Without the Rain...

When I was nine years old, I said it for the first time—“I hate you.” I was alone, no one could hear me, but I said it anyway. It would be my first experience with that word, with that feeling. It was the first that I realized that my parents didn’t love each other and that had to be someone’s fault. I would lay the blame on my father and it wouldn’t be until many years later that I would come to terms with not only parent’s relationship but also my father’s limited role in my life.

Growing up, I didn’t feel any different from anyone else. There was me and there were my three brothers. Bill was the oldest; he was already nine years old when my brother Nick was born. I was born two years later and my little brother, five years after that. He was unplanned. It wasn’t until much later that I would discover just how unplanned his little life was.

My parents both came from very damaged backgrounds; My dad, from a family that had very little to do with one another. His parents were the kind that would put up the tree on Christmas Eve and take it down on the 26th. I knew my father’s parents up until the age five. After that, we moved and they disappeared from my life entirely.
It’s surprising, the kind of things you remember when you’ve very few memories to fall back on. My grandmother, I remember, loved cheese popcorn. We ate it every time we visited my grandparent’s home. Every visit, when it was time to leave, it was time to give grandma a hug. I can still remember the smell of cigarettes when I hugged her. My grandfather loved chewing tobacco and I never saw him without a ball cap. That is all that I remember about him. He would pass away when I was nineteen years old having never spoken to me or even having seen a picture of me after the age of five.

My mom’s parents were involved in my life until a later age. The last time that I would see them would be when I was eleven years old. My grandfather on my mom’s side had a knack for making you feel special and then forgotten all in an instant. He was a difficult man who damaged my mother and her siblings to a very large extent in their childhoods. My grandmother on the other hand, was a quiet woman. To this day I have never had an actual conversation with her. She was very much under the firm grip of my grandfather’s hand all of her married life.

I was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania. A place I commonly refer to as “the hole.” I have been back one time since and I have no desire to ever return. You either die of old age there because you can afford nowhere else to go, or you screw up your life there.

When I was four years old, my older brother and I saw a lot less of our mom. We were too young then to realize the state of our parent’s marriage and when less than a year later our little brother was brought into the world, we had no way of noticing that our parent’s marriage had completely lacked intimacy for years. All I knew is that he was finally home from the hospital and lying in my parent’s bed that day that I slowly walked in and held him for the second time. I’d held him in the hospital once but this time, at home, it felt more real. At five years old, I felt so grown up and in a way, I looked at him as my very own baby and not just my little brother.

Soon after, my parents moved us out to Colorado. I was six years old and those were the happiest three and a half years of my life. Our first place there was tiny but my brothers and I never noticed. It was there that my parents began to argue. A lot. To my knowledge, I had never seen them argue all that much before but when we moved, it was terrible and almost daily. My dad worked a lot. I don’t think my siblings and I could fully understand the sacrifices that he was making to provide for his family financially. All I could think about was how I barely saw him and that bothered me a great deal. Secretly, I was a daddy’s girl. It was during this time in my life that I would begin to rely quiet heavily on my imagination. Every night after I’d been put to bed, I had difficulty falling asleep and most nights I would make up stories in my head to fall asleep. This became a nightly ritual that would go on for many years of my life.

Things got better for a time when we moved into a larger place but that was mainly because my father was working so much by then, that he rarely saw his family. When he did get home, he would often be so tired that he would plant himself in front of the television for the rest of the night. I do remember his putting us to bed nightly and those were some of my favorite moments at that time in my life. So many bedtime giggles. My parent’s most glaring difference was in their parenting styles. My mom was very rigid. She told me that she loved me often but she was very stern at times and believed very much in spanking and discipline. My father on the other hand, lacked any sort of discipline at all and I never received a punishment from him in my life. My father also lacked the ability to express his love for us in words but if there was ever a question in my mind of anything, it certainly wasn’t that.

At the age of nine and a half, my parents moved us to Dubuque, Iowa. My dad wanted to attend Bible College there. He never did. It was after this move that my parent’s marriage deteriorated completely. There were nightly arguments and shouting fights. And it was also at this time in my life, that I uttered those words for the very first time—“I hate you.” I knew I didn’t mean them, I knew it even then.

My parents would stay married for over seven more years until I’d turned seventeen and they finally filed for divorce—or my mom did anyway. The truth was, for many years I’d sided with my mother. I don’t know what it was. I needed that connection in a large way. Ever since the age of four or five, I’d envied my mother’s relationship with my older brother. By the time I was sixteen, my brother had moved out and his relationship with our mother had completely fallen apart.

He’d taken things so much harder—my older brother. For many years, I suppose being the older one, he’d been more aware than I’d been. Stronger in his faith than anyone I’d ever known, by the age of fifteen, he’d fallen away from it entirely. It would be years later that he’d tell me about the rejection he’d felt from our mother. And I had always thought him to be the favored one. I would feel that very same rejection later.

Growing up, my faith had been strong. I was four years old the day I first prayed that prayer but I was eight the first time I actually remembered it. My cousin had died and he was my age. It was the first time that I would come to terms with my own mortality and I wanted to be ready.

At thirteen years old, I attended a conference in Minnesota and went forward at the alter call to rededicate my life. This was to be one of the most life changing moments of my life and I remember it so strongly to this day. For several years after, I would turn to my faith on a daily, hourly basis. For the first time in my life, I was living my faith and not just leaning on the teachings and beliefs of my parents.

The day my mom filed for divorce was on the day of my older brother’s nineteenth birthday and two days after my seventeenth. I was attending College and still living at home. My little brother was only beginning to have difficulties at school. He was now twelve and beginning to display anger issues and difficulty controlling his temper with those around him. I can remember several very physical altercations with him at this time and there was more than once that I would find myself having to lock him out of the house out of fear and waiting for my father to get home.

Oddly, my mother never lifted a finger to physically punish my little brother—something that she had never shied away from when my older brother and myself where children. One of my darkest memories of this was when I was about seven or eight years old and my mother couldn’t find her pen. Somehow it ended in the accusation that I had either taken it or lost it. I was given sixty seconds to find it and as something my mom would often do, my mother began to count out loud each glaring second until time eventually ran out. When time did run out, I would have to meet her in the bedroom where she would use a belt to hit me several times. On this occasion, the belt contained metal pieces on it and I began bleeding as she struck me with it. This was not an uncommon punishment for my older brother and I to receive often. By the time, my little brother had grown however, this form of punishment had thankfully been lost.

In the year before my mother filed for divorce, I began to see a lot of changes in her. She lost a great deal of weight and began to really care for herself. She also joined several dating websites and began to chat with a number of the men who contacted her on them. Many of these men were sorry characters to say the least and lacking any sort of morals whatsoever. I began to fear for the choices my mother was making.

It was also in this year, when I was sixteen, that my mother began to drink. It started out harmless.. a few wine coolers here and there and developed quickly into something far more difficult. It wasn’t long before she was meeting these men she’d chatted with on the sites and going out to drink on a nightly basis.

Often times, I would lay awake at night waiting for the drunken call to come and get her. Every time she would get into an argument with whomever she was with at the time, and would need me to come and get her. And I would jump out of bed to “rescue” her every time— a little out of duty but mostly out of the fear that if I didn’t, that something bad would happen and it would be my fault.

This was all during my senior year in high school and by the time I’d only started college days before, the divorce papers had been filed. It was during this time that my mom met the man that she would become involved with for years. He was from a small town called Mankato Minnesota and seemed harmless enough. It wasn’t until a few months in that his penchant for drinking heavily began to show. My mother already had a problem but it was as she dated him that this problem became much more magnified.

In 2005, my mom decided to move to Minnesota to be with her boyfriend. This was also the year that my mother came to me one night, crying and telling me that she had something to tell me that had been weighing on her for years. She didn’t even have to say it. My little brother was actually my half-brother. I’d been wondering for quite some time and feeling rather foolish to think it. Now I felt foolish to not know. My little brother had always been quite a bit darker than my brothers and I and one of things that I would come to discover is that his father was African American.

She told my little brother just days later, something that must have been so difficult for him to understand or make sense of. His father was not actually his father now. He’d always struggled with the feeling of being different, now he knew why. He didn’t want to meet his blood father.. or the other half siblings he had out there somewhere. He simply wasn’t ready.

Not even months later, my mother moved out and took all of the furniture. I went with her, mostly out of a sense of duty that I had to protect her. I had left school after one semester. My little brother chose to stay with our dad. The house was entirely emptied out but my mom’s boyfriend had brought a magic kit for my little brother. The image of my twelve year old baby brother siting on the floor of that empty room in that empty house playing with that magic kit is still burned into my mind as the last thing that I saw as I left for Minnesota. And the nightmare and burned images were only beginning. Minnesota would be the place I would soon want to forget more than anything.

When we got there, everything started out rather quiet but quickly developed toward something I could never have envisioned. My mother and her boyfriend began drinking more and more. First it was just on weekends, pretty soon Thursday and then Monday were included. After a while, it was almost every night and so was the physical fighting. There were nights that objects where thrown and broken, slaps and punches were thrown, police officers were called to our home and many scary moments where I found myself fending off a crazed, screaming person that I completely couldn’t recognize as my mother anymore.

My mother would often drink in secret even after she and her boyfriend had already enjoyed quite a few drinks together that night. On one night, I woke to my mother hitting me. I pretended to continue sleeping afraid that if I moved or retaliated that the situation would only escalate. She retreated to her and her boyfriend’s room. A few hours later, I awoke to screaming. She and her boyfriend had begun to physically fight once again. My mom came running out of their room and into mine only to attack me. When I grabbed her arms to keep them from further hitting me, she bit and clamped down hard on my face.

The police arrived soon after and questioned my mom, her boyfriend and I. I can still remember praying that the officer wouldn’t turn the light on in my room and see the marks on my face. He didn’t. My mom was arrested and taken away, and I was left alone with a man I barely knew but couldn’t stomach to even look at anymore. I locked myself away in my bedroom the way I had for months now. My mom came home days later and eventually went to court and paid a fine but less than eight weeks later, the cycle would only begin again.

By this time, I hated my life and began to take careless risks. Often times, I would walk around downtown for hours at night, my mp3 player blasting, never glancing for a moment behind me. I would step out into the street without looking for oncoming vehicles. In many ways, I knew that I was not yet ready to take that step to end my own life and prayed that it would simply be taken care of for me.
I was completely lost and felt no hope anymore. My faith hadn’t been discarded intentionally but had rather dissolved away gradually until I no longer held any strength for it.

Eventually I would have to make decisions as I held pills in my hand and another occasion, a blade to my wrist. Each time, something inside me held back. Something said that this wasn’t the answer and I knew deep down, that my faith was still in there somewhere. So buried beneath all of the hopelessness but never the less, still there.

My mother and her boyfriend’s relationship also dissolved and we moved back to Dubuque in 2006. By the time we returned, so much had changed. My little brother had holed himself up in my father’s house refusing to come out, even to go to school. He had missed school so many times that his junior high had kicked him out and he found himself in a program for troubled kids where they picked him up directly from his home. Even then, he missed often by refusing to come to the door.

It was when I returned that my brother’s mental health became so blatantly clear. He was bipolar. When he was twelve, I’d noticed the signs and spoken with my parents about it. No one then had taken it seriously. By the time my brother was thirteen, not only had he begun to skip school but he barely left home to venture outside anymore and would often complain that too many people were crowding the room if more than two of us where in the same room at the same time. Often times, if I did get him to come out and I would pick him up, he would sit in the passenger side as close to the door as possible while staring away from me and out the window the whole time we drove. It was disturbing to say the least that he couldn’t even look me in the eye anymore.

My brother eventually made it to the 9th grade but never beyond it and he never completed it. He has never held a job, never received a license and has never driven a car. When I see him now, it is so difficult because I see a shell of a person that was once there. At one time loving and affectionate, he slowly became an angry and bitter young man. Often times his anger is directed toward the person who comes in contact with him most, my dad. On one occasion, he took a baseball bat to my father’s vehicles. Another time, he assaulted him. The latter has happened on far more than one occasion.

Since 2006, it has been a long journey back. For the first year, we lived in a hotel—my mother and I. Both of us found jobs but as we looked for apartments, she managed to find something wrong with each and every one. Her drinking continued, often times with money my dad had given her to help us get by as we searched for a home or money her boyfriend had given her to be able to move all of her possessions back to Dubuque once we did find a place to live. It wasn’t long before all of this money was gone. In the summer of 2007, my mother crashed our only car on a night she’d been drinking heavily. It was on that night, I found myself in one of the most distraught moments of my life. My hours at work had been cut back drastically and I’d been looking for another job. I questioned now how I would find one and how I would get there. I began to look for jobs within walking distance of the hotel.

I applied at two places—Kmart and Shopko. Kmart called me first and set up an interview. I really didn’t want to work for them, but the hotel was practically in the parking lot. My interview went extremely well and I was told to expect a call with an offer likely before the end of the day. The day and evening came and went with no call. A couple of days passed before I received a call from Shopko. I felt that I likely still had the job with Kmart but went ahead and set up the interview anyway. For days I had wanted to call Kmart so many times but before my interview with them, I had prayed that God would guide me to where I should go and that I would not allow my lack of patience to interfere. I had promised myself that I would not call but would wait on God’s timing.

My interview with Shopko also went well. I was told that it could take up to three days to hear back with an offer so I returned to my room and prayed that whatever job I was supposed to take, would call me first. Less than 24 hours later, Shopko called and offered me a job and I accepted. One hour later, Kmart called. It would be years before I would realize the impact of that one hour.

Not long after I’d found my new job, an apartment came along that I took as my new home. I was living alone by now as my mother had returned to Minnesota. For the first time in years and maybe even my life, I felt truly stable, truly safe. It was almost as though everything had fallen into place. Answered prayer.

But history has a way of repeating itself, I suppose. And I eventually allowed my mother back into my life. She wasn’t going to drink anymore, she said, and she was going to look for a job. Three years later, I was largely supporting us as she still didn’t have job. Her drinking hadn’t gotten any better either. There were several nights there that my own things had been broken; items that I had worked so hard for. When my mother had spent all of her boyfriend’s money, we no longer had any way to get our possessions back down to Dubuque.

I can remember the night I moved into that apartment. Every item I had, stuffed into Wal-Mart bags and one suitcase. I also had an air mattress, a 13” television and a vcr. Over the next year, I would work so hard to turn my empty apartment into a home. Despite the financial difficulty in the beginning, I never regretted the place that I started from. I became so grateful for each and every supposedly meaningless item I managed to add to my home.

Eventually my mother and I’s relationship greatly deteriorated. I had grown so tired of attempting to save someone from a situation that I finally had to accept that I had no control over. We fought constantly. By 2010, my mother was only partially living with me. It was that year that I became very sick and began to see what would be a series of doctors to find out why. In a short span, I’d had bronchitis, an ear infection and pink eye. I became so physically exhausted that I found it impossible to even stand long enough to do my hair in front of the mirror in the morning. I also dropped quite a bit of weight and if I hadn’t already been rather thin before, it really began to show.

By my third visit to a doctor, my blood was drawn for some tests and some basic questions were asked of me. The doctor could find nothing wrong on the surface and by the end of my visit, I was handed a card for counseling. I realized then that she thought I was crazy and I began to wonder if I was too.

A couple weeks later, I found myself unable to complete simple tasks at work and my heart began to race so I left and checked myself in to the emergency room. It was there that some more tests were run and it was discovered that I had strep.. I’d now had it for three months. As I recovered, my apartment also flooded that year.
By August of that year, my mother was back and showed up on my doorstep one day out of the blue. I allowed her to spend some time with me off and on that month but didn’t allow her to on move back in with me. After getting through the cleanup of my apartment, I decided to move and thought this to be an opportunity to completely start fresh with no bad memories in a new home.

Slowly, my mother worked at trying to stay with me once again. I decided to give it another shot as she hadn’t been drinking since she’d been back and had also begun a new job. She moved along with me in late September. Within a couple of weeks, she lost her job and one night we began to argue. She became angry and shoved me back against the fridge. That was the night when I’d decided that I’d had enough. About a week or two later, she moved out for good and I didn’t see or speak to her again for months.

I knew the holidays would be the hardest. I’d never spent them alone before. I began to focus very much on work, taking on a second small job, often going in for it even when I didn’t need too and working long after my shift was over.

I’d always been so good at the act.. pretending that I was all right. In all of my time spent focused on my mother, I’d never thought to build a life for myself. At 22, I found myself having to finally look at the fact that no one truly knew the real me. That year I had slowly begun to share with a new close friend. It was the first I’d ever voiced any of the things I’d gone through with anyone.

Thanksgiving was the hardest day as I listened to everyone’s plans with family all the while pretending to have my own. I spent a lot of time away in my office because I didn’t want anyone to see what my face would surely give away. It was around this time that my manager began to also notice that something wasn’t right with me. By late December, with Christmas approaching, these feelings only began to cycle once again and if I hadn’t already begun to feel transparent before, I was certainly feeling it now. My manager, Nate, offered a listening ear anytime that I needed to talk, that was on the 22nd. On the 23rd, I accepted.

I can still remember that moment, as I clocked out and stood at my locker for what felt like two or three of the longest minutes of my life. All of my life, my whole entire life, I’d shared a little with one person. Talking about myself and my life felt so.. weak. And yet, I felt some sort of prodding to go forward. And as I sat in his office and began to talk, all I could think about was how crazy I must sound. I’d been thinking about counseling but I knew that there would be no answers for me there. My faith was still in there somewhere and I knew that was the part of me that needed to be fed.

I finished talking and to this day, I barely remember a word that I said but I do remember what he said—“Wow, I don’t really know what to say,”—and I just thought, great, he’s wondering why I’m telling him all of this. And then he said the most important thing to me—“and I wasn’t sure why but I really felt for the past few days that I should pray for you.” I knew then why I’d been led to that office.

It was over the next few months that everything began to just fall into place. I had people in my life that I wondered now how I ever lived without and I began to realize that as my own family had fallen away, God had filled that empty void with others to make me feel surrounded by those who truly cared about me. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t going it alone.

One day I wrote a poem to my mom:

I hate you, I love you
This back and forth emotion
This up and down feeling
This stop and start life
Breathing in and breathing out
Getting up and falling down
Hiding while crying
Living while dying
Believing in nothing
Questions in the night
My soul in shadow
No one in sight
Bitterness screaming
Hopeful dreaming
Lost and alone
No place called home
Hating you, Loving you
Saving, then losing you
Finally free
Saving me
Learning to breathe..

It took a very long journey, a loss of faith and discovering it even stronger and opening up to those around to find myself surrounded by a new family before my life could truly begin again. And you know… it’s far better the second time around.