Rick wants Jacob to have a sibling, and now there’s a baby girl on the way. Rick’s sister was his saving grace growing up. While their relationship has sometimes been tumultuous, she has always been a rock in his life. They shared something terrible together, and though they don’t talk about it much today, it was better survived together than alone.
Like so many other things, the building of this life is actually quite wonderful. It’s not by his own strength that Rick is a great parent to Jacob and will be a great parent to our next baby. It’s the strength of the Lord who has always been by his side. He’s the one who has always urged Rick to continue on, to take the next step, to do the right thing, who has protected him from disaster and rescued him into love.
It wasn’t until Rick opened his heart to God in his midthirties that his hard life began to soften a little. It wasn’t until then that he realized he didn’t have to carry all his burdens alone—in fact, he didn’t have to carry them at all. He’d been carrying the load of everything that had ever happened to him, physically and mentally, on his back for more than three decades. But that changed when he finally met Jesus. Life didn’t get a ton easier, at least not at first, but it did become manageable. There was room for joy, for hope—room to grow and believe that the gaping wounds of his childhood might someday become just fading scars. There was room to believe that he might be able to forgive his mom even if she never changed and find peace in knowing his worth wasn’t determined by the insulting words from the past, the abandonment and neglect from adults in his life.
Nothing happens overnight, of course. It took awhile for all those possibilities to become realities. And the scars are still real and often painful. His first reaction to problems still tends to be defensiveness, but each time it melts away more quickly.
Best of all, Rick is learning to put his painful memories to use in positive ways. There are elements of his past experience that today make him uniquely qualified to help others through tough situations. The things he went through were horrific but there’s always someone else who is going through something similar. There’s always someone down the road who will benefit from knowing someone who can relate.
As for the woman who was responsible for putting Rick through so many years of torment—his mother—we’ve come to understand that she was a tormented soul as well, plagued with an evil she didn’t ask for either. Her love was tangled and misinterpreted, strangled and inappropriate. But in her own way she loved her kids. In between the boozy nights and the drug binges, she had regrets and attempted to do better. She tried hard to keep her children in her care, even if they probably shouldn’t have been.
Sometimes it’s tough to find the fine line between personal responsibility and the ills that plague people beyond their control—issues like addiction and mental illness. It’s a tragic and incredibly frustrating experience to watch someone self-destruct, especially when that destruction involves children.
I admit that it’s often difficult for me to have sympathy for the woman whose actions hurt my husband so much. I have had to pray for understanding and for mercy for her. You’ll meet her in these pages and come to understand how infinitely confused she must have been.
I’m coming to understand that the redemption in Rick’s situation is not a matter of his mother apologizing or feeling bad about her choices. The redemption is God’s healing power and Rick’s ability to be the parent he never had. In a way, it feels like he tries to be both mom and dad to Jacob. He will wake in the middle of the night for a feeding, try to meet Jacob’s every need, going above and beyond what anyone expects. He has lots of opinions about diaper brands, baby foods, rules and particulars, things you might not expect from a new dad. Sometimes it feels like he’s compensating for what he never had—or maybe he’s just being who he is. Either way, the world has come full circle, and the ultimate joy has made its way into his life.
Becoming a dad for the second time, it will be hard for him again. But Rick has learned to lean on a key Bible verse that we quote often in our prayers together: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28 KJV).
It was a long road to get to this point, so let’s start from the beginning.
CHAPTER 1
IN THE BEGINNING
It rarely starts with just one person. There’s almost always a story that goes back generations. In fact, it’s difficult to put the blame on any one person because the beginnings are so difficult to pin down. One mother hurts her child because her mother hurt her and her mother hurt her and so on and so on. There is often an intervening factor, too, something no one could control that impacts the way children are raised. Adults process their difficult childhoods in all kinds of ways—from addictions to people-pleasing to feeling intense, irrational shame. Add a generational curse of mental illness, or just the right kind of sensitive personality or character, and you have the perfect storm.
Most adults from such a background can pinpoint a few specific moments when feelings of inadequacy and a life of hardship began. Memories of such moments have the power to grind their brains to a halt, mentally transporting them back to the emotional muck that bogged them down again and again. By looking at one such moment in one little boy’s life, we can peek into the past that began to shape that arc of his life.
For Rick, it was kindergarten. No one told him why he was going—or even what kindergarten was. There’d been no daycare or preschool to prepare him—not even Sunday school. One day his mom just shoved him out of the house and toward the big, yellow school bus breathing heavy diesel on the street outside their rundown trailer in a less-than-beautiful part of Denver.
He hadn’t a clue why a stranger with a bus full of kids he’d never met was taking him away from his home. Sure, he’d seen those buses drive down the road, but he’d never been in one, and he certainly didn’t understand why he had to go in one alone. His tears erupted as he watched his mom saunter back to the trailer in her stained T-shirt and bare feet, hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, fumbling to light the cigarette in her hand.
Fear gripped his heart at the loud chug-chug-chug of the bus engine. But apparently he had no choice. It was either get on the bus or endure the fallout from a Monday-morning screwdriver with endless refills.
He wasn’t one to make a scene, so he climbed up the steep stairs with horizontal crinkles and found a seat, legs pasted to the brown fake leather, wondering where the bus would take him. His stomach felt hollow, as empty as the Seagram’s bottle broken at the corner of his yard. He’d used one of its jagged pieces to draw in the dirt.
It was the kind of September day that in some would evoke warm excitement for apple cider, hayrides, and Halloween—though Rick wasn’t aware of what those things were. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the Rocky Mountains stood solid and motionless in the distance as the bus bounced over the gravel road spiked with bottle caps, cigarette butts, and random scraps of trash. Each bounce felt like torture, the brakes screeching with every stop.
Even so, for a moment, Rick thought he might not want to go back. Maybe that bus could take him to a new life. But he couldn’t imagine what that life might be like. He knew nothing of blueberry pancakes for breakfast or warm baths at night or someone to sing him to sleep.
It would be like this for the entirety of Rick’s early life. Living with a charismatic and unpredictable drunk of a mother, he didn’t know anything different.
Her name was Sylvia. Sylvia, who cried and screamed for no apparent reason in the middle of the night. Sylvia, who ordered her children to hide behind the bed when the cops came looking for drugs. Sylvia, who was too wrapped up in her own addictions and narcissism to consider the epic failure she was to her children from day one.
Famed author and life coach Tony Robbins grew up with a neglectful and abusive mother like Rick’s. He frequently mentions her in interviews, but he gives her credit for giving him life and, be
cause of her abuse, for making him the man he is today—someone who helps other people live their best lives and escape prisons of their own making. Rick would one day be able to look back and adopt a similar perspective—to recognize his mother’s positive attributes, difficult as they were to discover amid the rot, and to understand a little of what had made her the way she was.
Sylvia came from a long line of dysfunction, and the same combination of nature and nurture that had haunted her mother and so many others in the family hit her hard. It almost seems like she was waiting for the right moment to let it sink its teeth into her soul. And once it did, she never looked back—at least, not for more than a few minutes at a time.
Sylvia was usually able to keep her life together long enough to retain custody of her kids. Something inside of her desperately wanted her kids enough to clean up her act and make it happen. They were sort of a security blanket for her. If she was arrested, she would call her parents to help with the kids. They would take over temporary custody until she completed the required AA meetings, parent training, and whatever else social services required. Then she’d bring them back home, and the cycle would start again.
I suppose most parents love their children in their own way, whether or not they wanted them in the first place. But in Sylvia’s case, the actual expression of that love was erratic. Rick and his younger sister, Jenny, were like neglected puppies she kept forgetting to take care of. Sometimes they were fed, bathed, and watched. But just as often they could be found scrounging in the kitchen for a piece of bread, wearing the same underwear for three days, and fending for themselves overnight while wearing pull-up diapers. She showed them love only when the time was right, when addiction wasn’t sucking it all up, when she remembered that these two parts of her were breathing, walking, living right inside her own home.
With a childhood like his, Rick was all but destined to become an abusive drunk or drug addict with little hope of a future. He was just one of many caught up in a vicious cycle perpetuated by an impoverished culture.
The poverty rate in Arizona, where he spent so much of his childhood, has always been one of the highest in the country, and though it has improved a little recently, is still among the highest.1 In 2013, all but four Southern Arizona cities had poverty rates exceeding 25 percent for female-headed households with children under eighteen, with South Tucson nearing 70 percent.2
While so much focus in the media is on immigrants streaming across the borders, looking for work, very little is spoken of the white working poor in Arizona and places like it—how they got that way, why they stay that way, and how the legacy of drug abuse and alcoholism destroys families decade after decade. (After all, the alcoholism didn’t start with Sylvia. It was just passed down to her like a family jewel.)
And Arizona is just one example. In the past few decades, the entire country has begun to segregate more distinctly according to class. The resulting disconnect and misunderstanding between the cultures of rich and poor seems to drive them further apart and, in the process, help perpetuate the problems of the poor. As famed culture analyst Charles Murray explains in his book, Coming Apart:
As the new upper class increasingly consists of people who were born into upper-middle-class families and have never lived outside the upper-middle-class bubble, the danger increases that the people who have so much influence on the course of the nation have little direct experience with the lives of ordinary Americans, and make their judgments about what’s good for other people based on their own highly atypical lives.3
Those in power, in other words, the ones who are making decisions and laws for people in poverty or working-class lifestyles, have little understanding of the challenges poorer people face, especially those who are also battling addiction and mental-health issues. As a result, the solutions offered to the poor tend to be ineffective.
This was already true in the 1970s, when Rick’s personal story began—and has more recently been amplified by the opioid crisis facing this same population of people across the country today. Plus, in those days, getting help for mental illness was rare. Seeing a “shrink” was not commonplace, and getting medication for everything from anxiety to postpartum depression to bipolar disorder was something few people did—especially poor people. What help was available required money they didn’t have. It may not have even crossed Sylvia’s mind to seek help. She might not have understood she may have been suffering from a mental illness that could be managed.
Of course, culture is not the only thing that contributes to the whys of deep family problems. Ultimately it comes down to humans being sinful and sin flourishing throughout generations. We’ve seen it since the beginning of time, in Bible story after Bible story and then down through history. But men and women are not doomed to continue the sins of their fathers. Choices exist even when it feels like there aren’t many—or that the only right ones are just too hard to make.
Living in a trailer park most of his life, Rick was surrounded by poor people. There were a few better-off kids at school, but most of the people he knew were struggling to get by, particularly the immigrant families who had recently crossed the border that was about twenty minutes away. Rick remembers a friend in high school who had one Asian parent and one white parent, but many of the students in his schools were Hispanic, and some were undocumented.
Illegal immigration was a dominant topic in the 1980s and 1990s just as it is today. It’s a dilemma that is yet to be solved—and one that deserves much of the attention it receives as it’s understandably a complicated issue with passionate defenses on both sides of the aisle regarding solutions.
But while politicians and policymakers discuss this issue obsessively, they often neglect other groups of impoverished Americans—both blacks and whites—many involved in a drug-fueled crisis that is breaking families apart and putting kids in foster care or the kinship care of secondary family members. The macro hot-button issue leaves the micro, long-languishing issue of our own individual states behind and abandons people to fend for themselves.
It’s hard to say whether or not a governmental policy focus on a family like Rick’s would have saved them from themselves. After all, government or media pressure can’t make someone choose to stop using drugs or drinking alcohol. But today we have Generation X, millennials, and Generation Z from certain parts of the country who have come into adulthood without adequate lobbying on their behalf by those who truly could make a cultural difference. That collective experience is mounting, and most people don’t meander their way into a life of purpose the way Rick eventually did. Most don’t join the military, avoid addiction, and find long-term relationships. Most don’t find God in a way that meaningfully changes their lives.
It’s the last part that matters most. Articles and books on culture and identity, politics and policy, attempt at length to identify the causes behind the generational dysfunction in families like Rick’s. But one cause that is often highlighted is the loss of religious connection in poor parts of the country.
In his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance notes that there’s a misconception about families in poor areas of the Bible Belt.4 In an interview, he elaborated, “It would appear that folks who are most destitute in these areas are the least likely to go to church. Church is increasingly something that is relatively confined to upper-income, well-educated people.”5
This loss of religious community is tied to the loss of coherent family structure, and both result in the lack of a strong foundation to build a life on. Involvement in a religious community tends to lead to a happier, more connected life. A recent Pew study revealed that such individuals show a strong sense of gratitude, honesty, forgiveness, and prayer in their daily lives.6 Imagine the consequences of large numbers of people in certain areas abandoning these practices and how it might affect their families and communities as a whole.
That’s not to say Sylvia’s family was particularly religious in the first place or that she was against re
ligion. In fact, she would attend church during episodes of short-lived sobriety, but faith was never a consistent or meaningful part of her life. If it had been, perhaps she might have been able to salvage her life and improve the lives of her children.
It’s hard to say for sure, of course. People who have a relationship with God can still get swallowed in the culture of poverty. Churchgoing Christians are not immune to addiction or to family dysfunction. On the other hand, the absence of faith in Sylvia’s household may well have provided a foothold for darker spiritual forces to enter the home. Sylvia’s vulnerabilities in that sense may have provided an opportunity for Satan to play a role in destroying her mind further and endangering her innocent children.
CHAPTER 2
FROM WHERE SHE CAME
Sylvia might never have had a chance, and you can’t fully blame her for what she became. Her downfall didn’t depend entirely on her own choices. It was created and cultivated by a variety of factors, including mental illness and patterns of generational abuse, a mix that was perhaps more toxic for her than for some of her siblings.
Her own mother, Annika, was divorced, worked as a bartender, and had several children before she met Sylvia’s eventual adoptive father, an American GI named Hank. The two were very different, and when Hank began asking her out persistently, he always got a no. But eventually Annika caved and brought home a daddy for her four kids, including Sylvia. You wouldn’t have guessed that Hank and Annika would stay married till death did them part—but so they did. Although Hank would become a stable figure in the lives of Annika’s kids, their sometimes tumultuous marriage also affected the kids negatively.
Annika’s five children—and later her grandchildren, Rick and Jenny—were brought up by two people who loved them, but who also failed them in some ways. Loving guidance and discipline were in short supply. Marital fights often disrupted the home. What appears to be a genetic disposition toward codependency, alcohol abuse, and mental illness was apparently passed on to the kids. And none of them was hit harder than Sylvia.
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