Who was my mother?

I went into the process of writing my memoir believing that I knew my mother. Inside and out. Being raised by a dying woman who overshared was a constant window into her soul. I can still smell her sweat 20 years later when I remember those last moments, her last breaths curled into my arms. And yet. I did not know her. Not really. 

First of all, I never knew her before AIDS. The pieces of her personality that are so clear to me…Loving. Paranoid. Depressed. Violent. Generous. Ashamed. How much of that was my mother and how much of it was being diagnosed with a stigmatized virus and a death sentence at 22?

Also, for all of the time that I spent memorizing her, I was so busy looking at the physical, that I did not look deeper. I didn’t think to. I’m ashamed to admit that. It’s not just because I was a self-absorbed child, but also because… I discounted her the way that society discounted her. My mother couldn’t read or write. I was managing our bills halfway through Kindergarten because already my math was more advanced than hers. My mother was mentally and physically ill. Society told me that my mother did not have anything deeper than her physicalness to give to me. And I believed them. 

Subconsciously anyway. Consciously, my mother was my Earth and Sun and Stars. She was my universe. And that is true too. Both things are true. I can still hear her laugh in the back of my throat. I can smell her sweat when I close my eyes. And when I look at my children, I can feel her in my breath and in my bones. I am her. In some ways. Hopefully not in all of the ways. 

So who was my mother? Because now I really want to know. Now that it’s almost too late. Now that I am the age that she was when she died. 

My mother was a storyteller. She narrated every mundane moment of our lives. She was unemployed and I never went to daycare, so every second of my life was filled with these narations. My mom could turn a two minute interaction with the mailman into a 25 minute story that kept the listener enthralled. She had a gift. I imagine that her storytelling was akin to a blind person who’s other senses are elevated. My mother couldn’t read or write and so she was hyper fixated on oration. We did not have television or internet in our home, so mama’s voice filled every space. 

My mother was an anxious type. Worried rants poured all over her banter about our lives. My mother was the original trauma dumper. Her stories would bounce between past and present, mimicking the pace of a Pentecostal sermon. There was always a life lesson doled out in the most terrifying way possible. 

My mother was paranoid. She worried that we would somehow win the lottery that she didn’t play and then we would lose our health insurance and she wouldn’t be able to pay for her AIDS treatments and she would die. She worried that the walls were too thin in our public housing complex and that the single mom next door might hear the wrong thing or see the wrong piece of mail and learn our secret. She worried that the government would take her away from me. That the threat of AIDS on the nation would be addressed by rounding up everyone with a positive diagnosis and sending them to a concentration camp to die, keeping the rest of society safe. None of this was completely unfounded. People with AIDS were being driven out of their communities by their scared neighbors. Politicians spewed hateful and threatening rhetoric about how to deal with the problem of AIDS all over the television and radio. Still. There was more to my mother’s paranoia than our reality. As a grown-up now I am able to make a mental map of these anxieties. I can compartmentalize them and see fact from fiction, but as a child I had none of those skills. 

My mother was the most generous person that I have ever known. She grew up in deep multi-generational poverty. The kind that scars. She had never had enough of anything essential to life. Not food or housing or even friendship. But still. If someone needed something, it was my mom who would show up. When the neighbors house burnt down, my mom used our foodstamps to go to the store and buy a box of goodies to bring to them. Even though our stamps never got us through the whole month. She knew that we’d eat at the church on Sundays and that we could survive it. She carried pockets full of candy around to give to the little children in my Sunday School class. She babysat any neighbor kids whose parents couldn’t afford to pay us back. Maybe they would replace some of those missing foodstamps. My mother knew the truth that anyone growing up in poverty knows. We are all bound up together. Generosity is cyclical. 

My mama was violent. She loved me more than anything in the world. I believe that. But she would beat the ever loving crap out of me. Almost every single day. I know that I get to be mad at this. I know I deserved better. And I know it’s possible to do better even if you’ve never known better because I do better for my own kids. My mom probably should have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Something other than depression and anxiety. But we were poor and rural and she’s gone now and I’ll never know for sure. What I know is that one minute, I’d be sitting across from her in the living room. Me with a book from the library and her with her plastic, needle, and yarn projects and the next moment she would be crashing onto my body with fists and feet flying. I would always wiggle away even when she was still twice my size. Maybe she wanted me to get away. She would chase me throughout the house, occasionally landing a punch or pulling my hair to bring me back into her orbit. She would never scratch me because scratching is blood and that equals death. Too far. She was ok with breaking me, but she didn’t want to kill me. 

My mother was the most loving person in the entire world. My children have heard me recite the bell hooks quote, “Love is an action. Never simply a feeling.” a million times. I live by those words. Still, I do believe that my mother did love me. She never missed a chance to cheer me on. In sports, in school events and at family functions. I gave my mom something to brag about.  Even though my mom was physically violent to me, she never denigrated me with words. Just the opposite, she filled my days with praise, encouragement and reminders that I was loved. That I was valued and that I deserved the world. It was a deeply problematic love but still it was powerful enough to carry me into my adulthood without her. 

My mother was depressed. She would spend entire days, and weeks and months curled into a ball on the couch where she slept each night and where she would pick at food that I brought to her. I would kiss her on the head and then walk myself to school in the morning. I would perch myself on the edge of the couch when I got home and pour my stories into her. She would perk up for this. Physically sit up and laugh at the appropriate times and get angry alongside me when I told her who wronged me during my day. Then I would lay next to her before going to my own bed and we would breathe together. “I love you. Good night. See you in the morning.” I said those words every single night and I would not go to sleep until she said them back. I understood that AIDS was not the only thing that might take my mother from me. Even after the men who tried to kill her were all dead, there was still the risk of herself. 

My mother was all of these things after her AIDS diagnosis. But who was she before? I want more than the blurry mental photograph that I can not animate no matter how hard I try. In my mind’s image of my mother before AIDS, she is silly. Posing like a goof, skinny as a rail with feathered blonde hair. She is a free spirit. A redneck hippie. In my mental image she is free from the men who hurt her. From the virus that took her from me. From the stigma from poverty. From AIDS. from being illiterate. She is young and she is beautiful and she knows it. I don’t believe that version of my mother ever existed. Even before the diagnosis, but I hope that pieces of that version of her did. And when I am struggling with my own identity and self esteem, I draw from this vision of my mother and I try to be it as much as I can. I was her universe and she was mine and if I can be free, maybe she will be too. 

This photo was taken the first time i saw the ocean. Only a few months after my mom died. Already striving to be free for both of us.

Celebrating WORLD AIDS DAY is an act of resistance.

That’s my gorgeous mama, smiling on the far right. And me, the dark haired cousin.

I was born and raised in the AIDS crisis. My parents’ were diagnosed HIV+ when I was an infant. One by one, I watched them die. First my father, then my step-father and then my mother. This epidemic might feel like history to you, but I carry it around with me every day.  

I have this chronic ache that has morphed throughout the years from terror, to rage, to grief to loneliness. AIDS consumed my life during my childhood. We opted to keep my parents’ HIV status a secret in our rural community in order to survive the stigma. Then when I lost them, I was finally ready to process our experiences out loud, but for the most part that demanded that I do the labor of carving out that space. There still aren’t many rooms where you can drop the word AIDS and not make everyone uncomfortable.  

This is why World AIDS Day means so much to me personally. It provides one day a year where I can openly acknowledge the losses that I have experienced. It’s a day to include my children in sharing the memories of the grandparents that they will never get to meet. It’s a day to be loud and public instead of alone. To my cracked orphan heart, that is a big deal.  

When I read AIDS statistics, I never see numbers, because AIDS has always been the most intimate part of me. My mother’s body. I cried reading the Facebook post by Dora Anne Mills yesterday, because when I see that 97% of the most recent new cases in Maine are people who inject drugs and 97% also have Hepatitis C, I see my father. When I see that 90% of the new cases are people who are experiencing homelessness, I see my mother and my step-father. This statistic raised me. 

I was born HIV negative, but still almost died from AIDS, because in the 80’s and 90’s, AIDS meant stigma. Shame. Violence. Poverty. Isolation. My family was already struggling at the margins of society before we got hit by my parents’ diagnosis’. And that is the point. People in the early years were always saying that AIDS can affect anyone. AIDS doesn’t see color, or education, or class. I have always understood that the goal of this mantra was to soften stigma, but it never landed with me, because AIDS DOES see color, class, and education.  

Systemic Violence doesn’t just hurt our feelings. It hurts our bodies. It leaves us hungry and traumatized. It weakens our immune systems. This is not just my opinion. There is plenty of research to prove it. If you want to learn more, go to the library and look for a book called Anti-Black Racism and the AIDS Epidemic. The science is there.  

What is happening in Maine right now is a flashback to my childhood in rural PA. AIDS is targeting some of the most vulnerable and already stigmatized among us. So we look away, maybe not because we are evil, but because it hurts too bad to see it. In a moment when the US government is making it a policy to look away from AIDS just as they did in the early years of the epidemic, I am asking you to break the cycle. I know it’s hard. I have been fighting to break cycles for my entire adult life, but I promise you that it is the only path to healing.  

We must learn from our past. If the government had faced the AIDS crisis head on when it first appeared in the US, my parents would likely still be alive today. My mother would only be 61 years old. My father and step-father only a few years older than that. We have the resources as a state and as a country to make sure that the 30 new cases in Penobscot County and the 5 new cases in Cumberland County survive this. I want them to be housed, to receive care for their addictions. I want their needs to be met with dignity and love. I want resources to flood their communities in order to put a stop to the spread of the virus so that we don’t see even more cases.  

Donald Trump officially cancelled World AIDS Day this year, but I don’t answer to him. Do you? 

on the 21st anniversary of my mother’s Death.


Donald Trump was inaugurated on the 21st anniversary of my mother’s death from AIDS. I was far too busy mothering my own children on that day to really give space to the gravity of either of those events. But only one day into his presidency, I listened in horror to the details of his plan to remove protections from immigrant families. Suddenly it hit me. Hard.

There are real people that I love, that I consider family, that my children go to school with, that I coach in basketball and sled with on the community hill- that are at risk because of these threatened policies. It might feel like a stretch to connect the AIDS epidemic to the immigration issue, but that’s how I make sense of my childhood experiences. I carry them around. I take them out and study them and I try to turn them into something useful. Something I could have used when the target was on my family.

Maybe if it wasn’t the anniversary of my mother’s death, the flashbacks to the presidential response to AIDS wouldn’t feel so relevant, but to me it’s a sickening echo. Presidents help to set the tone for how the country feels on an issue. Spreading fear and hate at that level cuts through communities not only at the policy level but on the more intimate personal level as well.  

I remember being 6 years old and sitting in class trying not to wet my pants, heart racing with fear, worrying that people living with AIDS might be shuttled off to some remote location. Isolated from the citizens who deserved to be protected from them. I worried that I would be sent into quarantine too as the child of a person living with AIDS. or even worse, that I’d be removed from my mother as an HIV-negative one. These fears weren’t completely the vivid imagination of an anxious child. I was hearing those threats on the radio.

It’s why when I hear this new threat today to immigrant families, I feel it in my guts. Why do we torture people like this? It makes me sick to think that there are families, terrified that they will lose citizenship or be separated from each other. Kids in class barely holding it in because we live in a world that won’t protect them. I hate it so much.

I was still reeling from the news when I scrolled through facebook and came to a comment on my local Public School’s page. Something to the effect of, “Come here legally, or you don’t deserve access to education.” That hit too close to home. I chose to respond even though I know that social media battles really don’t have a meaningful impact, because when I was a kid it would have mattered a lot to me to hear even one person stand up against those scary hateful words that targeted my family. I never heard from the other side. It seemed that those shouting about how dangerous and immoral people with AIDS were and discussing what we didn’t deserve had a louder megaphone than those acknowledging our humanity.

Right now, the threats seem to be coming for so many of us at once. It’s overwhelming and it’s terrifying. I used to consider myself an activist. These days I have all I can just to keep my own head above water, but I will never not be a loud voice acknowledging the humanity, dignity and rights of those caught in the crossfires of politicians today. I will never be so busy or distracted that I won’t get loud when I hear these hateful threats. I say this at the end of so many blog posts, but it’s so pressing for me. When will we learn from our collective history and do better for today’s children?

Which brings me back to my mother’s “deathiversary.” She was not a very “political” woman. She didn’t know how to read, and we didn’t have the internet. She wasn’t exactly informed on the issues. I have no idea if she would have voted for Donald Trump or if she would have voted at all. But I know that she was driven by love. I honor her legacy by choosing to be guided by love instead of fear.

Don’t Freak Out.

“Don’t freak out, but…”

I found out about the incident from another parent before I could hear it from my daughter. One of her basketball teammates had been followed from the bus stop all the way to the door of the gymnasium at their public school. The man was in his 20’s. I will not recount the details of the incident, because it is not my story to tell, but if you are a woman or a girl you can imagine. We have all had these violations.

The girl borrowed my daughter’s cell phone in order to call the police. Instead of lay-up lines and foul-shots, the scared 9th grade girls stood around watching their teammate file a report with the police. The next day we got the news that another classmate had been harassed a few hours earlier just a few blocks from the school on her walk home.

Those words, “Don’t freak out,” have been swirling through my mind for the past few days. My body disobeys that command and instantly my chest is squeezing and my vision blurs for a second. That command makes me feel like my response is the problem instead of a natural reaction to hearing that the violence of my girlhood is now preying on my daughter and her friends. At first, I suppressed my emotions and even let out a little guffaw, “Yeah, not surprising AT ALL. Of course girls can’t walk alone at night.” I rolled my eyes and went back to an email I was drafting.

But the next day, I woke up hot with anger and I can still feel it burning me from the inside out. I am freaking out. I’m so sick of this.

Why doesn’t this type of incident stop our whole society? Why isn’t everyone screaming at the top of their lungs? It’s so profound to me that I would let my son walk our dog at night, but not my daughter- even though he’s 2 years younger. Last summer, I let him knock door-to-door on our neighbors’ houses looking for lawn-mowing jobs. In two years when he is in high-school, I will not need to restrict his access to public transit for fears about his safety. I like to think of myself as a feminist, but I do not give my children the same privileges or opportunities. Because I can’t. and I am mad about that.

Pardon me if I freak out sometimes over the violence that I carry in my body. I refuse to believe that this is inevitable. Our daughters, and our sons, are watching how we react to these moments. Here is what I remember. One time a boy reached between my legs at my locker and grabbed my crotch hard before just walking away, daring me to do anything to stop him. This had happened countless times. I know that teachers had seen before and turned a blind eye. Some had even laughed at me or told me I was asking for it by dressing too sexy for school. But on this one particular day, a middle aged female teacher happened to see and she appeared out of nowhere. I was red in the face but still shoving my books in my locker when she came charging down the hallway after the offending boy, screaming and shaking her fist in the air.

When the boy, looking terrified to be chased by am enraged teacher, sprinted out of sight, she redirected her attention back to me. She was a short woman and I had to look down to meet her gaze. I remember she stood too close to me, closer than teachers usually stand, and she was as red in the face as me. “You don’t deserve that. That is not okay. I’m so sorry he did that to you.”

No one had ever done that for me before. The times that I had been hurt by boys and men, I had kept quiet and didn’t make a scene. That is what had been modeled for me. This woman shook my whole worldview up that day. In the moment, I was embarrassed that she had drawn so much attention to what had happened to my body, but somewhere deep inside she planted a seed.

I want to be her for my daughter and for all of the girls in my community. We do not deserve this. We should be able to take the bus, go to work, school, and our family reunion without fearing for our safety. I want to freak out. I want to make a scene. Every single time. and I invite you to freak out with me.

This is me at 15 trying to defend myself from the unwanted kiss of an old man that I had never met before.

My Mama has been gone for 19 years, but last week she shared the stage with Madonna.

I am not going to lie to you, I had mixed feelings when I was first invited to share my mother’s picture with Madonna for her then upcoming Celebration Tour. I feel guilty for admitting this, because I believe it was a sincere and meaningful gesture on her behalf. I appreciate it so much now and I am grateful to have participated. That first day though, I felt my shame and grief like a rock in the pit of my stomach.

I have no idea if my mom liked Madonna’s music. “Papa Don’t Preach” spent 2 weeks at the No. 1 spot of the Hot 100 the same year that mama was diagnosed HIV+. Madonna was 28 that year and my mom was 22. I wonder if my postpartum mother listened to that song when she was abandoned and alone in her low-income housing apartment, or if she just couldn’t relate to pop radio? I have no idea. I called my mom’s twin, Brenda, to ask, but she wasn’t sure either.

My emotional reaction wasn’t because I didn’t know if my mama was a Madonna fan though. I was struggling with knowing deep down that most of the people who would be seeing that image of my mother and honoring her now, would never have celebrated the woman that she was when she was actually alive.

My mother was born into multi-generational poverty. She was raised in a 2 bedroom trailer with her parents and 7 siblings. Her smile in the picture I sent to Madonna, reveals decay and neglect. My mom spent all of her school years in the Special Education Program and still managed to graduate illiterate and unable to do basic math. Society does not celebrate people who look and live like my mother did.

Part of my grief and shame is because I also did not do a good enough job of recognizing my mother’s beauty while she was still alive. I am ashamed of almost nothing, except this. I knew that my mother was dying my entire childhood. I loved her more than anything in the world, and still I often saw her through society’s eyes. I saw ugly. I saw stupid. I saw unworthy.

I was too young to appreciate her because the world around me told me, and told her, everyday, that she was nothing. Even worse, because nothing was what she was before AIDS. That diagnosis made her worse than nothing. She was dangerous. The world felt terrified of people living with AIDS during those early years of the pandemic and even though opinions shifted, her perception of herself was too damaged to recover.

I wish that I could go back and tell her that she was the most beautiful person that I have ever known. I wish that I could wrap her in a hug and tell her that I pour the parts of her that I find in myself into my children. That I ache for her every single day and that she is and always was worthy of the world even when the world couldn’t or wouldn’t see that. I am too late, and the world is too late, for my mama. My hope is that as we honor her life, and all of the other lives lost to AIDS, we also open our eyes to those living today who are pushed to the margins and who are not seen as worthy of our love or protection.

Over the past few weeks, messages have trickled in from people that I do not know in real life. People who follow my mama’s story through Instagram or through my blog have sent variations of, “Hey! I saw your mama’s beautiful face at the Madonna Concert!” Reading those messages of love from people who recognize my mother’s face from a 2 second display finally moved my grief into gratitude. It’s remarkable that there are so many people who know who my mother was and care enough to reach out to me to say that they recognized her. I don’t know if my mother was a Madonna fan, but I am sure that she would have loved this. She would have loved to have her photo on display at an international concert for one of the greatest pop stars of all time. She would be proud that people from all over the world saw the videos and said, “Hey, that’s Debbie!”

Thank you to Madonna for sharing the stage with my mama, and thank you to all of the people who read these stories and help me to keep her memory alive.

Exorcism

That summer, 2 small vans and a mini bus descended on The Grimes’s Farm. I watched from my window as a massive tent was erected in the yard. Since I did not have school to drag me away, I spent hours glued to the window. The women and children went straight into the house, but the men worked inside the tent. I listened to the hammering and tried to guess what they were building. I saw one of the vans go out and return with dozens of folding chairs. 

When Sunday came around I was finally permitted to peek inside the big white circus tent! Finally I could see that the hammering was the construction of a large stage, big enough for a preacher and a whole choir to stand on. I had a sense that church was about to be a lot more fun than usual and I was very excited. 

For two weeks we had services every single day. There was loud music rocking the whole valley and the clashing and banging of tambourines was ricocheting off of the mountains surrounding the tent. I was spellbound by this entire performance. We were not usually permitted any entertainment but since this was all for the Lord’s work, it was actually encouraged! 

There were scheduled services but any person who felt “called” by the Spirit could walk up on the stage and pick up the microphone and start to preach. People would make their way to the chairs or stand in front of the stage and shout encouragement and “Hallelujah’s!” 

I was terrified to take the mic but the Lord had been calling me. I felt his gentle push on me every morning when I woke up. I wanted to preach on the big stage! I wanted the people to listen to me and clap to my rhythm and most of all, I wanted to please God. I was a full-blown, born again, believer. 

I finally took the stage one afternoon when everyone was too hot to work the fields or do much of anything. The women were laying around in their ankle length skirts on blankets in the grass and the men were sipping iced tea and getting redder and redder under the sun. 

I did not tell anyone what I was planning to do because I wasn’t sure that I had the guts. I did not even tell my mama, but something pulled me to the stage and I forced my mouth to open and speak into the microphone. “Praise, Jesus!” I repeated the words that I knew were safe to say. No one could argue with those words. “God is Good!” 

The bodies lifted off of the grass and out of the chairs and soon the tent was filled. A child preaching had an instant effect on people and everyone was on their feet despite the oppressive heat. 

“I have been wantin’ to come on up here and praise God with you all!” My heart was racing but in a good way. Faces smiled back at me and I got a few, encouraging shouts from MY congregation. 

“Yes, Child! Tell us, Child!” 

I scanned the audience. Mama and Tom were back at the trailer. They came to Sunday service but they weren’t as invested as I was. In my mind, they were sinners and I needed to save us all. 

I let myself say things that I would never have dreamed of saying in a different context. It was still critical to our safety that I keep our secrets, but I felt confident that the Lord was guiding me. “It has been pretty hard for me lately. Things have been hard for my parents too. We’ve had it real bad! We were living for this world and not for the Lord!”

“MMMMHHHMMM!!! Yes, Child!”

“And then all of you guys came here and…” I couldn’t help it. I started to cry big fat tears sliding down my cheeks. But I continued with my sermon. “And I felt the Holy Spirit and now I just KNOW we are going to be okay! Nothing else matters except that GOD loves US! He loves ME! and My parents! and All of YOU! and it doesn’t matter how mean anybody is to us. It doesn’t matter how scared we are or what kind of house we live in or what kind of clothes we wear. All that matters is that we give our hearts to Jesus and he will protect us through anything.” I was drenched in sweat and tears by the end of my speech, but I had never felt so powerful or so hopeful in my life. 

“In Jesus NAME!” The crowd was crying along with me. These people had traveled all of the way from Maryland and South Carolina to be present for this Tent Revival and to see their “brother and sister in Christ, Mr. and Mrs. Grimes. They knew that they were up here saving the lost redneck souls of the “Pennsyltucky” backwoods. They knew that my parents were one of the families that the Grimes’s had taken in because we were “struggling with spirituality and housing.” 

After my sermon, I descended the stairs down to the ground only to be anointed by so many hands. Hands on my head, on my face, on my back, shoulders and arms. Everyone attached to these hands was crying and they were speaking out loud their own prayers for me. Their words were all jumbled together because they were all talking at once and I was suddenly a little frightened. I had seen this many times (at the Methodist and Baptist church we did this too,) but it had never happened to me before. I was always just a witness. 

I went back to my trailer exhausted and fell into a deep and peaceful sleep. That Sunday I was back to being in the fold-out chairs instead of on the stage and church had been going all day. It was starting to get dark outside. If it was quiet, we would have been able to hear the crickets outside the tent, but there was nothing quiet about this sermon. The whole Revival had an uplifting and fun energy until this one night and I do not know what caused the shift in the mood. 

Mr. Grimes himself was on the stage and he had the mic. He needed to assert himself on his own terf like an alpha dog protecting his territory. He was barking into the microphone and scanning the crowd. For what? I listened closely to his words. “God has spoken to me tonight! The Devil is among us! In this very tent! He’s here in the body of a child! One of our very own!” 

I considered bolting out of the tent. My mom was beside me and she squeezed my hand too tight and my fingers were turning white. There were other children in the tent, but I just knew he was talking about ME. I shouldn’t have gone up on the stage. I shouldn’t have spoken my true feelings out for everyone to see. I had put us all at risk!” I turned to my mom with panic in my eyes. Tom was oblivious and watching the stage. I don’t know how much he could hear of these sermons so maybe he wasn’t catching on to the fact that I was feeling targeted. 

The congregation was in a frenzy. Instead of encouragement and praise they were shouting words like, “NO WAY!” “WE WILL NOT LET HIM STAY IN OUR HOUSE!”

I wondered if everyone knew that Satan was in me. I had been so sure that I had been guided by God himself but now I was doubting everything. Had I been deceived like Eve? Was I possessed with the Devil? It suddenly made so much sense to me. I was a bastard. I was unclean. It was probably easy for Satan to come into a girl like me. 

I started to cry and I was frozen in terror. I was not sure how they would take the Devil out of me and I was humiliated to be exposed in front of this whole congregation. 

Albert stomped down those stairs that I had descended only a few days before. He scanned the crowd for his victim. I closed my eyes and prayed to God that I would survive whatever was coming. My mom let out a gasp and I involuntarily opened my eyes. 

Albert had a child in his arms. He was carrying her the way that Bill used to carry me to the car on those paper route nights. Her long hair was swaying almost to the ground and her feet dangled lifelessly underneath of her. She looked like a doll. She did not even look like a real girl to me. But she was a real girl and she started to cry when Albert stood her up on the stage. Her body looked tiny and frail beside him. I had noticed her before. She was about my age and I had felt too shy to approach her. adults were easier for me. Now I was grateful that I hadn’t! She had the Devil inside of her! 

Mr. Grimes put his paws on each of her shoulders and screamed into the top of her head. “I COMMAND YOU SATAN TO LEAVE THIS CHILD ALONE! I REBUKE YOU IN THE NAME OF THE HOLY SPIRIT! LEAVE!” With that final word, he shoved her body with all of his might and she flew across the stage and lay crumpled in the corner. How she didn’t slide right off to the ground I do not know. 

I do not remember anything after that. I do not remember her mother going to her to make sure she was okay. I do not remember the crowd cheering that God had defeated the Devil. But I know that those things must have happened. 

I was too busy searching my heart for the Devil. I could have walked away from the church at this point, but instead I doubled down and prayed harder. I went back to the stage again and again after that. When the vans and minibus filled up to drive back South to their home churches, they promised to send someone to come back for me next summer so that I could experience how they did the tent revival down south. But by the next summer, we were gone. 

“Tubey”

My oldest child, Corah, had a feeding tube from the time she was 3 weeks old. For the first 13 months of her life, that meant that I was pumping my breasts every few hours to trickle my milk through a tiny tube in her nose. At least once a day, but often more than that, she would lace her chubby fingers through the tube and rip it out of her nostril. It never took me more than a second to stop the machine so that the milk wasn’t wasted. I would run and grab a clean yellow tube, give her a little milk from my breast directly for comfort and then quickly push that tube up her nose and down her throat. A fresh piece of Tegaderm to hold it in place and we were all good. The hardest part was catching up on the lost milk since she was on a continuous drip and couldn’t tolerate larger boluses.

When Jamie and I realized that this way of feeding her was not going away any time soon, we consented to having a more permanent tube placed into her stomach directly. It required surgery and we had it scheduled while she was already under anesthesia for another procedure. Still, it had been a difficult experience for us, and for her and we were prepared to do anything to avoid repeating it for as long as possible. The doctors explained that if the tube was removed for even just an hour, the stomach would begin to heal and need to be surgically opened up again. They gave me a kit to replace the “button” that allowed us to put the feeding tube directly into her stomach instead of the down the throat technique. Corah’s cheeks were raw from all the tape and we were over the process of causing her pain every single time it got pulled out. The new tube was harder to pull out but much more dramatic when it did happen. At least at first.

I was one of those baby wearing, extended breastfeeding type of moms with all three of my babies. Honestly, I just didn’t know any other way of mothering. They were happiest close to me and so that is what made me happiest too. But Corah’s tubey was hard to maneuver in a baby wrap. On good days, I could put the machine in a backpack and snake the long tube carrying milk through the straps of my Ergot and get her adjusted on my front with the bag on my back. I could feel her feeding tube button pressed against my own belly and we both felt safe and comfortable in that position. BUT our days were long and there was so many opportunities for it to get caught on something in that position and ripped out, so I often just strapped her into a stroller where I could have more control over that long snaking tube.

I pushed Corah in that stroller all over the city every single day. I technically had a drivers licence, but I wasn’t comfortable driving in the city. I never even attempted for the first few years that we lived here. My mom had held true to her word that she wouldn’t let me take driver’s ed, (I wrote about that here: https://redneckaidsorphansurvivor.home.blog/2023/01/25/coach-p-edophile/) and even though I learned after she died, I still wasn’t confident.

Jamie was working long days and often having to work out of town so Corah and I had our own little routine down. I would mix up the formula that WIC provided, and I would fill the feeding tube bag to the top so that we would have hours of mobility before we needed to head home and refill. I would strap Corah into one side of a double stroller and the feeding tube bag onto the other seat. Then we would walk miles around our city, walking from our apartment in the East End to her doctors’ offices in the West End. Then down to the playground to slide down the slides with tubey on my back. Sometimes, I would disconnect her from the tube long enough to swing in the baby swing untethered for a few minutes. After that we would walk down to the grocery store which was on our way home and fill up the space under the stroller with as much as I could physically push and walk the rest of the way home. It was great exercise and it worked for a few years, until it didn’t.

We pulled this routine off for a few weeks without any glitches until one day we had wandered down to check out a new yarn shop that I had heard about. It was down in the Old Port in a big warehouse type of building. The yarn store was down a flight of stairs and I realized that I couldn’t get the stroller through the door of the building so I got the backpack on and started unbuckling Corah from her side of the stroller. That is when I heard the dreaded Pop! of the button coming out of the hole in her stomach. I lifted her little shirt grateful that she didn’t have a onesie on and saw the milk gushing out through that opening. So much panic went through my head all at once. Too much milk was coming out! I started calculating. I had one hour before it started to close. I scooped her up into my arms and flew down those stairs.

I had never stepped foot inside this yarn store before and even if this wasn’t happening I would have felt out of place. The Old Port is a tourist attraction and a young low-income mom was hardly the target customer for a place like this. Still there was no time for shame. I threw the door open and laid Corah out on the rug while I scrambled to find the replacement kit for her button. I had never had to put one in but I understood the concept. The button itself is farely small about the size of a nickle in diameter but much fatter. There is a two inch long fat tube that you push into the hole in her stomach and then hold it in place so it doesn’t pop back out with one hand while drawing a syringe with 2 ml of water with the other hand to fill the balloon on the end of that tube inside her stomach to hold it in place so that it wouldn’t pop out again. All the while I was rambling to the very confused and frightened shop owner who was a middle aged white woman, trying to explain what was happening and why it had to happen right then on her rug. I was on foot so I couldn’t do this in my car or get home in a timely manner.

I am not sure if I was just so flustered or if I really did have the wrong size syringe, but either way, I just could not get the syringe to twist onto the appropriate spot to insert that 2mls of water into the balloon. I tried tirelessly for about 10 minutes before realizing the clock was ticking and I wasn’t going to succeed. I raced back up the steps with the milk still oozing out of Corah’s tummy and the backpack now thrown into the seat uselessly.

“Do you need me to call an ambulance?” I thought about that for a second but Corah and I had already had an ambulance ride before and this did not seem to necessitate that kind of a trip again. I knew I could get up to Rite AID or to another little medical center and find a syringe that would connect in the right spot. It was the same kind of syringe that the pharmacy will give you to administer liquid meds to a small child orally. It just has a slightly different tip. That was my best bet. I sprinted with that double stroller past the enormous cruise ship, past the coffee shop with the line of people waiting for muffins and lattes and past about a dozen bus stops that would have been helpful if I had ever taken the bus before. I was still such a country bumpkin. I hadn’t figured out how to navigate this city at all except on just my own two feet.

By the time I ran through the doors at the medical center, sweat was pouring down my face and I was panting for breath. It had taken me 10 minutes to get that far and so now I was down to 40 minutes until that hole closed.

“Please! Hi! Can you help me?” I pointed to Corah in the stroller, who without the feeding tube bag attached to her, just looked like a “normal” healthy toddler. She wasn’t in any pain so she wasn’t crying or anything. “She has a feeding tube and the button popped out and I can’t get it back in and I need a syringe to replace it and if I don’t get one right NOW it’s going to close up and it means another surgery! Please! All I need is a syringe!”

“Are you a patient here?” The receptionist was looking at me skeptically.

“No…But my daughter is a patient of Maine Med and I don’t have a car and I can’t get all the way there in time. Please! She’s a child! All I need is a syringe. I can do it myself. I just need the syringe. I’m not asking you do to do anything. Just give me the syringe!” I was clueless about the way that this woman was taking in the situation. To her, I just looked desperate and screaming about syringes.

“No. We can not be giving syringes out to just anybody off the street! What are you thinking coming in here like this?”

My jaw fell off of my face. I am really good at navigating my way through the medical world at this point, but back then, I was still too quick to rage. “WHAT?! IT’S FOR MY BABY! You know what? I don’t have time for this!” I ran out of there so fast when I realized that it was a dead end at best and worst case scenario, that receptionist was looking at me like she was about to call the police.

It was still ok. I walked these streets everyday. I knew that I could get to the hospital in time if I ran the whole way. I also knew there was a Rite AID. I bolted straight for the pharmacy. They were a little more understanding of the situation and also I had learned a little since the last attempt and came at it with a slightly calmer approach. They showed me the syringes that they had but they were all like the one I already had. None of them had the right tip.

There was only one thing left to do and that was to run from the East End of my city to the West End. I dialed the doctors office while maneuvering my way out of the heavy Rite AID doors. By the time I got through all of the beeps and” push 6 for this doctor” and “push 4 for that line… ” I was already one block closer.

Finally, I had a person on the phone. “Hey! Susan! Hi! It’s Corah’s mom! Yeah, I just pulled out her button. Well, actually it was like half an hour ago now, but I can’t get a new one back in, because I don’t have the right syringe and no one will give it to me and I am on the way to you right now!” I explained the whole thing while sprinting down main street with a massive stroller, panting and gasping between words.

“Ok. Calm down. Take a breath..”

“Susan! No! The doctors said her stomach can close in an HOUR! I DO NOT WANT TO HAVE ANOTHER SURGERY!”

“Ok. Ok. Well can you reach Jamie? Or call a cab so that you don’t have to run the whole way?”

“Jamie is working in New Hampshire today and No! I can’t call a cab. I have to get off the phone. I just have to go! We will be there soon. Please, be ready for us!” I was embarrassed to say that I had never called for a cab and didn’t know how and didn’t have the time to learn how to in that moment.

I was trying to focus on getting there and making my lungs work and not crying. I walked miles everyday but I hadn’t run for exercise in years. Plus, that double stroller was heavy to be pushing around. Sidewalks in my city are completely inaccessible and broken everywhere so trying to navigate with a wheelchair or a stroller is damn near impossible without a lot of jumping off the sidewalk and going on the road over broken places.

I ran and ran and somehow made it to the Pediatric Offices. Up the elevator and into the office without that precious skin healing closed. I finally wept as the nurse showed me the correct way to insert the tube myself. They made me do it instead of doing it for me so that I would feel confident the next time. All the while, Corah was ok. She was used to doctors offices and drama and nothing hurt so she wasn’t upset.

They let me sit and catch my breath for a few minutes in the room before I had to head back out for the long walk home. I got Corah’s machine all set up with clean formula and a new “tubey” button and let her nurse at my breast while the formula simultaneously trickled in through the tube in her stomach. One ml per minute. If we increased the rate, she would often throw up. She loved to nurse and would do it often, but could not get in enough that way because of the amount she needed due to her kidney disease.

A week later, the tube popped out in the grocery store. This time, I went to the bathroom and washed my hands. I pulled out the syringe that I kept in the front pocket of the backpack and I easily and quickly replaced the button. I did that procedure so many times over the next 6 years that I can’t possibly remember how many times or any details about those times. It became as second nature as changing a diaper or giving a bath.

She no longer has her “tubey” as she affectionaly came to call it when she was old enough to name it. We had it removed for the last time when she was in the first grade. We felt confident that we could push water orally and that she had proved that she could swallow pills instead of needing them to be administered through the tube.

We had a party to celebrate the end of the era. We had been reluctant to consent to the feeding tube in the beginning and reluctant to part with it when the time came in the end. It was such a big part of our lives. Such a big part of Corah. She has always processed through art and she made a card to honor the moment with the words, “Bye-Bye Tubey” scrawled across the inside. Inspired, I baked a chocolate cake with the words Good-Bye G-Tube” and let her cover it in rainbow sprinkles.

Now she is a teenager. There have been many more tubes and many more procedures. There is a beautiful scar on her stomach where tubey used to be. The hole in her stomach did heal up fast, but the outside skin is still scarred in a “second belly button.” She boldly shows it off in the summer, wearing bikinis that won’t cover it and she dreams of getting a tattoo someday, not to hide it, but to decorate it in her own way.

“Rake”

My mom made this diaper bag for me when I was born and I still have it.

I was just a little kid the first time I heard the word rape. Where I come from, as a girl, it’s just a hard fact of life. Mother’s start teaching their daughters how to avoid it when we are still learning how to tie our shoes. But I found out about it by accident. 

Mama had a higher tolerance for me listening in on grown-people’s conversation because I was her only child and because we were so close. She wanted me around as much as I wanted to be around her. But there was this one time that mama shooed me out the door. 

The public housing apartments were all in a row, halfway up the side of a big hill. These particular ones were reserved for single parents, so every home had to have a kid in it. The “Brooklynside Kids” were a little gang that took over the front yards. No one cared if you were out there hollerin’ and horsin’ around in the front, but the back yards were people’s private spaces. Plus, there was an intimidating wall of rocks held in by mesh wire in everyone’s backyard. I guess to keep the top of the hill from crumbling down on us. I was never one to be out there horsin’ around anyway. Everyone referred to me as “Little Mama” because I was always trying to keep all the other kids in line, kissing boo-boo’s and being bossy.

This one day, I tried to bring myself to join the game that the kids were playing. It was some variation of tag. I should have just put my foot in the circle to be tapped along with the others. “My. mother. told. me. to. pick. the. very. best. one. and. you. are. IT!” I was on my way to do just that when my mama’s face popped into my head. She was keeping something from me, and she never did that. We kept secrets together, not from each other. Something was wrong. 

Mama had sent me outside as soon as our neighbor Tina came over. Tina was a teenager, just a few years younger than mama. She was over to our house all the time with her fat little baby boy. I loved him. He weighed almost as much as me with his little bald head and his two front teeth. He was my real live baby doll. I would carry him around while our mama’s had coffee and gossiped at the table. 

I turned away from the kids. I suddenly needed to know what my mama was in there talking to Tina about. I snuck along the side of the brick house and pushed my ear right up close to the sliding glass door. Mama and Tina were inside at the kitchen table. They were both beautiful to me although neither of them was seen that way by society. Tina wore acid washed parachute pants and her short, bleached bob was hair sprayed until it didn’t move. My mom’s was hair sprayedtoo but she wore hers softer. Mama would force curls into her limp hair, and I would stand beside her flattening out my big natural poofy curls. Mom always wore bright blue-green eye shadow. It was so bold, but it was the only color she ever wore. 

Now in the kitchen, I could see mama’s leg was crossed and her foot was bouncing up and down fast like it did when she was angry, excited, or just in the middle of a good story. Her head was buried in her hands and when she lifted her face to speak the blue was a smeared mask across her eyes. Mascara streaks were dripping down her cheeks and her lips were trembling. 

I wanted to bang on the door and shout for her to let me in. I wanted to hug her tight and make her stop crying, but my body was paralyzed with fear. My mom and I were so in sync that watching her body shake sent shivers down through my own body.  I put my ear up against the glass to listen to the words that mama was choking out between sobs. I could not understand them. Mama was not making any sense. I listened closely. 

“Rake!” I heard that word over and over again. It felt like a big and nasty word even though I knew what a rake was. People come from far and wide to see the beautiful fall leaves in the hills of my hometown. Why was mama saying rake like that?Wait… What?!? Mama said, the man next door raked her when she went to babysit his kids! I didn’t know mama went to babysit his kids. Maybe this happened when I was at my dad’s? I had so many questions. I felt so confused and scared.

I looked up suddenly to see if the man was outside even right now! The way mom was carrying on, it sounded really bad! Finally, the image in my mind of a man raking over my body out there in the backyard sent me screaming through the kitchen door. I threw myself onto my mom’s lap and clung to her for dear life. She crumpled over my back and eventually Tina scooped her baby boy up from the rug on the floor and left us there like that.

That night I curled up next to my mama in her bed, still clinging to her. I laid awake for hours staring at the window. Any shadow from the trees falling across the room would send my heart racing. I pictured him out there right now with his rake. I just knew he was coming back for both of us this time. When I finally went to sleep, he came through the window in my dreams. I woke up bawling and mama said, “It’s ok baby. It’s just the bobcats down in the swamp. They sound like a woman cryin’, don’t they? Remember, Crystal Fawn, never go outside if you hear a woman cryin’. That means the bobcats are out there.”

Coach P.edophile

I had been obsessed with basketball since I was a little girl. Even though I was only on the JV team, we shared locker rooms and practices with the Varsity team. We felt like we had officially made it. Walking into the locker room felt like a rite of passage. We were no longer children. Instead of loud silly immature giggles, the locker room was filled with people who HAD DROVE THEMSELVES THERE. We couldn’t hear exactly what the small group of seniors were saying because our huddle of lockers was on the other side of the room, but I imagined they were discussing sex, parties, drinking, driving, college, and who knows maybe even things I hadn’t even thought to think of yet.

Here I am, #22!

We tried not to stare at the bodies draped over the sink to fix a ponytail in the mirror, applying deodorant standing around in nothing but a sports bra and shorts, or laying down on the bench with headphones. These bodies were somehow so much older than our bodies. We were fascinated, but we also knew that they would call us “dykes!” if they caught us staring. It was important to not get caught.

This was the scene the first time my new coach walked in on us. Half naked girls out in the open in every direction. “Ope! Sorry! I thought you girls were done in here!” The JV coach, Let’s just call him Coach P., was standing before us with his hands in front of his eyes but his fingers spread so our bodies were still in view.

Girls were diving behind the stalls and hiding with whatever towel was closest to grab. “Hurry it up! Get to practice. You should be out there by now!” He yelled at us like we were the ones who had just done something wrong or embarrassing.

When he stomped away and we heard the door slam behind him, I heard an older girl say, “Fuckin’ Perv.”

“OHMYGOD! I CAN’T BELIEVE COACH JUST SAW US IN OUR UNDERWEAR,” the new JV players were all freaking out about this.

“I can’t go out there. I had my whole ass out! Oh my god.”

Now the older girls were paying attention to us. It was like someone called a meeting and we hadn’t realized. Suddenly they were all looming over us. Instinctively the JV girls all sat down to make ourselves smaller and show deference to these Varsity players. One of them rolled her eyes at us. Then they handed down their wisdom, that we really could have used 10 minutes ago.

“Get used to it.”

“Yeah, he does that ALL the time. It’s so fuckin’ gross.”

“Listen. If you don’t want that old man to see your shit, just get dressed behind the lockers and don’t fuck around when you get outta the shower.”

“You get used to it. It’s not a big deal. He’s just an old perv. His wife is so fuckin’ ugly you can’t really blame him. He’s harmless though.”

We were shocked. We had a male coach in Junior High but he had never once stepped foot in our locker room. What the fuck?! They looked at our horrified expressions and laughed at us.

“Listen girls. You don’t like it? Work hard and make the Varsity team so that you don’t have to put up with his shit as much. He’s an asshole to play for too.”

“Yeah, the Varsity coach is an asshole too but at least she’s a good fuckin’ coach and she doesn’t try to see our titties!” This girl reached over and grabbed the breast of the girl sitting beside her to make a point. We all laughed. Ok. This was a lot to take in. But we did as we were told and for the most part he was harmless.

He was annoying as all hell though. Sometimes he would just stop by my house to invite me to the movies or to “visit.” My next door neighbor, let’s call her Jessica, was on the team with me and a good friend of mine. Coach would stop at her place too. If he stopped at my house first, I would have to make up an excuse why I couldn’t go to the movies with him or out to lunch or whatever and then I would dive for the phone before he was even off my porch. There were plenty of teenagers over there so as long as one of them answered the phone, I might be able to get the message to her before Coach got to her door.

“Hello?” Great! It was her older sister!

“Hey! Coach is on the way!! Tell Jess to HIDE!”

“Ew. Fuck.” She groaned but she remembered this shit from when she was on the JV team. “Jess! Coach is coming. I’ll say you’re not here. Hide!!”

“Gotta go. Thanks.”

I hung up the phone grateful that I was able to help and feeling good about myself when my mom came in the room. She had been feeling sick in the bathroom and hadn’t witnessed this episode. “Who was that?”

“Oh just Jessica. I had to talk to her about something.” I pointed to the phone.

“No. Not the phone. The door. Who came to the door?” Oh shit. I did not need this. Mom hated Coach P. stopping by. I mean so did I, but I was willing to put up with it so that I didn’t have any drama in my basketball life. Fuck. I couldn’t think up a lie and she was standing there arms crossed glaring at me.

“It was Coach. He just stopped by to say hi.” I couldn’t lie.

My mom’s face was contorted in anger. “What the FUCK? Ew. That guy gives me the heebie-fucking-jeebies! You tell that mother fucker I don’t want him stopping by our house any fucking more. You are 15 years old. What the fuck is wrong with him? FUCKING PERVERT.”

She didn’t know about his tendency to forget that we used the locker rooms to change our clothes, and I was not going to tell her. She was already making such a big deal about just him stopping by. I also didn’t mention that he invited me to the movies. That would really freak her out. I was mostly on mom’s side with this one. He was a freak. But at the same time, I didn’t want her to embarrass me by making it a big deal.

“And just so YOU know, there is no way in HELL you’re taking that fuckin’ driver’s ed class. No. Fucking. Way.” This is exactly what I was afraid of. Coach was the driver’s ed instructor at our school.

“Moooooom. I have to get my license. Everybody does it. It’s not a big deal. I don’t even want to drive. I just want to have my license.”

“Over my dead body!” Mom forgot about being pissed at Coach P. and turned all of that hostility in my direction. “Little girl, you think you know so much about the world but you don’t know SHIT!”

“Why do you want to ruin my life?” I could match my mom in volume and intensity. In fact, even though I was still terrified of her, it was not enough to keep me from back talking.

“Oh, I’m ruinin’ YOUR life, hunh?” She came at me fast with her hand raised but for the first time in my life, I was ready for it. I did not even consciously decide my next move, it just happened. Instead of throwing my arms over my head to simply block the blows that my mother had in store for me, I reached up and caught her arms by the wrists. Her eyes were burning a hole into my face and she and I went crashing across the room. I never once swung back, but I would not let go of her wrists and let her hit me. She could not get away from me and I could not get away from her without unleashing all of this fury. We were writhing against the wall and she was madder than I had ever seen her.

“Oh, you think yer BIG now huh? Ok. Big shot. Ok. You want to say that I am ruinin’ yer life? I can do that! I can ruin yer life! You want that? You want me to turn yer whole life upside fucking down?” This was not going to get better and now I just needed to escape. I saw my chance when my mom was mid sentence. I knew she would want to get it all out before chasing me so I had about 2 seconds to make a break for it. Remember I had a grip on her, not the other way around so I had the advantage of taking her off guard with the chase. I let go without any warning and bolted for the door. Now if that thing had been hard to open or if I had hesitated in any way, I would probably not be alive to tell this story and my mom would have died in prison. I might be exaggerating but I might not. My mom was PISSED and she was known to chase me around with knives when she was even just half as mad as she was on this day.

I knew that once I got outside, I was free. Mom would not touch me outside. I bee-lined for Carla’s and just acted casual once I got there. “Wanna go for a walk?” I asked. “I’m bored.” She was game so we did our usual lap around town, past the cute boys houses, looking for anyone and anything exciting. We did not find what we were looking for but it did get exciting.

My mom wasn’t one to chase me out in the view of the public, but my Grandma had zero shame. She was from a generation where beating a kid was expected not shameful. I didn’t know what hit me when her old clunker pulled up beside me and Carla. I looked around like a scared rabbit for any kind of place to hide, but Grandma was out of that car and on me fast. She smacked me so hard right across the face. “You get your ass in this car this minute.” I did not want to get in that car but I was humiliated and didn’t want to make even more of a scene. We were practically on main street. Anybody could have seen! I got in the car and just sat there steaming mad but silent as Grandma drove me home. She kept looking in the rear view mirror at me challenging me to say anything in protest. When I didn’t do anything other than cry, she addressed me head on. “Your mom told me that you hit her. I can’t believe you would be that kind of evil. You know your mom is weak. She does everything for you and this is how you repay her. Evil. Just evil.”

Now I was mad. “What?! I didn’t fucking touch her!” I never ever called my mom out for beating on me, but she broke our code first by calling Grandma and accusing me of doing what she was guilty of. “She’s the one hitting on me. I just held her arms so she couldn’t do it. I’m sick of this Grandma.” I was sobbing now. Grandma didn’t say anything to this and her face softened a little. I guess she believed me.

Mom and I didn’t even speak to each other when I got home. I was sick of my mom beating me for the shitty things men did, but at the same time, I kind of understood where she was coming from. I could see it then but now it is even more clear to me. My mama wanted to protect me but she felt powerless. She couldn’t confront the perverted men that I came into contact with so she needed to beat me into understanding. No driver’s license was worth having to let that old man grope me or worse. She needed me to understand that even if she had to beat it into me.

“There can be only one.”

I finally made it home for the first time in 10 years. My partner, our three kids, and I spent a week camping in the hills of my childhood and visiting my enormous extended family. I got to see siblings that I hadn’t seen since I was a kid, meet nieces and nephews, and hug and love on some of my favorite humans. It was a gift and I am only beginning to make sense of it as I sink back into myself.

I am sure that I will do a lot of writing to process this trip but for now I have been content to slowly share photos on my social media and let it trickle out of me. Tonight though, I tried to make a post that needed more than just a quick photo and a few words. I need to get some of this out! I have been so filled with gratitude but the truth is that just under that has been this pulsing trauma that of course got jostled a little bit from our trip.

When I get triggered like this, it looks like an increase in my anxiety which means a decrease in my patience. It means I talk too fast and too much. It means I laugh too loud and cry too quick. I hate it. At 35 years old, I have lived with it long enough to know that I will move through this and get back to my baseline. I know I will be ok eventually, but I need a little calm for my soul right now. Tonight. My family needs it too.

One of the ways that I move through my trauma is to talk it out. Writing is a huge release for me and so tonight I am here on the living room floor in the dark typing on the computer that is dying because I let the 4 year old watch too many Cocomelon videos before bed.

First of all, can I just tell you that I wanted this story to be funny. I knew exactly what I wanted to say and how I wanted to talk about the goddamn sword in the back of my car, but for the life of me, I can no longer remember what the hell was so funny about it. I hope by the end of this piece, I can find the humor again for all of our sakes. Please bear with me.

The sword belonged to my mother. Apparently it cost her $250 and it is an exact replica of the Highlander sword. If you aren’t old enough to remember the tv show, go watch the theme song. I will share a link to the video at the end of this story. I grew up watching it with my mom and step-dad but I had pretty much forgotten about it until my Uncle Buddy handed me the sword and said, “There can be only one.” He had been holding it for me all these years since my mom died. Anyway, now I am old enough and so it has been driving around with me to basketball practice, the grocery store and the playground because I am not ready to bring it into my house. I am not ready to have such a physical reminder of the violent parts of my childhood inside my home with my own children.

This is when it stopped feeling funny I guess. For a week, my partner and children sat with rapt attention to story after story about my mama, my father, and all of my people on both sides. The stories were beautiful but also incredibly violent. Which I know. I still feel that violence take my breath away when I hear a sudden loud sound or anytime I am startled by an unexpected person entering any room. At this point, I can feel it and release it, but it still lingers within me haunting me forever I guess.

On one particular visit, my children sat wide eyed while a relative told a story about my mama (their grandmother who they never met) landing a punch in a glass window because she missed when she swung at her own dad. The stories continued to my mom chasing one of her sisters with a knife and throwing another knife at another sibling but “THANK GOD your mama had such terrible aim! It’s hard sayin’ how many of us wouldn’t be alive to this day if she could aim worth a shit! Oop! hahahahahhahah” My children and partner laughed on cue and I laughed too for a second before realizing this relative thought they were telling me something I didn’t know about my mama.

“You know I lived with that woman for 17 years, right? Trust me I KNOW how bad her aim was. I know how bad her temper was too. You don’t honestly think I lived with her for all those years and didn’t see that side of her did you?”

Here is the thing. I don’t talk about my mama’s violence too much. I love her and I forgive her and I understand that she beat on me because she was beat on so much and I was smaller and that is just how it was. But the truth is my mama made me fear for my life too. It wasn’t just my step-dad chasing me with knives or stabbing holes in beds where bodies just rolled out of reach. Every once in a while, not even once a year, but maybe once every few years, I will have a dream memory where my mama is chasing me through the halls of our old trailer or jumping over the coffee table with a knife pulled up ready to launch it at me. I would fly over the couch, duck and run always aiming for the door, a window or any escape. It wasn’t good enough to just hide. Survival meant getting out of the house. Mama would not chase me out of the house. She was willing to throw lethal weapons at me, but she was not willing to risk Children’s Services getting called. If I got outside, I was safe. That is just the way it was. Thank God, I always did make it outside. She did connect her fists and feet to my flesh but never a blade or a bullet. I know how lucky I am and I am tired of covering all that up. So I told my relative who was laughing about it.

I wasn’t hurt that he was laughing because here is the thing; Sometimes traumatized people just have to laugh. It feels good to laugh. It is also a form of release. I had been laughing all week about the violence too. I had laughed about the time my cousin was over and we made a big mess with the Barbies even though the social worker was on her way over and mama told us to clean up. When she got out of the shower and saw that mess, she threatened to kill us and sure as hell she grabbed a kitchen knife and went after us. My cousin was scared out of her mind and even called her own mama to come to her rescue. I didn’t have anyone to call, but the social worker showed up and we all just sat there and smiled and acted like nothing at all. We laughed about that because my mama is gone. The threat is gone and because we love her still despite it all. We all laughed about it. What else are you going to do?

But now I am here with this sword and I need to get it out of the car, because is it even legal to be driving around with a weapon like that? I can’t just give it away because even though it does not conjure up my favorite memories of her, it is something that she physically touched and now it is back in my hands and that is enough for me to want it more than I do not want it. Plus, my 11 year old son loves it and I basically told him it’s his. Someday. When he is older.

Tonight this all came to a head because I decided it had to be removed from the trunk. The children and I were headed to the public swimming pool and I needed to climb into the back anyway to find my sandals so why not just bite the bullet and get it out of there. So I did. My son immediately started in with, “Can I hold it? Can I take it out of it’s sheath? Whoa! It’s heavy!”

Phew. Breathe. Crystal Fawn. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Keep this light. The children do not need to feel this trauma that is now pouring out of every cell. Let them have this memory of their grandmother liking some ridiculous tv show and owning this silly little memorabilia about it. but WAIT! “STOP! NO! I said, don’t open it!” My impulsive boy can not have this type of thing around. He just can not resist and wanted to feel the blade. He is endlessly curious. It had seemed ok to let him hold the sword with it safely secured inside the red case. He uses tools and weapons that could be dangerous all the time when he goes to archery or fishing. He knows a lot about knife safety because he has a knife for wood carving. but when the sliver of shiny silver started to appear, my stomach bottomed out and I couldn’t deal anymore. I had agreed to take some photos with it and to let them take some too. We were going to keep it in it’s sheath for safety but take a couple of photos posing like the Highlander. But I just couldn’t fake it. I was anxious and grumpy and this wasn’t funny anymore. We took a couple of photos which did look silly because we were all in our swimming suits ready for the pool, but the energy just wasn’t there. When I looked at the photos tonight it is clear that I was in no condition to pose like a badass with a sword or to make jokes. My face is grief in every pose.

I’m not gonna mince words with you tonight. I had a rough day with my kids. I thought I could joke with them about the Highlander and keep it away from feeling personal, but I failed. Trauma sucks. Anxiety sucks. Today, I wasn’t as patient as I usually am. I was overprotective with my teenager and I yelled at my tween. I wasn’t the best version of myself and I hate that. But it’s real. I am not a perfect mother or a perfect person. I hate that my trauma finds its way to my children like this. I hate it. But I forgive myself.

Hearing all of those stories of generations of violence on both sides of my family, I am reminded that I broke that cycle. I did that. I work hard to be the best mother I can be. I make mistakes, I apologize and I work hard to do better. I know that my children feel my trauma and anxiety, I see that it has been passed down to them in many ways, but I also see that tonight when they fell asleep, they were safe. They know that they are loved. They will never have to fear that I will beat them or shoot at them or stab them. They know that they are safe here with their dad and I. We get a lot wrong as all parents do, but we do not get this part wrong. and I am proud of that. and grateful. and finally crying. Release.

Tonight the sword is hidden away in a secret location where children can not reach it and I am finally going to sleep.

Okay, here is the trailer to the show. This story wasn’t funny, but this trailer definitely is!