Conquering Chaos (9 page)

Just think about how we made our decision. We put our life under a microscope and
shined a light on every single way it fell short. And our conclusion was that our
situation wasn’t acceptable for our child. We didn’t mean that as an attack on our
parents, but it’s obvious how it could bring up some really complicated and difficult
emotions. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the kind of situation that can trigger an
addict. So during this whole thing, my mom’s drinking got worse and worse. That just
intensified the conflict and caused even more of a rift, which made it impossible
to work things out. At the same time, it reinforced the reasons we chose adoption
in the first place.

I have sympathy for everything that my mom went through. It’s not a mystery to me
why she wasn’t the perfect person, or the perfect parent. The fact is that no matter
what her flaws are, she raised me with a ton of love and we were best friends until
this came between us. I was devastated not to have her support. Never in a million
years did I think she’d turn her back on me when I needed her most. But that’s what
happened. I think both my pregnancy and my decision to get an adoption pushed her
over the edge and back into the bottle. And that’s when we went from being good friends
to fighting all the time. By the time we were on TV, that’s basically what people
saw.

Really, all the conflict stemmed back to the fact that I was trying to break the cycle.
When I got pregnant, I was repeating something that had happened for previous generations
in my family. My grandma was a young mom, and her life was chaos. And then my mom
was a young mom, and her life was chaos. And then I became a young mom, but I stomped
on the cycle.

When I chose adoption, I was going against all of their decisions. I was coming right
out and saying, “I’m not going to do what you did. I want to do better.” I didn’t
do it to declare war on them or judge them. But they could tell I was putting space
between my life and theirs, and they didn’t like it.

It’s not easy to break the cycle.

Tyler:

What amazed me was the way my dad could look me in the eye and lecture me about “manning
up” and “taking responsibility for your child.” Just take a minute to think about
the memories I’ve shared about my dad, and let that soak in.

My decision to place my child for adoption wasn’t about laziness or cowardice. It
wasn’t about turning my back on my responsibilities. It was about loving that child
and doing the right thing. I wanted to parent that baby. Catelynn wanted to parent
that baby. But no sane person could look at Catelynn’s and my situation, look at the
wonderful adult couples who’d been approved for adoption, and say, “Oh, that baby
is definitely better off in the trailer with the broke high school kids.” Give me
a break.

The problem was that this was a major difference in values between me and Catelynn,
and my dad and her mom. Remember, when Cate and I wrote out the pros and cons of parenting
this baby, the one thing on the pro side was “living with biological parents.” For
us, that one reason was obliterated by all the cons. But to my dad and Cate’s mom,
it was the exact opposite. In their eyes, it didn’t matter how many cons piled up:
“You don’t give away your blood.”

“You don’t give away your blood. You never give away your blood.” I heard that over
and over from my dad. My dad, who’d never been around. My dad, who’d been in jail
for most of his life. My dad, who chose crack cocaine over his family and did it over
and over and over again.

“You don’t give away your blood,” he’d boom at me. “I don’t care what you have to
do. I don’t care how worried you are about money. I’d go door to door begging for
food if I had to. I’d sleep in my car before I’d give up my kid.”

“You’d subject your kid to that life?” I said. It was so hypocritical I couldn’t even
believe it. “Just because
you
don’t agree with adoption? What about the kid? What part of that has anything to
do with being a father and taking care of your child?”

“I don’t care,” he said. “
You never give away your blood
.”

When I couldn’t take it anymore, I called him out. I told him, “You did give up your
kid. You gave me up when you chose drugs and crime and jail over me. If you think
I’m taking parenting advice from a crackhead, you’re insane. You know what, dad? Whatever
advice you live by, I’m pretty sure I should do the opposite.”

No, it’s not easy to break the cycle. If it was, the world would be very different.
But the more these bad influences tried to talk us into doing what they would do,
the more we believed in our decision. Their opposition made us stronger. It told us
we were doing the right thing.

Catelynn:

Did I want to be a mom? Yes. More than anything in the entire world, I wanted to be
a wife and a mom. But my dream was to take care of my family. And that takes more
than love. Love was never what was missing. I had endless love for the child inside
of me, just like my mom had endless love for me. But love didn’t save me from the
instability I hated so much growing up. If I parented my baby, I would shower her
with love every single day. But how could I protect her from the things I’d seen?

I’d never experienced stability in my entire life. I’d moved more than ten times.
I’d been attacked by crackheads. I’d been surrounded by drug deals and violence and
hard times for as long as I could remember. And yes, there was love and happiness
mixed up in all that, and parents who did the best they could. But all I had to do
was think back over the last couple of years of my life to know I wanted better for
my daughter.

Just look at what had happened with my mom’s crackhead boyfriend, the one who scammed
his way back into the family after he attacked me. If our lives had been more stable
and secure, we wouldn’t have gotten stuck moving to Detroit with him. But thanks to
the way things were, my mom got sucked into a bad situation, and so did her kids.

Living in that neighborhood in Detroit was like being stuck in an episode of Cops.
There were drug deals going on everywhere you looked. There were gunshots at night.
Needless to say, there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to go to high school there.
My mom didn’t want me going, either. Detroit public schools are not the place to be,
and definitely not for me. I was tough, but I was still just a small-town white girl
from the trailer park. I knew I wouldn’t last five minutes. The only kids in the neighborhood
I made friends with ended up scaring the shit out of me. There was a house full of
teenagers two doors down from us, and I started to hang out with the girls. But one
day when I went over there, one of their older brothers was there with a bunch of
his friends, smoking a blunt in the bedroom. Everything was fine at first, but then
all of a sudden they turned on the TV and put on this porno video of five guys gangbanging
a girl. Before I knew what was happening, they all jumped on me and started pretending
they were doing it. I was completely scared out of my mind. They acted like it was
a joke, but I got this vibe in my feet and my stomach that told me to get out of there
as fast as I could and never come back.

That was when I said, “Screw this, I’m going back to Marine City.” I had a couple
of friends there I knew I could stay with, so I packed my suitcase and told my mom
I was leaving. She didn’t argue with me. Of course she didn’t want us there. And I
didn’t want her there, either! It was devastating for both of us. I wanted her to
leave Detroit, leave that guy, get her own place and be normal again. But I knew she’d
gotten trapped. She didn’t have any money, she didn’t have a car, she didn’t have
a job somewhere else. How was she going to leave? What was she going to do, couch-surf
with me? She had nowhere to go, and she couldn’t just pick up my little brother and
go be homeless.

Tyler:

Cate and I had been together for three years when this was all going down. When she
left Detroit, she came to my place first. My mom always had an open-door policy when
our friends needed a safe place to stay. She’s always taken care of my sister’s friends
when their parents kicked them out or whatever. But she has rules, and for Cate, the
rule was that Cate could stay as long as she was going to school. Unfortunately, the
school wouldn’t let her enroll herself in the tenth grade without her mom there. Well,
her mom was in Detroit without a car. So Cate didn’t get to go to school. To this
day that makes me furious. What’s a kid in Cate’s situation supposed to do when things
go crazy at home?

So Cate and I had to lie to my mom and pretend she was going to school every day.
She’d get up with me, leave the house like she was going to class, and come back to
the house when my mom had left for work. Eventually, my mom found out. That was when
she said, “Tyler, I can’t do this. I have to call someone.” She called up Cate’s grandma
in Florida, and Cate’s grandma was like, “Hell, no. I’m not having my granddaughter
bouncing around from couch to couch.” So she called up Cate’s mom and had custody
temporarily signed over so that she could bring Cate down to stay with her in Florida
until things had stabilized.

It all happened fast. I woke up one day and went to school like normal, and when I
got home she was gone. There was a note on the counter that said, “I found out I was
leaving and it was too hard to say goodbye. I love you so much.” I was devastated.
I bawled my eyes out for hours. She wrote to my mom, too, to thank her for everything
she’d done, and when I got her on the phone we both cried. I wasn’t mad at her, but
I was mad. Three years together, and we were torn apart because these adults didn’t
have their shit together. First I was pissed at my mom, and then I was really mad
at Cate’s mom. I was like, “God, why would you let your daughter go to Florida?” Cate
was left with no place to go just because her mom was with some stupid asshole in
Detroit.

Catelynn:

I was in Florida for eight months and it was an extremely hard time. My grandparents
are amazing, and they took great care of me. But it was a drastic change, and it all
happened because my home life was messed up and out of control. There was nothing
I could do about it. I was very angry, and very depressed. Not having anywhere to
go or a stable place to live was devastating. I remember at that time in my life,
I smoked marijuana as often as I possibly could. It was the only way I could think
of to deal with my feelings and anxiety. If I wasn’t high, I was so full of anger
and helplessness I couldn’t stand it. As long as I could find five bucks to get a
joint, I didn’t have to think about anything that was going on or what a nightmare
my life had turned into.

Meanwhile, back in Detroit, my mom’s boyfriend kicked up his crack addiction. The
final straw was when he started pissing off the neighborhood drug dealers. One day
my mom, my brother and her boyfriend were upstairs when someone knocked on the door.
He went down to answer, and when my mom glanced out the window, she saw five guys
standing outside on the street and two more on the porch. It was one of those old
houses with a refurbished attic for the upstairs bedrooms, and there was a grate in
the floor where you could see down into the living room. So she looked down through
the grate as her boyfriend answered the door and let in one of the men outside, a
guy he knew.

Her boyfriend always kept a baseball bat behind the door, just in case. This guy who
came in grabbed the bat and smacked Dave in the head. As my mom watched, this guy
got her boyfriend on his knees and held a gun to his head, saying “Give me the money
you owe me, or I’ll kill you right now.” My mom screamed out that she was calling
the cops. And this guy just shook his head and told her boyfriend, “I don’t care about
you, your woman, or your kids. I’ll kill you right now.”

Finally her boyfriend convinced the guy he’d get him his money, and the men left.
That was it. My mom called my grandma and said, “I’m getting out of here.” She moved
back to her mom’s house in Marine City. Their relationship wasn’t good, but finally
there was just no choice. After that, my mom found out that her boyfriend owed those
guys something like forty-thousand dollars. He’s still in Detroit now, living with
two women and three kids.

When I finished the school year, my grandparents wanted me to stay in Florida and
graduate there. They offered to get me a car if I got good grades, and everything.
But I was young, and I just wanted to be home. I know that they knew it would be better
for me to stay with them, but I could never understand why I wasn’t able to go home.
I didn’t care that my mom was staying with her mom. I wanted my family, my friends,
and Tyler. So I took off like a rocket as soon as I could.

My poor grandma. She tried to get me to go on birth control in Florida. I said, “No,
thanks. Birth control would make me fat.” She told me, “Pregnancy makes you fat, too.”
I laughed it off. And four or five months after I got back to Michigan, I was pregnant.

Tyler:

Fast forward a few months, and here are my dad and Cate’s mom trying to talk us into
parenting the baby. With all that upheaval fresh in our minds. With Cate’s mom just
barely out of it and moved into a new trailer of her own. With my dad fresh out of
prison. With the two of them drinking all night in the kitchen. Oh, and getting married.

And there we were, watching this whole thing unfold with a child growing inside of
Catelynn. A child who didn’t ask for any of this. A child we already loved enough
to want the very best for.

It was so hard to be sixteen, scared, half-blinded by emotions, and hearing constantly
from our parents that we were making a huge mistake and ruining our lives. We wanted
their guidance. We wanted their advice and their support. It was hard as hell to have
them condemn our decision.