I learned a lot from my experiences in the Shelter system in San Francisco, CA. It was there for me at a juncture in life when I was shut out from every other option because I couldn't ask for help from anyone in the East Bay where I have always had a place to crash because of bad memories/ghosts. I just couldn't stay in the uneasy familiarity of the East Bay. I had to take care of myself all of a sudden with no idea of when I would have some stability again or how I could create some stability out of thin air. The would-be-worse mental tribulations possibly suffered from spending more time in Oakland after my Mom threw me out onto the street and out of my own childhood "hood" last November would have been more detrimental had I not moved to San Francisco right away. Granted, it was awful having an abuser roomie (I named him Tshirt after watching 'Funny or Die' - see embedded video for reference...) but he taught me I was having a hard time with the same kind of people all of a sudden. My Mom and Kai Kopp are exactly the same. When they didn't get their way with me, they both tried to intimidate me with physicality and mental abuse.
Mom, once, at a hospital in New York during the Christmas holidays a few years ago, repeated several Chinese proverbs she had read, one of which was, "If you hate someone, they will come back to you all the time..." That one haunts me time and time again. Mom was always accusing me of hating her, but I think the truth is she's the one who really hates me. Maybe I look too much like my Dad. I sense a bit of loss of youth/relations envy, and it goes deeper, it's judgment...Her religion is being right. She can't just appreciate that I turned out the way I did and love me for who I am. She should be proud of my ability to survive but instead I cannot seem to even get any kind of respect from her, let alone a healthy showing of motherly love. The problem is that she has never understood me or tried to. She has, for years, complained that I wasted ten years of my life by not going to college directly after high school as if by being economically challenged in my current set of circumstances, that's utter failure, and this was all caused by me obtaining my degree later/my "running away to NY and abandoning HER" so many years before. My point was that at least when I was in school, I had more of a serious focused approach to it that I would have lacked had I gone indiscriminately to school when I had been college-age. At that time, anyway, I had no idea what I wanted to study in college...Also, art school is great for learning different styles and technique, but the one thing that I had on all the younger art student populations going in was that at that point, my life experience was important to the voice in my work, whatever it was...Sure, some of those kids were way more skilled at execution of technique, they might've been pure naturals, but the measure of depth in their concepts was still in the works while in that aspect, I was more developed. I also come from a different sensibility of critique amongst peers through being a graff artist...But that's the thing...This just goes to show that my Mom and I have different ambitions in life and do not emphasize importance in the same areas. My journey in life brought me to graff again across the country because graff artists were/are the ones I related/relate to, who could know me without me having to explain anything, I gravitate toward graff naturally in every environment that I am in, and I was serious enough, was meant for it, I suppose, because I got lucky enough to become part of one of the sickest painting crews in the country in 1997. It is probably not a normal ambition to be a graff artist truly. When you do it for self and peers, it can be lonely because we are misunderstood. We are not the ones who want to exploit/rape our cultures with material/compromising values. I question my Mom's choices in who she has deemed trustworthy, for those who are given the ability to say something about me in judgment are only the ones that understand me. Through still being around when so many others have fallen off so falsely by making the claims that they are graff artists, or even worse when disrespect for graff's influence in every aspect of modern art these days is shown by the display of unlearned ignorance in trying to claim street cred without giving proper credit to its footprint, it does make me feel a bit elitist, like a card-carrying member of the School of Hard Knocks...Because I earned my right to identify myself as 'Snails', an aerosol lifer, complete with my own history and geneaology...Anybody can go to school, but not everybody can be a peer to the truly devoted. So yes, I am a year of the Rat graff artist and my year of the Snake mom is a Real Estate Broker...
...I'll get back to the story...After I lost my job and had my big confrontation with Kai (I was going to smash a bottle over his head and the last night I slept in the apartment with him, I slept with the bottle in the pocket of my sleeping dress. See, I don't believe in carrying knives or other weapons for myself, but a bottle is easy to hold and carry...The situation had been escalating for a little while, we had been fighting for over three weeks, I had been starting to fear for my safety...he was a baseball player and there were a couple of baseball bats lying around the house...I just thought it could go there, so I had to be armed...I mean I have seen "Warriors" and that was a scary thought, that park scene...those baseball players were menacing...and so it was in layers, our disagreements, the selfish pr*ck wouldn't allow me a bday bbq, it would just take a little effort to clean up the space and make it functional for a small get-together...conveniently when it had been for his purposes, I was always forced to cave, but when I ask for something that I would with no questions do for someone I considered a friend and definitely out of fairness for their contributions to the household as a roomie, he says it was conditional based upon me "being cool..." And just who was he to decide this? And the appalling thing to me was that he thought he had the right to put himself in that place of judgment? (I had to prove that MY character's creditworthiness was deemed worthy of HIS approval though I had graciously escorted him and his second baby mama and their son to St. Louis in February in order to give support to him and help with his son's care during travel, and with my own funding, to HIM?...How offensive! After the twins' Mom firmly said the twins could not go to St. Louis any longer because in the weeks before the trip, Kai's support/presence was not felt in the twins' lives and she did not feel comfortable with so little attention for the length/distance of the trip without her very presence... (I must also remind you too reader, that she had no idea there was another child and baby mama at this time and that they would be traveling with us too because even though I had been against the deception and demanded several times at different occasions that he come clean, a truthful scenario just never came into fruition in time, or so Kai had convinced me then...and originally it was set up that I would be traveling for the twins' sakes because though I couldn't agree to the conspiracy to keep his son a secret from his first baby's mama, I also couldn't let them go without me along if their Mom wasn't going with just Kai plus others alone...), I wasn't going to go after they weren't allowed to come because of the observations of Kai's treatment of his second baby mama and her reactions to him in turn, but I finally ended up going last minute after a really intense hesitation in consideration of the fact that in my own life, I did really need a bit of a break from the Bay. I got to walk through the St. Louis Museum of Art (it's great because it's free admission for everyone there) and have some quality time with Kai's cousin Mandy and her husband Mike when Kai and his entourage left after a couple of days and I had stayed on to sightsee, in order to make the trip worthwhile for me. That was the bit of "kick-off-my-shoes", "away from the madness of being in the thick of things" and finally, "an opportunity to breathe" type self-interest...Mandy and Mike are definitely separate people from Kai and were really genuinely good and gracious people to me...I found that I got interested in Wash U too from this trip...See, I'm good at traveling, it looked like he and his baby mama weren't at the time that I made my decision, and herds of elephants were gathering together and no one was supposed to notice them, but the eggshells were knee-high everywhere, anywhere my feet touched...and, honestly I didn't know what to think, for sure, what my role was in the whole thing...that is, until I knew...and I was and still am (gulp) wholesome...I said it...so what?! That is my weakness...My iron skin is like Toad's though (thick skin reference from 'Five Deadly Venoms'), impenetrable, but his Achille's weakness had been?...His ears...so it is...'cuz that is what kinda happens to me...I do not even flinch at physical pain, but I hear things over and over within my ears sometimes after gettin' attacked, because it is difficult to get rid of the useless drivel that should be forgotten, but is instead filed away in the sensitive and scarred rolodex that is my brain, that seemingly frivolous memory capacity for what is my own set of deconstructive criticisms?...saw this segment on a new kind of intelligence having to do with one's ability to remember everything autobiographically, and just as vividly as if any of those days plucked at random had been yesterday...I think I am a bit afflicted with this, or maybe I watched "Groundhog day" one too many times...I now know though, in my dealings with people who do not command respect, if before one has given them the power of critique, that in the interim of trying to establish the true face of their intention, and therefore gravity/level of importance of their opinion to your situation, then that whole time they are taking in trying to convince you to listen to them can be a time when, without the proper ability to sift through proper conduct/info, the ability to dispel all the useless crap that is forced upon you by having to succumb to being worn down by all the "talk." It's real bad when you get to the point of almost becoming brainwashed because you just are so tired of trying to come up with a combined logic, to stop arguing little points in terms of what the major problems are...that is the violation, the intrusion upon my personal space because I then have to accept the false comfort of words instead of what always is necessary to prove any kind of point and thereby create credibility, action...plain and simple...Kai, shut up and instead of just ranting like a bitch...show, show the action of the words...it's as simple as that.), and he instead suggests in a low tone as a solution that we go see Iron Man 2 alone together for my bday celebration...he progressively got all condescending after my usefulness to him in court had passed as if I hadn't been paying rent or buying groceries, trying to treat me like a slave/maid/subhuman and take me for granted in front of his friends, also trying to isolate me into a place of insults so he could keep me weak and then break me down, the Modus Operandus of an abuser...then he stalked me and called me so much at work that I lost my job...I had always been wary of his lack of character and his bitch fits, but I was on the fence about the nature of his intents, so until I knew for sure...and that came clear when his behavior started to change, and not for the better, when I was casually dating Joe W, a co-worker...). So when I got some of my stuff out of Kai's (I had to leave a bunch of stuff there) and had the nervous breakdown that led me to getting into the fight with the Resident manager at Public Storage over not having enough time to put my stuff back into the storage unit at closing time, I went on a graff rampaging spree and with desperation, I was only trying to cope the only way I knew how. By blowing off steam. I ended up getting busted and not until the fourth time I got busted that same day did I get my backpack full of paint taken away by the police and they still did not take me to jail at this time. It was when I stickered Westfield Mall and had broken a couple standpipe pieces that I got hauled off to SF General 7L/850 Bryant-C-Pod for about six weeks. In jail, I made a few friends/people of impact (it was like my friend Steven's piece about the pineapple...exactly how I felt about a generous Thai girl named Sucha who got busted for selling...). Unfortunately, one of my other bunkies od'ed right when she got out again after serving more than 11 months (she had been a size 2 when she entered and by the time she was about to leave, she was a 3X. She had asked me to drop her off some exit clothes for release and I did...but I heard she was dead when I visited Sucha last, and it broke my heart...Also I met K-K-Katy...She had been dating Pez and had been having problems with manic episodes. She had about 13 felonies at first count with about 13 pending in hate crime charges for bombing many public spaces including the Opera House (WHAT!? Now that's pretty bold!) with her seemingly racist tags...She was getting punished for her moniker which she said stood for Krazy Kooky Kid, and yet in court, there was 5 hours of testimony on her case because every tom, dick, and harry who had an encounter with a swaztika had brought pics as photographic evidence against her and many people/press came from several different counties...She was young and also real sweet, but real ignorant of the impact of her tag...or at least slightly stupid for being proud of the shock value...She's still at 850 Bryant...) I had contemplated ending my life towards my last days of imprisonment because I had nothing to look forward to in this wretched existence or so I thought.
I got released OR (Own Recognizance) and was put in the CJC (Community Justice Center). This is a court unique to SF and what it does is give the local neighborhood's disenfranchised a chance to better their situations by making them take care of themselves by mandated court orders plus they put out bowls of candy during court sessions. When I was released from 850 Bryant, since I was homeless, I was sent to the Episcopal Sanctuary shelter in the SOMA district of SF that first weekend. I met Chris first. He was a military guy and was good at conversation that first night at the shelter. I met him with the way older but still flirtatious Doc AKA the Professor (a nuclear medicine doctor) AKA "Filta-Fish" (because he is so not picky about his sniped cigs and he drinks like a fish...) and life didn't seem that bad anymore sitting there with them smoking some tobacco in the smoking patio. Chris spoke of Bobby, his brother, but I hadn't met him yet and I wouldn't until the next day. Bobby had been in the Military too and that's how he and Chris first met years ago. He and Chris were not blood-related, but traveled across country together from TN in January of this year. We didn't say that much to one another that first encounter, but Chris had invited me to pancakes at the Embarcadero (Homeless Church services on Sundays) with him and Bobby and I had said I wanted to attend...Cut to grueling and seemingly unending conversation with the older Shelter Resident, "Cat Lady" who talked my ear off and before I knew it, the guys had left without me...Then I get a phone call from Lisa who invites me over for the night before my first court date...It was the last night of my three-day (weekend) reservation at the Sanctuary and then the Court would place me at a place to stay after that the next day. I decided to cancel my last night at the Sanctuary and so instead spent a lovely evening with Lisa and Steve in Alameda and then went back to SF for Court that following day. I hadn't seen Chris or Bobby anymore that day before I had left for Alameda and it was up in the air that I would see them again. Court sent me to their Access Center and I was referred to the "Next Door" Shelter (also ECS) in the TL I stayed for a whole hour or so before I packed up my stuff and tried to get back into the Sanctuary. See, the TL is a bit rougher and that area's shelter is full of people I call "talkies", those who talk to themselves and are not aware of anything else, there's a lot more trannies and thievery at that facility too, and the strange population of those who get into fights with others from screaming at the voices in their own heads. A fight had broken out by my head and I was out. I remembered that I had had better luck at good conversations with a couple of people at the Sanctuary and I wanted to go back there all of a sudden as if I had instincts that it might be better for me there since I felt safer there.
Note: In the first days of being out of jail, I let Kai's babies' mama (his twins' Mom) know about his secret, that he had a child with another woman, had gotten this lush pregnant when she had been pregnant with the twins, close to delivering. The hard part to believe is that not only was everyone he knew in on the conspiracy to keep her in the dark, including his family, but also, the twins were 3 1/2 years old at the time that I let her know. Kai was really angry about the truth finally being told to her, tried to blame me for all kinds of other sh*t because of it, won't return the rest of my belongings, etc...I wasn't trying to spite him truly. I did it for his kids. Honestly, I had fallen in love with his kids and wanted to give them a chance for a "if not normal childhood, then at least one that is more healthy"...NO ONE had ever dared to tell her the truth...The truth is that I didn't want to get involved for so long, but in the end, I ended up doing what I thought was ultimately the right thing. Since then, a few times, she has thanked me for being the only one who would be honest with her.
There is a lot of hoop jumping in staying at a shelter. For instance, doing the daily check-ins and bedchecks, planning life around scheduled segregated (men/women) meals, having to use resource centers to get reservations (I had to stand in the Glide line for hours starting at 5 AM to get a 90-day bed), having no privacy or sense of personal space/having to share space with those of lesser hygiene abilities/addictions/mental issues/those who don't know how to give personal space to people, and also having to deal with staff who treats most like inmates or children (Bobby and I had problems with a few supervisors due to this problem and had to do more backflips through flaming hoops like go to the Shelter Advocate/Shelter Monitoring Committee in order not to get D.O.S.ed...This was at a time when I had just lost the baby and on top of that, we were just biding time until we got our own place together, but we had to keep our beds so that we wouldn't be sleeping in the streets...).
Anyways, I arrived at the Sanctuary sometime in June 2010. The first evening, I met Mike Demoya. He had vibrant blue eyes, and clammy hands the first time we shook, and was a 26-year old sous chef from SC. He was what I like to call one of my "two-weekers." I wasn't serious with him and when it started, we were just having fun together. He claimed to be a hippie (even got a "Deady Bear" patch while we were dating) and was actually the first hippie I've ever dated...I kept calling him a dirty hippie and the notion was reinforced since he never took showers/washed his clothes/changed his clothes. I knew he was not the right guy for me after a while, but he taught me stuff like "spanging", and about the circles at Golden Gate park...Even though Mike was the one to demand that we had a relationship, it just never felt like one with him because he never talked about what was going on with him/was selfish in that he always took but never gave back/always took off/shut me out constantly. I had been spending most of my time with my two new bros, Bobby and Chris, anyway. I had adopted them. Chris and Bobby were both adventurous, active, resourceful, fun, smoked medicinal meds, and loved to explore. We were inseparable for a time, the three of us. Bobby had gained my affection by becoming my own personal "Bobby Boucher." I started out doing odd things like saving him food. Bobby and I just naturally gravitated toward one another. The first day of rockclimbing at Glen Park, that was the day Bobby had a fit/temper tantrum and got Chris all mad at him. I realized his frustration that day had been about me later and then all the ladies at the shelter were telling me I had to be with the right guy...Some said it was Bobby like Dee. Some said it was Chris like Guera. Most people thought I had been dating one of my newly adopted bros instead of Mike anyway. I admitted to Dee at dinner one day that I had a crush on Bobby. Once I said it out loud, I realized it was true. Towards the end of my relationship with Mike (he had already decided without even saying anything to me that he was moving back to SC because he had gotten his old Sous chef job back...) there was a co-ed bingo night and I went immediately to Bobby not even seeing Mike. Then there was a series of parade weekends in the summertime in SF. The weekend before Pride was some kind of festival and Bobby and I had separated with the others we had been with, found ourselves alone together. At one point, it was just natural to hold onto his jacket through a crowd and he took my hand. That was it. I didn't have to explain anything to Mike. I think Bobby took care of that anyway. I'll never know what they said to each other. Mike was really mysterious and had a lot of problems like panic attacks anyways, so it wasn't surprising when Mike just disappeared thereafter. Bobby's and my relationship started to grow in strength almost at once. Bobby said he didn't like the way Mike had treated me and his goal in being with me was solely to see me smile, to always be the one who makes me smile. I had wanted to try to make a plan for escape out of the shelter as quickly as possible. Originally, Mike and I had made tentative plans to look for a place together, that is until a bit before Bobby took my hand that day. I asked Bobby if he might want to be my roommate instead when I found out Mike was leaving and when I had asked him, it was a question full of platonic innocence. Bobby looked at me puzzled at first, then said "OK." I think that might be when, though, I actually started to think of him in an incestuous way, him being my bro at that time and all. The tricky part in the whole thing is that I think Chris may have been a bit displaced in the whole thing. Chris had a bit of a crush on me, and got real upset when Bobby and I started being joined at the lips all the time and that was awkward. It wasn't so much me, I think, but Chris was lonely and needed affection/attention from a female and seeing Bobby in a relationship probably made him a little lonelier, not to mention there's some weird competitive factor in their relationship.
Anyways, Bobby and I wasted no time in loving one another right from the start. So I learned there was someone who loved me and that he was worthy of reciprocation, that love was possible for me. We already cared for one another and already spent all our time together, so it all was right. I got pregnant (the date of conception was July 6th) and got tested in my sixth week. That brought us together really quickly not to mention brought up the level of seriousness in our commitment to one another. He proposed to me one of the days I was forced to stay in the hospital for a week when first confirmed pregnant (they kept me to keep my sugar under control). Bobby and I spent so much time at the hospital in this part of our relationship. I had gestational diabetes and was high risk due to my older age and he was constantly hitting stuff like doors/people, hurting himself due to his temper/my hospital stay made him crazy 'cuz as he says I'm his water bucket and he needed me around in order to calm him...We were in the midst of dealing with all kinds of pre-natal agencies/the hospital and I was still having to go to Court every other week...We were stressed out (Bobby was jumping through GA hoops) and had the worst week ever the week of October 12th but so did everybody at the shelter...
But it was really bad for us. I lost the baby that week...
I was just at my WIC orientation and had just come from my doctor at SFGeneral after giving her a status on my sugar and after doing a paid hospital study...I was in denial once I started to feel the blood gushing. It wasn't until the WIC intake was over that I told the worker I was leaking onto her chair. She sent me off to the doctor again and I went. My doc was on a different floor and tried to get me into a room, but was fighting with a nurse who said I wasn't 15 weeks yet (I was only 9 weeks that day) and finally called downstairs to have me seen there. I got all the paperwork logistics done once I got there and I was just bleeding and bleeding. I told the receptionist after the paperwork that I was leaking blood onto the floor of the lobby and they put me into a room immediately. Anyways, I took my pants/underwear off and saw the remains of the baby and I started to cry uncontrollably in front of three docs. That was the most traumatizing part of the whole situation. I knew it was gone. I was so upset. The doc was ready to release me then and had called Bobby (he was on his way), but I couldn't stick around all those expecting moms in the waiting room under those circumstances so I left the hospital and went to get a pack of cigarettes...Bobby ran around the whole hospital looking for me and finally we caught up to one another. We just cried in each other's arms and the first thing he said to me was, "I still want to marry you." I was covered with blood, still bleeding on the bus ride home, and Bobby wasn't embarrassed by me, just covered me up so people wouldn't see, and comforted me all the way...
I have learned that it is not always true that it's harder to make friends when you're older. I have made a lot of beautiful friends from being homeless. Toebe is a fabulous New Orleans drag queen who cared enough to escort me to the clinic after demanding that I find out if her diagnosis was true that I was pregnant. She called it that I was pregnant right away even though it took me a couple more weeks to confirm it. She also helped me move the bulk of my furniture into my place from storage, the whiz at organization that she is...There is Sta from SoCal. She is a beautiful light-skinned youngin with gorgeous hair, wonderfully bubbly personality, and yet so fragile from being ripped off by people who take HER personal space away from her. She's been abused, but when she gets to be my age, she's gonna be an incredible incredible 38-year old, if she just stops being so self-destructive. She needs to love herself a little more. I wanna see her achieve anything and everything in her lifetime. She was friends with Dee first. Dee and Little Man were the original couple in the Shelter at first until Little Man got sent to jail for attacking one of the residents at the Shelter with a lock to the head (we called the guy who got tagged by the lock "the Kissing Bandit" 'cuz he was a Latino male who claimed to be gay to stay on the women's floor, but in actuality, he drank to the point of obnoxious inebriation always, and was lewd t0wards all the women on floor, constantly trying to get a kiss from all the women...). Little Man had warrants in MO and was waiting on extradition in San Brun0 after awhile and that's when Dee disappeared. She went back to the streets of the TL and back to her old bad habits. So Sta and I got closer after she disappeared. Dee surfaced again when she clocked C in the eye after C attempted to share a crack rock with her. Never share a crack rock with a crackhead. Why are you smoking crack in the first place? We love C but she is a person with no ambition to change her situation, a runner with no concept of how to say no to someone either. However, in her defense, she would give anyone the shirt off her back. I just hope she finds peace one day and decides to face up to whatever she is avoiding by being a runner. There was an old timer that Bobby and I both got close to, Yassim, and he coined the phrase, "Shelter Heights" to describe the constant soap opera-like dramas within the shelter. Yassim and I got close because of my adopted "Pa", Ezel, and Ezel was a wonderful older country raised-on-a-farm man with a great sense of humor. I had made both men laugh (Ezel and Yassim were like those two old muppets in the balcony) about this funny incident and that's how we all became friends. Apparently, on the men's floor, a naked man got in bed with another unsuspecting man in the middle of the night and the man who had been sleeping started saying, "Help...Help..." The old men and I were making jokes about it and I had said, "Whoa Bubba..." Bubba was all of a sudden the term to use for anybody who was a rapist, a thief, a suspect in general, at the shelter...i.e. Bubba got my cell phone...and Uncle Fred got Bubba-ed while he was in the shower...Anyways, Yassim (Bobby and I call him "Old Troll") started to be nicer to Bobby too when we started getting serious. Bobby and I had a knack for phrases at the shelter, I guess. "Church" (Bobby's term) became our avenue for decompression. "Church" which later became "Mass" was our code word for basically a medications smoking spot/elite congregation, usually meeting in one of the alleys just a block or two from the shelter. What I loved about Bobby was that he always took care of everyone and worked so hard to make sure we had something everyday. We started off illegally smoking in the cubby of the building buying off others who had club cards. It was Toebe who got me my Medical Marijuana card which I later paid her back for. Eventually every member of our Congregation minus a couple got legal. And HopeNet has been a savior. It has become our favorite club because they have really taken care of us.
At this time, I can honestly say that I feel blessed because through everything, Bobby has been there for me. He is the one reason that I'm doing so well today and that I want to keep living. He makes me look forward to whatever...
One thing I forgot to mention is that Mom and I hadn't spoke in months when I called her from the hospital that week that I was getting my sugar regulated after confirming my pregnancy and accepting Bobby's proposal. I wanted to just let her know so that she wouldn't take offense in the case that she found out some other way. I thought damned if I do call her to let her know the current set of circumstances, damned if I don't. So instead of being petty, I called Mom. Her first question was, "Is he Black?"
Really, Mom? Did you really just ask me this question? And it was the first question that came to your mind about the father of your possible grandchild?
This is what makes us so different. Yes, she did. Really...
Anyways, I ended up telling Mom that I was willing to have relations with her, but she was the one who said she didn't want anything to do with me, that that was it, once I stopped working for her...She didn't want to argue though, denying it at first, and then abruptly said, "You're going to be a better Mom than I was..." before hanging up on me...It was my ex-therapist Leslie who gave me comfort and who has acted as my surrogate mom so much in California (this is even though Kai tried to call her a few times to bring her on board with his plan to make me look like an insane person...and how did he get her number? And how does he have the nerve to attempt to sway a therapist anyway?). I am so thankful for her. She even visited me in jail. The combination of my patient lawyer and Leslie got me through. I can't express the gratitude. Leslie was the Mom that I wanted Bobby to meet instead of my biological Mom. It's crazy to think that my Mom is this great landowner, with all these resources and wealth, even owns an Oakland building where there is a cannabis club renting from her even though she abhors marijuana...and yet forbids me to smoke any of it, too...and I have nothing of any material value, and yet I am the richest person in the world too because of my relationships...
This last statement makes me conclude that my biological Mom and I don't have any kind of relationship anymore because I am not miserable without her in my life, a bit sad for the misfortune of it, but at the same time, relieved because I do not have to conform to who she wants me to be and I am free to be who I am...
I have also learned this trip out here that my biological father is dead. I never got to meet him after he took off when I was two and allegedly went back to his wife in Korea so many years ago. When I came from New York last July, in the first few days, Mom had said she ran his credit report and he had come up deceased in either CO or TX or some state like that...I guess that's why I was vulnerable to Kai once I met his twins. He was constantly saying things like he was going to have to give up seeing the kids because of the state of his relations with both baby mamas. (The one thing that keeps us and that will forever keep us from being similar for sure is how I feel about integrity. He was selfish in keeping a whole child a secret because he is never forthright about his intentions...always thinks he can get over...). Anyways, I was close to the ages of all his kids, even the son from the other woman. when my Dad split, so I was sympathetic, wanted to believe the best of his intentions to be a good Dad just because in some small way, that was like believing that my own Dad cared about me...Unfortunately, Kai made his bed with his women because he is a hoarder of women, not only stuff that is basically junk and he uses his children as vice grips to hold onto his women instead of thinking of their best interest...I have long been apathetic about my Dad, only because I don't really know how he felt about Mom, what happened between them, anything else about him besides the fact that he took a lot of photos of me as a kid until he left and that my favorite Uncle, the eldest of my Mom's younger bros, liked him...I cannot hold a grudge against him without knowing all that and I have forgiven him for not finding me because I cannot give him credit for anything. There is a noticeable hollow and numb feeling I have, though, when I think about family, that is until Bobby came into my life because now we are creating our own family together. I spent a lot of my life looking for male role models and recently realized that my movie library was all movies about good fathers (Finding Nemo, Life is Beautiful, The Incredibles, Chocolate, etc.)...When I got pregnant, the one thing that I found out is that I wanted to have Bobby's baby...I really did...We're gonna keep trying...He's gonna be a great Dad...We both have father issues, so there are some unspoken feelings I think we share without having to talk about them...
One more lesson I learned about racism...I am a minority within a minority! I was judged by a mean black alcoholic woman based on my appearance, who gave me no credit for having some street cred/taste in old soul music because in her definition, being a "sister" meant being Black as if being from the streets/knowing soulful music meant that I had to somehow give her and all Blacks all this credit (almost as if I had to emulate what "Black" was as if that was synonymous with "Ghetto) and dole out unearned respect for her ignorance/disrespect of MY culture/history and somehow demean blackness by being "ghetto". She, in the meanwhile, had no kind of capacity for anything but self and appeasing her bodily urges. WTF! One day, she jumped into a disagreement Bobby had had with another Black woman in the shelter, without even being present at the time, had accused him of being racist! I stood up for Bobby since I knew that was wholly untrue and the wildfire of the comment was spreading amongst all the predisposed to being prejudiced Black women on my floor. Afterwards, she held a great dislike for me. I have a theory that it's because Bobby would never give her the time of day and also Nic, an older gentleman, was a good Bones playing buddy and he knew about the tension and told me when the initial pre-choking incidents were piling, that the ass he was gettin' from her wasn't worth it if we were having funk. He basically said he would always defend me 'cuz he knew me like that and he wanted me to know he was serious about our friendship. Okay, so I gave it away...Towards the end of my stay at the shelter, she choked me out on the smoking patio. I didn't fight her because it was raining, I had to think of Bobby too, and it was my first night of my reservation (I had to re-up my 90-day bed again and the policy of the shelter is that you could not leave/stay out for 21 nights before being able to spend a night away from the shelter...(Bobby and I went urban camping quite a bit prior to having to start my reservation over again...))...and the most ironic reason is that I didn't want Trina to jeopardize her bed either...Anyways, Trina is a reverse racist and they tend to try to group up with other reverse racists...In the end, I survived the rest of the stay without getting into another confrontation with her. I had shoved her off me grabbing both shoulders and firmly pushing her away, making sure to look dead in her eyes the entire time that I was doing it, and I hadn't told the supervisor anything, I said nothing happened, when a witness to the choking brought the supervisor. I was on the edge of losing it though because Bobby and I couldn't leave for 21 days and we were about a month away from getting our place...I learned that I felt sorry for this reverse racist though because she would never know that this "plight of the sistas and the loss of good Black men," the very thing that she and other women like her blame others for, is self-created, that she closes all kinds of doors by being a really awful stereotype...I felt bad that she was so blindly ignorant, however I don't think she knows anything about her own culture or what kind of Black she is...
Bobby and I have survived past twenty plus couples that have come through the shelter and have already dismantled...I told Bobby (we'd only been together maybe three months and it had already felt like we had lived through many lifetimes together in that short time), "Seems like forever with you..." HAHA... He reminded me just now that it's like he always says. He's "in it for the long haul..."
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