horrific evidence online—for other men to learn from.

The terrifying fact that marital rape exists to this degree comes as no surprise to me. That’s because I wrote about my own rapes by my then-husband in my memoir, Sister of Silence. This includes the rapes that occurred while I was sleeping.

Today, instead of Issue 16 of When a Mother Knows, I’m posting an excerpt from my as-yet-unpublished nonfiction book.

Lethal Silence is not the sequel to Sister of Silence. But it frankly discusses rape within marriage. It remains near and dear to my heart because I feel like I’ve spent a lifetime researching violence against women. And sharing my knowledge and experience publicly. First, in my 2011 memoir. Next in my 2012 speech to the Maine chapter of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW-Maine). And finally, in my 2013 TEDx talk.

In 2012, Lethal Silence took first place in the Pearl S. Buck Award in Writing for Social Change category in the West Virginia Writers annual writing competition. In it, I cite evidence showing that wives aren’t the only ones suffering from what the CDC now calls intimate partner violence. So are the children—but in a completely different way.

Please give this excerpt a read. Because when it comes to rape within marriage, CNN’s rape academy story is just the tip of the iceberg.

Chapter 8

When Consensual Sex Isn’t

Before Greta Rideout accused her husband of rape in 1978, it wasn’t even a crime in most states: A man could rape his wife and be granted immunity. This is because the law of the day said marriage was a contract, in which one of a woman’s duties was to provide her husband with sex (Bazhaw, 2008, p. 1).

True, much has changed today. But there remains a huge divide between theory and practice. Thus wives are still being raped by their husbands. That’s why I decided in 2011 to speak up. Because in ten years of marriage, rape not only played a role—it defined me. Those rapes impacted my thoughts, my beliefs, and my dreams. And it ultimately led me to plan my escape, one which would have been just as deadly for my children.

Our society is blind to rape within marriage, because we don’t want to see it, or talk about it. But denial doesn’t change the fact that it happens—far more than you could ever imagine. So much so that in 1994 the United Nations spoke loud and clear, when it said marital rape would be considered violence against women (Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, A/RES/48/104. Article 2, § (a); Feb. 23, 1994).

The history behind the legislation of marital rape is a factor in continued denial of this problem, since raping your wife didn’t become a crime in all fifty states until July 5, 1993. But only a minority of states—seventeen and the District of Columbia—refuse to grant exemptions to husbands.

The rest do: In thirty-three states, a husband can’t be prosecuted if his wife is mentally or physically ill, unconscious—even asleep—and “unable to consent.” West Virginia, where my then-husband and I lived, is one of them. This means that what I instinctively knew was a moral and criminal violation of my body, mind, and spirit would not have been considered as such by the authorities. Other states with similar exemptions are Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, and Kentucky (Bazhaw, 2008).

But marital rape made front-page headlines in many daily newspapers in 1978. That’s when 23-year-old Greta accused her husband John of raping her—in front of the couple’s two year old daughter. The only reason Greta could even press criminal charges, however, was due to a recent change in the law. In 1977, just one year earlier, Oregon had passed a law that overrode the common law. This meant that for the first time, Oregonian husbands could be prosecuted for raping their wives. In other words, such men were not legally exempt.

Dr. Gilbert Geis, a criminology professor at University of California at Irvine, was interviewed about the issue of “spousal exemption.” He said English Jurist Judge Matthew Hale was responsible for the immunity granted husbands by the common law. In 1736 that immunity was explained this way: “the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by the mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto the husband which she cannot retract” (Net Industries, 2008).

Unfortunately, the judge in Rideout v. Oregon agreed: He denied District Attorney Gary Gortmaker’s motion to view the new legislation as superior to the old one. Ultimately, the case came down to this: Whether Greta was forced to have sex with John, and whether marriage meant a woman could tell her husband ‘no.’ In a six-day trial, a jury of eight women and four men decided in less than four hours that John Rideout did not rape his wife (Net Industries, 2008).

The media failed Greta Rideout, too: Headlines screamed happily when the couple reconciled two weeks later. But they remained silent when, three months later, the Rideouts separated and ultimately divorced (Bazhaw, 2008).

Today many men still subscribe to Hale’s antiquated way of thinking, but how do women see it? Not surprisingly, they disagree. In fact, note what the 2006 the National Institute of Justice reported in its 1995-96 National Violence Against Women Survey. It found that among the 17.7 million women who have been raped during their lifetime, a husband or an ex-husband was the culprit in 3.6 million (20-percent) of those cases (National Institute of Justice, 2006, p.26).

Since today many couples live together as if they were married, that’s important for another reason: one-half million (4.3-percent) of those women were raped by a current or former live-in partner. But that’s not all: 3.8 million (21.5-percent) were raped by a current or former date, or a significant other. Combined, all these rapes fall under “interpersonal violence” or “intimate partner violence” (IPV), the term coined by the CDC.

Using the NVAWS and US Census population figures, this federal agency found “an estimated 201,394 women are raped by an intimate partner each year” (Ibid).

Experts say 10-14-percent of women experience marital rape. These rapes are separated into three levels: The first involves using only as much force as is necessary to coerce. The second occurs when battering happens concurrently, before, or after, the rape. The third is called “sadistic rape,” and is when perverse sexual acts occur. This level often involves pornography (VAWNET.org, accessed 2008).

I experienced all three levels, because, as my then-husband later said, “I just felt like you had to do it every day.”

Every woman I know has some days when she doesn’t want, can’t, or is too ill or exhausted to have sex. Many women rightly refuse to have sex during their periods; I’m one of them. While pregnant, nursing a baby, or caring for a newborn, many women find their energy (if not their desire) for sex wanes. Having been pregnant for almost three entire years from when we married in 1980 until our fourth and final child was born in 1985 how often do you think I wasn’t “in the mood?”

Therefore, given that my then-husband felt he “had” to have sex daily, how often do you think he raped me?

Ultimately sex wasn’t about love, just as rape isn’t about sex: it was about power, possessiveness and control. And pornography was a significant factor. How could it not have been, when he devoured any pornographic material he found? He read it on the job inside the coal mines where he worked, and kept it hidden inside his vehicle and around our home.

“By the time I was 18, I could walk into anywhere and buy Playboy or Penthouse or whatever I wanted to read,” he said. And on the job “you walk in the bosses’ room … and it’s all over the table and on the power centers. It was everywhere and nobody said nothing about it.”

He now admits pornography was a major component in the rapes. “I think that’s why I was probably pushing you into some things you shouldn’t have been doing,” he said. “You’d read in there what the guys and the girls did and I … thought, ‘Well, that sounds like fun. We’ll try it.’ Well, I think in the end I couldn’t figure out why you didn’t want to. I guess I didn’t have no self-control. There just ain’t no other way to explain it.”

My refusals to have sex didn’t work then. Today the number of husbands who override their wives’ refusals to give them sex—by which I mean raping them—is much larger than we can even imagine. And many men still believe that women don’t really mean it when they say ‘no.’

That’s the same mistake my ex-husband made: “I thought, well, you did say ‘no,’ but you didn’t kick me out of bed or … whatever.”

He learned the hard way that I did, indeed, mean what I said: We divorced not long after the final rape. Which he remembers just as vividly.

Today, men who don’t listen when a woman says ‘no’ could ultimately wind up in prison: Numerous states already make it a crime for a man to continue having sex with a woman once she tells him to stop. Maryland became the eighth state to uphold a woman’s right to decide whether she wants sex to end even after it begins, after the Court of Appeals wrote: “The crime of first-degree rape includes post-penetration vaginal intercourse accomplished through force or threat of force and without the consent of the victim, even if the victim consented to the initial penetration.” With this new ruling, Maryland joins Alaska, California, Connecticut, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota and South Dakota in clarifying the issue of consent (Associated Press, April 16, 2008).

Part of the problem with society’s oblivious attitude toward marital rape is the mentality involved: People simply think the better you know someone, the less likely it is that force would be needed (and used), or harm would occur. But speaking from experience, I can tell you that whether it happens at the hands of a stranger or someone who’s supposed to “honor and cherish” you, the damage is insidious. I believe the harm can be greater when rape comes at the hands of a husband or boyfriend. When trust is betrayed and boundaries are violated, we cannot come to terms with the idea that someone who loves us would rape us.

Rape in general leads many women (but sadly not enough, since not all injured victims seek treatment) to obtain medical help. But the resultant problems due to the psychological trauma caused by rape—lost wages, medical treatment and PTSD—cost not just the individual, but society as a whole.

Looking at it solely from a monetary value, the NVAWS found women raped by an intimate partner lost an average 8.1 days from paid work, and another 13.5 days from household chores. This is the largest average number of days lost in this category, from among female victims of physical assault, stalking, and rape (National Institute of Justice, January 2006).

Finally, some damages simply can’t be calculated. This includes the long-term harm done to not just one rape victim, but ultimately to her children, too. They may suffer at her hands for a variety of reasons, including not receiving the care they need to grow into healthy adults themselves.

Experts who study spousal abuse find rape is a common component within marriage. Dr. Neil Websdale is a criminal justice expert who studied domestic violence in rural families. He said “roughly half” of the women he interviewed experienced forcible rape by their husbands or partners (Websdale, 1998, p. 12).

Granted, this figure is higher than that of Diane Russell’s 1990 San Francisco survey of female rape victims. Those women reported 38-percent of the rapes were committed by husbands or ex-husbands (and another 13-percent by lovers or ex-lovers). But significantly, both Websdale and Russell report a higher incidence of rape within marriage or similar relationships, than does the NVAWS (as cited in Websdale, 1998).

Which leads us to Helen Eigenberg, who said that study doesn’t show the true “magnitude’ of rapes. Eigenberg criticized the NVAWS, because it doesn’t directly ask a woman if she was raped, or if she had sex against her will. So the above numbers could be, and probably are, much higher than we know (Eigenberg, H.,1990).

With regard to marital rape, a woman name “Katie” told Websdale that when her husband “wanted to have sex intercourse, he did it, without my consent … Or whenever he wanted me to give him a blow job, he would take my head and push it down toward him and I’m like, ‘No, I don’t want to do this.’ But to get him to shut up, I had to do it anyway” (Websdale, 1998, p. xxiv).

Another woman named “Connie” had sex only because it kept her mate from getting angry. Which then satisfied his expectation that her job was to satisfy him sexually. Rural women repeated this story to Websdale again and again. One woman even said she was raped while “her abuser held a knife to her throat” knowing that as a child “she had been sexually molested” at knifepoint (Ibid, p. 12, 13).

Those women expressed similar sentiments, but “Sabrina” succinctly summed up how insidious marital rape is. Being raped, “sometimes three and four times a day … always at least twice,” including being forced to give her husband oral sex “has turned me against it, I have no feelings whatsoever … concerning sex, other than it disgusts me” (Ibid, p. 14).

Rape is not a crime of sex: It’s a matter of power. During their ten-year study of 200 couples, renowned psychologists Neil Jacobson and John Gottman also found this to be true. Reporting on the prevalence of rape within marriage, they said “sexual assault and coercion go hand in hand with battering.” But in spite of this finding, they acknowledge society still doesn’t understand the power component of marital rape. Referring to the antiquated laws regarding spousal exemption, they said a “high percentage of batterers rape their wives, but until recently marital rape was considered an oxymoron.” Calling the exemption “barbaric,” they said “many citizens have lagged behind the law in their attitudes” (Jacobson, N. & Gottman, J., 1998, p. 149).

Perhaps more seriously, many wives themselves “often still feel guilty enough to submit to sex when they don’t want it, even under coercive conditions.” Moreover, we women have been brainwashed ourselves, since “many wives don’t consider the sexual coercion as rape.” When Jacobson asked one client if her husband ever raped her, she initially said no. But a week later she asked Jacobson if “choking me until I give him a blow job” was rape. The authors said she minimized this “extremely violent act because she also subscribed to the belief that her husband was entitled to sex whenever and however he wanted it” (Ibid, p. 150).

Not every marital rape involves coercion or even force—but they’re still “equally insidious.” The authors say “a great many” marriages experience this “powerful method of sexual coercion” as emotional abuse (Ibid).

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Experts who study domestic violence have long believed that when sexual assault is part of the equation, there is “a high risk of potentially lethal violence at some point in the future” (as cited in Jacobson, N. & Gottman, J., 1998). Thus, they “believe the safety of battered women who are also (raped) is especially precarious” (ibid, p. 151).

I could tell you why I think this is true, but the above authors say it far better than I could: “Rape is not only violent; it is sadistic. It suggests that you are little more than a toy to your partner, to be used when necessary and dispensed with when unnecessary” (Ibid, p. 244).

My experience as a survivor of marital rape is helpful when it comes to offering suggestions about how society must change. The change isn’t only for society; it’s for individual victims, who can be their own worst enemy. For the majority of my marriage, I discounted my husband’s actions as rape, and I submitted to coercion when I didn’t want to have sex. The above studies prove that many other wives do the same thing. We need to stop this, and accept the truth: We have a legitimate right to say no in this intimate area of our lives.

Women can provide one of the best tools to help with this problem by supporting each other. In practical terms, what this looks like is being fearless and generous.

Being fearless means there’s no reason to fear speaking up. Don’t be afraid to ask a friend, family member, or neighbor who’s having marriage problems if sexual abuse is one of the issues. Helping other women like this shouldn’t be difficult, given that the more popular and provocative televisions shows and films these days include dialogue and scenes where nothing about sex is taboo.

Being generous means giving of your time, money and energy. Help fund and even staff sexual assault or domestic violence hotlines, which are in dire need of both. Money to build or appropriate safe shelter for such women—and their children—is desperately needed. Now more than ever. Get informed about the local, state, or national programs that provide public education and awareness about rape. About what the current laws say, so you can help someone else. Or even yourself.

Historically, battered wives haven’t spoken out about their abuse. That’s finally changing. However, when it comes to sexual violence—specifically rape within marriage—talking can be much more difficult. But just knowing that other people understand what’s going on, and care enough to talk about it, will help these women. Frank communication can go a long way in releasing them from their silent prison. In giving them the freedom of speech they deserve.

When I say I know just how liberating it is to speak out about being raped or sexually abused, you can trust me: I learned this the best way possible—by doing it myself.

Baba Was A Witch

The CNN rape academy story is bigger. Snopes had more.

Last week I wrote about the online rape academy CNN exposed and one of the first comments was some guy saying man, Snopes already debunked that and basically telling me to chill the f— out. Obviously, he didn’t read the Snopes piece…

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4 months ago · 2555 likes · 480 comments · Linda Caroll

In a world where everyone wants to get noticed, isn’t it a bit ironic that when it comes to writing books, many authors go into hiding?

Instead of using their given name, they use a pseudonym or pen name. A nom de plume, or an alias.

All words that mean the same thing: you don’t want people to know who you are. Or that you authored that book.

What about you? Do you write under your given name here on Substack? Is that really your legal name on the cover of your book?

No matter your gender, if you do go with a pen name, you’re following in the footsteps of a long list of fabulous female writers. This includes Joanne Rowling, known as JK to anyone who writes or reads, thanks to the worldwide success of her Harry Potter books. Yet, even with the advances women have made, Rowling still chose to disguise her gender by using her initials.

Hiding one’s own identity when writing for public consumption is nothing new. In fact, when Pride and Prejudice was first published in 1813, no one knew that Jane Austen—now one of the most celebrated writers ever—was its author.

She didn’t even opt for an alias. Instead, where the author’s name would normally adorn a book’s cover, the covers of Austen’s first four novels contained only seven letters:

By a Lady

By the mid-1800s, three women chose men’s names with the same initials as their own: Emily Brontë wrote her only novel, Wuthering Heights, under the pen name Ellis Bell. Charlotte and Ann went with Currer and Acton. Thus, the Brontë sisters became the Bell brothers. And the public was none the wiser.

There is always a price to be paid when we must disguise ourselves. No matter the reason we must do so.

But for the women who lived three centuries ago, hiding their identity wasn’t so much a choice as it was a savvy business decision. One that admittedly came at a cost. However, with that choice came freedom—artistic freedom! Those women were liberated because they had freedom of thought. Of self-expression. Of being content creators in a way that still lives on today.

In my opinion, that was the best type of freedom they could ask for. But a second close was this: as long as no one knew their gender, people read their books. Try to imagine that—if you can.

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And then, imagine this. Because we live in a new era today. Up until the 1970s, we womenfolk published a mere 20% of books. But now? The story has a new ending. Because “by 2020, for the first time in history, women were publishing more books than men.”

That, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, thanks to some very good research which shed a night light (good for under-the-covers reading) on the matter for bibliophiles everywhere. Including the fact that by 2021, books written by women were outselling those of male authors.

Man oh man, we’ve come a long way, baby!

Today, though, many authors still write under a nom de plume. And not just women. Think of Daniel Handler, author of the popular children’s book series, A Series of Unfortunate Events. Handler goes by the adorable pen name Lemony Snicket.

But why? Why on earth, in the “let it all hang out” society in which we now live, does anyone need to hide their identity? The reasons vary. But in many ways, they remain the same as they did in Austen’s day. Because at that time, writing books wasn’t considered proper for women. Writing just wasn’t feminine.

Heavens to Betsy, tell me it ain’t so!

Three centuries later, we have learned that writing books is indeed every bit a woman’s domain, as it is a man’s. In other words, if he can do it, so can she.

Or vice versa, as the famous soccer player Mia Hamm said:

“My coach said I run like a girl. And I said if he ran a little faster, he could too.”

Or, to borrow from Austen herself, to which I add my own twist:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a good pen, must be in want of a book.

In fact, the author who gave us Pride and Prejudice was as anonymous in 1813 as when the infamous Primary Colors was published 183 years later. When the single word, “Anonymous,” stood in place of that author’s name.

And although he tried his best to remain anonymous, Time magazine columnist Joe Klein simply couldn’t. After his 1996 roman à clef landed in bookstores, becoming a #1 New York Times bestseller, his anonymity died six months later.

For the young ‘uns among us, Klein’s book—which turns 30 this year—was about Bill Clinton’s first presidential run. This novel was billed as fiction, but was actually based on real people, real places, and very real happenings.

But I digress.

Given that “all the world’s a stage,” to quote The Bard himself, why do some writers still seek anonymity?

Well, as Michael Aronson, who reviewed Primary Colors, said in the New York Daily News, “Anonymity makes truthfulness much easier.” But that’s not the only reason. Another one is the layer of protection that a pen name provides you, and your book’s characters. (Who may or may not be real people.)

This protection might be warranted when writing nonfiction, because even if it’s dressed up as fiction, it still carries a legal liability. In other words, you can be sued. You see, shrouding your own name in secrecy can protect you legally—but only up to a point.

Which is why my editor urged me to get permission from my family members before publishing my memoir, Sister of Silence. This even though I changed all of their names, to afford them the protection that the innocent among them deserved.

And which I did. Thank my lucky stars, given all that has come since then!

After years of agonizing over it, I chose to use my own name. Giving me absolutely no anonymity. That was intentional, for several reasons. First, I like taking ownership for my accomplishments. Second, I’ve always owned up to my responsibilities—and my mistakes. Third, by the time Sister of Silence was published, I had been a journalist for 23 years. Writing under my own name.

Do I regret not using an alias? Yes, sometimes. Why? Because writing under a pen name makes retaliation less likely.

Which is why, specifically when writing memoir, using a nom de plume is often the wisest course. Writing memoir, you see, carries with it a level of liability that isn’t all financial. And if you write under the name bestowed upon you when you entered this world naked as a bluejay, you will have no choice but to accept that liability.

Which is why I say: don’t just protect the innocent. Protect yourself. Use a pseudonym.

Take it from someone who learned the hard way. Because while you might not care about the guilty parties whose sins you reveal—they sure as the dickens will. Especially if other people call them out about said sins.

In addition to not changing my own name, nor did I change other details, such as the name of the towns or the state where we lived. That decision has, over the last 15 years, come at a very high emotional cost. Especially because insensitive people have come up to my children in public, talking trash about their father.

The emotional cost was also pricey since he and his next wife went to great lengths to slander me after my memoir was released. While he did so behind the scenes, with our children, she did so in public. In particular, she took great pleasure in trying to humiliate me in front of people who had known—and respected me—my entire life.

Until then.

Including that time in 2015, when she did so in a courtroom full of people—during the sentencing phase of a criminal trial for a man who was found guilty of murdering his ex-girlfriend. A criminal case I was covering for my audience.

That was particularly ironic, given that Wife #2 was then married to the batterer I fled from in 1990. The man whose sexual violence I revealed in Sister of Silence.

I am proud of having written truthfully about a horrific time of my life, and about the effects that violence had on me and my children. Of writing about the fact that I survived when so many other women like me have not—because when we expose such ugly truths, we help others like us.

Nonetheless, I often wish I would have used a nom de plume.

You can learn from my mistake: when you write, change every identifying detail that can lead, like breadcrumbs, back to you. Change all the names of people and places.

Even your own.

Encinitas, California, August 2025 (Photo by Daleen Berry)

From August 16, 2025, when my daughter called to tell me she was in jail, until now, my life has been punctuated by the staccato rhythm of pivotal dates and mundane moments that have come and gone.

• On August 24, I boarded a flight from Honolulu, Hawaii, to San Diego, California.

• On August 25, I attended Keira’s criminal arraignment.

• On August 26, the aircraft that I thought would take me back to Oahu departed. Leaving me behind, standing alone on the tarmac.

• The rental car that I returned minutes before I was supposed to board the plane was simply traded out for another one.

• The two-day trip turned into six weeks. Which eventually turned into nine months … and counting.

I was stranded in a foreign land, dependent upon the generosity of strangers. Generosity which has not always been forthcoming. Which has, at times, turned into just the opposite.

On August 26, 2025, my life was already in shambles. I just didn’t know it yet.

Fortaleza, Brasil, in 2023 (Photo by Daleen Berry)

The evening after her arraignment, Keira could not stop talking about the felony charges. How they were linked to the assassins who were trying to kill her. She talked for one solid hour before I asked her to stop. I had been struggling to keep my eyes open for too long already, and it was close to midnight.

“Sweetheart, I really want to hear everything you have to say,” I began, interrupting her. “But I’m exhausted and I need to get some sleep. Can we continue this tomorrow when I’m awake and can pay attention to everything?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, as meek as ever. “Yes, but I have a lot to do tomorrow, Mom. And you have to catch your flight, so it might have to wait.”

Wait until when?

My mind was still making plans. It knew I needed to return my rental car and catch my flight back to Honolulu. It also knew that I was due back in Brazil in November.

But my heart?

That very heavy organ was telling me I wasn’t going anywhere. That in all likelihood I would never return to Brazil—because there was no way I could leave my daughter. Not until I got to the bottom of everything.

An outdoor market in Forteleza, Brazil, in 2023 (Photo by Daleen Berry)

The next morning, my circadian rhythm stranded somewhere between Hawaii and Brazil, I awoke long before dawn. So I got online and reserved another rental car. One that was more economical than the current one. The daily rate was lower, which I needed. All that remained was to switch the two cars out at the airport, and then find a place to stay. A much cheaper hotel.

It couldn’t be that difficult. Could it?

After a small breakfast inside the hotel, I told Keira I wasn’t leaving. She told me I should go home.

“What can you do here? Nothing. I have to do it all myself,” she said.

“I don’t know, but I intend to find out,” I said. “At the very least, I’ll push my flight back by a couple of weeks. Until after your next hearing.”

“Are you keeping the hotel room?”

I shook my head. “No, I can’t afford to. I’m going to look for one that costs less. But don’t worry, because I’ll figure something out. Everything’s going to be okay.”

An hour later, Keira was sitting on her bed in my hotel room, fingers speeding across the keys on her laptop. I reminded her to turn in the room keys at the front desk before leaving. I asked her to not stay longer than the check-out time. She promised she would do both.

“Where will you go after you leave here?” I asked.

“After I get this report done to turn into the district attorney, telling them what’s going on, I need to finish cleaning up my vehicle, so I can find the rest of my things,” Keira said.

The police had trashed it during the August 16 arrest, looking for drugs or other contraband they would never find—because Keira didn’t do drugs.

My body is a temple. I need to keep it pure.

How many times had she said that? How long had she been eating almost nothing but raw fruits and vegetables, and sprouted seeds and nuts? Her adherence to a raw food diet amazed me. I couldn’t eat like that. I needed meat. And bread, and cheese.

“Okay. I’ll call you when I’m headed back from the airport. It will probably be early afternoon.”

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Driving south on Interstate 5, towards San Diego International Airport, thoughts came at me from every angle.

I thought about how hard it must have been for Keira to give up her diet. Which for her was more like a religion than a way of eating. She had been making and eating raw food for years. In fact, she had prepared some of the most amazing raw food I’ve ever eaten—culinary creations that would rival the delicious (and expensive!) raw food we used to eat together in San Francisco and Berkeley.

But surely there was no way Keira could remain a raw foodie while living in her van. Or could she? Who knew? Between my need to buy clothes for her arraignment, the actual criminal proceeding itself, and then her shocking revelation that night, there really had not been much time to talk.

She had made her own kombucha for years. And thanks to the solar panels she had purchased a few years earlier, which gave her an energy source, she used her food dehydrator all the time.

My father at the controls, preparing for a flight

Driving to an airport anywhere always brings back memories of other, past flights. Of the flights taken with my father in the left seat, flying me to my monthly orthodontic appointments. Of the flights I took when I was training to get my pilot’s license.

Of the flights that had ferried me away from people I loved. Or to people I had yet to meet, but whom I would soon grow to love.

So I allowed myself the luxury of letting my thoughts carry me back Brazil. To the hot, humid, and oh-so-sunny city of Fortaleza, Ceará, where I had been an expat. The country where I planned to live indefinitely. But which a sudden turn of fate forced me to leave in June 2024—no thanks to dengue fever. I was so very sick, but my many friends took such tender care of me that I felt warm and pampered, like a small child.

Those thoughts, in turn, led me to the Brazilian man I had left behind. Or rather, they carried me back to the possibility of him.

I thought about him, briefly. How, just four days before Keira’s August 16 phone call, I had disembarked from the flight that had taken me away from him.

I had returned to Brazil in July for five glorious weeks. I went, in part, to gauge whether I should return—or stay put, in the States. But not the mainland. I lived on the island of Oahu, in the state of Hawaii. Where the Hawaiian culture, and especially its people, had grown on me.

But not to the same extent as had the Portuguese-speaking people in Brazil. I missed them terribly. I also missed their vibrant, hospitality-centric culture so acutely that I was homesick. I longed to go home.

Especially after what my family had done. Back in the place that had once been my home, in West Virginia. Their cold and cruel actions in February 2025, following the sudden death of my niece Destinee. After what they had done in January. And again in July 2020, not long after the pandemic began. What they had been doing to me for fifteen tortuous years.

Those memories instantly brought forth others. I could see in my mind’s eye one reel after another: how my ex-husband’s violence had split our family in two, long before our 1991 divorce. So that my four children were of two camps. How two children stood with their father, while the other two stood with me. A division they never really outgrew. Or could conquer, leading Keira and her brother to live on the West Coast, while their two sisters lived on the East Coast.

As far apart from each other in lifestyle and philosophy as the literal 2,645 miles that separates them.

Stop, Daleen. Pay attention to the traffic.

I couldn’t think about that. Any of that. If I did, I would start crying—and what good would that do?

No, I needed to focus on what I could do. What I had to do, to help Keira. Get her to a doctor, obviously.

But does she really need to see a doctor?

There was no way to know. Not yet. I didn’t have enough information. Which is why I had cancelled my flight. Why I was driving down I-5 to San Diego.

I remembered the last time I had visited Keira, in September 2024. I had flown to the Bay Area, where she was then living. In Sausalito, to be exact. At the time she seemed fine. We had spent two days together. During which we took a ferry, and dined at an outdoor table on the sidewalk. We ate pricey food that I could then still afford. Our conversation had been normal. She hadn’t voiced any conspiracy theories, nor was there even a hint of assassination attempts.

If there had been, I would have done exactly what I was doing August 26, en route to San Diego: I would have put my life on hold to help my child.

September 8, 2024 selfie, taken on the San Franciso ferry that would take me to see Keira

As an airport escalator carried me down to a lower floor, I thought back to Brazil. To the last night I saw him. We had only met maybe ten days earlier, but those brief moments together, spent among mutual friends, dangled something between us that spoke of future memories to be made.

We were all gathered together outside on a sultry, summer night. For a goodbye dinner of sorts. Eating food like I’ve never tasted in the States. And which took a while to adjust to, after first moving to Brazil. But which was delicious, nonetheless.

On that last night, what began as a handful of people quickly turned into—as any social occasion in Brazil is wont to do—more than a dozen. We sat around a table fashioned from several smaller ones, to which we had added folding chairs.

As the aroma of grilled meat and the sounds of lively chatter from a steakhouse across the street wafted our way, we laughed and joked on a poorly-lit side street in a small barrio (neighborhood) home to makeshift stores and concrete cafés. Buildings which were adorned with the same type of barbed wire you see on top of prison walls.

A dangerous deterrent for dangerous criminals. A place where I had never felt safer.

Rolls of barbed wire can be found throughout cities in Brazil, like the one seen here in Fortaleza, Brazil.

(Photo by Daleen Berry)

As the night wound to a close, I ordered the Uber that would return me to my Airbnb on the other side of Fortaleza. My friends gathered ‘round, in true Brazilian style. He drew closer.

“When will you return?” he asked.

“In November. Early November.”

His friend spoke up, more to him than to me. “That’s a long time.”

He turned to his friend. “Only two months. Not long.”

When the Uber arrived, we said farewell with a handshake.

He placed his other hand on top of our intertwined ones, grasping mine between both of his. “You are bem-vindo (welcome) back here qualquer (whenever you want).”

Before I even knew what was happening, he had opened the Uber door for me. And then, making sure I was tucked safely inside, closed it behind me. Smiling. Not breaking eye contact.

Pulling my thoughts away from Brazil, and him, I felt movement beneath me as the airport escalator reached the first floor. As I did the math: September and October, leaving nine weeks until November.

If I can find out what’s going on, if Keira gets a good public defender, if he can get the body cam video that proves her account of what led up to the arrest is accurate, if he can get the case dismissed—so very many ifs.

So few known variables.

When the present collides with memories from the past

I sat and listened to Keira for more than one hour. As she explained that the felony charges were a setup. As she insisted, again and again, that they were.

I listened as the details turned darkly sinister, and her story took on epic proportions edging into territory that sounded like it could have ties to organized crime.

It was late on August 25, long after the criminal arraignment we had both attended earlier in the day. I was exhausted and very nearly falling asleep. Until Keira’s next words jolted me awake.

Wide awake, on high alert.

“I’ve had several assassination attempts on my life. I know it might sound unbelievable, but some famous celebrities want me dead. They’re trying to kill me,” Keira said. “They used the deputy to try to put me in jail, so they could make sure I was taken out.”

As she talked, Keira told an incredible story about how she was being framed because of her art. Her music. About how people were trying to kill her.

“You believe me don’t you, Mom?” Keira asked.

I was instantly teleported from Hawaii back to our hotel room. Where, at that moment in Encinitas, my daughter sat, cross-legged on her bed. Keira was close enough for me to reach out and touch. Her voice was pleading, earnest. Desperate, even.

I looked at Keira and saw the fear etched into the worried creases on her face. She was terrified.

I didn’t know what to say.

It was real, of course it was.

It wasn’t real.

There’s no way it can be.

My brain didn’t know what to believe.

“Yes, I believe you,” I said. “Of course.”

What else could I say?

I looked at my adult daughter, whose voice quivered like that of a small child. Whose own tears moved me to the point that I felt my eyes begin to tear up. I reached for Keira, to hug her. I wanted to fold her into my embrace and protect her forever. To keep her safe from whoever was trying to hurt her.

To kill her.

To kill her?

“Okay, but Mom, this is important. You cannot tell anyone about this. If this gets out, it will be much worse.”

My inner journalist spoke without thinking. “We need to go to the police—”

“No! Mom, please!” Keira pulled away as if my words were scalding hot water. ““The police are in on this! If you go to them, I’ll leave this room right now and you will never see me again. Do you understand? Are you even listening to me?”

Her words shocked me, but the expression on her face was panic-stricken.

My thoughts were spinning so fast that everything around me suddenly seemed blurry. I felt like I was on a carnival ride, as a myriad of memories from the past spun through my brain.

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Keira in Chicago, in 2007, singing backup for a musical group. Keira on a plane to New York City, in 2012, where she was scheduled to write music with a famous rapper. Where she had been in a music studio with him, one day when I called to see how her trip was going. Keira telling me, in 2013, about another offer she had gotten, to join a famous rapper on his European tour.

Memories of me questioning her, because I had never heard of the guy. (Which meant nothing, given that I’ve never been a fan of rap music.) Keira showing me his email, telling her about his tour dates. Keira going on YouTube, to find one of his music videos. The two of us sitting there, watching his performance.

Me returning home, in 2012, following my trip to California. Only to find that Keira had turned my office into a music studio during my absence. Watching Keira as she changed the settings on her electronic keyboard, and then began to sing. Agreeing for once, to let me hear one of her original songs. Listening, as she crooned a melody so beautiful that it haunted me.

Keira had played piano since she was a child. All four of my children had taken piano lessons. As I had before them. And as my mother had done before me.

At one time, my dream was to have a family band. Each of us would play a different instrument. Just the kids and me, in the privacy of our home. It would be a good way for us to spend time together, a way to deepen our family bond, to ensure we remained close.

I had long since given up that dream. My three other children developed interests specific to their unique personalities. None of which involved playing an instrument. Resigned, I tossed my dream of having a five-member family band out the window.

We gave away the violin, returned the rented trombone to the store. Thankfully, Keira and one of her sisters loved to sing. I loved listening to their beautiful voices.

But only Keira, who probably had been a child prodigy, continued playing piano.

“Mom?” My daughter’s voice pulled me back to the present. Grounded me with its intensity.

“Mom, please listen to me. No police, because they’re in on it!”

I sighed deeply, not knowing where to turn. What to say. How to fix this.

“Okay, I get that. I need more information, but for now, I understand what you’re saying.” I held up my hand, trying to calm her down, and to make her see reason. “I will call Joe and ask him for the name of a contact here. Someone who can help us. We can talk to the state police, or the FBI, if need be.”

Keira’s head was shaking back and forth furiously.

“I know you think the police are good guys, Mom, but that isn’t always true.” Her eyes were wide, full of fear. “The police are part of this! So if you don’t stop, right now, then I can’t trust you. And I won’t tell you anything else—because you’re going to endanger my life even more.”

I looked at her face, tear-streaked with the black mascara she had worn to court at least ten hours earlier. I could see how weary she was, and my heart almost broke in two.

But I didn’t know what else to say. She was adamant, and so afraid, that the only thing I could do was agree. And then do what I knew would be best—tomorrow—before my flight back to Oahu.

“I promise I would never do anything to hurt you,” I placed my hand over her own, which still had a death grip on my arm. “I would never intentionally put you in danger. You know that sweetheart.”

Families keep secrets. It’s what they do.

But why?

Because they’re ashamed. Or embarrassed. Or because they feel guilty about their own actions. And their own trauma, which can be handed down generation by generation.

I’ve often wondered about the family dynamics that lead to such secrets. And how a young bride must feel to wake up and find out that her bridegroom isn’t who she thought he was.

Nor is his family.

I’ve often wondered why family and friends don’t speak up in time to warn the young woman what she’s getting into.

Because they’ve known it all along. They knew who he was. They just went to great lengths to hide his secrets. To lock them away like the skeletons in the closet they are.

Doing that let them keep up the pretense, as if wearing a heavy coat of concealer. Which instead of hiding blemishes on the skin, hid decades of deceit.

Deception that concealed the lies they first told themselves. Maybe little “white” lies, to help them come to terms with things that didn’t make sense. A self-defense mechanism, of sorts. But still lies.

Which, over time, turned into bigger lies. Lies that harmed other people. Good people. People who had done nothing wrong.

Of course the family didn’t see it that way. They saw that person—that good, honest person—as an interloper. Someone whose actions threatened their fragile house of cards, which could, at some point, cause the whole thing to come tumbling down. They had to protect themselves, naturally. They had no choice. Or so they told themselves.

Another lie.

The reason they saw that person as an intruder is because she had done something they never could. She had looked far into the future, and seen the day he would bring you home to meet his parents—and she desperately wanted to prevent someone else from becoming prey to those family secrets.

Like she already had.

Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash

I know exactly how it feels to wake up and find yourself a new bride in a family like that. A family that has worked so hard to hide the shame of its secrets that the line between truth and deceit had been erased long before I ever arrived on the scene.

If you find out the truth about the family you are marrying into, like I did, two months into your marriage, before the sheen has worn off, you will probably tell yourself the very same thing I did. Even though we have never met, and he wants to make sure we never do, you will probably even voice the same thoughts that I once did.

It can’t possibly be true.

I must be mistaken.

There has to be a reasonable explanation.

And so, because you are still new and not quite yet one of them, your brain will begin to pay attention. Unconsciously at first, seeking out any truth that might help dispel those uneasy doubts in your mind. Doubts that will rise after a mountain of evidence piles up right under your nose, higher and higher, until you struggle to tip your head back so far, just to keep the stench from wafting into your nostrils, that you will surely tumble backwards, nauseous and disoriented.

But no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to get away from that rotten odor. After all, you’re part of the family now. You’re one of them.

So they will think it’s safe to let down their guard, because surely you won’t mind seeing them as they really are. Why would you? Not when the many other brides who have come before you didn’t mind.

Only you aren’t like all the others.

Which is why you will eventually find it wasn’t a mistake.

There is no reasonable explanation.

And every terrible thing you’ve discovered really is true.

Will you follow in my footsteps, and try to help your husband and his family (who is now your family) because you care about them?

Because you want them to see the truth? To stop telling themselves the lies, before someone else gets hurt?

Or even killed?

If you’re like me, like I was, you will.

So I feel compelled to warn you now, before it’s too late. Then, at least, you will know.

I will tell you how your story is going to end. Not to hurt or scare you. But so you will be prepared. So you can leave now, if that’s what you feel is best. Before their lies become your lies. Their secrets, your secrets.

His family won’t see it the same way you do. They won’t understand you just want to help. So they will laugh at you and mock you. All while denying their own actions. Their own words, written down in black and white.

They will chide you: “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But when you tell them enough details, and offer enough evidence, they will know that yes, you do know.

And then they will become very angry.

They will defend each other. They will circle like hungry wolves, and they will hurt you. And if you don’t turn and run, then and there, they will devour you.

It will only be a matter of time, but yes, I know what will happen to you. Because it already happened to me.

Here are some of their lies, followed by the truth.

He molested her when she was six.

No, he didn’t. They were in the bathtub with three other small children at the time. The mental health expert who first heard the little girl say this, then told the girl’s mother that what had occurred was no more than normal childhood exploration. Not sexual molestation, because he was only seven. Too young to be a child molester.

2011 letter sent to a friend

The little girl’s mother abused her emotionally.

No, she didn’t. The little girl’s mother saw her daughter’s lies begin at an early age, starting with a stolen pack of chewing gum from a grocery store. So the mother took the girl by the hand and told her in front of the store clerk to return the gum and apologize. The mother didn’t raise her voice, and the little girl received no spanking or other corporal punishment.

When she was 14, her mother threw her down so hard she hit her head on a cinder block.

No, she didn’t. After her mother realized the father of her children was a child molester, she took her daughters and fled. But the little girl (always a self-proclaimed “daddy’s girl”) started showing signs of deeper emotional trauma. By age 15 she spoke of killing her mother and siblings.

1995 journal entries

Much later, by the time that troubled teen had become a mother herself, she was vilifying her own mother. Why? Because by then, she and her husband were abusing their young sons. So her mother kindly encouraged her daughter and son-in-law to be less harsh. To speak more quietly when correcting their children.

When correcting her grandchildren.

The grandmother also taught her beautiful grandson to stand up for himself. Because at age four he was so very sensitive, and so very precious to her—as precious as she was to him—that she had to do what she could (even if she knew it wasn’t enough) to protect him.

2011 letter sent to a family friend

But the truth that the grandmother spoke only made the family angrier. So they began to justify their actions. Perhaps the first lie they told themselves about her wasn’t even intentional. But accidental lies, when not reined in, have a way of taking on a life of their own. Of turning into a pattern.

They were small lies at first, but lies nonetheless. Lies that gradually grew so large she felt like they were going to suffocate her.

Lies that eventually led them to turn her only grandchildren against her. Something she had forewarned them would happen—and which they swore they would never do.

More lies.

What will you do when you learn these things, and everything else? Because there is so very much more you will learn. Many other things, all connected by lies. Things like how they let the grandmother lose her home, how they refused to help her when she fell into poverty.

Like how they vilified another family member who was in trouble. Like how, on August 16, 2025, they refused to take her phone calls, when she cried out to them for help.

Lies that grew and grew and grew, until even her first grandchild—who used to cry and beg her, “Nana, please don’t leave me,” every single time she had to go—began vilifying her, too.

Just like he saw and heard his parents do, for all those years.

Lines from an unsent letter, 2025

What will you do, when you find out that you just married that grandmother’s once-precious little blue-eyed, towheaded grandson? Who just one year ago shared such heinous lies about her that she was humiliated and stripped of her dignity, leaving her sick and in hospital?

Just as his parents had done to her in 2020, a few months into the pandemic. Like they continue doing, even now.

2020 emergency department diagnosis

What will you do? You, the blushing new bride he brings home to his wealthy family?

You, who now wear his gold ring?

You, who are now one of them?

Best wishes to you and your new bride as you walk down the aisle today, May 2, 2026