But I knew Andy didn’t have epilepsy. I didn’t have to be a doctor, I didn’t need to see the EKG results again, I just knew.
And I was right.
I called his surgeon and spoke with him about the situation, and after some discussion and an x-ray, he determined the cause of the problems. The surgery that connected Andy’s esophagus to his stomach, allowing him to eat, was stricturing. Food was unable to pass normally, became backed up and the pressure from the esophagus against his lungs prevented sufficient oxygen. He would lose consciousness, which allowed the food to work its way into the stomach. Pressure against the lungs eased and consciousness regained.
His surgeon took care of the problem and I never put Andy on anti-seizure medication. It was never discussed again among the neurologist or the pediatrician and me.
So I was familiar with the look I saw in the nurse’s eyes the day I picked Andy up from school. But familiarity does not equate comfort. I always felt people judged me about the decisions I made for him or the services and programs I fought for. I always knew in my heart that I what I was doing was right, but that knowledge was deep inside beneath stacks of insecurity. The looks, comments and resistance I faced from teachers, strangers, neighbors and other kids came without warning. In real life, there’s no rehearsal - no time to access inner resources. Not for me. Not back then. It’s like that stunned feeling you get when a person says something that blows your mind and you have the perfect comeback...four hours later.
He was in the nurse’s office wearing the change of clothes I sent with him on his first day. Every year Andy’s teachers requested that parents send a change of clothes to keep at school in case of emergencies.
The nurse came in looking quite serious and explaining to me that their policy was that children with diarrhea not return to school until they’d gone twenty-four hours after their last episode. I nodded and listened, as a good parent should, then asked where he was when it happened. She wasn’t certain, so I talked to his teacher. Andy had the accident in his mainstream P.E. class.
All I wanted to do was get my son out of there as fast as possible. The incident was bad enough, but it happened in front of his typical peers. My worst nightmare for him, aside from his medical issues, was to see him shamed or humiliated in front of people, and especially other kids. It shredded the fiber that made me his mother to think of him in that situation, helpless and stinking while other kids laughed and made fun.
His teacher told me there was an aide with him and she got him out of there as quickly as possible. She didn’t think anyone else was aware of what was going on.
I couldn’t speak for the sobs in my throat, and I couldn’t make eye contact with her because the tears were already betraying me. I just nodded, scooped up Andy’s things and hurried him out of the office, through the front doors and into the parking lot.
I said nothing as I pulled out of the lot and parked on the side of the road less than a block away. My teeth were clenched to keep my jaw from quivering, but when the tears started pouring, the sobs lurched out in an, uhhn sound that made my chest hurt. Andy sat very still and quiet.
“Goddamn it, Andy! You can not do this. Do you understand?”
“I sorwy.”
“You are a big boy. You do not poop in your underwear!”
“I sorwy.” He sat, frozen while I shook and bawled like a child.
“Why didn’t you ask to go to the bathroom?”
“I sorwy. Enna trwy again.” I didn’t say anything. I just sat there looking at him feeling helpless and hopeless. “Sorwy, Mom. Enna trwy again tomorrow, ‘k? Enna trwy again.”
And the thing is, I wasn’t mad at him. I wasn’t mad at all. I felt helpless and frustrated and I wished for the umpteenth time, not that he didn’t have Down syndrome, but that things could just be easier for him. More normal. It was the way I felt when I saw boys his age skateboarding or riding bikes. I bought Andy a tricycle for his fifth birthday and tried to teach him to ride it. Other people, his grandparents and therapists, have tried over the years to teach him to ride a bike, but he doesn’t get it.
I’d watch other kids do all the things kids are supposed to do, and I’d secretly resent them. I’ve never cared about the Down syndrome. I just wanted him to have a normal, happy childhood.
And he did. He had a normal childhood, Andy-style. He never rode a bike, not even with training wheels, but he rode a horse with a little help from his second cousin. He never ice or roller-skated, but he tried. He never played an instrument, but he was in honor choir every year in junior high and high school. (Okay, he’s totally monotone, but one of his aides in grade school taught him to lip synch, and he looked great in the robes!) He never learned to read for pleasure, but he steals all my catalogues, Rolling Stones and Cosmos so he can look at scantily clad women. (Nuff said.)
He never learned a foreign language, unless you count Andowneese. (And I do.) And he’ll never drive a car, but he drives me nuts every day and hopefully for the rest of my life. He went to his prom, graduated high school and started going to camp every summer where he goes white water rafting.
I can’t speak for my son, but this is what I think: Andy has no idea he’s different. Rather, he takes great pride in his extraordinary patience and tolerance for everyone else in the world that just doesn’t get it. With enough time and repetition, one day they will. Until then, he’ll wait.
“Enna trwy again. I sorwy.”
“Sweetheart, I know.” I stopped crying and wiped my face with my sleeve. “I’m not mad at you, punkin, I’m just sad about what happened.”
“Oh essa not sad. Essa Mom’s happy.”
“Now that I’m with you, yes.”
At home, I stripped his clothes, started the shower and threw all the damning evidence in the washing machine - with extra soap. I fixed him lunch and he spent the rest of the afternoon playing Mario Kart, waiting for Allan to come home so he could race against him.
Alone in my room, all the emotion flooded back, filling me with grief so deep that it felt like anger. I wanted to vent to someone, but there was no one I could talk to about it. I didn’t want to hear what my mother would say:
Kimberly, stop it! There’s no reason for you to be upset like this, and there’s certainly no reason for tears. It’s over. I’m worried about you letting things get to you this way. By the way, are you taking your medication?
Allan had a, “Sorry, man, you okay? Let’s play Mario!” attitude. He didn’t understand why I let things affect me the way I did. Nothing seemed to upset Allan. He just rode a kind of mid-level groove and let Mary Jane pay the fare.
That left nobody.
I knew from experience not to subject other people to anything but the pleasant parts of Andy’s and my life. I’ve had friends encourage me to open up about his early years, only to never see them again. Experience taught me that people thought they wanted more information than they could handle. I didn’t blame them. I mean, Christ, how would you react?
Hey, you okay? You seem upset.
I am, actually. My fourteen-year-old son shit his pants at school today.
Excuse me?
Yeah, well the nurse says it’s diarrhea, but he’s actually constipated. See, when he was a baby...
Where was I supposed to start? Where was I supposed to stop? Most importantly: what gave me the right to lay all that on someone whether they asked for it or not? They had no idea what they were getting into. They were just being polite, and I couldn’t blame them. I mean, what do you do when someone dumps unexpected heavy information on you?
When Andy went to his room to play Mario, I went to my room and got high. I smoked long and deep and pretty soon, I wasn’t upset. A few minutes later, I was comfortably numb. The sadness and grief I’d felt faded like chalk wiped from a board. With a good eraser and little effort, the board comes clean a layer of chalk at a time. That’s how it was with meth. Every bowl I smoked peeled away a layer: pain, sorrow, fear, self-doubt, shame, reg
ret. None of it existed inside that high. It was just my drug and me, and the only thing that mattered was maintaining the numbness because what I would otherwise be feeling seemed unbearable.
That’s how it happens. You start out wanting to get high, and you end up needing not to come down. Getting high - smoking meth - hadn’t been fun for a long time. It was how I got through the day. It’s what I did to keep from falling apart. I smoked meth to feel more social. I smoked as a way to relax. It made me feel normal. More importantly, it made me forget all my insecurities and pain, and it dampened my self-loathing for all the things I was and all the things I wasn’t.
I had no coping skills and no boundaries. If I possessed the skills to handle things like Andy’s accidents, the boundaries would be inherent. Stop telling me how I should and shouldn’t feel, Mom. I’m frustrated and sad about what’s happening, and here’s how I intend to handle it, so just back the fuck off.
Just the thought of standing up for myself like that - of saying what I truly felt - terrified me because it was too risky. More than anything, I craved my parent’s approval. They were all I had and I was afraid that if I ever did anything to disrupt the status quo, I would lose them. My fear wasn’t unfounded.
In my family, love was conditional, based upon following rules and doing what was expected rather than simply for being, and God help you if you rocked the boat.
When I was in the third grade, I got the idea to throw my parents a surprise party for their anniversary. I was nine years old. I’d always wanted a surprise party and I assumed everyone else would, too.
Mom kept a list of phone numbers on a piece of cork above the telephone and though I didn’t know most of the people on it, I called them all. Each person, or couple, was assigned to bring a main dish, side dish, dessert or booze. I told them gifts were welcome, though not necessary, and to please park on the surrounding streets to maintain the surprise.
Chuck went home with a friend after school to spend that Friday night, and my best friend’s parents were picking me up at eight ‘o clock, giving me time to play hostess.
Almost everyone from the list showed up and when Mom and Dad came home from work, the house was full of people yelling, “Surprise! Happy anniversary!”
I’d planned the party for weeks and was proud of myself for pulling it off so well.
When the doorbell rang at eight, I grabbed my little flowered vinyl suitcase and went to tell my parents goodbye. Mom grabbed my arm and asked through clenched teeth, “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“I’m going to spend the night with Eve.”
“You’re not leaving here without doing these dishes, Kimberly! After all this, you think I’m going to do them?”
It simply never occurred to me. There were paper plates and plastic utensils. I wasn’t thinking about things like glasses and serving spoons. I was a bad girl. I’d been thoughtless and inconsiderate, so I stayed and did the dishes while my friend and her dad waited in the driveway.
All these years later, my family still talks about that night and how stupid I was. According to my mother, the phone list was of people who were acquaintances, not friends. She barely knew most of them and was horrified to come home from work at the end of a long week to find virtual strangers in her house eating, drinking and generally making a mess. And to top it all off, I had the audacity to think I could get away with leaving her to clean up.
When I left Andy with Mom and Dad and lived in my van for a time, my father didn’t speak to me for a year. When I called the house, he would set the phone down without a word and I’d wait for Mom to pick up the extension. When I was there, he wouldn’t acknowledge my presence. He didn’t get out of his chair, talk to me or speak to my mother about the fact that I was actually in the house. I never stayed long.
I asked Mom about it.
“He’s hurt, Kimbo. He doesn’t understand you, and you’ve hurt him.”
“Is he ever going to talk to me again?”
She would change the subject
A year passed and Andy and I moved in with Allan when my mother called me on Valentine’s Day to tell me my father wanted me to come to the house. He hugged me, gave me a card, and just like that I existed again. Nothing was ever discussed and hasn’t been to this day, except for my mother to repeat what she’d said about me hurting his feelings.
In my family, we don’t talk about the bad things, especially when the bad thing is me.
Which is why I think I never said anything about what happened to me in the sixth grade. I knew that what was happening wrong, but I wasn’t sure that I was not to blame, and there was no way I was going to risk getting in trouble or losing the tenuous relationship I had with my parents by telling them my dirty secret. Keeping everything inside, living with pain, confusion and anger, even for the rest of my life, was worth the price of love.
As I grew up, I assumed that extended to people in general. You are the sum of what happens to you and the things you do. Tried and judged for your sins, the verdict determines your worth.
If moments of clarity and realization happened when they should be happening, maybe there would be no addiction.
Chapter 15
“Get out here, NOW!” It was a fall morning and I thought Allan was already gone, but something made him come back into the house to get me. I zipped a sweatshirt over my nightgown, slipped on my sandals and joined him in the front yard.
I was speechless. Hundreds of neon colored pieces of paper - green, pink and orange - littered our street from one end to the other. They covered the road, filled the gutters and flecked our neighbors’ lawns, cars and porches. Allan handed me one of the five by seven homemade flyers. In large, bold, block letters it read, “Got meth?” with our address beneath the catchy phrase.
“Oh, fuck,” was all I could say. I looked up and down the street, overwhelmed at what I was seeing.
“Come on,” Allan said, and started picking them up as fast as he could.
It was shortly after seven in the morning. Andy’s bus had already come and gone, but I doubted the driver could have read the flyers from his position. I hoped not.
We had no choice. I brought a garbage sack for each of us and we started grabbing. The lawns were set with early morning frost and our fingers quickly numbed. There may have been thousands of those damn flyers. They were everywhere: stuck to houses and the wheels of cars, tucked underneath windshield wipers, and wedged in bushes. The road looked as if it were painted in neon, and most of those papers had tire tracks on them where they’d been run over in the early morning hours.
A woman who lived a few houses down from us came out to help. Allan and I looked at each other, panicked, as she walked over to me.
“These have your address on them, don’t they?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m so sorry for all this. We’ll have it cleaned up as soon as we can.”
“I’ll help you. Is someone stalking you or something?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Allan shake his head almost imperceptibly. I wasn’t too surprised either. We looked like average middle class citizens. There was nothing about our house, our living habits or us to make anyone suspicious of any illegal activity. We were neighborly enough that people knew I was a bail bondsman, which explained my comings and goings at night. We did yard work and waved to our neighbors when Andy came home in the evenings. Allan’s son rode his bike and skateboarded up and down the street on the weekends we had him, and the boys would play catch in the front yard. We decorated the house at Christmas and I took extra rhubarb from our yard to share with the neighbors. We were responsible for letting the irrigation water down to the rest of the block in the summertime.
“Something like that,” I said. “An ex-boyfriend. You know how that can be.” It was the only excuse I could come up with.
I knew exactly who was responsible: Garnett. There was no one else would would have or could have done something like that. He was back together with his ex-w
ife and apparently, I was his new hobby.
“Yes, I do! I’m so sorry for you.”
“It’s just that it’s so embarrassing. You know. All our neighbors. You’re so sweet to be helping us like this. You really don’t have to. I just feel awful.”
“It’s not a problem. Let’s get this taken care of before anyone else sees them.”
We had the street cleaned within a half an hour.
The following Saturday, Andy and Allan were playing Mario Kart in Andy’s room while I was locked in mine watching movies and getting high. I barely registered the faint knock on the front door, but I heard something in Allan’s voice that I’d never heard before when he called for me. When I rounded the corner from the hallway to the living room and saw the two police officers standing in my house, I felt a surreal rush swarm through my body and for a moment, I thought I would lose consciousness.
“Can I help you?” I was relieved at the sound of my voice: conversational and relaxed. I sat on the sofa next to Andy who was sitting next to Allan.
“We’ve received some reports that there’s a methamphetamine lab being run out of this home,” the taller of two officers said. “We’d like to search the premises.”
My face was frozen in a polite smile, but my brain was racing. In my room, on the table next to my bed, lay my loaded pipe and container holding three huge, clear crystals. There was also another quarter pound of meth sitting on the top shelf in my closet next to a half pound of pot.
“Do you have a warrant?”
“No, ma’am. All we have are these three calls, all saying the same thing.” I waited for him to continue. He cleared his throat, asked his partner for the file he was holding and started flipping through it. “They all say that there’s heavy evidence of a meth lab being run out of here.” He looked at Andy, then back to me. “What we’d like is your cooperation. We can get a warrant if we need to, but if there’s nothing to hide we can just clear this up now. Do you mind if we take a look around?”
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