My mother turned 60 years old just the other day. I sent her a dozen orange roses for the occasion, one for every five years of her life. They should last at least a couple of weeks, since they weren’t in bloom just yet. I also sent her a card, wishing her nothing but a great day, a great decade, and peace on the start of her seventh decade of life.

My mother doesn’t even look close to 60, but as all of you know from other blogs, some of those first six decade have been tough and brutal, for her and for me. My mother was the first of twelve kids for Beulah and Samuel Gill, Sr., born in the small town of Bradley, Arkansas. They were tenant farmers in the Red River Valley of southwest Arkansas, just five miles from the Louisiana border, growing cotton and just enough food to feed what would become a huge family. Bradley was and remains a one-flashing-yellow-light-four-corner town on Route 29. Just over five hundred people lived there, with farms, shotgun houses, and ranch-style homes neatly segregated between a few affluent Whites, lots of poor Whites, and the abundantly poor Black side of town.

Being born into the Gill family in the late 1940s meant that my mother’s life would be a difficult and emotionally tortured one. She started doing household chores when she was five, began her role as a babysitter for her (eventually) eleven siblings when she was six, and graduated to hoeing and picking cotton by the time she was eight. Given that, it’s amazing that she wanted to get married or have kids.

Still, my mother had her half-Choctaw and half-Irish great-grandmother, her great-aunt, and her high school basketball team growing up (they team made the state semifinals in 1965). They all worked in her favor, as all three provided for her emotional well-being as she grew into an attractive six-foot woman. After drifting a bit after her high school graduation in ’65, one of my mother’s cousins came from the Bronx for a visit the next summer and told her that there were good jobs in New York City. Without much thought, my mother took a three-day bus trip from Texarkana to New York to what she hoped would be a new life. Given the alternative of tenant farming and generational poverty, New York must’ve seemed like going to heaven.

Sixteen years, a dead-end job and two abusive husbands later, my mother must’ve been thinking that Mount Vernon was an outpost somewhere on the outskirts of hell. With a fourteen-year-old kid in a school for the retarded, a twelve-year-old (me) getting beat up by the second husband, a three-year-old who all but refused to speak because of his abuse, a one-year-old and another one on its way, it was little wonder that she showed affection about as often as it rains in Death Valley.

My mother represents the opposite spectrum of my issues with women, the side that wants to help every woman in distress, especially women who may be in trouble. For twenty years after Memorial Day ’82, I tried to do everything I could to help my mother and to help make her happy. Over the years — many of which were as a college and grad student — I sent and brought home between $10 and $15,000 to pay for food and bills, to shop for my siblings’ clothes or to take them to a movie or a baseball game, to help take care of whatever needed to be taken care of for her and for my younger siblings.

But it was never enough, and I knew that deep down, even as a teenager. My mother has been on a lifelong search for meaning in her life, for someone or something whom she could pour all of her hope and faith into. Her search would explain why she chose to be with and marry my father Jimme, even with all of his shyness and growing addiction to alcohol as his method of making himself a New York “big shot.” He worked hard, making $300 a week as a janitor working at the Federal Reserve in Manhattan in the late ’60. It would explain why she rebounded into a marriage with my ex-stepfather in ’78 after her divorce from Jimme, for the self-assured and bombastically arrogant Maurice was in some ways the opposite of Jimme (he was more the other side of the same coin). My mother’s search would explain our collective conversion to Hebrew-Israelite Judaism in ’81, her embracing millennial Christianity in the mid and late ’80s, and her cutting herself off from any relationships with men after her second divorce in ’89.

There are many things I don’t like about my mother, both in terms of her outlook on life, the things that she’s done and the mistake she made by commission or omission. From our descent into welfare poverty to being forced to live with an abusive asshole for so many year. My older brother Darren’s stint in a school for the retarded even though he wasn’t retarded. Moving back into 616 East Lincoln three years after a fire had gutted the building in April ’95. Her complete distrust of anyone interested in dating or hanging out with me or any of my siblings. Her bigotry toward everyone who wasn’t poor, Black, heterosexual and from the South. Her refusal to trust anyone in authority, and her lack of confidence in herself and in her abilities.

I spent an entire family intervention in ’02 going over my mother’s faults and mistakes as a way to reach my younger siblings, who had never known my mother to work a regular job or as someone who had hopes, dream, aspirations and the energies to pursue them. I knew that the intervention would change my relationship with my mother for the rest of our lives. I just never anticipated that over the years that our relationship would get better and more like mother and adult son, and less like mother-young son, brother-sister, wife-surrogate husband, etc. Despite all of her ridiculously bad decisions and tendencies to take the path of least resistance, I still love her and want her to be happy. I’ve learned, though, that she has to be the one to want to be happy in order for anything I do to make a difference. I still hold out hope that my mother can find peace and rest in this life, maybe even with someone in her life who’ll take the time to understand her and have the patience to work with her to acknowledge her difficult past and to put it all behind her.

A couple of blogs ago I talked about my two-decade-long struggle to see myself as who I always was, a writer, a person who loved to write and rewrite sentences to say something to the world. Part of what got in the way of my discovering myself as a writer until turning 30 was my obligation to the practical. For years after my ex-stepfather’s abuse of my mother and our fall into poverty I saw it as my duty to help take care of my mother and my four younger siblings. Even going to college was in part a mission for my family, to earn a practical degree so that I could get a practical and decent-paying job. So I started my undergraduate education at Pitt as a Computer Science major, hoping to get a job as a computer programmer in the NYC-area that started at $25K a year.

That was in August ’87, and it was my naive plan for helping to lift my family up out of poverty and the violence of the recent past. Almost as soon as I set my plans in motion, I knew that something felt wrong. I’d taken a Pascal class my junior year at Mount Vernon High School and thoroughly enjoyed it. But the same class at Pitt seemed like a lot of effort for nothing. I got a B on one of my first big projects, a 500-plus line program that kept screwing up because I had two semi-colons out of place. I never felt like my class was something I should enjoy. I did okay enough, a B- in a course I earned a B+ in just a year and a half before.

I thought that it was just a symptom of my homesickness and my disillusionment over my second crush. Then I took a Logic course that was required as part of my major during my second semester. We had a British guy with a bar-handled mustache and over-dyed red hair. He was a professor with subtle British contempt for his American students. In a semester where I channeled all of my hurt and rage into my courses, the Logic course was the only one in which I didn’t do well — I earned a solid C. I never understood what this had to do with programming computers. It wasn’t as if I would be feeding a computer software based on some of my loopy logic problems anyway.

I came away from my freshman year knowing that I needed to change my major to something I loved, History preferably, although American literature would’ve worked as well. I knew all of this. I just couldn’t do it at first. My unemployed summer of ’88 experience didn’t help matters. “What can do you with a History degree,” I could hear my mother saying to me if I dared to change my degree and my plans to help her and my siblings. I could also hear what some of my former high school classmates said to me my senior year. “The only thing you can do with History is play Jeopardy,” one of them said in derision that year. Another classmate, jealous of my class ranking (14th out of 545), said “History’s the only reason you’re ranked in the top twenty.”

So I proceeded to take an Assembly Language course at the beginning of my sophomore year at Pitt, the Fall of ’88. After my week of homelessness, I was already a week behind in the course. For those of you unfamiliar with Assembly Language, it’s the language that makes sense out of all of the 0s and 1s that tell computers to do everything from turning on and off to turning every letter I’m typing into this Georgia font. My first program for the semester earned me a 50, which was in the middle of the pack. I could have coasted frustratedly to a C or a C+ by the end of the semester. What bothered me the most, though, was the fact that I knew that I couldn’t stand another nanosecond of this course, of any course, involved computer programming and systems analysis. If I somehow had been able to grow a mullet, I would’ve torn it out of my head by the time the middle of October rolled around.

I met with my teaching assistant from the Western Civilization II course I’d taken in the spring and told him my situation. He smiled and said, “Who cares what you do with your degree, as long as you’re happy doing it? The rest will fall into place.” Looking back, I know that taking advice from a poor history grad student about my life and career prospects probably wasn’t the wisest thing I could’ve done. But it was better than anything I would’ve gotten at home.

On Tuesday, October 18 of ’88, I called my mother collect from one of the front entrance phone booths inside William Pitt Student Union (I could barely afford to eat, much less a phone in my fire trap of my one-room in a falling-apart rowhouse). Then I told her what I had done that afternoon. That I had marched into the College of Arts & Sciences office on the eighth floor of the Cathedral of Learning and changed my major to History. There was a long pause on the other end of the phone, which seemed to go on longer than a Grateful Dead concerts. Finally, she said, “Are you sure, Donald? What you gonna do with a History degree?” “I don’t know yet, but I’ll figure it out,” I said in response.

That was just a day more than 19 years ago, a lifetime since my confusion over who I was going to college for. I learned something that day, something I sometimes need to remind myself of on occasion. That we all need to live our lives for ourselves as much as we do to benefit others, and sometimes, despite the others would may need your help. If I had followed through and earned a B.A. in Computer Science from Pitt, my mother and family would’ve been moderately happy, but I know I would’ve been miserable.

People make too many tradeoffs in the illusion that what they are doing for money will offset their unhappiness and help maintain the life that they want to have, for themselves and their loved ones. I know first-hand that for so many of us, this is an excuse waiting for a reason, and fear of failure or of disapproval or loss is that reason. Dreams may not pay the bills (although they can in my case), but they do make life worth living.

Tomorrow is October 16. Thirty-eight years ago tomorrow, the New York Mets won their first World Series, taking the Baltimore Orioles in five games. A little bit more than two months later, I came into the world, destined to be a Mets fan before a became an ex-baseball fan in the 1990s. Because I still remember that the Mets won their first World Series on October 16th of ’69, I also remember that the birthday of my second crush-turned-obsession is also tomorrow. It’s not exactly something that I remember with fondness.

Let’s rewind two decades to the days before 10/16/87. I was beginning to experience homesickness and I was tired of wondering about the past summer and the betrayal and disappointment I felt after being humiliated by this former crush and her sister (see July 23, 2007 blog “A Dream That Had to Die”). I’d been unsuccessful in my first feeble attempts at dating in my first semester of college at the University of Pittsburgh, so that didn’t exactly inspire confidence. But I remembered what a female friend of mine had told me about being more assertive, more determined about my dealings with women at the end of the summer. I felt like I had nothing to lost.

So about a week before October 16th, I bought a purple birthday card with a purple envelope. I wrote up my feelings about my crush and how I saw things regarding the summer that had passed and confronted her about the things that she had said about me in a letter I included with the card. I went to Hillman Library, found her university’s dorm room numbers and got her address. I remember putting the card and letter in the mail and thinking, “Let’s see if she responds.”

About two weeks later, she responded in what I’d call a Prince and the Revolution sort of way. If anyone’s old enough or a fan enough to remember, Prince practically invented text messaging about a decade before ordinary cell phone and pager owners started using it. My second crush wrote an entire letter in Prince short hand, with heart shapes as dots over her “i”s included and “2” for “to”. She admitted that she was talking about me with her sister in July and that she did in fact “like” me at one point. But that was all in the past, and that it was time to move on. Her letter in response helped open up a wound of distrust that I carried for almost a full year after that.

I no longer had any interest in dating, save if it led directly to sex (not that I was successful in this either). What was more important was that I had even less confidence around women my age than I did before my summer of obsession over my second crush. And that lack of confidence affected everything. My grades, my will to overcome my circumstances, my wanting to stay at the University of Pittsburgh or in any other college, my wanting to form new friendships.

Seeing my 2.63 GPA at the end of my first semester did snap me out of my depression at the end of ’87. But it was my almost single-minded determination–anger and controlled rage really–to push past the shattering of my image of my second crush that kept me motivated the following semester to correct the mistake of my first seventeen weeks. One of the great things about a university as large as the University of Pittsburgh is that it serves as a great place to break patterns, to break with the past and embrace new and diverse ideas, people, ways of seeing the world. I did that the following semester, all while calling people who weren’t in my immediate circle “assholes” and “bitches”.

But even in that semester and for the next couple of years, even with dating and a new set of friends and great academic success, it took time to learn how to trust women. I thought that every woman who had an interest in me had an ulterior motive of one kind or another, which caused me to shut them down before they had a chance to introduce themselves. I just refused to believe that they liked me for me unless they were obviously brilliant in their own right or unless mutual lust was the ulterior motive.

It took until my senior year at Pitt and the summer before graduate school to begin to trust all of my instincts about women in general, to see each woman as a whole human being rather than as some triflin‘ viper seeking to hurt me or exploit me in some way. I guess it took that long because I didn’t want to get hurt again, to feel that sense of betrayal and shame that I felt before I was even old enough to vote. It’s the same sense of betrayal and shame I felt when witnessing my mother’s abuse or experiencing abuse first-hand.

Still, I had to get over some of this lack of trust long before my senior year. Otherwise I wouldn’t have made new friends or dated at all or even made it through my third semester at Pitt, which included my week of homelessness and two months of living off of $200 and giving plasma to Sera–Tec twice a week for $25. My lack of trust–of people and of women–didn’t start with my second crush. But that letter exchange twenty years ago pushed me to the edge of the abyss, to my psychological breaking point, before my trust in the One and my rage brought me back from the brink. All of this, of course, is in Boy At The Window.

I’ve been married for almost 7.5 years, and haven’t had much trouble in my dealings with women since the early ’90s. Still, it was a sharp learning curve, one that couldn’t have happened without getting hurt somewhere down the line. It certainly wasn’t any fun. But I guess that it was worth it in the end.

In the spirit of Columbus Day minus the theatrics over whether Columbus really discovered anything at all, I have a few things to say about my path to becoming a writer. Given what many of you have read on my blog over the past few months, it would be safe to assume that mine was hardly an easy journey to writer.

But it did start early. I was eleven when I first got the bug. My sixth grade teacher asked me to submit an essay for a city-wide competition for sixth, eighth and twelfth graders in Mount Vernon’s public schools. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote about, something about current affairs and race. It was ’81, still a time when many folks thought that racism and all of its ugly legacy would soon be at an end. I finished second in the competition, which was hosted by the local newspaper, the Mount Vernon Daily Argus (it no longer exists, replaced by Gannett Suburban Newspapers in the ’90s). I won $15, got my name in the paper, and went to A.B. Davis Middle School on the day I finished sixth grade to receive my award. But not before also introducing a future city council member and mayor at my elementary school graduation earlier that day.

In the summer that followed, I decided to write a book about the top secret weapons of the US military. I spent most of July and a good portion of August looking up information on the latest technologies in airplanes, tanks, submarines and missiles, hoping to find something that hadn’t already been reported on by the media. I also contacted the Defense Department to get pictures of their latest pieces of hardware. Even though I’d only sent a handwritten letter to “To Whom It May Concern,” I actually received a response that included pictures. Of the M1 Abrams tank, the B1 bomber, the F-15 and F-16 fighters for the Navy and Air Force, and the MX missile. Interesting pictures, but not exactly classified.

After about fifty pages of writing, I lost interest in my project. School and my first days in the gifted track magnet program known as Humanities was about to start. My studies of Hebrew and the Torah, the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing, had begun to take over. And my mother had given birth to Yiscoc (pronounced Yizz-co) at the end of July, giving me a second younger brother and more responsibility.

Many of you who’ve been reading know some of the rest of the story. After a year of domestic violence and abuse at home and near outcast status in my nerd program, I almost completely forgot about the writer I’d wanted to become. Instead, my focus was on survival and making it to college by any way I could. I remember times in middle school and high school when a four-page paper seemed like an impossible task. Yet almost every teacher I had told me, “Donald, if you’d work a little harder, you could be a really good writer” out of complete astonishment. I took their words as a sign of insult, of an inability to understand that a child under the constraints of poverty and abuse couldn’t possibly “work harder” as a writer. Plus, as I told my AP English teacher during my senior year at Mount Vernon High School, “I don’t want to be a starving artist like Edgar Allan Poe or Emily Dickinson.”

So I spent my teenage years and most of my 20s in denial about my gift and the “discovery” that so many others had made about me. I went into the University of Pittsburgh with the ability to write in a sophisticated manner combined with the way I wrote when I was eleven. It was good enough to get me through my classes without making any improvements at all. Fortunately for me one of my instructors took an interest in me as a writer, took the time to point out my “colloquialisms” and “extended sentences” or helped me in formulating better arguments. I was grateful for the help, but didn’t think about it as a sign that I was born to write.

The re-discovery of myself as a writer began where it had gone off track, at home in Mount Vernon and with the end of my mother’s marriage to my stepfather in ’89. It was the end of the threat of violence and the need to live my life for me instead of for my mother and younger siblings that drove me to take my old writing from ’81 and ’82 and merge them with my memories of the more recent and chaotic past. I spent a significant part of my junior year at Pitt journaling about witnessing my mother’s abuse or my own experience with it, about running away from home or about being a Hebrew-Israelite. I took my first class in Black Studies because it was a literature class. I attempted to also take Creative Writing, but I could never get into the class because every student on campus seemed to beat me to the punch.

Then I got lost in the academic for about eight years. I saw myself as “an historian who loved to write,” I said on my occasions to my obnoxious professors and cut-throat fellow grad students who couldn’t believe that I wrote as well as I did, at Pitt and at Carnegie Mellon. One of the professors on my dissertation committee said, “You might want to think about a career in journalism,” what I considered an insulting response to my well-written and highly analytical thesis on multiculturalism and mid-twentieth century Black Washington, DC. I was determined to be a professor, to be a scholar and an intellectual (more on why the two are different later). Yet I also knew that something was gnawing at me, at my spirit. I knew deep down that something was struggling to come out and that I wouldn’t be happy until I knew what this something was.

The third age of discovery happened nearly eight years ago. My one-time literary agent asked me to take my erudite manuscript Fear of a “Black” America and make it more accessible to the non-academic reading public, especially since I wanted to reach them. I felt insulted again, but realized that she was right. “Therefore”, “thus” and “indeed” were all too much a part of my vocabulary, along with the standard 40-plus word compound sentence. In rewriting sentences, paragraphs, even entire chapters, I re-discovered my original calling. “I’m a writer who happens to be an academic historian,” I said to my wife one day in the spring of 2000. It had taken nearly two decades, but the person I was always meant to be had finally and fully surfaced.

I’ve wondered ever since if I waited too long to become a successful writer, if it would’ve been better if I had gone after this calling ten or twenty years ago. Or maybe I’m just a late-bloomer, that really all I have to hope for are a few minor and significantly underread publications in obscure journals or magazines. Life is what it is for each of us, where each one of us opens or closes a door to things, dreams, nightmares that can define us or destroy us.

Yeah, it would’ve been nice to have gone after Boy At The Window as a book in ’92 instead of ’02. But I know that at twenty-two and only three years removed from the terror of my childhood that I wasn’t ready to take a long hard look at my deep scars and the people who caused them. At thirty-two and years removed from those mama’s-boy years, I could stare at the abyss of my past and then take it apart, bit by bit, and put it back together again.

I’ve been a practicing Christian now for 23.5 years, a Christian in response to living with the dead, repressive and bizarre Hebrew-Israelite religion between the ages of eleven and fourteen. It was a conversion born out of desperation and a sense of hopelessness. For whatever reason, I needed something and someone to believe in who couldn’t and wouldn’t betray me, wouldn’t let me down as an imposter of some sort or another.

It all came to a head on my fourteenth birthday, December 27th of ’83. After a mugging incident and my Humanities classmates treating me like a real human being for a couple of weeks, I found myself in more despair that what had become normal over the past year and a half. Combined with my stepfather threatening to beat me up again because I allowed four boys to jump me at night and steal $13 from me–this despite defending myself vigorously for about three minutes before one of them reached in my pocket to take the money–I was just tired of feeling alone in the world.

That day, my birthday, was to be the day I would attempt to take my own life. I thought about two methods really. One involved getting hold of a samurai sword and committing seppuku, or suicide by ritual self-disembowelment. I certainly felt ashamed enough. But it was too messy, too painful, too much for skinny me. The other was an elaboration on my earlier thoughts of jumping off the bridge on East Lincoln that connected my part of Mount Vernon to Pelham. The Hutchinson River Parkway ran underneath.

I went down and around this stone bridge that cold and hazy afternoon. There was a path, a hiker’s walkway under the parkway and a pedestrian bridge that went under the overpass, crossing the Hutchinson River (really a stream at this point of its run) into Pelham. I looked at the bridge height sign from that spot as cars flew by on the parkway. It read “13.2 feet.” Then I walked from the river and made it back up to the bridge. I looked down at the cars underneath as I put myself, one leg at a time, atop the short stone wall, meant to keep young kids from falling off the bridge I guess. As I stood there, I kept thinking “What do I have to live for anyway?” Tears started to well up as I continued to look down at the cars zooming by on both sides of the four-lane parkway.

Then I had thoughts. And having any thoughts at all, especially thoughts of anything other than suicide, will short-circuit any attempt to kill yourself. One was of the remote possibility that taking my life could actually hurt someone else, my mother, my family, maybe even my classmates or teachers. A second, even more sobering thought was that I could survive the thirteen-foot jump. Only to be run over by a car going at fifty or fifty-five. And I could possibly survive that, too. But I could end up brain-damaged or paralyzed or a vegetable in a coma. There were too many risks involved to just jump off the bridge. For a few seconds I stood there, lost and not sure of what to do next. My next thought, my third one, was that maybe, just maybe, this is what hitting bottom really feels like. Maybe something good for me and my life was just around the corner. Maybe if I hold out a little longer, I’ll find a reason to live my life and live it well. My fourth thought brought me to Maurice. “Wouldn’t that be the best revenge, that I overcome every situation in my life and become successful? Wouldn’t making the ultimate comeback from the edge of the cliff be better than ending it all now?,” I thought.

With that, I got down from the stone wall and went on a long walk through Pelham before going home. I spent the rest of my time off going through everything I could find at home and at Mount Vernon Public Library about Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three major religions west of India as I saw it. I wanted to know once and for all how to situate myself spiritually. I didn’t want to wake up at thirty only to realize I wasted another fifteen years, ready to commit suicide again. I picked up an old Bible we had in a storage bin underneath my bed. I went to the library to compare Biblical text with the Qur’an. I read key Talmud scriptures that matched up with key Islamic ones.

Two revelations came to me from these exercises. One was that there wasn’t much of a difference between Islamic and orthodox Jewish law. The other was much more significant. Forgiveness and redemption wasn’t automatic in either belief system. You had to go through some form of ritualized spiritual purification to gain Jehovah or Allah’s amazing. You had to earn your forgiveness if you were a Jew, a Muslim, or a Hebrew-Israelite. Messing up even in the smallest of ways left you on the spiritual outside looking in for a connection to The One. It was like being disconnected over the telephone with no way to dial back in except through a holy day of atonement.

In reading the Gospels, it started sinking in that Jesus’ life was about providing a path for each of us to gain unconditional and unearned forgiveness, including me. I read the New Testament at home late at night so that I wouldn’t get caught venturing into forbidden scriptures. Somewhere between Matthew and Mark I found myself, maybe for the first time, realizing that I’ve been searching for someone to save me. From myself, from my family, from a life without meaning, from a life of hell-on-earth, and certainly from an afterlife without my proper place in it. I was finally in a place where I felt like I could turn myself over to my God, possibly through Jesus.

But I wanted to be as sure about this decision as I could be. After the last few years of watching my mother, Maurice and Jimme make so many horrifying and almost fatal ones, I wanted this decision to be more correct that any 100 I’d gotten on any test. I wanted my potential conversion to Christianity to feel as good as I did the day I served as the introductory speaker at my elementary school graduation. And above all else, I wanted to be at peace with my decision so that if anyone asked me about the Hebrew-Israelite thing again, I could respond to their questions—and their questioning of my decision—with honesty and good information.

It took four more months of research at Mount Vernon Public Library and using my Afro-Asian History and Literature classes to explore different religions before I became a Christian. Despite my wildest expectations, my life didn’t immediately get better. It would be another three years before I went off to college, and another five before my stepfather would be out of our lives.

But I did learn something about the need to have something, someone to hold on to in my mind and heart in order to–as Jesse Jackson would say–“keep hope alive,” to invest my faith in. I wasn’t ready to put that kind of unshakable faith in myself, and every person of authority in my life had proven to be unable to live up to the minimal expectations of food, clothing, shelter, security or love that I had. For me at least, becoming an atheist would’ve meant giving up on the idea that someone out there had a vested interest in me succeeding and surviving this life, that my life was indeed worth living. While my faith and my relationship with God and Christianity has had its ups and downs since April of ’84, the lesson of the importance of hope and faith to make my life worth something hasn’t been lost.