On Mother’s Day and Areas of Gray, Revisited

08 Sunday May 2022

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, race, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

616 East Lincoln Avenue, Abuse, Death, Disappointment, Intervention, Mother's Day, Mother-Son Relationship, Nurturing, Trauma, White Evangelicalism

My Mother’s Associate’s Degree Photo, Westchester Business Institute, May 12, 1997.

I originally wrote this blog 11 years ago this week, on the edge of my wife’s master’s graduation ceremony at American University. Little has changed since 2011. Except my younger siblings are all approaching or over 40. Our son is officially a young adult, applying to colleges after a gap year, and we have a dog. My mom has leaned so hard into white-bred evangelicalism, making herself a MAGA and a not-so-closeted Trump supporter in the process. As I have said in recent months, I can no longer execute the ritual of calling her once every four to six weeks. My spirit and mind can no longer take the gaslighting that comes with these phone conversations. I haven’t talked to her since the start of 2022. I am in year 53, but my mom still talks to me like I am 17, and a naïve teenager at that.

Here’s a reminder to everyone who is spending this weekend and will spend time tomorrow celebrating their mother’s unconditional affection and love that this kind of mother — despite whatever Hallmark and Lifetime attempts to communicate — is not a universal mom. Just like the universal use of “women” without a qualifier all too often equals white women, becoming a mom assumes everyone has loving, nurturing moms. And this is simply not true. There is so much gray between the Hallmark-card-mom and Mommie Dearest.

“I took care of my kids! I put food on the table, put a roof over y’all’s heads, put clothes on yo’ back! I did the best that I could, and none of y’all can tell me different…” That’s what my mother yelled to us the day before Sarai’s funeral last July. It was an excited utterance, after she had spent five days in a trance, unable to do as much as eat a piece of toast. We were in the living room of our place at 616, me, Mom, Maurice, Yiscoc and Eri, being yelled at over a lifetime of disappointment and frustration. Ours and hers.

Folks have been posting all week on Facebook and Twitter about their wonderful, loving and supportive mothers, practically requiring people like me to do the same. As if all mothers all alike. As if all mothers are either the best or the worse. As if a good mother should be put on a pedestal like a trophy or gold medal, and a bad mother to not be mentioned at all. After all, most of us prefer not to hear bad news.

My mother was neither the best nor the worst mother in the world. She ultimately was and remains a contradiction of advice and action. She told us growing up never to depend on the government for handouts, but ended up on welfare from ’83 to ’99. She’d advise us to go to school and college, yet did almost nothing to help any of us get there. She’d complain about us not getting along as a family. Then call my younger siblings “Judah babies” and tell me that I was just like my alcoholic dad.

I’d dealt with all of this, all of the awful decisions and refusals to make any decisions about family, her life, her marriage to Maurice, the abuse that I had to put up with. The intervention I did for my younger siblings, for me and for Mom back in January ’02 had in most respects put the issue of my mother’s mistakes to bed for the family. Or so I thought.

All of that came back to me as I listened to my mother yell at us from seemingly out of nowhere that terribly hot and sticky Friday, the sixteenth of July last summer. I stood, then sat, on the new yet cheap beige couch in the living room, sweating next to a barely working window fan. I watched Mom’s contorted face spew its sharpen words, like arrows raining down on us. I could only think, Not good enough, Mom! Your best wasn’t good enough. I didn’t say it. Because I’d already said it back in ’02.

Her best hadn’t been good enough that week. Neither Sarai nor Mom had taken out life insurance, so it was either “ask Donald” or pass-the-hat time. Mom’s best hadn’t put food on the table one out of every three days between the end of ’81 and the middle of ’86. Her best left us behind in rent for nearly three years, had lost her a job with Mount Vernon Hospital, had led us to welfare. Doing the best that she could had made us Hebrew-Israelites and left us with an abusive, cheating Maurice/Judah as the alleged man of the house for most of the ’80s.

Most importantly, Mom’s fatal flaw as a mother was her lack of love and support for us as we moved from baby to toddler, toddler to little kid, kid to preteen, teenager to adulthood. We were all one group of burdens dumped onto her by a God that used us as a test of her as a mother and person. Mom said as much, multiple times, over the ’80s and ’90s.

I know that some of you will find this post offensive simply because I’m talking about my mother, the woman who gave birth to me. That’s just too bad. There’s a lot of gray between a great mother and a horrible one. My mother made a lifetime’s worth of bad decisions and path-of-least-resistance non-decisions that scarred me and my other siblings for life.

I love my mother for all the good that she did and all the good that she did teach me growing up. But that doesn’t me I should gloss over her record as a mother, provider and worker, especially during my growing up years. It means that there’s a lot I don’t like about my mother, who she was and is, and things she didn’t do well or didn’t do at all. It means that she has a limited sense of the responsibility she had when giving birth to me and to my five other siblings.

It also means that Mother’ Day for me remains very complicated. I’ve been buying my mother cards since ’84, and will continue to do so. And every year, finding the right card is hard, like looking for a good shoe for my nearly flat, quadruple-wide, size-fourteen feet. Still, I do the very best I can, because after all, she’s still my mother, and I love her with all of my heart.

In the years since, I have resolved some long buried issues, with neglect, sexual assault, and ass-whuppin’ abuse, long before life at 616, the Hebrew-Israelite years, and my mom’s gradual adoption of whiteness-dipped evangelicalism. Today will be my 39th year wishing my mom a good day on Mother’s Day with a card. But as much as I want to, I cannot celebrate this day with her, even as I celebrate my partner’s nearly 19 years of motherhood. With each passing year, it becomes more painful and sad for me. Maybe today’s the day I stop calling my mom on Mother’s Day, too. Mind you, it’s not out of anger or spite, or even a refusal to accept reality. At this stage of my life, I simply need to protect my heart. I am already disappointed, and from my mom’s perspective, a disappointment.

My Take on Carnegie Mellon University

23 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

47 Percent Video, Affirmative Action, Alumni Association, Barbara Lazarus, Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Mellon University, CMU, Conservatism, Disappointment, Exclusion, Fundraising, History Department, Isolation, Joe Trotter, Mitt Romney, Pitt, Silent Treatment, University of Pittsburgh

View of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning from Carnegie Mellon lawn, Pittsburgh, PA, October 22, 2012. (http://www.broadwayspotted.com/).

It’s with extreme disappointment in which I write my latest post, this one on Carnegie Mellon University, or as the locals and attendees call it, CMU (sorry, Central Michigan University folks). But I feel I have little choice, given the amount of crap I’ve received over the past few months from my doctoral institution. The alumni association and the fundraising people at Carnegie Mellon ask me for money at least twice a week, and don’t seem to get it when I say “no” or “never” or even “when Hell freezes over.” I’ve known creditors less persistent about getting money out of people than the fundraising arm of Carnegie Mellon.

The last straw for me, though, was last week. I received three emails on the same day, not to mention a letter in the mail, all asking for donations. One also included an alumni survey, which I dutifully filled out and rated Carnegie Mellon at the low-end of every category in the survey. “Not only do I not mentor my students or aspiring college students about Carnegie Mellon,” I said. “I go out of my way to make sure that they do not ever consider applying to or attending Carnegie Mellon,” I added at the end of the survey.

Romney in 47 Percent Video, September 18, 2012. (Joe Pompeo/http://capitalnewyork.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright Laws – cropped/low resolution.

I don’t think that the alumni association or the fundraisers really understand the depths of my disappointment regarding my four years at CMU between ’93 and ’97. I found the university culture about as welcoming as going to a Mitt Romney fundraiser in Boca Raton, and with many folks from the same crowd as well. Anytime your campus refuses to recognize Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a holiday, or insists on having Dinesh D’Souza give a two-hour talk on race without an opposing viewpoint, it’s a stifling place. A campus in which the College Republicans stage marches while not having a strong College Democrats or progressive group in place is a bastion of conservatism, not just politically, but socially as well.

In four years, I became friends with a very small group of students and professors. I would’ve made more of an effort, if I hadn’t been told practically from day one that my master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh and my other achievements meant little because, well, I had a degree from Pitt. And these sentiments came from my professors!

From my fellow students — who often walked by me as if I were a ghost until I forced them to say “Hi” — there was the impression that I must’ve gotten into the History program under some “special dispensation,” as one White guy put it. Yeah, my M.A. — earned in two semesters with a real committee examination — and a year of PhD work had nothing to do with my ability to write rings around my fellow students!

All in all, my Carnegie Mellon experience only worked out as well as it did because I reached out beyond my department and beyond the university to maintain connections and friendships with real people. My list of good folks at Carnegie Mellon is pretty short. The late Barbara Lazarus (see my post “Ladies and Gentlemen, Dr. Barbara B. Lazarus” from July ’09), Susan McElroy, John Hinshaw (who himself didn’t talk to me for two years after I’d gotten a Spencer Fellowship), and “My Friend Matt” (September ’12). The Black Graduate Student Organization (or BGSO), the graduate students of color/women graduate students working group that Barbara headed, and our group of fourteen doctoral students of color (the total number of non-White and non-Asian PhD students at Carnegie Mellon). That and playing intramural and pick-up basketball as much as three times a week were the sum total of my positive people and experiences at CMU.

Carnegie Mellon’s University Center, or “the new sanitarium,” October 22, 2012. (via Wikipedia).

I spent the majority of my non-classroom time on Pitt’s campus hanging out with friends there, working on my dissertation, meeting with some of my former professors, or otherwise enjoying my status as an alumnus. If anything, I needed to walk across that bridge between Carnegie Mellon, Schenley Park and Pitt as much as I did in order to keep my sanity, to make sure that I was essentially the same person I’d been while going to grad school with comparatively less uptight folk.

Of course, I could also go on about how my experiences with Joe Trotter as my advisor (see my “Outrage, Maybe” post from May ’10) turned me into an anti-Carnegie Mellon advocate, or how the sanitarium look of the university buildings could leave Polyanna depressed. But for those involved in alumni fundraising and related tasks at Carnegie Mellon, get this. I will never, ever, ever, give CMU one penny of my hard-earned dollars. I’d sooner give my idiot ex-stepfather a penny at his grave before you could pry a cold copper piece out of my hands, alive or dead. As far as I’m concerned, you owe me for four years of unnecessary anguish in the midst of my determined success.

This Is No Korra-Nation

14 Saturday Jul 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Pop Culture, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Authenticity, Avatar, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Avatar: The Legend of Korra, Bryan Konietzko, Cultural Traditions, Disappointment, Korra, Michael DiMartino, Modernity, Nickelodeon

Avatar: The Legend of Korra – Welcome to Republic City (game screen shot), April 10, 2012. (Harryhogwarts via Wikia.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because image is only being used to visually identify the subject.

I wish that this was only a pun. But, Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko’s Avatar: The Last Airbender spinoff The Legend Of Korra was only a legend in their own minds. It’s not that Korra’s first season wasn’t a good one. It’s that Korra could not possibly live up to what was the greatest animation series of all-time.

Any fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender couldn’t help but be disappointed with the first season of Korra. First, it took four years for them to bring Korra to Nickelodeon, and a full twenty months after they released the first stills for the new series in August ’10. They wasted two of those years making the terrible live-action The Last Airbender (2010) as directed by M. Night Shyamalan (see my “The Last Airbender, or Shyamalan’s Cynical Egg?” post from July ’10).

Korra, Avatar: The Legend of Korra (artwork), October, 2011. (http://fanpop.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as image is only being used to identify blog subject.

So Korra was behind the 8-ball already when the show officially launched in April. Then the first episode began, exploding through waterbender Avatar Korra’s growing-up years in about three and a half minutes. That opening scene set the tone for all twelve of the first season’s episodes. One could sort of justify the rapid pace of Korra because she’d already mastered three of the four elements and because the spin-off had moved seventy years into the future, and a somewhat modern one at that. But the pace left little room for character development and the clear-cut personality distinctions that made Avatar: The Last Airbender the ultimate experience.

It took three episodes for me to find a good-and-honest scene that produced a personality quirk (see Bolin as a poor man’s Sokka here) and a hearty laugh. You got no sense of how Tenzin became part of Republic City’s council, or how tension-filled his life must’ve been as the responsible son of the great Avatar Aang. The elderly Katara appeared in a couple of scenes, and there was no attempt to explain the intervening years between the end of the Hundred-Year War until the last couple of episodes. Even then, these were fleeting scenes in a fast-paced, let’s-get-Korra-to-the-Avatar-State season.

The sheer lack of an attempt at authenticity with Korra, though, was what I found most disappointing. Seven decades into the future with modern technologies would create cultural tensions for sure, but it certainly wouldn’t wipe out the traditions of the four nations, even in Republic City. That, and only flashes of the spirituality that was completely infused in Avatar: The Last Airbender, made Korra a poor facsimile for whatever tensions between tradition and modernity that the main character faced in the first season.

I plan to watch Season 2, assuming that DiMartino, Konietzko and Nickelodeon plan on putting out a second season of Korra now that Season 1 is over. But I’ve lowered my expectations for the new series, especially if the creators intend to continue to rush through plots. It was as if Avatar Korra was on an out-of-control 2 Subway rumbling through Midtown Manhattan, about to flip over and derail.

After The Fall

18 Friday May 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Politics, race, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

6007 Penn Circle South, Angelia N. Levy, Betrayal, Bitterness, Carnegie Mellon University, Contaminated Food, Disappointment, Emotional Wreck, Gastrointestinal Illness, Heartbroken, Joe Trotter, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, My Mother, PhD Graduation, Pittsburgh, Rage, Summer of Abuse

The planet Caprica under nuclear attack, Battlestar Galactica (2003), September 28, 2011. (Gary Hutzel/SyFy Channel via http://soundonsight.org). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of low resolution of picture.

Fifteen years ago this date, I officially graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with my PhD, no thanks to Carnegie Mellon itself (see my post “The Audacity of Youth, Grad School Style” from August ’11). I’d been done with the dissertation since the Friday before Thanksgiving ’96, so the ceremony itself was anticlimactic. The week of my graduation, though, revealed more about my mother and the ugly truth about how conditional our relationship was than I knew or thought possible (see my post “My Post-Doctoral Life” from May ’08 for much more).

All of that was on top of a week that included doing an interview at Teachers College, going to my mother’s associate’s degree graduation and being followed while Black at the Barnes & Noble that used to be on 66th and Broadway in Manhattan. That week came on the heels of recovering from the ordeal that was the political struggle over my dissertation process with Joe Trotter (see my “You’re Not Ready” and “Running Interference” posts from November ’08 and April ’11).

By the time I went back into town with my girlfriend (now wife of twelve years) Angelia from Pittsburgh International Airport, I was in a space I hadn’t been in since the late spring and summer of ’82. The “summer of abuse” at 616, as I call it now (see my “To My Ex-Stepfather” post from July ’09). My pursuit of higher education, then advanced degrees and career options, and all of the success — direct, collateral and otherwise — that came with that striving and those triumphs was apparently a lot of what had kept me grounded for the previous fifteen years.

Lava lake, Mount Nyiragongo (volcano), Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo, May 7, 2011. (Cai Tjeenk Willink via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

Now that I was done, and I was able to see people for who they really were, I found myself unbound. A deep well of rage — along with a bucket of betrayal with which to haul it up — was suddenly available to me, and would remain so for years to come. For the first time since the beginning of my sophomore year at Pitt, I felt despair, as if I was homeless and sleeping on a stairwell landing in Forbes Quadrangle again. I spent that cab ride back to East Liberty in an emotional fog, somewhere between tearing up and ready to beat someone half to death.

Angelia brought me back to her place, made me sit down, and insisted that she make dinner for me. She pulled out of her freezer some leftover stir-fry vegetables and turkey from Thanksgiving ’96, and made it into a stir-fry over rice. I was about halfway through this meal before my brain began receiving messages from my normally precise palate. “Stop eating!,” my synapses started screaming. The food I’d eaten had probably gone bad long before Angelia had frozen it. And despite the sweet and sour and soy sauces, it also became apparent that the meat had experienced severe freezer burn.

Within a few minutes, I had severe bloating and pain in my stomach, and Angelia had given me water and Pepto Bismol to settle my stomach. She apologized, “Sorry, Donald,” with an ironic laugh, adding, “This just isn’t your day.” I went back to my studio apartment on Penn Circle South that evening, in pain in many more ways than one.

My intestinal pains became worse over the next three days. I wasn’t eating much to begin with, and what I

Chemical structure of bismuth subsalicylate, aka, Pepto Bismol, September 5, 2007. (Edgar181 via Wikipedia). In public domain.

had in my system as a result of Angelia’s poisonous gruel had resulted in an intestinal blockage. A clear-headed person would’ve gone to the ER and had himself checked out. But my brain was about as clear as a mushroom cloud in the middle of Central Park. I could barely move, it hurt just sitting up, and I cried, sometimes in my sleep. At some point, the pain in my gastrointestinal tract and the pain from my graduation ceremony merged as one and the same.

Was I experiencing some psychosomatic trauma? It wouldn’t have been the first time my emotional flaying manifested itself in my G/I tract. Angelia’s food may have been the catalyst, but the realization that my mother was never really on my side — along with my advisor and some of my friends — was the root cause.

By that Friday, I was able to eat again. But like my relationship with my mother, my intestinal tract has never been the same. Betrayal and loss of trust — and faith — will do that to the most confident of us.