From Pillar To Post

CONTENT WARNING: Dark humor and references to violence and racial discrimination may distress some readers.

Mom often used this phrase - from pillar to post - when describing her troubled feelings for children who were continually uprooted and thrown wherever the adults in their lives decided to land their feet. She'd say, "Those poor children, thrown pillar to post!" This phrase was especially applied when Mom erupted in angry tirades about her sister and her sister's five children, and the conditions they lived in under my uncle's heavy and abusive hand. 

When I was very little (I'd just started Kindergarten), my mom told me we had to visit my aunt and cousins and turn on their water. Mom gave me very strict instructions that I wasn't allowed to run around the property, that I had to stay very close to her. I obeyed, she wasn't one to play around with warnings or instructions. When we arrived, my step-dad pulled a long-iron water meter key from the trunk of the car and sprinted across the street to the house. My mom grabbed my hand tightly before following him, and exclaimed, "Jee-zus Christ!" Half the porch was gone, there were no porch steps, no porch roof, gaping black rectangles where windows once closed, and a roof that sagged on one side. My uncle had moved my aunt and their children into an abandoned and dilapidated old mansion off of Franklin Avenue. They were squatters. I'm not sure how long they lived there, but by the time I was in first grade, my aunt and her family had moved into a habitable half-double in the south-end of Columbus. Of course, they'd move again, and again, and again....

And so would we. As for moving, I'm not sure why my mother wasn't as troubled for her own children as she was for her sister's. In fact, the maternal side of my family was quite nomadic and since I resided with my mother, I lived the life of a nomad child alongside my siblings and maternal cousins. We never quite settled in anywhere, never rooted. None of us. Poverty, abuse, and every level of codependency and dysfunction among the adults in the family left us kids emotionally wind-whipped and unsettled. We were thrown wherever, from pillar to post.  

I'm astonished by how easy it was then for families to frequently change residence and without social concern, particularly families with minor children. Did anyone care to inquire as to why our family moved every few months and dragged all of us kids around? Nope. Or, how easy it was then for our parents to find a place to rent despite their eviction histories? Fast forward to the present and no one's identity or character is exempt from criminal, official, and social scrutiny. It's difficult to disguise our identity or to hide our past. Tech developers cracked the safe to our coveted privacy when they introduced us to social media platforms, where we've gorged our egos and have broadcasted our every shit and shower to the world for the past two decades. Conversely, we now spend billions of dollars per year monitoring our identities to detect fraud and foil thieves. We no longer have the freedom of movement that we once had decades before. Now, we're saddled with security checks for every transaction and multiple authentication procedures to protect our social and financial viability. Back in 1970-something, there was none of this convoluted identity and privacy business. It was too complicated for landlords to check a potential renter's credit score or income, and the only way to determine if someone had a previous eviction or criminal record was to visit the county clerk's office and scroll through page after page of dockets on microfiche. It took legwork to investigate a potential renter's credibility and nobody had time for that shit. Instead, landlords employed a highly fallacious, yet simpler, way to determine a renter's integrity: racial discrimination. We weren't Black and we didn't speak Spanish. It was apparent we were excellent tenants. 

Even more astonishing, the very social institutions that state and federal authorities established to track and report child welfare were often negligent in their over-site of the children they were charged to protect. For example, the State of Ohio passed the Bing Act in 1921, which required children to attend school until the age of eighteen, and restricted those under the age of sixteen from working in various industries to thwart child labor. Progressive reformers believed that children could forge a better lot in life as adults if they weren't exploited and had a basic education. They were right. But, how do you track children who don't attend school? Truancy laws have been in effect since compulsory education was legislated across the United States, but the act of truancy required a child to be absent from school without parental knowledge. A simple handwritten note or telephone call to the school is how our parents escaped accountability and child abuse flew under the government's administrative radar. There was no official inquiry into why my mom moved her family a dozen times or why I attended nine different schools from Kindergarten to eighth grade. There was no official inquiry into why my aunt and her family were squatting in an abandoned house or why my cousins didn't attend school while living in Missouri. 

This act of moving, a gerund used to indicate a change in one's place or position, has a deceptively benign meaning. This is why we have to create phrases like from pillar to post to better indicate or describe the type of moving. The phrase hasn't the anticipation and excitement of wanderlust, which elicits images and feelings of freedom and exploration, but rather a state of being violently tossed or upended with no space or time to articulate images or process feelings. For my cousins, their father was a sadistic and impulsive man whose sporadic income fed his fetishes and ego rather than his wife and children. He was a conman and vagrant who incessantly chased Lady Luck. As for my mother and us children, moving was indicative of an erratic change in our family dynamics and income - Mom was either getting married or getting divorced. She had a capricious nature and little tolerance for boredom or daily doldrums and couldn't stay put for long. But, she was our center of gravity and the only constant in our lives, and we were her appendages, powerless against her force of movement. When she was disrupted, we children were disrupted. And, she was disrupted frequently. 

In the spring of 1984, I walked into our apartment on Racine Avenue, after running all day with my friends, to discover my mother packing up the kitchen.  

"Are we moving?" I asked. There was accusation in my tone and I was pissed. 

"You need to go upstairs and start packing your room," she directed. I'd never given my mom crap for moving, I was cooperative, and I helped her where I could. But this time? No. We had moved three times over the past year, we hadn't lived in that apartment for six months, and the school year was nearly over.

"Why are we moving? I don't want to move!" 

Mom laid her cigarette in the ashtray and said, "Angela, I'm not arguing with you. Get your ass upstairs and pack your room."

"This is bullshit!" I hollered.

"That's enough..." she warned, stepping toward me.

"I don't need to live with you," I said. "I'll just live with my dad!" Like a flash of lighting, Mom slapped my face with such force that she spun my head and knocked me off balance. She had never slapped me and I was so stunned by the ferocity of the act I couldn't even cry. 

"How dare you!" she screamed at me. "You don't know what the fuck your talking about! Go pack your fucking room!"

I did as she said. 

Years later, in one of Mom's more reflective moments, she apologized to me for uprooting us kids and moving us all over Hell and Creation. I told her there was no need to apologize, she did what she had to do. 

"Maybe I could have done less of what I had to do. Surely, moving all the time affected you kids," she said. I assured her it hadn't, I was fine, my brothers were fine, we all were fine. People move. 

None of us were fine. I wasn't fine.

We were the feral offspring of stunted, maladjusted adults who created and perpetuated within us children this psychological mindfuck of ceaseless survival. We were subject to our parents' whims and wills, little seeds thrown to the winds but never able to land and root. We were misplaced, continually battered by their sharp and reckless movements. Simply, the notion of belonging, permanence, and safety didn't resonate or exist for us. Our parents were too lost in the psychological shit parade of their own childhood traumas to care much about the future psychological shit parade they were nurturing in us. There was no one who would save us children - no relative, no neighbor, no government, no god.

And so, we often moved from pillar to post - thrown wherever the adults in our lives decided to land their feet.