Young Money Dropout

Mama, I want to go to school.
I am not asking for the world,
just a little part for myself.

But you have that bad ankle,
and that school has all those stairs.

It was a sprained ankle mom,
a sprained ankle!
It will be well by the time school starts.

You didn’t have a problem when
I went on all those window-washing jobs this summer,
walked across the parking lots, climbed ladders with buckets.

That’s different, and besides you brought home money. 
If you go to school, you’ll have to be carried
up and down the stairs.
I will insist.

I won’t be carried up and down the stairs like a baby
like last year when you made those four boys carry my chair.
I couldn’t even stand
to look my classmates in the face.

Then it’s settled. 
You’ll get a job.
You’re not going back to school.

~from The Locust Years (forthcoming)

My mother often seemed to love me. Yet there were also times of real cruelty…

My mother did give me the roots for a strong and real faith – the kind that ends up being a true relationship with God – and she often seemed to love me.

Yet there were also times of real cruelty, cold indifference that cut me to the core, and times she shamelessly used me.

One example is making me wash all of our clothes in a bucket in the yard day after day, year after year on a (pretense? real psychotic idea? who TF knows?) that this would “motivate me” to learn math – her words, discovered in a journal I found and promptly burned after I moved to Tennessee.

Perhaps the most disturbing example is the one in the featured poem, when she tricked me into dropping out of school right after the eighth grade so I could work and bring home money.

I still remember sitting in that restaurant, feeling my heart hit the floor when she asked if they were hiring because up until that moment I was still halfway hoping I could convince her to enroll me in high school.

The manager instructed me to obtain a hardship work permit, and I was hired that day. Anyone from my old life would think I was glad to get that job, and that was the truth-construct I presented. The real truth is, my feelings were mixed.

Who holds a five year old to “promises?”

Mama used to always remind me of the “promise” I made to her when I was five. She’d been crying – fearing for her poor health as I recall, which was something she did on an almost daily basis. Wanting to comfort her, I said “When I get big, I’m going to take care of you.”

Well, on the one hand, who doesn’t want to help their mother have a better life?

And Lord knows, we needed the money. That work permit was mine the instant I laid our finance records on the desk.

On the other, who doesn’t want to go to high school and open themself up to all that it offers?

And finally, in retrospect, who holds a five year old to “promises?” At that age, you barely have a concept of what “promise” means, but you certainly wouldn’t be able to consider a concept deeply enough to truly make a promise of any kind, let alone one that will direct the entire course of your future.

At 15 (my age at the end of 8th grade, thanks to a teacher who thought I should skip 5th grade, followed by a stint of “homeschooling” that meant “hang out at the house all day”) I was already dreaming of further developing my writing and growing my knowledge of the world in relationship to it.

I think Mama was afraid that if I went to school, I’d end up leaving her and starting my own life. Only now that I’m grown and a teacher does the full magnitude of the opportunities I actually missed really sink in but God had my back. In 2007, he led me to a loving, supportive husband, re-enrollment in school, and eventually a master’s in curriculum & instruction. Not only has my dream to become a writer been fulfilled, but I also get to pass on those skills to kids in a low-income area who need to discover the healing and empowering properties of their own writing.

The way Mama explained her “reason” for not wanting me to go to high school was that I had sprained my ankle (true) and that it was injured so badly I would have to be carried up and down the stairs if I went to school (completely false). The idea of being forced to do this was a major drawback in my desire to attend. Already often bullied at school, I knew better than to start high school like that!

Mama quickly forgot about my “ankle injury” after I started working.

But a couple of years later, she encouraged me to go get my GED, and I quit working while pursuing it. I succeeded in less than a year and received my GED diploma just before my 18th birthday.

Some delusions are easily deduced, and clearly demarcated against the backdrop of reality – for instance, the idea that my dad was possessed. Others are not nearly so clear or uncomplicated in their definition. I’ll never know whether my mother was being selfish and cruel by not wanting to let me attend high school, or whether it was somehow her mental illness. I will also never know for sure whether her motivation for manipulating the situation was from fear, need for control, or something else entirely. To be honest, it’s been very hard to admit that I’ll never be able to untangle it and to let it go unresolved.

If you’ve been suffering from anxiety and/or depression for a while now, you are probably familiar with the concept of ruminating. Ruminating is where you continuously think about something – a memory, or perhaps a conversation you replay again and again.

While ruminating is not by nature negative, it becomes a negative pattern when you’re ruminations center around negative events or outcomes. Research has shown that depression symptoms are worsened in patients who tend to continuously ruminate.

For me, ruminating often takes the form of recalling an event, such as not being allowed to go to school, and then trying to deduce the motivation behind it.

My therapist and I have discussed this tendency at some length and she, who I can always count on for good strategies presented in a humorous way, gave me some memorable advice:

“You keep getting caught up in a maze that has no cheese,” she said. “Before you go into a maze, I want you to make sure there is cheese at the end!”

With that goal in mind, I drew on a favorite tool – visualization techniques. I created this little decoupage box and placed it in a corner of my mind. Now, when things fall into the simultaneous categories of “hurts like a mofo” and “cannot be explained,” I take down my little box and drop in the memory, the event, the question. I can rest it with Him for now. And it doesn’t bother me at all to think that when I get to heaven, I probably won’t remember to ask.