I try to be thankful that my parents are still living. There are many people in this world who do not have the benefit of having a living parent. Many battle with the unrelenting grief of either having one or both parents deceased. I on the other hand battle a different agony, one that is rarely if ever talked about openly. It is the battle of having parents who are estranged and can be classified as “the living dead”.
It is a strange thing knowing that someone is well within your reach and at the same time so very far away. It’s like you want to call them, want to know if they’re ok but at the same time you know that to do so would only invite heartbreak, disappointment and emotional turmoil your way. This is what I mean when I say my parents are part of the living dead. I know where they are geographically, where they can be found on a map but emotionally, they are lost in some unknown dimension, orbiting my heart and my undying hope for reunification.
I grew up without a father. He left our home when I was 3. He became addicted to heroin and his own demons, therefore he was not equipped to raise me. My mother singlehandedly tried to raise both my sister and I but she was just a young girl in her twenties, sheltered and naïve as to the ways of this world. My grandmother was a strict disciplinarian. She ruled the roost with an iron fist. It was always ‘her way or the highway’. Being under her roof meant the suppression of your identity for the sake of short term peace. My mother hid constantly; learned to suppress her feelings regularly. She did not know herself at all. She had no identity other than former wife and full-time mother. She became afraid she might not ever meet her real self and in her fear, used alcohol as both a crutch and an escape hatch. It was how she coped with the disquieting reality of being a single mother at 23.
Many nights my mother would come home drunk, if she came home at all. Some nights we would go out to eat at Beef Steak Charlie’s, a local bar and grill down the street from our apartment building. Initially the night started off fun. Then, one drink became two, two became three and before we knew it, my sister and I were carrying our mother home like two angel wings, one on each side, laughing at the way she talked. Her speech was garbled, slurred and jumbled but we made nothing of it except that she might have had a little too much fun. We snickered at how silly and uncoordinated she was. For a while it was a game to us. We laughed as we all relieved ourselves in dark buildings, her peeing like a race horse underneath a staircase, us wondering how so much water can come out of one human being.
This would go on for years. As time went on, our mothers drinking increased considerably causing her to become unreliable, inconsistent and untrustworthy. Our father often times would make guest appearances in our lives and deliver intermittent affection: a hug, a bearded kiss and a pack of off brand Now Laters called “Jingles”. Such meager tokens acted as sad gifts that were used as tools to relieve my fathers guilty conscious. Many days I entertained the idea of us being a family again but my mother, for reasons unbeknownst to me at the time, made it adamantly clear that she had no intention of reconciling with my father ever again.
My father would continue to engage in this pattern where he would leave, then come back, hug us, kiss us then leave again. Sometimes he would call us on the phone and promise to come see us but then, never show up. When we would express our anger over his broken promises, he would look sad and guilt ridden then disappear for an even longer period of time. From this I learned many things. For one, I learned to suppress my emotions in order to protect his. Additionally I learned that my feelings weren’t as valuable as his and that I always had to make sure I did not say or do anything that would upset or chase him away. I would carry this lesson with me into so many of my future relationships.
While my father continued to battle his addiction to opiates, my mother continued to dance with lady alcohol in a Sapphic ritual of disastrous proportions. She would drink and party with strange men who I did not trust and who did not have her best interest at heart. I began to resent my mother for putting me in such awkward positions, triggering feelings of fear and nervousness, for inadvertently making me responsible for being her protector, her shield, her surrogate father. While she entertained strange men, I entertained anxiety. I was on high alert all of the time. The pit of my stomach burned with constant fear and intermittent rage. I never knew when I would be put in a predicament where I had to defend my mothers honor from one of her disgruntled guests. This left me feeling a mix of powerless and overly anxious.
Her drinking, once pleasantly annoying became wildly concerning. I remember one afternoon coming home from school and telling her that a bully tried to fight me. My mother had been drinking and so in that moment she decided to teach me how to fight. While trying to teach me how to defend myself, things got out of control and she ended up bloodying my nose. The neighbors must have heard all the commotion and subsequently called the police because in no time flat two officers knocked on our apartment door. My mother instructed me to go into the bathroom to clean my nose. When my mother answered the door, the officers asked to take a look around the apartment. What they saw when they looked around was not only a mess but also a young boy with a bloody nose. One of the female police officers took out her handcuffs, threw my mother on the bed and arrested her while one of the other officers hit her on her leg with a nightstick. Another officer ushered us out the door where we were taken to the precinct to be placed in foster homes.
After days of being shuffled from one foster home to the next, my sister and I went to live with a woman who was an alcoholic and sex addict. We literally went from one bad situation to the next. Our foster mother would frequent the tavern across the street from her home and bring back younger men for sex. She would take the check that she was given from the state to take care of us and use it to buy younger men. Oftentimes we went without adequate food, clothing and grooming supplies and would only get the bare necessities to keep us alive. There were times that she would chain and padlock the fridge so that we didn’t have access to food. I remember sleeping on her couch and peeing on the cushion because I was so worried, scared and afraid. I missed my mother. I wanted to go back to the familiar pain.
Ultimately my mother completed the requirements outlined by the judge and gained visitation rights for my sister and I. Those were some of the hardest moments of my life, being granted access to my mother for brief periods of time only to be returned back into the arms of a stranger. I remember spending such nice weekends with my mother and then having to say goodbye on Sundays. I remember waving to my mother as the train would pull out the station on our way back to Yonkers. I remember her mouthing the words to a song that she encouraged me to keep close to my heart. It was Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings”. She would play this song during our visits and she would cry and we would cry too. I would come back to the foster home feeling utterly miserable.
Eventually as time went on, we were reunified with my mother. For a while things were good and then the drinking started again and my mother encouraged us all to keep the family secret reminding my sister and I of the consequences of telling, that being removal from our home. My sister and I were blamed and shamed for telling the truth about things my mother was doing when we were first taken from the home. We were accused of somehow misperceiving the events that transpired in the house and we were cautioned to never tell family business again. From this I learned how to protect my abusers, how to deny my truth in order to uphold and honor my mothers delusions.
Many nights my mother did not return home. She would be out on drug and alcohol binges and she would be gone for days sometimes weeks at a time. I would cry and force myself to go to sleep and hope that she returned in the morning. Many nights I wondered if I would ever see her again. Just the mere thought of not seeing my mother again made me cry my eyes out. I would fall asleep looking at her picture every night and pray that she returned home safely.
Eventually my mother did return home. When she came home, she looked terrible. She looked like she got into a fight with the world and the world won. In our anger and worry, my sister and I yelled at her only to have our feelings dismissed, only to be made to feel like we were the reason she needed to drink, only to feel like it was our fault she was like this. We learned how to silence our feelings in order to ensure her presence. We learned how to suppress our responses in order to accommodate her delusions. But it never worked because she was off again and again, taking vacations from parenting while leaving us to raise ourselves.
What was my saving grace during this difficult time? It was my faith and my grandmother’s love. She is the one who introduced me to God. Her faith and her hours of prayer and bible study provided me with a spiritual foundation that helped counter the devastation of being raised in a war zone. The delicate balance of discipline and love really helped show me that there was another world besides my own, a paradise earth that I could be a part of if I were pleasing to God and lived according to His word. I wanted to live in that world because the one I knew was fraught with so much adversity and sorrow. I needed something to hang my hopes on. In this case, the prospect of a better tomorrow.
Then disaster came like a thief into our home. My grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer and she died in 1997. I remember receiving the news over the phone from friends of my grandmothers in Virginia. I cried out and wailed. I could have stayed home from school that day but I went anyway because I did not want to stay at home and think about this. Apart of me thought it was a dream and that once I got back from school, it would be like it never even happened. I quickly realized that this was no dream. I lost my grandmother forever. Who would protect me now? My grandmother was the only one who really understood me, who knew my potential, who saw me before I had the vision to see myself. Who would tell my mother I was worth being good to? Who would correct my mother when she was acting a fool?
Losing my grandmother created an imbalance in the family. My mother suffered a temporary form of insanity. Grief consumed her ability to make rational decisions and she became wildly self-destructive drinking and using drugs to cope with the pain of losing my grandmother.
One night after an alcoholic binge, she came back home but she wasn’t alone. She brought a man who she introduced to the family as “Eli”. Turns out his real name was not Eli. I did not like him but my mother said that he was coming to live with us. I felt powerless and utterly helpless. I asked my mother not to do this but often times she would cry and tell us how lonely she was. She accused me of not understanding how she felt and of being too hard on Eli. I did not understand what was happening at the time. I did not know that the man she brought into our lives would be someone who would cause a lot of pain but would also provide a lot of life lessons all at the same time.
“Eli” was a crack addict who also had his own trauma history. Eli was diagnosed with HIV and had a conflicted relationship with his mother who would often times (even in her old age) threaten to go upside his head with a hammer. She was a tough woman as she raised 17 kids on her own, many of which were chemically dependent so she knew a thing or two about being stolen from in more ways than one.
Many nights my sister and I would get into fights with Eli because of the influence that he was having on my mother. Oftentimes the two of them would lock themselves in our bedroom and smoke crack all night long. They would call it “experimenting” and they would tell us this was all they were doing but we knew something more was going on. We just didn’t have the words to describe what was happening to us so we just sat in the living room eavesdropping on the destruction happening right in front of us.
Many times our mother would emerge from the bedroom with fixed, dilated pupils, talking strange and sweating profusely. And Eli he would present as paranoid and walk around the house bug-eyed clutching a small hammer in his hand. I remember one night catching him smoking crack in the bathroom. I told my mother about this but she did nothing. Many nights we were told to sleep in the living room because they were in the bedroom smoking crack. We were told to order food from King Wah Kitchen, the local Chinese restaurant down the street. Every night our mother encouraged us to order a pint of chicken and broccoli as knowing we were eating a vegetable somehow helped to assuage the maternal guilt my mother felt from doing things she knew she had no business doing.
I remember one night my sister and I were in the living room and my mother came out and she sat us down and she told us that she had unprotected sex with Eli. Everything inside me shattered. I felt like a pile of broken dishes. I cried hard that night. I did not understand how someone that said they loved me can want to leave me. I was confused, perplexed, angry and disgusted. In that moment I hated my mother and I hated Eli even more for exposing my mother to HIV. That was a turning point for me as I realized that day that I was alone in this world. I realized that at any given moment the security that I thought I knew could be snatched away from me in an instant. I thought that if I went to school, achieved, did better, was a better son it would be enough and so that’s what I did. I locked myself into achievement hoping to outrun the unpredictability and inconsistency that was my life. Despite my achievements everything came crashing down around me. In this moment the seed of my self-destructive tendencies was planted slowly.
My mother would continue to drink throughout my adolescence and early adulthood which resulted in many consequences namely the loss of friends, the loss of jobs, skirting the edge of eviction, issues with her health, poor relationship with her kids. Despite all of this she was not motivated to quit. By this time Greg was no longer in her life as they broke up which caused her to spiral tremendously. My mother began to circle the drain. At this time she was going through full blown menopause which triggered many depressive episodes. Additionally poor adjustment to many major life transitions also contributed significantly to her distress. To cope, she would mix alcohol and pills and would engage in many suicide attempts. Watching her battle this way made me feel both powerless and insignificant. I began to make it my life’s mission to keep her alive so that way I would have a mother in my life but thing is I could not save her. Here in lied the seed of my codependence. Here I was trying to breathe her air but I could not breathe for her. She would need to find the will to do it herself.
I remember being in my early to mid-twenties and telling my mother that I was gay and initially she seemed to be okay with my confession. But then while under the influence of alcohol, she threw a glass table on me and she stabbed me in my knee with a knife. I did not feel safe going home but I had nowhere else to go. I remember walking the street most nights hoping to be kidnapped by someone, hoping to be taken anywhere but where I was. I felt so alone. I had no friends, no family, no one! I tried my best to find support from a series of boyfriends, but that only made the pain worse as many of these men also had their own unhealed childhood wounding so all we could ever be to one another was pending death. Eventually my mother apologized to me and I learned to bury myself. Funny really, the parallels between having a parent who is living but at the same time emotionally dead and me being living but burying myself and my emotions as if they too were dead.
Throughout my twenties and even up to the present moment in my forties, my mother continues to struggle with alcohol addiction. She continues to struggle with taking accountability for how her drinking has affected me and often times deflects away from any attempts to discuss these things. For this and many other reasons I have decided to maintain my distance. I have opted on respectful estrangement as opposed to disrespectful engagement. I realize that I will never get the care and concern I need from my mother. She just does not have the capacity to hold space for me as she is emotionally stunted and incapable of deep feeling. Her trauma history has locked her into a state of maternal immaturity that will never allow her to be the parent that I need. I have made peace with reparenting myself and creating my own inner family. When you do not have healthy roots, you have to learn how to grow your own, harvest new love from scratch. This can be very difficult and I cannot lie, there are some mornings where I still wake up sad, angry, depressed and confused. I ask myself “Why was I not given good parents? Why didn’t my parents love me enough to stop engaging in bad habits? When will I finally heal from this?”. I realize that some wounds you just never heal from. You just learn how to manage the bleeding that comes from them. That is what I am doing as I write this out. I am managing the bleeding by telling the truth about them. I do this in hopes of isolating the issues that have emerged as a result of my inadequate parenting and using these findings as invitations to build new skills that will help me cope with the myriad losses that occurred as a result of insufficient parenting. I hold this as an invitation to others who have also had poor parents. Begin your healing/hurt management journey NOW. While it’s true, it was not your fault that you had poor parenting it is your responsibility to do the work it takes to be the person you want to be, the person that lives with integrity even in the face of adversity. That is the definition of integrity, holding true to your values, your morals, your beliefs and your principles even when others do not hold true to theirs. I wish you all much success on your journey towards joy and I look forward to the day when the pain doesn’t hurt as much as it hurts today. Much Love to All My Rootless Survivors.
