Ginny and Me:Reflections of

What God Can Do

Christine Walters

Ginny and Me:Reflections of What

God Can Do

CHRISTINE WALTERS

AuthorHouse™1663 Liberty DriveBloomington, IN 47403www.authorhouse.comPhone: 1 (800) 839-8640

© 2015 Christine Walters. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 04/30/2015

ISBN: 978-1-4969-6421-2 (sc)ISBN: 978-1-4969-6420-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015900445

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NIVScripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. [Biblica]

NKJVScripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

Scripture quotations marked AMP are from The Amplified Bible, Old Testament copyright © 1965, 1987 by the Zondervan Corporation. The Amplified Bible, New Testament copyright © 1954, 1958, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Contents

Acknowledgments ........................................................... 5Prologue .......................................................................... 7

Chapter One Ginny and Me ........................................ 9Chapter Two Growing Up with Ginny........................19Chapter Three God’s Grace and Mercy ........................ 27Chapter Four Saving the Worst for Last ...................... 34Chapter Five Angry with God ................................... 40Chapter Six Final Good-bye ......................................45Chapter Seven God’s Plans Are Not Our Plans ............ 50Chapter Eight Four-Year Bondage ................................ 56Chapter Nine Reflections of What God Can Do .........61

Epilogue ........................................................................ 69Prayers........................................................................... 73My Prayer to God ......................................................... 75Poems by Chris ............................................................. 77Reflections of Christine ................................................. 87About the Author ...........................................................91

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my children, family, and friends for supporting me through this journey and believing in me. I would also like to give a special thank-you to the individuals who encouraged me to finish my book and the friendships established.

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Chapter One

Ginny and Me

Hear my prayer, Lord; listen to my cry for mercy. When I am in distress, I call to you, because you answer me.

—Psalm 86:6–7 (NIV)

V irginia Marie Walters, born June 26, 1949, known as Ginny, had childhood paranoid schizophrenia with multiple personality disorder.

She lived most of her adolescent years in the Buffalo State Hospital, located in Buffalo, New York.

Ginny stayed there when the hospital housed the mentally and criminally insane. There, she met my father, who was housed there after serving a few decades in prison. When both were released from the hospital in 1974, they married after having me. . She was twenty-six; my dad was thirty years older. My mother was white, and my father was black.

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My mother’s mental illness consisted of hallucinations, delusions, and violence to others, but mainly to herself. Many times, she had a hostile behavior with unclear thinking. She thought everybody wanted to put her away, back into the Buffalo State Hospital. Then there were the multiple personalities. She had four that were familiar to me:

1. Virginia, her birth name. She did not like to be called by that name. She stated that Virginia was another person. She thought of herself as a withdrawn, outspoken, and rotten person.

2. Ginny, her nickname. She used this name instead of her first name. She tried being normal, stable, and married with a child. Everyone knew her by Ginny.

3. The little girl. She had a babyish voice and liked someone to cover her up when she laid down. She liked teddy bears and Easter baskets.

4. The bad one. She had a deep, low voice and sounded evil. This one could get very violent.

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A letter that Mom wrote to her doctor

I was placed in foster care not long after she had me. Due to my mother’s history of mental illness, I would visit with my parents as a very young child in a room with my social worker from Child Protective Services. In foster care, I experienced my first account of abuse.

As a child, I suffered a lot of damage as result of my mother’s mental illness. And I struggled with my mixed heritage. My mom would tell me that white people did not like me because I was black. She said that, if anyone asked, I was to say I was black. Ironically, she also said that black

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people did not like me because I had a white mother. From a religious standpoint, I was raised both Catholic and Baptist. On Sundays, my mom and I attended mass without my father and Baptist services with him. My parents were able to have unsupervised weekend home visitation. I would run away before the social worker came to take me back to foster care. I would call the social worker as “the bad man who took me away.” My parents finally got full custody of me right before enrolling into school with ongoing monitoring for many years through a program offered by a faith-based nonprofit organization in Buffalo.

I started kindergarten at the age of four. Despite telling me that white people did not like me for being black, my mom put me in a mostly white Catholic-Polish elementary school. The teacher said I would just daydream and refused to talk. As a result, the school thought it might be best for me to repeat the grade at age five when I had developed more.

I struggled in the second year of kindergarten. Elementary school was the worst for me. I took speech therapy for language disorder and speech impairments. I think I developed speech problems because of the family trauma, dysfunction, and abuse.

I hated school, and I was teased all the time. The other kids would call me racist names such as Oreo Cookie and Zebra. And I would pee on myself. I could not control it and did not know it was happening until I felt wet. As you can imagine, the mocking was relentless. The kids called me Pissy Chrissy.

Because I refused to talk to anyone, I would skip school regularly by sneaking out of the building. Then I would get

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on the Metro bus, walk home, find a way inside the house, and hide so my mom would not know I had left school. She was always lonely. She sometimes would find me hiding and let me stay to keep her company. The school would call my mom. Oftentimes, the police would come looking for me.

I would often run away from school and knock on the house door, hoping my mom would let me come in. At times, she would look out the window and signal me to go back to school. Then she would close the curtain. But I would not go back to school. I stayed outside and made friends with the alley cats, feeding them and giving all of them names. I would use the money my dad would give me from gambling. I’d rather be outside with the cats than go to school.

As an adult with my own children, I often wonder why nothing was said or more questions weren’t asked about why a little girl was leaving school and riding the bus by herself. Did not anyone realize the risk of a child left alone?

In my early childhood, my mother was consistently in and out of the psychiatric center. Occasionally, she had to be admitted for months. Other times, it was a few weeks. With my mom admitted to the hospital, I would usually be at home by myself alone. My father was out gambling most of the time.

Our watchdog, Brownie, was half coyote and German shepherd and only allowed to be loose to walk around the house when I stayed home alone. He stayed in the kitchen, remaining chained to the back door for protection. The chain led up from his neck and was nailed to the back door. We lived in a bad neighborhood, and because Brownie was