Entry #4 (Click here to read entry #3)
My parents broke up midway through my 10th year of life. As a kid, I always thought that my parents were married. After they split, I found out that they had never been married. Back in those days’ people would use the terms shacking and common law marriage as a way to describe couples who had lived together for a while and had kids. This is what my mom and dad were: common law married. When my parents split, my mother, brother and I moved in with my saved, sanctified, Holy Ghost filled church grandmother. Needless to say that this was a major culture shock. To go from having your own room and space to sleeping on the floor with a pallet was a major change. In addition to the three of us living there, my mothers 3 dead beat brothers lived there too. So in a 3 bedroom; 1 bathroom house there were 2 kids and 5 adults. Needless to say we were stuffed in there like sardines. I recall my mom and grandmother arguing very often about various things: one of the main things being my mom’s lack of church attendance and her habit of smoking. As I mentioned previously, this grandma was a church matriarch…spent 4-6 days at church for prayer meetings, revivals, and other church functions and she of course wanted us right there by her side. My mom grew up in these circumstances, but once she became and adult she vowed that she would not force her children to endure what she had endured when it came to church.
After this major change in my life, I realized that my dad was a major deadbeat, but I still loved him. I can recall my mom struggling to make ends meet. Dad hardly ever came around and when he did, he had the gall to hand out $5 to my brother and I like that would erase all the other crap that he did, but I still loved him. We eventually moved out of my grandma’s house once my mom had been approved for government housing assistance. We moved into a yellow 2 bedroom wood-frame house in a marginal neighborhood, I hated that house. It never really felt like home, but there was nothing I could do about that. As a kid I believed that things were ok. I had a lot of friends in the neighborhood and we would run and play without a care in the world. Looking back, I can see that my mom was a total rock through all of the things she endured raising my brother and I. My dad sucked for the entire decade of the 80’s. He came around when he felt like it. He never really contributed to the well being of his kids. He believed that dropping by on the weekend and taking my brother and I for a burger was acceptable. He would give my mom a hard time when she would ask him for help on bills…it was a total mess. I can recall many times where our lights got disconnected and we would have to sit in the dark with candles until mom found a way to get them reconnected. Our gas got disconnected from time to time as well…and my so called father never stepped up to help unless it was convenient for him. To this day I think that they only way he would help my mom out was if she slept with him. I recall him coming by the house and the two of them would be sitting in the living room talking about stuff and he would say to my mom: “come step into my office” meaning the bedroom…they would be in there for hours and then of course, the next day the lights would be back on.
Around the age of 13 my mom started to date this dude named John. He was a chef who on the surface seemed to be a good dude. He was nice to my brother and I and he seemed to make my mother happy. After about 6 months of dating, somehow this guy ended up living with us. I couldn’t believe this shit. Why does this dude have to stay here with us in this little ass house? Despite my pleas, he moved in anyway and within 2 months he was standing over my bed in the middle of the night looking down on me. I awakened and he put his finger up to his lips and said shhh as he began to pull my covers back. What John didn’t know was that I wasn’t about to let him crawl his nasty ass up in the bed with me. I began to scream to the top of my lungs and my mom ran to the room and caught his ass standing there with his dick out. He tried to diffuse the situation, but mama wasn’t hearing that. Back in those days, people would raise their windows and would have to put a stick of some sort under the window to keep it up. We kept our stick right in the hallway outside of my room…mama grabbed that stick and whacked John in the back of the head and threw him out in his drawers that night. From that day on, my mom was my HERO.
Aquarius.Soul © 2009
