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whitneyrmcguireblog · 5 years

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Crashes

Making time to reevaluate childhood trauma as an adult before its too late. Sometimes I feel like i’m a passenger on a speeding jet, ascending into the air, my life, the landscape beyond my window. Everything feels like a blur. As I am working through upending fears to create joy, I have decided to write through this process as best I can. Feel free to leave feedback. Or not. Today’s fear: Crashes. Read more below.

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I remember a loud crash. My head was resting on my mother’s lap as we both sat on the floor. Her french tip acrylic nails tracing calms down my back, repeating affirmations of better days to come as if writing sentences over and over the way ornery pupils do for punishment. Goosebumps emerged from my skin filling my body and mind with comfort. belonging. A pervading knowing that I was loved. The crash happened during my mother’s evening prayers, a ritual she embraced just 12 years prior to my arrival Earthside. It was 1991 and I was five years old. Glass shattered in our living room and all I could see were headlights. Our elderly neighbor, one my mother was never really fond of, accidentally pressed her gas instead of her break and sped into our front porch. “She’s a bitch,” my mother would say, ignoring the social mores of swearing in front of children through her feigned smile every time we pulled into our driveway, under the watch of this neighbor. She never returned the smile. The matriarchs of my family rushed to our aide that evening. I stood on my favorite stool, hunched over the kitchen sink, dry heaving from the fumes of our neighbor’s mangled Buick LeSabre. A few of my braids affixed with plastic, colorful beads, tapped the side of the sink escaping my grandmother’s gentle grasp catching remnants of my spit. The patriarchs remained outside with the police.

I’ve only a few memories in this kitchen. Most of them revolving around the swift need to diffuse tension. Despite the frequent goosebumps offered to me by my mother’s touch, my stomach held memories of a different sensation, prompting my uncle to offer me ginger supplements often. Apparently I worried a lot. My parents’ arguments filled the home as I watched them between banister posts on the stairs. My mother humorously recalls “losing it” on my father a few times, once so badly she chased him out of the door and down the street with a knife. The other times she would grab the closes hard object and hurl it at him out of frustration and exhaustion. A hairdryer is the only inanimate object my father fondly recalls being thrown at him.

My parents lived together for only one year of my life. I met my father when I was 4. He was released from prison shortly before my 4th birthday. The first time he drove me to pre-school, without my mother, I screamed the entire way there. Later that day, I fell off of a swing and cracked a tooth. Bloody and all, I knew the first person I would see outside of pre-school staff would be my mother. I was right.

The second crash occurred a few months later. My mother and I rushed to a Buddhist meeting, skipping morning prayers. An elderly woman in a very big green car rammed into our toyota sending it careening into on-coming traffic and eventually on the lawn of a small law firm. I was secured in a booster seat in the back. Somehow I managed to hold onto my barbies the entire time. I don’t remember fear. The door closest to me was too dented to open, so I crawled out of the opposite window into my mother’s arms. No one from the law office came to check on us. We were in the “white part of town.” They did let us use their phone to call the police, however. My mother never skipped her morning prayers again.

The green paint from the woman’s car streaked the gray and silver dents on our car, which eventually stayed in our driveway. We couldn’t afford to get it fixed. Every time we approached our home, I saw the “good side of the car first, feeling a flash of hope that it was fixed, but at we got closer, I would spot the side that was impacted by the wreck. And I would grow instantly cold. Even in the summer. This is when fear began to set in for me, for just about everything. If we parked next to a wrecked car in a parking lot, or pulled up next to one at a stoplight, my 5 year old body would tense up, my heart would race, my stomach would churn and sometimes I would cry. My mother, unaware of my newly-acquired phobia, would repeatedly ask me what was wrong. I don’t remember what I told her, but I’m sure it was, “nothing.”

The third crash happened outside of my presence. My grandmother, a new widow and our primary support, was apparently leaving the parking lot of a gas station when someone slammed into her Lincoln town car causing significant damage to the anterior of the car. She came home shaken up, but quite unaffected in my opinion. I, however, feared going into the garage everyday until the car was fixed. I noted the way my grandmother and mother handled these situations. Ones that seemed to completely jar my sense of security seemed nothing but blips on the radar for them. It’s worth mentioning that I never saw either of them cry after my grandfather, my grandmother’s husband and my mother’s father passed away the year prior.

He was a pervading force in my life. My first father. He made me waffles, eggs and bacon in the mornings and we would discuss fishing, books, and my mother - his favorite child, though he never expressed that verbally to her. In the evenings, curled up in his lap, I would often stare at the gold playboy bunny symbol that dangled from one of his many gold chains. Eventually, I would find his Playboy stash and marvel at bodies I simultaneously wanted to devour and admire. His death left an imprint on my psyche. Men leave.

The day I won the kindergarten spelling bee, my mother was absent. My grandfather met me backstage with a bouquet of flowers and drove me home. The garage door opened shortly after and my mother also walked in, greeted with her own bouquet of roses i excitedly presented to her with a smile on my face. “CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR DIVORCE!!!” I yelled à la Oprah, with arms outstretched in power stance. She thanked me bashfully. “Glad that’s done,” she said.

The year I turned 6 was an opposite year. Everything was different as if I had unknowingly agreed with some higher power to participate in 365 opposite days that year. You know, the kind where you wear your clothing backwards or days when the teachers dress up as students and vice versa. Except I wasn’t in on the joke. When I blew out the candles on my 6th birthday I wished for my grandfather to come back. He never did. Apparently my grandmother couldn’t get the image of his dead body slumped in his favorite chair during March madness out of her mind either. We moved from that house soon after. She, into a smaller, family-owned condominium across town, and my mother and I in a cute, run down two story home somewhat near her.

Although my new bedroom was twice the size of the one my mother and I shared in my grandparents’ home, I spent most of my time in my mother’s room perusing her fancy clothes and watching MTV and Nickelodeon on her personal television. My mother was a teacher during the day and a Jazz singer at night. I consider myself a “stage kid” because I grew up used to the daily grind of having a parent who worked two jobs, to which one I could accompany her, when appropriate. Her most consistent gig was at a restaurant near the airport called Shades of Jade. We would have to drive almost an hour to get there on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On those days I would meet her at home from the bus stop and hop in the tub to wash off the day. She would lay out my outfit for the evening and I would watch her apply vibrant shades of red lipstick, black eyeliner, and blush to her caramel-colored skin. She was always a beautiful woman, but on those nights, her beauty was especially enhanced. Her charisma and stage persona always made me feel a little small. Like I could never do what she’s doing, despite her encouragement for me to join her on stage for what she thought would be cute mother-daughter moments. Also, tips were more abundant when the singer’s child was present. But I never acquiesced. A retired white couple befriended my mother during her residency at this restaurant. They were regulars and often bought me extra shrimp toast and egg rolls to eat while I sat through my mother’s four-hour set. They were artists themselves and often brought writing and drawing implements to keep me busy. I loved to draw. I loved to write.

The fourth crash happened the summer before my first year in boarding school. My mother had recently accepted a job in Las Vegas after explaining to me that “she had exhausted the Mid-West circuit (for performing).” She was ready to regain her sense of self and step even more fully into the person she was before I came along. She met my father before moving to New York after graduating from Central State University in Dayton, Ohio. They remained in contact during the 13 years she spent performing with some of the biggest names in music at the time, Chaka Kahn, Prince, Rick James, etc. One divorce under her belt and the trauma of watching her first cousin and twin flame die from AIDS sent her back to Dayton, our hometown, for a change of pace and more stability. “I didn’t want to be no damn teacher,” she’s often reminded me. But when my father was convicted of a drug offense, she was left with no income and a newborn baby. “I had to do what I had to do,” she said. My father remarried rather quickly after their divorce, their second my the way. My mother divorced him while he was in prison, perhaps as a way to regain a sense of control during one of the most chaotic times in her life. My step mother, a more simple woman who pragmatically sought stability through a government job she held for nearly 40 years, and a teen mom, reminded me of my mother, only in looks. Both had short hair, channeling Anita Baker. Bother were the same complexion. Both were consistently aggravated by my father.

On the day of the fourth crash i was brewing with anger in the wake of one of the most explosive arguments I had ever had with an adult - my father - the night before. We sat in his black GMC truck arguing about whether he should have to pay for the laptop computer i needed to rent for boarding school. The $400 rental fee may seem like small change for many, but for my family it meant the difference between being able to afford necessities versus something that seemed rather extravagant at the time. “You don’t need a computer. You can use a pen and paper.” I retorted with the fact that most of our assignments were disseminated via computer and that I would be at a significant academic disadvantage without one. “Well why can’t your mother pay for it? Child support doesn’t cover these things. I am not obligated by the court to pay for a computer. What is your mother using the child support for?” “BILLS!!!” I responded at the top of my lungs, I’m sure followed by many expletives I brazenly employed — a hallmark of my communication tactics with my parents. I don’t hold my tongue. The morning after, I decided to skip church, but my stepmother, a faithful woman at the time, guilted me into attending church that day. I was always annoyed by her driving. She always stopped too short in my opinion, driving too closely behind cars that were in front of her. In fact, I often questioned her depth perception. This day was no different. While in traffic she stopped short and actually tapped the red pickup truck in front of us, but then, “BANG!” The loudest bang there ever was. The cereal I was eating from a cup flew out from between my legs and scattered all over my white pedal pushers and the dashboard. My step mother checked the rearview mirror and all we could see was the red trunk of her Mazda 626 mangled. “My CAR!” she exclaimed then checked me to make sure the cereal milk was not, in fact, blood. The first responders to the scene asked me a few questions then looked at me sympathetically. “It happens,” the firefighter said to me pointing to my wet pants. “It’s MILK!” I said, curing the embarrassment he was transferring to me from his assumption that I had wet my pants.

I received a few hundred dollars from the settlement from that accident and went to the nearest Walmart to purchase snacks for my dorm room. I had been accepted to boarding school the year prior as the result of my misunderstood independence. Just a year prior to that, when I was 12 years old, I met one of my mother’s favorite students, Jamila. She had the longest hair I had ever seen on a 100% black girl, sort of like Aaliyah. She carried a confidence that I often tried to mimic, but could never really nail. She was tall, beautiful, and her eyes sparkled with new beginnings and an “other side of the train tracks” aura. My mother introduced me to Jamila by reminding me that she was attending boarding school for high school. I had no idea what boarding school was so I inquired about her experience as if her little sister, ready to hang on to her every word. “You will really like it. You should apply,” she said. Following that conversation, I read my first (and only) harry potter book and another written by a black woman Buddhist member my mother had recently befriended. Both stories, one fictional, the other biographical, told the story of boarding school with the same amount of magic. Except Charlene’s magic was navigating an all-white institution as one of the first black students to integrate her historically white male boarding school. I saw myself in both characters. I saw myself in Jamila. So I decided that I would pursue the opportunity to apply to boarding school via a feeder program for inner city youth.

A few months, lots of judging from my family who thought my mother, father and me were crazy, many re-writes of handwritten applications and essays later, I was in! Five out of five boarding schools accepted me, but only one offered me a full-tuition scholarship, Jamila’s school, St. George’s high school in Newport, RI. The first time I visited campus I felt goosebumps, like the ones my mother’s nails caused. For the first time in a long time, I was fearless.

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