Conquering Chaos (5 page)

Another neighbor down the street was a target of mine, too. That was the craziest
thing I ever did. This woman was typing on her computer in the office about fifteen
feet from the kitchen. I sneaked in through the garage and went into the kitchen,
where she had her wallet on the kitchen counter, and I grabbed it and ran. But I remember
feeling so bad. I just wanted some cash, but I had this wallet with all her debit
cards and her driver’s license and everything. So I did something even dumber: I went
back to the scene of the crime that night, crept in the same way, sneaked into the
kitchen, and slid the wallet back onto the counter.

When I was younger doing all those things, I think I was sort of daring someone to
catch me. Part of the whole rush was thinking I was going to get caught, but then
I kept on doing it. It’s like I was asking for it. I don’t know. Maybe I wanted somebody
to get me in line.

Catelynn:

Oh my gosh. We sound completely insane.

You know, when we put all these stories in writing, we started to wonder if it was
really such a good idea. We were worried we sounded like we were really crazy, messed
up people. Like we said in the beginning, we get a lot of positive comments from people
who have watched our lives and really feel like they know us. We didn’t want to change
their opinions by telling them all the bad stuff we did before they “met” us.

But then we realized that was the whole point of being honest. Of course we want people
to think good things about us, and we want people to recognize our accomplishments.
But we don’t want them to think we were born knowing how how to act right and make
good choices. It was a process for us, one that started as soon as we realized we
were going to be bringing another life into this world. By the time the cameras showed
up, we were already trying as hard as we could to do right by the child we had on
the way. But before that there were plenty of mistakes and bad choices and behavior
that went on right up to the day we found out Catelynn was pregnant.

Think of how many “bad kids” out there have that potential to grow and change. You
never know! There are a lot of kids out there who are born into the wrong environments,
or don’t know how to handle themselves when they’re young, and sometimes it takes
them longer to figure things out. But when you see one of those “bad kids,” just remember,
they might just be waiting for someone or something to help them be better. That’s
why we want people to know that we made that transformation. So we’re being honest
about the before and the after. Once upon a time, we were the “bad kids.” But it’s
not a permanent label.

Drugs and alcohol have had a huge impact on our lives. And we don’t mean the times
we messed around with them in our teenage years. We’re talking generations of addiction,
alcohol and drug abuse in both of our family histories. Throughout the lives of our
parents, our grandparents and even our great-grandparents, drugs and alcohol have
played a huge part in the cycle of addiction, poverty, and violence that we’ve worked
so hard to break.

Wherever there’s addiction, there’s never just addiction. The addiction is just ground
zero for destruction that spreads all across a person’s life. It damages anyone who
winds up in its path: friends, family, kids. Especially the kids. From the children
who have to raise themselves because their parents are always high or passed out,
to the ones who have to watch their family members getting wrestled into cop cars
and carted off to prison, to the teenagers who grew up thinking being drunk and high
is no big deal. We can barely scrape the surface. There’s violence and abuse, screaming
and fighting, dirty houses and scumbag grown-ups who don’t give a crap if there’s
a five-year-old in the room when they’re lighting up that crack pipe.

We’ve seen it all. We lived it. And it’s a really sobering thing to look back at all
our memories and realize how close we were to following in the wrong footsteps. We
walked a thin, thin line, and we’re grateful every day we didn’t cross it.

Catelynn:

I don’t know if I remember an exact age of when I realized my mom’s drinking was a
problem. I just know that for my whole life, for as long as I can remember, it was
there. She’d drink too many beers, or there would be a party, and I would be the one
watching the house to make sure everything was okay. We never talked about it. She
was in denial for a long time. I was probably fifteen the first time I heard her admit
that she was an alcoholic. My dad tells me she was a heavy drinker before I was born,
so it was no secret. She just didn’t call it what it was: alcoholism.

She definitely wasn’t the first in her family. Her father has been an alcoholic for
all of her life, and so far all of mine. And her mom had her share of things she did,
too. Those are things everyone knows, but nobody ever brings up in detail. We know
there’s a history of addiction there, but no one confronts it like it’s a problem.
It just gets swept under the rug, except really you can still see it.

I know my mom’s life was hurt by her parents’ addictions, from the way she was treated
to the irresponsible behavior she could never count on. And then there’s the fear
that comes with it, like the time her dad crashed his motorcycle on the way to pick
her up from a friend’s house, because he was so drunk. That kind of drama and danger
is scary for a kid.

But they get used to it, and then they sometimes end up doing the same things. My
mom started drinking around the time she got her driver’s license, at about sixteen
or seventeen. And from then on, drinking was a problem for her. It was a problem before
I was born, and after I was born, and all through my life.

Children of alcoholics end up being caretakers instead of kids. There was always this
burden on me to watch the house while she was too drunk, which felt like always. It
was never just a few beers. If there was a case of beers in the fridge, she had to
drink them all, and then she’d want to go out and get more. And the house was chaos
all the time, because she couldn’t keep things straight. She’d hide her keys from
herself so she wouldn’t be able to drive drunk, which was a good idea. But then she’d
get so drunk she’d forget where the keys were, and then she’d be pissed because she
couldn’t find them!

And it was scary sometimes. When my mom passed out on the couch, you could not wake
her up. I could shake her for thirty minutes, I could slap her in the face, but she
was out cold. That’s really terrifying for a little kid.

But even I never really confronted it for what it was, at least not for a long time.
The first time I actually sat down and talked to my mom about her alcoholism about
it was in couples’ therapy. I hadn’t been living with her for years, and I was never
home if I could help it. I was always at Tyler’s house, or a friend’s house. I stayed
away as much as possible. She was just so unpredictable. Sometimes she’d be so happy,
and I hated when she would cling to me when she was drunk and hang on my shoulder.
But as soon as I reacted, she’d turn into a complete bitch. It would change in a heartbeat.

It did end up getting a little better. She didn’t stop drinking, but she worked not
to get sloppy drunk. She married a guy who wasn’t a big drinker, and that was a good
influence.

Addiction is huge on my mom’s side of the family. Her parents weren’t even the ones
who started it. They’re all products of their environments, as far back as I can see.
My grandma’s dad, my great-grandfather, was an alcoholic to the day he died. We used
to go visit him until he was in his seventies, and even then we always had to bring
him booze. And there are more relatives, aunts and uncles and cousins, who have just
destroyed themselves with alcohol or cocaine or meth. So everyone is repeating the
same legacies of addiction, over and over. It just infects the family. And with it
comes a lot of verbal and emotional abuse, which also trickles down and spreads.

All the bad behavior, that’s what kids in the family are learning from day one. They
grow up and make the same mistakes because they learned all the wrong crap about drugs
and alcohol from their environment. That’s how cycles work.

Tyler:

Drugs and violence were always connected in my head, thanks to my dad Butch and one
crazy week I spent with him when I was eight. He’d just gotten out of prison that
summer, and I was stoked to have my dad around. I wanted all the time I could spend
with him.

He was staying with my uncle and my uncle’s five kids, and they didn’t care what went
on. They just didn’t give a shit what went on in front of the kids, and the kids were
so young, we were oblivious to the details of their partying. We just thought, “This
is how grownup guys hang out.” I wasn’t familiar with seeing anybody under the influence,
really. My mom would drink at family reunions, but she’d never get drunk. My dad was
the first one I saw go all out.

That week didn’t end well. Why not? Well, one night they were all hanging out, drinking,
playing cards, and this woman came in saying, “Butch! Butch! Somebody’s there with
a flashlight!” This was kind of a rough place, not the nicest part of town. It wasn’t
unusual for people to break into your car and steal your stuff or anything. And that’s
what everybody assumed this was. So of course my dad got all tough went stalking out
there to whoop some ass, with me following behind, excited to see him lay the smackdown.

So I was right behind him when we saw the light from the flashlight, and then we heard
the dogs barking. Three cops came out from behind the garage screaming, “Get down!
Get down!” Four other cops came up from the driveway. They went after him hard. These
cops were pissed off. They’d been looking for him for months, and when they got him,
they didn’t hold back. They jumped on him and smashed his face into the ground. I
mean, smashed him down on the concrete. So when I saw that, I went crazy and ran at
the cops. I was an eight year old kid going at the cops, thinking they were the bad
guys.

Of course one of the officers grabbed me, and then my big sister came running out.
She was four years older, so she had more memories of my dad. She kind of knew this
was the kind of thing that happened if you got close to my dad. She put both her arms
around me to try and pull me back. She was saying, “Tyler, don’t look at this, just
look at me. Mom’s coming to get us.” But I was screaming for my dad to look at me.
I’ll never forget that: He would not look at me. That was how I knew he was ashamed.
He would not look at me. But that was all I wanted. That’s why I got away from my
sister and I ran after that cop car screaming, just wanting to see him turn around
and look at me through the window.

That was a bad weekend. And all that was because of drugs. He broke into somebody’s
house and stole something to get some money to go out and buy his crack rocks. That’s
what happened.

My mom was pissed off. Not just because my dad had messed up so bad and made it so
I had to see something like that, but also at him and my uncle for letting my cousins
and me run wild in that environment. My uncle had caught my cousin and me smoking,
and he came clean with my mom about it. She was just pissed. And knowing my mom, I
think she was just as pissed at herself for not knowing better when she let me go
over there.

But on the ride home, she talked to me. I was asking her tons of questions. I couldn’t
understand what my dad could have done to make those cops hate him so much, or why
they’d done that to him, hurt him, and treated him like that. And she had to explain
to her kid that my dad had an addiction, and it made him do things that hurt the people
he cared about. “That’s why you’re hurt right now,” she said. “He knows it’s wrong,
but he has a disease that makes him make these bad choices.”

I was pissed. I thought the eight-year-old equivalent of, “Fuck that.” Not only had
my dad abandoned me for these drugs, but I had to see the cops bashing and smashing
him like that. If I wasn’t born with a problem with authority figures, I had a pretty
freakin’ big problem with them after that. That’s how I went into second grade. That’s
when I started really fighting with teachers and getting suspended.

Catelynn:

There was a lot of violence like that around me, too. I had one uncle who had a huge
meth problem. I can remember him hallucinating while I was at his house, asking him
if I could see the government people flying around his house. He was always in some
kind of trouble, in jail or getting bailed out. Once he went on a meth binge, got
drunk, got in his car, crashed into a school bus, got caught with a gun he wasn’t
supposed to have, and got hauled off in handcuffs. But the worst was when he’d beat
his wife in front of the kids. He’d freak out and start to whoop her ass in front
of us, until she’d get away, throw us all in the truck and speed off to get away.

It was like scary movie stuff sometimes. One time, my mom had to go over there because
he was screaming he was going to chop her head off with a machete! When she got there,
there he was, actually standing there with a machete ready to chop her head off.

I wasn’t safe from violent addicts, either. When I was thirteen or fourteen, Tyler
and I suspected my mom’s boyfriend at the time — the father of my little brother —
was doing crack. We found proof when we found a crackpipe hidden in the bathroom,
and three days after that, we found out we were suddenly being evicted.

Because my brother was just a little baby at the time, the landlord gave us a few
extra days to pack up and leave. Tyler came over to help, and so he and my mom and
my sister and I were packing up the whole house. The boyfriend, though, was just sitting
in a chair watching, and he was obviously high on crack. He was running his mouth
saying ridiculous stuff like, “We don’t have to go anywhere! I paid everything! We
don’t have to pack, we’re not leaving!” But my mom and I knew that wasn’t true. We
all just kept working while he sat around, high and talking crap. Then my mom left
the house for a bit. While she was gone, I made the mistake of making some remark
to the boyfriend about him not helping us pack.