Calm in all the Chaos

Ha ha, if you read through my blogs, even just a bit, you can see the passion I have. I like to do things so that they mean something to me. I want to use this post to reflect a bit on a slap dash picture of the kind of childhood I had and how when I think about it, it explains a lot about who I've become and how my values and ethics play out in my daily life.

As an adult now, I feel lucky, or rather quite proud, that I have been able to do the things I've done and continue to do so. I'll also be 30 in less than 2 years and to have so many stories accumulated before then is quite exciting. But I'll try and stick to my childhood upbringing in this post.

Growing up, I had many parents. My mom was of course always there when I really needed her, but like my grandma mentioned, my mother is quite good at letting her kids see the world for themselves, and she most definitely knows when to dump us somewhere and let our survival skills kick. I cannot count the amount of times my mother has dropped me off somewhere in a place she at the very least semi trusted and said "see you later." This makes it sound like she neglects us or something, but this is the complete opposite. See, for my mother, having kids that can survive without her is the meaning of being a good parent. And while most people will agree with that and say that's such a great idea as they applaud and not do it themselves, my mom puts that idea into practice, big time.

There was the moving to Juarez in second grade when my mom was trying to help my stepdad get his papers to work in the states. The having to wake up at 4 in the morning to cross the bridge to get to school in time. We used a family member's address in El Paso as it would have technically been illegal for us to use our Mexican address, or rather I would not have been able to go to that school. Despite all the movement and inconsistency in my home life, my mom made sure I always went to the same elementary school. This is probably why I still love school so much and relate to the "bad kids" so well. I know that for some, school can very much be an escape, a sort of way to forget your home problems and focus on things you want to learn, maybe. The focus on making sure students feel comfortable enough to want to learn drives me as a teacher. Period.

Then there's the many houses I moved back and forth from with my mom. She was a "single" mother at the time, because although she was getting serious with my stepdad, he still could not live in the U.S. legally speaking. My mom didn't want him to just live in the U.S. with us illegally though, because if he got deported or something, all bets were off and we'd have to move to Mexico likely permanently. Wow, that would have changed my life in ways I can't even imagine.

Moving back and forth taught me how to adapt. It also taught me how to choose my words wisely. So did being out and about. I grew up surrounded by cholos in gangs, by drugs I didn't even know where there, and by all sorts of poor people problems that some rich people like to look at in pity and say "if they just had more money, everything would be better." Kids have a wonderful way of finding hope and optimism in "bleak" situations though. That's what we did, because my friends and I would laugh and smile, I did that a lot at school. We all knew to an extent that there were some things you weren't supposed to talk about, like some of us lived in Mexico but kept our mouths shut. I remember once when I got a referral, my friend and I kind of freaked out because the principal told us to call our parents. But our phone numbers were Mexican. So we called our relatives in El Paso instead, who weren't home thankfully, and we sweat beads on the inside. Having to do things as such taught me how to keep an excellent poker face no matter what. Always being teacher's pet too ensured that when shit hit the fan, I always knew how to cover my tracks and not let anyone know I was masterminding the whole shit scheme, especially not to those who I knew would take the blame. Because they'd overthrow the brains, me, and I couldn't have that ha ha.

We used to have this little mailbox in our classroom one year. There were these 2 students who were "dating" as much as fourth graders do. So we would notice (or I would) that he always wrote her letters and put them in the mailbox. One day after school, because my friend and I would stay later when nobody was there, we told the janitor we had forgot our homework. We said it was due tomorrow and if he could please open the door for us to grab it really quick. He was hesitant, but then said okay be quick and watched us as we went into the class. I went to my desk and I grabbed a sheet of paper or a notebook (I forget), and then on the way out I said "oh I need to blow my nose." I grabbed a tissue from the tissue box that just happened to be next to the mailbox. I've become an expert at noticing all the detail in my peripheral vision, so as I watched the janitor without him noticing, I slipped my hand in the box and grabbed the letter at the same time, making it all look like I was just getting a tissue. Mission complete. We thanked him for letting us in, pretending like he was such a great help and then we went outside to open the letter. It was a picture he had drawn of a rose that was really pretty and said something about love blah blah blah. So I said we should leave it on the step where we all lined up to go to class in the morning so that everyone could see it the next day. We put sand and maybe a rock over it, and the next day, the whole class saw it. Nobody had any idea as to how the letter had got there. I was good, and my other friend was good at keeping his mouth shut too. Nobody ever found out. That's usually how these things went. I would be satisfied just with the knowing that I got away with it, I never felt like I had to go and tell someone in order for me to feel accomplished. That's probably why I rarely got caught.

All of this ability was a mix of learned and natural skill I suppose. Growing up with my grandma on my dad's side taught me an immense amount of attention to detail. For her, nothing was ever good enough, nothing was ever clean enough, and nothing was ever organized enough. She didn't rule with an iron fist with me because I wasn't always at her house, but she taught me how to keep quiet and observe first before you attempted to get away with anything. I had to learn how to be really sneaky around her if I wanted to pull one of my stunts. She unknowingly helped me build a skill I would use to steal food, money, and break things, all while being able to shift the blame onto others. My family still talks about how amazing it was that I got away with half the stuff I did. I would stump whole groups of adults and not get caught. If I did get caught though, which was VERY rare, I would pay the price with my mother. She knew how my mind worked and knew exactly how to punish me to make me reform myself. I was good, but she was and probably always will be, better. I didn't plot much when my mom was around. I never had to, she was usually really fun to be around anyway.

There was also the fact of moving around so much and always being out and about that taught me how to observe before acting. I learned at a very early age that you can't always walk into any social group and treat them all the same as you would any other. I developed many masks, and I learned how to adapt to my immediate social situation very fast. This was even more true when my mom wasn't around. I knew that if I wanted things to be pleasant, I had to adapt. And growing up with lots of Mexicans meant I always had hoards of people around me, and social pressure was something we sort of just lived with. Everything you do will impact someone else, and this was perhaps a value ingrained in me from a very early age and one I still carry with me to a large extent. Over the years, this has taught me how to be an individual in collective society. How to keep the peace without becoming a robot, how to maintain your own beliefs without feeling threatening to others. I had years of practice in this field.

I was also not your typical teenager. By 13 I already had my first "work experience" as I started volunteering at the zoo. That's where I met my high school best friend and had lots of good times. A large portion of my teenage years were spent hanging out with animals and my friend, dicking around in the public portable. Sometimes if we really didn't want to work, we would go around to watch the Christmas lights, which really meant we went to the prairie dog cave to talk about teenage things, and sometimes even played makeout games. Making out with girls and being told I was good at it really drove the point home that I might be gay for real. (Duh!) The zoo was also one of those stable escapes from home I knew I could count on to have fun, keep me safe, and actually learn something. The dicking around was only part of what we did, the other times we actually were quite useful. We even got to see an Ibex give birth and then watch over the calf for a while in the back. We knew the zookeepers, and I look back on that experience as one that taught me a ton about our intrinsic connection to everything else. Animals were just like us in more ways than I had ever known. It was cool.

Drugs. Another big thing growing up. Drugs were mainly the realm of the cholos and gang members, but it did frequently leak into the kids who wanted to be cool as well. I remember being a bit shocked but then moving on when I caught one of my friends smoking right outside her house. I was like, "ok. Don't get that smell on me, and can we play video games now?" Drugs were always there, I knew they were not so good for you, and I never really had the urge to do them. I can thank a large part of that to my father. Mr. drunk growing up. That man has likely done a ton of shit under the sun, and he was never that shy about telling his young son. I realized that drugs have the potential to turn you into a helpless prick, and I didn't want to be like my dad, at that time someone I thought was a loser in a lot of ways, so although the drugs were all around me, I never dabbled or even wanted to. Drug dogs coming to school, even in middle school, was a normal part of life in my book. I never realized how "hood" the places I had grown up in were until much later in life. I always grew up in "bad places" so I never really trusted the opinions of people who said places were bad yet who had never been there. Most of the time I would think, they're not bad places, you're just stupid. Like lots of people saying bad things happen in Juarez (which they do), and telling my mom and I constantly that we would be this that and the other if we kept living there. The whole time us blowing it off because we didn't have many options, and to us it was home. The place where I got enchiladas after church, a bomb ass burger down the street, and fresh made tortillas around the corner. We also were next to a park where we would feed the birds, and there were stores I would go buy chips at. Of course there were the obvious drug deals or gang bangers, and those cholos we had to pay to let us drive down their street, the time our car was stolen outside the gym. I cried because I thought they had stolen my homework, that's how much of a nerd I was. I was elated to find out later that I had left my backpack at home. There was even that guy I thought would kidnap me if I didn't get out into the open quick. But it's where my mom was, and for many of my childhood years it was home. There was no lack of scary shady shit that went on around us, but it's sort of fucked up and very interesting psychologically how normal that becomes to seem when you are always exposed. You learn how to be intelligent in your own way, very street smart. In my college years, I met a ton of people who had good grades or were "good students" but put them anywhere "rough" and they would be almost helpless. We don't value street smarts as much as I think we should in our grades and money obsessed societies, where the ideal is a cookie cutter life. I think learning at such a young age that happiness can't be bought allowed me to be more successful when I moved to other countries. I just let myself be immersed without holding judgement in order to better adapt to my surroundings. Growing up with my mom and the way she lives will send red flags and alarms off for a ton of people. Trouble is they all complain about different things, and if my mom listened to any of them, she would never have lived her life the way she wanted to, and by extension neither would have I. So we learned to drain the nay sayers out, you can't keep everyone happy, so we don't exactly ever try. This probably contributes a lot to why we're such a close family. We just let our love flow in it's non traditional non sappy way, and then we do what we want with our lives encouraging each other. There is no "this is me" and "this is you," it's more a "this is who we are" kind of feel.

Perhaps a great outcome of my childhood experiences is that I've learned to find calm in all the chaos. I don't easily buckle under pressure, and I can usually see the light on the other side, and if I can't, then I laugh. Because if it's over, I'm gonna go down laughing and remembering all the cool stuff in my life. Even the shitty shit shit that happened as a kid, I can laugh about all of that now. I can smile because I know it's now all a memory, not a present reality. I don't have to sleep at motels and have the stripper my dad is dating bang on our door in the middle of the night. I don't have to sleep in the car with my mom in front of my school for about an hour. This was because nobody has arrived to open the school yet and we had to come early to miss all the traffic crossing from Mexico that would make my mom late for work. I don't have to answer "I don't know" when someone asks me what time they are coming to pick me up and feel like a bit of a burden on those taking care of me at the moment. I don't have to go to sleep by 9 because I have to wake up at 4am the next day, where my friend's dad would beep the horn for me to come out. I couldn't miss that beep or else I wouldn't make it to school on time. I don't have to stay the night at my dad's drunk ass friend's house and go to school in the same clothes the next day with my hair a mess because my dad kept saying we'll go home soon but we never did. Despite it all, I am glad, even grateful I had these experiences. They have made me far from average, have made my heart bigger and more accepting, allow me to be rather fearless when it comes to making big decisions, and very tactical when things need to get done. I feel things, and I go with them, ready to learn what they can teach me. That's how time and again I'm able to find calm in all the chaos.