Photo credit By Christopher Michel - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=137876103

Let’s go!” His voice is deep and gravelly, like that doctor who’s on the TV all the time. She decides to trust it. They run to the corner and turn right to the snaky street with the teetering homes and the grown  up trees. It’s already transformed.

The year is 1973, and women are not helped for needing help. If a woman knows better she keeps it in-house. Not like Mrs. Kirby who they took away. Jenny Kirby looks like a pale ghost at school, moist and puffy. She whispered to me in the cloakroom. “I heard Daddy say they gave her electric shocks.”

It Breaks My Heart to Leave you Behind. I wrote this story for Mutha Magazine when I was on a road trip with my sweet daughter Dyani