Start Talkin' Again

I’m sitting outside in my garage, watching my son clean up his Legos that he had thrown all over the place during his latest rage meltdown.  He gets easily distracted as he cleans up; he recites animal facts as he rights turned over chairs, talks about Power Rangers as he straightens up the bikes.  I’m sternly keeping him on task, using my Dad Voice, so he knows what happened earlier was NOT ok. 

He didn’t only throw his toys.  When we sent him to his room, he opened his second story bedroom window and threw books and a drawer out into the yard. 

That was new. 

Then he ran down the street without any pants on to avoid getting into trouble.  I had to grab him in the park and put him into my car.

That’s right.  A middle-aged white guy, in broad daylight, chased, snatched up, and threw a half-naked, 7-year-old black kid kicking and screaming into his Ford Expedition and drove off.

SUPER.  I’m still waiting for the police to knock on my door.

He does this kind of thing a lot.  

He’s always had trouble at daycare and school because of his behavior.  His daycare kicked him out just before summer a few years ago.  His kindergarten kicked him out too because “other kids were scared of him.”  I’m sure they were…but also, I don’t think there was a lot of patience for him from the other parents.  I mean…hey, it’s a private school, and parents pay so their kids don’t have to be around troubled kids like Thomas.    

Eh, maybe that’s not entirely fair, but it sure was a punch in the gut.  Honestly, I don’t think they had any other choice though.  They just didn’t have the resources to keep a kid like Thomas under control.

With Thomas, it’s like there are two little boys inside him.  One is without a doubt the most charming, smart, easy to love little kid in the world.  He genuinely gets how to be around and treat other people, has deep compassion and empathy, loves animals to a fault and knows more facts about them than that cute big-headed kid on Jerry Maguire.  He’s constantly building shit out of Legos, duct tape, other toys, running up and showing us some crazy thing he’s taped together that has a laser mouth and a claw to grab bad guys, with a robot on top that can fly…and in every damn scenario, he’s helping someone.  Always.  Usually animals in distress, but…helping.

The other is a barely aware ball of rage that is so amped on adrenaline that I, a 220-pound man (well, probably more now, thanks COVID), can barely restrain him when he’s having a meltdown.  When he’s finally done screaming and kicking and clenching and sobbing and finally relaxes into an exhausted heap into my own shaking arms, I can SMELL the adrenaline pouring from his pores and the fear in his breath and the piss in his pants.  These episodes were so sudden and forceful we had him tested to see if he was having seizures.  He kicks teachers trying to help him.  He chases his friends with sticks.  We can’t really sit through a church service because we know he’s too much for the volunteers in the daycare to handle.  And it all turns on a dime.  The second he is disappointed or angry or is told “no” or has perceived himself to be slighted in anyway—in HIS words—"the bad guys take over the headquarters.” 

The bad guys take over his headquarters. 

My God.  Can you imagine what that’s like?

We have a lot of support.  We have therapists that see him constantly, we have him on medication to help with the aggression, and the staff at his school…what saints they are.  I have lost count how many times I received gentle but concerned phone calls asking me if I could please come to the school to help, that Thomas has just turned over every chair, every table, and every nerve, in the classroom.

“We had to evacuate the classroom.  He’s in the principal’s office, but we can’t get him calmed down.”

“Ok.  I’ll be there in a few minutes.” 

Every single day I prayed my phone wouldn’t ring.  That he was having a good day.  That I wouldn’t have to see the sympathetic faces of the staff as they buzzed me, yet again, into the office.  They have been SO patient, SO kind, SO involved and SO loving it makes me cry.

But as totally messed up as this sounds, COVID-19 was the best thing that could have happened to him.  Or, to us.  When they cancelled the rest of the school year, we realized the stress of that had also been cancelled.  At home, we can watch him.  At home, we can monitor is progress with the meds.  At home, we can keep him—and others—safe. 

At home.

What you must realize is that Thomas, as a baby, was struck by his biological father in the crib.  So hard, in fact, that his entire head swelled to twice the normal size.  He has been diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury as a result.  He had trouble walking until later than he should have, and even then, he was super bow-legged (it has since gone away). He was mainly non-verbal until way past the time that he should have been talking.  In fact, I didn’t hear him make a coherent statement until one day when I was bringing him from daycare, I heard him say “Ba-ba bay, ba-ba bay.” 

After a few moments I said, “Are you saying, ‘bout that base, bout that base?’” 

He responded with “Bringin’ booty baaaaaaack!”  Then laughed hysterically.

That’s when I knew how much I loved the guy.  He was funny.  And silly.  But I knew most people wouldn’t see it, because that day I was bringing him home from daycare early because he had thrown a block at his teacher and had hit her in the side of the head with it.

TBI’s are a bitch.  And in young kids, you never really know how they will present.  He isn’t delayed in the slightest academically.  Just emotionally.  And we hope…oh GOD we hope…he’s going to learn how to deal with it through therapy and the right meds and proper parenting so that he can have a normal life.  I lay awake at night often worrying about him.  Worrying that I am so direly inadequate to help this guy and I am so FUCKING scared. 

Some of you have wondered why I haven’t written since November of 2016.  Why I haven’t been talking about the kids, relaying the same funny stories, talking about parenthood, what it’s like to raise adopted kids of another race, etc.  There are a multiple reasons, but the main ones are that 1) I felt like I was starting to write a preachy sitcom set in a disturbing political era and 2) I didn’t know what to say anymore.

So, I stopped and just tried to listen for a while.  Take care of my family, take care of my marriage, take care of Thomas, try not to alienate the girls with that effort, go to work, start a brewing business.

So why now?  Why pop my head up in the midst of all this…hostility? 

In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, John Prine, a musician that rivaled Bob Dylan in his lyrical humanity, died of the virus.  So, I started listening to his Pandora channel and was exposed to some pretty amazing—and moving—music.  One song in particular popped up from a long-since-passed musician named Blaze Foley.  He wrote a song called Clay Pigeons, a song that Prine had covered and made slightly more famous.  There was a lyric in there that had been sitting with me for the past month, just festering, saying

“I’m going down to the Greyhound Station, gonna get a ticket to ride. 

Gonna find that lady with two or three kids and sit down by her side

Ride ‘til the sun comes up and down round me ‘bout two or three times

Smokin’ cigarettes in the last seat

Tryin’ to hide my sorrow from the people I meet

And get along with it all

Down where the people say y’all,

Feed the pigeons some clay,

turn the night into day,

and start talkin’ again, when I know what to say.”   

This has been eating at me.  In the middle of all this, trying quietly to hide my sorrow from others, to hide my utter fear…looking how to get back “in the saddle again.” 

All the while I was quiet.  

Then I saw Ahmaud Arbery gunned down by some tough guy hillbilly asshole vigilante wannabes while jogging.  And before I could blink, we had the GUT WRENCHING murder of George Floyd.   

We all know what happened.  We all know what we saw.  I’m not going to go on a rant about the political movements associated with it, I’m not going to preach to you.  I know what I believe, and I’m pretty sure you have made up your own mind about what you believe.  So again, I was hesitant to say anything at all about it.  Why?  Why would I waste by breath?  Seems like we’re all just screaming into the void.  Useless.

But then I had a number of friends contact me and ask what I thought about George Floyd.  Friends genuinely thought of me, a chubby white dude, raising a black male in this world.  At first, I honestly didn’t know what to say about it.  I don’t know how to describe the horror of seeing something like that and quite literally seeing your own son under that knee.  Begging for his life.  This is not something white people will be able to see.  Not really.  I know good allies try to see it, but they just can’t.  Their outrage is true and real, but it’s still academic.  “Our” kids are still basically safe.  Black mothers and fathers have been seeing this, been SCREAMING this, for 400 years.  

But I’m not a black father.  I’m the white father of a black soon-to-be man.  And I’m realizing he’s going to be considered a “black man” sooner than he should be.  And he has his TBI behavioral issues.

And you guys, I am very, very scared. 

I have no frame of reference.  I don’t know how to teach him to “be black” in America.  Not only America, but a place where Confederate flags still fly.  Where people stand armed on the top of their roofs during Black Lives Matter marches to intimidate them.  

I thought I was inept before with his behavioral issues?  Jesus.  I had no idea.  

I feel like a lion that has adopted a tiger cub, thinking it was all the same.  But it isn’t.  

I’d always thought love was enough, that everything would work out fine because I LOVE him.  But can I really, truly protect him?  How do I, when teaching him to drive, look at him and say, “now, when the police come, make sure you’re doing X,Y, and Z.  You don’t want to be seen as a threat.” And when he asks me why he needs to do these things and not me, do I say, “because you’re black?”  

HOW DO I NAVIGATE THIS?     

So.  You wanna know how I feel about all this?  Fine.  I feel like a tourist in black pain.  I feel like I’m tipping my toe into something that hurts and is ugly and is terrifying, like some unknown ichor of hell, but I can’t describe it or help my son prepare for it.  It’s not that I feel useless.  I don’t.  Amy and I are doing everything we can, loving as hard as we can, protecting the best we can.  And we thought that might be enough.

Then Arbury was shot for jogging.  Then Floyd was utterly extinguished under the knee of a bad cop.

He called for his mother. He called for his mother as he was being slowly killed.

It’s asinine for me to speak as if I’m some voice for fathers of black children.  You may as well ask a blind person to describe the color blue.  I don’t know the whole of it, but I’m trying, because I have to for kids' sake.  And maybe those I know who actually need to hear this will take it more to heart because I’m your friend and you just haven’t been listening to black people.  But I’m asking all of you, my friends, to try and see your own son there as well.  Maybe your son has his issues.  Maybe your son has a TBI.  Maybe your son has special needs.  Maybe you have spent countless hours advocating for him, protecting him, done everything you could to make sure he has the resources he needs.  Maybe you’ve imagined his face under a mortar board on graduation day, smiling, happy, successful.

But what if all that potential…that kid that loves animals, that kid that wanted to be a space-fireman-architect, that kid who builds crazy Lego machines with laser cannons in the garage with the most infectious smile you’ve ever seen…died for no other earthly reason other than he was seen as a threat due to the color of his skin?  

That he was a tiger rather than a lion?

Friends, I am so, so tired.  I know we all are.  I feel like crying just about every day with this.  I see Thomas wake up every morning happy and hopeful for a new chance at the day, because I know he’s trying.  He’s trying to stay in control.  He’s trying to be the “good boy” people want him to be.  

He’s trying to keep the bad guys out of the headquarters.  

I see a little boy struggling with his own demons that were put upon him without his consent, the sins of his own father.  And now I know there are bigger, more dangerous demons waiting for him out in this world.  It breaks me.  Because I know it is only a matter of time before he is seen not as a super cute little kid, but as threatening "Black Male." That countdown keeps time with him and grows more urgent as I try to coach him through his disability.

It’s time to speak up.  It’s time to rebuke this shit.  Because I saw my son under that knee.  Maybe some of you are waiting for my usual pithy end, where I tie it all up into a nice narrative.  I don’t have that ending.  Maybe that’s what has actually been holding me back from writing again.  I don’t have a nice wrap up.  

Maybe there isn’t one.  Maybe we need to figure it out.

The song said, “Start talkin’ again, when I know what to say.”  So it’s time for me to start talking again.  For Thomas, for my girls.  

Damn it y'all.  You know what to say too.  

Say it.