It’s happening again. Another major event that breaks even those of us who have burned out on the all-consuming rage and constant barrage of unprecedented events. Another Minneapolis incident. I suppose Prince knew what he was doing when he called his band “The Revolution.” Another murder by a police force even less trained than those who have been victimizing people of color without accountability for decades. Another video with comment sections full of people trying to blame the victim and paint them as the aggressor.
I’m going to say the quiet part out loud.
The first documented causality was a white woman in an SUV, and that was the tipping point. All the videos of brown and black people being terrorized, brutalized, and abducted from their communities have been awful. But so many people who do not ‘fit the profile’ have been able to simply look away and carry on with their lives.
Others have shown up in support of their communities, blowing literal whistles in a fog of chemical irritants and unprovoked violence. But they were also an “other.” The protesters. The agitators. The non-compliant. All painted by the media as another problem to be solved by government sanctioned armed, masked thugs.
Yesterday felt different. Yesterday, a woman dropped her child off at school and was dead in the front seat of her SUV before recess. The wheels were turned away as masked men reached for her door. Women have always carried keys between their fingers and locked the door as a reflex. It’s just part of existing while female in the world. But instead of outrage over the murder of a woman in her own neighborhood by a predator, our government immediately called her a leftist terrorist because the masked men were on their payroll.
I’ve been quiet for a long time. The state of the world and the upheaval in my own life in the last few years has pushed me to a place where I needed to just shut down. I’ve called it rest. Called it healing. Called it doing the best I can. But the truth is that I’ve just been too fucking tired to keep screaming into the void. I lost my voice and went into a defensive state of numbness that’s allowed me to keep the house clean, the bills paid and my clothes comfortable.
I’ve wrestled with the idea that maybe I should try to get back out into the world. Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. Maybe it’s safe enough for me to just drive into town for groceries, grab a coffee and compliment a stranger.
Today I’m grateful that I cancelled my dermatology appointment. The idea of sitting in a waiting room with people who are okay with what happened in Minneapolis yesterday and not okay with the response by those in the streets is more than I can bear. Those people live in my community. They drive oversized trucks with American flags, pro-gun, pro-Trump and pro-life bumper stickers, “roll coal” at protesters and cheer on the kidnappings of foreign leaders on foreign soil and foreign sounding or looking people in their own neighborhoods. Whether they are the vocal minority or the actual majority doesn’t matter. They are echoing the rhetoric of our “elected” leaders.
I’m running out of hope. But I'm not giving up. And I won't let the weight of it all keep me silent.
you don't even
(whatever whatever what-ever)
care that you'll never recover
from the recession
Empire Records was your favorite
film & like, who needs a job
with a decent paycheck & benefits
when you can be a tattooed
gum-chewing freak forever?
damn the man!
you remember dial-up modems,
AOL chat rooms, web page
guestbooks
you ever made mix tapes (& later
made the transition to mix CDs
but some long nights you long
for those days spent pressing
record & play.)
you grew up playing Oregon Trail
& part of you can't help but think
your demise will arrive like death
did in that game, driving an 8bit
Conestoga, telling you: you have
died of cholera, you have died
of dysentery.
you have died of exhaustion.
no one wants to claim you
once you were a Gen-Xer
but they kicked you out & you know
you're not a Millenial cuz, like, you
still use soap & napkins & drink beer,
& go to Applebee's once or twice a year.
New Kids on the Block was your boy
band & you came of age during
the heyday of third-wave ska, learned
to skank at summer camp after a few
sweaty rounds of spin-the-bottle
& from them on got sorta turned on
every time you heard
pick it up! pick it up! pick it up!
you wonder at the ways of the younger
generations, so many of them eschew
sex & cars, but back in your day, there
was no greater insult than you're a virgin
who can't drive
you heard a lot of whispered innuendo
when Clinton was prez, adults snickering
about what happened under that table
when they thought you weren't listening
like you didn't know what a blowjob was?
like you'd never been asked
spit or swallow?
you gave your first blowjob at twelve
bestowed the back of your throat
to an older boy hoping he'd splatter
his coolness back onto you; twelve was
the age you developed a taste for several
oral fixations—cocks & tongues, joints
& cigarettes
you had a lot of firsts at twelve, like,
that was the year you wrote your first zine,
the year you first tried suicide, yeah
there were enough things making you feel
so shitty you wanted to die, even when
you were twelve
the year punk broke (your heart)
you were too young to see most
of the cool '90s bands live, but old enough
to be devastated when their lead singers
killed themselves or o.d.'d—you had your
first cigarette the day Kurt died, stood
huddled in mourning
outside your school with all the other
weirdos with their black clothes & nicotine
haloes, someone passed a cigarette to you
& you smoked it while a boy you knew
bloodied his knuckles on the brick wall
while muttering fuck you fuck you fuck you
& the world was ending
Y2K was your armageddon, you were
eighteen, so full of whitehot fury you wanted
to see the world all burning skies & shattering
glass, but nothing happened so you shot up
& passed out in your boyfriend's bed
the world has been ending ever since
you were born, & you spent so many years
trying to end your life in both direct & oblique
ways, you never thought you'd live past
twenty-one, & maybe what really defines
your generation
is that self-destructive impulse, cuz
your heroes were suicidal rockstars & you
grew up aware of chemical warfare & species
extinction & your own downward mobility
& your older siblings raised you on the gospel
of Gen X slackerdom, so, like, whenever
an adult asked what you were going to do
with your lives you responded in unison
planning for the future?
ugh, as if!
—Jessie Lynn McMains, from forget the fuck away from me (Bone & Ink Press, 2019)
The fire happened last summer on the one odd day when the wind was blowing away from the house.
My ex-husband put the loaded shotgun outside before hanging himself last fall.
The water pump blew out (the first time) 30 minutes before I left to pick my husband from a week-long trip and last time, (yesterday) right after I’d run a load of laundry but before we went to bed.
The pharmacist fixed my medication cost, taking it down from $77 to $15 on the 3rd refill.
My dog got sick before we left for vacation rather than a literal shit storm starting in a carpeted hotel or Air BnB room.
We’ve had the available credit to cover all of these disasters, trips, medications. I keep looking for the good and trying to be grateful because ‘it could have been worse.’ I wake up and look for the baby bunnies in the yard or the free-range horses in the valley out back. I go to bed beside a man who loves me with his whole heart and supports me in every possible way.
My pants fit.
All of the COVID tests were negative and I’ve managed to not pee my pants in the throes of a coughing fit.
I made a new friend, was offered a promotion at work and made two amazing pots of soup- avgolemono and roasted garlic which blended together perfectly when the leftover ratios were wonky.
The kitchen sink is the only drain that’s backed up.
“Your breast imaging exam shows no sign of cancer.”
My estrangement from my mother was never meant to be a war.
I didn’t cut her out of my life because I wanted her to suffer or because I wanted people to pick a side. All I wanted was peace.
I wanted… no, needed to put myself in a place where I could more easily give up on ever getting the things I needed from her: an acknowledgment that her choices and actions hurt me profoundly and maybe some kind of apology for all the times she failed to protect me. Instead, she fed me to the wolves that lived under her roof and made me feel responsible for the claw marks left on my body and soul.
I needed to give up on the idea of ever feeling mothered so that I could work towards more acceptance and find a way to heal myself. Nothing I say or do can fix what was broken between us because she is simply incapable of seeing past her own pain, and that's sad.
She can't step out of the victim role long enough to consider that while I’m a survivor today, I was a child then. I was a child who needed a mother; I was not and am not just another old soul put in her life to guide and teach her.
That’s a hard truth I’ve wrestled with for decades.
Keeping her in my life meant holding on to a glimmer of hope; I can’t and won’t hold onto that anymore. Seeing how she reacted to my telling the truth so openly only reinforces what I know to be true.
The newly added layer to all of this was learning that a relative called her about my social media and said that I should seek therapy.
Well, dear relative, don a robe and take up a gavel if you're here to judge me. Seat yourself front and center where I can address you directly.
I submit to the court that you haven’t acknowledged me in decades.
My fragmented memories include being yelled at until I cried, being looked down on, and feeling small around you. Even as a small child, I inherently knew that you viewed us as poor, white trash relatives who deserved pity and contempt but never empathy.
Each Christmas, a gift from you sat under the tree. I knew it was from you because of the wrapping paper covered in the toy company logo you worked for. I knew it was mine because there were two and the other one had my brother's name. Mine, however, was labeled with some variations of a boy's name with the same first and last letter as my own.
You couldn't be bothered to relay the correct 4 letters to the assistant who handled the task. I wasn't even the correct name on your list of family obligations.
You sit and judge me without having the courage or decency to speak up and tell me what you really think of me. You call others for answers to questions I would have given without guilt, blame or shame.
None of this is my fault. I didn’t choose to be a family scandal but I am choosing to share my story in my way.
I refuse to stay hidden like your own eldest child who, no matter how much I dig, I’m unable to find a trace of anywhere on your social media.
Keeping secrets only fosters shame.
And if YOU had ever done any meaningful therapy you might realize just how important and cathartic it is to speak up and to help others.
I didn’t decide I was special and needed to be heard. I was told time and time again how wise I was and how I was able to help someone else feel what I always needed… to feel safe, seen, valued and loved.
I wouldn’t keep writing, sharing, and shrieking into this digital void if I hadn’t heard the echo returning… Thank you! Hearing your story has helped me heal, too, more than once.
Thank you, judgmental relative, for validating what I remembered about your character.
This is such a complicated kind of grief. My villain was JT, my first husband and the father of my only child. Last summer, he died by suicide.
It had been over a decade since we had any contact at all. He was one of only two exes that I’d call a “bad ex,” to the point that I had somewhat recently looked him up on social media just to be sure he was blocked on all of my accounts.
In that search, I found a podcast he was doing because, of course, he was. (Cue the “Stop Giving Men Microphones song.) He displayed the same arrogance and self-righteous indignation with a venomous voice and deep scowl as he sat alongside a redheaded woman who seemed to fluctuate between feeding his ego and humoring his outbursts.
When my daughter agreed to let me come to his memorial… we’d had our own estrangement of sorts, but this was the first step in reconciling that we took… I walked in expecting that I’d been painted as a villain in his story, and I was prepared to be treated as such when I met the redhead, one of his girlfriends. Instead, she greeted me warmly and would later send me a Facebook friend request, as did his other girlfriends.
In connecting with them I learned that he told people at least two things about “his 2nd wife.” I looked like Gillian Anderson, and I was a writer.
I was a writer.
That’s something I used to identify as despite my minimal publication. It was so much a part of my identity, but somewhere along the line, I’d given that up. I never stopped writing, but I gave up the idea that I was a writer.
I was just another burned-out, former gifted child who couldn’t stop screaming into the void of various social media and blogging platforms. But learning that others knew me as a writer (who looked like Gillian Anderson!) made more of an impact than I expected… almost like a bizarre parting gift. He gave me back that part of myself.
But that gift is shelved alongside all the hurtful things he said and did when I was still forming my identity. When he said to me “If you get fat, I’ll leave you,” I was only 17.
And at 19, when I did balloon up in a post-partum cloud of cannabis smoke, he didn’t leave me. Instead, he cheated on me with our roommate in our home for nearly a year. She was a natural redhead but taller, thinner, and with bigger boobs than I developed during pregnancy.
Their denial of the affair when my Spidey senses started pinging was textbook gaslighting. They convinced me that I was crazy and nothing was going on between them. And I believed it because I had to. I had a small child, no family support, and nothing of my own.
The timing of JT’s suicide was almost comedic.
The day he put his loaded shotgun on the porch and hung himself by a pullup bar was the same day that my mother casually dropped the bomb that the man who raised me wasn’t actually my father. Information that came to light because my daughter had doubts about her own paternity, ordered 23AndMe, and then saw a familiar name on her report.
JT had been the embodiment of my ‘daddy issues’ with his resemblance to the man who raised me. The day he died was the day I learned that my bio dad was part of a ‘chosen family’ I’d known my entire life. Heavy upon heavy upon heavy there.
So much complicated grief raining down on me at once, and here I am, months later, still trying to get a handle on all of it.
I’m finding myself sobbing into my keyboard while sitting in on suicide prevention trainings for my job and flowing in and out of this overwhelming grief while numbing myself out every night. The more I learn, the more I just want to be stupid and not think at all.
Knowing about the abuse JT survived and how it impacted who he was doesn’t take away the damage he did to me. Knowing that he didn’t speak ill of me doesn’t change the fact that he was absolutely the villain in my story, and I’m not going to try to pretend otherwise.
We were young… I still had a provisional driver’s license when I met JT and was barely old enough to buy a beer when we finally separated for good. That doesn’t excuse how we treated each other, and I said as much at his memorial.
All I can do is own my part of it and try to do better… and I have. It took me two more divorces to get to where I am today. But today I was able to recognize that I woke up dysregulated, told my husband what was going on, how he could help and he did. And then I got on with my work day.
I’m finally not afraid that if I get fat my husband will leave me.
I’m not afraid of not being pretty enough, sexy enough, fuckable enough… I’m not afraid of being too much, either. On my dysregulated days, when I find myself crying too much, eating too much, feeling like too much… my husband makes sure I know that it’s not too much for him.
I can be exactly who I am, and I’m safe. I’m loved. I’m HOME.
I’m still trying to undo the damage that was done by the villains in my story. That doesn’t mean I’m ignoring the humanity of the people who hurt me or that their deaths don’t (and won’t) take me right back to the times in life when they were so important to me. It’s a complicated grief to see them leave the world and the rest of the things they left behind.
Maybe there’s a way to reconcile this with the villains still walking the earth. But maybe this is just a first draft of a process I’ll have to go through again when my other villains pass.
My first husband gave me exactly two gifts… actual gifts that I cherish, not the gifts of the added insecurities from the trauma inflicted (on each other) during our marriage. Those gifts are things I’m still trying to untangle within myself decades later that I may never fully be rid of.
But the real gifts- my daughter is the most obvious one. She is a genuinely amazing human in every sense. We both gave her far too many gifts because of who we were as parents, but she has continued to shine and show others what it means to be a force of nature in the best possible way.
To say I’m proud of her is an understatement.
The other gift arrived after his death by suicide last summer. It seemed small, but the more I hold it in my heart and really see it for what it is, the more I realize how pivotal it is for who I am and how I want to move forward in the world.
When he died, hadn’t been in contact in decades, and our relationship was toxic and bitter at best and abusive at worst. We were both young and had a lot of our own baggage in hand when we met, and that made it impossible for either of us to treat the other with the kind of love and compassion we both deserved and needed.
I see all of that now. But in talking about him, I only remembered the pain. I only remembered the bad times and the image of the man who broke parts of my soul in ways I may never fully heal.
He remembered me as a writer who looked like Gillian Anderson. That’s what he told the people in his life when he ended it. I was a writer. What an amazing gift!
I AM a writer.
That’s one of those childhood dreams that slowly faded as I moved from pencil to pen, notebook to word doc, and MySpace to Tumblr to not sharing much at all.
So, how do I get it back? Do I find another platform? Focus on marketing and branding so people will pay to read my ramblings? Do I risk using my real name on the door to the room where I go to splatter my guts on the wall?
I feel like I’ve been screaming into the void and am growing weary of the sound of my own pain echoing back. I’m also afraid of being so open and honest that people will think less of me or that in the process of healing my own trauma, I’m ripping open the wounds of others.
I don’t want to shut out the world anymore, but I don’t want to go out there and bleed all over others already wrapped in their own bandages.
Existing while female means having a random dude-bro tell you that, “You’re smiling too much” because somehow men got the message that telling a woman in public they should smile more is not okay while also not understanding that if she’s not smiling, then maybe she doesn’t want to be spoken to. Maybe, like me, she was pondering whether to buy naan or make a homemade batch later… looking for the King’s Hawaiian rolls and remembering that the garam masala was in the aisle I walked in on, on my way to get my vaccine.
This is how my day got derailed.
My first mistake… and clearly, it’s absolutely MY mistake for not only being a woman in public alone but for having my long red hair pulled up in a ponytail and deciding to put on enough makeup to cover my hyperpigmentation and define my eyes just a little…
My first mistake after that was deciding to not wear a mask into the grocery store/pharmacy where I was getting my COVID vaccine booster.
This wasn’t an easy decision. We have managed to avoid COVID *knocks on wood* because we mask in most public places, use a nasal spray, and are fully boosted. We both work from home and usually get groceries curbside, but today I needed to get my vaccine, pick up prescriptions for myself, my husband, and our dog, and maybe grab a couple small things while I was in the grocery store.
COVID numbers are generally down, and it was mid-morning on a Thursday… hardly peak shopping hours, and the parking lot reflected this.
The mask-or-don’t-mask calculations also include the social capital. That’s another way of saying the ability to walk around a public space without being glared at and instead smiling at strangers and making small talk in the checkout line.
People don’t mask around here anymore, not even in medical facilities. At a doctor’s appointment last month, I told the nurse, “I’m not sick, just trying to keep it that way,” after which she relaxed and warmed up… a stark contrast to the icy glares I got from other patients and the front desk clerk in the waiting room.
I’m generally a really social person.
I’ll strike up conversations with anyone, anywhere. And when my anxiety over being in a public place is low, I’ll walk slowly, make eye contact, and smile at people as they pass.
I’ve also come to understand that I hold a certain amount of pretty privilege and am not ashamed to admit that I’ve used it to my advantage in certain situations. Being dressed down, naked-faced, in a baseball cap doesn’t change that. If anything, it’s shown that people view me as even more approachable when I’m out in the world that way.
This is just who I am in public. I’m a people person who often comes home feeling energized by the little low-attachment interactions of saying thank you and good morning to strangers as I run errands. But I was reminded of the other side of that today in the Safeway bakery section.
I wasn’t smiling at all because I was lost in thought.
I was debating making fresh naan and the string of thoughts that came with it from the timing of when I’d need to make the dough to whether or not to use all of the garlic I roasted yesterday to make hummus… and if I make hummus, should I also grab celery to eat with it? And where are the King’s Hawaiian rolls? They’ll go really well with all the soup I made yesterday… but maybe I should just bust out a batch of the copycat Roadhouse Rolls that my husband loves so much…?
And then I heard it.
“You’re smiling way too much!” from a dude-bro standing on the other side of a refrigerated case full of crescent rolls and OJ. That was all it took to go from planning my day to a full-blown panic attack. I looked up, gave a little chuckle then turned in my tracks toward the front of the store.
Never mind that the pharmacy line had dwindled since I arrived for my vaccine, and I needed to pick up three prescriptions. Never mind the garam masala or the half-priced Easter candy display I’d passed on the way in. TIME. TO. GO. NOW.
It wasn’t the comment itself that did it. I mean, it was just another way for a man to tell me I needed to smile more… something I’ve heard on the street and in public spaces more times than I can count.
It was all the other times I’ve been existing while female, only to be treated as though I was on display for a man’s viewing pleasure.
It was the time some rando honked at me at a stop light and took my picture when I turned to look at him. When I told the story on Facebook later that day, several male friends responded with some variation of “Well, you’re so pretty! I understand why he’d want a picture of you.”
It was the day I was standing in line at a convenience store and suddenly felt the knuckles of an old man with a cane passing across my ass as he walked too closely behind me. When I turned around and made a scene, everyone in the store (including my then-husband and so-called best friend) treated me like I was overreacting. I must have imagined it, or it was totally an accident. Why would an old man grope me like that?
It was walking into work in basic office attire- slacks, chunky heels, and a plain shirt, through a parking lot full of blue-collar workers who stared at my car and then wolf-whistled as I stepped out. When I got to my desk, shaking with adrenaline from the rage and fear the rest of the office treated me as though I was being overly sensitive, dramatic and why would they whistle at the office fat girl?
It was the last day of training at a different job when one of the instructors hissed at me under his breath, “You sure do know how to walk into a room,” as passed by his chair. Suddenly, I remembered the tests I’d taken with perfect scores and answers that were clearly wrong. I understood that my nomination of ‘most professional’ was more about how I filled out my slacks than how I spoke to callers and classmates. For the rest of the time I worked there, I had to listen to everyone else talk about what a great man he was and how much they missed him.
It was being 13 years old, walking with two other girls to the convenience store for Doritos and root beer when a car full of men passed by repeatedly, catcalling us from the windows. They then pulled into the vacant lot we were passing through, blocking our path. When they went to get out of the car, I told everyone to run, and we made it safely into the store. Panting, with tears streaming down our faces... we forgot the Doritos, and the cashier let me use the store’s phone to call my “dad” to ask for a ride home. We were afraid they would be waiting for us when we walked out. My dad refused to come get us and told me to just settle down.
It was every single time I’d been harassed by a man in public only to have the men in my life invalidate me when I spoke up.
But I’m me, and I can’t shut up, so I’m doing it again. I’m writing this hoping that someone else will finally realize that these things (and worse) happen to EVERY WOMAN YOU KNOW.
Not just women who dress in revealing clothing. Not just women of a specific body type. Not just women who you personally consider attractive.
We do not color our hair or put on makeup to be looked at. We don’t stand in our closets thinking, “Hmmm… which top might cause a small car accident in the Lowes parking lot?” or “Does this skirt make me look like I want a man’s opinion?”
We have bodies that we choose to adorn in our own way, not to make you look but because we have to leave the house to do the same things you do- get a vaccine, pick up something at the bakery, and maybe, next time… maybe remember to get all of the prescriptions.
One friend that I grew up with shared stories of the abuse she suffered at her dad’s hands… some of which I saw firsthand. We were teenagers getting ready for church at her house, in the bathroom doing our hair and makeup when he yelled at her and shoved her so hard that she flew behind me and landed in the bathtub… then we all went to church where he sang in the choir.
Another friend posted about the anniversary of his dad’s passing and how much he missed his parents because of how much they taught him and how well loved he was as a child.
We’re all roughly the same age (early/mid-40s, late GenX/Xennials) but I think our dads were of different generations. The good dad was a bit older than the abusive one and my friend with all the positive memories of his parents was adopted.
The abusive dad was close in age to my own ‘dad’ (and my father) which is what all of this brings to mind. The man who raised me and the man I recently discovered was my father were both in the military during the Vietnam War. My bio dad was a Soldier & Marine while the man who raised me joined the Navy to avoid combat. Their drugs of choice were also on the opposite end of the spectrum with the man who raised me smoking copious amounts of (then illegal) cannabis and my bio dad (allegedly) being a heavy meth user.
The man who raised me was the picture of undiagnosed depression, hiding in the garage and avoiding me when he wasn’t working on a construction site, slinging racist rhetoric, or screaming at fast food employees. If he’d been alive on January 6th I have no doubt that he’d have been at the Capitol in a red hat. In my childhood home, I was the one who did the yelling… yelling at my brother in the middle of the night for pissing on the toilet seat or at my ‘dad’ when I came home from school because we had DARE that day and I’d discovered a bag of weed in the pocket of the jacket I’d borrowed from him. I remember calling him by his name and yelling, “What the fuck is this shit?” as I flung the baggie at him.
I was eight.
I was constantly told how grown up and mature I was but in the times when I truly needed an adult there wasn’t one who I trusted to parent me. My ‘dad’ was afraid of me and/or so deeply resented my resemblance to my mother that when I looked straight at him with some hard or uncomfortable truth he literally ran away muttering, “I have to go to the bathroom” where he would lock himself away until I retreated to my bedroom.
As for my bio dad, I’m told he was a yeller as well. His widow said that she didn’t think he was made to be a parent and that he was constantly hollerin’ at the kids. She had 2 when they met and they later had my sister. My little sister, his youngest, described him as kind and loving but also that he could get scary at times.
My husband’s father is also a Vietnam Vet who survived a horrific incident that left him pretty badly wounded. His parents went in the opposite direction of my own, becoming deeply religious. Their home had no drugs or alcohol, only Jesus.
Oh! And a missionary trip to Africa with all 3 boys during a political coup that became its own trauma fuel for my husband and his brothers.
My childhood home included a pot-growing babysitter which was fitting because apparently my ‘dad’ was a dealer. Their disco cocaine days only slowed down after my baby brother walked into the living room with a McDonald’s straw up his nose because he’d seen them doing lines.
From where I sit now I can see all the trauma across my family tree.
I see the abuse my mother endured as the later-in-life accident in an otherwise ‘perfect’ Catholic family. Her anorexic mother chided her about her weight and the magnet on the fridge read, “Holy Cow! Are you eating again!” with a small bell that alerted the household that the door had been opened.
I see the quiet acceptance of poverty from my ‘dad’ as the child of a teenaged mother whose bio dad abandoned them shortly after his birth… a mother who’d grown up picking cotton in the fields, a ‘rich Oakie because they had 2 mattresses for all dozen or so kids.’ And I wonder how much he heard as a child about the traumatic birth she experienced because breaking her hips to deliver him was the way it was done before C-sections. I can only wonder because they all passed away before I could begin asking these questions.
I see my bio dad’s family and the stories my living blood relatives have told of alcoholism, parental estrangement, murder/suicides, drug abuse and a host of Jerry Springer episode fodder. Add all of that to combat in Vietnam and it makes sense that he would self-medicate into an early grave.
I see it all and it makes sense, but none of that means they are forgiven for the way I grew up. You can’t forgive away that kind of deep damage.
And where I sit now, that also helps me understand why my own daughter cut me out of her life like she did. I understand her trepidation at reconnecting after her father’s suicide and the fact that no matter how many times I’ve said “I love you” to her since, she’s never said it back.
Do I expect forgiveness from her for everything she had to endure because of my own trauma? No.
You can’t forgive things like that away.
What I can hope for is that she’ll understand and accept that I know better now and I’m trying to do better. I will never be the mother she needed because I can’t go back in time. I can’t bring back the dead. I can’t fill the holes in her soul or mine that festered and grew because our parents didn’t have the tools to support us when we needed it most.
The best I can do from here is speak up and tell my story so that others don’t feel so alone in it. I can break the silence around the parts of our GenX/Xennial feral latchkey kid narrative that so many of us are only beginning to voice.
We were alone. Unparented. Abandoned by parents who were also very damaged people struggling to make sense of the world around them.
A world full of Vietnam veterans and the women back home who were suddenly told that being a wife and mother wasn’t enough.
It’s a wonder that so many of us have made it to middle age at all!
I was 16 when I met my first husband, and he was 22. I'll call him JT.
I was JT's 2nd wife, and our daughter was his 2nd of 2 daughters. We left California together to be closer to his older daughter, and I never went back.
Our split was ugly. And among the many mistakes I made during that time in life, I didn't protect my daughter from any of the awful things that he and I did and said to and about each other.
When we were together, he was a heavy cannabis user and drinker. Apparently, he moved on to more problematic substances from there. I know that at least 2 of his sisters also enjoyed the disco dust because my daughter has disclosed her heavy use at times, both with them and on her own.
FTR- my daughter is 26 years old. She has lived independently since she was 18 and cut off contact with me a few years ago. I've done my best to offer amends and own my part in her issues because... well, just like my mother, I was unprepared and unsupported in ways that left me unable to give her the things she needed to become a reasonably adjusted woman. I respect her space and peace but also have ensured we have channels for exchanging important information.
Today that channel (It's MM, if I'm being transparent) reached out and asked if I was in the place for heavy news. MM was aware of the disclosure about my paternity that my mother made yesterday and did his best to check in with me, but you know what it's like when someone says, "Can we talk?" or "Are you sitting down?"
JT died by suicide last night.
My daughter found out via his last ex-wife, which was a relief because my first thought was that she might have been the one to find him.
MM then went on to relay a recent incident where my daughter went out of town, and JT stayed at her apartment to take care of her cat.
He trashed her apartment, and one of his guests overdosed and died in the bathroom. She was able to move into another unit on the same floor pretty quickly after it happened, but it wasn't clear to me if she'd been the one to make that particular discovery.
My heart is broken for her right now, and I know that there's nothing I can do.
Here's the thing: JT was a genuinely terrible human. I'm not going to not "speak ill of the dead," and I'm not going to sugarcoat who he was in my life. Our relationship was full of infidelity, abuse, and trauma. He wasn't fond of asking for consent or hearing the word 'no' in any context... if you know what I mean.
He owed back child support for his first daughter, so any money he might have earned would have been garnished. That meant I was the primary wage earner during our relationship, returning to work just a few weeks after giving birth.
JT got to do all of the mommy stuff I couldn't. He saw her first steps, heard her first words, and was the primary parent while I worked 50+ hours/ week plus a 60-minute+ commute daily.
I was only 18 when she was born, and our only "support" was from his family. Barely.
Before I got pregnant, he told me, "If you get fat, I'll leave you." But he didn't leave when I gained 50 pounds of post-partum depression and weed weight. Instead, he cheated on me with our roommate for over a year, gaslighting me into thinking I was crazy when I started to suspect things.
JT wasn't the only cheater; another thing I was too open with my daughter about. When she met JT's high school best friend (who had a habit of sleeping with JT's wives), she suspected he might actually be her father. I'm pretty sure that's why she did her own 23&Me DNA test. There was a zero percent chance that she was fathered by anyone but JT, but as shown by the way that my 2nd and 3rd husbands have taken care of her, she needed a better father figure in her life.
I managed to get that right. I found her better dads than the one she shared blood with. The exact opposite of what my mother did in withholding my paternity until yesterday.
It's a lot. It was a lot yesterday and today, it just got heavier. I've got another 30 minutes in this training then I'm going to get brave in front of the camera for the clock app thing again. Fuck.
With the "formerly known as birdy" app burning down, I started exploring the clock app. It felt like a space for lighter, fluffier stuff where I didn't think I could (or should) post anything, but that changed yesterday. A lot changed for me yesterday.
It was 5:30am and I'd been at my desk for about half an hour already, preparing a 6am training. My mother messaged me, saying that some "stuff" came up about my biological father's identity and asking if want to talk about it. I'm almost 45 years old, and this was the first time I'd heard the expression "your biological father." Of course, I wanted to talk about it!
She admitted that she cheated on my father with her HS sweetheart and told me exactly when and where I was conceived. His name was familiar to me for several reasons... his family had been a chosen family of sorts when I was a child. His mother was my other Nana, his younger sisters my aunties, and his daughter and I had been connected on FB for several years.
I also knew that he fathered a pregnancy when my mother was 16 and that she was able to legally terminate pre-Roe because of the state laws of the time. I'd told my half-sister that story, and we joked about how we almost had a half-sibling in common.
It turns out that she's known about my paternity since our father passed away over 20 years ago. My aunties have always known. I was THE family secret for over 40 years...
Another kicker here- someone with my bio father's last name popped up on my 23&Me years ago, but it didn't set off any alarm bells. He messaged me 5 years ago saying that he thought we were related, but I didn't see the message until I got back into the account yesterday. He is mutual friends on FB with my aunties, half-sister, and MY MOTHER.
Also, when I looked yesterday, one of my aunties turned up on the same list of DNA relatives, and I think that was the catalyst for my mother's disclosure. In one message, she said she wanted to tell me before I saw it on 23&Me, but when I asked whose profile it was "clearly laid out on," she said she didn't know. She would have taken it to her grave, knowing that my half-sister and aunties knew the truth and would have to tell me.
There are so many layers to all of this that I'm still unpacking.
Growing up, I'd never felt like I belonged in my dad's home. He openly resented me for my resemblance to my mother, and though she said that he had no suspicions about my paternity, I genuinely believe that he felt it. I spent much of my childhood locked in my bedroom, unable to understand or connect with the people raising me... my dad, his parents... I've written about them a lot. And I was right. I didn't belong there. They weren't my people.
Then there's the fundamental genetic and health stuff. My dad and his mother had this awful, papery skin that split open at the slightest touch. She had breast cancer and died after years of cardiac issues, both of which are hereditary.
Due to what I believed to be the family history, I got my first mammogram early and have been obsessed with sunscreen and moisturizer since I was a teenager. As it turns out, I should have been more concerned about my tendency towards high blood pressure since my father died from an aneurysm, and my half-brother has survived two of them to date.
Layers... so I took the dogs out to the porch and filmed my first TikTok last night. Pirate called it "intense" but has been unbelievably supportive. I'm thinking of a series about all the mother-daughter issues in my life. All the things my mother gave me. All the ways I failed my own daughter. How to use my voice... my actual voice and my actual face to express myself after hiding behind the written word all my life.
Maybe I'm just screaming into a different void there. I've still got my account set so only followers can see my content for now. Olive reached out after seeing it but so far she's the only one of the dozen people I know in real life that follow me there. I might open it up later but first, I have to figure out how to make better videos.
I've been told more than once that I've got quite a story, and it just got more interesting... and interesting is my favorite euphemism.
On the left is a picture from a photo shoot that came up in today's Memories. I was 25-ish: At a glance- look at how thin and pretty I was!
That year was one of my personal worst, including an entire month spent in bed detoxing from an accidental opioid addiction. In the early 2000s, there were no warnings about the prescriptions that came with the enhanced curves on display in that photo shoot.
On the right is the only selfie from this weekend. I'm 44 now: At a glance- I look awful!
That was taken in the middle of a 2-day long project that included refinishing & sealing a deck and installing railings around it. My allergies were (are) killing me, and today I'm sore all over from the physical labor. I don't remember the last time I was this proud of myself and excited for what's on the horizon.
Seeing these side-by-side and knowing the 'me' underneath each image really struck me this morning. As a cis-femme woman, I've spent my entire life bombarded with messages about how important it is to be "pretty." I've pinned so much of my self-worth to the paint and glitter, the numbers on the scale, inside my pants, and all of the things you can take a picture of.
The loudest voice in my head always asked if I was pretty enough, f*¢kable enough, too old, too fat... enough, but not too much. Be soft emotionally but not physically, be sexy but not too sexy. Don’t take up too much space but don’t hide, but don’t put yourself on display but remember, people are always looking at you. And it was all always reflected by a mirror or a man.
I’ve known for years that that voice was wrong, and I AM more than those pictures. I’m smart and super-organized; I’ve got “the patience of a saint” and amazing communication skills. I did more physical labor this weekend than I've done in a decade or more. We got the job done, and the only injury was the sunburn on the top of Pirate’s hands.
We did all that work because the lender wanted it done to approve the loan. Neither our agent nor the sellers’ agent could find a contractor to do it in time for closing on the 16th, so we agreed to do it. The initial bidding war for the property meant we would pay closing costs, but they are paying us an amount that will more than cover things.
Our movers are booked for Memorial Day weekend, Starlink is in a box in the living room, and my moving kit will be fully assembled so we can start packing next weekend. It has been a hard few years between multiple moves, changing jobs, the deaths of a significant childhood friend (Byron) and a pet (Sweet Dane), and well… *gestures broadly* but I’m almost HOME at last.
Home will be 38 acres in Northern AZ, with chunks of quartz all over the property, wild horses at the fence line, and a deck I helped make code-compliant with my two hands and two dudes.
PS: I've hesitated to share anything about the ranch until the ink is on paper. There are still more pieces in motion, but even if the deal falls apart, I'm damn proud of the work we did, and I know what we can have.
Even if somehow this isn't forever home, it will be more home than I've had in a long time. Being a renter and always knowing the lease will expire differs from being an owner.
Having done this before and having to start over has taught me that it's always for the best. Having been married before and preparing to get married again, I know each time has been a lesson and a piece of my story that I wouldn't change even if I could.
Welcome to the latest iteration of my social media presence... Please call me Ember.
The Middle Layer began almost a decade ago when I decided that I wanted to do something else with my writing. I've done this since I could hold a pencil so my inner thoughts have gone from spiral-bound notebooks to word files and eventually online in a variety of places.
Blogging has been my journal, my sounding board... my place to publicly splatter my guts on the wall.
Before Tumbler, I was on MySpace where being wide open online was becoming the norm. I was completely, drunkenly, unfiltered there to the point where it filled with things I shouldn't have said at all. It was an ugly place in life but it's part of my story... I also made a lot of friends on MySpace, forming my social circle in Texas in my 20s and into my mid-30s.
When I shifted to Facebook in 2009-ish, I was still authentically myself but slowly I realized that the people who knew me in real life didn't need such an open window into my head. To this day the "memories" section makes me cringe, but it also reminds me of how far I've come both in the way I engaged online and in my real-life journey.
Things changed again when I got active on Twitter in 2020.
Initially, it was a place for me to promote my Ember Sparxxx content but it felt weird to post political rants and COVID stuff in the same place I was linking my adult content. That's why I started my 'nilla account: RylRed.
In general, I never hid the fact that I was getting naked in front of the camera, but I also didn't want people who knew me in real life to see it unless they explicitly asked.
I guess that's been a good way to describe how I engage with my various social media accounts. I don't hide anything, but I try to keep each account far enough apart that nobody stumbles into anything by accident.
Do I want my co-workers to know Ember Sparxxx exists? Nope. Would it be the end of my career if one of them put in the right search terms on PH and they recognized me? Also no.
Funny story there... that happened with my former spouse immediately after the first of my content went up. Ooops!
I have no political aspirations and the only politician I've personally encountered was a low-level city councilman who I turned down. Another story for another time.
With Twitter burning to the ground (along with our democracy... so many rabbit holes, so little time!) I decided to come back to Tumblr and just connect some of these dots.
I'd already changed the privacy on some of my Middle Layer content and will continue to use nicknames but because of the blog/sub-blog stuff, I'm going to end up re-blogging TheMiddleLayer & RylRed's Rants between each other while. I'm still figuring out how to re-establish my online presence without connecting too many dots to real-life places where I have to maintain a filter that I just don't wear in places like this.
Every day there's one more thing that feels like the drop that'll make the bucket overflow, but it's still raining and somehow I keep getting up and doing the things.
January 6th, 2020: I was working from home watching rioters tear the Capitol apart on one screen with my Teams app open on the other. I was supposed to be working on e-learning materials for new hires at the company where I worked, but I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t think about truck reservations or maintenance schedules. I couldn’t think about what I was going to do for lunch, or when I’d last gotten up to pee.
That was the last time I remember being so overwhelmed by the state of the world that I was frozen in abject horror at it all.
There were meltdowns over more things, of course. The day I tried to make my first cloth mask and collapsed on my office floor, sobbing all over my fabric scraps. The day I drove by Denny’s on the way to one of the last in-store grocery trips I’d take. Breaking up with my best friend over my COVID-cautious behavior while she was in Vegas, having flown through Phoenix… all pre-vaccine.
Getting the call from my brother that my mother was hospitalized with COVID and declining rapidly.
Spoiler alert- she survived and still believes it’s all a global conspiracy concocted by baby-eating Dems who secretly, are all lizard people running the “New World Order”.
Today as more details come in about the mass shooting in Texas I don’t feel half of the rage and sadness that I might have felt in the past.
If I’m being totally honest, I felt more rage waking up to a dirty kitchen earlier this week. More rage at the finding the scrubby sponge covered in cheese and at Metalhead interrupting whatever we were watching to ask Pirate for gas money. And that’s fucked up.
I've become relatively numbed from the rapid succession of major historical events and statistics of late: more than 1 million deaths from COVID, 21 weeks into the year and 213 mass shootings, 200 bodies found in a basement in Ukraine, formula shortages, the impending reversal of Roe, and on and on...
They have become numbers and headlines in a way that removes all of the horror and humanity.
At the same time I’m seeing interviews of a grieving father, the EMS who learned that his daughter had died while evaluating her best friend; videos of enraged parents screaming at officers to do something being pushed and yelled at by the bystanders with badges; interrupted press conferences full of rage. It feels perverse and exploitive, more voyeuristic and inflammatory than humanizing.
This is the world we live in.
Are there going to be protests? Probably.
More hashtags with variations of ACAB that will side-step the Zuc-bots designed to shut down that kind of ‘hate speech’ while ignoring actual neo-Nazis? Of course.
Political action? New laws? Of course not!
Because we’ve been here, done that again and again only to watch the Ghastly Old Party continue to bring their Bibles and guns into the statehouse without repercussion.
Pirate keeps saying that nothing will change until there is real violence... Violence towards the right people, not the poor, black, and brown ones who keep turning up in body bags and behind bars en masse.
Every time he says that part of me recoils in horror. That horror feels like the last piece of my own humanity clinging to the idea that we live in a world where we are still somehow safe.
Meanwhile, the rest of me knows we aren’t safe.
It’s become a statistical reality (not that I’ve dug up the numbers personally, but I’m sure between Pirate and MM they can find them) that life expectancy in the US is rapidly declining for so many preventable reasons.
Increased mental health problems turn into increased negative health outcomes, violence, and self-harm, all exacerbated by (if not rooted in) increased poverty across the nation.
Toss in the anti-vaxxer/anti-mask “what about muh free-Dumbz!?!” crowd and here we are: barely halfway through 2022.
The sad part is that so many of the things killing Americans are things that other countries have solved: access to health and mental health care, restricted access to guns, vaccine and mask mandates.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But this IS the American Way now.
Whatever the case, I’m just trying to hang on to my humanity without falling apart and it’s a delicate balance I’ve yet to achieve.
Yesterday I saw a tweet that said that providing mental health care right now feels like handing sunscreen to people who are on fire.
And what am I doing? Laundry. Doom scrolling, exchanging links and messages with MM and getting ready for a dental appointment.
I’m here writing about another example of all the ways that society is collapsing around us.
MM shared some articles recently that indicate a total collapse in the near future and just said “End of the civilized world within 5 years, all a downward slide to 2024, and then the Civil War and completion of the US's collapse.”
And here I am at my desk Tweeting, blogging, fueling the fire, and thinking about what to make for dinner.
That last piece of my own humanity is clinging to the hope that there’s a better answer than burning it all down.
As far as I can tell the only way to truly get out of the line of fire is to leave the life and home I’ve been trying to build for myself. The house, a nice enough rental with a sectional couch and open floor plan; the job where I’m interviewing for a promotion; the health insurance that affords me the luxury of all of the medical appointments I’ve had without being afraid of the co-pays; the last bits of the American dream of middle-class life in a gated, cookie-cutter suburban bubble.
Running away to Mexico to live near the beach is not the fantastical dream it sounds like, and I know it. There are no good answers and it all exhausts me.
The rain keeps falling. The blood keeps pouring. The tweets keep coming. And my laundry keeps drying while the rest of the world is drenched in rage.
I’m still here. I’m somewhere new, a cookie-cutter gated suburb of Phoenix to be specific, but still here.
Pirate and I seem to be the last people on the planet to not get COVID and the isolation has been wearing on me. This weekend I’m going to brunch somewhere with a patio to catch up with my beloved Olive before she moves back to Canada. The one person in the state I’d care to share oxygen with is leaving the country this summer.
Another thing to grieve.
This chapter of my life might as well be titled “Grief” or more accurately “Kummerspeck.” That perfect German word encompasses the grief itself and the physical changes that come from settling into the sadness with a block of brie, a bottle of wine, and salted-caramel chocolates.
You’ve heard people talk about wearing their hearts on their sleeves? Seems I’ve taken to wearing my grief across a midsection that’s wider than it’s ever been.
I’m a living testament to how weight gain is different at every phase of life.
At 19 years old and over 200lbs I had a smaller waist than I do at 43 and under 200 lbs. Whatever the case, I’ve given up ‘hard pants’ in favor of leggings and skirts for now. Athleisure wear is still trendy, right?
Why all the grief?
Byron is the obvious answer… his sister has been tagging me in Facebook posts of memories of him. The one last weekend, Easter weekend, hit me square in my bloated gut. It was Easter weekend, 30 years ago, that he held my hand on the way home from church. That was the day I knew I loved him, as much as a 13-year-old girl can know anything.
It just happened that I finally unpacked my DVD collection on Easter. The same box held my old VHS tapes, one labeled “Easter 1992.” I resisted the urge to dust off my VCR and watch it, mostly because I didn’t have the energy for that kind of deep dive into my own feelings.
No time to schedule a proper meltdown yet.
Instead of taking the time to process things and heal, I’m spending my energy explaining the logic behind why we run the dishwasher when there’s room for a few more dishes to a 22-year-old.
There have been daily arguments and the repeated question of ‘How much of this is mental illness and how much of it is him just being an asshole?’
Pirate’s anxiety has spiked and his already-thin patience ran out before Metalhead deflated the air mattress and assembled his desk in the former gym-and-storage room.
Unlike the person with the patience of a saint that I once was, I’m finding myself short-tempered and struggling to withhold my own outbursts of frustration with things. That’s a new layer to the grieving for who I thought I was thing.
I’ve lost that calm patience that’s allowed me to manage and instead find myself shutting down, too tired to even cry at times.
I’m over it. I’m out of spoons.
The brightest silver lining I can find is that there may actually be a medical reason for at least some of it.
Last fall, my labs came back with elevated calcium levels but my doctor seemed to blow it off, failing to put in the order for follow-up labs.
My new doctor personally called me on Friday night when my bloodwork came back with the same results. He mentioned the lab closure for Easter Monday but I told him I’d get in on Wednesday or Friday at the latest.
The more I read about hypercalcemia and hypoparathyroidism the less inclined I am to wait until Friday.
My mother was diagnosed with both last year but she insists it was due to COVID and has healed itself.
The bruise from last week’s blood draw is mostly healed, so I’ll get in tomorrow right after the training session I’m working.
In the meantime, I’m still here. Sometimes that’s the best any of us can do, right?
I’ve been working on fully accepting this whole post-COVID world we live in. Not post-COVID because it’s over though you’d think it was given the unmasked anti-vaxxers gathering for the holidays… But post-COVID because COVID is another marker I use in my life to delineate one chapter from the next.
There was the chapter in my 20’s when I was a crazy, skinny blonde young mother who married a solider 6 weeks before 9/11.
There was the chapter when I was food-bank poor while raising a toddler and teenager with a man 10 years my junior.
There was the chapter where I learned about and practiced ethical non-monogamy, and eventually found myself co-parenting the 2 boys that came with the other half of the Quad.
All of those chapters ended in the month of December.
Not the divorce papers or the change of addresses but the moment when I knew there was no going back. It was over.
The deepest cut to date was December, 2018. How has it been 3 years already!?! That was when the Quad exploded, leaving me in the guest room for almost a year before another poor choice that lead me to living alone for the first time as an adult.
This year’s December devastation is an actual death.
Funny enough, it had nothing to do with COVID, but instead a lifetime of struggle both medicated with and caused by alcoholism. Three years ago, he felt the final blow when his 5 year old daughter was murdered by her mother’s new boyfriend.
Byron was my first love… and ‘that first’ for both of us when we were both barely teenagers. I wrote that whole story out the day before he finally let go.
Yesterday I learned that a ‘celebration of life’ is being held for Byron next month in our hometown.
Of all the things that COVID has taken from me, the ability to go grieve with those who knew and loved him hurts most of all. In theory, I could make the 9 hour drive. I could afford a hotel room and work a few longer days earlier in the week so I don’t miss any work hours. I could book the pet sitter that we found for our now-cancelled trip to spend Mexico on the beach with family.
In reality, my hometown is full of red hat wearing, overly religious, anti-vaxxers. I don’t need a mask and Gates isn’t going to inject me with his baby eaters 5G chip. Jesus will protect me… now gimme my guns and let’s go Brandon!
I just can’t bring myself to gather over a potluck and share excess oxygen with people I haven’t seen in decades for the sake of someone who, depending on whether his beliefs held true are not is either in Heaven dancing with his murdered daughter or simply no longer aware and in pain.
Neither of those outcomes for Byron would mean that the physical strain and danger of the trip are worth it for me.
I know all of that logically, but just writing it out brought back the heavy sadness that’s becoming all too familiar.
The hallmark of December in my world. Greif. Pain. Sadness. Loss.
The running joke has become that I picked the perfect time to start drinking again. Chardonnay and smoked Gouda are acceptable in the daylight, right?
One of my oldest and dearest friends is at the end of his very hard life. He has been in pain for so long… physical and emotional agony beyond anything most of us could imagine. I’m trying to find peace in knowing that his suffering has ended.
His heart is still beating. His lungs still fill with air. But the morphine has already taken the last semblance of the man who I once knew. His sister shared a picture of a sad old man in a bed, not him. Not Byron.
Another childhood friend commented-
That’s not my buddy…Doesn’t even look like him. My poor friend. Pure sadness in our hometown. It shouldn't be this way. He's full of energy and sarcasm. My friend... my dear friend.
My heart is breaking in ways I didn’t expect.
The first time I lost him, I was still very young. I moved away from home and simply didn’t know where he’d gone or what had happened in his life after the phone call when I made a choice.
At 16 years old, I was living just a few hours away from where we’d grown up together. I got that call the day after I’d gotten into a relationship with my first husband and father of my only child.
Byron said, “I love you. I’ve always loved you” and he asked me to come home and be with him.
I said no.
Easter Day, 3 years before that phone call, he held my hand on the way home from church. I knew I loved him then.
We shared some firsts and laid the groundwork in my mind and heart about what it means to love and be loved. Until that phone call, I didn’t know he loved me. Or even saw me. I didn’t know that I mattered at all.
I was young and in love and all poetry is bad poetry. These are two of the bad poems I wrote about him.
“Love”
Love is a bottle of vodka
on a cold winter’s night
It warms you
intoxicates you, then offers
Another drink
until you’re hooked
(At the time, I couldn’t have predicted that he would grow up to become an alcoholic.)
“The Toy”
No happily ever with you
just the morning after
then you’re back in her arms
Fucked and forgotten and I was
the toy
Not the one playing…
Byron’s nickname comes from a quote that I believed for so many decades.
“In his first passion woman loves her lover; in all others all she loves is love.”
~George Gordon Byron
For several years after that phone call, I would think about him and wish I’d said yes.
The song “Your Wildest Dreams” by the Moody Blues played on the radio often back then. There isn’t a better way to explain that time without quoting that song. I won’t try.
Almost a decade passed before we found each other again.
I’d married an active-duty soldier 6 weeks before 9/11 and we were living in Germany. Byron was married, unhappily, to the woman who bore his 2nd and 3rd children. I befriended her via MySpace, but life was pure drama for all of us back then. Byron was deep in his alcoholism, living the nightlife, running a comedy club.
There were always stories. He hung out with Nick Cannon. He dated Tonya Harding. He sang karaoke and was always the center of attention. Everyone knew his name, but the “haters” were always trying to bring him down. Chaos. Pure chaos.
After Germany, I moved to Colorado alone, then bought a house in Texas where that marriage ended.
The ink hadn’t dried on my divorce papers before Byron moved in with me in an attempt to start over somewhere new. When I picked him up at the airport, I almost didn’t recognize him until he opened his arms and yelled “Wassup Homette!” or something equally cheesy and, well… Byron.
He waited tables at a restaurant where I worked, dated a girl who took my first college algebra class for me, and cheated on her with a friend of a friend of mine.
I kissed him exactly once in Texas. And I knew immediately that it was wrong. He wasn’t that man to me anymore.
The last time I saw him was when he came to get his things out of my house. The night before, we’d gotten into a fight over him going out for more alcohol. I don’t remember if it was because he was trying to get sober or if he was already just too drunk. He flung one of my kitchen chairs across the room, narrowly missing me. I was devastated.
That was the 2nd time I lost him.
He was working on his sobriety when we re-connected again. He had a little girl and a new wife by then. He wasn’t allowed to see any of his 4 other children, but this little girl was different. He was getting sober so he could be a better father for her.
I was in Arizona with a different soldier when I got a ‘goodbye’ voicemail from him. He’d been living out of his van in the parking lot of the restaurant he was working at. Getting fired from that job pushed him over the edge.
We were connected on Facebook where he’d also posted something similar. I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest. After a few hours of watching the comments, I realized that nobody else was going to do anything to try to help him. I looked up the police department in the town where he lived and spent that night exchanging calls with law enforcement. They found his van but he was nowhere to be found.
I cried myself to sleep thinking I’d lost him again.
The next morning when he returned my call, he was mad that I’d sent the cops after him. But we still ended that call with “I love you.”
From there on, he would randomly just call me to talk about whatever was going on in our lives. He posted “Happy Birthdays” on my Facebook page… his daughter’s birthday was the day after mine. We liked and commented on things we each shared via social media. He was listed as simply “family member” on my “Family and Relationships” page. We were as connected as we could be, despite the years and miles that separated us.
Three years ago this month, my life fell apart again. But it was still bright and sunny on the summer day that same year when the next big hit came. We were on a video call when he told me that he’d been diagnosed with liver cirrhosis. He wanted to call me and tell me about it face to face before sharing it on social media. Talk about bitter irony… finally getting sober only to get really sick from years of alcoholism.
I began bracing myself for losing him again that day.
A few months later he would face an unimaginable heartbreak. That bright beautiful girl who’d inspired his sobriety was taken from him.
He and her mother had gone through a nasty breakup… I’d helped communicate with her to help him get his belongings out of the house where she later moved a murderer in. Devastating doesn’t begin to describe it.
That’s when the phone calls got harder. There were times when I could barely understand his slurred speech. Times where he would tell me something he’d already told me on a call he didn’t remember. There were a lot of tears and reminders that his little girl would want him to keep going.
When my life fell apart, those hard calls still held moments where he did his protective thing asking me if he could come fly out and kick someone’s ass for me. Moments where he told me how much he loved me and how proud he was of the woman I’ve become.
His call on Valentine’s Day, 2020 was right after I’d moved into my own home for the first time ever.
I sobbed when he told me how strong I’ve always been and that I deserved so much better than life had given me.
He gave me all of that love and support in the midst of his own agony, watching and waiting for the man who took his little angel from this earth to be sentenced.
When the first wave of COVID hit, he was making a living stocking grocery and pharmacy shelves. That meant he knew where those hard-to-find items were and had access to buy them before stores opened for the day. He took advantage of that, delivering care packages to people who couldn’t find toilet paper and hand sanitizer.
My care package was a bottle of Tylenol, an unopened thermometer he’d bought for his daughter, and candy- a pack of nerds. That was one of his goofy terms of endearment. Before we could just say “I love you” it was “Love ya, Nerd! Lol!”
That first lockdown was a scary period both because of COVID and because I was alone.
We talked often during that time.
He laughed at my crazy adventures in dating and said that he wanted to be my other boyfriend. The romantic connection between us was long gone but we talked about growing old together, watching Grey’s Anatomy while he acted goofy and sang “Oh-oh Ah-oooh Ah… the right stuff!” while hitting on the nurses in the old folks home.
I had to stop following him on Facebook back in late 2018 after he posted a particular picture from his daughter’s funeral. He was holding her with her head (thankfully) obscured by his head hanging over her blond hair. Her little hands were in her lap with a tiny ring on her finger. She had a frilly white dress on with sparkly silver shoes.
When I would go check on his page, it had become a portrait of a life that wasn’t. There were the repeated cries for help- he was out of money, out of food, homeless on and off. He was sick, injured, in and out of the hospital in excruciating pain.
The happy images were bittersweet because that was his memorial to his little girl.
I sent money when I could and always did my best to pick up his calls, even if all I could do was tell him that I loved him but couldn’t talk.
These last few months he started calling me, telling me that he just wanted to hear my voice. He told me how tired he was, and I finally stopped trying to encourage him to keep going.
I just told him I loved him over and over and did my best not to cry until we hung up.
The first post about him accepting hospice care was back before Thanksgiving. I missed that one because I hadn’t been checking his Facebook as often. I wish I’d have known before he was too far gone to call one more time.
At this point, it’s been a slow-speed car crash that I can’t look away from. On December 5th his sister posted:
My Brother is fading. He’s on 30 mg of morphine per hour. I can’t understand his speech it is slurred from the heavy sedatives. It is my hope to get up there within a couple of weeks. Praying he holds on til I get there. This is so hard.
The next day she shared that the nurses told her that she needed to come as soon as she could.
I reached out and I sent her a little money to help pay for her trip. It’s a 10-hour drive, so I was able to stifle the urge to check her Facebook page for most of the day she traveled. But that was the day I asked my partner to pull out the tub that had all my old pictures in it.
I sat on my office floor with a glass of wine and cried while I rummaged through my memories, looking for the ones of us from when we were kids.
She’s been there for a little less than 2 days now and the images she’s sharing are heartbreaking. Every time I feel like I’ve cried all I can, the urge to check for an update hits and there’s another picture of that sad little man’s body. Not Byron. Not anymore.
Last night, she sent me a direct message. It was a picture of my school ID dated 1992-1993. That would have been my freshman year. He’s held onto it for almost 3 decades through moves, homelessness, marriages, and divorces… a lifetime.
His was not one of those lives where home always had the same zip code. Neither was mine.
Today he officially moved from the hospital into a hospice care facility. He hasn’t eaten in 3 days and his sister said he hasn’t been able to wake up to talk to her. Another friend of his asked if he was going to pull through and she replied simply, “No.”
So now I watch and wait. The same mutual childhood friend just commented:
I'd make him wake up if I was there. Straight up !! I'd be having him singing and dancing right out of that place. Lol !! Play some NKOTB n I bet he'll wake up. Especially "Summertime!!" I sure do wish I was there to comfort my friend, my homie, my brother. Sure hope he gets a waking up. Remember, nkotb if all else fails.
I’m so fucking sad.
So I sent a message to that dear friend who Byron and I grew up with.
It's been a hard week.... thinking of you Dear friend ❤ Here's a little smile for you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbIEwIwYz-c
