Hey Kid!
I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.
Life’s kinda crappy, huh?
I am going to tell you a few things that will hopefully help, help you get your light back. It has started to fade.
I know that, as you sit wrapped in your piled Smurf blanket in that HUD-funded project bedroom attempting to drown out screams and thumps with your Tears for Fears cassette, that what I’m going to tell you first is going to be very hard to accept, but you have to trust me on this one!
You’re gonna make it, kid.
It is going to get better. Blue skies, warm ocean breezes, sunrises over the Appalachians better.
However, I am not going to sugar coat this for you. It will get worse, a lot worse, before it gets better, but if you just hang on it will be worth it.
When the yelling and cursing is pulsating below you, put your headphones on. Turn the music up loud. You’ve got Prince and Whitney Houston hugging you from the radio. Let the clever rhymes and brilliant word play of Run DMC and Eric B & Rakim force a smile in the darkest hour and take out your aggression by screaming into your pillow with Public Enemy and N.W.A.
When the drugs make their heads droop forward like a willow just beginning to weep, it will get quiet. This is when you read. Read. Read. And, read some more. Escape into fantasy. Learn about faraway places. Understand that the world is so much bigger than your small-stifling basin surrounded by the suffocating Appalachian Mountains.
Read until your lids get heavy and then escape to school. You’re safe there. I know that the free breakfast and lunch embarrasses you, but eat them. Work hard and don’t get in trouble. School is going to be your first ticket out of this mess.
However, know that you’re grades or manners or praise-filled notes from teachers are not going to fix your parents. I know that you think that if you are just smart enough or polite enough or athletic enough that they will become like the Keatons or Cosby or Seavers from your beloved sit-coms. They won’t.
When it gets too much, like the time you watch your dad throw your mom through the plate glass window of an insurance company, go with Skomie. Your granddad will shelter you in his own, peculiar gruff way. When a lot of kids are playing with dolls and having tea parties, spend a be emptying ashtrays and pouring draft beers for the regulars in his peeling-paint bar that over looks the polluted Tug River. However, after you lock up on summer nights, you’ll climb into his giant Buick Riveria and head to the Sterling Drive-In for all chocolate banana splits.
Skomie is not going to make it nearly as long as you need him to; he’ll die suddenly of a heart attack when you are 14. You will be in the Bluefield Junior High School cafeteria. Your mom will come to the school and deliver this news. You don’t have a complete concept of exactly what this means. You cry in that dramatic teenage girl way, not necessarily because you have grasped exactly how this will impact your life, but because you know that is what teenage girls are supposed to do and that the other girls will rush over in their Espirit sweatshirts and give you hugs. You will be the center of attention, and you kinda enjoy that.
Shortly, after his death, your mama will be arrested right outside of your gran’s cute little apartment on Cumberland Road. It will be a scene straight out of your beloved Law & Order.
I know, I know. This seems like a lot. It is. But, stick with me.
After your mom’s arrest, you’re going to change. You will make yourself hard, but it is just the veneer. You are rapidly crumbling on the inside. You will try way too hard. You will use your intelligence and wit to belittle others, others that you actually like. It is the only way you know how to make yourself feel a little better. You’ll wear a lot of black because you are under the impression that it makes you hard. You will miss colors.
In high school, you will party – a lot. You’re going to hang out with some of the most popular kids. You will miss the irony that you desperately want to belong to a group of rich kids who identify as “The Criminals”. You’ll know that you only fit in sometimes; when you’re funneling the Natty Light the fastest or making out with boys that you don’t care about and whom certainly don’t care about you. You’ll hear all the whispers but you’ll pretend that you don’t.
I would tell you to just hang out with the kids that you really like, the AP nerds who like to watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 reruns and drink Jolt Cola, but you learn valuable lessons from the “cool kids”…and, you make a couple of lifelong friends.
You make it to college, kiddo. You screw up a little in high school; your Algebra grades are abysmal. You skip a lot of school to drink wine coolers by your best friend’s pool. However, your college guidance counselor and your senior English teacher believe in you when you’re daring them to don anything but.
You start to find your footing a little at WVU. You meet great friends, friends who are down for a good time, but ones that you feel comfortable letting your fortified walls down a little as well. You also meet, well re-meet, a skinny, mustached Italian boy who you hand your heart right over to. It is the best move you have ever made, even if your roommate says he looks “sketchy” (it’s just the mustache).
However, now that you have real friends and a boyfriend that you love with your whole soul, you get incredibly scared. Your insecurities and fear of abandonment come roaring at you like a runaway coal train.
Your mom and you will be locked in a constant battle during college. She will take out a credit card in your name. She will call and threaten to sell your little brother’s bike if you don’t wire her money, money from your grants and from cleaning food trays in one of the dorm cafeterias. You’ll send it. You’ll hate yourself for sending it, knowing that she is lying, but you’ll always send it.
You will graduate college. You will move to Charlotte, NC. You will marry that no longer mustached Italian boy, the one who was stronger than you, the one who climbed over your walls and refused to leave, although lesser people would have taken the first bus out of Crazy Town.
You will have good jobs and make great friends. However, you will still spend most of your twenties thinking that you are a little more amazing than you are. You will be under the impression that you did everything on your own. Honestly, you are completely full of yourself. You have done good, kid, but damn, are you full of yourself.
And, then you will lose your mom and baby brother in a two year span. However, in that two years you will welcome the most magical little person ever created, you will welcome in your peace. It all changes in that two year span.
Your peace comes to you on June 17, 2009 at 8:19pm. At this exact moment – you heal. When you look into your daughter’s eyes you are certain that you would live it a thousand times over if you knew that in the end you would get to hold her. Surrounded by your incredible husband and amazing friends and family, you hold your peace and feel the last of your walls come crashing down.
You will always flash back on those dark and twisted memories, but you will use them now to help you learn. You will knock down the walls. You will let people in and you will let them know how happy you are that they are there.
You will gain empathy, true empathy. You will accept yourself for who you are and be brave enough to become her.
You will struggle but you will also love and hug and kiss. You will not hit. You will not yell, well, you will try not to yell. You will use kind words. You will smile – lots! You will be goofy and silly. You will trust. You will find security. You will know who you are and you will like you. You will love big and loud and open.
It was not your fault.
You’re gonna make it, kid. And, you are gonna love the hell out you!
Soshally Awkward
Sosha Lewis is a writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Huffington Post, MUTHA Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. She writes about her sometimes wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking past filled with free-lunches, a grimy sports bar, a six foot tall Albino woman who tried to save her teenage soul, felonious, drug addicted parents, an imaginary friend named Blueberry and growing up nestled in the coal-dusted mountains of West Virginia.
