“Uncle-Dad”

I was scared of my father’s side for most of my childhood. Ever since the gun incident. Even though he wasn’t alive anymore, I still avoided anything and everything to do with my dad. Like when my older brother got a summer job as a “Carnie,” I didn’t ride the ferris wheel, even though it was my favorite because it was too close to the ride he was working. Or if I spotted one of my sisters in the Rite-Aid, I would put down whatever I had intended to buy and duck into whatever aisle was closest until I could sneak out. One time the store manager confused me for a greeting card thief when I was in stealth mode and banned me from the store for a year. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if it wasn’t one of 2 stores in the whole town. Anyway, at least my sisters didn’t see me.

I hadn’t spoken to my siblings since I stopped going to our dad’s, but I knew they would still recognize me. Everywhere I went, people would take one look at my matching dark hair and eyes and say, “You must be a Gamet! I bet I know who your daddy is!” The truth is, and I never confessed this before, I was equal parts ashamed and comforted when people said this. It is true that I was terrified of being associated with my father’s side, but it is also true that I still loved him, and them.

I wasn’t just scared about the gun either. It was also about AIDS. I was still trying to keep my mom’s status a secret and that was much harder to do if people knew my dad. It was still a secret that he died from AIDS, because his wife was still living here in this small town with her own HIV status and of course there was still the matter of all of us kids. None of us were positive, but the town didn’t know that, and they would punish us the same as they would punish our parents if they knew. Still, there are always whispers in a small town and I knew that at least some people knew how my 36 year old father died.

My father’s people had been living in this region for many generations. In fact, some of our ancestors are Indigenous so yeah, some of our people lived here forever. You couldn’t take two steps in any direction without running into one of my relatives. I had to do a lot of fancy footwork to stay under everyone’s radar. It helped that all of my siblings were so much older than me. There was one relative though that always surprised me. I couldn’t dodge him no matter how hard I tried and eventually I quit trying. My brothers and sisters, who grew up with him in a way that I did not, call him “Uncle-Dad.” I call him this in my heart but I have never said it out loud.

To me, he was “Uncle Don” and he was my father’s best friend and brother. My dad had a lot of brothers, but I never took much notice of the other ones and they never seemed to notice me either. But Uncle Don kept tabs on all of “his kids.” He took in all of the stray kids in our family who had lost our parents to drugs, to incarceration, to AIDS and to death. Most of us were biologically related to him at least, but I know he watched out for kids who weren’t even blood.

The people that I respected most in my life were women. They were the ones who were doing all of the loving and hard work of caring in my community. I saw men as a source of violence and pain. But, my Uncle Don was this amazing exception. Now, I know he is a real person and not some fictional character. I know he has flaws like the rest of us, but at that time in my life, I thought he was a superhero. After my step-dad died, mom and I didn’t have a man to fix the little things that would break. I know that’s unnecessarily gendered and mom and I could have rolled up our sleeves and learned how to figure things out like broken heaters and mice in the walls, but we didn’t and we didn’t even know we could. We would just sit in the freezing cold waiting for the landlord who would never fix anything until my Uncle Don would suddenly appear and just like that we would be warm again and the mice would be gone.

I remember one time, this time of year actually, that’s probably why it popped into my mind. It was snowing just a few days before Christmas. Mom and I were feeling low. We didn’t have any presents and we didn’t have any food and we were flip flopping back and forth between grief and rage about that. All directed at each other. We had been fighting all morning and the snow just kept coming and coming. neither of us cared because we had nowhere to go anyway. Our car was already buried under a foot of snow and there seemed to be no end in sight. We would eventually have gone out and brushed the snow off with our arms and took a broom handle to the top. But the sidewalk would have stayed impassable for the whole winter. I don’t think we even owned a shovel.

That’s where Hero Uncle-Dad Donnie comes into the picture. Mom and I pushed the curtain aside to find him digging us out. I hardly knew this man, and yet he loved me enough to show up in a snow storm and make sure that my mom and I could get out safely if we needed to. He would never come in to say hi or look for acknowledgment. Most of the time, he would sneak off without us even knowing he had come, but when we stumbled on his small acts of kindness, we always knew it was from him. There was no one else as generous and thoughtful.

Even though I didn’t have the same anxiety around him that I had for the rest of my dad’s side, I still was a little shy around him. I would mumble a thank you if we found ourselves face to face and try to take in as much of him as I could without looking directly at his face. He is a bald man with honey colored skin. Other than those two features, I look exactly like him.

I went home for my 26th birthday, and was able to spend some time with Uncle Don and Aunt Luann at their restaurant “Don and Lu’s.”

Uncle Don was perceptive enough to understand what I needed without me ever having to ask. He would remind me every time I saw him no matter the setting or the circumstances. “Your dad loved you so much. He loved your mama too. That was his only crime. Loving too much. He was a good man who just happened to be in love with two different women.” I couldn’t agree completely with that sentiment. Loving wasn’t the only bad thing my father ever did, but I still loved to hear him say it. I only ever heard terrible things about my father and hearing good things, especially from such a good man, really made me feel hope that my father was a good man even in part. Maybe there was more to my father and to me than I knew. Once Uncle Don planted and watered that seed in my heart, he would always leave me with this. “Your Uncle Donnie is always here for you. And your mom. You hear me?” Then he would lift my chin so that I had to make eye contact. Looking into his eyes would always make a whole lump of tears form in my throat and I would just nod while he spoke the same words he said every time. “You guys were my brother’s responsibility, so now you’re mine. We’re family and no matter what, that doesn’t change.”

I never gave my Uncle Don any indication that I was hearing him or that this meant the world to me. In fact, I never said much beyond the mandatory polite phrases in response. So, I am writing this now to tell him and to tell the whole world. Thank you to my Uncle-Dad, Uncle Donnie, for showing me the kind of person that I wanted to be in the world and for still being an inspiration for me. I haven’t seen him now in almost a decade, but here he is meeting my oldest two children the last time I made it home. I am so glad that I have these pictures so that I can give my children a face to go with my stories. I want them to know that they come from more than trauma. They come from kind and good people who despite immense pain, continue to love and give generously.

I hope to see my Uncle Don and my Aunt Luann someday soon so that they can meet my youngest and we can update these photos. ❤ ❤ ❤

Candy Cane Vomit

C came over to my house after school. I was in the 10th grade and she was one year ahead of me. She was my only friend now. Strange that she would walk willingly back into my life after everyone else walked out. Any other year, I would be in the locker room right now tucking in my jersey and lacing up my basketball sneakers, but not this year. Not after that night. I lost everything that night, even basketball.

Everyone was coming out to the game tonight for the “6th man” where the crowd dresses in the team colors and gets extra loud and involved in cheering on the team. C and I were already decked out in our tight vintage orange and black Phys. ed. tee shirts and hip hugger jeans. We applied some shimmer to our eyes and took out our Sharpies. We each had a giant Orange Posterboard laid out in front of us and we wrote something like Go Gators! on one side and Brian W Riz-ocks! on the other side. Brian W riz-ocked because he had promised to bring us a bottle of vodka and escort us personally to the game. He was older, cooler and also…he was part of that other night. I know now that he was a player and even a curator of the violence I experienced that night, but at the time I felt like I owed him something. He had escorted me to that party. I was supposed to end up in his arms that night but that is not what happened. I could not believe that he had apparently forgiven me enough to invite me, again after all that, to hang out. I had no interest in this boy personally, but I saw him as an olive branch from teenage society. If he could give me a second chance, ,maybe everyone else could too?

…not the most important thing about this photo…but yes that is Vin Diesel on my wall…and if you could see the poster beside that one, it would be Ja Rule! Lol This is me at about 15/16 years old.

“Girls! Welcome! Come on in.” Brian opened the door to his mother’s van and C climbed into the back while I took the front seat beside him. “I have been working on this for weeks. I have something really special for you girls. Here.” He handed me the bottle first. “Taste it.” I had been drinking alcohol for some time by this age, but I had never drank liquor straight out of the bottle. Like most of my rural peers, I was mostly drinking cheap awful beer that I pretended to love and jungle juice supplied in excess to all girls at every party.

I tipped the full bottle back just a little. Brian was saying something but I couldn’t hear him. My eyes squeezed shut and my mouth was on fire. It tasted like peppermint. He informed us that he bought the bottle weeks ago and saved it just for tonight. He had even gone through the trouble to soak a couple of candy canes in the bottle to give us a festive surprise.

C was laughing at me. “Come on. Let me try it!”

I passed her the bottle grateful for a minute to let my stomach adjust to this heat before pouring more alcohol down my throat. I could feel the boy watching me as he drove. I looked out the window watching the lights flicker past. My cheeks were red and I was embarrassed. I knew he was thinking about that night. We had never talked about it.

C passed the bottle back up to me. We were all pretty quiet even though we had been rowdy back at my house. C and I had bought a couple of orange candy referee whistles to blow at the game whenever we wanted to cheer our team on. Plus, I had already digested the notion that it was my job to be sexy at all times and that drawing attention to my mouth with a candy sucker was an easy way to grab that attention from boys. For now, in that van, I kept it quiet in my hand. I did not want to make this boy think about my mouth like that. I did not want him to think about anything that would make him think about that other night.

“You aren’t drinking it! Don’t you like it? I made it just for you. Come on, isn’t it delicious?”

“uhm…um…yeah. no. thank you! This is so sweet that you made this for us!” I gushed and turned to C for encouragement. “Right, C? Isn’t this so good?” I wasn’t doing a good job of being appreciative. Especially since this boy was being kind to me after everything I did. I remembered my place. I shifted my weight just a little toward him. Just enough for him to notice. I took a deep breath and put the bottle to my lips. I tipped it back and this time I took a big swig of it. “Yummm! MMMM Oh my god, Brian. This is Sooooo good.” I was lying but boys don’t care if you are lying as long as you say the right words.

He grinned at me. I could feel my body melting from the heat of the sugary minty alcohol and the last thing I remember of the entire evening is this moment with the Christmas lights flooding the van and Brian saying, “Have you ever drank liquor before? No? Well, don’t worry if you don’t feel anything right away. Just keep drinking until you start to feel it.”

I know what happened after that. I know most of the details of that night, which is lucky actually. It is worse to not know. Everyone made sure that I knew every moment of the rest of that night for all of the remaining years of high school. They loved how fucked up I was. The kids at school. The ones destined for college, and marriage and security. They loved that I was so ruined. We pulled up to the high school just in time for the Varsity Boys Game. The gym was packed to capacity. Thank God my mom wasn’t there. She went to every game back when I was on the team, but now she spent her Friday nights at the Church boxing up her old medicine bottles to send to Missionaries in some other poor place. She would carefully tear off all of the medicine labels so that no one would know they were AIDS medicine bottles. Too risky to just smudge them out with a marker. She would sit in our living room for hours with a kitchen knife, scratching away at the dangerous labels. Then she would throw away all of the evidence and carry her prayers down the street to the church.

That is where she was when the police called her. But I am getting ahead of myself. At first, C and I were the center of attention. It was a roaring crowd, but we were the loudest. Maybe I would have been able to maintain my jovial spirit and avoid my unraveling if the crowd had stayed with me. But this crowd hated me. It did not take much for them to remember that I was vile and I was to be eradicated. I was apparently walking down the bleachers maybe headed to the bathroom to pee out some of the vodka, when my ex-best friend came up behind me and pushed me down onto the court. I landed hard on my face right in front of the cheerleading squad. “SLUT!” She said loud enough for everyone in the now dead silent gym to hear. She was trying to save herself from the shame of being my friend. She needed to publicly disown me. The gym was quiet now as everyone watched to see if I would peel my body off the floor. I laid there with the eyes of my whole community on me. No one stepped forward to check on me. The players were frozen in their spots on the court and a few of the boys started to laugh. Apparently this is the point in the night where C and Brian realized I was way more intoxicated than them and that I was going to bring us all down. So they left. By the time I brought my body up to my feet I was raging. I hated all of these kids. I hated them for hating me. I hated them for hurting me so badly and then blaming me for it. I hated them for being normal kids whose parents weren’t dying of AIDS.

Brian was wrong. He had been lying too. Liquor does not immediately hit you as you drink it. If you aren’t careful, you might drink too much and not realized it until it finds its way into your bloodstream. My blood was mostly just alcohol at this point. I stood up and directed my hate at the closest targets, the Varsity Cheerleading squad. I don’t know how they reacted. I don’t remember and their reactions didn’t make it into the many re-tellings of that night that I heard about. All I know is that I started spitting on them and then… I vomited all over myself.

I was escorted off of the gym floor by a teacher while the crowd erupted in laughter and taunts. By the time the police came I was barely able to sit up by myself. I laid there sprawled on the steps leading to the boys locker room. So fitting. I could not get the taste of candy cane flavored vomit out of my mouth and I was still spitting and spitting. I was told that I kept spitting on the police. So much spitting. I have never once since that night spit on anyone on purpose. I guess that night it was my only weapon.

By the time my mom made it from the church to the high school, I was out of police custody and being strapped onto a stretcher. This is where suddenly my memories come back. The last thing I remembered from that night was the Christmas lights, but the first thing I remember when I started coming back to life was the sirens. Sirens had always been so terrifying and triggering for me. Now they were blaring in my head and I could see the paramedics, this time here for me instead of my mom. How was I the one on the hospital bed and my mom was sitting right there?

I awoke also to my own voice. I was sobbing and screaming. “Nobody loves me! Nobody loves me! Nobody loves me!” over and over and over again while my poor mama watched in horror. The paramedics rubbed my back and told me, “your mom loves you. She’s right here. Do you see her?” but I was devastated. My mom did not know anything of the horrors that had been happening to me lately. she did not know about boys in tents or girls who abandoned. She thought this was my second time drinking alcohol. I had already been found out for my first time drinking when the Rite Aid photo lab reported inappropriate pictures that my friends and I took while playing strip poker and drinking her mother’s Drambuie. But my mom was insanely naive and really truly thought that I had only drank the two times that I had been caught drinking. I hated lying to my mom but she could not know this. I was her angel. She could not know how far I had fallen. It would destroy her.

I was 14 when I started drinking alcohol. Here I am that first time where my friend and I decided to invite a boy over and play strip poker. My oldest daughter is almost this age now, so when I look back at this picture, I see a child here and its hard to believe how grown up I thought I was. or that this is what I thought grown up meant.

Mom did not punish me. She wanted to and she even tried on some vague level to say “your grounded,” but there was no heart behind it. I think I broke her. She looked scared more than angry in that conversation back at home after the hospital had pumped my stomach, filled it with charcoal and tested my blood for drugs. The school punished me. The law punished me. My peers punished me the most. but my mom was too scared and too exhausted to punish me. We never talked about how I told the paramedics that nobody loved me but I know that she was deeply affected by it. I knew my mom loved me, but at that moment in life I did not think I deserved love. I did not feel love from any source outside of my mom to affirm that I deserved it.

An afterthought: I wrote a whole blog post one time about white privilege and still there were people who could not understand what I meant. This moment where I am drunk in public acting up and SPITTING ON POLICE and they take care of me and safely get me to medical attention is a moment that is clear to me that I experienced white privilege. I think of all of the young black kids who were acting out or even not acting out but just being typical teenagers and the police used that as justification to take their lives. I deserved to be handled with care in this moment and so does every child that is hurting and messes up. Black Lives Matter.

Anxiety in the Mundane Moments

Sitting in the hard metal chair, I heard my stomach rumble. I put my hands over my belly to muffle the sound. Lunch was still an hour away and I never ate breakfast at home. There wasn’t anything to eat and I was always running late anyway. Back in Elementary, the bus would drop me off early enough to take advantage of the Free Breakfast Program, but I guess they didn’t have enough mini cereal boxes or styrofoam bowls for the Junior High kids.

It was hard to focus on the algebra problems in front of me even when I wasn’t hungry. Numbers were never my strength. I forced myself to focus on the page and get it over with. I didn’t want this assignment to turn into homework because then I’d never do it. I was a smart kid and Aced pretty much anything that I attempted, but I never did homework. If it couldn’t be completed in study hall or homeroom, it was going to be turned in incomplete. It wasn’t a political statement about only working on the clock, it was just the way it was.

I had separated my life into two separate worlds. Home and school could not comfortably overlap. If my mom sat in the bleachers during my basketball game, I was grateful she was there but also distracted. If people saw my mom or talked to her, I thought they might see our secret written on her face. Could you see AIDS when you looked at her? I thought I could. She looked too old for 30. Her teeth had already fallen out, her hair thinned and greasy and she was too skinny. Better to keep my mom hidden away at home.

There was a whistle in my hometown that would blow at noon every day and then again anytime that there was a local emergency. If the firetrucks, ambulance, or police needed to be dispatched, the whistle would sound. Adults took note of it. In a town of fewer than 2000 people, a person was likely to know whoever that alarm was sounding for. Kids mostly ignored it, consumed in play or learning. I was never really much of a kid.

When that alarm blared, my heart picked up speed and my head screamed a million anxieties to me. Is my mom okay? What if that is about her? If she died, would someone come to tell me right here at school? Did we say I love you this morning? Yes. Definitely. We always said I love you because we knew that we would not have the privilege of saying that forever. If the phone in my classroom rang, I had the same reflexive body responses and racing thoughts.

That is what happened that day that I was solving for x while counting the seconds until cafeteria pizza. Brrrring! Brrrrring! Brrrrring! Mr. Andrews looks up annoyed. He was buried in a stack of tests from the first period and I had been watching him mark all over them with his red pen. I hope he goes easier on us tomorrow when we have our test. Answer it! I was glued in my seat but I wanted to race and answer the phone myself. Please! The lump in my throat was barely letting air through and I knew that I was white as a ghost.

I searched Mr. A’s face for any kind of clue as to what was being said on the other end of that phone call. “Mmmhmmm. Mmmhmmm. Ok. I will do that.” Do that?! Maybe they are telling him to send me to the principal’s office or the nurse so that they can tell me what is wrong?!

Mr. A dropped the receiver on the hook and sighed. I had not done a single problem in that entire time. I was still too terrified to drop my gaze. He stretched and walked back to his desk without addressing any of us in the class. Phew. I guess this wasn’t about me. We were still safe.

My shoulders were tense as I now scanned the room to see if anyone had noticed my bizarre behavior. I should not have been so obviously stressed out. People might figure out our secret if they saw me act so strangely. I needed to try harder next time to hide my fear. I wiped my sweaty hands on my jeans before picking my pencil back up.

The bell rang announcing that class was over and we were that much closer to lunch. I would have to finish this assignment in study hall.

Can you imagine how many times this scene played out in all of my years of schooling? When I heard the whistle in Kindergarten, I would sometimes pee my pants. I would sit there in terror waiting for my world to collapse while also hoping that the wetness squishing under my butt would evaporate or at the least, not be too obvious when I stood up. Later, when I realized peeing was not helping me conceal my secret, I would chew on my hair. Thick chunks of it sucked into my mouth until I had a mass of wetness fringing my face. These would all have been “tells” alerting my peers that I was a freak and my teachers that I needed help if anyone had been paying attention to me. But I had learned to make myself invisible long ago. Being invisible is the easiest way to keep a secret. If I never spoke up in class, I wouldn’t accidentally say the wrong thing.

My report card from 6th grade says, “Crystal is a pleasure to have in class. She is always quiet and polite. She does her school work and does not not involve herself when classmates are disruptive. She is a good student.”

My mom saved every one of these report cards. I have them now too. The little A’s and S’s proved that I was going to make it. I was going to survive this and become something better than this life we were trapped in. We both knew that she wouldn’t make it. But knowing that I would, was all that my mom cared about.

Our secret being revealed would mean that all of those hopes would be lost. If people knew the truth, we would be shipped off to live in quarantine on a deserted island. That’s what some people said should happen to individuals living with AIDS. Maybe our neighbors would show up at our house with pitchforks and chase us out of town. There was no way of knowing exactly what would happen if people knew the truth, but mama and I were committed to never finding out. I locked that secret deep in my stomach and kept it there.

I never once brought it out to examine it, even when it was safe. Mom and I didn’t discuss it when we filled her med box. She just sat there handing me bottles and watching me read the labels that were beyond her reading level. I would carefully pour the little pills of every color into my hands and count off however many needed to go into each little box. We could have unclenched our teeth and let the secret slip out in these moments. Let it stretch out and relieve us of its weight for a second, but we never did. That is how we kept it locked up for so long. I had built a fortress to protect our secret until one day when I looked at my mom and saw that she was dying. Saw that we were at the end, and took down every brick and fence myself. I told my friends from school, I told our neighbors, I told the people in the grocery store, I scheduled an appointment with the important men from the Rotary Club, and I told them.

17 years, I kept that secret, until my mom was on her death bed and we were facing our greatest fear. It has now been 17 years of living with that secret outside of my body. Sometimes it tries to creep back in, but just the feel of it scratching at my insides, sends me to the computer, or to the phone or to a friend. I need to let it out anytime I notice that I am hiding again.

I don’t have a lot of use for secrets in my life now. I am happy to protect someone else’s but these days, I feel safest when I am living fully in my truth.

Walter LeRoy Hyde- Uprooting Shame from my Family History Part 1

Sundays meant church growing up. After services, the congregation would pour out of the chapel but no one would go home. We would run to our cars or reach in our bags and pull out casseroles or cookies to share with each other. Mama and I lived in an apartment only a block from my grandma’s church. We ran home to find a dish to share one Sunday, my mama with her long legs way out ahead of us, and Grandma and I straggling along behind deep in debate. I don’t remember the sermon that Sunday or what exactly got us going, but I know that this particular conversation never left me. I could feel the charge from both of us. We needed the other to understand. Grandma was known to back hand a kid across the mouth for any kind of backtalk or swearing. I felt the hot sting of her fingers on my mouth enough times that I only dared to disagree with her when it was critical.

The sun was hot. It was the summer before I went into Sixth grade. We were barely controlling our tone but managed to keep the conversation hushed until we made it the porch. I imagine that we meant to go inside to finish the conversation, but we were getting so frustrated with each other we were just locked in place. Grandma was probably double my size still but we were braced for battle, eyes locked on each other and shoulders squared up.

“I KNOW that God made all of us! And God doesn’t mess up! He made all of us and he loves all of us NO MATTER WHAT!” OMG, yes, you should know that I was quite a little child preacher and had the influence of the Pentecostals to give me some FIRE in my sermons.

“You don’t know ‘nothin! You are a know-it-all child who don’t-know-nothin!”

“UUUNNNGGGGHHH!!!!” I stomped my foot down and shook the whole porch. I don’t know how this didn’t earn me a smack in the mouth. Maybe Grandma was distracted with what she wasn’t saying out loud. What she was deciding to finally tell me.

“Yes, God made all of us and he loves all of us, but it’s not like that. You just don’t understand. You don’t know anything about all of this.”

“Jesus loves the little children! ALL the Children of the world…RED OR YELLOW, BLACK OR WHITE, we are precious in his sight cuz Jesus loves the little children of the world! Why would God make us all so different if only some of us were going to go to Heaven? Do you think he made some people the wrong way?!”

We had this conversation before, but this time my grandma seemed out of control of herself. She grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled my face right up close to hers. “Crystal, you don’t understand what it’s like to be Black! You don’t understand what it’s like to be the only Black person in town. I have to tell you something.”

I looked at her suddenly differently. I could tell we were not debating issues of justice, but getting personal.

“Crystal. My father was Black.”

She was still talking. Saying that it is so hard “for the children when they have a white parent and a Black parent” saying things like, “That is why you should never BE with a Black man…” saying, “Do you understand?”

I couldn’t make sense of this revelation. I looked at my grandma. She was white. All my aunts and uncles were white. All of my cousins were white. We were white trash. Everyone called us that. What the hell was she saying that her dad was Black? I had no examples of light-skinned Black people in my mind to pull from. I did not have a lot of access to television up to that point (and mixed people were not depicted on television a lot even if I had) and my mostly white town didn’t offer up any examples either.

Maybe if she had not said that next part about me being with a Black man someday, I would have been able to focus on her Big Reveal, but I had heard those violent words before out of the mouth of my step-dad and they made me see red. I just started ranting at her about how closed-minded she was being and she left me there on the porch. The trance was broken and the conversation was over.

All of these years, I have seen myself as somewhat of the hero of this story. My grandma of course the obvious old white racist villain. I knew this story mattered to me and to my life, but I thought it mattered as part of my origin story as a person who is always striving to be anti-racist. I did not ever once think about the fact that it was an even deeper part of my origin story. My grandma was offering me a truth that she never again tried to share.

Thankfully, the Universe decided to bring this back to my attention this year. On New Year’s Eve, I got a letter in the mail concerning some relative of my Grandpa. I don’t really remember any of my Grandpa’s relatives, so I reached out to an aunt on Facebook to get more info. She didn’t have a lot to share either as she didn’t know them well, but she said that she did have a little more information about Grandma’s side. She sent me a link and I skimmed it while making homemade waffles for my 3 kids. Most of the names were unfamiliar to me until I came to Cora, my great-grandmother.

She was someone that I loved a lot. My mom and I would go to visit her in the nursing home every single week when I was little, even though we didn’t have a car. Grandma would drive us or we would get a ride from someone else. Cora had helped to raise my mom and her siblings when grandma was in a psych hospital so she was an important figure to my mom. Cora’s nurses came to expect my visits, and they would give me cookies and balloons. I remember them and those visits vividly. When Cora died, I didn’t really understand what happened, but I remember lying beside my mom in bed while she cried and cried. I didn’t understand what death was yet, but I understood grief. This was the early years of my mom’s diagnosis, and she was sure she would not live much longer. She used Cora’s passing as a teachable moment. I don’t remember her words, but I remember the lesson. Death would come and come for us and it was scary and really really sad. I named my first child, Corah in her honor.

Cora stood alone in my mind because her husband was not alive when I was born. No one ever spoke of him. I didn’t even know what his name was and I had never seen a picture. But there he was on my broken i-phone screen beside Cora’s name. Walter Leroy Hyde. My great-grandpa! He was a beautiful child. Light brown skin, dark brown eyes and short curly black hair. He took my breath away. My mom’s side is all fair hair and eyes and even though I spent so much time with my mess of aunts, uncles, and cousins growing up, I just didn’t see myself in them. I didn’t look like anyone on that side at all. But looking into Walter’s face, I saw myself. I saw my dark eyes and curly hair. Not as curly as his, but my first thought was, “That’s where my curls come from!”

Suddenly, my conversation with my grandma 2 decades ago, filled my head. Oh my God. My Grandma’s dad was Black. She was right. Of course, she was right. I had done what everyone did to women in my family and just wrote her off as an old crazy rambling woman, but she was telling me something. Something really big. Something she never tried to tell me again and now that I desperately want to hear these secrets, there is no one left to finally listen to. Maybe because this bit of information came to me like a gift on New Year’s Eve, or maybe I was just ready for it, but I feel committed to finding the truth in this story. I want to know who Walter was. What happened to his parents? Was he “passing” at some point in his adult life? Was my grandmother considered “passing?” Did my mom know? She must have. I called her twin and we had a conversation about it. I got a little more info from that conversation and from a sweet internet friend who helped me do a little research. (Thank you Amy!)

Before moving back to the region in PA where my people are from, My great-great-grandparents moved to Virginia and bought a 600-acre farm. I thought I came from deep multigenerational poverty, and I do, but apparently, somewhere back there, someone had money. Great-Grandpa Walter was born in 1892 on that plantation in Virginia. Slavery was abolished 27 years before he was born but there were slave cabins on the property and I found accounts saying that Black people were “working the fields where they grew watermelons, corn, peppers, and beans.” There was a canning factory on the property and my great-grandfather’s siblings worked alongside the “colored help” processing the harvest. My great-great-grandfather , Edson (raised Walter but wasn’t his biological father) also owned and ran an oyster farm in Maryland. He would leave to go work there for long periods of time. The story goes that while he was away, Addie, my great-great- grandmother was having an affair with one of the Black people working in the fields. When I was told the story, I was told that she “fell in love with the gardener.”

My gut was full of fear because in the late 1800’s a Black man could be lynched for even looking at a White woman, let alone having an affair with one. Lynchings were happening all the time in Virginia the year that Walter was born. I was surprised at first that the Black ancestor was a man because I also feared that the legacy of white men raping Black women and especially the women who they enslaved would be a part of this story. I mean I can’t write that off here. Women can rape men and of course even though slavery ended officially, Addie held a lot of power in that situation. I will continue to dig into this because the truth is so important and because I want to know.

I think about Addie’s pregnancy with my great-grandpa, Walter. Did she wonder if the baby would be born brown? Did she know it was the unnamed man who was the biological father or did she not know which man was going to be the father? Addie’s husband, the White man who is on Walter’s birth certificate, was getting older. He was 57 years old the year that Walter was born. Addie was only 37.

Addie had married Edson at 18. She did not come from the same money and privilege as Edson. She had dropped out of school in the sixth grade and began working in the small town hotel soon after. She met Edson while working there. Was there love in that marriage? Did she marry him to escape? How did Edson react when their child was born and had brown skin and dark curly hair? Was Addie in love with this other man? And my biggest question of all…Who was the man that history erased from the story? Was he in love with Addie? What happened to him when their affair was discovered. Did he ever even see his son?

And Walter. I can only imagine what growing up was like for him. The family moved back to rural Pennsylvania “following some tragedies,” including the death of one of Walter’s siblings. Many of Walter’s siblings died. He was one of only three of their children to survive to adulthood. What was his childhood like being raised by this white family with who he was only biologically connected to the mother?

I can not imagine Walter’s reality, but I relate to some parts of it in big ways. I relate to living in secret and shame and fear. I relate to being raised (part-time for me and full time for Walter) in a family where I was the product of a parent stepping outside of their marriage. My father was married with 4 kids when he had his affair with my mom. Being in that house with his wife and their kids (who I love!) was not a comfortable feeling. I didn’t understand why completely, but I understood that at least in part, I was not a welcome addition. I was not a part of the family in the same way that they were and their mom was not My mom. Walter was raised full time like that in a family where he did not look like any of his siblings or his parents. He did not look like anyone in his whole town.

I am only at the beginning of searching for answers to my questions about my great-grandpa, Walter, but I atleast have a couple of stories now that I have gotten some of my aunts to open up a little bit. Their stories paint Walter as kind of larger than life man. Brilliant and brave. I wonder how no one ever told me any of these stories even though it is clear that he was loved and admired? The story goes that Walter and his older brother once built a little glider plane and they would climb the hills where I grew up and fly off the edge with their neighbor friend. One day the neighbor boy flew too close to a barn and clipped the wing off and that was the end of that. Another story is that Walter worked for the local electric company and he one time got shocked while up high working on a wire. The jolt sent him crashing to the ground, but he was so tough, he got right back up, climbed the pole, and went to work.

Part of me hopes that family will read this and have some more pieces of the story to share with me, but mostly I am sharing it because when I started digging the only official record is that Walter is white and that his father was white and the same man that fathered all of his siblings. The last generation that knows the truth is aging or already gone and the truth is disappearing along with it. I don’t know what happened between Addie and Walter’s Black father. I don’t know what happened to erase him from the story, but I can end the shame and stigma around talking about race in my family. I can speak the truth as I know it and learn from our history and our ancestors. I find it so interesting and bizarre that I have spent my whole life overcoming secrets and shame only to discover that that pain already took root in my family long before AIDS. I owe it to Walter and to myself to step out of shame and secrets and into the truth. I see this as part of my work as a white person committed and re-committing every day to eradicating white supremacy in me and in my society.

I am sorry that I did not listen to my grandmother that day. I wish that I sat in silence and let her tell me her experiences. I wish I could hug her and promise to carry the truth and speak it for her. I still know that my grandmothers stance on mixed race relationships is wrong but I am not so arrogant to think that I have any understanding of what her experience was or her fathers. I can not go back to that day or that moment, but I can move forward with intention and love and carry her in my heart as I search for the truth.

Remembering my great-grandpa Walter Leroy Hyde 1892-1963 and my grandmother Caroline Pearl Kellner 1936-2008

For Joy…and for Me

A few days ago, I saw a person die on the side of the road. I was driving my kids to the Skate Park and happened to be stopped at the longest red light of my life. First responders took turns giving chest compressions. First the woman. Then the man. They wore masks because of Coronavirus and I quickly realized that they were doing chest compressions ONLY with no mouth-to-mouth. This is all while I am still at the red light. I dont know how long I sat there. Was traffic just not moving? Was everyone glued to this horrific scene as I was. I realized I was not breathing. I feel trauma in my throat. It closes up until my chest aches with lack of air. When I was a child they diagnosed me with asthma for this exact reason and no one ever mentioned the words “trauma” or “anxiety.”

At some point I had to drive away. I had three children in the car. They were afraid too and they also wanted to keep going on to the skatepark. When I velcroed and snapped all of the pads and helmets into place, I realized I was still not breathing well. I was still trapped in the scene I just saw with an overlay of the scenes I saw in my childhood.

My mom attempted suicide more than once, but I have one time scarred into my mind. We are living in public housing. I am upstairs at the neighbor’s house. Another child is with me. We are 4, maybe 5 years old. We are supposed to be playing in his room but we are watching with our faces smooshed between the bars on the stair banister. My knuckles are white, clenching like my teeth. Maybe this is the beginning of my throat closing and holding my breath in fear? I am silent, but I want to scream and run to my mom. I can barely see her between the paramedics. They are surrounding her, but they are not touching her. They are in a circle and none of them know what to do and none of them want to be the one to touch her. There are three of them. My neighbor is the one who is holding my mom’s limp body upright in her kitchen chair. She is saying words I don’t understand. It is so loud. Every once in a while one of their radio-phones makes that cracklings sound and a loud beep. Then they push the little button and shout into it. I can hear noises coming out of it too but they are too mixed with the crackles to sound like words.

At this age, I dont know exactly what is happening. I only know that my mom was right when she told me that people will be afraid to touch her. That she is dangerous. I touch her all of the time. I want to touch her now, but I am too afraid.

As a grown-up I learned that my step-mother had the same thing happen when she collapsed and the paramedics refused to care for her because of her HIV diagnosis. Probably anyone who was living with HIV in the 80’s and 90’s has similiar stories. We weren’t just fighting for survival. We were fighting stigma and people’s fear.

This is what I am trying to grapple with at the skate park. “Mama, watch this!” I smile and say, “Wow! That is amazing. You have worked so hard at that.” But as soon as I watch the trick, I am glued back to the sliver of sidewalk winding past the field where I know the person is dying. I can still see the police from here. The paramedics are here too now and the fire department. There are a lot of trucks. No one is doing chest compressions anymore. My mind is racing. Would this person still be alive if they had done traditional CPR with mouth-to-mouth? Did they not do that because of Corona Virus or is that outdated? I have taken CPR courses many times but it has been years since I re-certified. Maybe some protocol has changed? Or maybe I am witnessing another horrific reality of this pandemic.

We do not stay at the Skate Park for long because every inch of pavement is occupied with man-bro’s. These grown men are apparently oblivious to my masked children who are clearly trying to respect social distancing. Aside from my children, there is not a mask in sight. I want to scream and cry and yell at these men that someone is dying just a stones throw from the park and do they not care about anyone else? But I know that would do nothing. So we leave. And my throat remains clenched.

I talk to my kids on the way home about the complexity of policing in America. They know about Black Lives Matter. They know that policing is rooted in institutionalized racism and directly linked to this country’s history of slavery. But in this moment, I talk to them about how policing as an institution and police as individual people are two different things entirely. While the institution is inherently racist, some of the people in the occupation are likely people who want to be helpers. People who get into it to save lives. Some of the people are the ones giving chest compressions to dying people in the park during a pandemic. I am overwhelmed with grief and gratitude but I am also a mother so I keep my cool to the best of my ability. I drive us home, get the toddler down for a nap and start making dinner.

Over the past few days, a woman’s picture has been circulating on Facebook. Her name is Joy. She is beautiful. I don’t recognize her even though we live in a small city. Still, her face is familiar and warm. The Facebook posts say she froze to death a few days ago in my city. My city, although “progressive” has abandoned the most vulnerable among us. We have left an older woman to die in the cold rather than provide safe housing and compassionate care for her alcoholism. I do not know if this is the same person that I saw die the other day in the park. Are people dying outside every day in my city? But even if this is not the same person, I feel connected to her. I feel accountable to her. I feel like I have to finally scream, and cry and add my anger and grief over her death and the deaths of so many to the community call to action.

I read all of the comments on the Facebook posts about Joy’s death. I am searching for clues as to who this woman was. I am searching for a way to quiet this shaking inside me. I still feel the tightness in my throat. I read a lot of comments online from people who have said things like, “Why didn’t she stay with a friend?” “Why didn’t someone take her in for the night?” and I am thinking back to my own experience of being homeless. And a Woman.

There was a period of time after I dropped out of college where I had no money and no place to stay. As an orphan and a 19 year old, I was completely on my own financially. A human angel and student at the college I just left, let me store my belongings in the apartment that she was renting with two other girls. We had all just finished our freshman year and their parents were paying for them to live off campus for the summer. Everything I owned in the world was shoved into a few plastic totes and some bags and pushed into an unsightly heap in their living room. These roommates of the angel friend tolerated it to my face, but I could feel their contempt. Some nights, I would sleep on their couch, but the guilt of taking up even more space in their apartment would often win out and I would search for other housing options. The nights I stayed there, I would sit outside on the sidewalk of their downtown apartment and chain smoke rather than be an eyesore upstairs.

I wasn’t old enough to go to the bar and the only other place that stayed open until 2 am was a coffeeshop called the Beehive. I would buy one cup of coffee for like $.95 and sip that for hours while smiling at people at other tables and scanning the room for a kind face. Usually by closing time I would have found someone who felt safe enough and nice enough to ask if I could stay at their house that night. I tried not to ask the same people too many times because I didn’t want to impose on anyone.

Some nights, the barista would start stacking chairs and I would not have found a safe person to go home with. On those nights, I would grab a chair and turn it upside down and put it on top of the table. They knew that I was helping because I didn’t want to leave because I had nowhere to go. If I was lucky, the person working that shift would be the sweet blond boy from West Virginia who was happy to play his guitar for me and tell me stories of the hills. Stories that felt familiar to me. That boy never touched me. Even though I was sleeping on his couch. Even though he was doing me a favor.

Other nights, the worst nights, I would go home with the red haired barista. He was not safe, but I knew what to expect from him. He wouldn’t kill me and leave me in a dumpster. I would be expected to kiss him and let him grope me all night. I knew that if I stayed smart and alert I could avoid anything further because his sister lived there and I would just scream for her if I had to. He tasted like cigarettes and not in the good way that I actually liked back then. He tasted like old man cigarettes and alcohol and rape. He was in his 30’s. I was 19.

I was mostly right about being able to stay relatively safe in his house accept for one night where he was particularly drunk and he was getting angier and angrier that I wouldnt have sex with him. When he got up to pee, I grabbed my cell phone and ran out the door. I spent the entire night walking around Pittsburgh talking on the phone with an ex-boyfriend who was in another state. I was terrified of being on the street, but it seemed like I used up my luck at that baristas house. It was time to pay up so I got out and never went back.

Another night, I was wandering the streets, looking for a new late night hangout when I noticed a truck driving very slowly behind me. It was the middle of the night and there were not many people around even though this was downtown Pittsburgh. The driver was emboldened by my glances back. “Hey, sexy! Come on, hop up in my truck and I’ll take you for a ride!” Every cell in my body was screaming at me. This was my worst nightmare. Rape was just a reality for a girl like me, but something about a stranger dragging me away into his truck to rape me felt worse than just the boys I grew up with.

I took off as fast as I could down an alley. I saw him turn his truck around and follow me. I cut across a lawn and dove into some bushes in front of a business that was closed for the night. I was curled in a ball praying that he couldn’t see me in there and also dialing the phone number of a friend I had met at the coffee shop. “Please, come get me!” The coffee shop friend was a boy just a year older than me that I felt safe with. I hadn’t ever been to his apartment but I was desperate. I hoped the man from the truck couldn’t hear me whispering the address to my friend as he drove by with his window down and his neck craned out the window looking for me. That night I got into a big fight with the safe boy because he couldn’t understand why I was so scared. “I’ve been beat up lots of times and mugged too, it’s not a big deal.” safe boy said to me.

“I’m not scared to be beat up or mugged. I have been beat up and mugged. I have been shot at and had knives held to my body. I am scared to be RAPED!”

No matter that I was trembling all over, this boy felt like he needed to mansplain to me that rape was no worse than being beat up. He insisted that he was just as at risk on the street as me. I thanked him for taking me in for the night and went to sleep wondering where I would sleep tomorrow and how could he not understand that rape is more than just an assault on a body. It is an assault on your whole soul. It is an assault on your humanity. It is just….For me, the one thing I still have a hard time talking about. I can talk about child abuse, AIDS, death, oppression, stigma, anything, but everytime I write a story about rape, it remains in my google docs and not in my blog.

I continued like this for a couple of months before I landed a position with Americorps working at a Women’s Shelter with mothers who were struggling with addiction. This job got me off the street and into a room with some kind adults who were all in their 30’s. My Americorps stipend covered rent but there was barely any money left for food. I was a lot safer than when I was on the street at night but I continued to find myself in the position where I depended on men for my survival.

I know that I am privileged to be writing this blog now from a different position than I was in back then. I partnered with a man outside of my class and saw myself lifted out of poverty. But I also know that if I had not met this particular man at this particular time in my life, I would likely have continued to find myself to some degree housing insecure and food insecure. I may have grown up to be a woman like Joy.

We live in a country with enough empty homes to house every homeless person. Yet, we refuse. We leave human beings outside to face all of the risks of being in that vulnerable position and sometimes those human beings die out there. We need to expect more from the society we live in. We can live in a world where every human being has access to housing, food, healthcare and dignity but we must demand it. I felt compelled to share my story today even though it feels a little vulnerable.

To Joy, I am so sorry. I saw you. I’m so sorry it was too late. I’m so sorry we will never get to hear your stories. I will remember.

There are no pictures of me during the times I wrote about because I had a flip phone and no camera but these two photos were taken when I finally got into a room in an apartment. Here I am Wearing my “professional clothes” that I bought at Goodwill for my Americorps job.

I know… “how were you smoking and drinking when you didn’t have any food?” You might not get it, but at this point in my life, cigarettes made me feel safer. They made me feel less shaky and they helped my throat and chest relax when I got that tightness from anxiety. Plus, my mom was a smoker so it always made me feel closer to her.

A very special interview for World AIDS Day 2020!

Thank you to Corah, Burton, Aida and Jamie for helping me with this blog post.

An honest peak into my life. Messy house in the background and toddler chaos. ❤ I’m the luckiest mama in the world to have these sweethearts.

What you might not know that even I can only imagine.

My mom was 22 years old when she was diagnosed HIV+. I was there, but I was only 3 months old, so please forgive me if I get some details wrong. I am doing my best. I have only the pieces whispered to me from relatives and the memories of the stories my mom shared with me when she was alive. These things were never said in full voice and never ever in mixed company.

I want to imagine what this time period was like for my mom because I never had the privilege of knowing her as an adult. Almost..I was 17 when she died. But as I mother my own children, I am reminded that children are incapable of understanding their parents as full people. And that is ok and good unless you never get the chance to grow up.

I imagine my mama cradling me in her arms. Bottle pressed to my lips. She is numb. She is in shock. She is begging God to save her. To save us. She has been living with my father and his 4 children for the past year, playing step-mom to my half siblings and homewrecker at the same time. Most of that year, she is watching her own belly grow with her miracle baby that doctors told her she would never have. But now everything is crashing down around her. Of course it is. You don’t interject yourself into the middle of a marriage and not have some fall-out.

But she did not expect this. No one did. Who would have expected in 1986 for a heterosexual woman in rural America to be diagnosed HIV+. and yet, just the day before, my fathers ex wife had shown up sobbing at the door. Her message was unbelievable and yet it was true. She had been diagnosed HIV+. 6 months to live. Maybe more maybe less, but there was no cure. There was not even a decent treatment. She would suffer and she would die and she would leave behind 4 children ages 6-12. But what about my father? What about my mother? What about all of us kids? We all needed to go get tested. How long was the waiting period in 1986 to get results for an HIV test in a town of less than 2000 people? How long did these mothers, and fathers need to hold their babies wondering if they would at best be orphans and at worst be lost to the epidemic as well? No one knew much about HIV yet, let alone a poor illiterate woman. There was more misinformation and stigma than scientific facts.

My mom must have felt cursed. She had grown up in an evangelical church and knew the lesson well. If you disobey God, he will strike you down! Her dream of becoming a mother was now being held over the fire.

My brave mom who was 22 years old, facing each day with an HIV diagnosis and a new baby.

There must have been waves of new things to fear and grieve. While she waited on her own diagnosis, my father gave her his decision. If he came back positive, he would leave us and go back with his wife. He had hurt his real family enough. He would care for his wife and care for their children if she were to go before him. As it turned out, she was the only survivor from all of the diagnosis. I am so happy for her. Honestly. I wish my mom was here too, but I am glad that she made it.

You already know the rest. My father was positive. They had been living together out at his sisters trailer. He would move back into his ex-wife’s apartment and my mom would stay with her now ex boyfriends sister in a tight fitting trailer on the same land as her ex boyfriends mothers house. The grandmother of her new baby. Can you imagine all of the mixed feelings that all of these characters had for my mom who had swooped in and taken my father out of his marriage? Can you imagine how they felt about her after he finally went back to his wife? Can you imagine how they felt about me? I was allowed visitations with my fathers side until I was about 6 years old and even though I was so small, I can still remember, if only viscerally, which relatives loved me and which was saw me as the product of the homewrecker AIDS diagnosis fiasco.

My mom was eventually given an apartment in the housing projects for single mothers. She and I would live there alone for the next 6 years. I would visit my dad on the weekends.

If you have been following my stories, you know all of this. But here is what you might not know yet. My parents were forced to get their HIV tests at the local health clinic. The clinic was the best and only option for healthcare unless you had reliable transportation out of town and health insurance coverage to go somewhere else. The clinic was staffed by an ever changing physician from away and local nurses. In all of my pediatric years at that office, I never had the same doctor for more than 3 consecutive years.

They promised my parents confidentiality but what were the laws and protections in place in ‘86? They promised that the diagnosis would not leave the clinic, and maybe the physicians believed that. I mean, they were from away and maybe did not understand the ways that information is shared in small towns. The nurses knew the truth. They didn’t even hide their disgust and hate when my parents entered the room.

They put rubber gloves on immediately and glared at my mom on the plastic paper covered bed. She clutched me and fought to remain calm and dignified while they threw the thermometer into her lap and said, “take your temperature and then leave the thermometer on the paper to be disinfected.” They wouldn’t touch her. They wished she wasn’t in there at all. Maybe they were genuinely scared. Maybe they didn’t know the ways HIV is transmitted from one person to the next. Maybe they already hated her for being poor and trash and were used to throwing her away. Maybe this was just another round of their abuse.

My step mom was the first to receive her diagnosis and the first to face the violence of stigma. She was sitting in a booth in the diner in the middle of our small town. My siblings were fighting over plates of chicken tenders and ranch and one basket of fries. Money was tight and eating out was more about the experience of doing something out of the house than actually buying food to eat.

She thought she noticed a waitress staring at her. She thought she noticed the waitresses whispering to each other behind their hands. But was that even new? How much whispering had been going on about her over the past year as her husband moved in with another woman who was growing his baby? Her stomach was probably in knots but the doctor had told her to keep living. To go on as best as possible for the sake of the children. They would not have her for long and she should try to spend time with them.

“SHE HAS AIDS!!! I HEARD IT FROM A RELIABLE SOURCE!!” The diner staff had been escalating each other. Ew! She was sitting right at the table, eating off of the silverware and plates! They would have to throw everything in the trash. They were getting angrier and angrier. How dare she put them all at risk! Now they were out for blood. They were on the attack.

My step-mom quickly got up from the table. She tried to get out of there fast, but she hadn’t paid and she had 4 kids to corral.

“Do you deny it?!” They wouldn’t let her get away that easy!

She didn’t lie but she didn’t confess either. “Who told you that?!”

“The nurses from the clinic saw it on your chart! We all know the truth! You have AIDS and so does your cheating husband and his slut girlfriend too.”

Did my step-mom defend herself? Did my big brother who is a pain in the ass but also a fierce protector to this day, stand up and defend his mom? Did they all even know yet what was going on? Had their parents sat them down and explained that they had been diagnosed with a virus that had just finally been given a name and that society hated everyone who had the virus?

By some miracle, none of my siblings tested positive. Even I tested negative. Who knew that the evil corporate scheme to convince low income mothers to pay for formula instead of breastfeeding would actually save my life? I mean, I lucked out by being born negative in 86 to a positive mom. Now, babies have a good chance of being negative thanks to testing and really effective medicines, but in 1986 my chances of survival would have been near 0. Especially if you factor my class background in. Even if HIV+ babies were surviving in the early years, factor in malnutrition and trauma and I would not have had a chance.

My mom had always told me that no one knew she had HIV. or at least that almost no one knew. Wishful thinking I guess, but I believed her. We needed to believe that the people in our town did not know we had this vile mark upon us. We had seen the reactions even from those who loved us the most, and we knew that the reactions from strangers would be worse.

My mom with her parents. Their trailer was the most consistent place in all of my childhood. She never told me how they reacted to her diagnosis, but I know they loved her. My grandfather died just a few months after her and her mom died just a couple of years later. I miss them too.

Most of my mom’s family eventually came around. As the years passed and they became more convinced of the science that you can’t catch AIDS from sitting next to someone or even giving someone a hug. But in those first years after diagnosis, my mom and all of my parents faced the need to say goodbye to relatives who were terrified of them.

My mom was one of many. She didn’t talk much about this time period, but there was one story she was willing to share. One story that left a scar that she could still feel years later. She took me over to her sister’s house. Not her twin, but one of her sisters houses, it honestly doesn’t matter anymore which one. She was excited to bring me over to play with my cousins who were about the same age. We were all perfect little mischievous toddlers and she was desperate for a relaxing and nourishing afternoon of family and silliness.

Maybe my aunt didn’t have a phone to call ahead or maybe my mom was the one without a phone. This was in the time before cell phones so it wasn’t as expected to call ahead. Either way, when my aunt answered the door, it was clear that this visit was both unexpected and unwelcome. Still ,she wasn’t a total monster. She opened the door. She let us in. She even let my mom place me on the floor to steal the ball from my cousins or whatever other toddler thing I did with my time back then. But when my mom reached down to comfort my cousin when he started to cry…well that was when my aunt needed to say what needed to be said. “NO! Deb! NO! Please don’t touch my kids.” Did she look angry? Afraid? Embarrassed? Sad? Did she love my mom and feel bad saying these things?

My mom was obviously hurt. Did they fight? Or did they talk it out. I mean they must have to some extent because my mom did not pick me right up and walk out the door. Not yet at least. Maybe her loneliness and despair pushed her to work things out even though she was not the one in the wrong at all. “Why did you let us in if you don’t want us here?! So, I am allowed in but I am not allowed to touch my nephews is that it? Hunh?” My mom was a fiery woman but she was also deeply ashamed so I can not imagine if her words were loud or forced.

“No, Deb. That is not IT. You can come here. But you have to understand! These are my children. You can’t expect me to not protect them! You can sit on the couch but that is it. You need to sit on a towel and I will throw it away when you leave. You can not touch us or eat or drink anything. And you can not use the bathroom here.”

My mom was understanding now. Now she was pissed. And humiliated. I was oblivious still slobbering on the toy that I had swiped from my cousins fingers. She scooped me up and barrelled out the door. She turned back and made sure my aunt was looking before screaming, “I won’t be back, Don’t worry!” while rubbing her hands up- and down any surface she could reach. Honestly, she didn’t blame my aunt. I mean she was terrified of giving me HIV as well, but still, let my aunt sanitize her whole apartment. Let her tear the door off the hinges and burn it.

A note:

Every word of this story is the truth. Or as close to the truth as I can get. Not every word or thought, but the scenes and actions are all true. The story involving my step mom at the diner was only used because she had shared it herself in a local paper decades later when it was clear she was going to be a long term survivor and was living in a different community. Out of respect for her and my siblings, I would never have shared a part of our shared story involving them directly unless she herself had already shared it publicly. Just to be clear about this piece. I am sorry if I have not captured the scenes or emotions perfectly.

Seizures

Basketball Season was my favorite time of year. Still is. In fact, I am now the director of my neighborhood elementary school’s basketball league and I coach each of my kids’ teams. So, you can imagine my excitement about seventh grade basketball. Seventh grade was the first time that I got to play on a real team, a team that you had to try-out for! It was a big deal and I was thrilled when I made the team.

Maybe that is why my mom didn’t say anything about the $65 basketball sneakers that were a mandatory purchase as part of the team uniform. She quietly sold the VCR and the TV and scraped together enough cash to give me this luxury. The shoes were horribly ugly but they were my first pair of basketball sneakers and they were NIKES and they made me feel like a real player. I was elated. I had been all about basketball for as long as I could remember. Carrying around a little stuffed ball since I didn’t own a real one, and practicing my shot over and over while laying on the floor.

My junior High-School was housed in the same building as my high school and the girls basketball teams all traveled on the same bus to and from away games. We were expected to watch the JV and Varsity Games. One night, at a home game, my mom who came to every single game that I ever had, despite illness, poverty and social exclusion, sat through my game with a headache. She wouldn’t miss my game for the world, but she didn’t feel up for sitting through JV/Varsity games as well. She asked if I could walk with a friend and she would go have a rest. I didn’t think too much of it. My mom didn’t feel well a lot. She was diagnosed HIV positive when I was three months old and between the immunodeficiency and side effects from medications, she was always sick.

I stayed through the games, cheering on the older girls and getting some flirty teenage girl practice in as well. The boys basketball teams often came to watch every game too. It was a small town and there wasn’t much else to do, so we all went out for the cheap entertainment and the chance to sit close to other teenagers of the opposite sex (or the same sex but none of us were out yet as bi or gay or queer as some of us grew up to identify as.) My mom and I lived in town and so my friend Carla and I decided to walk home together since she lived right up the hill from me. Somehow we walked right past my mom’s car still at the school parking lot, driver side door wide open, lights on and seatbelt buckled with no one strapped inside. I guess there were still other cars there when we left and besides we were probably giggly as usual distracted by our very important crushes and friend drama.

But when we got near my house, my heart started to race…Where was my mom’s car? Then I saw her. She was standing perfectly still, holding onto the railing. “Mom!” I yelled, I started jogging toward the house. I am sure that Carla was not picking up on how fearful I was yet. I mean, how could she? All of our worries were wrapped up tight and I never talked about it with even my closest friends. But she must have heard my voice shake, because instead of continuing up the hill when I left her abruptly and headed down the street that turned off to my apartment, she followed close behind. “Mom!” I yelled again. But she was not responding. Not with words or motions or even a blink. Nothing. I shook her, please just be a joke! What was this? What was going on? Nothing like this had happened before. I ran into the house, screaming for Carla to watch my mom. I dialed 911 as fast as my fingers could dial. I was always ready for this moment. Trying not to cry, trying not to fear that all of my worst nightmares were coming true, I gave the ambulance the address to our house.

How do people with AIDS die? Is this what it looks like? Is this it?! God, No! Please. I could hear the sirens approaching and my mom was still stuck, leaning against the railing. She still had not moved a muscle and she would not answer my questions. Had she been in a car accident and walked home? Where was the car?! The sirens snapped me back to reality. I still had a job to do here. I had to keep our secret. I had to get rid of Carla!

“Carla, thanks for helping! You gotta get home. The ambulance is coming and your mom will be worried about you. I will call you later. Bye!”

But no way. Carla wasnt going away.. And I am glad looking back. But in the moment, I now had to to figure out if I had to legally disclose my mom’s HIV status to the paramedics and if so how could I do that in front of Carla? Would the paramedics deny my mom treatment as they had done in discrimination against my step-mom who was also living with AIDS? Would they make a scene about it and talk about it loudly like a nurse at the local clinic had done and leaked our secret when they were first diagnosed? All of this was racing through my brain as I stared in horror at my frozen mom and ignored the tears streaming down Carla’s cheeks.

13 years old, but I was trained for moments like this, so I handed Carla the phone and demanded that she take it inside. I shut the door tight behind her just as the ambulance doors flew upen and the paramedics ran up the steps. Quick! I would only have a few seconds to get this out. “I have to tell you something! Please, come close. I need you to know, but I need you to help us and I need you to keep this quiet!” Finally the tears were stinging my eyes too as I begged the woman to honor her commitment to helping. I leaned right into her ear. I whispered clearly so I only had to say it once. I almost NEVER said it out loud and it felt weird on my tongue, “My mom has..AIDS. Please. Please, take care of my mommy.” I was suddenly a very mature grown up kid and a little baby all at the same time.

Thankfully they took my mom to the hospital. Our secret was safe. But was my mom safe? Carla called her mom who offered to take me to the hospital. That woman was a saint. I still love her so much. She was a single mom with four kids and she was always happy to take me on as well. (Thanks Mrs. Gigs. Love you.)

Carla (on the left)
and I getting ready for our first high school dance. I was 15 and she was 16.

I don’t remember if I took her up on the offer to go to the hospital. I don’t remember if I stayed home alone that night or if I went up the hill to sleep at Carla’s. We had only just become friends earlier that school year. We weren’t in the same grade, she was older and we hadn’t known each other before. I don’t remember because this scene of my mom needing to go to the hospital and me needing to either stay alone or stay at a friends or get a ride to visit her in the next town over was a scene that happened over and over again for the last few years of my mom’s life.

I kept playing ball though. It turned out my mom had a seizure disorder as a result of the HIV. I don’t know that much about it because I was young and no one really took the time to explain it to me and my mom didn’t have the capacity to understand it herself let alone translate it for a child.

This is what I do remember. My Uncle Bud came to my basketball practice. He never had kids and I had never seen him at my school before and I never saw him there after this. So, I knew immediately that something was terribly wrong. I remember the ball literally just fell out of my hands when he walked into my practice. I couldn’t even make my fingers work to hold it. I could barely see. Everything was spinning, but I followed him into the hallway where he told me that my mom was going to be in the hospital for a while because of the seizure and that she might have more of them.

I thanked him for the information, but I needed to keep up the charade. I composed myself and walked calmly back into the gym. Obviously everybody was staring at me. Waiting for me to tell them what was going on. I steadied my face and told them that my mom had…Cancer. That’s right. I bold faced lied to my team. Because you know what? I knew that cancer was acceptable. I knew that it would mean that people would make me cards and give me flowers. But I knew that AIDS meant shame and blame and guilt and that if I told them that…..we would die a different kind of death. I had promised my mom I would never let that happen. So here we were.

When I got a ride up to see my mom with my grandma later that night, I crawled into bed beside her and breathed in the sweaty sick smell of her hair. My mom. I can still smell that sick hospital smell and I still find it comforting and nauseating. I can’t even write about that smell without crying. I wish I could smell my mom again.

Anyway, I curled up next to my mama, who was surprisingly alert and aware and I whispered in her ear that I told the kids that she had cancer so she didn’t have to worry about our little secret. I felt like I had to whisper about it even here in a private hospital room with only my grandma in the room. We never even talked about it in front of them. They knew. But it was better left unspoken.

No one ever asked if my mom still had cancer or if she got better or asked anything really. Which was for the best. Maybe they didn’t ask because they knew I was lying. Maybe they didn’t ask because I was so skilled at avoiding the conversation. What mattered was that my mom had survived and our secret was safe and we were going to make it for a little longer. We still had a little longer together. Safe with our secret and each other.

Stigma, Secrets, and Shame

Trauma has a way of sealing memories in or locking them out. For me, it is the former. My memory is like the home videos middle class people take of their family milestones. Just like that, I watch myself participate in my own history. I never hold the camera. I am only an actor.

An example of this is also one of my very oldest memories. Maybe my first true memory complete with action and movement instead of just those earlier still photographs that I can just barely see if I close my eyes and really concentrate. I am little, too young to go to school yet, maybe 3 or 4 years old. My days are spent at home with my mom whose primary occupation is mother. She narrates every single thing that she does because she is a shattered lonely woman and I am her everything. “Mommy is washing the dishes so that we can pass inspection when the mean lady comes to see if we live like slobs.” or one time, “Ouch!” Why is mommy pouring ketchup on her arm? That is funny! “No! Get back! Get away! It is blood! And Mommy’s blood is POISON! GET BACK I SAID!” mommy’s blood is poison? Is my blood poison? Is all blood poison? Wait! The poison is in mommy?!

My mom never held the scariest details back from me….or atleast I dont think she did based on the horrors she decided to share. We played this scene out over and over until I knew the truth. My mommy was dying because her blood was poison and I could not under any circumstances get it on me. If I saw her bleeding, I needed to yell and tell her and get away! If she dropped a glass or even just got a paper cut, “MOMMY! You are BLEEDING!” There are a lot of sirens in my head. Still to this day. I hate sirens.

It seems extreme, but this is not a conspiracy theory. People living with HIV were driven out of their communities, fired from their jobs, kicked out of schools, abandoned by their families and friends. Even the politicians of the time were threatening to round us all up and send us off to live in isolation in some AIDS refugee camp. But wait! I was born negative. Would I get to live with my mom or would I be forced into the welfare system “for my own safety?” These were the very real scenarios that we had heard of and lived in constant fear of.

Here is the tricky part. For anyone, but especially for such a young child. How did my mom teach me to both fear her blood with all of my life, and also NEVER react that way in public or mention it to ANYONE EVER? Fear. She put the fear of God in me that if I ever told, our lives would be over. The meager allotment of respectability that we had as poor white trash living in public housing over on Brooklynnside Lane would be done. No one would ever come near us again. Maybe we would lose our housing all together? Maybe we would lose our whole town.

Keeping “the secret” was critical for our survival. And so I did. I never once slipped up, I learned to keep my mouth shut and to make myself invisible. People joked that I was always “hiding behind my moms skirts” and heck ya, I was hiding. I was terrified that someone would read my mind or that I would reveal our dangerous truth.

I started having asthma attacks. I couldn’t breath. I was sick a lot just like my sickly mother and no one knew yet that trauma and anxiety can look a lot like a child who can’t sleep, wets her pants at school, has episodes of gasping for air and sweats a lot. It seems so obvious to me now. How could no one have seen the red flags that I was not ok? As hard as I worked to keep the secret, my body was giving us away. But luckily no one was looking. No one cares about a redneck girl in the middle of small town America whose mom is dying from her own sins. Luckily, we didn’t matter.