Chapter Eleven: Bankruptcy

It started a few years ago. New Digimon action figures had just rolled into KB Toys, so I went to check on the bit of birthday cash I stored in my underwear dresser. But all I could find was tighty-whiteys. I could have sworn I had a twenty tucked away in there somewhere. Eh, no matter. I wasn't yet a slave to money, and the only practical value of a dollar was getting two ice cream sandwiches from the lunch line.

I got older and the dollar amounts grew in significance. Nothing too major in terms of dollar figures, though, and still in small enough amounts to notice when there was some missing paper. That curious phenomenon happened a few more times; twenties disappearing when I couldn't remember buying anything. So I decided to ask around.

"Mom, did you borrow any of my money?"

"Yeah, sorry, I took a twenty. I'll get it back to you next Wednesday when I get paid."

Thanks for letting me know ahead of time, I thought to myself. If you really needed a quick spot of cash you could just ask. It's not like I'm in your family and would be glad to help or anything. I wonder, what other things does mommy take without asking? And so the distrust began to linger.

Flash forward to the fall of senior year. I've got Roth IRA retirement dreams. I was formulating a plan to set aside money so I could retire on time, and retire in style. No mall walks for this geezer, I want to be riding in pure Italian luxury. I knew that now was the time to start planning for the future, and in a proverbial blink of an eye I'll be sixty five. And when I'm sixty five I know I'm going to want to live for myself and my family, not for debt, the government, or some corporation.

But I still had forty eight more years to go. And in the meantime my parents, or at least my mom, determined that in my drug-addled state I was incapable of managing my own finances. So they went repo on my ass and confiscated all my cash, thinking I would just squander it all on herb. Because squandering it on the useless material treadmill of Target and Wal-Mart is so much better.

The school year was young and I wasn't in the best position. My parents thought I was on the verge of meltdown. I still had some things to prove, so I let their redistribution of property slide. But I found the spot where my mom tucked away the hundred plus dollars in cash she had nabbed. I checked in every now and then to make sure my nest egg was still waiting for me.

Flash forward again, this time to Thanksgiving '08, and I'm cashing in from my hours at Maggie Moo's. We've got some relatives from Ohio staying with us who want to do the whole tourist thing in DC. I was killing time in my room when my mom came to me with an apparently earnest plea.

"My paycheck might be a little late this week, would I be able to borrow some money to take our relatives into DC?"

"Yeah, how much?"

"Just a hundred."

"Sure, that's fine."

My mom had been keeping me restricted to the house lately and I saw an opportunity to earn a night out.

"Since I'm doing you a favor by lending this money, do you think I could spend the night at ____'s tomorrow night?"

"So you're calling it a favor?" shes says, almost shocked.

"Well, I am lending you money."

"I was just lying about needing to borrow money. I just wanted to see if you were spending all your money."

Did she really expect me to simply make all of my funds her private money well? This is the twenty first century, and with kids liable to sue their parents she's lucky I wasn't even charging interest. And the whole time she was just trying to manipulate things, construct a small web of lies to see where it got her. I was surprised she had revealed her strategy of lying. She was basically holding up a giant sign saying, "Don't believe anything I say anymore." Whatever, that was her mistake, not mine.

Skip to Christmas time. I was worrying about how I was going to pay for college. Apparently the United States was (and still is) in a recession, but my parents still had their jobs. There was no evidence of any scarcity under the Christmas tree this year, with ample presents as usual. Being male, middle class, and white is the shit.

I got an iPod video, not bad, I do listen to a bit of music. On the other hand, I didn't have a car so I wasn't sure an iPod would get too much use. With probable student debt just months ahead, why not get a start on saving a bit? My mom didn't mind the idea of putting away a little cash either, and approved my idea that I could exchange the iPod for cash and tuck the money away. So I went to the Apple store the next day and cashed in. But there was a little hang up.

My mom had bought the iPod with her debit card. So the money from the gift exchange just went back to her debit card balance. When I got home, I told my mom that the money had been restored to her checking account, and that it would be great if she could get that cash to me soon. She said she'd gladly oblige and I would have cash-in-hand shortly.

Predictably, I had no way of ensuring her promise. Plus, no one likes getting constantly hassled about money, so I didn't pressure my mom about the affair for a few days. But a few days later, after the events of Chapter Two, my mom was pissed. Real pissed. She informed me that I wouldn't be seeing any of the money from that iPod exchange. Great.

I understand that I am in no way entitled to any Christmas presents, but to single out a single family member is just disrespectful. I don't raid my mom's bank account because I don't approve of the new purse she got for summer. I wasn't counting on being denied that pretty substantial sum. My frustration escalated when I checked in on the cash my mom had taken earlier in the year and found it missing. Now I was down two pretty large sums of money.

My mom had deprived me of roughly $420 in total. I asked her when I could expect to see this money, if ever. She got very defensive, insisting that I didn't appreciate her enough. Anyways, I wasn't in any position of power so I had no choice but to let it slide.

I don't really count on seeing any of that money. I can't wait to get out of those house and I don't have to worry about the constant potential threat of my mom raiding my funds. Until then I'll just have to be a bit more fiscally conservative.

It may just be wishful thinking, but man it would be nice to get a check from my mom for $420. What sweet subtle revenge that would be.

Chapter Ten: Andrew Crosses the Rubicon

For those of you who don't know, I'm avidly involved in my school's debate team. The topics inevitably discuss some aspect of government policy. To many in the general citizenry, these debates are snoozers, spiritless, and stale. But in this complex world of cerebral chess via argumentation, I am in my element.

Accordingly, I pursued my love for debate to the limits of nerd. Every summer of high school I attended a debate camp so that I might hone my mental quickness, creative jests, and word economy. This past summer it was the Whitman National Debate Institute (WNDI) at the prestigious Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Despite the uncanny name, the WNDI was one of the better camps for high schoolers in the country. Off the bat there was a high pressure to succeed. These people would more than likely be my competition on the national circuit when the time came. I immediately began to size up the competition.

Most of the people there could be described in one phrase: "pseudo intellectual." Although, there were still a fair amount of intelligent, funny, interesting people at the camp who were legitimately interested in humbling acquiring knowledge. The reality is that most debaters there were talkers. Swift talkers who really, really liked to talk about themselves. Especially frustrating were the pretentious hipsters. These 'renegades' of American culture, they liked to assume airs of superiority as they broadcasted idiotic dissertations about Nietzsche, the economics of energy, and the otherwise intellectually stimulating. Their conclusions were most often false, obvious, or unoriginal.

As the first few days of the camp unfolded, I was able to simply sit back and let the others expose their own weaknesses. I was content with staying quiet and absorbing information. There was nothing I liked more than letting others talk circles around themselves, then going in with the scalpel of efficient argumentation and systematically dismantling and discrediting their talking points.

He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious. - Sun Tzu, The Art of War.

As I rapidly gained more confidence in my own debate abilities I was overlooking crucial errors I had made in other sectors of life. I was in for a rude awakening.

One day, going through the usual email rituals an unexpected email from my mom caught my eye. The subject line sent my heart racing.

Where did the “pot” in a white folded piece of paper on top of the freezer downstairs come from?

How could I have been so careless! In those days, just months ago, I was woefully unprepared to handle my mother's powerful convictions. I felt ashamed of my behavior and compelled to acquiesce to my mom's decisions. Things have changed a bit since those days. The following is the rest of that day's email dialogue with my mom.

"i tried it after we got back from lithuania. i didn't like being in that altered state, and i haven't done it since."

Where did you get it?

"someone from work"

How did you smoke it, and with whom? Also, this means you were driving my car with this in your possession from work to home?

"Out of a joint, by myself. It was after Tyler left. And yeah I drove with it."

This cannot be correct because there was not a “joint” in the piece of paper, only loose pot. More important, don’t you know this is illegal and that I can personally have your license pulled. So, to avoid this happening, I want you to tell me truthfully what happened and I promise you it will go no further, not even a mention to dad about this. I am not stupid Andrew. I just want you to be truthful with me.

"I guess I just left the loose pot lying around. The reason there was no joint was because I smoked it. (DUH! -added later) I know it's illegal but I also felt the need to experiment. It wasn't with Tyler, it was one night when ____ and ____ were spending the night. I didn't like it, neither did ____ or _____. I told _____ about it, and before I tried it I talked to _____ about it and she didn't recommend it at all. _____ wasn't very happy and I regret it."

Okay. Well, go and have a good day!

First lesson, honesty fails as often as it succeeds with parents. Second lesson, be more careful. Third lesson, my mom has the ability to go from crazy to seemingly normal in seconds. This could prove tricky to handle.

This is when my mom first started to really getting a footing in terms of controlling my decisions. My mom was now suspicious of these afformentioned friends, despite their spotless grades and disciplinary records. To make matters worse, my mom began to associate potential drug use with my recent break-up, an association that led her to assume that the next logical consequence would be the rest of my life getting flushed down the toilet.

Hell hath no fury like a mother scorned. To my mom, this was her mandate. This is why she was justified in aggressively curbing back my privacy. Her nosiness, her rummaging through my things, her monitoring of my text messages were all there simply to help me. Yes, because I was the one with a substance abuse problem. I could just imagine my mom taking deep relaxing drags of her Marlboro lights between raiding my dressers for evidence of my wrongdoings. Not to mention memories of my alcohol-scented father dispensing family wisdom between sips of beer.

It's better to have loved and lost than to be stuck with some bitch for the rest of your life. -Ken G.

My self-destructive lifestyle was clearly evident in my rock bottom grades and unhealthy friendships. I was obviously letting malicious friends pilot my life and influence my every decision for the worst. My mom saw me as no more than a slave to chemicals.

Well, actually, I had well over a 4.0 at that point, and my most influential friends give great risk-averse advice. But I guess it's easy to confuse the two when you're so bent on reaching a foregone conclusion that it blinds you to anything else.

Chapter Nine: Intermission; or, The Calm Before the Storm

As of now my stories have all taken place in essentially the same time frame: elementary school up to the first few weeks of high school. From the start of high school until this past summer, nothing major happened with my mom. Yet, since this past summer, things have escalated worse than ever before. The following is my account of what happened between the two extremes.

At fourteen years old I was poised to take a swan dive into mediocrity. I didn't see any sort of notable future in front of me. I was untested, intimidated by the growing importance of each passing day. I could throw AP classes and commitment to the dogs for all I cared. I wanted to retain that buoyant and carefree spirit forever. The approaching concerns of maturity and college yielded to present idleness and leisure.

On the humorless side of things, my closest friends were experimenting with harder and harder drugs and I was rapidly falling into the gravitational fringes of their influence. Back then I was content with mild experimentation (at least by my standards) and my friends' behavior profoundly concerned me. These were people who I could identify with intellectually and emotionally, and here they were, with pills and powder, doing the kinds of things that could instantly shatter a child's naivete.

Imagine an alternate Andrew G: age 17, lazy and unmotivated, penniless and eager to attend the prestigious Devry University in the fall of '09. That would have been far out, man. And that's where I was headed. Most people don't realize how easy it is to throw everything away. But the fates had something else in store for me. By virtue of pure chance, my two closest friends were caught with an illegal substance just hours after I had been with them. When my mom learned about my freshly busted friends, she banned me from ever seeing them again. And so at one of the most critical points in my life, circumstance made my decision for me.

I joined the debate team and toned down the malice a bit. Getting away from some of the chaos allowed me to maintain a tenuous respect for my schooling. I was aware that I had no idea about the trouble I could have been getting in to, and mild boredom was a much more appealing prospect than addiction.

By the midpoint of my sophomore year I was taking my academic life pretty seriously. It was then that I became cognizant of the extent of my gifts. I actually wanted to challenge myself, to see how far I could push my potential. Further, I was in place to make consistent runs at the state championships for debate. I was even mustering up some self-confidence after a few failed attempts at kindling some puppy love.

By no means was I some momma's boy during this span. I got into mild trouble now and then, but my parents pride and faith in me were constant. I was a devious one. Practical jokes, drinking, general dickery. We all know boys will be boys.

Junior year was a blur of infatuation and hard work. Luckily, most of the school work came to me easily and freed me up to do other things. One lengthy relationship and a few bouts with depression later, I lusted to bask in best life had to offer. As a new bachelor, I didn't have to worry about pleasing anyone else but myself, and my actions reflected it.

The summer after junior I learned to let it all go. It didn't come all at once. Not even close. Every day became a struggle to find a clear meaning in life. It took some pain and self-respect, but I got there. My attachments to things that didn't matter, my crippling self-hatred, and my irrational social inhibitions crumbled before the emerging new me.

It was this past summer that I re-united with those friends whom I had been banned from those years ago. Our paths had split markedly over these three years. Still, the circle was complete. Believe it or not, despite high risk activities, these friends had averted total disaster. They helped me get in touch with myself. But this time around, I had enough self-control to avoid their 'alternative' lifestyles. I could pick and choose the best advice they had to offer while avoiding the pitfalls of shameless indulgence.

Under this reawakening, I was beating the drums that would soon awaken a sleeping giant. My attempts to celebrate my freedoms and humanity were on a collision course with those antiquated ideas my mom had of me. I was unknowingly playing with fire over a powder keg. As coincidence would have it, this perfect storm of polarized people culminated in what is now present life.

Chapter Eight: The Fundamental Theory of Patty G.

The daughter whines to her father, "You messed up my childhood!" And the father says, "How could I, baby? I wasn't even there."

Although the temptation exists to conceptualize my mother as a terrifying and malicious Minotaur, the reality is that my mom is a human being. She has real feelings, rich years of experience, and her own unique worldview. My mom did not always embody the emotional distance and fear she presently exhibits. Actually, I distinctly remember that I was once incredibly attached to my mother's presence. In the most basic terms, I'm going to explain how we got from point A to points W, T, and F. The following represents my attempt to break down my mother's psychological chronology, from birth to present, with the purpose of better understanding the riddle of my mom's psyche.


Her birth came in 1959. She was born in the epitome of small-town America, Laconia, New Hampshire. She was the product of a hardworking, hard-drinking jackass and a homely Lithuanian-speaking girl. She was the first of four daughters in typical New England working class family. However, I have reason to suspect my mom began suffering from a very early age.

In the words of her best friend, my mother's biological father was the "meanest man [she] ever met." The details are cloudy, but it's obvious that things were bad for my mom from the start. I know her dad liked to hit the bottle, and probably the women as well.The fact that my biological grandfather was out of the house by my mom's tenth birthday does not bode well for the circumstances of her childhood. Neither does my mother's reluctance to reveal details about her family during that time in her life.

I see my mom as blaming herself for her broken home. Parents rarely effectively shield their children from the contagious self-hatred that brews in dysfunctional families. My mom was in the proverbial thick of things as the social delusions of the 1950's reached a boiling point.

School life wasn't much better. My mom attended Catholic school from kindergarten to the start of high school. Anyone with older Catholic relatives knows that those nun's had acquired a ravenous taste for corporal punishment. The nuns would get you when you least expected it, too. My mom once recounted how she lived in such a state of perpetual fear that she once wet her pants in class. That little stunt didn't go over too well with Mother Superior. It cost my mom quite a bit of flesh and dignity at the expense of an extensive paddling. Not just any ordinary paddle either. It was one of those paddles with holes in it, to make the paddling motion more aerodynamic, so you could really put some zest on it.

These first ten years of my mom's life were surely a nefarious nightmare to those of us accustomed to basic respect for human rights and dignity. These days, teacher's who paddle for fun wind up in jail real quick. Further, these ten years passed with the cultural revolutions of the '60s in the ever looming societal background. As my mother went through the motions of poorly disguised emotional abuse, she saw an entire nation's youth rebelling against authority. Yet here she was, confined to strictly enforced norms and expectations.

While the first decade of my mom's life was marked by the presence of a distant, angry, and abusive father figure, the rest of her years had no father figure at all. By the time she reached high school, the flamboyant counter-culture rebellions had subsided and my mom had yet to experience the love of a supporting male figure. My mom entered her most impressionable years without any idea about how a healthy intimate relationship should operate. Like many young women, my mom likely suffered from a low self-esteem. Her odious father was certainly no help either. This seems like a predictable recipe for a potential future of physical and sexual abuse.

But my mom did not follow down any truly dark paths. In fact, she supplemented her fatherly void with attention from boys during high school. Apparently, Patty G. was quite the cutie in her teen years, because she went through boyfriends like toilet paper. Her primary criterion for selecting a boyfriend was how nice his car was. She was a bombastic teen unto herself, and predictably received considerable flak from her mom and step-dad for it.

At 18 she moved to northern Virginia, where she's worked various paralegal and law clerk positions since. She met my father in the early 80's and the two dated and traveled for nearly a decade before they decided to settle down. My father surely saw something in her. And as far as I can remember, my mom was quite normal up until her and my father split up.

So how does all of this culminate in the Patty G. we all know and love today? Well, when my mother and father separated my mom realized that my sister and I would inevitably end up favoring one parent or the other. My mom wanted to be sure that it was her we turned to if it ever came down to choosing between parents. It was this simultaneous awareness and fear that drove her first attempts to manipulate me. My mother began to tell me that my father didn't care about us, that he had new girlfriends, and more important things to do than visit or provide for his kids.

I wouldn't be surprised if my parent's marital issues had drawn distant and painful memories out of repression. As I matured and drugs, sex and alcohol became bigger and bigger blips on the radar, the only guideline my mom had to follow was her own experience. The only lesson she learned was that pain is the best motivator. Fear and suffering were acceptable methods of coercion. You do what your told because your parents are always right.

My mom's signature trait is her compulsive lying. She'll manipulate facts, omit details, or even construct entire webs of lies. Whether she's talking to me, my dad, a friend, or a cop, my mom has a distinct aversion to presenting an objective view. It's because she has a need to control things. She's been making up for the agonizing lack of control she experienced as a child with any means possible. My mom thinks that she knows what's best, not just for me and my sister, but for my father and her friends. So what's the problem in some white lies to get them pointed in the right direction?

Yet the more she tried (and continues to try) to control me, the more it backfired. I saw the fear behind my mom's attempts to attach herself to me. She wanted me to be her precious son forever. The closer she forced us, the more uncomfortable I felt. The more I understood myself, the more I understood my mom's motives. And the less I respected her questionable parenting techniques. I want her to be happy, but she needs to realize that to be truly content she cannot be contingent on other people's lives.

I wonder if when she looks back at painful childhood moments, my mom feels the anger in her parents eyes more heavily than the fear in her little heart. Because she certainly does not seem to identify or sympathize with my side of things. She may remember the pain she felt, but she doesn't see me in that same light. She sees my lifestyle as the harbinger of everything that brought down her family: chaos, mischief, disdain for authority, dishonesty, and distrust.

It's as if she wants me to let her down. She's still looking for something to hate, something that will fix her shattered past. She thinks, somehow, what she's doing now is making up for lost love. But my mom just doesn't have perspective on her actions. My mother has no equitable standard gained from experience. In her misguided struggle to feel loved, everything is expendable. The worst part is I want to help her, but she refuses.