MWC Reentry
Never Stopped Running
On fate, protection, and coping
(Content Warning: Domestic abuse, trauma, death, and mourning are discussed.)
Our sun surrenders western skies while half of me sits in the shade.
That would be our harvest; Enduring memory of her weathered voice, worn down to a whisper.
“B.J. you there? I know you there. Boy, pick up!”
My mother’s voice crackled and scrawled on the answering machine in real-time as I listened, my hand frozen just before picking up the receiver. I froze as if somehow she could already hear me. Catching my hunched reflection in my dresser mirror, shame heated my spine, rising to the base of my neck.
“Please pick up, son,” she continued. “I really want to talk to you.”
I retracted my hand but remained frozen, hunched.
“B.J. please, I promise, no more crazy talk.”
Uh-huh, right, sure, I think to myself.
“I just really need to hear your voice right now.”
I took a deep breath but made no motion to pick up as her voice vibrated, ionizing dead air once more.
This is a bad time, anyway, I rationalized to myself unconvincingly. Maddie will be home from work soon, and I need to get dinner started.
“B.J., baby it’s been months, boy when you gonna cut your momma a break?”
Cut you a break? My mouth went dry. I sat at the edge of my bed rocking back and forth, glaring at the phone and the noisy, nearly obsolete technology tethered to it that emitted ma’s incessant pleas.
You were supposed to protect us.
Instead you — no, I can’t blame you. You took as much as you could, and then you checked out, and who could really blame you for that?
“I really need to hear from you!” she said, her voice cracking near the end.
She didn’t know what she was doing, I kept telling myself. That wasn’t her, but that’s the problem! What was I supposed to do? I was a kid!
“Fine,” she said. “Okay then. I see how it is.”
I swallowed what tasted like rusty nickels, rising to walk away from the answering machine. I heard her resigned sigh and felt my own sigh deflate me.
“I still love you, B.J.,” she said. “Ain’t nothin’ gone change that, you hear me boy? Nothin’.” The phone clicked, there was a long synthetic chirp, and then silence.
My inner six-year-old cursed his frailty, failing to move strengthened bones of adult hands
dissolving all resolve to reenter and answer the damn bell just this once.
I sank onto my bed again, interrogating the darkening figure in the looking glass. What kind of monster doesn’t answer the desperate pleas of his own mother?
To the reflection glaring at me from the mirror, the answer was obvious; it was the timid, fearful kind of monster born from watching his mom spill his dad’s blood on a school night. Their fights were normally one-sided and horrific, ignited by dad’s coke-fueled and often cruel ego. But she flipped the scales and introduced a new type or horror. I guess ma had had enough that night and went for the endgame.
All who knew of the years of domestic abuse — but sat silently on their hands on the sidelines — saw her attempted murder as justified. For the cops, it was a typical case of a black woman wrenching her life back from her abusive black husband via kitchen knife in front of her six-year-old son.
But none saw it for the psychotic break it actually was. We all needed therapy, especially poor mom. Especially me too, I guess. I was only six and that incident fundamentally shifted how I navigated the world. I harbored so much resentment at ma for blowing up the only life I knew, not realizing until I matured how unbearable and lonely it all must’ve been for her. And yet, I could never bring myself to completely empathize with her because of everything that came next.
My dad’s stabbing wouldn’t be her last psychotic break, nor would it be the last time that every civic and social institution — not to mention every adult family member — failed us. Over the course of the next decade, long after her separation and divorce, many more unspeakable horrors awaited my mother. The kind of things I cannot even bring myself to type here. Whatever you care to call it, fate, karma, or whatever; all of it completely failed my mother. And so she did the only thing she could; she turned her back on reality.
Impoverished, lacking support systems, or any healthy coping mechanisms, she did the best she could until all there was left to turn to was fantasy. And then even the fantasies themselves turned dark.
As for me, I learned how to freeze and flee at age six and spent my formative years honing these skills until ghosting on anyone who challenged or otherwise threatened me was as commonplace as breathing. I would deploy my talent for freezing and running away again and again, especially when momma reached out to me.
I don’t owe her shit, I told my scowling reflection.
I was a kid living though that nightmare. She was supposed to be protecting us! Instead, she-
One frayed thread left our tapestry undone, and our family was strewed and threadbare by nearly a lifetime of faulty looms.
She was strong, but everyone has limits.
The phone rang again, shaking me back into the present. My inner six-year-old didn’t give me time to process as I snatched up the handset before the end of the first ring.
“Hello?” I confronted the caller, wincing, bracing for a familiar voice.
“B.J.?” Momma’s astonished tone sent my heart racing.
“Hey, ma. What’s up?” I said, as cheerfully as I could muster.
“Boy, I been tryin’ you and tryin’ you for the longest time!” She had the rapid-fire, peppering cadence of a mother finch trying to ward off a fox prowling for her unhatched eggs. “Why you so hard to get a hold of?”
“My bad, ma,” I said, casually downplaying my recent ghosting event. “You know how it is, though. School and work-study and lookin’ for full-time work so Maddie can get off my ass- uhm …” I felt my face getting warm. “Sorry ‘bout my language, ma … I meant to say, so she can get off my butt.”
“Humph!” ma replied. Uh-oh, here we go.
I couldn’t be sure, but it sure sounded like ma was really ma this time.
I felt myself reflexively relaxing into the role of a son about to be told what’s what by his mother. I’ve heard many friends and colleagues become annoyed in this role, but I secretly relished it because it felt normal.
“Let me get this straight,” ma continued. “What’s that girl name again?”
“Madalyn, ma,” I said for the umpteenth time.
“Okay, Madalyn, Maddie, or whatever,” momma said as I silently mouthed the same words to myself. Every. Fricking. Time.
“So let’s see here; she riding your ass now that she finally working, but you getting a vocational pension from the government to go to school, plus ain’t you workin’ too?”
“Come on, ma,” I said, offering token resistance, knowing she would blow right through my halfhearted stop sign.
“Hell naw! Wait a minute wait a minute!” she continued. “When you was in the Navy for six years, just what the hell was she doin’ then?”
“Now that’s not fair,” I countered. “Maddie did some school for a minute.”
“Yeah, right, for a minute,” ma said in a mocking tone. “And what degrees did she get? Or did she quit and go back to watching her talk shows and spending your money when school got too hard for her?”
“Ma, we’re a team,” I said, not even convincing myself. “It’s our money.”
“Well, hell yeah, B.J.!” ma shouted. “See? Right there! A team! That’s all I’m sayin’! You defendin’ her right now. You got her back! Do she got yours?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Just be honest, baby,” ma continued in her rapid, chirpy pace. “I know enough about marriage to know it’s supposed to be a partnership! Mmm-hmm! You carried her ass for six years, and I bet she trippin’ even though she not even carrying you right now. You pitchin’ in too, plus you trying to better yourself, and she don’t even see that! Mmm-hmm, I just don’t wanna see you get taken advantage of. Don’t let her ride your ass like that, B.J. Be a man. You hear me?”
“Okay, ma,” I said, laughing. “You made your point.”
Ma is here now.
Familiar and free blending into well-worn paths leading us again laughter easy and flowing if only we could live here
In many ways, ma was fortune’s greatest fool. She married at age eighteen after becoming pregnant with me. Momma told me that the marriage was against grandmother’s wishes. Once the honeymoon phase ended and dad’s drug addictions and domestic abuse began, long-festering resentment compelled grandmother to turn her back on her own daughter. “You made your bed; now you can lie in it,” was grandmother’s reply.
So momma had to cope on her own, and as a strong, resilient black woman backed into a corner, cope she did. But she was only human, and we all have our breaking points. Once her coping mechanisms devolved into delusion and dissociation, it was up to me to look after my younger brother.
He was still crawling tempest swirling around him untouched, unbroken a relief to all who were wounded collaterally
“You seen Phil lately?” I asked.
“Oh I see that boy all the time!” ma laughed, her voice becoming musical. I could imagine the twinkle in her eye. “Especially when he need some money! He done knocked-up some girl.”
“Oh word?” I feigned surprise, though I already knew. While our conversations were infrequent, my brother and I talked way more often than I allowed myself to speak with mom.
“Yeah,” ma continued with a twinge of discomfort. “I told him to get a blood test before claiming her.”
“Ma!” I scolded her, even though she blurted out exactly what I felt, but was afraid to say.
“What?” ma replied. “I’m serious! Your brother too pretty!” I suppressed my jealousy with a nervous laugh. Phil has my face with lighter skin and better hair. Sibling rivalries can be petty and dumb.
“He too nice, too!” ma continued. “Too soft-hearted! I warned him that some girl is gonna wanna put a baby on his ass to try and keep him!”
“Bet he loved hearing that,” I laughed.
“Nah he ain’t like that too much,” ma said in a wary tone. “You know how hard-headed your brother can be.” Her chirpy, rapid cadence returned. “He sweet, but damn those Tauruses are stubborn as hell. He gone learn, though. Mmm-hmm. Watch and see!”
“He still at grandma’s?” I asked.
“Mmm-hmm, he still stay with Lela Mae,” ma replied. “Mmm-hmm, both he and y’all daddy still stay with y’all grandma.”
“Yeah, I know about dad,” I said with a sigh, coiling the receiver cord around my finger.
“Yo’ daddy though,” ma said in a hushed tone, as if he could somehow hear our private phone call.
“He don’t look right,” she said, after a long pause.
“Yeah, I saw him,” I confirmed, wishing I hadn’t.
“Those drugs eatin’ that poor man alive,” ma said. “Mmm-hmm. Weed, coke, crack, you name it, he’s done it. I saw him for a minute last time I was there to see Phil and visit with Lela Mae.
“Nuh-uh!” she continued, while seemingly arguing with the incongruent memory of seeing the man she once adored at his nadir. “I couldn’t believe that was the same man I fell in love with before you were born! I asked him, I said, ‘Oh Barry, please tell me you ain’t on that heroin now, too!’”
Both ma and I giggled like gossipy church ladies, assumedly at our shared dark humor of having to slide our expectations of my dad that much lower in comparison to the magnificent legend within his own mind. Having already shed gallons of tears in our lifetimes over the man who caused us so much pain in our lives — a man we both still loved for some reason — ma and I were probably the only two people on the planet who understood this particular punchline.
Ma continued. “B.J., yo’ daddy laughed and said hell naw, ’cause he scared of needles, and I was like, ‘Oh, thank God! There’s somethin’ out there you won’t try!’”
I snorted, laughing into the receiver, and could hear momma’s big belly laughs echoing back at me. I knew it was bad form to riff on dad’s ongoing losing battle with addiction, but fate had been unkind to us all, and sometimes it’s better to laugh to keep from crying.
Besides, ma sounded like ma again. Moments like these — when she seemed to reenter our shared reality and stay a while — were rare and wonderful gifts. I had no idea how long she would remain in that moment with me, free and lucid. When it got this good, I’d always hoped she’d stay with me forever.
She never did.
She reminded me of snow; either beautifully fleeting or a blizzard overstaying her welcome; always arriving never in perfect amounts. I always think of her when she vanishes.
As a teen, no adult took me seriously when I told them mom was checking our home phone for taps from the CIA. Or that every color in the spectrum contained a hidden coded nefarious meaning from the illuminati to catch her slipping. Or that she believed Oprah Winfrey — Oprah Winfrey! — paid someone to break into our apartment — in the projects, mind you — to cut her hair while she slept, only to leave without stealing anything and locking the door behind them.
Looking back, I can see why everyone slapped their knees and patted my head upon hearing stuff like this. Our reality had become stranger than fiction. Everyone thought I was creative and funny, but not a single person took my cry for help seriously. I had to figure it out for myself.
When momma crept into my room after midnight and tried to stab me in the chest for buying the wrong toilet paper earlier that day, that was the last time I slept under her roof. I was sixteen years old. For the next few months, I slept in school, came home, and stayed up all night, keeping watch over myself and my brother, Phil. When she snapped again a few months later, trying to drown my brother in the bathtub, that was the last straw.
We slipped out the window after she went to bed. My girlfriend Madalyn talked her mother into letting us stay the night at their apartment. Trauma-bonded since we met in sixth grade, Madalyn and I always had each other’s back like that. We ducked momma the following day, ultimately making our way to Lela Mae’s (our paternal grandma) house that evening.
I graduated high school by the skin of my teeth, married Madalyn, and joined the Navy, in that order. I know now that trauma bonds make a poor foundation for building a life together, but back then, surviving was all we knew.
It seemed like everything leading up to the adult I became was one frenzied, Jenga-scaffolding act of desperation after another until this moment; this phone call. There we were, mother and son, with two-thousand miles and a decade or so between us, trying to reenter our maternal bond through our common dialect; a familiar, playful shorthand vernacular doing the heavy-lifting.
“So how are you and …” Ma’s voice trailed off. “What’s that girl name, again?”
“Madalyn, ma,” I said dryly.
“Pssssh!” momma dismissed my derisive tone. “Don’t make fun of your momma for forgetting stuff! You gone get old too — if you’re lucky, that is!”
“You always forget her name, ma,” I countered, teasingly. “I don’t think you wanna remember it.”
Not that I blame you.
“Whatever, boy,” momma scoffed, smacking her lips. “How y’all doin’ anyway?”
“We fine, I guess,” I said, shrugging.
“Y’all fine, huh,” ma repeated in a gentle, mocking tone. “You guess?”
“We good,” I said through pinched lips.
“Mmm-hmm,” momma said, letting me twist in the uncomfortable silence a moment.
“B.J., you really gone lie to your mamma like that?”
“Na, ma. It’s just …” I sighed. “Nevermind.”
“She better not be cheating on you!” ma shouted. “Nuh-uh! I’ll come out there and fuck her up!”
“Oh, come on, ma!” I scolded again.
Ma doubled down. “I’m serious! Is she, though?”
“Nah, nothing like that… but…” my voice trailed off as I searched my brain for the right words.
“But what, baby?”
“I dunno, ma. I kinda wish she was?” There was a long silence. Then came the implicit admission of what I knew to be true but was afraid to say out loud. “It would just make things easier, you know?”
“Oh baby,” ma said, with empathy and without a hint of judgement. “You wanna leave, don’t you? Poor thing! Almost ten years, huh? Y’all lasted longer than I thought you would, but I knew this would happen, mmm-hmm.”
“No you didn’t,” I spat. Okay, maybe there was a whiff of judgement on her part.
“Oh, I’m sorry, baby,” momma said. “I ain’t tryin to start nothin.” I believed her. Besides, if I was being judged by her on this, I supposed it was earned.
“You know you ain’t gotta stay, right?” she asked.
“I know, but I wanna keep my word and all that,” I felt my voice crack, but I kept talking, “but shit — I mean shoot, sorry ma — it’s hard, you know?”
“Yeah, baby,” ma said, her voice sounding like a warm hug. “I know it is.”
“I thought we’d feel that way forever,” I said, sniffing, wiping away a tear. “But I just don’t feel it anymore. I still love her, but-”
Momma finished my sentence. “But you’re not in love with her anymore, are you?”
I paused a moment to compose myself. The tears in my eyes were giving the dying embers of sunset a fishbowl effect.
“I see what it is. Mmm-hmm. And no disrespect to Madalyn or Maddie or whatever ’cause y’all were good to each other as kids, right? See, y’all two were like Hanzel and Gretel huddled in the haunted forest, right?” Ma spoke rapidly. Her pitch always went higher when she was excited.
“And her momma and your momma took turns being the big bad witch, didn’t we? Mmm-hmm. You ain’t gotta say nothin’, baby. We meant well, but sometimes we didn’t do right, I know. I know. Mmm-hmm. And y’all banded together, but y’all ain’t babes in the woods no more, and now y’all grown now and lookin’ at each other like, ‘This is it? This is the one I’m spendin’ the rest of my life with?’”
My mirrored reflection was now ninety percent silhouetted, the corner of my mouth, arced further down, devolving from scowl to sulk. Ma had perfectly diagnosed the dying embers of my marriage.
“I still love your daddy, you know?” ma said quietly. I sat in silence, absorbing. “Even after all that shit. All the beatings he gave me.
“But after that last time he hit me,” ma continued, her pitch rising again, “something shifted.” I felt the terseness in her tone, and so I waited and kept listening.
“I wish I could take back what I did and just left with you and Phil, you know? You know how he was. It wouldn’t have been too long after he passed out from all them drugs, and he never would’ve noticed.” I heard her sniffling a moment through the handset as she composed herself. “But that’s not what happened, is it? Nuh-uh, and well, I just gotta live with that. I’ll always care about your daddy, but from a long, long, looong-ass distance.”
There was another extended moment of silence as I stared past my reflection out towards the softening, fading sunlight reflected off the incoming marine layer. Madalyn was off work now, and her headlights would be lighting up the driveway soon.
“Maybe you should think about what you’re gonna do,” ma said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“So what you gone do?”
“Well shit, ma! I mean, shoot, ma!” Suddenly flustered, I began to wonder where and how our conversation ended up here. “I dunno, yet!”
Ma laughed. “You grown, baby,” she said. “I think you can cuss in front of me if you want. I won’t fall apart or ground you or disown you or nothin’.”
I laughed. “I just got a lot to think about, ya’ know?”
“I know, baby”, momma said, and it was comforting, knowing that she knew and even now, she was in my corner. This is the momma I missed. The ma I hoped would come back to me and never leave again.
“But if you gonna cheat, make sure not use your home phone.”
“Ma!” I shouted, still reeling from the whiplash.
“Get a phone card and only use outside lines!”
“Ma! Stop!” I said, half yelling, half laughing.
“Oh yeah! Yo mama ain’t no square!” she said, sounding exactly like a square when she said it. “They got those monthly disposable cell phones now too!”
“My God, ma! How do you know about all this?!?”
“And only look for women stuck in the same boat as you,” ma said, continuing with her lesson. “Only go for married and looking girls! Those single girls are a bad risk! They ain’t got nothing to lose by blowing up your life and letting Madalyn, Maddie, or whatever find out!”
“Oh my God, momma can you please stop telling me how to cheat now?”
“Okay baby, but you know how it is,” ma said in her mama-bird cadence. “Right or wrong, momma always on your side. If you’re wanted for murder, momma gonna help you hide the bodies!”
“Thanks, ma,” I laughed. “I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t come to that.”
“One day, you’ll have your own kids,” ma said. “Mmm-hmm. Then you’ll see.”
I groaned. “I hope not. I’m a mess.”
“Mmm!” ma said impatiently. “Boy, you think it’s gonna be like on TV? We’re all messes in real life. Ain’t none of us ready. But when it happen, just do your best!” Then she added softly, “it’s all you can do, baby.”
The sky was purple and twinkling in places, peeking through the clouds. Beneath it, countless headlights streamed to and fro. My bedroom dimmed into a collection of shadows. My facial features in the mirror were reduced to imagination during yet another pause in dialogue. As ma cleared her throat, I waited.
“You know… your momma ain’t always get it right,” she said eventually. “Sometimes I got it way, way wrong. But I did my best, baby, you know?”
“I know you did, momma,” I said, suddenly tasting rusty nickels again.
“And… I could’ve been a better son too…”
“Don’t ever say that dumb shit again, boy!” ma scolded me. “You and Phil were the best boys!”
“Okay ma,” I said, chastened. “My bad.”
My driveway became bathed in unbalanced headlight beams. “Hey ma, Maddie’s home now. I gotta go take care of dinner before she starts trippin’.”
Momma muttered something that sounded vaguely insulting towards Madalyn.
“Ma. Come on, now.”
“Okay, baby, okay,” ma said. “Don’t pay me no attention. Oh, and don’t take so long to talk to me next time, okay?”
“Okay ma. I love you”
“Love you too, baby.”
That was the last time I spoke to ma. She lived for nearly another decade but that was our final real talk, the last time ma was ma to me. It was one of the longest conversations we’d shared in a long time that didn’t disintegrate into her singular madness as I tried to steer her from her insane paranoia about the FBI, the CIA, the illuminati, Oprah hiring people to steal her hair, people on television sending her secret messages, and countless other theories.
Not even two days later, she left an unhinged rant on my answering machine about the government stealing Phil and my princely royal African inheritances (this delusion narrowly predates the Nigerian prince e-mail scam). After that, I gave up on any notion of ever getting momma back permanently. Just like that teenager slipping out the window after dark with my brother in tow, I ran away again. I went back to ducking her calls and talking with her sporadically whenever guilt overcame dread. Sadly, on the rare occasions that we spoke and she did come back to earth, she never stayed with me long.
I should’ve felt lucky to have some semblance of closure from our final real talk, but all I felt was anger and frustration at cosmic fate randomly stealing yet another cherished attachment. But in hindsight, I suppose I didn’t deserve to get her back.
I didn’t cherish my bond with momma enough to fight for it once I got older, stronger, and informed enough to diagnose the damage. I just kept on running. That fact remains a shameful burden that only worsens as age and wisdom allows me to reflect on our lives. I’ll always carry the ever-present guilt of detaching myself and avoiding interaction for as long as possible, even as an adult.
My mother didn’t ask for any of this. I try to remind myself that none of us did. Ma had no one to lean on, so she broke with reality. I had no one, so I ran away. I got so good at running that I guess I never stopped, even now, after all this time.
She was supposed to protect me, but I was supposed to protect her, too.
Barry Dawson Jr. IV ~ 2021
(Note: Some names were changed.)
Other work by Barry:
