Love is a Privilege
I can just about guarantee if you’re reading this, someone close to you knows where you are at this exact moment; your mom, spouse, a friend, your kids. If the police came looking for you, someone would know where to find you. I’m going to call our first mom Jade for safety, and to be very clear, when she got to our house, no one knew where she was (outside of children’s services).
“Is there anybody you want to let know that you’re here? You can use my phone and give them my number,” I said.
“I’m good,” Jade replied.
I let a few days pass before I started to ask questions. I already told you I’m a fixer, I solve the problems. If I could find out how she got here, certainly I could get her back to her family, resolve whatever falling out they’d had and they’d all live happily ever after. Except this wasn’t a fairy tale. This was a real life, smack-you-in-the-face, story of a broken home, with each chapter unveiling different things like poverty, mental health issues, children’s services, homelessness and abandonment.
All of what I’m about to describe is Jade’s description of her familial situation and I can assure you, parts of it are not the complete truth. I don’t think she was intentionally lying about any of it, but maybe she exaggerated somewhat to make it less painful.
She told me the story with an energy I hadn’t seen from her. I could tell she was feeling sad, other times angry, and each time I got another piece of the puzzle, I started to understand just how dire the situation had gotten. I regretted ever being a crappy daughter to my own parents and having so much sass over the dumbest things, but hey, don’t we all? She grew up out of state, living in a trailer with her paternal grandma and grandpa and their little dog. She slept on the couch for most of her life, never having had her own room. I took a mental count of the people to bed ratio in my house: five beds and three people in my family. My reality check started kicking in very hard.
Jade’s dad had been adopted at a very young age and he had a few siblings, including one aunt who seemed to have a “normal” life. I made a mental note to try to encourage her to call that aunt. Her parents were married, but they had a very tumultuous relationship: dad was a veteran with PTSD who drank a lot and mom spent her days taking too many prescription pills. Dad now lived in a motel and mom was in a homeless shelter, but her whereabouts seemed to change daily. Jade had two brothers and I never quite figured out if they all had the same dad or not. The brothers had been adopted by a family (or two, again, I’m not positive) in Ohio when Jade was really young after their mom lost custody of them. Her mom and dad were in and out of the picture throughout her life, until she was in high school, when they all packed up and moved to Ohio.
“What made you guys move here?”, I questioned.
“My parents didn’t have anywhere to go, so they moved in with my brother”, she said.
The brother’s house, let’s call him John, was a two-bedroom apartment. How the now adopted John connected back with the family is something I don’t have the answer to. What I do know is, if I counted correctly, throughout her senior year of high school, eight people were living between the two bedrooms. She graduated, earning a vocational certificate as well. She was bullied but had a few close friends. She liked to draw and read, listen to music and watch Twilight, never smoked or did drugs, had tried alcohol twice and it wasn’t for her. She loved her nieces and nephews and spoke of them often.
The day before she came to our house, she had been in a hotel. Job and Family Services paid for her to stay a few nights and the extra night came out of pocket from a local police officer. But let’s back up. She moved out of John’s house into her other brother’s house after graduation. Stay with me because there’s about to be a lot of brother’s cousin’s uncle’s type stuff here. Let’s call the other brother Jake. Jake’s house included Jade’s mom (and dad I believe), his wife, their two or three kids and one on the way. This was also government subsidized apartment living and as you can imagine, was very over crowded. Remember how I told you being poor was hard? Jake’s wife, let’s call her Sarah, had a love/ hate relationship with Jade, and I later found out, she wasn’t the most honest person. Sara moved Jade in with her grandma because her own house was too crowded. Sara’s grandma’s house was Jade’s last address that she’d list on any paper work. She lived there for a total of two months or so and the grandma also had a roommate. Another subsidized apartment rental lacking in space. From house to house, Jade would work for a day or two before she’d get fired. I think the longest job she held was five days at this point. She wouldn’t have anyone to watch the baby, nobody would give her a ride and when she had to walk, they’d call her to come home immediately and get the baby. Nobody in her family had shown her an example of what a job was supposed to look like. Responsibility isn’t the easiest priority when you don’t have enough food and you sleep on the couch. All her money went directly to Jake and her government benefits did too. In fact, she was going to different resource centers at her brother’s discretion, getting free goods, and her sister-in-law was selling them on local rummage sales. Desperate for a few dollars had a whole new meaning.
She called her grandma and handed me the phone. I think she had been here about four or five days and now Grandma was the only person who knew where she was. Mind you, she got kicked out of Sara’s grandmas, then was at the hotel for a few days and now my house, so it was close to two weeks with nobody knowing her location. My heart broke when I talked to her Grandma. I missed my own Grandmas so much and I thought about how they would feel if I were in this situation; but they’d never feel this way, because I’d never be here. Her grandma thanked me for taking care of her, asked me to send pictures of the great-grandson she’d never met and now, likely never will. She said she’d send gifts and money that never showed up, and said Jade could live with her if she waited three months or so to figure out how to make it happen. Broken, empty promises.
Jade’s family loved her in the only way they knew how. Cyclical neglect is a real thing. If your parents didn’t hug you, how would you learn to model that for your own kids? If your grandma, who raised you, tells you a three-month-old baby needs juice in a bottle with karo syrup, wouldn’t you listen to her?
I read recently that privilege is when you think something is not a problem because you aren’t affected personally. My parents gave us everything we ever needed and more growing up. My friends all had cars when they turned 16 and a good bit of us never paid a dime for our college. Even if they didn’t have a car or the latest clothes, they had a roof over their head and family who loved them. I didn’t realize the privilege it was to have people who knew your whereabouts and to care about your well-being. I didn’t realize love was a privilege, but I did realize it shouldn’t be. Love is a necessity; a basic need. Jade’s love was missing. Her story started to make more sense.
Isn’t the saying there’s three sides to every story? His, Hers and the truth. I’ll vouch for that. There’s another side to this story. I’ll tell you about it next week. It’s the one that started to unravel over the course of a year. It’s pieced together from a web of people, who’ve all been part of this story since Jade was pregnant, and it started to make me question my empathy.