E3 - Pawned Childhood

Check out ReComOut: https://recomout.com/

Growing up in extreme poverty means living in a constant state of impermanence. Everything in your life - homes, possessions, even relationships - feels temporary, disposable. I learned this lesson repeatedly as a child, packing up my meager belongings into a single box while watching my mother and her boyfriend prioritize their next drink over stability.

This episode takes you into the very beginnings of the chaos that would become my new normal. The devastating betrayals and Faustian bargains I had to make as a child still in single-digit years. These arrangements led to consequences my mother chose to flee from rather than face.

Listen to understand how poverty creates cycles that are nearly impossible to break without meaningful intervention and why children often remain silent about their suffering even when they desperately need rescue.

Transcript

Hey listeners, thanks for tuning back in. Today's episode won't be the happiest, but that's kind of what you signed up for. Don't forget to follow this podcast wherever you're listening to it and follow us on all the social medias.

Before we start today's episode, I want to give a shout-out to this organization that reached out to me. No, this isn't a paid promotion, so, seriously, stick around and listen to what I have to say. So this organization is called ReComOut. It stands for Re-Entry Community Outreach. It's based in Portsmouth, Virginia, and their mission is trying to help ex-cons get back on their feet after being released. They're having a felon-friendly job fair in Portsmouth on March 31st at the Hidden Treasures Galleria from 6:30 to 8 p.m. If you need any of those resources or know anyone who needs some of those resources and they live in the Portsmouth area, please share this with them. I think the mission of this organization is really great. I think there's a lot of people that can use their help. 

If you know anything about the history of America's prison systems, you'll know that our prison systems were once a model for the entire world. We were trying to rehabilitate offenders and give them skills so that, once they were released from prison, they could reintegrate into society and become productive members of society again. I think we've really lost that mission over the years and now we treat anyone who gets incarcerated as broken for life, but I absolutely do not believe that's how it should be. The whole concept was that they would go to prison, they would pay their debt to society and then they would come back out and start contributing again. I really want to see the prison systems turn back into that, and I think that this is a really great step to trying to get us back to what we were. So please go check out their website: recomout.org. I'll have a link in the show notes of this episode. 

We moved from this apartment. Again, I had everything I could carry in a single box. Everything else got left behind. I remember there just being a mess of my stuff on the floor for someone else to clean up. And we moved not too far away just a few streets away. Of course, being an eight-year-old kid, it was an entire world away from where I'd lived previously. And, it was only a few streets away. It was still going to the exact same elementary school I had been going to before. But we moved into a stand-alone house and, coincidentally, my parents had previously owned a house in this exact same cul-de-sac. My dad was in real estate for a while, probably when he was in his late 20s, early 30s, and to this day he still thinks of himself as a realtor even though he hasn't done anything in real estate in decades. But I think that's more to do with him constantly trying to relive his glory days as he's gotten older and just being disappointed in himself that he never really made what he wanted of his life. So we moved into this single family home and it's probably a thousand square feet, maybe a tiny bit bigger, but of course, coming from a tiny apartment, it seemed huge to me. 

I had my own bedroom. I had my own bedroom in the apartments as well, but I had another one here. My mom and Earl had their own bedroom. And, for a while, I remember my sister living with us. And it was her and her boyfriend. Her boyfriend's name was Bobby and I don't think anyone really liked him that much, and I remember her having ferrets in this room. I don't know if her boyfriend didn't shower or if he just sweat a lot because he was a bigger individual, but, like I remember their room just smelling terrible all the time and they kept their door closed a lot. And I remember going in there once and, like you know, they had the ferrets and it was just a super messy room and just smelled really bad. 

I had a cousin around the corner from this new house that we had moved into. My cousin's name was Tom and he's not actually my cousin; he's the cousin of my brother and sister and again they're only my half-brother and sister, so he's a cousin on the side that I have no relations with. But he was like my idol when I was younger. He was a few years older than I was and he was into all the cool things and he did martial arts and all this other stuff. I was really, really good friends with him. We hung out a lot and, again, he lived right around the corner. He came over to the house once. He was always at the house. We were always playing video games. I was always at his house. And he came over and I think we were playing Mortal Kombat on the Super Nintendo. He was beating the hell out of me in this game because, again, he was a few years older than me and, as I've said before, I was never really very good at video games anyway. So he, I think he had backed me into a corner in this game and he was just whaling on me and there was nothing I could do. If you think back to the first episode where I had a disagreement with my best friend Clifford, you might know what's coming. So, I was pissed that he was beating me in this game and, being an eight-year-old with a very quickly deteriorating home life, I did not know how to deal with this emotion. So, I picked up the Super Nintendo console and I hit him right in the face. I remember specifically hitting him in the nose with this console and I remember him holding his nose and of course he got up and told my mom and then he left. Yeah, that, uh, I guess that's just how I dealt with things back then. I didn't have any other way of dealing with things. I didn't have the tools. 

Soon after we moved into this new house, we got a pet dog and, as far as I remember, this is the first pet that I had ever had. I wanted to name it Jake because Jake was my favorite character from the Animorphs books. Now Earl had a big problem with me naming this dog Jake, because he said we couldn't name an animal the same name as a person or anyone that we might know. But it was my dog. I named it what I wanted to. Now, to this day, I'm not a dog person; I'm much more of a cat person. But I don't have any pets because I don't really want something that I have to take care of all the time. But this dog, I loved it to death. I was a little boy with a dog; who doesn't love that? I would run around the yard with that thing for hours at a time. It was definitely my best friend at the time. When we inevitably moved out of this house, we gave the dog away. 

I'm going to stop here for a second and talk about pets and poverty. I've noticed this trend throughout my entire life. Even to this day with my mom and her pets, and especially one of my cousins and his pets (not the one I was talking about earlier). People in poverty tend to get pets all the time, and when they inevitably move from whatever place they're living in, or when they just get tired of them, they just let the pets go, or they give them away, or the pets are no longer their problem. And I know a lot of people get tired of pets from all socioeconomic classes and they get rid of them. But I feel that this problem is exacerbated in poverty because they can't afford to take care of these pets anymore. So they get these pets, they have them for a while, they get rid of them. And then as soon as they get moved into their new place that they're going to have for a few months before they get kicked out, they immediately get new pets and the cycle repeats itself. Now, I have a cousin, specifically, who has done this countless times throughout my entire life. Every single time he gets a new place which, again, is every few months, he gets new pets and then he eventually gives them away. I've seen my mom do this. I've seen him do it. I've seen countless other people in poverty do this. It's a very fascinating phenomenon to me and I would love to dive deeper into studying it. That being said, I've also seen it on the opposite spectrum, where these people in poverty will get their pets and then it's like the only thing that they have in the world. So when they get kicked out of their place and have to move, this pet is all they have and they will feed this pet before they feed themselves. And I think you see that a lot more with homeless people rather than just people in extreme poverty who still have a place to live. It's a companion, right? It may be the only person you have in the world, and so I very much understand wanting to keep that pet and take care of it. That's sort of two extremes of this scale of people in poverty owning pets, and it's very fascinating to me.

But I had this dog that I loved and of course when we moved out of this house we gave him away to the neighbor and I mean that broke my heart. It was the first pet I had ever had, first pet I had ever lost. And of course there was no reason for us to get rid of this dog because as soon as we left this house and moved into our next place we immediately got another pet. 

I briefly talked about my mom's new boyfriend, Earl, in the last episode, but I just want to go a little bit more in-depth so that you have a better idea of what I'm talking about when I do mention him in the future. There were three things that stood out the most about Earl's appearance: his hair, his glasses and his skin color. He had dark hair with these two really big strips of gray in the front of his hair. They would kind of remind you of Rogue from the early 2000s X-Men movies, if you think about it. He had glasses that were kind of the definition of Coke-bottle-lenses. Like these were some of the thickest lenses you have ever seen and I never really thought about it when I was a kid, but thinking about it now, I'm pretty sure he had a lazy eye or something, because his right eye was just always looking off to the right when he didn't have his glasses on. I don't think it was really noticeable when he did have his glasses on. And his skin color was a very dark tan color. Now, that's not really significant for any reason except for this: I heard him referred to more than once by different people as a Skunk Mexican. Now, that sounds like probably a super racist term to me and yeah, I'm not entirely sure what it means. All I can think of is his hair kind of looked like a skunk's fur with the different colors, the gray and whatnot, and I guess his skin tone was more Hispanic in nature; not entirely sure, but that is what it is. Another thing you should know about him is he was always drinking and he was always smoking. This man, pretty much all times of day, had a beer in his hand and by the end of the night every single night he was pretty well drunk. He also always had a cigarette in his hand. Now, this was back in the late 90s. Smoking was still pretty commonplace. It hadn't really been completely eradicated yet. His favorite brand to smoke was Camel and when he couldn't afford that he would roll his own cigarettes. Us being in the extreme poverty we were in, he rolled his own cigarettes a lot and he bought the cheapest tobacco possible to roll these cigarettes. I think I said before that he wasn't abusive, as far as I remember. He wasn't a terrible guy when he was around us. He was just an extreme alcoholic and always drunk and that presented its own problems. He wasn't terrible to me. He would play games with me. He watched Digimon with me a lot. I loved Digimon back in the day. I still love it. I don't care what you say, if you think Pokemon's better, I love Digimon more, so deal with that. He also had a beard. It wasn't like a crazy beard, it was just bushy enough to like cover his entire face. It didn't really have any length to it. But anytime that he was mad at my mom, he would shave his beard off completely because she really liked his beard. And that's just some special level of petty that I don't even know. When I was doing some research on him, because I haven't seen him in decades, I found out that he died back in 2018 and it also looks like he was arrested for domestic violence sometime before that.

One of the first memories I have of this guy is when we moved into the new house that I said we were moving into at the end of the last episode. Earl's son came over one night and, of course, Earl, my mom and whoever else were partying and drinking as they often did. And I remember Earl offered both of us a beer. Again, I was like eight, maybe nine years old at the time and his son was around the same age. And I think it's pretty common for little boys, at least out in Kentucky, to be given their first beer around this age, but I was not into it at all; I didn't drink it. I'm very averse to alcohol in any form, even to this day; I don't drink. So I didn't drink it back then. And I remember his son definitely did drink, like the whole beer can, and I guess it's kind of culturally okay to give kids their first sip of beer when they're young, just at least for the humor of it or something, I'm not sure. But I still feel like eight or nine years old was a little young to be giving us beer, especially an entire can to his son. But alcohol was the entire world to Earl and my mom, so it kind of makes sense if you look at it that way.

So at this point we are in the beginning of fourth grade for me. I wore this shirt to school once and it was like a knockoff Power Rangers shirt. It wasn't actually Power Rangers, it just had some people on the front who looked like Power Rangers and it was like on an alien planet and there was a moon in the background of this image and the moon was pink. And I wore this shirt to school one day and this kid mocked me incessantly that day about wearing a shirt with pink on it and that made me gay. And of course "gay" was a huge insult back in the 90s. You know, if you have an earring in your right ear then you're automatically gay. Right, you did not want to be called gay. And this was, honestly, I think, the first time I had really ever experienced any kind of bullying. Even for as small of a child as I was and the extreme poverty I lived in, you would think I would have been a prime target for bullying, but I really wasn't. I was really never bullied at all. Now, some of that can probably be chalked up to the fact that I was absent from school a lot. So, I mean, the students didn't really have a chance to get to know me, which I feel like may have made them bully me more, but I just wasn't really bullied.

So, I was absent from school a lot. I remember, specifically in third grade, this one instance where the teacher asked us to pull out our homework. It was something about, you know, practicing our cursive handwriting. And I had not done this homework, which was a little unusual because I was a very good student. You know, I always did what I was told, I did my homework on time and, you know, I got good grades, I was always in advanced classes and ahead of my peers. And so I hadn't done this homework for some reason. And she asked us to pull it out. And I was freaking out about this homework because this was so unusual, like what's going to happen to me because I didn't do this homework? I can't let them know I didn't do this homework. And so I was frantically asking the teacher to call my mom and I was pretending that I was sick and I needed my mom to come get me so the teacher didn't discover I hadn't done my homework. So eventually my mom came to get me and I think I did the homework that night and then turned it in the next day. 

We're around the point in the story, or we're approaching it, where I was absent from school a lot because, I don't know, whatever reason. Often, that reason was because my mom and Earl wanted to take some of my things: my video games, my video game systems, my TV, anything of slight value, and pawn it so that they would have money to go buy beer and pills, maybe some weed and coke. And so the trade-off was always "if you let me pawn some of your stuff so I can go buy drugs, then I'll let you have the day off of school, or I'll buy you something with a little bit of the money that we got from pawning this stuff". And you know, this is one of those things that's like if I had a nickel for every time this happened, I would have a few nickels, but it's weird that it happened more than once. And it did happen more than once. I mean, so many times did this happen. And, of course, it was never my mom who had bought me these things that she was pawning, it was always my dad. 

My dad really showed his affection through buying things. And so... And he was also the only one that had any kind of money, because he ran a concrete business and, of course, sold all of his drugs in addition to doing them. But he would have money. You know, he'd buy me these video games, these video game systems, my clothes, most of the things that I had probably came from money that he had given my mom to buy me things or that he had bought for me himself. And so, I mean, this was, you know, basically free money for my mom, because she was pawning something that she had not paid for. And of course, it didn't affect her; she wasn't playing video games. But I lost a lot of my stuff as a child to these transactions.

So, inevitably we got kicked out of this house that we were living in. I wish I could remember the specific reason that we got kicked out. I am assuming it's because my mom and Earl had lost their jobs and I think Earl had connected with some guy who had some construction work way down in this place called Bowling Green, Kentucky. Now this place is about three hours from Lexington, which obviously, in the grand scheme of things, is not that far, but again, being a nine-year-old kid, that was an entire world away from everything I had ever known. And so, once again, probably less than a year we had lived in this house, and now it's time to pack up all of my things, of course, that my mom hasn't pawned or sold.

Actually, a point that I need to go back to about the pawning is when you're trying to get some quick cash and you take your stuff to the pawn shop, you always pawn it and you never sell it, because they give you more money for pawning it. Because the assumption is that you're going to keep making payments on this thing and they're going to make more money from, like, the interest from you buying your stuff back, essentially, and then if you don't make your payments, then they just take the thing and sell it anyway. So, it's a win-win for the pawn shop. But you always pawn it, you never sell it. And, of course, I don't think we ever went back to get something that we had pawned. So, you know, we essentially sold it to the pawn shop but we got more money for it. And that's a poverty life hack for those of you who need it, I guess.

But it's time for me to pack up my things again. And we were moving to an entirely new life. Now, my mom was originally from Bowling Green, so she still, to this day, has some family down there. But I had never been there before. Well, that's not entirely true. I think when my mom first left my dad with me, we lived there with her friend, Julie, that I mentioned before, that I wrote the book about. I think we lived there very, very briefly. But we were going to my mom's hometown so that her boyfriend could get some construction work. Why couldn't he get construction work in Lexington? I mean, it's, you know, it's a city; there's plenty of work to be done. My hunch is that he had probably gotten into some trouble with the authorities and there was a warrant out for his arrest, and so we needed to leave town and he needed to lay low for a bit. 

Now, we had this storage shed out back of the house and it was mostly full of my dad's stuff. I think back in those days he also was moving places pretty regularly, and so he would put his stuff in a storage shed, or, in this case, he put it in the shed in our backyard because we had the space. Now, the stuff that he had in the storage shed was a bunch of his stuff from when he served in the military. So it was like medals and paperwork and stuff like that. But he also had this really big collection of stamps. Yes, I'm talking about postage stamps, but they were like special stamps. They were all gold foil and I don't really know what was special about them, but he had a whole bunch of these gold foil stamps and I feel like throughout his life he's always tried to collect things that he thinks make him seem above his station, let's say, and this was what he had at that time. Now he often entrusted my mom with a lot of these random... we'll call them valuables. And inevitably my mom would sell them, just like she sold my stuff because, again, this is free money to her. Or she would just let them get thrown away when we had to move from wherever we were living. Now, in this case, I think she just let them get thrown away. We had to move, we couldn't bring them with us and all my dad's stuff, all his military stuff, all these stamps going in the trash along with my dog getting given to someone else because we couldn't bring him with us. And we had like this little station wagon at the time and that's all we had to move. Like, I don't think we had a U-Haul or anything like that when we moved this time. We just had this station wagon and so anything of, you know, all three of our possessions, my mom, Earl's and mine, if it didn't fit in the station wagon, it wasn't coming with us. So we weren't bringing any mattresses, we weren't bringing any kind of furniture whatsoever and, as it was, the station wagon was completely full of stuff to the point where there was no room for me to sit in the back seat and so I had to just sit on a whole bunch of stuff. And of course this was back in the day... I don't think seat-belts were mandatory yet. I remember when seat-belts became mandatory and people in Kentucky were not happy about that. You know, "government's not going to tell me what to do", etc., etc. So I had to sit on this big pile of stuff all the way to Bowling Green and somehow I was sitting on a knife the entire time. It was like a big kitchen knife and like somehow, miracle, this thing didn't cut me the entire trip down there. But yeah, I was sitting on this knife the whole time. It was wild. Never even knew it.

But, so we've got all of our stuff packed up in the station wagon and we are actively heading out of town. My mom had a court date on this exact day that we were leaving town. This court date was for all the school that I had missed. She had gotten in trouble with the truant officer because I was never in school and she had been summoned to court to answer for why her kid wasn't in school, why wasn't she being a responsible mother? Well, the answer was because she was drunk and high all the time and didn't care about me going to school. But she's not going to tell the court that. So, station wagon full of stuff. We are literally on our way out of town to start our new life. We drive downtown to the courthouse and we stop outside of it. All of our stuff in the car. And my mom doesn't want to go in there because she's pretty sure that she's going to get arrested and go to jail. So we're sitting outside this courthouse and her and Earl are discussing it and he's trying to convince her that she shouldn't go in there, like, she should just leave. I mean, he's probably already on the run from the cops, why shouldn't she be as well, right? And, again, I was a very terrified child and I didn't want to lose my mother, even if she was bad, right?

This is a problem, I think, with the foster system, is that the kids who really need to be taken away from their parents are so scared of being taken away from their parents that they don't want to lose them, because that's all that they have in the entire world is that relationship that they've had their entire life and they're scared of losing it. And so they don't want to report their parents for being awful because they don't want to get taken away from them and sent to some stranger's house. I know that was the case for me and I think that's the case for a lot of kids. I don't know how to fix that problem, but that is absolutely something that needs to be addressed.

But I was scared of her getting taken away and so I agreed with Earl: she shouldn't go into court. We already had our stuff, we should just leave town. So, bowing to peer pressure, not doing the right thing, my mother agrees and, even though we're right there at the courthouse, she just drives the car away to start our new life. And we start our new life with her having a warrant out for her arrest.

Alright, I feel like that's a good dramatic spot for us to end this episode today. But before I go I just want to talk about the school system and accountability. Now, obviously the school system got onto my mother for me being absent so much, but clearly that wasn't enough, because she just went on the run from the cops. And obviously there's not really much they can do about that because she's subverting the system. But just thinking back to my school days, the entire time I was in school as a child... you know we're talking elementary, middle and the very brief time I was in high school. Not once did a single teacher or guidance counselor or anyone involved in the school system reach out to me to ask how I was doing, how my home life was, if I needed any help. And I don't know if that would have made a difference in my life, but it certainly couldn't have hurt. And just thinking about it now, I feel like they very much failed me in that regard. Now, we could obviously get into a debate on the school system's role in parenting children, of course, but the fact is I'm supposed to be there every weekday for a good portion of the day, and when I just don't show up or when I stop doing my homework or anything else, I just feel like someone could have intervened a lot earlier to ask how my home life was, and no one ever did that. And I think schools in general could do a much better job of looking into students' lives that way and possibly improving them.

Anyway, that's my end of episode soapbox for today. I hope you enjoyed listening and I really hope to see you back next week.