Something to Prove

Mike always had something to prove.

I remember an early childhood in southern Idaho with all the layers upon layers upon more layers of clothes and snow gear heading off to school in the winters. I remember going out to shovel the driveway with dad —mostly the two older boys and dad shoveled while I just messed around “helping” here and there— and then coming inside for hot chocolate and a fire going in the fireplace. I remember summers filled with yellow dandelions and making wishes on their white seeds as we blew them into the wind. I remember my room downstairs in the blue house, with the red and white polka-dotted bedding. I remember the play room just off the backyard door and our swing set and slide in the backyard (areas where I spent the majority of my time in that house). I remember chocolate chip cookies that were hot and ready for when kids got home from school.

We were fortunate to have a lot of things many other people in this world do not. We had two parents in the picture who cared and tried their best, and we always had a decent house to live in with enough space for our family’s needs. Our dad was college-educated with a good, stable job. Our mom was a stay-at-home mom. Although our mom very obviously and admittedly did not enjoy cooking and was no gourmet chef, we never wondered when we would next eat or where our next meal would come from. We didn’t qualify for any government aid nor ever needed reduced lunches at school. We ate dinner together as a family in the evenings the majority of the time. We weren’t in a war-torn country nor feared for our lives daily. Our parents were good people who genuinely wanted to do good in this world and teach their children to do good too. We were a church-going people. Every single Sunday. In fact, our entire Sundays were dedicated to the Sabbath, The Lord’s Day. Our home was much more religious than the average. We had what was labeled as “a good home” and a very “nuclear family.” My parents checked all the boxes they had been taught to check. They followed all the rules and did everything right, according to society and our white middle-class conservative community standards. All of this is pertinent because it is not the type of home life most people envision when they think of someone who spent the majority of his adult life in and out of jail cells, and who had spent time living on the streets, homeless, more than once.

However, as lucky as we were to have so many privileges in our life and advantages over others, no one and nothing is ever perfect. Mike was blamed for a lot. He was a rowdy child. He definitely had the hyper-active type of ADHD (I think he may have been the only one of us kids who did, or at least his was the most extreme) and had an especially difficult time with being told to sit still, be reverent, be calm, and not be extremely impulsive. He liked to make people laugh and would rather be the funny guy doing whatever it took to get a few laughs than ever be serious or reverent or sit still anywhere. He also was really and truly not physically capable of staying still for very long. Being as impulsive and hyper as he was, he often was treated as a “bad kid” by adults in his life. He got more punishments, scowled/disappointed faces, talking-tos, spankings, lectures, threats, and raised voices than anyone else in the family, without question. Consequently, he developed a defensiveness to protect himself from feelings of shame; a defensiveness that often got him into even more trouble. The moment he was pointed at and blamed as a child, his defense was deny deny deny. He never admitted to anything, even if everyone literally watched him do it right before their eyes. If he got a spanking he would stubbornly say “that didn’t even hurt.” When it came down to being cornered and desperate (freeze, fight, or flight): he was a fighter. This is how he learned from a young age to protect himself from a world that felt like it was set against him from the beginning. He grew to distrust authority figures very early in his life. Try as he might, the rest of the world seemed to be on a different sheet of music than he was, and he learned early on that trying to play their tune was impossible for him to do. So, he better be ready to put up a fight whenever he was confronted for playing the wrong notes. 

On April 20, 2012 Mike posted lyrics to the song “The Unforgiven” by Metallica on his Facebook page. It expresses his experience and perspective.

“New blood joins this Earth
And quickly he’s subdued
Through constant pained disgrace
The young boy learns their rules

With time the child draws in
This whipping boy done wrong
Deprived of all his thoughts
The young man struggles on and on, he’s known
Ooh, a vow unto his own
That never from this day
His will they’ll take away…

…They dedicate their lives
To running all of his
He tries to please them all
This bitter man he is

Throughout his life the same
He’s battled constantly
This fight he cannot win
A tired man they see no longer cares
The old man then prepares
To die regretfully
That old man here is me

What I’ve felt
What I’ve known
Never shined through in what I’ve shown
Never be
Never see
Won’t see what might have been

What I’ve felt
What I’ve known
Never shined through in what I’ve shown
Never free
Never me
So I dub thee unforgiven…

…You labeled me
I’ll label you
So I dub thee unforgiven

…Never free
Never me
So I dub thee unforgiven”

I contributed to some of the blame aimed in his direction. For a long stretch of time (5 years) I was both the only girl and the youngest. Our parents could be relied on to favor me in any conflict or altercation between Mike and I, which was a frequent occurrence, because Mike was “older and knew better.” I knew this clause and I relied on it. I very quickly figured out how to use it to my advantage whenever I was really fed up with him. He may have barely touched me, but I’d quickly and dramatically call on the authorities to come to my defense: “mooooooooooommmmmm! Mike hit meeeeeee!” Even if I had started it and even if I had egged him on… I knew it didn’t really matter, I would win and he would lose. Every time. I distinctly remember a couple of times pausing in my “distress” to stick out my tongue and smile from behind the protection of mom’s legs while he was getting into trouble. I knew to wait until she wasn’t looking and immediately put my sad face back on when she was. I didn’t understand what it felt like to be on the other side of that until I was no longer the youngest (and boy was that time a wake up call for me when it arrived). For that reason, and many others, I am incredibly grateful that my parents didn’t stop with me. Being the only girl and the youngest would have absolutely turned me into a monster.

Although Mike built up a tough exterior of acting like nothing ever got to him and he didn’t care, he was quite desperate for love and approval, like any other kid. This caused him to seek out approval and validation any way he could. He never set out nor wanted to be a “bad kid.” Expectations that were especially unattainable for him (such as sit still, stop being impulsive, don’t be obnoxious, and listen/focus) set him up to fail over and over again. Each failure brought him shame and self-loathing as well as loathing for whomever he came to see as his enemy (those who were setting the expectations and rules). This resulted in more acting out and fighting as hard as he could… to win, to gain power, to prove himself, to protect himself from feelings of shame, to feel accepted as he was.

This is in no way a claim that our parents are to blame for Mike’s difficulties with substance abuse that landed him in prison multiple times (and consequently cost him his life). It wasn’t just on our parents and they weren’t the only adults in his life that struggled to know how to effectively teach and help him. There is a whole educational and societal system that dictates expectations on how kids should be behaving and acting, as well as how to respond accordingly. Parenting methods of the past focused much more on punishment, and using authority over children to force submission (remember how school teachers used to hit kids with rulers or put them in the “dunce” corner?) rather than teaching, understanding, and helping them. Teachers, adult leaders at church, relatives, everyone… What this does is set adult against child and starts a war, rather than solves a problem. I don’t say any of this because I am some perfect parent, because I am not. When my own children misbehave, my instinct is to react angrily and “lay down the law,” to force their will to bend to mine, too. It is really difficult to break out of old habits and ways of thinking, even if you actually have the knowledge and education to know there are better ways. I imagine it’s pretty impossible when you don’t even have that. 

Besides all of that, I do not believe this issue of adults not knowing how to deal with kids like Mike to be the sole reason or source of his problems anyway. I am not as narrow-sighted as that. This was but one piece of the complicated and many-pieced puzzle that helped shape his life. Had this been the only piece present, I don’t think he would have had the issues he did. Plenty of other kids have had similar difficulties with ADHD to varying degrees and also with adults in their life that didn’t know how to handle it. Many don’t end up with substance abuse problems (although it does increase the likelihood, as studies have found a distinct correlation), so this alone could not be the sole cause of anything. All this part of the puzzle really did was create in him a feeling that anyone in a position of authority was against him and a need to prove himself to anyone and everyone, including peers.

Peers. To explain Mike’s circle of friends, we must first discuss our oldest brother. Anyone who has an older sibling can understand the hold they can have over all of those who come after. Some oldest siblings have more influence over their younger siblings than others. Our oldest brother was everything. He had much more power than I think he has ever really realized or understood. He was almost sacred to us all in those younger years. He was not only the oldest child in the family, but the oldest grandchild as well. Stories of the delight over his arrival as a baby, and how he never got put down because everyone wanted to take turns holding him, circled around most family get-togethers. He didn’t get in nearly as much trouble as Mike because he was a mild-mannered kid rather than explosive, and always apologetic. He was wise and calm, rather than emotional and reactive like both Mike and I were. He was loved and favored in many ways, for his good-naturedness and humility. I grew up knowing him to be the wisest, smartest, calmest, and absolutely the coolest kid in our family. I always wished to be more like him in those ways. I didn’t know until later in life the extent and causes of some of his own demons and struggles going on under the surface. He hid his feelings and struggles well. From my view, he was nothing but the ideal. I never could have dreamed of disagreeing with him or thinking he was wrong about anything. What he said was fact of life, it was law. If he said Nirvana was a cool band, there was no question that it was. If he said a TV show was dumb, well then it just simply was. When he said anything that seemed different than what I had witnessed or believed myself, I changed what I believed because my truth couldn’t possibly be as true as his. I saw the same admiration for him in the eyes of each of my other brothers as well. In some ways, this level of admiration and worship really damaged me, because I wasn’t like him and that made me feel not good enough and rejected for years. I knew he didn’t take much notice of my existence while we were growing up, but as he was 5 years older I didn’t expect him to. He did, however, notice Mike. He let Mike, and only Mike, into his inner circle. He regarded him as his friend, peer, and complete equal, despite the 3 years between them.

Mike once revealed to me that as a child he had tried hard to prove himself and be accepted into our oldest brother’s inner circle and group of friends. As a little kid, he felt lucky to get to tag along with our oldest brother everywhere and be included. Chuckling, he told me that he knew he had to prove himself to be hard enough to hang with a group of cool older kids like them. He had to make sure he wasn’t the annoying little brother who just got in the way. So he made efforts to be the hardest and the angriest, to make up for being the youngest and smallest. He wanted to be taken seriously. I do remember when we were growing up he often reminded me, with great satisfaction, of the fact that all of his friends were several years older than he was. It was a status thing for him. He loved the success of having proven himself worthy of such a cool crowd. With them he was accepted, applauded, included, and validated. What’s more, they understood his pain and anger towards authority figures. He found a place with the disenfranchised misfit youth of the 90s that were fed up with the establishment, and they welcomed him with open arms. They recognized his pain and anger, and he recognized theirs.

Although there were ways Mike often sought my approval and validation as adults, he never seemed to need it as kids. While he spent his time with our oldest brother stealing cigarettes from the local grocery store a few blocks away and smoking them in secret at the park with their friends (and then moving on to weed and other things not too long after), with me he dropped all pretenses of being hard and acting older than he was. With me, he could just be. He had nothing to prove to me as kids. He was already the older, bigger, smarter, cooler sibling. The fact of the matter was, as much as our oldest brother regarded Mike as his peer and his equal (and I know as they grew older and the age gap was not quite as wide, this definitely became true), he wasn’t really. Not at this point at least. At the end of the day, an 8 year old who goes out and steals cigarettes and smokes them at the park with 11 year olds is still just an 8 year old. He still had the maturity level and mentality of a kid who wanted to sometimes just play make-believe and do kid stuff.

We played with Barbies and G.I. Joes or sold lemonade in front of the church building by the busier street, hatched plans to secretly adopt a puppy and then somehow successfully keep it hidden from our parents, or rode bikes to Arctic Circle with enough change in our pockets for ice cream. At one point we planned an escape. We were very serious about our plans to run away, as we packed a couple of suitcases and set up our meeting time and place. We dramatically talked of leaving our mean parents behind and going off to travel and explore the world together. He told me we would be just like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I wonder if the fantasy of leaving everything he had going on felt like a relief to him. No more pressure to try and be accepted and validated by parents and teachers, prove himself to his peers, or anything else. Just have a grand adventure out in the world without anyone telling us what to do anymore. Without any pressure.

He kept me separate. He didn’t like the thought of me being roped into the darker side of life he experienced with our oldest brother. The first time I knew anything about his drug use at all was the time he got expelled from our middle school for having been caught with weed at school on Drug Free/D.A.R.E. Day when I was in 6^th grade and he was in 8th. And even then, he refused to tell me why for months and months. I begged to know but he didn’t want me knowing, and mom and dad certainly weren’t going to talk about it. I remember my head reeling when he finally told me. I was shocked (I was innocent). I didn’t even know just how young he was when he started to smoke cigarettes and then weed —and then get into more serious drugs— until we were both much older. I never knew any of that was going on in those earlier years. 

I was in high school, and our oldest brother was off in Brazil, when Mike finally let me in a lot more to the realities of that side of his life. By that time I knew he had a drug problem, but I didn’t know much more than that. I remember the conversation as we sat in the car together, parked by the side of the road in a neighborhood he was going to drop me off at. I know he didn’t tell me everything, but he told me a lot more than I had previously known about his experiences. With our oldest brother gone, it felt like he needed to let someone else in and be truly seen by someone in his life. He needed to unburden himself. He told me things about our oldest brother that he made me promise not to tell anyone, which I never did. He told me things about their experiences and his feelings about it all. Before this conversation, I only knew the very bare minimum. I know that a part of this separation of his two worlds was in effort to protect me from it, but I also think another part was to preserve the innocence of our relationship, to keep an area of his life untainted. Mike seemed to house his innocence and vulnerability in me.