Culture

“Peeping through my Window pt 2”

I’m a boy.

We all gotta grow up sometime right?

But how, where do we fit, when did we find that fit, who did we imprint on?

Well I never really had a father figure, and no shots but the father I had was a step dad that died while cheating on my mom. He was the father of my two youngest brothers; and the other dad I wanted, kept sending me out along with the woman I wanted to be like a mom, though they were already family so it was kind of a double titled thing.

Maybe that’s why it didn’t work- too many titles and identities to keep up with. As for me, juggling identities was a WayOfLife. I thrived at it, because I didn’t know who or what I wanted to be besides a little bit of everything. So early on, after moving from a predominantly black area, there was nothing but white all around me, I began to absorb a bit of them because I found out that you can’t be too black around white people. Again, being a pro at this talent, I continued making others comfortable at my expense. There’s no real win here because I’d visit my family, and my cousins would say, “I sounded white”. I couldn’t hear it but I knew what they meant. That made me even a little more aggressive just to protect my blackness and not seem soft, I had to be both. Ironically, I took the worst of black attributes as a defense mechanism, and inhabited the best of white people’s attributes, or what I perceived to be white. Balancing impulse and thought, fearlessness and premeditation, slang and big words, but I kept my swag and dress code, everything ain’t for sale!

How do you grow, when you don’t know? You just become I guess. So I became someone to be loved, even if I didn’t love myself. I figured out exploitation early on, because only the good tangible things of me people wanted while condemning me for the undesirable characteristics I had. No one understood trauma or emotional chaos back then; at least I wasn’t aware of that consideration. I was an internal mess that no one dared acknowledge or consider, as if I was the prototypical upbringing of any child, and it was only me that went astray. I saw early on that people make excuses for themselves before they find them for someone else, unless you really love that person. Guess I wasn’t really loved ha!

I didn’t experience that love to a fault that you see that makes people in denial of their problem child or abusive partners. I was always this trial and error experiment it felt like, believed to be an angry untamable black child. Then I started to see an underlining narrative: if I admit or succumb to what people think I am, then at least they’ll understand that and have hope for me, having reason to afford me chances, and accept me, versus me opposing their judgements, and being pushed out again. So I did! I became every title and name, until medications got involved and I showed them that I’m good without them, that’s when they figured I was too smart for my own good and really got tossed around. I don’t like pills, but that was the answer back then to kids like me. Times haven’t changed, just pill vials. Ironically, as I’ve grown up, pills sound like the greatest excuse to exist in the state of what I’ve always felt, down trodden and adrift.

I exploited what people wanted, respected and loved the most. They like smart, funny and athletic people, so that’s what I became. I fought my friends’ battles just to vent the part of me that I had to hide, otherwise I was this walking talking void of suppressed expression and repressed emotion with fake smiles and laughter. I laughed when happy, I laughed when angry, I laughed when sad, so I never knew exactly how I felt when every reaction was the same until rage came forth, because tears lost their purpose.

I felt like superman when a girl would like me. I saw myself with my eyes, not theirs, so I was always mystified like “what, me?!” Bet! And that attention made me work harder to be the best boyfriend, again, even at my own expense. But I couldn’t just get attention from her, most people weren’t as deep as me, they hadn’t gone through the same roads, so I needed more company to feel the most. It was being a player, it was stuffing, it was escapism. I even put that same tireless effort in being the best kind of friend to every friend I had, hoping to feel like I was a part of their families, making up for feeling separated from mine. Though I made every teacher and coach work for my trust because I hated authority figures, they always represented pain, manipulation, lies and control to me. I felt like dirt in their eyes, especially cops and case workers. It felt like they peered into my soul and saw what most kids couldn’t see, even if they could sense it, and was disgusted. So I felt naked and invaded in their presence. I was a great athlete, and student. As far as grades, though a class clown, I could concentrate and do the work fast to prove a point. But I was restless. My mind stayed busy fighting ghosts. I learned how to express myself, but I was rebellious to their wishes, they were just like every adult I’d ever known, say one thing for your trust, then trick you and send you away.

As a state ward, I felt like a paycheck to most. I won’t really expound too far on the things I went through in some foster homes or on my grandpa too much in this, maybe for another book, or later on in this book. Who knows, maybe more courage may surface. Just because I express myself openly doesn’t mean it’s easy. People take too many things for granted; they see the product but stay naive of the process. Like wrapped presents.

Adults get more thinner than kids as they grow, imagine that paradox! So I grew up into this fractured teen representing a whole hole, but no one ever saw the hole, only the obvious troubles. So my escape was and is my relationships.

“Peeping through my Window Pt 1”

I’m a boy.

We have this patriarchal society that demands a man be a man, even proclaiming it with gusto! And yea, I’ve gone through things that made me become a man earlier than I should’ve. I’m in a testosterone heavy environment as I write; I’m physically strong with hardened features and scars, and I’m a 31 year old absentee father of two, man enough to admit that I’m still just a boy.

In my life, I figured that age isn’t just a numbers thing. Too many numbers rule our lives as is, time, ratings, statistics, height, weight and monetary figures. But age is a rite of passage, given the things one sees and does in order to stake claim to adulthood, but even deeper, it’s about emotional identity and maturity. That’s where I’ve come to understand that in the broad scope of life, with still so many assumed and arguably hoped for years ahead of me, in my own traumatic 31 years of life, I’m still a thrill seeking questioning lost indecisive wounded boy with mommy familial and abandonment issues. Adorning a myriad of missing links that may never find their proper place again in my chain link fence of battered stories and fractured memories.

I was a child of the land. I say that because even as I experienced a roof, I felt bottomless; I don’t think I ever stepped a day on solid ground. Growing up  I was in a merry go round of foster and group homes, shelters, family respites, and juvenile facilities, while my mother was largely incarcerated most of my life. I had no real concept of a father. Later on in my teen years I finally understood where he had been all these years and it wasn’t the story I was once told. He died at the hands of my mother while she was pregnant with me during a drunken altercation where in her panic she had stabbed him once, fatally, in self-defense, protecting us both.

I was a child of devastation, doomed to be traumatized, a sacrifice of man for boy, a life for a life, a love for a love. A choice that would preordain me for a life of ups and downs. I never asked for nor understood why. I just lived and believed normalcy in the things I saw, heard and felt. The one constant though was that I always held on to the memory and love of my mom. Her love was the best and never shied from showing me how important I was, whether she was there or not. I felt like the world and only the world in her presence. When her light left my side, I only knew darkness, shadows, vacant words, voided feelings, consolation kinship, and obligatory love. Nothing ever felt quite whole or genuine without her.

Of course, as I grew I learned to be embarrassed of her because I was embarrassed of myself. I don’t remember any lessons of “love myself”. Only “you’re smart, strong, talented, athletic” and “you can do this and that”. I learned what I could do for others, so I figured I’d be those things to get the inclusion I wanted so much. That became my identity: what everyone else said I could be or wanted of me, there I would find wholeness. Giving everything of myself until I am empty, then give more. Making everyone comfortable, embracing my discomfort, then I’ll never be lonely again because I have something that someone needs, some of everything because I could do so much!

I met so many kinds of people throughout life because the constant moving, absorbing different personalities, upbringings, and colors. I learned white people at an early age, which is as it sounds, but that was when I learned to be embarrassed of myself, when not comparing myself to my real family, feeling like the odd one out, like “my mom’s son”.

White people talked, acted, ate, joked, dressed different and went to church different. Their families and perceptions were different; their homes looked like small buildings. Before this new kind of white people, I only knew the poor ones. You know when you’re a kid and meet a few people that have the same characteristics, so you unknowingly blanket all like that, like “why do they…” statements.

Ironically we do it with more venomous as adults.

This was around the time I used to run the streets with no socks and shoes, to run faster, racing and playing killer man. Then I went to a suburban foster home and taking my shoes off to play wasn’t normal, along with eating the school food nor my thick wool colorful sweaters. I was an alien again, until I beat “their fastest” person and in a blink of an eye, I was the new cool fast black kid. Accepted again, for what I could do, see the theme? One day, I was invited to play smear the queer, I said no, I’ll watch, and then I was like oh! that’s killer man and played. It was either same game different name, or same name, different way in suburbs.

Even black people were different. The foster family I lived with had a son I saw in roller blades, with some pink specs. I’d never seen a black dude in tight jean shorts in rollerblades. I still see that vividly, sheesh!

What I noticed so fast was cultural differences, questions I never had answers to or considered. Why am I in foster care, what did my mom do, why wasn’t I with my real family. Because everyone was good except my mom, it’s not like my family had despot drug addicts and poverty. They all had homes. Trying to assert that didn’t make sense to them, then not me. I saw people think but not say what I thought too. They didn’t want me, a consistent theme no matter where I went, no matter who I chose to be, no matter what thoughts I tried to block and no matter what I kept myself from saying and doing, I was just too much!

I have so many years and situations I’ve blocked out or forgotten. But I remember when I didn’t feel a part of my family any longer. It’s when my grandpa died and I was away in a foster home, he loved me like my mom did. That was the worst day and news because at that time I felt officially no ones. I held onto the one day a year I consistently went around my family on Thanksgiving; that’s all I had left as far as feeling like family.