A Child’s Song

                  I never slept tight or felt secure; I was only seven and was always on the edge and was just waiting for the day that I finally fell off-- and then it happened.  It seemed like only moments before I had finally fallen asleep, when out of nowhere the largest boom to have ever rung in my ears pierced my body. My mother and her long time live-in boyfriend’s meth lab had finally exposed our life.  

I awoke with my body shaking in fear and shock, yet I was engulfed in a state of euphoria that their secret was out.  The next several hours seemed to pass as if it were an hourglass.  There was what seemed like hundreds of policemen, drug task enforcement teams, ambulance crews, social workers, and drug dogs.  Everyone around me kept talking like I wasn’t even there, as if I didn’t live in the run down, mice- infested, two-bedroom, tin can of a trailer my mother called “home” for my sister, brother  and myself, right next to the “garage” that we kids were never allowed to go into.

I will always remember the look on my mother’s face when being questioned about the entire scam that they had been running.   She looked irate, upset, and couldn’t help but blame everyone around her for her own life lessons.  She kept begging the police to let me be with her.  She screamed that “I was too young to understand, I needed her,” but she had no idea how much I understood.  She would have felt ignorant if only someone would have asked me what all of this meant, or if I was okay.  She verbally fought and physically struggled; I saw the tears roll down her face as you often see rain rolling down your car windshield after a cold, hard rainstorm, but I, and everyone else who knew our story, knew it wasn’t real.  The police had been at our tin can several times.  Many of those times were not nearly as bad as this time.  There had been several times and would continue to be several more times, because meth is the kind of drug that you live for, the kind of drug that keeps you going when it seems like you have nothing else, the kind of drug that allows your family to slip right away from you, and the kind of drug that assures you that all of this is okay.  It is not okay.  I felt lost, hopeless, with nowhere to turn and no one to go to.  And my mother wasn’t even a person of the least bit of decency to look at me with her nickel-size dilated pupils and bloodshot eyes to realize what this was doing to me.  

I had no father to go to.   My father verbally and physically abused my mother and finally died of a methamphetamine overdose when I was 4.   I then spent the following thirteen years on and off in nothing short of hell while in and out of the care of my mother, or lack thereof.   For the next several months I lived with my aunt while my sister and brother stayed with a family friend during the time that my mother attended rehab, counseling, and parenting classes.  When the judge felt that she had “done her time and now it was time to be a mother,” he placed me back in her care.  You know, the entire time she was gone she never called, never wrote me letters, never even asked if I was okay.  In a way I was insulted.  I hated the woman for everything that she had put our family through, but a part of me was still young.  Aside from having to wake myself up for school, wash my own too-small clothes in the washing machine, often without soap because she couldn’t get out of bed, walk to the bus alone, hungry, because she was too negligent of a mother to put food in the cupboards, there was still a part of me that needed a void filled.  My sister only twelve, my brother only ten and I only seven had severely suffered from my mother and her boyfriend’s beatings.  Even after all the late night screaming and the hitting, we were left with bruises and scars, feeling hungry for days on end, strange men in our home at all hours of the day and night, the lies, and the rumors.   The young part of me just wanted to be comforted and consoled.  I told myself that it was going to be okay, “I WANTED A REAL MOTHER!”

When she came to pick me up from my aunt’s for the first time since she had been away at rehab, I couldn’t breathe.   I was paralyzed.  I had the feeling of being so scared that my heart was racing and I couldn’t move.  I tried to take a step, but my legs were dead heavy, and I had no emotion.  I saw my mother’s mouth moving, like she was getting angry.   I saw it in her eyes, the same look I saw only months ago when I had been misbehaving.   Her face looked no different than it did when she abandoned me; she still looked like meteors had fallen from space and hit her in the face.  I thought to myself, “Disgusting.”  I knew she wasn’t clean.   I knew how easy it was for her to get her hands on meth, or any other drug for that matter, and she would do whatever it took for her to get her fix.  She was just another junkie who slipped through the cracks of the “system.”  I didn’t want to leave the security of my aunt’s home.  It was at my aunt’s home that made me feel secure.  I felt safe there.  It was at my aunt’s home that she taught me a tune that I would never forget.  I can’t recall where we gathered the tune from, but it only took me a few times of practicing to perfect the vibration of the humming.  The tone is soft and quiet with a mellowing effect.  The melody is short and simple but enough to take my mind off the world that is spinning out of control around me.  

I stood on the top step of the five stairs that led up to my aunt’s front door.  I began to feel outraged.  I wanted to scream, the kind of scream that is deep, scared, and threatened, and I wanted everyone to hear my anger.  I wanted to explode; I wanted my mother to understand the feeling inside my body was not one that would ever heal.  I wanted her to feel the hate that I felt toward her and the resentment that haunted me.  My ears were beginning to allow the sound from my mother’s moving mouth, and I could hear that she wanted to reassure me that “It was going to be better this time; we were going to be a family again.”   I felt a tear stream down my face, slowly, like a warning.  If I were to blink, it would flood my face.  My mother hugged me, and my body went numb.  I thought to myself, “How embarrassing, she is nothing short of an ignorant, strung out junkie, so high on meth that she can’t even tell that this tear her daughter has shed is not one of happiness, but one of fear and hate.” I lifelessly allowed the hug, knowing I had no control.

My aunt kissed my head, hugged my body, and whispered in my ear, “If you’re ever too scared, close your eyes and hum our song.” I felt a sense of relief.  For that moment, I felt like there may be hope.  I breathed in deep, let out a sigh of relief, and whispered “I love you.”  I climbed into my mother’s old beat up, sea- foam yellow, four- door car, where the seat belts were broken, the windows were permanently stuck down on one side, and it seemed like the radio had been adjusted to play loud AC/DC rock music every time she turned the key and the engine cranked over.

She patted my leg and said, “Do you mind if we make a quick stop?  Mommy just needs to pick up some stuff from an old friend.” I sat there with my head turned looking out the window with my hands in my lap, and very obediently I replied, “Okay.” My voice was soft and clear, not shaky and broken like my mother’s.  When the car pulled to a stop, I looked out the dirty front window and noticed a house all too familiar.  This was the house that my mother went into and came back after a long fifteen minutes with a bag secured shut with a rubber band, full of a substance resembling powered sugar.

I closed my eyes, and softly began humming my song.