Mother and Daughter

Muriel Pereira is a short rotund woman. She walks hunched over slightly with the peculiar shuffle of someone with osteoarthritis of the knees. In her late fifties she is often wearing large sunglasses, even indoors.
Muriel suffers from mental illness but also personality disorders. Personality disorders are not treatable. So you have to learn to live with her. Muriel’s glass of water in life is forever half empty, never half full. Everyone and everything that goes on around her must be criticized, and belittled.
Raised outside of Boston, she led an interesting life as a young person. Very bright, and college educated, she is multilingual. At one time she was a travel hostess, leading trips to Spain and Portugal. I am not clear on how she ended up living in Fall River. She is married to Nuno, whom I hear about all the time but have never laid eyes on.
I have seen her get in fights both verbal and physical with other club members at Towne House. Towne House is the clubhouse for the mentally ill we both attend. Once in the kitchen she got into a slapping girl fight with another member and they both ended up in handcuffs and carted off to the police station. Muriel is very paranoid. Sometimes she will see someone wearing an item of clothing and insist that it's hers and its been stolen from her.
Murial is also a busybody. She will overhear things, and always think the worst. About 9 years ago I was playing video games with another member named Jane. Jane is a former drug user, but had been clean for about a year. Jane asked me about how much it cost to feed my dogs. I told her that a bag of “Joy”, the brand I was feeding at the time was $15 a bag. The following day I got called into the directors office. He tells me Muriel has accused me of dealing drugs on Towne House property. At first I was totally confused by this accusation but then it came to light that she had heard me talking with Jane. I realized then what she heard. I don't think I ever laughed so hard. I brought in an empty bag the following day to show Muriel and the rest of the club what a $15 dollar “bag of joy” was. Jane no longer attends Towne House because of incidents like this.
Muriel also has an obsession with food that is mind boggling. She talks about it constantly. Every item of food made at Towne House is awful and of course if she were in the kitchen she could do it better. She criticizes everything, and accuses staff of shorting people on food when they serve it. She shows up at the club with numerous shopping bags every day, filled with food. I think she is afraid that if she does not carry it with her, she will somehow not be able to get any if she needs it. Muriel has no one but her husband and herself at home. They receive food stamps and Muriel makes it to every food pantry in Fall River. She also signs herself up for all the holiday food baskets, from multiple agencies. Muriel tells them there are 5 people in her household. Herself, and her husband and their 3 kids. Thanksgiving and Christmas find her with so many turkeys and hams it's really scary.
Muriel has 3 children. Two boys and a girl. All the children were removed from her custody as infants. I am not sure what the specific reasons for this were, but I can imagine why it happened. The two boys were adopted by the same family. Now young adults they are in college. I don't think she has actual contact with them, but she is kept current on their lives.
The girl is now 19. Her name is Debbie.
I first heard of Debbie a decade ago, when she was a patient at a state hospital in Worcester County Massachusetts. Debbie would call her mother at Towne House, and be hysterical. Every call was about a crisis. Muriel has no home telephone so the only way she could contact Debbie and vice versa was through the Towne House Telephones. It fascinated me in a very sick way, that this mentally ill, unstable individual had an equally sick (if not more so) child institutionalized by the state.

I have been a Towne House member since 2001. At times I have been a more active member than others, using the club resources and facilities but not always participating in the day to day activities there. In 2009, I began attending more regularly again. There I met Debbie, Muriel’s daughter.
Now the idea that multiple generations of the same family are attending Towne House together, is sort of disturbing to me. But Muriel and Debbie are not the only ones. Faith is there with her son Tommy. She's about my age and Tommy is 19. Helen attends also with her daughter Tiffany. Tiffany has a job though and so does not come every day.

Debbie is short and chubby and definitely looks like a younger version of her mother. Her hair is peroxide blonde. She wears slutty cheap clothes from Walmart and the Fashion Bug. Because of some of the meds that she is on, she has a very strange affect. She stares straight ahead and is unable to make real eye contact with people.
Debbie is very out of control.
When I first met her she was living in a group home. She had to account for where she was, and had a curfew at night. There were a few incidents where she disappeared and had to be located by the police and returned to the home. She was fucking anyone who asked. Without any kind of precautions. Taking all sorts of street drugs and failing to take her prescribed medication. Hanging out in nefarious parts of town, with all sorts of lowlifes.
Her mother would start wailing how Debbie was smoking pot, and this was causing all her problems....
I think smoking pot was the least of Debbie’s problems.
Then she became obsessed with getting her own apartment. No one thought this was a wise idea.
Somehow she convinced an agency, to give her the first and last rent for an apartment. You would think in a case like this that there would be caseworkers and protocol that would ensure that she found a safe place to live, with a lot of support.
Instead she found an apartment in the worst part of town, in a building that had previously been condemned by the board of health and declared unfit for human habitation. And the agency handed over the money and she moved in. There were no locks on the doors. The place was infested with cockroaches and there was no heat. The second day living there she walked into the apartment to find a junkie shooting up in the bathroom. One of her neighbors threw him out.
She had a mattress and box spring on the floor, and some kitchen stuff but that was about it. Now her decline escalated.
With no rules and no boundaries she stopped taking her prescriptions altogether and was out all night inhaling every substance offered to her. She pretty much stopped coming to Towne House, and when she did she was really out of it. Her mother spent hours on the phone daily trying to get someone to intervene. Finally after a month of drama and heartache, Debbie was hospitalized. I was relieved. I was really worried she was going to end up dead in a dumpster someplace.
This was 6 months ago. She is now hospitalized at Taunton State. I heard she is really doing well, and they are talking about matching her up with a roommate and getting her an apartment on Main St. in Taunton. I cannot believe that in such a short time anything much has changed. Once she is out, how long will it take for her to be right back where she started all over again?