Inheriting a teenager
I've got this younger brother. His name is Colby and he was born when I was 14. He was the only child of my dad's second marriage (although my dad fathered a few other offspring during that time, he did not do so with his wife). Colby had 3 half-sisters and 3 half-brothers and we all called him "Baby" well into his teens.
When Colby was six my Stepmom, Brenda, finally found out about the other women my dad had impregnated during their marriage. I told her about all of them one night because she was about to take him back even though he had beat her up pretty bad. He was in jail, but she wasn't going to press charges. I knew she had left her first husband, another abusive bastard, the instant that he cheated on her, and rightly predicted that she would do the same thing with my father. She moved into a little rental house about three blocks away from my dad's house so that Colby and her two older sons could still attend the same school and wouldn't have to leave all their friends. This was a terribly idea, though, because my dad was close enough to walk over whenever he was drunk, break into the house, and beat her up right in front of her three sons. After a couple of years, though, his house was foreclosed on and he had to move across town to a cheap apartment. She and my dad remained married but legally separated so that she could keep his military health insurance.
When Colby was 15 his mom had two brain aneurysms burst on the same night. By that time both of Brenda's older sons were out of the house, one in college and the other in the Army. Colby called her boyfriend (yet another asshole, but one who at least didn't hit her) who drove her to the crappy base hospital where she could get free care, but neither their equipment nor their doctors were advanced enough to figure out the cause of her severe head pain, so she was put into an ambulance and transported to the nearest hospital in town, which happened to have a world class brain surgeon on staff.
Brenda "coded" in the ambulance, which is a medical euphemism that means she died for a little while. They brought her back to life, but she was severely altered from that moment.
By the time she had brain surgery a significant amount of tissue had already been damaged. She would never again be able to use her right arm and she had to drag her right foot when she walked. Her vocabulary gradually expanded to about 20 words, but some days she could only use one word and everyone had to guess what she wanted to say until they figured it out. She couldn't work any more, of course, so she went to live with her mother up north, who along with her four sisters helped take care of her on a daily basis. She was only 44 and the rest of her life was in the hands of other people.
Colby went to live with his oldest brother, Mike, who was about to graduate college and start medical school. Mike did his best, but couldn't provide a whole lot of supervision. He worked full-time as a respiratory therapist in order to pay for school, and between word, classes, and studying it was all he could do to keep the kid in school and make him pull his up his grades. He wasn't able to keep him from drinking and doing drugs with his friends. The new car Brenda bought shortly before her aneurysms burst had gone to Colby and he took full advantage of the freedom this afforded him.
Less than a month after turning 18 Colby was awarded a full scholarship to USF. To celebrate he got drunk at a friend's house and on the way home tried to avoid a police checkpoint by driving over some residential lawns and crashing into a hedge. He went to jail. He was fined thousands of dollars and many hours of community service, but at least he didn't lose his scholarship. The DUI was in Atlanta, where Mike was attending medical school, and the state of Georgia did not share this information with the state of Florida. Mike paid the fines, and paid for the laywer, too, and Colby had to get a job to pay him back.
In the fall Colby started college in Tampa. His other brother Nick had just gotten out of the Army and was also going to school in Tampa so Colby moved in with him. He joined a fraternity and started doing cocaine. By the spring he was working at a bar with plenty of access to booze, dealing cocaine so that he had enough money to buy cocaine, and of course, failing all of his classes. When Nick objected to this bullshit, Colby moved in with the owner of the bar where he worked. His mother's car disappeared. Different members of the family finally started talking to each other about all of the money he was asking for on an increasingly frequent basis and figured out that he was putting all of that right up his nose.
His brothers tried to get him to go to rehab and/or join the military, but he would not, so they cut off all contact. When I heard about the severity of the situation I drove the two hours to Tampa and found him living with some random people after getting in a fight with his boss/roommate and losing everything he owned. He didn't have so much as a change of clothes and was more than happy to get the hell out of Tampa and come live with me in Orlando.
He lived with us for about a week, sleeping about 20 hours a day despite my older daughter's constant attempts to wake him. I made an appointment for him to talk to a therapist who specialized in drug and alcohol abuse, but by the weekend he had arranged to ride up to Fort Walton Beach with some of his childhood friends who were attending UCF in Orlando and were about to go on summer break. He lived with our friends for a week, then moved in with our father, who was living in a halfway decent apartment for once and working a regular job.
A couple of weeks after that we found out Brenda was dying. She had lung cancer. Caused, like the burst aneurysms, by three decades of chain smoking. My dad paid for Colby to fly up to Pennsylvania and Colby stayed there until she passed, sleeping right next to his mother as he had done most of his childhood. Still trying to protect her from things he wasn't strong enough to fight.
Brenda refused all treatment for her cancer. She didn't have a lot of words, but she was able to clearly say that she wanted to die. After four years of living with her mother, I could understand why.
The less said about her horrible fucking mother the better. Let's just say that I'm pretty sure the reason Brenda sought out mean and abusive men was because that's how she was used to being treated at home. I hate that I did not take care of her myself. I could have tried harder to make that happen. It wasn't impossible. I could have done it. But I didn't. Maybe if she had lived with me and my kids she would have wanted to give herself a chance to live.
Anyway. Moving on.
I had last seen my Stepmom that April at my sister's wedding. She seemed so happy and her health was so much better than it had been at my other sister's wedding a couple of years earlier. She scolded me about getting married before I had any more kids and I promised her that I would. In May she was diagnosed with cancer. One weekend in June my sisters and I all flew up to Pennsylvania to visit her. She died a couple of hours after we arrived.
We stayed until the funeral and it was an ugly weekend. After a couple of beers one night Mike and Nick jumped on Colby and gave him a brutal beating in front of the entire extended family, with only my sisters pulling them off of him (I had already gone to bed). When it was all over and Colby lay on the back porch trying to recover his grandmother came out and kicked him in the head. Later she said she figured he had started the fight.
After the funeral Colby went back to Tampa and stayed with one of his friends for the rest of the summer, though Brian and I invited him to stay with us. He had a girlfriend and she paid for everything he needed until school started. Amazingly, his scholarship was still active, though he was considered 'on probation' until his grades improved.
Things started to go well for him. He got a job at UPS, not delivering packages but entering bills into a database at night after class. With the money from his scholarship, which paid for tuition and books as well as a couple of thousand for living expenses, he was able to get into a decent student apartment. He got all A's in his classes that semester.
Then his girlfriend dumped him and the next thing I knew she was calling me in the middle of the night from the hospital after he overdosed on cocaine.
Fucking great.
That was just in time for Christmas break, and one of his aunts who had recently moved to south Florida went and got him (the ex-girlfriend called her first) and he stayed with her for the holiday. Things seemed okay when he went back to school in January, and when the scholarship money for the next semester came in he said that he was going to pay the rent for his student apartment and buy a cheap car. He bought the car, a halfway decent 82 sedan, but instead of paying the rent for several months in advance, he must have done something else, because he wrote me a frantic e-mail last week asking if I could loan him $300 to pay his rent on Friday before he got evicted.
Personally, I don't have $300. I am a stay-home mom and I haven't worked in well over a year. Certainly I could have gotten it from my new husband, but I was wary of the timing. Friday happened to be Colby's 20th birthday and I was worried that he was really asking me to fund some celebratory coke binge.
I was in Fort Walton Beach over the weekend and my dad gave me $100 to send Colby for a birthday present, which I did.
But I talked to the kid on the phone yesterday and he was terribly despondent. He said he didn't do anything at all of his birthday, just say home and worried about how to pay the rent. He knows he blew his money all by himself and now he doesn't know what to do because he doesn't make very much at UPS.
Personally, I've pissed away a great quantity of money on stupid shit over the years and there have been quite a few occasions, especially in that awful year after I broke up with Daryl and my brother Scott killed himself and I started dating Brian who was a pain-in-the-ass to catch, and I never really had to live with the full consequences of my actions because I had a mom who loved me too much to let that happen. She bailed me out time and time again, even on the weeks when I paid her back on Friday only to ask for another loan on Monday and sometimes I only asked for $20 so I could go to a nightclub but I told her I needed it for lunch money and I am not a perfect person but I'm not horrible either and I grew up and got better.
As established earlier, Colby doesn't have a mom any more. He's only got his sisters and brothers. The other 4 won't even consider sending him rent money because they don't want to contribute to his drug problems, because we can't tell if he still has those problems or not.
I am actually planning to drive to Tampa this afternoon and find out what the fuck is going on and if I have to pay his rent then I will fucking do it, and fill his refrigerator up with food, too, because his next move is going to be moving back to Fort Walton Beach, aka LOSERVILLE to live with his childhood friends who have already dropped out of college and are encouraging him to do the same.
And I need to get that kid on some fucking antidepressants and make him take a drug test and... and... I don't really know what the hell I'm doing. I don't know anything about drugs. I just know he's my brother, he's only 20, and his mistakes remind me so much of all the mistakes I made and the way my Mom helped me through all of them.
Colby was really close to his mom. Really, really close. She was a good woman, a really good friend to me, and a great mom. If nothing else, I have to something for her, finally.
When Colby was six my Stepmom, Brenda, finally found out about the other women my dad had impregnated during their marriage. I told her about all of them one night because she was about to take him back even though he had beat her up pretty bad. He was in jail, but she wasn't going to press charges. I knew she had left her first husband, another abusive bastard, the instant that he cheated on her, and rightly predicted that she would do the same thing with my father. She moved into a little rental house about three blocks away from my dad's house so that Colby and her two older sons could still attend the same school and wouldn't have to leave all their friends. This was a terribly idea, though, because my dad was close enough to walk over whenever he was drunk, break into the house, and beat her up right in front of her three sons. After a couple of years, though, his house was foreclosed on and he had to move across town to a cheap apartment. She and my dad remained married but legally separated so that she could keep his military health insurance.
When Colby was 15 his mom had two brain aneurysms burst on the same night. By that time both of Brenda's older sons were out of the house, one in college and the other in the Army. Colby called her boyfriend (yet another asshole, but one who at least didn't hit her) who drove her to the crappy base hospital where she could get free care, but neither their equipment nor their doctors were advanced enough to figure out the cause of her severe head pain, so she was put into an ambulance and transported to the nearest hospital in town, which happened to have a world class brain surgeon on staff.
Brenda "coded" in the ambulance, which is a medical euphemism that means she died for a little while. They brought her back to life, but she was severely altered from that moment.
By the time she had brain surgery a significant amount of tissue had already been damaged. She would never again be able to use her right arm and she had to drag her right foot when she walked. Her vocabulary gradually expanded to about 20 words, but some days she could only use one word and everyone had to guess what she wanted to say until they figured it out. She couldn't work any more, of course, so she went to live with her mother up north, who along with her four sisters helped take care of her on a daily basis. She was only 44 and the rest of her life was in the hands of other people.
Colby went to live with his oldest brother, Mike, who was about to graduate college and start medical school. Mike did his best, but couldn't provide a whole lot of supervision. He worked full-time as a respiratory therapist in order to pay for school, and between word, classes, and studying it was all he could do to keep the kid in school and make him pull his up his grades. He wasn't able to keep him from drinking and doing drugs with his friends. The new car Brenda bought shortly before her aneurysms burst had gone to Colby and he took full advantage of the freedom this afforded him.
Less than a month after turning 18 Colby was awarded a full scholarship to USF. To celebrate he got drunk at a friend's house and on the way home tried to avoid a police checkpoint by driving over some residential lawns and crashing into a hedge. He went to jail. He was fined thousands of dollars and many hours of community service, but at least he didn't lose his scholarship. The DUI was in Atlanta, where Mike was attending medical school, and the state of Georgia did not share this information with the state of Florida. Mike paid the fines, and paid for the laywer, too, and Colby had to get a job to pay him back.
In the fall Colby started college in Tampa. His other brother Nick had just gotten out of the Army and was also going to school in Tampa so Colby moved in with him. He joined a fraternity and started doing cocaine. By the spring he was working at a bar with plenty of access to booze, dealing cocaine so that he had enough money to buy cocaine, and of course, failing all of his classes. When Nick objected to this bullshit, Colby moved in with the owner of the bar where he worked. His mother's car disappeared. Different members of the family finally started talking to each other about all of the money he was asking for on an increasingly frequent basis and figured out that he was putting all of that right up his nose.
His brothers tried to get him to go to rehab and/or join the military, but he would not, so they cut off all contact. When I heard about the severity of the situation I drove the two hours to Tampa and found him living with some random people after getting in a fight with his boss/roommate and losing everything he owned. He didn't have so much as a change of clothes and was more than happy to get the hell out of Tampa and come live with me in Orlando.
He lived with us for about a week, sleeping about 20 hours a day despite my older daughter's constant attempts to wake him. I made an appointment for him to talk to a therapist who specialized in drug and alcohol abuse, but by the weekend he had arranged to ride up to Fort Walton Beach with some of his childhood friends who were attending UCF in Orlando and were about to go on summer break. He lived with our friends for a week, then moved in with our father, who was living in a halfway decent apartment for once and working a regular job.
A couple of weeks after that we found out Brenda was dying. She had lung cancer. Caused, like the burst aneurysms, by three decades of chain smoking. My dad paid for Colby to fly up to Pennsylvania and Colby stayed there until she passed, sleeping right next to his mother as he had done most of his childhood. Still trying to protect her from things he wasn't strong enough to fight.
Brenda refused all treatment for her cancer. She didn't have a lot of words, but she was able to clearly say that she wanted to die. After four years of living with her mother, I could understand why.
The less said about her horrible fucking mother the better. Let's just say that I'm pretty sure the reason Brenda sought out mean and abusive men was because that's how she was used to being treated at home. I hate that I did not take care of her myself. I could have tried harder to make that happen. It wasn't impossible. I could have done it. But I didn't. Maybe if she had lived with me and my kids she would have wanted to give herself a chance to live.
Anyway. Moving on.
I had last seen my Stepmom that April at my sister's wedding. She seemed so happy and her health was so much better than it had been at my other sister's wedding a couple of years earlier. She scolded me about getting married before I had any more kids and I promised her that I would. In May she was diagnosed with cancer. One weekend in June my sisters and I all flew up to Pennsylvania to visit her. She died a couple of hours after we arrived.
We stayed until the funeral and it was an ugly weekend. After a couple of beers one night Mike and Nick jumped on Colby and gave him a brutal beating in front of the entire extended family, with only my sisters pulling them off of him (I had already gone to bed). When it was all over and Colby lay on the back porch trying to recover his grandmother came out and kicked him in the head. Later she said she figured he had started the fight.
After the funeral Colby went back to Tampa and stayed with one of his friends for the rest of the summer, though Brian and I invited him to stay with us. He had a girlfriend and she paid for everything he needed until school started. Amazingly, his scholarship was still active, though he was considered 'on probation' until his grades improved.
Things started to go well for him. He got a job at UPS, not delivering packages but entering bills into a database at night after class. With the money from his scholarship, which paid for tuition and books as well as a couple of thousand for living expenses, he was able to get into a decent student apartment. He got all A's in his classes that semester.
Then his girlfriend dumped him and the next thing I knew she was calling me in the middle of the night from the hospital after he overdosed on cocaine.
Fucking great.
That was just in time for Christmas break, and one of his aunts who had recently moved to south Florida went and got him (the ex-girlfriend called her first) and he stayed with her for the holiday. Things seemed okay when he went back to school in January, and when the scholarship money for the next semester came in he said that he was going to pay the rent for his student apartment and buy a cheap car. He bought the car, a halfway decent 82 sedan, but instead of paying the rent for several months in advance, he must have done something else, because he wrote me a frantic e-mail last week asking if I could loan him $300 to pay his rent on Friday before he got evicted.
Personally, I don't have $300. I am a stay-home mom and I haven't worked in well over a year. Certainly I could have gotten it from my new husband, but I was wary of the timing. Friday happened to be Colby's 20th birthday and I was worried that he was really asking me to fund some celebratory coke binge.
I was in Fort Walton Beach over the weekend and my dad gave me $100 to send Colby for a birthday present, which I did.
But I talked to the kid on the phone yesterday and he was terribly despondent. He said he didn't do anything at all of his birthday, just say home and worried about how to pay the rent. He knows he blew his money all by himself and now he doesn't know what to do because he doesn't make very much at UPS.
Personally, I've pissed away a great quantity of money on stupid shit over the years and there have been quite a few occasions, especially in that awful year after I broke up with Daryl and my brother Scott killed himself and I started dating Brian who was a pain-in-the-ass to catch, and I never really had to live with the full consequences of my actions because I had a mom who loved me too much to let that happen. She bailed me out time and time again, even on the weeks when I paid her back on Friday only to ask for another loan on Monday and sometimes I only asked for $20 so I could go to a nightclub but I told her I needed it for lunch money and I am not a perfect person but I'm not horrible either and I grew up and got better.
As established earlier, Colby doesn't have a mom any more. He's only got his sisters and brothers. The other 4 won't even consider sending him rent money because they don't want to contribute to his drug problems, because we can't tell if he still has those problems or not.
I am actually planning to drive to Tampa this afternoon and find out what the fuck is going on and if I have to pay his rent then I will fucking do it, and fill his refrigerator up with food, too, because his next move is going to be moving back to Fort Walton Beach, aka LOSERVILLE to live with his childhood friends who have already dropped out of college and are encouraging him to do the same.
And I need to get that kid on some fucking antidepressants and make him take a drug test and... and... I don't really know what the hell I'm doing. I don't know anything about drugs. I just know he's my brother, he's only 20, and his mistakes remind me so much of all the mistakes I made and the way my Mom helped me through all of them.
Colby was really close to his mom. Really, really close. She was a good woman, a really good friend to me, and a great mom. If nothing else, I have to something for her, finally.