Rock Bottom Was Only The Lobby

Tag: #truestory

  • Accountability- Part 2

    Accountability- Part 2

    Trigger Warning:
    This post contains honest discussion of suicide attempts, psychiatric hospitalization, substance use, pregnancy loss, custody loss, and mental health crisis. Please read with care and come back when you’re in a safe place if you need to.

    (Some names have been changed.)


    Two years and some change. That’s how long I went without my children. And if Part 1 was me owning the chaos I created, Part 2 is me sitting inside the consequences of it.

    The first thing I did was what any completely unqualified person does when they’re desperate: I tried to become a lawyer. I studied family law like a madwoman. I was convinced that if I just read enough, learned enough, filed the right paperwork, I could represent myself and fix this. Ha. Fat chance. There is a reason lawyers go to school for as long as they do, and I learned that the hard way. And even if I could have navigated the legal maze on my own, the filing costs alone were way beyond anything I could manage. I had no job, no savings, and no idea how deep I was already in.

    Meanwhile, Cynthia and I were still at it.

    I know. I know. 

    I told you we broke up for good eventually. And we did, I assure you. Spectacularly, as always. Just our style. Just not yet… Bear with me.

    Losing my kids had sent me into a spiral that I couldn’t pull out of, and instead of getting quiet, the fighting between us got louder. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I cried constantly. After one particularly bad fight, she walked out and didn’t come back until the next day.

    When she did come back, she told me she’d had sex with a man that night and she just knew she was pregnant.

    I thought she had absolutely lost her mind. Who knows that? The day after? I was flabbergasted.

    About four weeks later, she took a pregnancy test.

    She was pregnant.

    I didn’t know what to do with that. 

    Six months into the pregnancy, things between us hadn’t improved at all, if anything they were worse. Then she went in for an ultrasound and got news that stopped everything: the baby’s major organs were developing outside its body. It was not a viable pregnancy. When the baby was born, it would die immediately. 

    She was too far along to terminate in Oklahoma, but her mom lived in California. So that became the plan. Her mom came and got her, and Cynthia left.

    I don’t have words for all that was wrapped up in that goodbye. I still don’t.

    I had been given a court date when I was served, and I held onto it like it was a lifeline. I hadn’t done anything wrong, not really, not in the way that should cost a mother her children, and I genuinely believed I had a chance of getting the ex parte order thrown out. 

    My sister and my best friend came with me. I didn’t walk into that courtroom alone, and I will always be grateful for that.

    What I wasn’t prepared for was everyone else who was there.

    Sam and Rianna had brought what looked like an entire army. I recognized her parents, but most of the faces were strangers to me. A very large family, I assumed. I started to panic before I even reached the stand. The tears started before I could stop them.

    When it was my turn, the judge looked at me the way people look at something they’ve already decided about. She was not moved by my tears. She was, in fact, annoyed by them. She told me I needed to control my emotions. I told her I just wanted to be with my children.

    She said that wasn’t going to happen.

    She gave me more time to find representation, kept the ex parte in place, and sent me home.

    I walked out of that courthouse with my sister on one side and my best friend on the other, and I had never felt so small in my life.

    There was no way I could afford a lawyer. We all knew it. Sam and Rianna had resources, a support system, and a plan. I had cardstock and photographs.

    That’s not a metaphor. I went home and I obsessively wrote my children’s names on cardstock and made collages from every photo I had of them and hung them all over my apartment. I needed to see their faces. I needed to be surrounded by them in whatever way I could manage. 

    My sister moved in with me for a while because she could see I wasn’t safe to be alone. I could barely sleep, barely eat, barely function. A neighbor of mine, a stripper named Stacy, needed someone to watch her toddler while she worked nights. She paid me fifty dollars a day. That became my income. That became my purpose. Showing up for someone else’s child when I couldn’t get to my own.

    Seven months in, my sister decided I needed a reason to get out of my own head. She threw a small party at the apartment. Just a handful of people. One of them was our mutual friend Richard, who asked if he could bring a guest.

    The guest was Keith.

    He was tall, six-four, with long black hair and a t-shirt that said “I Like Their Old Shit”. He was quiet in the way that some people are quiet because they’re actually paying attention. I went to put on music, something I was sure no one would recognize. The opening notes of “Both Hands” by Ani DiFranco came through the speakers.

    From across the room, Keith said, “Hey, Ani DiFranco.”

    I whipped around. No one ever knew Ani DiFranco.

    I sat down next to him and we started talking. He listened the way people rarely do, with patience, with stillness, without waiting for his turn to speak. I overshared, because I always overshare, and because my children and everything I had lost were all I thought about. At some point I looked up and realized everyone else had gone home. Keith stayed. We talked until the sun came up.

    He became my lifeline. I held onto him accordingly. 

    Keith had a serious drinking problem. Gin, specifically. He’d wake up and take a few drinks just to get rid of the shakes before walking the mile and a half to my apartment, he’d had a DUI years before and refused to risk another one. 

    I understood addiction. I had my own history with alcohol. So instead of keeping my distance from it, I drank with him. That became our days. Music, drums, drinks, noise complaints from the neighbors. On the hard days, when the grief swallowed me whole, I needed to be alone, and Keith understood that too. He was the same way. It worked, in the imperfect, cobbled-together way that things work when two broken people find each other at exactly the right moment.

    Then the apartment manager decided she was done with me. She wasn’t renewing my lease, still punishing me, I think, for all the chaos Cynthia had left in her wake.

    During one of my depressive spells, when I hadn’t left the apartment in a couple weeks, she called a tow company and had my car removed, claiming it had been abandoned. I walked out to go to the store and it was just gone. The tow yard wanted twelve hundred dollars to release it.

    I didn’t have twelve hundred dollars. I lost the car.

    My last day was approaching fast and I had nowhere to go, nowhere to put anything, and nothing to do about either of those facts. Keith and I are both bipolar, which means sometimes we could be a bit impulsive, and when my older sister, different mom, same dad, was going through something hard (her mom passed away) and I said I wished I could be there for her, Keith didn’t hesitate.

    Let’s go, he said. We can take my car. So we did.

    We came back to a lock on my door and a note from the sheriff’s office.

    I called. They gave me fifteen minutes the next morning to get what I could carry.

    Fifteen minutes to collect the pieces of your life. I stood in that apartment and tried to decide what mattered most. Keith told me I could store a few boxes in his dining room. That he’d let me stay a couple nights a week. We hadn’t been together long. It was one of the most generous things anyone had ever offered me, and I took it, because I had no other choice.

    The rest of the time, I was at my mother’s. So that became my life, a few nights a week with Keith, the rest with mom, all of it suspended somewhere between surviving and drowning.

    What I didn’t expect from Keith was what he taught me just by being himself. Where I had spent years tangled up with people who had no idea where they ended and others began, Keith had boundaries. Real ones. When he needed time alone, he just said so. Plainly, without drama, without making me feel like a burden for existing. It was so foreign to me that at first I didn’t know what to do with it. I had never been with someone that honest about their own needs. It was, quietly, one of the most important things I had ever witnessed.

    On the nights I stayed over, we’d go to bed watching Casablanca. We’d talk for hours, the kind of talks that wander and double back and end up somewhere neither of you expected. I’d get lost in it. In the music he’d play, in the sadness I was still carrying, in the grief of missing my kids, and underneath all of it, in the slow, terrifying feeling of falling in love again. It was a strange thing to hold all at once. Grief and love, side by side, neither one canceling the other out.

    I applied for disability during that time. The depression was bad enough that working consistently wasn’t something I could count on myself to do. And the dark days were really dark. The kind where you can’t locate a single reason to believe anything will ever be different. I started doing the math in my head, the worst kind of math, if I couldn’t get my kids back, they’d be eighteen before I had any say in the matter. And by then, who knew if they’d even want to know me. 

    Rianna had offered to give me updates if I called, and I did call, occasionally. But I’m ashamed to say I didn’t call as often as I should have.

    Because it fucking hurt. Every single time.

    One afternoon while Keith was over helping his mother, the pain got to be more than I knew how to carry. I took forty-seven Klonopin and twenty-four Ambien and decided I was just going to go to sleep and stop hurting.

    When Keith came home, he could tell immediately that something was off. He called COPES, a local mental health outreach here in Tulsa, but the medication had already started working faster than help could arrive. He realized what I had done and called 911. COPES pulled up just as the ambulance was pulling away with me inside it.

    I spent a week in the hospital, followed by a week in the state psychiatric facility. Which is, I want to be honest, much more like jail than like healing. It was awful. My roommate got hold of a safety pin and carved up her body with it while I slept, then painted our room with her blood. I woke up to that. 

    They fed me a low-sodium diet, plain pinto beans, a piece of bread, a vegetable. Every single day. I would not wish it on most people.

    But somewhere in there, I started to feel a little better. Stabilized, maybe, is the more accurate word.

    And then, remarkably, something small and good happened. Years before any of this, I had put my name on the Section 8 waiting list and completely forgotten about it. It was my turn.

    I got an apartment in downtown Tulsa.

    It was a shoebox. The roaches were the size of Cadillacs. Only a twin bed and a dresser fit in the bedroom. But it was mine. And it had a beautiful view of the Tulsa skyline, which I would sit on the concrete ledge outside my 8th floor window and look at on the nights I didn’t know what else to do with myself.

    By this point, my kids had been gone a year.

    I was starting to build a life without them. Not a life I wanted. Not one I had asked for. But the alternative had already shown me what it looked like, and I was still here.

    So if I wasn’t going to die, I had to figure out how to live.

    For a whole other year, I tried.

    That’s Part 2. Not the worst of it, I know that’s hard to believe, but it’s the truth. What I can say is that this was the year I learned I was harder to kill than I thought, in more ways than one. I was still standing, barely, in a shoebox apartment with roaches and a skyline view, trying to figure out how to want a life again. 

  • Accountability

    Accountability

    Some names have been changed for reasons you will understand after reading this. My accountability is what’s important here. The others in this story came to terms with this history in their own way.

    With honesty comes accountability. That’s something I’ve had to sit with, really sit with, as I do this work of breaking cycles and telling the truth. Because the truth is, I played a role in the chaos too. I made decisions, over the course of more than twenty years, that added fuel to a fire that was already burning. And I have to own that.

    To understand where things started to unravel, you have to understand what we lost first.

    My grandmother raised me alongside my mom. She was the backbone of our entire family, the kind of woman who holds everything together just by existing. She died of lung and liver cancer when my son, Brandon was just one week old. It was an awful, painful death. The kind you don’t forget. The kind that changes you.

    When she died, everything fell apart. My mom lost the house I grew up in, which is still something I carry bitterness about, I believe the family should have stepped up and prevented that. But that’s a story for another day. What I know is that losing my grandmother was the first real loss I had ever experienced. She was the closest person to me I had ever lost, and I was completely and utterly devastated. I did not handle it well.

    And neither did my husband, Sam though I say that without blame. He had never lost anyone either. He didn’t know how to comfort me, didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to show up for me in the way I needed. And on top of all of that, we were brand new parents, trying to hold the weight of grief in one hand and the awe of a new baby in the other. It was an impossible place to be.

    I felt alone. I felt like I didn’t have a partner. And while that’s not an excuse for what came next, it is the context.

    It was Halloween. Brandon was about five months old. My sister threw a party, and that’s where I met Cynthia. She was my sister’s friend, openly gay, confident, and warm. We clicked immediately. Before long, she was at my house almost every day. She helped me with Brandon. She listened to me cry about my grandmother. She was present in a way I was starving for.

    And then one day, she kissed me.

    When Sam came home from work, I told him what happened. He wasn’t upset, if anything, he was intrigued, and he asked if she’d be open to a three-way situation. I asked her. She said she’d try. So we did.

    What I didn’t anticipate were the feelings that followed.

    I was 21 years old, grief-stricken, lonely, and completely lost. I didn’t understand what was happening inside me. I loved Sam, I knew that. But I also couldn’t explain the pull I felt toward Cynthia. What I know now, that I couldn’t see then, is that she was filling a void. She was there every day while Sam came home from work and retreated to video games until dinner, then video games until bed. I was invisible in my own home. And Cynthia made me feel seen.

    That’s not love. That’s survival. But I didn’t have the language for it then.

    In January, I made the decision that I believe was the catalyst for years of pain that followed: I left Sam for Cynthia.

    It was the worst decision I have ever made in my adult life.

    Inevitably, Cynthia and I fell apart, because we were never really built for each other. I wasn’t in love with her; I was drowning in unresolved grief and trauma, and she was the hand I grabbed onto. I should have been in therapy. I wasn’t. And so the cycle kept spinning.

    Sam and I tried to get back together more than once. We even moved out of state to try to start fresh in Ohio. But I still hadn’t figured out what was broken inside me, and I kept going back to Cynthia. It was a mess, and yet through all of it, Sam and I never fully let go of each other. We were still intimate, still tangled up in each other’s lives, somewhere between together and apart.

    About a month after we moved to Ohio, I found out I was pregnant. I panicked. Things weren’t stable between me and Sam, Cynthia was still in the picture through late night phone calls, she was living in Las Vegas, and I didn’t know which way was up. We ended up selling most of what we had and going back home, I wanted to have my baby surrounded by something familiar.

    And as soon as we got back, Cynthia came back too.

    What happened next is exactly as complicated as you’d imagine: Sam, Cynthia, Brandon, and I all moved in together to wait for the baby to arrive.

    The four of us living under one roof was exactly as complicated as it sounds.

    Sam and I continued to be intimate, behind Cynthias’s back. She found out. We broke up, got back together, broke up again. That cycle became its own kind of normal, which is a painful thing to admit.

    When the baby came, I’m sure we were the talk of the hospital. Cynthia was there, Sam was there. Cynthia slept in the hospital bed with me while Sam slept on the couch. And to make an already uncomfortable situation worse, Sam’s mother was an RN in mother-baby, at that same hospital. My nurses were all her friends and coworkers.

    I still feel terrible about that. I think about her sometimes, what she must have gone through, what she must have felt watching all of that unfold. There is no apology big enough. I know that. And I carry it.

    After we came home, I fell apart in a different way. The postpartum depression hit me hard, I mean hard. I was on the verge of suicidal. Sam called my mom, told her I needed her, and she and my stepdad came to stay with us. I’m grateful he did that. I’m grateful she came.

    Eventually, I got better. Sam moved out, in with his mom. I enrolled in cosmetology school, working at Sonic, trying to build something, some kind of foundation where I could support my kids on my own terms.

    Then one day, Sam called and offered to take the kids while I finished school. I could have them on weekends.

    My mom warned me. She said, Sarah, this could turn into something.

    I didn’t listen. I couldn’t imagine Sam being vindictive. I thought he was just trying to help, and honestly, I was stretched so thin I let myself believe that. 

    So I agreed.

    Looking back, that was the first time I saw the door open to something I wouldn’t be able to close easily. But at the time, things between us were still okay. We had family Sundays, both of us together with the kids, spending time like some version of a family. We were still intimate. I was still confused, still spinning, still unable to figure out what I actually wanted or needed.

    Cynthia and I split for good eventually. And even then, I couldn’t just go back to Sam, not because I didn’t love him, but because I was terrified of hurting him again. I knew something was still broken in me that I hadn’t fixed. And I think some part of me believed that protecting him from more damage meant keeping my distance. I think he always held onto hope that I’d figure it out. That we’d find our way back to each other.

    I didn’t figure it out. Not then.

    When I moved in with my sister and brother-in-law for a while, I fell in with a group of women in the apartment complex, a close-knit group, all lesbians. I started dating one of them, split up, then another one, split up, then I ended up in a relationship with one of them. Her name was Tara. We eventually moved in together at my mom and stepdad’s place.

    That hurt Sam, I think he had been quietly holding his breath, waiting. And when I moved on, something in him shifted.

    He started dating a woman who worked at  the daycare where our kids went.

    My first reaction was territorial and ugly, if I’m being honest. This woman saw my children every day. More than I did. It felt wrong, and I said so, and for a short time, he stopped seeing her. But that didn’t last. And looking back, I can’t really blame him. I had put him through years of confusion and heartbreak. He deserved to move on.

    So he did.

    By this point, Sam had his own apartment in our hometown. Since I’d dropped out of cosmetology school and Tara and I were staying with mom without air conditioning that summer, I would spend my days at his apartment with the kids. Tara would drop me off in the morning and pick me up after work. Sam and I, still, would sometimes sleep together before he left for the day. And I would spend the rest of it cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, keeping his place spotless.

    His new girlfriend Rianna thought he was a clean freak when she first started coming around. I eventually blew his cover on that.

    Somehow, the four of us, me, Tara, Sam, and Rianna actually got along. We’d hang out, play board games, have drinks. It sounds strange, but it was our version of normal.

    Then one night, Tara took me to dinner. And asked me to marry her.

    I won’t pretend the decision was purely romantic. It wasn’t. Tara was a hard worker. Dependable. I knew she would take care of me and my kids, and at that point in my life, stability felt like love. So I said yes.

    Sam found out about a week later.

    He went to his mother and asked for her wedding ring. She gave it to him. He took it to a jeweler, had the diamonds removed, and had them reset into something new.

    He proposed to Rianna. She said yes.

    I knew what it was. I knew he was hurting, and I knew this was his answer to that pain. I never wanted to hurt him, not intentionally, not ever. But the truth is, I was a woman drowning in decades of trauma, abuse, mental illness, grief, and loss, just trying to find the surface. And Sam was collateral damage. So were others. That doesn’t make it okay. It just makes it real.

    What I haven’t said plainly yet is this: Sam and I continued being intimate even after Rianna became pregnant with their first daughter.

    One day, trying to reach Sam, I got Rianna instead. She had found out about me and Sam and confronted me. Told me that I would never deal with Sam directly again, that from that point forward, everything went through her. And that was it. That was the end of whatever Sam and I had been to each other for all those years.

    Then she called Tara and told her everything.

    Tara stayed with me for almost a year after that. But she never trusted me again, and the weight of that eventually crushed what was left between us. I found an apartment for me and the kids and kept trying, kept pushing forward, kept trying to understand myself. I had another relationship, nearly two years, with another woman. And then Cynthia came back.

    Eye roll.

    We got back together immediately, because apparently I hadn’t learned enough yet. It was a disaster, as it always was.

    Then one day I came home from work to find Sam and Rianna sitting in my apartment. They had something to tell me.

    My son Brandon had come forward and revealed a secret so big it required immediate action. Please understand I cannot share those details because he was a child and it’s his story to tell, not mine. And the details are not important right now for this. My son is a very strong young man and I promise is doing his part to break curses. 

    I couldn’t breathe. But it was real. And Brandon, my boy, had gone to his dad because he knew he needed help. That took courage I still think about.

    I went into action immediately. I made the calls. And Brandon was required to spend a year in a mental health facility in Oklahoma City, an hour and a half away.

    So I worked all week, every week, so I could take weekends off. I’d get a motel room in the city and go see him.

    *Important Side Note*

    After Sam married Rianna, I was constantly navigating what felt like an endless war with Sam over custody. He had tried to take the kids from me twice. He lost both times, because there was no real grounds to remove them from me. My relationships had been complicated and unconventional, but that alone is not a reason to take children from their mother.

    Sam made more money than I did and was ordered to pay two hundred and fifty dollars a month in child support. The moment that was enforced, he took me to court. He lost.

    When Rianna got pregnant with their second daughter and Sam started panicking when about the money coming out of his check, I actually gave him the child support debit card. Handed it over. Let him hold it. But when I lost my job and needed it back, he refused. I ordered a new card. He lost access. Next thing I know, we’re back in court over custody, he lost again.

    But none of that prepared me for what was coming.

    I was driving my daughter to her dad’s for his week. Joint custody, which I had fought hard to keep, because my kids needed both of their parents. Out of nowhere, somewhere on that drive, I started crying. I couldn’t stop. My daughter looked at me with those wide, worried eyes and I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t understand it myself. That crying was the first warning sign, the first red flag that something inside me was breaking in a way I couldn’t hold together anymore.

    I dropped her off and went to work.

    The crying didn’t stop. It escalated. And somewhere in the middle of my shift, I had a full breakdown. I don’t remember much of it. What I know is that I ended up at Laureate, a psychiatric facility, and they kept me for a week.

    I was going to miss my visitation with Brandon. So I called him and told him what was happening. He told his dad.

    Sam saw an opportunity. And he took it.

    When I was released, I called to make arrangements to pick up my daughter. I was at my aunt’s house. I wanted to take her swimming. Sam asked for the address, said he’d bring her to me. I remember thinking, that’s surprisingly kind of him. That should have been my warning. He never did anything kind without a reason.

    He didn’t bring her.

    A process server showed up at my aunt’s door instead. An ex parte order. A restraining order. No contact with my children, none, whatsoever.

    I had been sober from alcohol for almost two years. I broke that sobriety that night. I didn’t see the point anymore.

    I went to Legal Aid of Tulsa hoping to find free representation, I had lost my job from the breakdown and had nothing. But Sam and Rianna had already gotten there first. Conflict of interest. They couldn’t help me.

    I was completely alone. I didn’t know my rights. I didn’t know what I could fight for or how to fight for it. And because of that, more than two years passed before I could see my children again.

    Two years. The distance from them nearly killed me.

    And that’s where I’ll leave part one of this chapter, not because the story is over, but because some weight needs to be set down before you can pick it back up again. What I’ve shared here is the part I’m most ashamed of. The choices I made, the people I hurt, the version of myself I was when I didn’t yet understand why I was so broken. I was never a bad person. I was a deeply wounded one. And there is a difference, though it took me a long time to believe that about myself. 

    Part two is where things get darker before they get lighter. But I promise you, they do get lighter. I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this if they didn’t.

  • The Whiskey In The Closet

    The Whiskey In The Closet

    On late nights, Johnny Carson, beer-soaked napkins, and the most honest person I ever knew.

     I was, without question, a grandma’s girl. While other kids my age were asserting their independence and pretending not to need their families, I was perfectly content sharing a bed with Estella Pearl Bradley until I was twelve years old. No shame. Zero regrets. The woman had Nick-at-Nite and she rubbed my knees when my growing pains got bad. You don’t walk away from that.

    But let me be clear about something: she was not like other grandmas. Not even a little. It was completely normal to come home from school and find her taking a break from yard work, cold beer in one hand, pickled pig’s foot in the other, very short shorts, high-heeled sandals. She was not a cookie grandma. She was Pearl. And Pearl had a vocabulary that would make a sailor pause. “Harder than a preacher’s dick.” “Wouldn’t that just frost your balls.” “Your ass is grass.” These were just things she said. Casually. In the living room.

    She also drove me to swimming lessons every single week. My teacher was Carmelita Hughes, a woman who conducted lessons in the pools of old oil baron mansions across Tulsa and who did not entertain the concept of opting out. One afternoon we were supposed to jump off the diving board. I decided that was not going to happen, walked out to grandma’s car, and explained my very reasonable position. 

    She did not see it that way. She told me my ass was, in fact, jumping off that diving board today. And if she had to go get Miss Carmelita to push me, she would do exactly that. I knew when to admit defeat. Grandma was not going to be my ally here.

    I jumped. I was proud of myself. So was she. On the way back to school she handed me a snack and a thermos of Kool-Aid, and when we pulled into the parking lot she reached into the glove box, pulled out a napkin, soaked it with her Busch beer, and wiped my face before sending me back inside. I probably smelled like a panhandler at an off-ramp. I was five years old. It remains one of my favorite memories.

    The evenings had a rhythm. Dinner dishes done, grandma would pick up her glass of ice water, very innocent, very hydrated, and slip into her bedroom closet. This is where she kept the half gallon of LTD whiskey. She’d emerge with a generously poured glass that now resembled sweet tea, settle into her chair, and click on the evening news. Two people in the entire family would stick around past that point: my Uncle Johnny, and me.

    “By the time Johnny Carson came on, grandma was generally hammered — and absolutely wonderful.”

    What I loved most was when the TV became background noise and she started talking. Drinking grandma was honest grandma. No filters, no careful edits. Just truth. I watched a tear roll down her cheek as she described going hungry in the 1930s, and how flour companies started printing pretty patterns on their sacks so mothers could sew them into dresses for their children. I was a kid. I knew I was hearing something real.

    At some point I’d eye her glass and ask for a sip. She always said the same thing: “Yeah, but you won’t like it.” I thought she was being modest, I loved iced tea, and this looked exactly like iced tea. The burn that hit the back of my throat corrected that assumption immediately. Grandma let out a little chuckle. Didn’t try to hide it. Fair enough.

    One thing you did not say around grandma: “I’m bored.” That was not a safe thing to say. Before you knew it you’d be armed with a butter knife, a rag, and Murphy’s Oil Soap, standing in front of louvered doors. To this day, if I bought a house with louvered doors, I would use them as firewood.

    My grandma also had your back in the ways that mattered most. When my cousin Susan came out, after leaving her husband, an army base in North Carolina, and a life that didn’t fit, she came home and told the truth about herself. My Uncle Johnny called grandma to raise hell. Grandma went off.

    “John D!” — his middle name was Darcy, so that’s what she called him when she meant business, “if you didn’t know that girl was gay when she was three years old, you haven’t been paying attention. It took everything she had to leave and come home and tell you the truth. Now you will do nothing but support her. Got it?”

    For context: Susan had always been the husband when we played house. She was a ninja, Freddy Krueger, or a vampire every Halloween. Dressed up for Easter, she looked like she was in drag. Grandma had been paying attention her whole life. She loved her the whole time and was ready when it counted.

    One of her best friends was a gay man named Fritz, a former gourmet chef and, as she eventually told me, a very successful drag queen who made, in her words, a beautiful woman. I didn’t see it. I thought he looked like a toad. But he came to stay during the holidays, helped in the kitchen, and I resented him deeply, not for any of that, but because he slept in grandma’s bed and I did not appreciate the competition or what he could be doing to her in there unsupervised! When I admitted this to her, she laughed, explained that Fritz was gay, and assured me that if he were to touch her silky drawers, it would only be to find out where he could buy some. That settled it. I grew to love Fritz.

    My grandma put a full face of makeup on every single day. So do I, even when I don’t leave the house. She wore a ring on every finger. So do I. I didn’t inherit these things consciously. I just became her, in the ways that count.

    What I didn’t understand until much later was what she had survived to become who she was. Her husband’s suicide. Her boyfriend’s suicide. Losing everything, and then picking up the broken pieces and making something beautiful she could be proud of. I never understood her contentment with being single, her self-sufficiency, her refusal to be defeated by the world. I do now. The same things that happened to her happened to me. And I found myself on the other side of it the same way she did, choosing beauty over bitterness. Loving hard. Rebuilding.

    She prepared me for life. She gave me skills, practical, emotional, spiritual, many of my closest friends simply don’t have, because I was raised by her hands. She didn’t want me soft. She wanted me skilled, independent, and strong. That is exactly what I am.

    She died in our pink house in Broken Arrow, surrounded by the people she loved, one week after my son was born. My ex-husband Steven raced us to the house so we could say goodbye. My son had come a month early, like he knew. The day before I went into labor, my mom was crying in the kitchen telling me grandma was holding on to meet him. I told her she couldn’t put that on me. I had no control over that. I went into labor that night.

    I named him Bradley. After her. Estella Pearl Bradley. There are things I want to stop with me, patterns, inherited pain, generational nonsense. But his name is not one of them. His name stands for a woman who gave me stability in crazy times, taught me how to take care of myself and my family, and loved me with everything she had.

    I still feel it, universes away.

    This past weekend I stayed with my mom’s best friend Rhonda, they had been friends since they were eight. She talked about my grandma and said she was the only person who ever made her feel truly welcome. Like she belonged there from day one. My best friend Jessica, who I’ve known for thirty years, says the same thing. Grandma loved her too, folded her in, bought her favorite snacks, made room. That was just who she was.

    When I was little I wanted a cookie grandma. Not the kind who cleans your face with beer. But now? I wouldn’t trade her for anything in this world. She was exactly what I needed, even when I didn’t know it yet.

    Five minutes before she took her last breath, I leaned close and told her: 

    “I am so proud of you. And so proud to be from you.”

                    Estella Pearl Bradley

    Cold beer. High heels. Rings on every finger. A heart with room enough for everyone.

    Happy Mother’s Day, Grandma. I love you wherever you are. 

  • The “Family Curse” is Just Untreated Trauma: It Ends With Me

    The “Family Curse” is Just Untreated Trauma: It Ends With Me

    We call it a “Family Curse.” It’s a convenient phrase, isn’t it? It implies that the tragedy stalking our bloodline is mystical, unlucky, or somehow out of our hands.

    I’m done with that. I am done laughing it off to keep the peace. I am done pretending that what happens to us is a matter of fate.

    The “curse” isn’t some abstract, supernatural hex. It is a cycle of silence, denial, and untreated trauma that has been passed down, unexamined, for generations. And every time we stay silent, every time we “protect” the family name or the perpetrator, we are just handing that curse to our children.

    I realized this when I looked at the patterns. My grandmother’s husband killed himself. The man she was with after did the same. My husband killed himself. The man I was with after did the same.

    Moms Parents Estella Pearl 1928-2003 & Russell J.R. 1921-1967 (Died by suicide)

    But the rot goes even deeper than that. It starts with the absolute violation of the most sacred space: the home. My mother eventually confided in me, a heavy truth that changed the entire landscape of my understanding of our family. She told me that she and her sister were sexually assaulted by their own brothers when they were children. My aunt lost her virginity to their oldest brother, a cycle of abuse that repeated over and over, trapped in that house until they could finally escape.

    Grandma (moms’ mom & brothers)
    Aunt and uncles

    They were children. And because of the silence, that trauma wasn’t just left in the past; it was baked into the foundation of our family’s reality.

    When my cousin Crystal from my Dad’s side of the family, who was living out of state, finally found the courage to tell us she had been molested by our grandfather, I was 10 years old. I will never forget the horror of listening to her pour it all out. But what bothered me even more than the act itself was the reaction: my grandmother (Dad’s mom) didn’t believe her. That is a betrayal that cuts deeper than words. And he was never held accountable. That is absolute bullshit.

    Me in my grandfathers lap. Just knowing we were unaware of the danger of this yet… makes me sick.

    That betrayal was just the beginning. That cousin, Crystal, the one who had the courage to speak up at 12 years old, she carried that trauma her entire life. She was nearly 40 when she died by suicide. And the cruelty of it is almost too much to write: she died in my grandparents’ house. The same house where she was victimized.

    The cycle didn’t stop with her, either. Her brother, Corey, took his own life a few years before she did. Her daughter took her own life at just 14 years old, less than 2 years after her mom died.

    Corey & Crystal

    Do you see the pattern now? Do you see how this isn’t just a “curse”? It is a bloodline being systematically destroyed by secrets that were never allowed to see the light of day.

    They say 1 in 4 girls are molested by a family member. That number is staggering, and it is a reality that is making us sick as a collective.

    I was 11. It was at a surrogate aunt’s parents’ house during her daughter’s birthday. I had won a pair of pretty earrings in a game, lost one on the porch, and was so anxious about it that I couldn’t sleep. I went into the living room, and the aunt’s stepfather was there. He had me sit in his lap. He started touching me. I told him to stop, and thankfully, he did. I ran back to the bedroom and I didn’t get back up.

    I didn’t tell anyone. I held that secret until I was 16. I was at the pink house in Broken Arrow. My little sister came to my room crying. Tensions were already high because another cousin had just been victimized by a neighbor, a predator who was eventually arrested for molesting multiple kids and producing child pornography.

    My sister told me she had been molested by the son of a babysitter she had years prior. I told her the only thing that made sense: You have to tell Mom. When she hesitated, I promised her: I will tell Mom what happened to me, too, if you agree to tell her what happened to you.

    We made that pact. We told. My mom fought so hard to find those men, the stepfather who had nearly beaten his wife to death, and the babysitter’s son. But these were the days before Google, before the age of information. We couldn’t find them. We couldn’t get justice.

    The point of sharing this, of exposing the darkest, most horrific corners of my life, is not to rehash the pain for the sake of it. It is to expose the problem. This is happening everywhere, every day. And it is making us, as families and as a collective, incredibly sick.

    Stop protecting the abusers. It is not helping anyone.

    I am writing this because I have children. I have the future. And the idea of them walking this path, of them inheriting this “curse,” makes me want to throw up. So I am blowing the lid off this shit. I am facing the rot so that I can clear the foundation.

    If you are reading this and you are carrying a secret, or if you are protecting a secret, please: Do something. Don’t let your family end up like mine. The curse stops here. It has to.

  • Pipe Bombs, Tail-less Hamsters, & No Leg Steve: Mom Bartending Through Hell

    Pipe Bombs, Tail-less Hamsters, & No Leg Steve: Mom Bartending Through Hell

    (Photo credit: Me & my cousin Shonna on a float trip down Illinois River)

    Spring was a blur after my stepdad Richard died in what I can only describe as the world’s most inconvenient garage explosion. One minute we’re a normal(ish) family, the next there’s a hole in the deep freezer patched with duct tape like some redneck war wound. I avoided that garage like I owed it money. The air felt heavy, cursed, haunted by whatever the fuck Richard had been up to. Running in for frozen meat or ketchup? I sprinted like the devil himself was chasing me with a lit fuse. Silly? Maybe. But trauma makes you superstitious.

    The FBI hung around for months afterward, asking questions we couldn’t answer and parking unmarked cars nearby to watch who came and went. Eventually they ghosted, leaving the pipe bomb mystery as our family’s favorite unsolved true-crime podcast episode that actually happened in our garage.

    Plot twist (you’re welcome, I won’t make you wait 20 years like I did): While staying at a surrogate “uncle’s” house visiting, (actually an old client from my mom’s secret double-life days) I casually mentioned what a fucking weirdo Richard was. Then I dropped the gem: “And who keeps pipe bombs when the whole family is home?!” Uncle calmly informed me that Richard had been selling explosives to the Mexican Mafia. Oh, and my dads brother once middle-manned a deal for a live claymore mine. A claymore. For the Mafia. In suburban Oklahoma. My jaw is still on the floor somewhere in 2002.

    Important note: The people who knew those details are all dead now. If they weren’t, I wouldn’t be telling you shit. I’m no snitch.

    Suddenly a lot of things clicked. Like how we always had money even though Richard wasn’t a doctor yet. And why Mom came flying down the stairs after the blast, told me to grab my sister Rachel and the neighbor girls, and run next door, because she knew exactly what that sound meant. She wasn’t going back to sex work (Richard wouldn’t allow it), so apparently blowing shit up for cartels was the family business plan. Cool. Normal.

    A couple months later, around May, we got a frantic late-night call from my Uncle Johnny (Moms brother). Aunt Susan needed the hospital, something was very wrong, and he’d been drinking so he couldn’t drive. (Why no ambulance? Still a mystery. Oklahoma logic.) Mom & a friend hauled ass in her Isuzu Trooper from Broken Arrow to Bixby, they carried my gray-looking aunt into the car, and drove like bats out of hell to Saint Francis. Miraculously, no red lights the entire way. She made it, slipped into a coma, and we were left wondering what fresh hell this was.

    I was 13. My cousins came to live with us while Aunt Susan was out cold. By then Richard had been dead about six weeks. Mom was still mostly in bed, Grandma was working in-home health and gone for days, and suddenly my mom had five girls under one roof. Enter my dad, the bartender/manager at The Bottom Line in Broken Arrow, who showed up one evening, marched upstairs, and told Mom to get her ass out of bed, shower, put on something cute, and meet him at the bar.

    She laughed. He wasn’t joking.

    “You’re gonna learn to bartend,” he said. “You need a real job. You can’t go back to the industry now, the girls are getting older and starting to notice.”

    Mom, being the fast-learning people-magnet she was, dove in. She was gorgeous, hilarious, and could make the phone book sound like a stand-up routine. People loved her. Before long she was working nights at The Bottom Line, and later at C.J. Moloney’s, selling personality and shots instead of her body, and actually making it work.

    That summer turned weirdly awesome. Mom would take all five of us to Albertsons and we had two buggies again, one for her, one for us kids, and basically say “get whatever you want.” Just like the old days. Grandma hooked us up with pool membership (including the cousins). We lived on MTV, BET, junk food, and chlorine. It was the best summer ever, which is insane considering the spring had featured a mafia-adjacent explosion and a coma. But when you’re all drowning in the same shit storm together, you somehow float.

    During that same coma summer, Mom started dating Jimmy. He had two little hellions under seven that I got stuck babysitting way too often. Those kids were absolute freaks, they once cut the tails off Rachel’s hamsters. Like, snip-snip, no tails, just because they could. Ewww. Little psychopaths in training. Weirdly, I’d still pick babysitting them over dealing with Rachel any day. I no longer have a relationship with my sister, and stay tuned, you’ll get that story one day.

    I actually liked Jimmy. He had full custody, a good job, his own house with a pool (which I loved), and he was good to my mom. He just didn’t like Rachel (the one Richard had spoiled like a princess). Fair, she’s… a lot. Still is. Jimmy also drank too much. They lasted about a year and a half, including a memorable Ohio Christmas trip. I was genuinely sad when it ended.

    Then came the parade of not-so-serious guys, including one who tried to impress Mom by buying me an expensive watch and this giant hot air balloon/gift basket for my 16th birthday. Dude, gift the woman you’re sleeping with, not her teenager. Weird.

    Freshman year brought Steve. Steve was 25 (only nine years older than me, ew), had no legs (train accident as a teen), and got around fine on prosthetics. He also sat around doing nothing while Mom supported him, then tried to play stepdad and boss me around. He even coached my little sister’s basketball team. A guy with no legs. Coaching basketball. I affectionately called him No-Leg Steve. (Yeah, I was a bitter little shit. Still kinda am.)

    They dated about a year and a half. Shortly after the breakup, when I was 17, Mom went missing for five days. No one had seen her. Work hadn’t heard from her. I was losing my mind but knew better than to call the cops, our family doesn’t do that. Right as I was about to break the rule, she called. Steve had kidnapped her, held her hostage in a hotel, and repeatedly raped her in a fit of rage and desperation.

    I wanted to call the police. We didn’t.

    Recently I saw No-Leg Steve’s obituary. Everyone described this beloved, wonderful man who died of cancer. Not the arrogant, bossy rapist I remembered. Karma’s a bitch, I guess. He deserved it.

    The biggest lesson from those middle-school-to-early-high-school years wasn’t the explosions, the mafia side hustle, the coma, the hamster mutilation, or the kidnapping. It was watching my mom’s insane resilience. She fell apart after Richard died, bed-bound, depressed, barely functioning. Then my dad dragged her up, taught her to bartend, and she ran with it. She provided. She bought name-brand consignment clothes, let us have grocery cart freedom, and she was always there for us, even if it wasn’t always the healthiest way. The Xanax and Arby’s came when we were dealing with stressful or upsetting situations like a breakup or fight with a friend. Again, not healthy but she was doing her best. She did it all with a smile, cracking jokes, and loving us unconditionally.

    It’s okay to fall apart. It’s okay to break down. But my mom showed me what surviving, and then thriving, actually looks like. She did the damn thing, every time.

    Thanks for coming to my Oklahoma trauma dump. Pass the Arby’s.

  • The Secret In The Suburbs : My Mother’s Double Life

    The Secret In The Suburbs : My Mother’s Double Life

    The Mirage of Normalcy

    Growing up is a universal struggle, but for most, there’s a roadmap. You have parents who, in an ideal world, act as the bumpers on a bowling lane, keeping you from sliding into the gutter. For a while, that was my life. My mom was the efficient office manager for Greenwood; my dad was a grease-stained mechanic who could fix anything with an engine; and my grandma was the backbone of the house, juggling shifts as a bartender and an at-home health aide.

    Those days were draped in the blissful beige of the American dream. We were “normal.” But normalcy is a fragile thing, and in our house, it didn’t just crack, it shattered.

    The Slow Unraveling

    It started with the paychecks. My dad’s money began disappearing into a haze of drug use. Then, the betrayal at my mother’s office hit like a physical blow. Her boss, a man she had served loyally, asked her to train his niece. My mom, ever the professional, poured her knowledge into the girl, only to be handed a pink slip the moment the training was complete. He didn’t just fire her; he replaced her with nepotism and a cold shoulder.

    Pretty soon, payday became a ghost story. My dad wouldn’t come home. I was eight years old, and while I couldn’t articulate “financial ruin,” I could feel the electricity of anxiety in the walls. I knew my dad was a shadow, and I knew my mother’s silence was heavy with a mix of fury and soul-crushing sadness.

    The final straw for my mother came while making the bed. My parents had a water bed and while tucking the blankets in between the frame and mattress on my dad’s side, she pricked her finger on a used syringe. Even after the divorce, the chaos had a rhythm. They stayed friends, which meant I saw my dad whenever he was “up.” The rule was written in stone: If Daddy is using, he visits us at home. If he’s clean, we get the weekend at his place. I lived for those weekends, even as I learned to swallow the bitter pill of disappointment. The no-shows, the “I’ll be there in twenty minutes” calls that turned into three-week disappearances, that became my baseline.

    The Lady at the Table

    Survival took my mom to the Cajun Boiling Pot. It was a local seafood joint where the air smelled like Old Bay and desperation. Nightly tips weren’t just extra money; they were the difference between keeping the house in Broken Arrow or losing everything.

    Then came Chris.

    She was a customer who didn’t quite fit the scenery. She spent the entire night staring at my mother, making cryptic, lingering comments about her beauty. My mom was beautiful, striking, actually, but Chris looked at her like an investment. When she finally paid her bill and walked out, she left a business card face down on the table.

    “If you want to make some ‘REAL’ money, give me a call.”

    The Transformation

    At first, the change was a whisper. The atmospheric pressure in our house dropped. My mom stopped pacing. My grandma, usually sharp-tongued and stressed, began to soften. Then, the whisper turned into a roar of new things.

    We went to Scaggs for groceries, a trip that used to be a calculated battle of coupons. Now, my mom handed me my own cart. “Put whatever you want in it,” she said. I remember the weight of that permission, the sheer luxury of not having to check the price of a box of cereal.

    For herself, the transformation was cinematic. The tired waitress was replaced by a woman draped in Dillard’s finest. She smelled like Estée Lauder Private Collection and expensive hairspray. There were real-hair wigs, designer heels, and a new “job” selling Visa and Mastercard services. But the biggest sign was the new phone line installed in her bedroom.

    “Don’t EVER answer or use this phone,” she commanded.

    I would sit in the hallway, heart hammering, trying to catch snippets of her voice through the wood of the door. Who was she talking to? Why did the phone ring at such odd hours?

    The Parade of Men

    Then came the boyfriends, a revolving door of security.

    • Ben was the wealthiest, driving a car that looked like it belonged in a magazine. He moved in, got rid of all of our worn out furniture and decor and filled our house with luxury. They got married right there in our living room. Six weeks later, he was gone. Oh, and so was his stuff.

    • Ed the Optometrist was the “handyman” who fell off a ladder while painting our house, breaking his arm in a clumsy attempt at domesticity.

    • Bobby was the romantic, leaving behind stacks of mixtapes. My mom never touched them, but I devoured them. To this day, the sounds of Salt-N-Pepa, Mariah Carey, and Marky Mark are the soundtrack to my confusion.

    I started to see the pattern. My mother wasn’t looking for love; she was building a fortress. She had tried college, she had tried the 9-to-5, she had tried to play by the rules, and the rules had left her broke and abandoned.

    So, my mother, the PTA member, the doting homeroom mom, the woman who never missed a school function, became a high-dollar sex worker. She started in a “cathouse” run by Chris and eventually started her own “outcall” business out of our home, right under the noses of the quiet, manicured streets of Broken Arrow.

    On the outside, we were the perfect suburban family of girls. On the inside, we were living a lie that was about to catch up with us. Little did I know, the “good life” was about to cost us more than we ever imagined.