Prison Baby: A Memoir (17 page)

AS THE MORTUARY workers roll Mother’s body towards the door on a gurney, I shadow the attendants. I’m thankful she and I said everything we needed to say to one another before she passed away.

They load her into a body bag, all the life, all the fight in her gone. My mind taunts me with my battle against her, with all she endured. How did she wait for me so long? How did she stand by me through all I did to her?

I want—need—to give her more, and she’s gone.

Gone. Death does not honor our desperation for a second chance. Nor does it obey the cry for reconciliation.

That night, I pull on all my mother’s socks, one over the other, all the socks except the blue ones she died in. She was cremated in her blue socks.

Hopelessness tries to drag me down into its hole but I won’t let it. I need to prove to myself and to Mother my love for her, my respect. A stranger to the temple, back in Minneapolis I attend the mourner’s service every night and I sit Shiva for 365 consecutive sundowns and recite Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourning. I haven’t done any one thing in my life for 365 consecutive days. My orthodox uncles who taught me the prayer do it for seven days. But I can’t—won’t—stop. My devotion to the mourner’s service shocks everyone, most of all me.

GRIEF BITES AND stings. I need to occupy and distract myself, and while I might not have the DNA for impulse control, I discover in those first twelve months without Mother my extra gene for quirky, off-the-wall creativity. I sink my sorrow into the only outlet left, since I no longer drink or drug, and put my nonlinear, bouncy brain to good use and invent a few products. The creativity helps lift the shroud of constant sadness. I work nonstop, with a fount of ideas. Some tank, but I don’t care because I don’t call mistakes failure.

My father begins his descent into the horrific world of mind subtraction: Alzheimer’s. My time’s up on a new life designed to care for myself and focus on my work.

MY FATHER’S DAILY HOUR-LONG WALKS TURN into all-day wanderings into neighborhoods where we can’t find him. His repetitions of “Where are we?” and his empty gaze give us clues he needs to see a doctor. My father’s disappearance cell by cell reminds me that I adored some things about him, qualities I’d forgotten because of his eruptions of violence.

His capacity for deep compassion and ease with his emotions brought me close to the most tender side of this man. He’d often shed tears when he heard a story about someone in need. And he held great admiration and respect for laborers and blue-collar work—maybe that was the socialist in him.

When I was in high school and still living at home, one night after dinner I broke a teacup in my mother’s china collection and felt terrible. My mother lit into me, but my father defended me. “She feels bad enough,” he said, “no need to scold her.” That was it. I felt released from the guilt and protected by my father.

On one of his last travels alone, I took him to the airport and we sat over tea at a table by a window. He asked me, out of nowhere, “Do I dominate you?”

Right in front of me, I knew then where I learned my blunt honesty.

He must have sensed how my walls of protection and tension built up in his presence.

“Yes,” I told him.

That’s all we said. But his question caused me to reflect. We had a special way with each other, soft moments clouded by his infrequent and unexpected violence. And then there was our contest of wills, the special way I knew to aggravate him on purpose, to provoke him.

THE DAY MY father finds out he is losing his mind, he can’t recall two-syllable words on the doctor’s orders.
Table, walnut, diving
. He says he sees them swim away, first one, then the other two. Words float from a once measured vocabulary. After a lifetime of scrutinizing
Paradise Lost
, he replies, “Alas, I thought as much,” the day doctors diagnose dementia. It’s his dancing companion, this madness, for the next ten years.

“Don’t much like the idea of an existence without my mind,” he tells me on one of our visits to the neurologist. “Toenails,” he adds. “After the mind goes, there is not much left but toenails.”

Thank God for toenails, I think. At least there’s something left.

The scholar melts into a slow drip through stages of childhood. He reads books with the pages turned upside down. He thumps the wall with the palm of his hand next to the elevator button in the lobby of his assisted-living center, his face puzzled as to why the elevator won’t respond to his wall banging. Pained and fascinated at the same time, I witness the curse of my father’s Alzheimer’s. The disease steals his critical, cerebral style, yet as the intellectual professor fades, Dad softens. It’s also the first time in my life I see his face open, without a beard, and his gentleness glows from his cheeks.

AS DIFFICULT AS I found my father and as much as I rejected my mother, they and their friends influenced me in the deepest of ways. They introduced me to great writers, painters, a few physicists, all family friends who dined and drank at parties at our house every month, sometimes twice a month. My parents kept a social household, and their literary circle impacted my worldview about marching to your own drumbeat. Some were gay or lesbian, some drank like pirates, or were depressed or flew between highs and lows on who-knows-what, and some were institutionalized with off-and-on “insanity,” as my parents would describe it.

I can’t say I learned to write from this exposure, although I’m sure all those nights of poetry readings helped me fall in love with words and the sound of language. Since I never talked, I listened a lot.

I’m also sure my early rebellion against academia and what I viewed then as artistic and literary arrogance stems from this background.

A FEW YEARS before my father dies, my life as a mother begins. Motherhood never seemed possible in my former life.
How can I raise children and care for others when I couldn’t even take care of myself
?

My father and I become a little closer before he passes away because I like him better with his tender side, even if it’s in dementia. I’m also shocked how his regression parallels the same stages of development as my now seven-year-old daughter—only in reverse.

The night he dies, my daughters and I visit him. My youngest, then around three, holds his hand and tucks her little yarn-toy lamb on his pillow, right by his ear. He is on his way out, nonresponsive other than the moment when his body softens from its labored breathing into a sigh. Hospice musicians play harp and guitar off to the side of the room, and I remember then one of the sweetest things my father did for me, for us.

He took me to a few R&B concerts before I was old enough to drive. He knew I loved music, hated to talk, and we would sit, basking in the melodies together. The two of us together at small club jams, full of mostly people of color, with Roberta Flack onstage or large auditorium blasts with Donny Hathaway and others. Me and my father, whose six-foot-five frame made him stand out as the only white man around. Even though I felt embarrassed about him at my side, I loved it at the same time, my loving father brave enough to venture out with me this way, even though he lacked courage in some other ways. I loved him and hated him, and in the end, only loved him.

HE DIED THE night of our visit with the baby lamb toy. While we waited for the mortician—my girls and my niece, Madeline, played Crazy Eights with the deck of cards I found in his dresser. Right at the foot of my father’s bed, next to his lifeless body, they giggled and shuffled cards. When the mortuary workers arrive, along with my sister-in-law, we all escorted him alongside the gurney, his body in a brown, vinyl body bag like my mother’s, down the long nursing-home halls into the parking lot.

Later that night, in the underground parking lot of our apartment building, my oldest daughter, who’d been teaching herself to ride her bike for almost a full year but still couldn’t stay upright, hopped on her bike as I reached into the car to take her sister out of the car seat. I turned around and she sailed past me on her bicycle. No training wheels, just free riding on her own. Life not only goes on, it soars, where joy can live inside loss and grief.

MY CHILDREN ARE still young as I begin to write this, and I believe their story is for them to tell, not me, which they’ve confirmed. Like any parent, I’m protective of them. My world doesn’t need to be their world.

As a new mother, I’m not prepared for the pressures of parenting and one day, frustration about something I can’t remember erupts. I’m alone at home and strike the edge of my daughter’s crib. My right hand fractures into bits. I wonder then if I’ll ever stop this fight with myself, with the world. While I’d never dream of placing a hand on one of my girls or anyone else, I want this battle with myself ended. My hand in a pink cast for months, I walk them to pre-school with this constant reminder about my unpredictable inner turmoil. I consult a specialist in trauma and grief, along with another professional who treats soldiers with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. I feel like a soldier, a warrior. I learn that not just soldiers live with PTSD but also survivors of rape and abuse—and inmates.

“Childhood trauma in the first years,” they tell me, “overstimulate and enlarge the amygdala, the part of the brain which processes emotion.”

It’s like I’m in a science class, but I also recognize I need to address my thinking and behavior. I’m afraid of myself right then.

“This part of the brain controls impulses and processes memories of emotions,” they say.

Oh hell
. I recall the multiple broken attachments and severed bonds I experienced as a child. Then we discuss my discovery of The Letter.

“The shock and trauma pitched you into a tunnel of dissociative amnesia,” the counselors say.

The lockdown, my emotions blocked and separated from my body.

“Overdeveloped fight or flight or freeze instinct,” one of the professionals says.

They suggest I have PTSD, which started, they say, in my infancy. Lots of people heal from PTSD, though.

There’s more. “Most likely you arrived in your adoptive home with RAD,” one of the counselors goes on. “Reactive attachment disorder.”

The word
disorder
sounds like a prison sentence.

As one of the counselors explains more about this, I’m dazed. “It’s a rare and lifelong condition,” she says. “And it can permanently change a child’s brain in development and hurt her ability to establish future relationships. Often caused by early separation from a birth mother, a child learns subconsciously it’s dangerous to attach.”

Yikes, it’s all there, I think. It’s more and more clear what damage those early years caused. But I don’t accept it because I’m sure I’ll overcome it all.

Signs of RAD in toddlers and children include withdrawal from others, aggressive behavior towards peers, masked feelings of anger, and, the counselor adds, “Watching others closely but not engaging in social interaction, preferring not to be held and to play alone.” On and on, and it all rings true.

“A lifelong challenge,” the counselor stresses.

Yet I’m almost relieved because now I understand more about my past.

STUDIES SUGGEST THAT chronic intrauterine exposure to heroin causes hyperactivity, a brief attention span, and delayed cognitive, perceptive, and motor skills, as well as other developmental delays such as hypersensitivity to light, sound, and touch. Does this explain my sensory jitters as a girl? Maybe it does explain the occasional pinball of language and sound inside me where at times it’s too much for me to drive and talk at the same time, and at other times, when sound and light bounce in a battle for my attention during a group conversation.

More pieces fall together for me during my consultations with childhood specialists. Since every drug a pregnant woman ingests passes from her bloodstream through the placenta to the fetus, drug addiction in a mother causes addiction for the baby. After birth, with the drug no longer available, a baby’s central nervous system becomes overstimulated and causes withdrawal symptoms, which can last for two to six months.

I learn how the brain of a deeply traumatized child needs repair over a lifetime, if it’s possible. I’d already conquered one: my reaction to the smell of airplanes and the big vomit scenes when I travel. The olfactory bulb communicates right into the amygdala and hippocampus, the latter responsible for associative learning. Both are part of the brain’s limbic system, an area connected with memory and feeling, sometimes called the “emotional brain.” It’s all tight wiring and explains a lot of my past.

The sense of smell often calls up powerful responses and memories in an instant from conditioned past experiences. When we smell a new scent, we link it to an event or a person, even to a moment. Our brains forge a bond between the smell and a memory. When we encounter that smell again, the link is built in, ready to provoke a feeling or association. It’s common for smells to call up childhood memories because we encounter most new odors in youth, though studies show we begin to form associations between smell and emotion before we’re even born. Infants who were exposed to drugs, alcohol, or cigarette smoke in the womb show a preference for these smells. Even for garlic. Such smells might upset another baby, but to the initiated, they’re normal smells, even comforting.

This all explains my nausea on airplanes, the association with the Big Escape.

“Babies who suffer from heroin withdrawal also struggle with eating difficulties, overstimulation, and irritability,” a counselor tells me.

I suck in deep breaths.
This was me. She’s described my parents’ concerns about our first years together
.

“They’re difficult to console or comfort.”

My heart pumps full with a burst of pain. I don’t think about how I needed comfort.
Poor Mother, I couldn’t hug her. Wouldn’t
.

If only, if only . . . my parents had been informed, our relationship and my childhood could’ve been so much easier. But now I understand “if only” doesn’t go anywhere. I need to reframe my view of the past with a new perspective through a different lens.