Gloria Harrison

Did you see her? Was your uncle understanding about the huge loss that you went through? 

No, I didn’t even know him that well. A couple years after the accident, I got an insurance settlement, and they still hadn’t adopted her. I was like, “Are you guys going to adopt?” I thought, “What is my life, even?” I sent them money, several thousand dollars, to adopt her. And he bought a gun cabinet. They never adopted her, and she was being horrendously emotionally neglected, if not also abused in other ways as well, which I suspect she was.

How did you find that out? Through the grapevine? 

Carol’s mom, Helen, took care of her, and she was verbally abusive. I heard from people that Sierra “just wasn’t right” and that she needed help. When I would visit her, I could see that she was living in poverty. They always had a dog in the front yard tied to a leash, never an inside, family dog. They always got parvo and were always taken out back and shot. I didn’t know until years later—when I was an adult—that parvo is treatable. But there were no doctors. There was no “primary care” for animals, including children. 

I also saw Sierra with Carol and Helen in Kmart once. They didn’t know I saw them. Sierra was in the front of the shopping cart, in the little compartment where kids sit, and Helen was pushing. Sierra was being playful, and Helen was yelling at her for it. Slapping her on the legs. Helen was a mean old rattlesnake. Mitch drove a truck and was always gone, and Carol left Sierra with Helen, who lived in the trailer next door, while she was at work. Sierra once told me that Helen would make her sit quietly in a chair while she watched her soaps during the day, and she’d get in trouble if she even moved. When she came to live with me, she didn’t even know how to play. I’m not kidding. She would turn on the water and fill up the bathroom sink and quietly splash around in it. That’s all the “playing” she knew how to do. She didn’t know how to pretend, my ex-husband had to teach her. And she didn’t know about flushing toilet paper down the toilet. We had to teach her that, too. She threw it into the trashcan and was distressed at the thought of flushing it, because she would “break the toilet,” and she acted like she was afraid of getting in trouble. 

The stories go on and on. 

You got to see her a little bit when she was with Mitch and Carol? 

Yeah, and it was pleasant.

They didn’t tell her that you were the mom? 

Yeah. But everybody was like, “She looks just like Gloria.” So she always was like, “Why does everybody keep telling me that I look like my cousin Gloria?” When she was five and a half, I was dating Jim, my now ex-husband. We were in Albuquerque. My Aunt Sunny, my favorite person and first hero, called me one day. We had come back from a weekend in Fort Collins. The phone was ringing, so I unlocked the door and rushed to the phone. Sunny said, “Hey, Gloria, you know, I had Sierra here this weekend. Carol brought her by so she can visit. And she needs help. That little girl needs someone who can help her.” This was a four-minute conversation. She’s like, “They never adopted her. She’s legally yours and they’re not doing right by her. I think you need to go and get her.” 

I said okay and hung up the phone. I told my boyfriend of a year, “Well, I guess I’m going to get back in the car and drive three hours south, and when I get back I’m going to have a kid.” 

And he’s like, “Okay, want me to go with you?” 

I drove down to Alamogordo, where my Aunt Sunny lives. But Sierra was already gone. She was with Carol. So I had to drive from Alamogordo to Roswell, which was another two hours and by the time I got to Roswell … 

(I swear to you, none of this makes sense even now, but this is literally what happened, and there’s no cell phones. I had to figure all this out on the fly). [Ed note: Fort Collins to Albuquerque to Alamogordo to Roswell: 848 miles in one day]

I go to Roswell. I went to Carol’s house and my uncle had already left her. They were in the middle of a divorce. I drove all that distance not knowing what I would say. I get there and Carol is crying, washing the dishes. She already knew. I told her I was wondering if I could have Sierra for a week. I hadn’t talked to this woman in months, and for me to show up out of nowhere should have been shocking. But she said, “Sunny called me. I already packed her stuff.” By the front door were three black industrial-size trash bags full of clothes and stuffed animals. I was like, “I’ll have her back in a week.” Carol was crying and said, “Okay.” It struck me as weird. I think she knew Sierra was never coming back. But we’ve never—not once—talked about it. 

After a week, I said to Sierra, “Hey, I’m actually your biological mom and you’re not going back.” 

For about five years, they had this little girl. And when I say I “kidnapped” her, I mean it, but there were no legal repercussions. Carol said one time something to the effect of “I don’t like this,” and I said, “I guess that’s a problem,” and that was the whole conversation. My uncle never contacted me about it. It was and is to this day surreal and inexplicable. 

To her dying day, Sierra saw me as her kidnapper. I felt like I’m gonna rescue this kid. But it never panned out. She had nothing but disdain for me. She had some behavioral issues that were pretty severe when she was almost six years old. They never really went away, and just got worse. Yeah, so I “kidnapped” her, I didn’t rescue her, and my aunt and uncle never even tried to fight for her. She died without ever once talking to me about the fact that they never fought for her. I wonder if she ever thought about it. She’d rather have believed I was a kidnapper than believe she was abandoned by them, right? 

After her death, in 2019, everybody assumed I must be experiencing the absolute worst grief anybody can experience because she was my child, and it wasn’t like that at first; still isn’t in a lot of ways, though the grief has deepened in strange ways over these last three years. She and I grew into two people who had a relationship. She would have been 30 this year. But we finally met each other as women, you know. I was never her mom, though she called me Mom. I think she knew intellectually I was her mom, but it wasn’t until she was fully homeless and addicted to drugs and needed a mom that she started seeing that I had always been there since the day I took her. And I never had a chance to talk to her about my complete absence, that it wasn’t abandonment, but what I felt like—even as young as I was—was the most ethical way to handle the situation. I can’t give her away to others and keep interfering. I was trying to do “right.” 

She was not healthy. We were estranged, you know, like she was very toxic and harmful in my life. I was raising kids and had to draw intense boundaries, so the pain is extraordinarily complex. Of course, my connection with Tolkien and Indigo—that’s the type of love or grief people think of. I’m not saying I didn’t love her, but I never loved her the way people talk about loving their kids, right? That’s a painful thing I’ve been grappling with. 

While you were raising her again, Dillon was with your sister’s? 

Yes. Kim and Tim raised Dillon from the time he was born.