don't give me an automatic weapon, or a big rock

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They showed up about a week later. The lady, Mary Moller, was a complete bitch. Her tone of voice, the way she put things….looking back I realize that her comments were designed to send one of us into a rage. I think they were expecting Michael to get angry, but I did. That bitch and her supervisor, Roberta, kept saying that we knew how Hazel got hurt and it was only a matter of time until the truth came out. They didn’t believe that we really didn’t know what happened.

They found out that Michael was facing a layoff, and said that maybe he had lost his temper and done something he wouldn’t normally do. Every word from their mouths was an attempt at getting a confession. It was a very draining meeting. It was about this time that my tears started flowing, and they didn’t stop for a whole year.

We took the advice of an attorney friend and each got our own public defenders. Before we got a chance to meet with either of them we were given an evaluation at the local child abuse agency, Julliette’s House. The doctor, whose name escapes me now, was very nice at first. He examined Hazel, took pictures of her arms and legs, then of her genitals and the inside of her mouth. My skin started to crawl. The doctor commented how it looked like she must have fallen at some point because there were no bruises to accompany the broken bone. There were no finger marks or anything else to indicate that someone had handled her roughly. Michael and I had already pointed this out to one another so it was a relief to hear the doctor say it. Would this be the end of this? No.

We were then separated for interviews. They asked me if Hazel had been a planned pregnancy and I said she was. They asked me basically all of the same questions that everyone had. I could tell by the questions that they thought that Michael had hurt her. We thought that the lack of bruises said so much, but it was not an explanation, so they were not going to stop. The doctor did not see the panic stop as a possibility. He asked if anything else out of the ordinary had happened that day. That’s when Michael mentioned that Hazel had awoken in the early morning after the whole panic stop thing and that when he was trying to prop her bottle she arched her back and that he had heard and felt a ‘pop’ when he rolled her over. Any new parent knows that when the baby wakes, no matter who gets up with her, everyone is half awake. I remembered hearing her fuss for a minute, and then quiet right away. He said that once he got the bottle in her mouth that she went back to sleep. That was pretty much what I had heard, and her crib was still in our room at that point, so I had been right there. The doctor started suggesting that perhaps he had been frustrated or tired and been too rough with the baby. We both insisted that was not the case. They weren’t buying it. We didn’t have any other explanations. We had no idea why this was happening. That meeting was another nightmare. There would be many more to come.