I never knew my dad. My mother raised me when she was very young and made tons of mistakes due to her age, her lack of resources, and her substance abuse problems. We moved around a lot, as I recall. Sometimes I was kicked off to stay with family members for weeks or months at a time. I vaguely remember living in Chicago — broken-down mobile homes and apartments. We never had any resources whatsoever. Never enough heat or food.
Wearing hand-me-down clothes from my mother was a brutal thing as a little boy. When I was in my early teens I wanted to wear jeans, but we couldn’t afford jeans, so I wore my mother’s jeans to school, and the kids noticed. They made fun of me so bad that I never wore jeans throughout all of high school.
When I was around seven, my mother married a man named Bud (she had frequent men in her life). He was emotionally devoid and treated me more like an employee. I was to do chores and more chores. We never spent any time together “playing catch” or anything like that. I was mowing the lawn with a manual push mower at eight years old, handed a pair of oversized scissors to cut around the fence posts and the foundation of the house because the old push mower couldn’t get in there. He was a very strict, military type of guy. He would watch TV from the dinner table, but I was not allowed to turn my head to see the screen — I would be punished if I looked at the TV while having dinner. One day he brought me home a gift: a book on table manners. I was to read a chapter a day, write a book report on that chapter, and present it to him before dinner. I learned discipline and the value of hard work from him. He left a deep mark on me, for certain.
Their marriage lasted an impossibly short amount of time. He quickly moved out of the house into a condo down the street, and his parenting became strictly picking up my little sister to take her out to dinner on Friday nights — where it was my job to walk out to him, get the list of chores I was to do, and “get the check.” This is where he gave my mother roughly $250 a week to live on.
My mother drank about a handle of vodka a week, sometimes more, plus about a carton of Merit 100’s. So we didn’t have a ton of money after that to put gas in the car, pay for heat (much needed in northern New Hampshire), buy food, pay the phone bill. Our home phone, the landline, was frequently shut off for lack of payment. Food was always in short supply, which still has a lasting effect on me today.
One of my happiest memories was something so small and silly. We never had enough heat, and the house was brutally cold — partially due to a lack of money to keep it at 70, but also to how the home was designed. I would be scolded if I dared turn the heat up, so often I would be fully dressed in pants, socks, and a sweater in the home just to stay warm. The heat in the house was often in the high 50’s and low 60’s for about six months of the year. When I was young, I would wake up super early, while I knew my mother was still sleeping off last night’s drink. I would take a long-sleeved t-shirt, and as a young man of say ten years of age, turn up the heat, and crouch down over the heat register so the warm air would fill up my shirt and warm my whole body. Ohhh, what a glorious feeling that was. I still smile when I think about how great that made me feel.
My mother was not much of a housekeeper. She did very little around the home; later in life I realized she had a touch of hoarding, as she never wanted to throw away anything, even the old coupons we got in the mail. Somewhere in grammar school I remember being made fun of because my clothes were always dirty — I must have smelled terribly as well. So at an age where the washer was taller than me, I started doing my own laundry, without a clue as to what to do. Between reading the box and watching TV commercials, I figured it out well enough.
It wasn’t until I was a parent myself that I realized any of these moments were fairly crazy. While I could never tell if my mother was bi-polar or if it was the alcohol, she would often fly into fits of rage, yelling and screaming at me. I can remember, in my teen years, screaming back at her, asking, begging, WHY I was being yelled at. “What did I do wrong!” I would scream back in tears, desperate not to make this mistake again. It never mattered. She was angry at the world, and I happened to be standing there. It was like being raised by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — one minute full of rage, the next moment totally fine, with no clue what she had just done.
Around the age of twelve or thirteen, I discovered a method to solve some of this. I moved my room into our unfinished basement — in New Hampshire. If I thought upstairs was cold, this was next level. But I was out of the way.
And when things still got bad — if I got caught trying to grab some food, or wanting to watch some TV — those nights I would grab my backpack and my dog Maxie and sneak out. I did this for many years. Grab whatever food I could find, slip out the back sliding door, and walk off into the dark New Hampshire woods. Normally around dusk, mostly in the summer and spring, though I did camp in the winter occasionally. Just to be out of the house, so I couldn’t be yelled at, screamed at, or generally be miserable. Just me and my dog would walk toward a place called Diana’s Bath, find a nice mossy flat area to set up camp, make a fire, cook some food, and find peace. I would sneak back in the morning reeking of campfire smoke and get ready for school.
As a father now, I can’t imagine not knowing where my kids are. I never once asked my mother if she knew that I snuck out and went camping, just to hide from her, a few times a week.
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