When Enough Isn’t Close to Enough

23 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Addictions, Death, Domestic Violence, Happy Birthday, Homelessness, Mother-Son Relationship, Parenting, Parenting Lessons, Poverty, Running Away, Self-Reflection, Soul-Searching, Vanity, Welfare Poverty, Yiscoc Washington

Yiscoc Washington, July 5, 2017. (http://facebook.com).

“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 Mom yelled at us the day before Sarai’s funeral seven Julys ago. 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 Mom’s flat at 616, me, Mom, Maurice, Yiscoc and Eri, being yelled at over a lifetime of disappointment and frustration. Ours and hers.

Today is my brother Yiscoc’s thirty-sixth birthday. That he’s here at all is a bit of a miracle. Especially with the number of times he ran away from 616 between 1989 (when he was eight years old) and 1994, with his one-time video game addiction, and with muggers and pedophiles out there and all too willing to take advantage of a vulnerable preteen.

I started with Mom, though, for a reason. Her yelling at us was probably meant for me, but it was in response to Yiscoc, who shared a personal secret with her for the first time. Mom’s response was to defend her record as a parent, to tell us that we had no right to judge, critique, or assess her record. That she added, “That’s what you get for…” in response to Yiscoc’s tearful sharing session was shameful and disgusting.

“You’re So Vain” (1972), by Carly Simon, 45 cover, cropped, July 23, 2017. (http://avclub.com).

“But you don’t understand, your Mom was mourning the loss of her only daughter,” would be the response of Mom-defenders everywhere. To which I say, really? Your Mom’s response is to push four of your five living children away with a tirade? One where she says, “this fucked up, piece of shit life I helped set up for all of you was the best I could do, and if you don’t like it, that’s on you, and you can kiss my Black ass!” Would that really be acceptable under any circumstances, much less during a week of mourning?

Yiscoc ran away from home, hung out with several wrong crowds, and dropped out of Mount Vernon High School a year and a half before he could have completed his coursework. Seventeen years later, and Yiscoc still doesn’t have his GED (the last two times, he failed the social studies portion of the exam — ain’t that a kicker!). I’m not laying all of this at my Mom’s feet. But Yiscoc’s adult life wasn’t exactly set up for success by his growing up years. The normative permanence of systemic racism on the one hand, and domestic violence, welfare poverty, and the 616 fire of 1995 that left Yiscoc and my other younger siblings temporarily homeless on the other, would make any kid itching to run away.

A second younger brother has now reached the second half of his thirties. Yiscoc’s the same age I was eleven and a half years ago, when I began working on Boy @ The Window in earnest. One of the things I figured out in writing such a torturous book was that I blamed myself for so many of my parents’/legal guardian’s failures and sins. I had blamed myself for not putting an end to the domestic violence at 616 since I was twelve, for not doing enough to support Mom and my younger siblings since I went away to college at Pitt in 1987. I also came to understand how much Mom deflected, defended, and denied when it came to her parenting, especially when we called on her to do more than find temporary shelter, meager food options, and threadbare clothing. Mom was and remains one of the vainest and unaffectionate people I have ever known — vain, insecure, and likely clinically depressed.

“Flash Memory #2” (an unmasking), in stainless steel, by Liu Zhan, Kuang Jun, and Tan Tianwei, 2009. (http://elhurgador.blogspot.com/2012/05/unmask-group-escultura.html; H.T. Gallery, Beijing, China).

I also know that Mom has passed these traits down to each of us. I’ve been dealing directly with them for three decades. I’m not sure Yiscoc has ever peered behind his mask long enough to see Mom lurking in the shadows, warts and all. If he has or ever will, it has been or will be an ugly sight. But if we are truly attempting to rebuild and remake ourselves, it is a sight we must endure. A painful process of honesty, soul-searching, revelation, and admitting that on some level, we’ve fucked up, and been fucked up, by life, oppression, and parenting.

Happy Birthday, Yiscoc. Know that despite everything, I do love you. I hope that this next year brings you closer to the person you want and need to be.

The Things I Can’t Say

28 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Hebrew-Israelite, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Competition, Happy Birthday, Intervention, Jealousy, Life, Mom, Mother-Son Relationship, Sharing, Silence, Trust

U.S. Route 66 shield, made to the specifications of the 2004 edition of Standard Highway Sign, January 27, 2006. (SPUI via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

Today was my Mom’s sixty-sixth birthday. I’m just beginning to come to grips with the fact that Mom’s a senior citizen, considering that she was only twenty-two when she had me in ’69. It’s been a roller coaster ride through hell, with many downs and only a handful of ups over those years. The one casualty in those years that we haven’t overcome has been the ability to share everything that has been my life with her, especially in the last decade.

I learned the hard way sixteen years ago that the lack of distance in age between me and Mom resulted in a sort-of competition. It was one of which I hadn’t been aware until ’97. It involved higher education, finding work and finding full-time work. It involved friendships and relationships, God and church, and finding a passion for a calling. Week after week, and year after year, from ’87 to ’02, I talked on the phone or at 616 with my Mom about these situations and issues. Only to find that my triumphs and failures were only a point of comparison for her, and not a conversation involving life and lessons.

When I finally realized this in ’97, and did an intervention involving my family on this and other issues in ’02, it was the third most emotionally painful thing I’d ever been through. I had to decide how I should talk to my Mom moving forward. I made the choice to not share significant parts of my life with Mom. From that point on, I chose to not discuss any victories or struggles in my jobs, in finding work, in consulting or teaching with her. Nor have I talked about my marriage’s ups and occasional downs, my writings, my publications, my projects, my hopes, my dreams, my fears, or my struggles. Mostly, I’ve only talked about my son and his glacial journey toward adulthood, the weather, my siblings, or something in the news that may be funny or relevant.

Ginsu 9-Inch Japanese Stainless Steel Slicer, October 28, 2013. (http://www.amazon.com).

This has been the case since the summer of ’02. Uncomfortable silences and frequent struggles to think about what to actually discuss that could have real meaning, have been what this has meant for the two of us. Given her response to the intervention I conducted in January ’02, I can only imagine what Mom’s response would be to Boy @ The Window. On the one hand, she would act unimpressed, as if I’d written a book about organic chemistry and nanotechnology. On the other hand, my Mom would likely be seething behind her ho-hum mask, ready to rip my throat out for airing family secrets and dirty laundry. (I actually dreamt as much the other night, being at a book talk with Mom coming over the table, slashing at me with a Ginsu knife).

I haven’t been angry with my Mom for years, and I forgave Mom for any mistakes she made regarding me growing up years ago. But I know my Mom well enough to know that our relationship could never be an adult mother-son one, where I get to be an adult and her son at the same time. Part of that means me remaining silent about a significant part of my life, including a memoir in which she’s a main character. It’s too bad, yet it’s also the way it must be. For my emotional sanity, as well as for hers.

My Mom, Birthday 63

27 Wednesday Oct 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, New York City, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bradley Arkansas, Death, Finding Peace, Funeral Arrangements, Happy Birthday, Mother-Son Relationship, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Regrets

My Mother, Thanksgiving Day 2006. Donald Earl Collins

This has been a rough year for my family. But even with my financial difficulties and writing struggles, teaching, looking for additional work, my wife in grad school and Noah turning seven, nothing compares to what my mother’s gone through in the past few months. In July, my only sister Sarai passed away at twenty-seven after a lifelong struggle with sickle-cell anemia. Earlier this month, my grandmother — my mother’s mother — died after a battle with cancer and dementia at the age of eighty-three.

That’s difficult enough, to lose your only daughter and your mother three months apart. It became a hardship almost immediately. Neither my sister nor my mother made any preparations for Sarai’s death, funeral or burial. “It cost too much,” my mother said after I asked about next steps the morning Sarai passed. It took three days’ worth of work to get Sarai’s afterlife arrangements done. In the case of my mother’s-side grandmother, they were never close. My mother had been back to Bradley, Arkansas to visit her father and mother only two times since she left for the Bronx and Mount Vernon in ’66. Once in the summer of ’69, when she was pregnant with me. The other was in ’04.

Because my mother married and remarried at an early age, I’ve had a front-row seat for watching her in her twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. My mother has always avoided looking back in her life, reflecting on her mistakes or triumphs, or talking about anything that matters other than God. But one thing that was obvious to me when I went home to 616 and Mount Vernon to help with my late sister’s funeral and cremation arrangements was the sense of regret that I could feel coming out of her body. It wasn’t just grief, mourning, the rage that I’ve seen and felt when others dear to me have died. No, there was a sense of deep, repressed regret, about all the things that could’ve and should’ve happened, but never did.

I heard that same sense of missed opportunity in my mother’s voice a few weeks ago, after my mother called to let me know that my grandmother had passed. I’d only met my grandmother once, when I made arrangements during what I called “my Southern poverty tour” as part of my social justice fellowship job to visit Shreveport, Louisiana and Bradley, Arkansas. So while I didn’t feel much for the woman, I did feel for my mother.

I felt for her because unlike my mother, I’ve said everything that I could’ve left unsaid to her years ago. The family intervention (see “The Intervention,” January 21, 2008) I orchestrated nearly nine years ago. All of the arguments we had when I was growing up. My PhD graduation ceremony at Carnegie Mellon in ’97. My I love you’s to her now.

I may regret that our relationship isn’t closer, but at least I know why. I certainly regret how I’ve said some of the things I’ve said to my mother over the years, but not the meaning of my words. The only serious regret I have now is not being in a financial position to do more for my mother than I have over the past quarter-century, to make some aspects of her life easier. Still, all I can wish for her is a Happy Birthday, or at least, a day in which she can find peace. Hopefully, one birthday, she’ll have both.