Inside

“Peeping through my Window pt 4”

I’m a boy.

From 2007, I left my group home and aged out of the system as a state ward, graduating high school, going to college, then to jail, then out to fatherhood, then back to college, to imprisonment, to homelessness, then back to prison where I am now.

When I first graduated high school, I was finally free for the first time in my life! I had a car and the world in front of me! I survived! I was like, kiss my ass statistics! No prison, I’m going to college!

I did something most thought I wouldn’t do (I get it though, I was a troubled child with a plethora of complexes). My dark skin, my height, my living situation, I felt I was a mountain of shame. Everything I did, in retrospect, was a cry for attention; I wanted to win affection, from whomever. I wanted that constant validation, someone to say all the time that they get it, despite everything I’ve gone through, they are proud of how I handle it, how I deal. I don’t really believe everyone needs a pat on the back for everything, but a kid can’t decipher what’s too much and not enough when dealing with emotional fractures. Graduating was bitter sweet, leaving the best home environment and family I’d been a part of and separating from my best friend going out of state to college. I was starting my new journey, only to realize how lost I actually was. I wasn’t used to having no worries and just a clear day left to my own devices. I didn’t know how to handle that kind of peace and sunny disposition. For a while, it was good, but stress was pulsating me. That toxic relationship I had with my first son’s mom was the wreck I never saw coming. I may have secretly craved it though, because I knew I should’ve cut ties. I had many signs and opportunities to escape, but I don’t like breaking hearts. And a not so good reason I’ve always kept that had me over staying in relationships was that many gave up on me and I saw the worst relationships that people stayed in. I’m not a quitter; other people can quit, but I won’t. Anyone can change, they just have to feel wanted.

I had a chance to leave, but she sent me a positive pregnancy test on a picture message. I was going to have my own family. I never had one, never had a father but I was going to be a great one! At least in my own mind. I was going be there every step of the way. But before our son came, I went to jail during my second year of college because of that relationship. Once I got out, we moved in together. Parenting and working as kids was doable but we made it harder than it should’ve been because we both had our own things we hadn’t matured from. I tried to run back to college but only lived the party scene instead of going to class. I began drinking and smoking heavy, going from relationship to relationship, my favorite hiding spot. I was miserable inside and I missed my son. Maybe I hadn’t lost him yet but my distance made that a certainty because I felt dirty and guilty after the fall out between me and his mother.

So I ran, too ashamed. That was my excuse. I haven’t seen my son since he was two, he’s 11 now.

I carried my childhood pain and anguish into my adulthood and it sent me from college right to prison of all places. What an irony. So needless to say, I became that statistic. I remember my aunt saying that getting there is half the battle, but staying there and out is the other. Well I didn’t stay out, I became my worst nightmare and proved people right in the worst ways.

My first prison term was short, but it only made me worse,.I was kind of in an aftershock after my world being flipped upside down. Prison was another monster with different implications I’d never faced. So smartly, I dived deep, hiding in yet another relationship that became deep and toxic at times, but pain means love right? If you fight me then you really love me, that’s kind of a mindset of toxic love. It was the only thing I knew, so naturally it gravitated my way. I don’t think misery loves company so much as misery manifests its own company and then says, “what the hell.” Misery settles in its own supply. Needless to say, the mindset and lifestyle in that kind of love guided me straight back to prison.

I had too much pride and fear to ask for help. This time, the gavel was brought down on me harshly. And I’ve had to find myself, and then recreate myself inside these prison walls. It’s been a tough and long journey, but that journey still hasn’t ended yet.

Another time when I’m not still in prison, I can talk about the specifics of my journey inside these walls. One thing I know now which I didn’t back then is that I still don’t have it all figured out, I hope I never do, because that’s a comfort I’m not willing to embrace. Something can always be done to be better. Plus, I like connecting with those still finding themselves. It’s a more authentic intentional WayOfLife. Connecting with people with similar stories manifests depth, and often I’m told I’m too deep…eh, those people just haven’t been through enough yet.

Becoming a Man.

“Peeping thru my Window pt 3”

I’m a boy.

Relationships, where do I even start with that vast term? Do kids even consider family and friends as relationships these days? I don’t remember that being a thing spoke about, I only believed relationships was a girlfriend-boyfriend, husband-wife type thing.

I knew nothing of relationships, believing that I could have them by just being the best version of myself while hiding my worst, clueless of the inevitable implosion. There was a rage that I had no clue had festered so deeply becoming something so void, dark and wounded, that would expose itself at unexpected times, mirroring those very people and things I deep down hated, wanting to be nothing like.

I blurted this out one day to my best friend on the phone, maybe because I had never said it out loud, but I told her about one of my foster homes. How I used to get tormented in that home. I was punished with crazy labor when I got in trouble. I had to carry a wheel barrel, digging dirt and dumping dirt for hours, or walking stairs for hours. If not just beat before or after (sidenote, it helped me become a pretty physically strong kid!).

I remember one day, I needed to use the bathroom while we were at the park. My foster brother and sisters wouldn’t take me back, so I defacated myself. They rode me on the bike with me sitting close to the tire ripping at my shorts and smashing it all over me. Once we got home, I got beat for shitting myself and for my foster mom having to clean it. I walked stairs on my toes up and down from the dark basement for hours where I was told werewolves were,(my worst fear) and that staying on my toes would keep them away since I’m walking like them. (upside is that I’ve been fast with big calf’s and quads since a kid) I still walk on my toes to this day, ha.

My foster brother would tie my socks together at the toes and spin me around upside down on his shoulder as I cry out upside down. Then he’d put me down and make me walk, laughing as I fell. One day I busted my chin real bad and got stitches, obviously the why was lied about. To make it worse, it was Christmas Day, where they gave me diapers as a present, get the joke?

At that same home, the foster brother had me have sex with his two sisters, (my foster sisters) while he watched and kept an eye out for his parents outside. They were years older than me and I was told to go from bed to bed. At that age, I began to think that this was the thing to do, they liked me when I did it and I didn’t get messed with as much when I did. So I liked making them feel good because it made them like me. Obviously, I became hypersexual before fourth grade. I started seeing women and sex as things to make people feel good and like you.

So I looked for sex in all my relationships, even when I was too young still. It wasn’t for myself, but for them in my head. As I got older I noticed sex didn’t solve life stresses, it was just another mask. I had so many by then, I could find more.

But then that inner rage came bubbling up when things got too overwhelming. And those angry outbursts turned to verbal onslaughts, and later on, physical abuse. It wasn’t that I took to hitting women, that was isolated occurrences, I never desired to hurt anyone, especially women. But it was a respect thing. It didn’t matter who it was, once I’d had enough, I blew! Because I never handled my disagreements assertively, I was a passive people pleaser. I just agreed, stuffed it, and got past it, not realizing that I was just stacking it all up. That rage was colorless and sexless, I saw nothing but searing white light. Scars from being made fun of when I was little made me self-conscious and real sensitive to certain words and actions. That led to abuse with my first son’s mother.

I’ve been apologizing for those days since it happened in every relationship and interaction with a woman. To this day I’m so disconnected in relationships, scared and passive because I face those ghosts of what I went through with her and never want to do that again, knowing that I may never be forgiven nor deserve to be. The only time I’m not sensitive in my relationships is when I’m actively sabotaging them, pushing them away because after so long, I feel too dirty and unworthy of having someone. You know when someone’s so far out of your life but still control it in a way and don’t even know it, they may still be wounded by you but your shame from them rules your life? Yea, that’s me. So I emotionally detach at random. I’ve always feared hurting women because what my mom went through just to get me in this life and the abuse I witnessed her go through as well. Aand I ended up doing the same thing.

One day I’ll have to tell my son what I did, because that accountability is mine alone, though it affected his life. My distance from him was a result of my own guilt and emotional turmoil, how selfish we parents can be. He has barely had a father because I ran away from my mistake. Me and his mother, we were both kids with a kid and being kids when we had to be adults. I was older, I was the man, I should’ve been one, but I wasn’t, see why I said I’m a boy?

How can I even be a father when I had no real understanding of family and parenthood. Most examples were of crippled and fractured love, foster families getting divorced, fighting each other, or getting rid of me. I believed nothing lasted; everything eventually would fall apart.

This is just a little peak at what formed me, I don’t know if I properly correlated how former traumas became emotional with relationship identity. I’m not really trying to prescribe a definite reason or way in any of this. It’s still a blur to me. Putting these pieces together while imprisoned just seemed like a logical thing to do, though what I feel I am is illogical because I think and see things too different from most. But given my life, embracing the dark times is as stress-less as walking in the sun with a cool breeze.

“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.