Context

On Who is Dangerous And How to Love People Who Could Be.

Photographer: Ken Light

Is My Son Dangerous?

“If you don’t come home right now I’m going to make fucking chaos in this house,” my son shouts from the speaker phone. 

I am trying to get back home but I’m the only parent on duty - David is with his show, Empire Strips Back in NYC - and I have other kids to pick up and shuttle to various places.  I know what he can do. A few days before, he kicked and punched the kitchen door so hard and so many times that he mangled the dry wall around the door frame and it wouldn’t close properly. We will need a contractor to come in and fix it. 

Click. 

He hangs up on me. 

I rush and drive too fast because I’m worried about what he means and what he intends to do. 

He hasn’t been okay.

Raffi struggled last week. His thoughts were disordered. His moods off. It have been because my husband, David, was out of town on business. As I have mentioned in my Instagram posts (@kiminthewest) David is the boundaries and firm borders for all of us. I am the blobbety blob of love, formless and oozing everywhere. Together we make up a tight team. He gives my blobbety blob definition and direction. Context. He does the same for Raffi. He gives him guard rails and boundaries. Raffi listens to him and allows his father to hem him in, keep him safe. 

By the time I get home my kid is calm. 

“‘I’m sorry Mom,” he starts when I come in the door.

 “I don’t know why I said that to you.”

He does this thing where he looks like he is Superman, flying across the sky with his fists out, but instead lands an enveloping and sometimes jarring hug. Even his hugs are aggressive. LOL.

We stay connected like that for a minute.

“I’m proud of you for getting yourself into a good mood again,” I  whisper into his ear during the hug. I’m not just saying that, his ability to see his own moods and be able to stabilize them, has been something we have been working on. We all have; when the kids in the house struggle, it can be a monumental battle for the parents to regulate their moods. How do you stay calm when a kid is accusing of things that never occurred, or is dismantling your bookshelf, books flying across the living room, or is about to throw a punch? I’ve lost my shit more times than I care to admit. We are all getting better at handling our moods.

Other families play scrabble. We manage our moods. LOL.

There was a time not too long ago that he couldn’t regulate his emotions at all. He was all anger and rage and impulsive thoughtless decisions. If you missed it, I wrote about how understanding, recognizing and coping with your own dysregulation can be its own privilege. I want that for him.

“I don’t know why I’m like this.”

I do. If you read me enough you know that he struggles from all the developmental trauma of being in foster care for years because of neglect and hunger, and also being separated from his family of origin, the overdose death of his mom, just a garbage bag of traumas and hurts that have shaped him.  And he carries those in his actions and decisions and his moods and whether he can regulate himself. Puberty is making this more and more of a challenge.

This doesn’t happen daily. It happens minute by minute every day. 

“I need dad,” he says, his face contorting. He cries. I kiss his forehead and hug him until he pulls away. 

We call David and he escapes into his room with the phone. 

I can’t hear them, but I know how this goes. My son will tell him how and why he got mad and David will talk him through, and then end with something that props him up, diverts his attention, makes him feel good. And probably a reminder to be nice to me. 

Sometimes here on substack, someone will pop in (usually on Twitter, which is nearly all about criticizing people these days and leaves me hollow and bored by all the anger) and tell me I shouldn't talk about my sons struggles publicly, as if he exists in glass or that he isn’t connected to the world or something. Like his problems are shame problems and should be hidden away, family secrets. 

But sheltering him, and our family, from the world and the world from him feels like a bad plan. 

The world isn’t built to meet my kid and his brain and I want the world to know him. And how he struggles and how he flourishes and what makes him special. And what it means to have some broken bits so that YOU can be better. So that YOU can be more educated about people who have challenging behaviors, and aggression and sometimes make stupid choices, but who are still good, so so so good, and also maybe not acting in ways that are okay. 

I want you to meet my son with the kindness and empathy he deserves while also knowing what he can do, and that even though we have to teach him to be accountable (what does this mean exactly? What is justice when the perpetrator is a hurt and wounded soul? Could all perpetrators be hurt and wounded souls? And if so, what is justice exactly? I don’t have the answers.) I also want people to have empathy for the things that aren’t his fault, that he is still working on. 

I want him to have context. I want YOU to see him in a framework that YOU can understand.

All of this gets raised with the death of Jordan Neely in a NYC subway. A man asking for food. My son could be Jordan and he could also be Daniel Penny. The one who is disorderly and potentially perceived as dangerous to some people. And the guy with the fight or flight brain who senses danger where there isn't any (not saying this is Daniel Penny’s motivation - I know nothing about Penny - just that it could be my son’s motivation. His brain is always on fight) and tackles someone to the ground thinking he is doing the right thing. 

It could go down with my son either way, I think. 

• I ask myself: How do we have empathy for potentially unsympathetic people? For people who could hurt us?

• And this begets more questions for me: Why do we attribute mental illness with danger just because we, The Well, might not understand it? 

• What is justice when one dude perceived danger where there wasn't and acted on it?

• Why is telling people he is hungry and needing food and water something that provokes people to react with aggression? 

• Why have we created a society where there is no context for people experiencing psychosis and mental disorders? 

• Why is sanity the only way for people to have meaning? 

• Do we throw away the people making the mistakes too? How do we decide who to throw away?

• Are incarceration and/or execution the only way to have justice for people? 

There are, it seems, more questions than answers.

Is My Daughter Dangerous?

I think of my daughter here, too. 

I wrote about her psychosis, psych ward stay and her bipolar diagnosis here. 

When she was walking through our neighborhood wielding a stick and talking nonsense to people, shrieking and screaming at the air, what was her worth? 

My daughter - gorgeous, white and young - probably wouldn’t have been killed for being a threat, as Black men often are, and she probably did not pose the kind of threat a homeless person would, but I thought it. My husband, David and I followed her along the street, her head in a psychotic cloud, and the police pulled up and she banged her hands on the hood of the car, and screamed in their faces. I worried what they would do. 

Would they hurt her? It was a privilege to be there watching it all and not having it happen without context. Jordan Neelys parents couldn’t be there to provide context.

“She is a good girl,” I kept saying. 

Over and over to anyone who was there. 

So they knew. So they would see she belonged to people and was loved and not always psychotic and unhinged and mad. So that she had context. 

“She is a good girl.”

I did not trust they could see her without it. 

What would Jordan Neely’s family have given to be there and provide context for their son, their brother, their friend? 

“He is a good boy, a nice young man,” they might say. 

“He’s just sick. Don’t be afraid.”

We, as a culture, have little value for people in crisis. We call the police on the homeless, step over people sleeping in streets, hope it won’t effect our property values and don’t think about demanding that our government respond to what is obviously a humanitarian crisis right here in our own streets and neighborhoods. 

We leave people without context.

Is Becca Dangerous? 

If you didn’t get a chance before, I’d love for you to read the piece I wrote about Becca. 

She was a friend and also an unhoused, meth-addicted, mentally ill, traumatized homeless trans-woman who was a part of our lives for a couple years when I ran a pantry in our front yard during the pandemic.  Her story is also in my book.

She was killed a couple months ago by a drunk driver in the wee hours of the morning. 

The driver was charged. Later the charges were dropped. Why? 

I think I know: What is the value in spending money on a trial when the victim is a homeless Mexican trans woman, disconnected from her neighborhood and her city? 

Becca had a life without context. I’m sure the DA figured no one would miss her. 

But we did. Our family still talks about her, thinks about her.

Here is a passage from my book, The Meth Lunches, about what Becca wanted for her own life: 

I am so alone,” she tells me, unable to stop hyperventilating.

“I have no one, nothing.”

“Do you have any idea what this feels like to be in this city, and to have absolutely nothing, no one?”

She isn’t asking me. She is asking the universe, the skies. The spring air. The Gods she doesn’t believe in.

“If I die out here, they will just cremate me and no one will ever know I existed,” she says.

“That’s not what I want for my life.”

For all out talk of inclusivity, we have pushed the homeless out of our communities. And the severely mentally ill. They are uninvited interlopers. And because of that they almost by definition have to live outside the law. 

The homeless do not have context.

Here is an example of giving context where there isn’t. The passage is from my book:

Between gulps of air she tells me about how a security guard at a local taco shop flung her bike repair cart into busy, rush-hour-clogged-Maryland-Parkway traffic. Many of her day-to-day possessions are strewn and blowing between cars. The wheels of the cart are mangled, twisted. In pieces.

I grab the keys. I tell her to get in the car.

We are at the taco shop in five minutes.

The guard changes his tune a bit.

“I’m a good person,” he says. “I wasn’t giving her a hard time.”

I’m friendly.

“I get it,” I say. “Help me collect her stuff.”

I am able to offer Becca the privilege of my housed status. Just by showing up in a car and appearing housed, the guard gives me respect that he will not give Becca.

Becca is so angry that I think she might hit him. I make her sit in the front seat like a petulant, grounded teenager. She tries to scream at him through the closed window. But I tell her to be quiet.

“Do not make this worse,” I say in my firm, no-nonsense parenting voice.

Dodging cars, I scour the street for clothing, supplies, anything I can grab.

She is not purely the victim here. She has launched a chemtrail of cusses and epic put-downs at the guard, who is just doing his job. It is unclear who started this.

I load her stuff into the back and peel off.

At home, she lays all the things we’ve collected out on the driveway.

Becca and David spend a half hour picking through everything that is left. They decide the cart is unsalvageable.

This is devastating for Becca. It’s her livelihood.

We have pushed groups of people outside our communities. Forgotten them. And then we wonder why they steal our bikes and break into our houses. When you give people housing inside a community, especially for folks with impoverished or unwell circumstances, you provide context. 

“Oh, he’s okay, he lives down the street. He doesn’t bother anyone.’ That is context.

Everything, even food, is about housing and having context.

What is Danger? 

I realize in the writing of this that exposure to danger makes a difference in how you calculate danger. I have more exposure to it, and frankly more time thinking about it and managing my own moods, so I hope I have more skills to deal with it and more tools to de-escalate. Although brains are funny and who knows what anyone would do in any situation.

If you live in the calm bubble of healthy brains, closed off neighbourhoods, your sense of what is dangerous will be different than mine or someone else’s. My son makes me count the threads of a situation in ways that maybe other parents might not have to. 

If my son can scream “Leave me alone you fucking bitch mother fucker!” at me, as he did today, and then slam the door in my face, after pushing me aside to get into the house, all because his best friend said he would come over and then couldn’t, but then later that same boy lays in my arms - like he did when he was four and had just come to us - and says:  I’m so afraid I will hurt you someday. I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt anyone, Mommy,” how do you deal with this kind of human?

Well, you love them. Right where they are.

You shift your parenting techniques to fit the child, you go two steps forward, one step back. You choose to love: your kid and your family and close friends but also strangers - let’s call it ‘public love’ - your neighbor, humanity, difficult people, unlikeable people, people without context, strangers who are in crisis.

You give other humans context. You show up when you can and say: He is good. He’s having a hard time. But he is so so good. 

So that people know he is anchored to someone.

You hope that people will give your children grace when they are in the world. That they won’t hurt people and people won’t hurt them.

But you just don’t know. 

Because like Jordan Neely’s family, and even Daniel Penny’s family,  just loving them is never enough to protect them. You can do all the right things and still lose them in a subway surrounded by strangers.

My Son’s Thoughts on Who Is Dangerous.

For homeschool, my son and I talked about Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny. 

He had seen some mention of it on Tik Tok and asked me about it. We watched the videos, the news commentators, the youtubers with their takes. I asked him what he thought. 

“How can you kill someone who is so cool? he said, which made me laugh.

The Michael Jackson impersonator thing really resonates with him. 

I ask him if there were any plausible reasons that could explain why Daniel Penny should’ve done what he did?

“Like what if his brain was in fight or flight mode, like yours is and mine is sometimes? I asked. 

“You shouldn’t kill people,” he tells me. 

“Daniel Penny should go to jail for the rest of his life.”

In my son’s heart, he is Jordan. 

Never Daniel. 

I wonder ( and worry) which one the world will see when he is out there by himself. 

____________________

NOTES:

I’d really like to thank all the people who reached out about their struggling loved ones and your stories of healing and thriving. Big love to all the people who have family members they love and who could be inconvenient, difficult, traumatized, unwell, cantankerous, or mean as fuck and are still loved and have been given context even when it isn’t easy to do so.

You all help me. I hope some of this helps you. 

On a lighter note, if you go to Amazon and look up my book, it says that customers who viewed my book also viewed this book which provides lessons on how to cook your own meth. Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha…. This just nearly broke me. I swear my book is not about why you should cook meth. Also, maybe don’t cook meth. :)

Thank you, as always for reading. xo Kim