Leaving Cloud 9

by Ericka Andersen

  The places where Rick’s family stayed looked more or less the same—dark, grimy, and roach infested, with mystery stains on the mildewed furniture. They were filled with society’s outcasts—criminals, sex offenders, drug dealers, and addicts. Folks around town knew these were the places where you could find drugs and prostitutes.

  The motel room Rick remembers most clearly had two double beds, a short hallway, and a kitchenette with a stove. Everything was filthy, with little room to move and no cleaning supplies—not the kind of place where maids made the beds every day.

  True to the rumors, the motel was a hot spot for drug dealing and crime, with police busting someone every few days. As far as safety went, there was none. Sylvia always instructed the kids to lock the door and not open it if she wasn’t there—and they trembled in fear when they heard police sirens or angry arguments happening outside.

  At one hotel, another little boy lived there at the same time they did. His mom or dad—Rick doesn’t remember who was who—would leave him in Sylvia’s room while they went out to a nearby bar. The boy was sickly and perhaps mentally slow. But he seemed almost relieved when his parents left him there. Maybe he was just happy to be with kids his age.

  Rick and Jenny were glad the boy was there too. The three of them found solace in one another, attempting to create some sort of childhood amid the chaos. They played together and shared snacks if they were available, always wondering when their adults might come home—or if they even wanted them to.

  “He was a good kid. He was a survivor,” Rick recalls now of his motel friend, wondering what might have happened to him, but the boy’s name is lost in the memories. He’s now just a brown-haired, scared little guy that Rick can only hope made it out alive.

  At one point a boyfriend of Sylvia’s lived with them in the motel— Sylvia called him Little Jimmy. They had a few old pots and pans, and Little Jimmy would dump canned ravioli or SpaghettiOs in them night after night for their dinner. If not that they’d have hot dogs or cereal, grilled cheese after grilled cheese. Rick has strong cravings for these foods to this day despite being forced to eat them continuously as a child.

  Rick and Jenny shared one double bed in that room. Often they were left alone all night or deep into the night, wondering when Sylvia would come back. Sometimes she would be gone for days at a time, and the kids would stay huddled in the motel room, munching on stale cereal and flipping between a few available channels on a TV set that was well past its lifespan.

  One time a loud banging awoke them at night, a man’s deep voice radiating through the jangle of the rusty gold-colored lock. They froze, silently looking at each other, praying the man and his banging would just go away. Rick could see the outline of his arm, the small sliver of the white of his eye trying to peek through the not-quite-closed curtains.

  “Sylvia!” the man yelled, then let out a string of expletives, bitter disgust in his voice and one last fist to the door. And then silence. But Rick couldn’t fall back asleep that night, the man’s creepy stare seared into his mind.

  Thankfully that was the only time a stranger tried busting down the door, but every successive night at that motel was more terrifying to Rick, the fight-or-flight impulse building up in him until it became reflexive, constant, necessary.

  It was nights like that one that created in Rick the hair-trigger defensiveness that defines post-traumatic stress. This is a common reaction in children who grow up in frightening, uncertain conditions. When childhood eventually ends and they are safe from the predators of the past, they still feel like they’re in the jungle, with threats lurking everywhere. They live on high alert, and it’s easy for them to forget they are grownups who can fend for themselves and live in a more rational world.

  Rick knew God existed at this point and would try praying generic prayers when he was scared. He did that the night the man banged on their door. Afterward he felt that perhaps the prayer had worked to keep him away. But he also thought maybe God wasn’t listening at all. Their situation wasn’t really changing, after all.

  Then it got worse. The cash ran out entirely—on Christmas Eve.

  Worse than sleeping in a motel is the next level down—sleeping in a car. It was Christmas Eve in Colorado, and the cold was moving in, with light snow that could turn heavy at any minute. With two kids in the back seat and nowhere to go, Sylvia parked the car and told them she’d be right back.

  Rick and Jenny huddled together in their dirt-encrusted, puffy bomber jackets, a threadbare blanket covering them in the back seat, while Sylvia crunched through a gravel parking lot into a slick, brown building with a neon sign that read BAR out front. They’d been here before, but it had never been this cold. And they were older now. Everything was beginning to make more sense, and their life seemed less normal with every day. The numbness—both from the cold and the emotions—began to settle over them like the blanket.

  It wasn’t long before Sylvia had worked her charms on an unsuspecting but willing man. The two of them came stumbling out the door, the neon letters of the bar sign highlighting their silhouettes as they threw open the car door.

  The man barely noticed the kids in the back seat. He just kept pawing all over Sylvia as he directed her a few blocks away to a moldy-looking, two-story brownstone motel. Sylvia left the car running with the heat on when they arrived and promised to return quickly. The gas gauge was dangerously close to E, as was the kids’ hope for ever getting out of the car that night and sleeping in a bed.

  But true to her word, Sylvia was back thirty minutes later. She hauled them out of the car and into the motel room, now absent the man but with a king-size bed where they all piled in—hungry, tired, and Santa Claus all but forgotten.

  CHAPTER 8

  KINSHIP CARE

  After the night in the car, the family stayed at Sylvia’s parents’ house for a few nights before she got another pension check and was able to put some money down on a trailer. From trailer to motel and now to trailer again—such was the traveling life of a poor family with little stability. It was nice for the kids to have a room of their own again, where all their things could stay, but Rick never knew how long they’d be there. It was all too likely they’d be forced out by eviction or by the law if his mom got in trouble again.

  Sylvia’s arrests weren’t as frequent at this time, but Rick vividly remembers cops showing up and calling a pair of overworked social workers with tired eyes who took him and Jenny down to the police station. In a small town, Sylvia’s involvement with drug dealers and her tendency to public intoxication kind of tipped the law off from time to time.

  The kids responded to what was happening first with wide eyes and then with an increasingly relaxed acceptance. They got used to the social workers who said their names as if they knew them when they didn’t. Sitting in the cracked leather chairs at the station, with dirty fake-glass windows above their heads, became somewhat familiar year after year. So did waiting to either be taken to foster care or—more commonly—to his grandparents’ house.

  Rick was six years old when his mom was arrested one memorable night. He remembers standing with his sister in the lobby of the police station—quiet, confused, scared—when their grandparents came whisking through the door. Their appearance might have been a relief to the two frightened children, but then, from a room away, this conversation boomed:

  “Why do we have to pick the kids up? I’ve raised my kids,” Rick’s grandfather said. “Why do I have to raise these kids? I’m old. Why should I have to put up with this?”

  “We can’t leave them,” his grandmother reluctantly responded. “These are my grandkids.”

  Sylvia’s parents’ reluctance to take over parenting duties seeped into Rick’s daily life once the kids moved in. They clearly favored Jenny and had little patience for a rambunctious little boy with a lot of energy, curiosity, and mischief. That didn’t bode well for an unwanted child whom no one stopped to nurture or encourage. Rick was lost within himself, his in
terests constantly denied, his energy squashed. There were rarely any friends to play with at his grandparents’ house and not much to do when he wasn’t at school. Life there was boring, and he constantly felt like an irritating presence.

  Governmental approaches to the problem of poor, abused, or neglected children like Rick have changed over the years. Policies varied from state to state, and the underlying philosophies shifted back and forth from “get the children out of the home” to “keep families together whenever possible.”

  The federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, passed in 1974, required states “to prevent, identify and treat child abuse and neglect.” Following this a variety of other policies were implemented at both the federal and state levels. But it’s impossible to say how those policies might have affected Rick simply because his grandparents were able and (more or less) willing to help.1

  It wasn’t until 1997 that the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which guides current policy, was passed. This act leaned toward prioritizing children’s health and safety over reuniting them with parents.2 Suffice it to say, things have improved since the early 1980s, when Rick was living with his grandparents, but problems still remain. And the landscape of needs and proposed solutions still changes frequently.

  For instance, “kinship care”—relying on extended family to “foster” at-risk children—is making a comeback in modern-day America after years of decline. Millions of children around the country are now being raised by grandparents and other relatives. Sometimes these kids are unnoticed by the general public, but the truth is that for every child in foster care with relatives, there are twenty children being raised by family outside the formal foster care system.3

  And while it may seem great that kids have relatives to take them in, kinship care isn’t always a positive. The truth is, these situations are often based on emotion or obligation. They typically arise in response to a crisis, and family members don’t have time to consciously decide what they want to do. In addition, they receive no training and little support.

  Foster parents at least willingly choose to take in children. They are trained and monitored, and they receive both financial and social support. Families involved with kinship care, however, are often unable to get the full benefits that foster parents receive.4 Although kinship care can be a godsend for children in bad situations, it’s far from easy for the children or their caretakers—and the caretakers can hold a grudge against the children for disrupting their lives.

  This seems true in Rick’s situation. It’s clear that his grandparents cared for the children mostly out of obligation—and their reluctance showed in very negative ways. We can’t know for sure, but it might well have been better for the kids to live with strangers.

  Rick’s grandparents’ house had a big brick fire pit in the yard, and once a week Grandpa Hank would fire it up and grill hamburgers. More rarely, he took Rick to go fishing for catfish and cook them up for dinner. Those are some of the scarce, sweet memories Rick has of living in the kinship care of his grandparents.

  For the most part, though, life there felt like being in an orphanage or foster home. It wasn’t like living with family at all. The terrible food, the strict rules, and general coldness created a strange reality for a sensitive little boy just looking for someone to genuinely care for him.

  His grandma picked out their clothes the night before. There were two pairs—school clothes and play clothes. Even today, Rick likes to say he’s changing into his “play clothes” after work. Rules were many and strictly enforced—no TV aside from one hour of cartoons on Saturdays, no elbows on the table, no drinking milk before a meal (something Rick prefers to enforce with our son now), no talking with your mouth full, always clean your plate.

  Behavior was monitored closely, and punishments were doled out with little love or care by Annika, who was definitely the disciplinarian in the house. Hank, still dazed by the fact that he was partially—and not by choice—raising his own grandkids, paid almost no attention to them. He spent his time in the garage working on an old red El Camino or just sitting in the backyard on a 1960s-style lawn chair, staring off into the distance and waiting to be called to dinner—which was usually a difficult time for Rick.

  Annika was German by birth and loved to cook food from her homeland. Night after night, dinner consisted of cabbage and schnitzel or some kind of wurst. While Jenny liked the food, Rick despised it, yet he was required to eat it day after day. In fact, he’d be forced to sit at the table until he ate everything on his plate. What he didn’t eat would be saved for the next day’s breakfast. Annika wasn’t going to waste food, and she insisted that he would eat it if he was hungry enough.

  Even though the rules were the same for Rick and Jenny at Grandma’s house, the two were treated very differently. Perhaps it was because Jenny was the sweet, smart girl who obeyed the rules and made good grades. Maybe it was just personal preference. But the reality was that Jenny was loved by her grandparents and Rick felt he was not.

  His grandma in particular doted on Jenny, calling her “Tensy,” because she was tiny, but Rick doesn’t remember a single time that his grandma hugged him or told him she loved him. In fact, she made no secret of her disdain for him. He was nothing like the sons she had raised—rowdy and loud, tough little boys with strong opinions and traditional male qualities. Rick was reserved and sensitive, quick to get his feelings hurt or get upset by seemingly small injustices. And Grandma was quick to shame him for those qualities.

  When Rick’s hair grew long in the early 1980s—something he had no real control over, since he couldn’t cut his own hair—Grandma often told him he looked like a girl and acted like one too. He did happen to like his hair that way—he thought it looked cool—but shame saturated him after his grandma’s name calling.

  One day she decided she had had enough of him looking like a “sissy boy” and hauled him to the barber. Without asking what Rick thought or cared about it, she ordered the barber to shave his head. Rick opened his mouth to protest but then realized there was no point. Besides, he feared repercussions. Would she make him go to bed without dinner—or for breakfast eat cold, leftover liverwurst that had been sitting out all night? Would he be banished to his room for the next twenty-four hours? He didn’t want to find out, so he let the barber shave his head bald. It was one of the most humiliating moments of his life.

  Sylvia said not a word when the next day she saw what had been done. Like Rick, she was fearful of her parents. She was also in their debt, and she knew it. They’d always be there to take the kids when things went wrong, and she had no intention of cutting that safety net to pieces. Her parents could do as they liked with her kids as long as she could keep living her debauched lifestyle.

  The reality of being unwanted in his grandparents’ home began to build a foundation of self-hatred in Rick that would manifest itself in devastating ways when he became an adult. Children deserve and need to be loved unconditionally, disciplined with care, and groomed with a future in mind. No such care was given to Rick, who really didn’t know any different. He didn’t know about moms who don’t get drunk or dads who want to bond with their sons and teach them to grow up and be good men. Whether he was with his mom or his grandparents, all he knew was whiskey and frowning and the minimal amount of attention that could possibly be paid to children who weren’t really wanted.

  Aside from providing food and shelter and making sure they followed the rules, Sylvia’s parents did little to supervise or entertain Rick and his sister. Usually they were shoved out into the backyard and told to play there for hours on end. The adults didn’t want to deal with them, so they had to fend for themselves. Maybe that’s when Rick started building the independence and perseverance that would later propel him through work and marriage and college and jobs and life in general.

  Beauty was always an ironic contrast to the ugly realities of Rick’s actual life when his family lived in Colorado. Gorgeous purple mountains, snowcapped p
eaks, and orange-pink sunsets framed the lives of neglected children with little more than their imaginations to keep them occupied.

  Thankfully, the magic of childhood is that those very imaginations can help a kid temporarily escape the grim realities that surround them. A square of bushes in the backyard was easily transformed into a fort where Rick and Jenny would play G.I. Joe, soldiers, or cowboys and Indians. On rare occasions, a neighborhood kid would join in, but usually it was just Rick and Jenny. As a typical big brother, he would tell her what to do and chase her around the yard, bearing down with “Indian rubs” and arm punches when he got angry with her. This only led to trouble for him, though, as Jenny would usually run crying to Annika, who would then “take the switch” to him.

  This part of Colorado where Rick’s grandparents lived was much greener and more lush than where they had been living before. They lived near an airport and would lie on their backs on the cool grass for hours, watching airplanes fly overhead as if they were watching the movies.

  When that got to be old news, Rick and Jenny would dash around the yard catching grasshoppers in their hands or trapping lightning bugs in jars. They would even chase the occasional rodent around a bush. Crab-apple trees in the yard bore bright-red fruit, though no one ever ate any of it.

  It was around that same time that Rick and a neighbor friend decided to steal some peaches off another person’s tree—for no particular reason other than boyhood rebellion—and got in trouble for it. Ironically, he didn’t even like peaches. “I was just being a follower,” he remembers. “I hated peaches because they were fuzzy. I thought that was gross.”

  Being a “follower” is something Rick truly disdains today, often hefting the accusation against people he doesn’t care for. There was always something in him that craved independence and solitude, and he never felt a desire to be popular or well liked. Maybe survival mode allows only care for oneself, especially when no one else is there to do the job. To this day, Rick hates trends and rolls his eyes as everyone jumps on the bandwagon of the latest TV show or band. That attitude is just one of those random side effects of his early life—and there are many.