“Happy Abandonment Day!”

“Take this nigga cuz I don’t want him no more.” The words of my mother, spoken like death and birth. I’m sure they don’t put that on any Hallmark cards. So every mother’s day I tell myself, why should I be ashamed that my mother decided not to stick around. Humanity is complicated. And if happiness in life is finally learning to love yourself, how you get to it is nobody fucking business.

I often have to be brutally honest with my memory. My mother was never a mother. In my fantasy, I want to repaint her innocent and a victim. Yet, I know I have so little to work with since I barely knew her. I don’t remember her being a mean mother. I do remember some disturbing physical attacks mostly provoked by me. I wasn’t a child that should ever be left alone. I have actually burned down people houses. I was a well known fire starter in the neighborhood. I think I made the papers.

The month of May is the national Foster Care month. It is also the month of Mother’s Day. I decided to make it my own personal “Happy Abandonment Day” to be celebrated with a warm bath, liquor, freaky masterbation and Chinese food.

I guess I was one of those kids that wished I didn’t belong to my family or some rich white people would come and adopt me. I guess it was my nappy headed ghetto kid dream.

I was never in foster care. My mother gave me to my father’s mother. I wish I had gone to foster care. I wished I would’ve gotten the option to be adopted. Yet, I had a very extensive large family. I just didn’t want them. I believe growing up in my grandmother’s house was worse than foster care. It was like being thrown to a pack of ghetto vicious wolves. I grew up with thirty five first cousins all male. It was like a juvenile detention center and me being somewhat effeminate, I had to fight to not constantly get rapped. They always worry about the girls, but effeminate boys are the real prey.

Abandonment is abandonment. It feels no different if you were giving to an orphanage or alcoholic grandmother. Over 500,000 children in the U.S. currently reside in some form of foster care. Black children make up approximately two thirds of the foster care population and remain in care longer. I remember growing up and my grandmother would always yell at us kids who she now had to take care of cuz the parents either got themselves incarcerated, were on drugs or dead that when we turn 18 we were no longer her problem. I feel as if that’s all foster care and orphans dilemma. Yet, I ran away from my grandmother’s house at age 15. I beat her to the punch.

I think the worse part of being a foster care kid is the emancipation. It’s when the kid turns 18 and in the eyes of the law an adult. It’s when that kid graduates high school and no longer has a support system. I always wondered how my grandmother was going to handle my 18th birthday. I wonder if she would wake me with a shotgun and have me pack all my shit and get the fuck out. It would be like, “Happy Homeless Day black ass nigga.”

You are emancipated to the big crazy scary world. The world I still remember when my mother abandon me when I was eight years old. I didn’t think she was for real. I remember being in that hotel and thinking to myself that she had to come back. She had to come back. And a day later she still hadn’t come back. Funny, twenty years later at some therapist's office, I was asked when I knew she wasn’t coming back. It hadn’t settled after all that time that she was never coming back. I never saw her again. I never wanted to. I never loved her. It makes me feel evil. I didn’t. I barely knew her. My father died when I was five years old and I feel as if I knew him better than my own mother.. Yet her abandonment was an extremely harsh blow to my ego. I didn’t realize I was so co-dependent on a woman I barely saw. It was like, how dare you bitch, I should have left you. Probably a reason why I usually break up with people before I give them a chance to walk out on me.

At 33 years after surviving the mental institution, somehow never been incarcerated, still healthy, and not dead, I no longer give a fuck about the mandatory greeting card bullshit. I celebrate me. Yes, I may have a functional alcohol problem, chronic unemployment, trust issues and an inability to be faithful, but I am still here. So mama, happy fucking abandonment day. I am still here.