By sewitsforyou on Flickr
It took me a while to write this, broken up over a week or so. There is no TL:DR version. I’m not the funniest blogger out there, and this is proof. So if you have time and desire, grab a drink and settle in for a long (for a blog post) read.
I never, NEVER stopped loving my mom.
This post has been a long time coming. Those who know me well already know most of this, but those who don’t might have only gotten glimpses through my other posts.
I think Mom’s problems started a lot earlier than my family thinks.
When I was young, elementary school age, before my parents split up, we’d go on family vacations together, go to church together, have barbecues and basically all the normal things healthy families do. Mom would pray with us and write letters to Jesus.
At some point, and this is where I think the first symptoms were showing, she started cutting things out. She stopped coming to church with us. She’d break toys if I was fiddling with them while she was talking to me (I would have been diagnosed ADHD if I had ever been examined for it). She started getting meaner and nastier.
When I was 12, just before 7th grade, I got into an argument over who-knows-what with her. I do remember the end of the argument was her storming up the stairs, screaming “Well, your father and I are getting a divorce, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Shortly after, dad moved out.
People kept trying to tell me it wasn’t my fault, and I shouldn’t blame myself. They didn’t need to tell me that. I was smart enough to know that already.
That summer, the house got sold and we (my mom, my brother, and myself) moved into my grandparents house. Near the end of 7th grade, she got into an argument with one of my uncles, and we moved in with a family friend, living in the second floor of his apartment. I’m really not sure what happened to precipitate that move, but I remember trying desperately to maintain a sense of normalcy in my life. I’d record songs off the radio. I’d roller blade three towns over to visit my girlfriend.
Then one day, that summer, with no warning, no chance to say goodbye to my girlfriend, my town, or the friends I’d known all my life, we got up at 4AM, got in the truck (GMC Jimmy), and moved to Florida.
Prior to this move, we’d had biweekly visitation with my dad. My understanding (I use that term loosely as my mom’s side of the family rarely saw fit to explain anything happening to me, controlling the flow of information better than China does) was that we weren’t supposed to move farther than 50 miles from my father. So I knew something was wrong.
When we got to Florida, we moved into a trailer which was, once again from my limited understanding, owned by an old friend of my mother. Apparently, they had some kind of argument, and we moved out of there, into a duplex in a rather backwoods but still civilized part of Clearwater. I went to JFK middle school for 8th grade, as the new kid, meaning I got into a lot of fights.
That year, my brother and I had our own rooms, and mom slept on the hideaway couch bed in the living room. I knew that she was sacrificing a lot for us. I knew there was something wrong under the surface. She cried a lot. I could hear her talking in her sleep, saying troubling, frightened things.
My mom only came to one band performance after moving to Florida. She made a big deal about how inconvenient it was.
That summer I worked (read: volunteered) as a counselor-in-training at the local YMCA. I learned a LOT that summer about how to care for people and teach others, while still being taught myself. I don’t know why this is relevant. It was another bone of contention with my mom though. Another inconvenience.
That summer we moved, again. This time to our own house in Palm Harbor. This is where the defining decisions and moments of my teenage life were made.
My first day of high school I remember feeling like it was an omen of things to come. I was excited to be starting out at a new school, but that was dampened by the darker-than-usual-ness of that morning. As I sat down on the bus, I looked across the aisle at another freshman looking back at me.
His eyes went wide, and he threw up. Nerves.
“Great,” was all I remember thinking.
It was, in a way, an omen. School itself wasn’t that bad. But my home life felt like that kid. Sick.
My mom was slipping ever further into a paranoid delusional world of her own, where any kind of authority figure was evil and out to get her. I didn’t see a doctor or dentist while I was in high school for anything more than a school physical.
It was an affront to my mother to ask for anything. I can say with a clear conscience that I didn’t ask for much. I asked for rides to church and band practice. Each being met with fierce, angry words. She would tell me how wrong I was about everything.
It’s difficult to write about those first three years of high school with a broad depth. There’s a lot of Groundhog Day memories punctuated by very, very bizarre, sad, or disturbing moments.
What I endured on a day-to-day basis will, to some people, be less than worthy of a blog post. But for me, living in my own skin, these three years did more to fuck me up than anything that came after.
Every day, I would leave the house as early as I could for school. When I got home, if I stayed home, I would hear mom screaming into thin air about how she wants the doctors and the lawyers and the policemen and the neighbors dead, and their children raped and killed. How she wanted them all to burn in hell, having (use your imagination) shoved in their (use your imagination). She smoked two packs a day, sitting in the kitchen. She would scream about how nobody gave a damn about her. She would scream about how God was an asshole. screaming, and screaming, and screaming. I literally could not turn my music loud enough.
In order for me to go to band practice or church, I had to endure an hour of “they’re stealing my children and my money!” rants.
If I tried to calm her down, she would throw things at me and spit on me.
Now I was old enough to know that I wasn’t the fucked up one. But it still takes a toll.
The rest of my family in Florida was no help. They were very much into the “she’s not sick” delusion. Grandma, whom I love dearly, is the biggest enabler on the face of the earth. My mother needed help, but she’d guilt me into not trying to make her go. Her sons and daughters are alcoholics, yet she always has booze in the house.
My mother and grandmother, for lack of a better word, brainwashed me into hating my father. With a passion. Everything wrong with my mother, my family, or the universe could be blamed on him.
Here are a few specific moments that stand out:
One day I came home from school to find my room trashed. I mean TRASHED. Stereo, clothes, anything not furniture was littering the floor. If it was furniture, it was toppled. Many things were broken, books were ripped apart. When I came home, mom just laughed at me. She never told me why she did it.
That night, I packed a bag and went to stay with my dear friends Ricky and his sister Michelle. I stayed for a week. My mom found out where I was hiding and threatened their parents with kidnapping charges. They were willing to help me fight for emancipation. I didn’t want to burden them any more. I went home.
Another memory: I don’t remember what the argument was about, but I remember my mom throwing a knife at me.
This is one of my favorites: my high school band traveled all over the country. My junior year, we were heading to Indianapolis for Grand Nationals. We were about to perform for the home crowd before we left the next day as part of our own sendoff. I was standing at parade rest, in my uniform, in front of the chain link fence in front of the bleachers, waiting for the signal to start moving our equipment on to the field. My grandfather leaned over the bleachers to whisper to me that I was staying with my uncle that night. Mom was in jail. That little gem made my performance that night fun. I still played well, albeit through tears.
Our house was right next door to a Pinellas County Sheriff, and two doors down from a K9 cop. Great location for a paranoid schizophrenic. She went outside to get the mail, and ended up screaming at the K9 cop her usual litany of garbage. He threatened to have her arrested. So she did what any perfect whack-job would: she went into the house, grabbed a carving knife, and threatened to stab him (or cut off his balls, I forget). Either way, him and the sheriff arrested my mom. She only spent one night in jail.
Things weren’t the same after that. I was instilled with a sense that in no way did I belong with my family. I talked to a Navy recruiter and started the process of joining, so I could ship out right after high school.
That summer, I went to a church camp. When I came back, mom was in the middle of packing up the house. She told me I had three days to pack my shit. The house was sold and we were moving.
I wasn’t about to spend my senior year in a new place. I had a plan. I had friends. I had a band (school type) that was keeping me sane. I wasn’t going anywhere.
So I called Ricky to come get me. I packed one suitcase with clothes and a box of books and walked out. As Ricky and I drove off, my mom ran behind the car, flipping us off and screaming obscenities.
I ended up staying with Lara and her family for my senior year.
Mom didn’t come to my graduation. Or my wedding.
The next ten years were filled with a cold-war style avoidance. I kept our phone conversations to a minimum, since they were all the same talking about the doctors and lawyers and police. For my own sanity, I minimized these communications.
Ten years. Ten years of hoping she’d snap out of it, that I’d get my mother back. Hoping I could WANT to take my one, two, then three kids to visit her. She once asked my wife if (referring to Quinlyn) “this Spic baby is really my son’s?”
December of 08, I got kicked out of the Navy for being fat. In January of 09, we were in the middle of moving across the country. It was about a week before a hiring convention that I pretty much HAD to attend if I wanted a decent job.
Given my moms paranoid fear of doctors, she kind of hadn’t seen one in almost 15 years. She also continued to smoke like a chimney. And my grandma was still an enabler. So when she had a mild heart attack and refused to be treated, my grandmother took her home. Two weeks or so later, my mom had another heart attack. This one wasn’t mild. This one was bad. This one put mom out of commission. She had to have surgery. She had to be sedated the entire time because of the schizophrenia. Any time she woke up a little, she would spend all her energy trying to pull the needles and tubes out.
It was hard to watch.
Somehow (I’m really not sure), my mom was given medication for the schizophrenia. Her heart is working, but only at about 20% capacity. She’s very very frail, more so than she was before the heart attack.
About a month after we moved to NJ, I got a Graduation card in the mail from her. Then a birthday card. Then a wedding card. She’s been sending things to my kids. I look forward to her phone calls.
I have my mom back. She’s basically coming out of a walking coma. She’s realizing slowly, that she missed out on the last 15 years or so. She’s trying to catch up.
Remember, it’s never too late.
