‘Something’s Not Right in My Family and I’m Afraid’ : Desperate Woman Calls for Help and Learns How to Be a Mommy

Desperate and crying hysterically, Terri De Primo’s only thought was to get away from her two small children for an hour or so. The day and evening had been a nightmare.

Steven, 2, had a cold and demanded constant attention; Nikki, 4, wouldn’t listen, was all revved up and running through the house. When bedtime came, neither child was able to calm down and go to sleep. And, as usual, there was no relief for Terri from this round-the-clock child care, no family member or friend she could turn to who might give her a break from her children.

Finally, at 3 a.m., Terri couldn’t take it anymore.

She stuffed some diapers into a Miss Piggy bag and shoved Steven and Nikki outside, locking the door behind them. “Get out! Get out!” she screamed. “You don’t want to listen? That’s fine. You take your Miss Piggy bag and you get the hell out of my house.”

It was dark outside, wintertime, and the children, dressed in their pajamas and jackets, were terrified and crying. “Mommy! Mommy! Let us in! The bogeyman’s coming to get us!” they howled, banging on the door.

Ignoring their pleas, Terri went to an upstairs bedroom, covered her head with a pillow and sobbed. Confused and afraid that she might harm her children if she didn’t get away from them for a little while, Terri had all kinds of thoughts racing through her mind:

Why can’t they listen to me? I love them more than anything in the world, but why can’t they see I need a break sometimes? Why is this happening? This is exactly what happened to me when I was young, and I vowed when I had kids I would never do this to them.

Depressed and isolated, married to a man who seldom came home, 28-year-old Terri had no friends, no phone, no car. The only thing in life she could count on was being the constant caretaker of her two preschool children. And it was not a role for which life had prepared her. Shunted from foster home to foster home since age 3, Terri knew little of what it was like to have a stable, secure family life.

Terri desperately wanted to give her children what she never had. But she didn’t have it to give; things were falling apart.

Then, as she became aware again of her children outside, she struggled to gain control of her feelings. After about an hour, she went downstairs and let Steven and Nikki in. The two exhausted children went right to sleep. But Terri couldn’t stop crying. By 6 a.m., she had made an important decision.

At exactly 8 a.m., she went to a pay phone and called the group home for adolescent girls where she once had lived. “Call us if you ever need help,” they had told Terri when she left. Now she dialed the number and waited. A voice answered at the other end.

“Help me,” sobbed Terri into the phone. “Something’s not right in my family and I’m afraid. Life’s not supposed to be like this.”

The phone call was the first step on a path that led Terri and her children to a smart, nurturing, 57-year-old woman named Hettie Richburg who would change all their lives.

It’s been five years since Richburg, then a registered nurse working at the Well Baby Clinic of the Baltimore City Health Department, walked into De Primo’s life. She found her way there through her volunteer work at the Exchange Club Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse. The program, started locally in 1982, trains volunteers to work on an intensive, long-term basis with families displaying symptoms of abuse and neglect or those at risk of doing so.

Richburg was in the program because she had seen firsthand in the clinic the frustration and difficulties experienced by so many mothers. And since her own children had grown and left the house, Richburg was feeling a bit of the “empty nest syndrome.” So when she saw the Exchange Club ad for volunteers in the newspaper, she responded.

It was a perfect match: Richburg was mature, patient and non-judgmental, just the type of person able to develop a trusting relationship and serve as a good parenting model.

‘There Had Been a Crisis’

De Primo was her first case, and Richburg was nervous when the center briefed her on the family’s needs. “They told me she was really having a lot of problems and that she needed someone right away,” said Richburg, settling back into a chair in De Primo’s small, neat living room. “They told me there had been a crisis where she had put the children outside in the middle of the night. And that she had called for help.”

Richburg’s first impression of De Primo remains vivid: “When I saw Terri, in my mind I saw this tiny, little frightened girl sitting in a corner trying to be a mommy. I honestly thought the kids were just going to take her over. She was just overwhelmed. She seemed frightened and was crying. But it was clear she wanted to talk. So I just sat and listened through her tears.”

Driving home hours later, Richburg found herself wondering how she was going to help: What have I gotten myself into, she wondered.

Two days later, Richburg arrived at the De Primo house to take the children apple-picking. As they prepared to leave, De Primo approached shyly. “Can I go too?” she asked. “I think that’s something I’d like.”

‘Needed Her Childhood’

The day was a huge success. “Terri climbed a tree and the kids were so happy,” Richburg said. “We sat at the lake and fed ducks and it was just so much fun. And it didn’t take me long to see that Terri really needed her childhood. I don’t think she’d ever had one.”

De Primo was one of 10 children; her mother died when she was 2, and all the children were taken away from an alcoholic father and put into separate foster homes. “When I was growing up, I thought that everybody got beat, that everybody got yelled at,” she said. “In this one family I lived with, I had to eat with the dog. I had to sit on the floor and eat with the dog.

“When you’re raised up in a world where everything is mean and everything is battered, that’s the way you think it’s supposed to be. How do you know whether you’re right or you’re wrong if you’ve never seen a good parent?” she asked.

“But when I met Hettie, she made me feel like I was part of something. What Hettie did was she listened to me. You know, she would come over, sometimes every day, and she made me feel like I was worth listening to. Sometimes she’d stay for an hour, sometimes for four hours. Sometimes she’d take us out and we’d spend the whole day with her. My kids loved her. They’d get up in the morning and it was ‘Hettie, Hettie, Hettie.’ ”

‘I Just Need You’

But there were still bad times to get through. Richburg remembers getting a call in the middle of the night from De Primo. “Hettie, I need you,” said De Primo, crying. “I don’t know what for, but I just need you.”

Richburg and her husband drove to De Primo’s house. Richburg put the children to bed and sat down with the other woman at the kitchen table.

De Primo remembers: “She made some coffee and we started talking and, just from her being there, I could feel all the tension going down. I knew I wasn’t alone.”

Small moments, perhaps, but important ones. Slowly, patiently, Richburg was nurturing, mothering, filling in the emotional gaps for the hurt and lonely child who resided within De Primo.

“My life started changing when I met Hettie,” De Primo said. “She is my friend, my mother, the family I never had. I remember the first Thanksgiving we spent with her. I never went anywhere on holidays because I never had anywhere to go. Never. It was very depressing. Then Hettie invited us over to her house for Thanksgiving. And we had the best time. There must have been 30 people there, and everybody just made us feel so welcome.”

Like Grandchildren

Richburg said they are one family now: “Her kids are like my grandchildren. I told Steven the other day: ‘Now don’t you ever grow up and forget about me.’ ”

Divorced now and studying accounting, De Primo finds that her life has changed totally. “My daughter is on the honor roll,” she said. “My son still has his problems, but we work with them. And we have a man in our life now who’s been a very good father image for my children. We have our ups and downs--just like any other family--but I would say my life has completely turned around.”

Zena Rudo, who directs the Exchange Club program, said that changing the parenting patterns in a family like De Primo’s takes a “long-term commitment to that family. These mothers need continuing support. But you’d be surprised at how quickly child abuse stops when a volunteer makes that commitment and establishes a real, trusting relationship.”

The program has 30 active volunteers and has helped 1,450 children and their families since its inception seven years ago.

‘No Longer at Risk’

“We figure we have a 95% success rate,” Rudo said. “What we consider success is that the children are no longer at risk for child abuse and neglect, that it’s a stable environment and that the parents use appropriate discipline and have good parenting skills.”

Here, however, is another way to consider success--a moment that Richburg remembers with tears in her eyes: “When I first met Terri, Terri literally could not stand Steven. And Steven, in reaction, picked at her all the time. And she couldn’t stand that. I tried to help her see that Steven really needed her love and wanted to make sure she was going to be there. And that’s why he kept putting his hands on her.

“But she just took it personally and thought he was trying to drive her crazy. Then one day--I guess about six months after we met--Steven came crying to her with some little thing and I saw Terri just reach out and wrap him in her arms.” The voice telling the story wavered and then, as though describing a miracle, repeated the thought: “She just reached out and wrapped him in her arms.”

Richburg paused, lifting a hand to wipe her eyes: “You know,” she said, “I still get tears when I think about it.”