By Anna Gustafson
When Flushing resident Mirian Detres-Hickey was stealing food from a hospital to feed her children years ago, she understood just how far things had sunk — and the woman who is now a Queens College administrator knew she was doing exactly what she needed to do to survive.
For Detres-Hickey, that combination of despair and perseverance has characterized much of her 57 years, which have been marked by an abusive grandmother who forced her to sleep in a dumb-waiter for a year when she was 9, a husband who beat her until he ended her pregnancy and landed her in the hospital and time spent receiving shock treatments in a mental institution — all of which she has detailed in her recently self-published memoir “When It Rains It F-n Pours.”
Detres-Hickey, director of special services at Queens College, discussed her memoir at a packed event at the school earlier this month.
Throughout her life’s events she said have left wounds only now beginning to heal, she remained optimistic that she would receive a good education and provide a better life for her five children. It was a struggle, but she said her love for her children helped her to overcome the two years in a mental institution in the 1970s, a suicide attempt, becoming hooked on drugs and time spent homeless.
While living on the street, she would go to a hospital to steal food for her children, but “they got hip to it and the police showed up.”
“I told the policeman it was for my kids and he told me not to worry about it, that he’d give me food from now on,” she said. “So every morning, I would show up at the hospital and the policeman would be there with a bag of food for me.”
Detres-Hickey, who has a form of dyslexia, had to work incredibly hard to attend school and would spend hours completing a single essay. Though it was a challenge, she had always been determined to go to college and got the chance after she divorced her abusive husband.
After leaving the man with whom she had one child and who beat her so severely he ended another pregnancy, she was determined to provide a good life for herself and her young son and went to college. She attended Lehman College in the Bronx for three years and transferred to Castleton State College in Vermont, where she graduated.
Her father, the one adult she looked up to, had always told her administrators were respected people, and she focused on furthering her studies in order to land an administrative position that would guarantee her family a good life.
She put herself through graduate school to receive a master’s degree in education from Long Island University and a master’s in special services and administration from Springfield College. Thanks to loans, she was able to earn her Ph.D. in education administration and special services from Walden University.
She is now Queens College’s director of special services and a sociology professor.
“My struggles started from birth,” Detres-Hickey wrote in the book published in 2009. “I was born with an invisible disability, which some of my elementary teachers referred to as ‘stupid,’ especially when they were addressing me. I have been mentally, physically and sexually abused. As a wife, I was beaten because that was normal and it was the expected way a husband, or should I say man, deals with his wife in the neighborhood. I used drugs and lived in the streets as a homeless woman with my babies. The love I have for my children caused me to go through a metamorphosis in life. The change was so drastic that not even my own family recognized me when I was almost done.”
Not long after she got her Ph.D. from Walden University in 2005, Detres-Hickey moved to Flushing and began working at Queens College, where she is determined to help students who frequently remind her of herself — smart and capable but lost in a world that often does not glance back when they fall through the cracks.
“I felt I needed to become an administrator to help not only the students with disabilities, but help the teachers understand what disabilities mean,” said Hickey, who has been diagnosed with a form of dyslexia that makes it difficult for her to identify sounds. “I love my job and that we’re able to do so much for the people here.”
Detres-Hickey grew up in the South Bronx with a mother from Spain and a French-German father.
She spent much of her childhood watching her father beat her mother and said there were a countless number of nights when she and her siblings were taken away by the police and forced to spend the night in an institution with other children who had been removed temporarily from abusive homes.
After graduating from high school, Detres-Hickey married a man she calls “Macho,” with whom she had one child and who beat her so severely that he ended her pregnancy and put her into the hospital for weeks.
“When I got to the hospital, they found the baby had been dead in my uterus for 28 days,” Detres-Hickey said. “I could have died.”
She ended up remarrying a musician named Ray, with whom she had her other children.
Time and again in her life, Detres-Hickey thought maybe this was it, maybe this was the end. But it never was, and she ended up pulling herself out of a hole sometimes so black she did not know which way was up.
“I always gave myself goals,” she said. “Even when I was still homeless and living in an abandoned building, my goal was to get my kids a place to live, it’s as simple as that. Don’t say you’re going to have a house in 10 years. You have to give yourself steps.”
With her book and an administration career, Detres-Hickey hopes to inspire women in similar situations and students.
“I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do,” she said. “I’ve made it.”
Reach reporter Anna Gustafson by e-mail at agustafson@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4574.
