Chapter One: The Best Mom in the World
My earliest memory begins in a haze.Coming out of the bedroom, smoke hung thick in the kitchen, making the whole apartment feel like a waking dream. The brown cabinets were stained a sickly yellow from years of it. Some guy—tall, skinny, with a shaggy haircut—stood by the window. He was twitching and paranoid, peeking through the blinds as if he had just drank a gallon of coffee or robbed a bank.Through the thick haze, my mother sat at the end of the old, brown kitchen table on a rusty metal chair with a floral fabric top. I stepped closer to her, but she didn’t even notice I was there. The table was a graveyard of glass ashtrays, torn Brillo pads, open containers, and scattered garbage. I stood right next to her, entranced by what she was doing.She held a lighter in one hand and a short glass pipe in the other. She inhaled the substance through the glass with long, calculated breaths. The flame from the lighter being sucked down into the pipe scared me a little, but I couldn’t look away. At the time, I had absolutely no idea it was crack cocaine.As a four-year-old boy, I just thought it was a really cool trick—the way my mom could make the fire disappear into the glass and then blow all that thick white smoke out of her mouth. The smell of burnt plastic stung my nostrils as I stood there staring at my beautiful mother, her long blond hair shining under the dull, yellow kitchen light. The smoke seemed to fill her lungs with such grace. Somehow, watching her made me completely forget why I had come out of the bedroom in the first place.My brother and sister whispering my name snapped me back to reality. They were peeking through the cracked bedroom door, their funny 80s-style haircuts silhouetted in the shadows, desperately trying to get my attention. My sister, wearing a blue shirt with straps over her shoulders, had a mushroom-like bowl cut. My brother just glared at me, his prominent freckles catching the kitchen light.They woke me out of my trance, but they also caught the attention of the tweaker at the window.He darted over and grabbed my arm, almost lifting me entirely off the ground as he forced me back toward the bedroom. I tried not to look into his bloodshot eyes as he frantically tried to figure out a way to keep us locked out of sight. My mother never even blinked or noticed him grab me.He threw me into the bedroom, slammed the door, and turned the lock on the old brass handle. I don’t think his drug-addled brain understood that the door could just be unlocked from the inside.My brother and sister just stared at me. Then, they looked down at the half-loaf of bread I was clutching in my right hand. I was completely dumbfounded. I couldn’t even remember grabbing it, but my mission had been to get us something to eat, and somehow, I had succeeded.The bedroom felt like a fort. It was just big enough to fit a mattress on the floor where the three of us slept, surrounded by a sea of scattered clothes. The laundry completely covering the floor was fine by me; most nights, I preferred to curl up and sleep on a pile of dirty shirts so my brother and sister wouldn't kick me off the small mattress in the middle of the night.I ate a slice of dry bread and drifted off to sleep.A few hours later, I woke up and twisted the lock on the door handle. I crept slowly back out of the room, fully expecting the tweaker to be waiting for me. But the kitchen was empty. The crack pipes, lighters, matches, and glass ashtrays were still spread out across the garbage-covered table, exactly as they had been.Did they leave us alone? I thought to myself. Where did they go? How long was I asleep?I crept through the kitchen like a thief, terrified of making a sound. The bright sun shining through the closed blinds told me it was daytime. As I peeked into the living room, I saw bodies scattered everywhere, asleep on the floor like a twisted adult slumber party inside a tiny housing project.I quietly navigated my way to the counter, grabbed a bottle of syrup, and walked back into the bedroom, overflowing with pride. I finally had syrup to go with the bread. I never ate it again as an adult, but sitting in that dirty room as a hungry four-year-old, the taste of syrup on dry bread was absolute heaven. We were so hungry we didn't even notice the mold on the bread until we reached the very last slice.I could never tell if my mother purposely positioned herself so the sun would shine perfectly through her blond hair, or if it was just a natural accident of the kitchen window.She was nervous. She huddled the three of us together around a table that had been frantically wiped clean. The man with the paperwork was coming to visit us again, and we had to review the rules. We knew the drill.If the man asked about our mother, she instructed us to say she was the absolute best. She had drilled it into our little brains. Periodically, she would test us.“Who is the best mom in the world?” she would ask.Almost like trained circus monkeys, we would all jump up and shout, “You are!”We knew exactly what we were supposed to say, and more importantly, what we couldn’t say. We were never to mention the beatings, mostly because we were taught we deserved them. She warned us that if the man knew we misbehaved, he would take us away forever. The act was easy enough for my sister. Just a year older than me, she adored our mother and looked up to her like a god.My older brother, just eleven months older than my sister, didn’t have the mental capacity to accidentally say the wrong thing. Although he could talk and understand basic concepts, he couldn’t comprehend the dark reality of our situation. He was easily convinced that we lived a great life full of playtime, DuckTales, and Oreo cookies.As we sat there, I caught my mother looking down at me with a flash of panic. She was staring at my arm. There was dried blood crusted over a hole she had put in my skin two nights earlier, when she beat me with the heel of her shoe for sneaking out of the bedroom. Acting strictly on instinct, she snatched a long-sleeved, grey-and-green striped shirt off a chair and shoved it over my head in one swift, violent motion, hiding the evidence just as a heavy knock echoed against the door.At four years old, this all felt completely normal.My mother took her time methodically removing the heavy chains from the door and turning the deadbolts. When she finally pulled it open, the caseworker stepped inside.He looked entirely out of place in our world—wearing a suit and tie, shiny black shoes, thick black glasses, and a pencil mustache. But the moment he walked in, he stared at my mother the way a starving mountain lion looks at a helpless lamb. He practically licked his lips as he followed my mother to the kitchen table, where they both sat down. He began to ask my mother about her day and how she was doing.My mother had a gift for drawing the attention of any room she walked into. She had beautiful ivory skin, a slender figure, and knew exactly how to dress to keep men looking.Oddly enough, the caseworker never asked us a single question our mother had prepped us for. His focus was entirely fixed on her every movement. He followed her around the small apartment, completely hypnotized by her body. He was so distracted by his own inappropriate desires that he didn’t even glance at the glass crack pipe my mother had forgotten to hide, sitting right in plain sight on the windowsill next to the fridge.After a few minutes of casual conversation, the man apologized for bothering her and let her know that he looked forward to seeing her again as he walked out the door.My mother breathed a massive sigh of relief. She turned and looked down at the three of us, waiting to receive the praise we felt we had earned for doing such a good job of tricking the man.Looking back now, I realize the tragic truth: we were just children. We didn't trick him at all. The system simply didn't care enough to look.Children don't have a baseline for "normal." For a long time, I didn't realize my childhood was a tragedy because, to a four-year-old, the person who provides the bread and the syrup is a hero, regardless of the smoke in the kitchen. I looked at my mother through a lens of pure adoration, completely unaware that the "man in the suit" was supposed to be my protector, or that the "cool trick" she was doing was the very thing stealing our future.I had to learn that one of the most dangerous parts of trauma is how easily it masquerades as normalcy. Resilience, in its earliest form, is simply the ability to adapt to a broken environment. I was proud of that syrup. I was proud of being a "trained circus monkey." I had to become an adult to realize that the "best mom in the world" was a script written by a woman who was just as trapped as we were. The "Invisible Leash" didn't start with an ankle monitor; it started in a kitchen, tied to the fear of being taken away from the only world I knew.