Tag: lost

Death Looks Peaceful, or Does it? Part 1

When I really started to know my aunty, and the torture she when through. To watch someone fight the fight, to say no to giving up time and time again.

Part 1!

After the incident with my dad and Jess (Rachel), things were calm for the most part. Things started to return to normal, well at least what I thought was normal anyways. I can’t recall the exact time and date, but it wasn’t too long after Jess left, Jackie’s family was hit with a blow that would last for a few years.

I mentioned before how the Whitcomb’s weren’t loving, and there was an emotional distance between all of them. It was around the year 1992 – 1993 that Jackie received a phone call from her sister Gayle. This phone call wasn’t like anything I have ever witnessed at this early stage of my life.

I remember Jackie picking up the phone and answering the call like any other phone call, then it took an abrupt turn for the worse. Jackie went into this panic mood that put her in autopilot, and I remember her telling me to grab a coat and to get out to the car. The ride was intense, with Jackie cutting in and out of traffic trying to get to Gayle’s house, about 45 minutes away.

I don’t recall exactly what happened, but I remember us showing up and finding Gayle laying on the floor in agonizing pain. Jackie rushed over to her to help her up, but Gayle couldn’t stand, she couldn’t even move her toes, feet, and legs were all limp. From what I remember of the story given to Jackie from Gayle, was that Gayle was putting laundry away, and when Gayle bent over and started to lift the cloth basket, she lost her balance and fell backward. Gayle hit the metal cross track with such force, she broke her back paralyzing her.  Jackie managed to get Gayle to the hospital, where they spent a couple days.

Later, that week Jackie received another phone call from Gayle, asking her to come over because she needed her too. I didn’t go that trip, but I remember her being gone for a while, maybe 5 or 6 hours. When Jackie arrived back home, she was pissed, swearing all kinds of words disgusted with Gordon.

Gordon of all people, who I really didn’t know anything about other than he owned the DnD’s that my cousin and my aunty worked. Well, Jackie proceeds to tell us what happened, Gordon broke her arm. That bastard broke her arm because she called Jackie and not him when she fell and broke her back.

This is the beginning of getting to know my aunty, Gayle.

The Crying Out Begins!

    I remember those kids outside of the shed, all of them older than me by 3-5 years easily. They were belting out these laughs that just left me so enraged, I ran into that door and it came off the hinges. My scrawny little body hit the ground and rolled with momentum where I stood up and kept running. I ran so fast to my grandmothers’ trailer home, running up to my mother and grabbing her legs.

   Being terrified after watching my dad just stand there with my baby brother in his arms, as my mother’s mother drove off like a bat out of hell. Then listening to my mother bash my dad and his family for her own reasons, me being too young to really realize what was going on. Then in the twenty-four hour period, getting locked in a shed,  being laughed at, sobbing as any child would, my mother tells me to stop acting like a baby.

    At such an early age I remember that feeling of disappointment, not coming from my mother but coming from me towards her. Who starts shutting down and withdrawing at the age of 4? I was already awkward, I had a speech problem, reading was out of the question and that wasn’t resolved until fourth grade. Now my mother is shunning me for reasons I did not know at the time, but later in life, everything comes to light.

    Since I am aware of everything and by digging into my mother’s past I can safely say that my mother was torn between her new lover and deciding on abandoning me as she did to my dad and baby brother the day before. Nevertheless, Jackie starts to feel like shit after I started to beg her to take me home to my dad. Begging her to take me home to my baby brother and dad, then telling her mother she was just as evil for driving away. At that moment, her mother (I feel sick calling her my grandmother) raised her hand to me.

    Jackie shocked me when she stepped up to her mother with them, “I dare you to lay a hand on my child.” I found out that the only person allowed to beat me, was Jackie herself. Fast-forwarding a bit, to give the reader a visual depiction of the folks in my family and dynamics up until I was thirteen. Actually, I have to say eleven because of the most influential person in my life until the day she passed, what my dad’s mother Sharon.

   From the time I could speak the only name I ever called her by was Moonie. The rundown begins with my mom’s side of the family, she was the youngest of four siblings. Jackie had two older brothers and a sister, Jack, Joe, and Gayle, her mother and father (pop pop). Poppop drunk himself to death when I was only 3 years old, so I didn’t know him that well. But from what I can remember he was one hell of a landscaper but his downside was his wife, Rose.

   She was a crazy bigot who tormented everyone and even Pops until he died. Joe and Jack were involved with whatever (I don’t know a whole lot about them other than they drank and partied hard) and Gayle, God bless her soul, was kinda a loose woman which my mother idolized her. Gayle had two son’s, James and Robbert. I will tell you about my relations with them throughout this blog. Robbert was the only one from Jackie’s side of the family that I was close with.For my dad’s side and he is the youngest of five, his three oldest sisters were Cheri, Gail, and Dawn, his brother’s name was Earl (God bless his soul).

    Moonie was a single mother who raised 5 kids, worked multiple jobs, and took no shit from anyone. Cheri still to this day is the biggest pill dealer in her area of Maryland, then Gail who is the powerhouse successful lesbian and Dawn who pushed tons and tons of marijuana for the Jamaicans/business owner and then Earl who was an extremely well put together homosexual. Cheri has three boys, Grayson the oldest, Nick the middle child and then Alex being much younger than his two brothers. Dawn has her son Jarrett, both Gail and Earl never had nor wanted children.

    This was the size of the family as I grow up from childhood, which I will tell you the growth of the family as this blog goes on. Growing up and watching all the arguments and watching my mother leave my dad for other men than when he would take her back. The next thing she would do is slander my dads family name, telling anyone who would listen about how they mistreated her and blah blah blah. Being that mom and dad were high school dropouts, they really didn’t have anything to offer the world.

    Thank the Lord for Gail and her success because, without her, neither of them would have had a decent job or career.Since that briefing of my family is out of the way, I am going to rewind a bit and share the molding and shaping of this man who lives to tell the story of overcoming so shit in life. Never once will I say my life was harder than everyone else’s or that I went hungry. That wasn’t the case for me and after the incident with Rose and her mother driving off with me, life got real, fast and my childhood was out the window.

   Soon after the above incident, I was in third grade and my brother was in pre-k. Both of us get called out of school early. Excited as kids could be, we load up into our parents’ car and go for a drive. I remember today as it were that very day, Beautiful weather, windows down, fast food ready for us, and the drive went on. We all pull up to this newly built townhome, and we walked inside. My brother and I were running around guessing which room was ours. Sadly mistaken we were, to find out our parents were separating again, but the good news was my dad got an apartment right up to the road across from our new school.

    When I asked where we’re staying, my mom promptly said we were staying with our dad. Do you remember that feeling I said I got at the trailer home? I got it again and this time I was one pissed off little kid.A week into the move, I am helping my dad unpack the apartment and as I took every family photo out of the box, I would slap stickers on my mother face.

THE STORY WILL GO ON…TO BE CONTINUED!!!

Click, Click, Click

A story that will having you realizing, maybe your life wasn’t so bad, or was it? When a person is left with the decision to either give up or empower himself to make a difference within.

A story that will have you realizing, maybe your life wasn’t so bad or was it? When a person is left with the decision to either give up or empower himself to make a difference within.

When does someone call it quits? When does someone say they just can’t take it no more? Then on the other hand, when does someone say they will just make the best of the situation? How about that was the hand I was dealt in life so just deal with it? Of course, there are countless ways to ask these questions depending on the scenario and of course the individual.

Each of those questions has an easy, yet not so easy answer and it is entirely up to the individual faced with these questions to answer them. Not only do they have the choice to answer them any way they want, but when do they face the situations or circumstances that had them ask these questions in the first place? To empower oneself not to look down on these circumstances and individuals, whereas being empowered to look at those very things in the face and be humbled?

I am going to share different parts of my life with those who took the time to read this and hopefully someone gets something out of it. Let me start with an overview of myself and my conquest for answers. My name is Christopher, I am from Maryland, I have a younger brother, and our parents are divorced after 20+ years of marriage. It’s almost the end of 2018, so I think it is safe to say this all sounds normal so far, correct? The funny thing is the normality of this family was far from it during the conception of it.

Before I continue I must inform the readers that I searched for years and asked countless questions to people that were family, not family, old friends of relatives that knew them before I was conceived. All this searching to better understand these people that raised me and called me their son, their child and to say they loved me. To only find out things no child should ever know about their mother, father or whoever raised them.

My doubts about my identity started at the age of five due to my mother’s youngest nephew Rob. Rob took it upon himself to start telling me about some other guy being my father and that Patrick was just a guy that my mom convinced he was the father. That moment was followed up by a five-year-old asking his mother if the guy he called dad was really his dad or not. With her just to tell me Rob was out of his fucking mind and not to believe a word that came out his mouth. Jackie’s reaction triggered a memory that raised even my doubt. I recalled a year prior to this, my mother with the assistance of her mother Rose, actually kidnapped me from Patrick while he was holding my little brother outside of an Ames store (similar to K-Mart but back in the early ’90s). I recall them speeding away and us going on a long drive to her mother’s trailer. That in itself became a nightmare leading to the both of them telling me to go outside to play with the other kids on the block, and during a game of hide and seek I was locked in a shed following laughter of the kids. That very moment created my fear of dark tight spaces and the doubt of love coming from my mother.

To Be Continued:

Post 1, 11/28/2018

“You do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be written behind your silence and your suffering.”     Anne Rice

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