Once, as James spent another night drinking for hours with Sylvia, she transformed into what he says was pure evil—an evil that he would encounter thirty years later in the form of a Facebook profile photo. James must have been searching her name, and when her profile popped up, a single photo emerged of what appeared to be a spirit, spilling black tears from her eyes. It was the epitome of a picture one might expect to find of Sylvia.
Thinking about that photo reminded James of another incident from their time together: “I wouldn’t usually believe this if someone told me, but her voice changed. She was looking at me with hate. She was speaking to me in the Devil’s tongue. I heard the Devil speak to me through her, calling me a b—, telling me there is no god but the Devil. That came out of her mouth. I stood right there to her face, and I knew there was a demon in her . . . because that voice was not . . . something she could make up. It wasn’t her voice.”
The story rings true because it is similar to other incidents Rick experienced with his mom. In drug or alcohol-induced hazes, she would sometimes morph into this “other” Sylvia. It was almost as if she had left her body and been replaced with a spirit.
Those moments were scarier to Rick than even Tony’s abuse. Her voice was definitely not her own. It was deep and low, a sinister haughtiness coloring every word. To Rick it sounded something like the evil serpent in a storybook. Occasionally she would fall into fits or seizures, then claim to be a dead twin sister who didn’t exist. It was in those moments that the house felt godless, as if Sylvia had opened up her soul to the netherworld and let herself be consumed by it.
Hearing James’s confirmation of the same behavior Rick described to me was chilling. But thinking of Rick and Jenny there in that house, I know it was not, in fact, godless. Without God’s protection, that demon (or whatever it was) could have swallowed them whole, destroyed the entire house, wiped them off the map, and taken their souls too.
If there was demonic activity in the house, that might explain why it always seemed like Rick had a blocked path to God in those days, why he rarely thought to pray or felt like there was a way out. But Satan couldn’t take their souls or destroy them entirely.
Jesus said, “Let the children come to me. Don’t stop them! For the Kingdom of God belongs to those who are like these children” (Mark 10:14 NLT).
Jesus said “Don’t stop them!”—and He meant it. It didn’t matter if the Devil himself was sleeping in their sheets, they would not be stopped from finding the kingdom of heaven. God was with them even in those moments when they felt so alone and so scared. And though they still suffer the consequences of Sylvia’s actions that put them in harm’s way, their minds and hearts were spared in the end and they were kept safe.
Even in the midst of that evil, the presence and love of God prevailed. He wouldn’t let His children be taken down. He commanded the Devil away with those simple words, “Don’t stop them!” And Satan had no choice but to obey the One who makes the wind and the water and the sun and the stars and the hearts of those little ones clutching hands in their trailer.
And the evil did remain in the home. The same evil must have taken over years later—the night Sylvia nearly killed her own daughter.
Sylvia always had a hair-trigger temper, especially when she was drinking heavily. If the kids made her angry, for a justified reason or not, she would often go berserk. On one particular night James walked into the kitchen to see a wild-eyed Sylvia pointing a butcher knife at fourteen-year-old Jenny.
According to Jenny, it started from nothing. Sylvia could change from being “herself” to becoming this other, drunken entity in a split second.
“You could see it her eyes,” remembers Jenny. “She would just be gone.”
In this instance, she got angry with Jenny for some inexplicable reason and threw a glass at the wall. It shattered. Sylvia then grabbed a piece of the glass and jumped on top of Jenny, cutting into her leg with the glass and causing blood to come gushing out. They wrestled around like this on the floor before Jenny was able to get herself up again, all the while shouting, “Why are you doing this? Just stop, just stop, just stop!”
But once on her feet, Sylvia grabbed the butcher knife from the counter. As she was about to bring the knife down into her own daughter’s flesh, James appeared and stepped in front of Jenny. Sylvia came down on his arm with the knife, cutting him to the bone and—maybe—attempting to kill him.
Somehow James managed to wrangle the knife from her and stop the assault. Bleeding profusely, he ran out of the house before more damage could be done. Sylvia seemed stunned at her own actions and was left staring blankly in the kitchen, blood dripping down her own clothing from the crime.
Rick had been home at the time and heard the commotion in the kitchen, but he tried to tune it out. It could have been about anything. After so many years of drunken episodes happening in the middle of the night, nothing much alarmed him anymore. Same old, same old. But when the door slammed and the silence hit, he wondered if something more might be wrong. He ventured into the kitchen, treading lightly, not wanting to meet Sylvia’s eyes or speak with her. Then he saw her and the blood—a lot of blood. Jenny filled him in on what had happened.
If it hadn’t been James, maybe Rick wouldn’t have cared as much. But James was one of the only people who’d ever actually cared about his well-being. Rick sneaked out the back door and hopped in the car to go searching for James.
In the meantime, James stumbled down the road, unsure of exactly where he was going. He had been walking twenty minutes or so before Rick pulled up beside him. Rick took him directly to the hospital and asked James not to tell Sylvia he had helped him get there. The last thing he needed was another reason for her to give him undeserving grief. He was still living like a ghost, attempting to be unseen and unheard at home at all costs.
James got help in the ER and ended up being fine, but the terror of that night and his decade spent with Sylvia remains. Today, a massive scar remains on his upper right arm. He says it’s not the only one—just the largest and most visible.
“The worst part is, that stab wasn’t for me. It was only for me because I stood there,” James remembers, blinking back tears. “She was going to stab her daughter. You don’t do that to your children.”
There are qualities of James that exist in Rick today. He saw something he liked in a man who actually cared about him. Those qualities were cemented in his mind, one in particular: This is how a man acts, being silly with his woman and driving her crazy in a way that’s lovably irritating. Like many of the sparsely placed good memories in his past, these qualities were stunted and even forgotten, only to be revived later at a healthier time. They gave him something good to hold on to—so good that years later, when the happiest moment of his life finally occurred, Rick gave his firstborn the middle name James. He wanted to honor the man who maybe, just maybe, saved his sanity and his life.
Cartoons were a solace for Rick at that age, and one of his favorites to watch on TV were Looney Tunes’ Road Runner cartoons. One day, driving across town, James pointed out a real roadrunner on the side of the road. Rick was fascinated because he had no idea roadrunners were real animals. He recalls James’s smile and him saying, “Yeah, duh,” with a laugh. It was a short, sweet moment that made him feel like a normal kid.
Rick also adored big, brave, strong cartoon characters who were involved in saving the world one instance at a time—characters like G.I. Joe, He-Man, and even Superman and Batman. Like any little boy, he wanted someone to look up to. Fortunately, he finally had a man in his life who might be able to provide some real direction.
Sadly, through the years James found it harder and harder to stay with Sylvia. Her behavior never improved, their fighting raged on, and their relationship was toxic. James was a good person and he felt a responsibility to the kids, but he was the victim in an abusive relationship.
Normally it’s a woman who stays in a relationship “for the kids,” but this tim
e the roles were reversed. James couldn’t bear to leave Rick and Jenny in the hands of someone so incompetent—something Rick’s biological father had done when the kids were small and even more at risk.
It would be eleven years before James finally couldn’t take it anymore.
Maybe he knew at the time, maybe he didn’t, that he was the only adult to make Rick feel as if he mattered, outside of the brief time he had with Steven as a young child. But no one could blame James for leaving after the kids entered their middle teens. What more could he do for them at this point? They were well versed in the art of battles with Sylvia. They could protect themselves physically, though mentally and emotionally they were drained and scarred—as was James himself.
Aside from Rick’s army buddies, who ultimately became his only lifelong friends, James was the only male role model Rick could look to in his adult life. James was an unofficial, “adopted” stepfather who provided a lasting, though rocky, foundation that Rick could build on.
Those who grow up clinging to so little will grasp fiercely to the bits of goodness that come their way. Something small to a healthy child can be massively consequential to a child of poverty and abuse.
God uses imperfect people—and James is a great example of this. His drinking and drugging were not the best example for two small children. But there are no perfect people—and if God didn’t use sinners, there’d be a whole lot less love and grace in the world.
James never had his own children. Why, we don’t know. But he was an important father figure to Rick and Jenny.
To Rick, it doesn’t feel like he was saved from much as a kid. But who knows what might have been. What other man might have been there instead of James? Someone else could have killed Sylvia or hurt the kids. Someone else could have broken them down even more than they already were.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, for better or for worse, this “normal” guy was put into a tricky situation and loved the kids in front of him the best he knew how.
CHAPTER 16
MAN BOOBS
As a young boy Rick was instilled with goliath insecurities about his body despite being a completely normal size and shape for his age. Sylvia’s thoughtless nonparenting injected a remedyless virus of body scrutiny into Rick’s mind when he was younger than ten years old.
“You have man boobs,” she spat to a healthy boy still years away from manhood. There were multiple occasions when she told Rick he was fat. Then, after a few months of this, she came home with weights and a Bowflex machine for him to use.
It was a strange criticism. No one in the family was overweight, and Sylvia had never suffered any weight problems herself, so where the venom came from wasn’t clear. But it proved to be another tool in Satan’s arsenal against Rick. Sylvia’s criticism and nagging cut Rick to the core. The damage manifested itself in multiple ways—mental anguish, emotional insecurity, and complete and total disdain for who he was as a person. Eventually it would eat into his physical health as well.
There’s a lot of talk these days on keeping young women from developing eating disorders. But it’s easy to overlook the little boys who could fall into the same trap because of mentally abusive parents who have no clue or care about the lifelong disabilities they’re creating in their children.
For Rick, his body became a place of idolatry and a battlefield for acceptance, love, and adequacy. Though he never developed an eating disorder, Sylvia’s hateful and irrational words were stamped permanently in his psyche, his self-worth, and his general view of the world.
Eating disorders aren’t the only fallout from such criticism. Sometimes it’s just a constant mental strain, an obsession with exercise, a “never good enough” feeling that invades everything you do. Your body can become the representation of your mind. For Rick, it eventually developed into another mask he put on to fool the world into thinking he was okay. But no matter how fit he got and how good his body looked, it was never, ever enough. It would matriculate later into other forms of body anxiety.
Man boobs. Fat. Sissy boy. Weak. The names and negativity swirled in his head as he grew into an adolescent, creating a foundation of lies that would eventually become a crippling anxiety. The anxiety would develop into depression, a debilitating fear of speaking in front of others, and difficulty in forming close friendships or other healthy relationships. When the people who are supposed to love and take care of you as a child instead reject and brand you, it’s difficult to truly believe that what they say about you isn’t true.
The foundations of self are built in us as children. Imagine a home being built on a crooked, rocky foundation with poor materials and unskilled workers. It’s not a house that will last long or stand strong. The consequences of a bad foundation for human beings are far more tragic. There are consequences of childhood abuse and neglect that other people can’t understand and problems that may never get fixed: shame, rage, irrationality, paranoia, inability to trust, lack of compassion. That’s not to say everyone with an unhappy childhood has those results. But it’s tough to reverse a lifetime of verbal abuse, a childhood devoid of support, love, or stability.
And imagine how a whole host of children raised in this way can ultimately affect society at large. The old saying, “It takes a village to raise a child,” is sometimes criticized, but in some ways it is true. If a child is raised in a supportive community with positive influences to balance out the negative, there is more hope for them to cling to, more opportunity to rise out of the muck. But Sylvia kept herself and her children secluded from healthy community involvement. Sadly, that’s the case with many other families, leaving children cut off and unable to benefit from what might be helpful.
The Enemy is creative in this way. When one tool doesn’t work, he heads back to the toolbox for another—and he won’t quit. But here, again, we can see evidence of God’s presence in the situation. Because, you see, if Satan’s strategy is working, he can go on autopilot with the plan and focus on someone else. But if it’s not, he has to keep trying something new.
As a child, Rick wasn’t responsible yet for choosing the Lord or even knowing what that meant. Jesus was interceding on his behalf, and Satan was having to work twice as hard. Rick and I both believe this to be true. It was impossible to avoid the consequences of human sin in the lives of those around Jenny and Rick. But even in the face of that sin, the Lord took up the mantle for them and said, “They will not be defeated. I’m standing in for them. Though they may be scarred, the wounds will not be fatal.”
It can be difficult to see God in Rick’s story. Where was He when these little ones were being terrorized?
For Rick and me, seeing it requires looking beyond the obvious story line and watching His hand in the details. We still can’t understand every situation, but if we look closely enough, we can see Him. Next to Rick in bed when violence exploded in the kitchen, keeping any man from ever laying a hand on him. Protecting him on the highway during that high-speed chase with the cops or when someone drunk or high was at the wheel. Keeping them safe when the men broke into the apartment or when they were living next door to junkies in the motel or when their own mother attacked them.
Through it all, they somehow made it out alive. Intact—if barely—but capable of one day rising above every antic Satan pulled.
Rick was victorious. He is victorious. And that is to say, Jesus is victorious.
We may never know the full answers to why it all happened—at least not on this side of heaven. But we know God loves His children fiercely and that it broke His heart to see them languishing in such a hurtful environment. More important, we know He is faithful and that no matter what else can happen to us, we can trust Him to bring us through.
CHAPTER 17
AGE TWELVE
With alcohol stashed in the refrigerator like juice boxes, it’s surprising Rick didn’t take his first sip until the age of twelve. No kid likes the taste of alcohol at first, but it grows on nearly everyone who chooses to keep
drinking it. That first sip could have begun to seal a lifetime fate of following in his mother’s footsteps. The fact that it didn’t is nothing short of a miracle.
At thirteen he was introduced to pot by friends at school, and later he would move on to harder drugs. At the same time, his mother’s drug use was accelerating too.
It became a constant battle for her to keep the crystal meth stocked (along with the booze and the string of men trailing in and out). With Steven’s pension payments as her primary source of income, it was tough. Sylvia had on-again, off-again jobs at the Laundromat and as a maid in a motel, but her binges prevented anything like a steady paycheck.
One night Rick was in the room when his mother sat down to do meth, and she accidentally dropped the bag, scattering the powder all over the carpet. She fell to the floor in hysterics, screaming, “My crystal, my crystal!” as if she’d just dropped diamonds down a sewer drain. She scooped up the bits she could mound together, completely distraught that the night’s supply was ruined.
“It was probably twenty-five dollars’ worth of drugs, but to her it was like gold,” Rick remembers.
The house was dark and filthy, rank with sticky countertops and cracked liquor bottles on the floor. But she frantically collected tiny bits of meth on the floor in a scene that is forever imprinted in Rick’s mind.
When drugs are consumed regularly in your household, they begin to seem normal. Before living with them, Rick thought they were scary. But then he realized that nothing tragically bad happened when his mother touched them. It was the effect over time that really caught up to her.
As the drug use increased, so did the crazy. Drugs seemed to draw out the mental demons she already had—revving up paranoia, visions, conspiracy theories, and the like. There was no taking anything she said seriously anymore.
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