I Grew Up in a Family of Crack Addicts. So Why Did I Fear Being Taken Away?
Growing up in a household with 15 people – four of whom were strung out on drugs and sobered up only by drinking 40-ounce King Cobras malt liquor and pints of E&J brandy (known around my home as “Erk & Jerk” or “Easy Jesus”) – meant that by the time I was five years old, I was accustomed to the acrid smell of burning crack cocaine. I was used to the unending fear that my cousins and I would be accosted by “The People” and carted off to live separately in dilapidated homes, where we’d be forced to call a stranger “Ma Dear”.
As a child raised in California in the 90s – at the time, one of three states with the largest average population of foster children – I was all too aware that I could become a statistic and join the then-78% of children removed from homes where “at least one parent was a drug abuser”. Though decades have passed since the “Just Say No” anti-drug era, parental substance and drug abuse continues to be a serious concern for the estimated 6m children in the US who live with a parent addicted to drugs or alcohol.
During the daylight, plenty of love flowed through our four-bedroom home, when the addicts among us were asleep, resting up for another round of their crackhead equivalent of The Hunger Games. Still, I learned to hide myself in the back room, hoping that any given day wouldn’t be the day that “The People” in their dull suits and worn briefcases would descend on our home with plans to remove us from everything we’d come to both love and hate.
On days when the aggravation of living with addicts got to be too much, my cousins and I would burrow in the smallest room of the house and convene the Council on Domestic Crack Addiction – our unofficial, one-bedroom, part-hate-part-support group for dealing with drugs, drug addicts, violence, abuse, neglect and the devastation and dysfunction of our family unit.
We were a loosely organized independent think tank that had only three membership requirements:
1) Must be a current or past resident of the home;
2) Must be drug-free;
3) Must hate crack addiction.
During our meetings we would often share how many times our uncle called each of us “bitch” during last night’s drug binge. We discussed which of us won the undeclared award for telling the most believable lie to stave off the cruelty of kids laughing at the drunken crackhead who got on the same public bus line that four of cousins and I rode to school – a lie so believable that it protected us from the “crack baby” jokes and the taunting that followed us to school the following day, when word got out that we were the children who shared a bloodline with individuals who didn’t subscribe to “blood is thicker than water”. (Why would they, when water could be so easily be mixed with crack and injected into the blood stream, making the drug even closer than a mere daughter, son, niece, or nephew?)
Never in our meetings did I share my fear that we’d one day be turned over to the authorities and separated into homes much worse than the dysfunction we’d grown prone to. Instead I imploded from trepidation andmaladaptive daydreaming. If any of my cousins experienced my feelings of angst, they kept it to themselves – or maybe our mutual unspoken fear was the catalyst behind the elaborate suggestions and plans to help us to escape our dysfunction (or force our dysfunction to escape from us) that we shared on one occasion or another that would .
My cousin, a high school freshman at the time of the last meeting where all eight of us would ever be present again in the cramped room, finally suggested – to general consensus – crack addicts were zombies with no purpose except to inflict pain on themselves and others, and should therefore be forbidden to walk among us. The proverbial gavel was banged after we decided that our meetings couldn’t will our addicted relatives and their dysfunction to escape us. We couldn’t banish our addicted family members to a camp where they could no longer kick in doors or leave remnants of makeshift crack pipes made from broken TV antennas and aluminum foil for us to find scattered throughout our home. We’d have to escape them.
And so began the separation that I had feared would one day rear its head.
Two of my cousins were removed from the home and taken first to another city and then to another state by one of our other maternal aunts; another cousin was taken in by a non-relative who became her “guardian angel”; and a fourth cousin became pregnant and fled the city with her boyfriend. But four of us were left behind. We didn’t, as we’d feared, become part of the nearly 30,000 foster care children who by the age of 18 are never adopted by a “forever family”, but we did remain denizens in the dysfunctional four-bedroom: there were no guardian angels, no prince charmings and no escape routes except adulthood for us.
Instead, we watched as one of our aunts fought her addiction and succeeded – taking yet another one of our cousins with her to a home where they’d make a new beginning as mother and daughter and leaving only three of us cousins remaining in the home to navigate an escape plan of our own. We watched as our uncle shuffled from one recovery center to another, each time relapsing and taking comfort in his old vices. We watched, as our bond with one of the youngest of our clan weakened until it was no longer strong enough to protect him from turning to the streets for validation and then finding shelter in the prison system – the only place that welcomed the sinners of the streets with open arms: “The People” came to take him after all.
Drug policies and treatment provisions, coupled with the history ofwidespread failures by Child Protective Services, are a lamentable oversight that have led to many children becoming adults dependent on what they once despised: addiction, chaos, incarceration, neglect and abuse.
I stepped out of the shadows to be seen as more than the consequencesof my childhood. But unfortunately, the last of my cousins remains in our childhood home, wishing on a star for “The People” to offer her some relief; such is the life of a child left behind.