Who Raised Him: From Trauma to Truth

This week, we're gonna follow up last week's topic, Who Raised Him?, and talk about some real shit today.

I'm gonna tell you who raised the one I was dealing with last. Now, of course, I don't know who raised the one you're dealing with, but a lot of these same behavior patterns are common in a lot of dysfunctional families.

Today, we're gonna talk about one of the most complex relationship dynamics between a man and a woman: the relationship between a mother and her son.

And we're gonna talk about what happens when a mama's boy becomes mama's foe.

Welcome back to Relationship Status: Uncomplicated, the podcast. I'm Crystallyzed, your host.

And today, I wanna explore the man-woman dynamic from a different perspective because a lot of times, we lose sight of something very important.

Even though we're adults, and as adults, we are responsible for our choices as well as our actions, we don't get to choose a lot of the things that shape us.

A lot of things happen to us before we even understand who we are. Somebody has already made decisions that put us in a position to become who we become.

And when we're thrown into this thing called life, and now we're responsible for our choices on top of the choices we didn't make...

It's complicated.

And that's what I wanna talk about today.

There's a man I know. I know him well because we were in a relationship for about a year and a half.

And even though it's been about five years since I've seen him, I still think about him sometimes.

I don't continue friendships with my exes because they're an ex for a reason, and he's definitely an ex for a multitude of very good reasons. But that doesn't mean I hate him.

I don't love him. I'm no longer in love with him, but I do have love for him. He's a part of my life, part of my past.

Things weren't all bad between us, but the good certainly did not outweigh the bad.

Nevertheless, there's still that connection there, and every now and then, for whatever reason, he crosses my mind.

I don't have a way to contact him, but I still wonder what's going on with him.

I know he got issues, and I just always hope he's okay and hold out hope that he's gonna improve and try to do something better with himself.

But he's trouble, and he's troubled.

So sometimes when I hear a news story about somebody getting shot or killed or something uptown or around the city, I'll Google his ass like, "Oh, Lord, what he done got into? Did something happen to him? Was that him?"

I don't know why, but I just know that trouble is definitely in the shadows based on the way he lives his life.

But when you have that kind of connection with somebody, when you've shared that much of your life, you still have a little bit of compassion for them.

There's still some ties.

The last time he got up out of prison, he reached out to me.

Now, while he was incarcerated, I had sent him some correspondence trying to encourage him and help him find a better path. That's just me. That's how I am.

So when he got out, he reached out, and I thought he was reaching out because he wanted to talk to me. He wanted to explore some of those options or see about anything positive, or see how I was doing maybe.

But no, of course not.

He's a user. He wanted me to do something to help him.

He needed to get his ID, and because it didn't cost me anything financially, I did help him.

And the holidays came up, my birthday came up, and I never heard from him again.

It was not necessarily painful, but it did kind of sting a little bit, 'cause I'm like, "Damn, ain't nothing changed with this man."

I wasn't disappointed, but I thought maybe the correspondence that I had sent him while he was incarcerated and, you know, us talking that day had some kind of impact.

But apparently not.

Then, on his birthday the following year, he contacts me, sending me these rambling, incoherent texts, clearly under the influence, not sober, out of his mind, asking for money.

And I was not going to send him any money on his birthday talking about he 50.

You 50 years old out here still trying to get a pack of cigarettes and can't get it?

I was so aggravated. I was pissed off, and I'm thinking, "Why are you asking me for anything? Anything."

And then it was cigarettes, and he wanna get something good to eat.

Now, it's 8:00. I know good and well you ain't spent your whole birthday day sober with nothing to eat. You just at the tail end, and you trying to get some more.

But I just, very nicely nastily, let him know, "You need to start getting some help, and you need to start looking out for yourself because at some point, you gotta want something different for yourself.

"You gotta wanna stop begging. You gotta wanna take responsibility for yourself."

That's what I was trying to tell him—not because I'm mad or I hate him, but he needs to do better.

Nobody needs to live their life just out here wandering around waiting to see if you can get something from somebody else before you can get what you want and need.

I just want him to do better.

And then this year, after he got out again, I looked him up. I saw he wasn't back in. You know, I didn't see anything about him. He wasn't dead.

But then he crossed my mind. Not sure why, but I looked him up again, and this time he was incarcerated.

And the charges were different this time.

Burglary—not unexpected.

But it said communicating threats, assault on a female, assault by strangulation, and forcible rape.

And I'm looking at his mugshot, and I can just see something in his face and in his eyes that just sent a chill through me.

And I'm looking, and I'm like, "Damn."

Because I know him.

And it's kinda crazy because I remember sitting in the kitchen with him one day, and we're having a completely normal conversation, just talking regularly.

No problems that day.

He's very intelligent. He's funny, charming, very charismatic. And we're talking, and everything is just good.

I mean, no arguments, no tension, no hostility.

And he looks at me and says, "You look so pretty, it just makes me wanna rape you."

And I didn't say anything in response to that.

I didn't challenge it. I didn't ask him, "What the fuck are you talking about?"

I just sat there.

But I remembered that.

And when I saw those charges, I went back into that moment in the kitchen.

And it made me think again: What kind of mentality does somebody have to have to take that moment that we're in—of affection, attraction, intimacy and translate that into violence?

Because we were in a relationship. We lived together. We had been intimate, of course.

So why wouldn't he be like, "Come on, girl, you look good. Come on in here. Let me... Come here, let me see what..."?

You know, why wouldn't he say it like that?

I just didn't understand how it became, "You look so pretty, it makes me wanna rape you."

That's not normal.

And I'm not saying that to excuse anything about him.

It made me realize that maybe the signs were there long before I understood what I was even hearing or listening to.

You know, and then I'm looking at this mugshot of him, I start thinking about all the stuff he was telling me about his childhood.

Now, he'd been in the system for a very long time—most of his life.

As a juvenile, he was in multiple facilities, detention centers, training schools. He told me about all of it: the group homes, the detention centers, the training schools, psychiatric facilities.

Now, he came to North Carolina from New Jersey when he was about 12 years old.

By the time he was 18, he had already experienced multiple years of instability in his life.

His childhood was not great, and he had been institutionalized.

And by 2020, when I was dealing with him, he had already done six prison stints.

Now, all these years later, he's been back two, three times again.

He's 50 years old.

He's barely had any stable employment, and I used to try to help him get a job.

You should have seen me. I'm like, "Oh, you wanna work? Let's get it."

So I had made a resume for him.

And you know most jobs want 10 years of employment. Most of them do.

So I had typed up his little resume, his cover sheet, got everything set.

The whole resume showed that his employers were various prison camps throughout North Carolina. I had it typed up. We had the addresses on the application just like any other employer.

And he was able to get a job.

So he had the ability to get the job even though he tried to use that felon as an excuse.

Honey, I typed that felony shit up so cute and quick and had his ass with some paperwork.

He didn't have much of an excuse, but it was always one somewhere for something.

But we had got him a job and everything.

Now, he didn't finish high school, but he was very literate, very intelligent.

Told me while he was in prison he done read the whole series of Game of Thrones. I didn't even know that was a book.

He done read all of them.

He done read so much shit, just reading.

It's heartbreaking because he has the potential to be so great.

And then when you look at his past and his experiences, it does give you a heart for him, and it does bring out that compassion.

But it's very sad that at his age, he never got what he needed to be able to move forward and get better.

And when I think about his life, one word and one scenario keeps coming back to me:

Trauma.

Trauma.

Trauma.

Trauma.

But what stands out to me most is his relationship with his mother.

And I'm not gonna sit here and speak badly about his mother, 'cause I never met her.

And I don't wanna sit up here and speak ill of the dead. I don't have anything negative to say about her. I don't know her.

I only know what he told me about his life.

So she died when he was about 25 years old.

So by the time I met him, his mother had been deceased for about 20 years.

And yet, at 45 years old, he's still carrying the pain of that relationship.

And he would tell me that it was his belief that if his mama couldn't love him, can't no woman ever love him.

And it just really was sad.

But then it used to make me angry because he wasn't saying, like, "You don't love me," or, "I ain't never had a girlfriend to love me."

He wasn't saying, "I got issues. Women can't love me because I'm a player," or, "You know, they know I'm full of shit."

He didn't say anything like that.

It wasn't about any woman other than his mother.

His belief in his heart and soul was, "If my mother couldn't love me, nobody can."

And no matter how much love, kindness, encouragement, honesty, or openness I tried to give him, he just couldn't get past that wall.

But that wound did not start with me.

And it was very sad, but then it became a point of contention.

I started getting angry because now you know that I do love you. You're just being stubborn and resistant.

Now, his mother was very young when she had him, and she had experienced a lot of trauma herself.

So from what I understand, she had been sent from North Carolina to New Jersey when she was young.

I'm not sure if she was a teenager at that point or a young girl, but she went from North Carolina to New Jersey.

And he didn't know why.

He never had an understanding as to what the situation was that would cause his mother to leave North Carolina to go to New Jersey.

He never knew why.

But while she was there, she was living with an aunt. I'm not sure if it was the mother or father's side.

But she experienced horrific abuse from this aunt.

And according to what he told me, the abuse was so bad, it was so severe, that his mother tried to kill that aunt.

So after all that, she ended up on the streets.

She had him when she was 15, and by the time she was 18, she had given birth to three children.

He was number two.

The oldest daughter had already died. She died as an infant.

So his mother had just given birth to his younger sister when his father was murdered.

He was only four years old.

But he remembers being around his father.

He remembers being at the pool hall. He said he remembers playing on top of the pool table, rolling the balls.

And he said he remembers the funeral.

He said at the time, of course, he didn't know it was a funeral. He didn't understand what it was.

But he just remembered being around and everybody was crying, and he was just confused.

He was looking around trying to understand why everybody was sad, but nobody explained to him what was happening.

So imagine being four years old, watching everybody around you crying, and nobody tells you what's going on.

Then his mother—she couldn't handle it. She was no longer in his life.

The little sister went to live with the father's family after the father was gone, and he went to live with that same aunt who was abusive to his mother.

And he experienced that same level of traumatic, torturous abuse that was inflicted on his mother by the same woman.

Now, he told me he was a bed wetter, and because of that, they restricted his water.

They wouldn't let him drink.

During the day, certain times, they would cut him off.

So he told me that he would go into the bathroom and cup his hand under the faucet and drink water that way.

So he would sneak water from the bathroom sink.

Years later, grown-ass man, and that's how he would still drink water.

I had this water machine—the big blue five-gallon jugs attached to the machine. Can pump water hot or cold, any temperature you wanted.

And he's drinking out of the sink.

And I'm like, "Why are you drinking out of the sink?"

And he just drank out of the sink like it was nothing.

He eventually told me that the scenario was based on that whole circumstance.

But I realized that's how he learned to survive.

And that's the part people don't think about.

We see adult behavior.

We don't see the childhood circumstances that created that adult behavior.

Like, he was a thief—a burglar, thief.

We see him, he's a thief.

But we don't see that little boy trying to figure out how he was gonna eat on the street.

We see the addict, but we don't see the child who never learned how to regulate their pain.

We see the criminal record, but we don't see the child who gets passed from one place to another, one facility, one institution, without anybody sitting down and helping them understand what the world is going on and what's happening in their life.

And that's important because I'm not saying what he did is okay.

I'm saying that something happened before that behavior became a part of who he was.

Now, as a child, eventually he was living on the streets, and that's where he learned to steal.

But even that story is complicated because he didn't start out stealing.

He tried to work.

He said up in Jersey they would stand outside the grocery stores. Apparently, it was a whole population of children living on the streets.

And they would try to make money by loading people's groceries into their cars.

So when people would push the carts outside, they would grab the cart and put them in the car, and they would get paid for doing that.

So he would stand around the grocery store and make his money and go get him something to eat.

But then he said he found a dog.

So the dog became his companion, and he wanted to take care of the dog.

And now he needed more money because he was trying to feed himself and the little dog.

So that's when he started stealing bicycles and selling them.

He slept outside. He slept in abandoned cars.

And then he told me about waking up one night and finding an old man inside the car with him.

He talked about the experience very briefly, but it was some type of sexual interaction.

He doesn't talk about if it continued beyond that, if it was just an isolated event, but he did tell me he woke up to an old man on him.

So more trauma. Instability. More survival.

And then he went to North Carolina, he went back to Jersey, and eventually he did make his way back to North Carolina.

And then there's another part of his story that really stuck with me.

So I think by the time he went back to New Jersey, or shortly after he went back to New Jersey, his mother had another child.

So at one point, he was back living with his mother and he had a little brother.

And he was taking care of his little brother.

His mom had got him, and he was in a hotel, and she would be gone hustling, doing what she do, and he'd be in the hotel taking care of the baby—changing diapers, making bottles.

And he was only 10 years older than his brother.

So he's 11 and 12 years old, responsible for a child when he was still a child himself.

And at one point, his little brother was calling him Dad.

So think about that—a child being placed in the position of being responsible for another child.

And that's why we have to keep thinking about who somebody really is.

Who raised him?

Because somebody did raise him.

And sometimes it's not mother, father, aunt, uncle, grandmother.

Sometimes it's the streets.

Sometimes it's trauma.

Sometimes it's institutions.

Sometimes it's other children.

Sometimes it's survival.

And that's where I wanna bring this back to us as women.

Now, I don't have children, but I have nieces, I have nephews, I have little cousins that I've babysat and watched and cared for.

And there is something about nurturing that exists in us as women.

Some people activate it. Some people, it never gets activated. They don't live that nurture.

But when you're responsible for a child, that responsibility is real.

And it's not about giving your children fancy clothes and pretty shoes and a nice, beautiful home and a nice car.

It's not about fancy food. They don't need the best games and all the extravagant experiences.

Parenting is not about that.

It's about responsibility.

It's about being there.

It's about teaching and talking and nurturing and loving.

It's about discipline.

It's about boundaries.

It's about helping a child understand the world that they're living in.

And I think sometimes we underestimate how much of a child's adult life is being built while they're still a child.

And I keep thinking about that video that's circulating online of that little boy cussing his mother out.

He is cursing her out. I mean, big words.

But he's young, maybe even 11, 12.

He's calling her all kinds of names, threatening her, ready to fight her. I'm talking about beat her ass.

And everybody's commentary is, "That boy needs his ass whooped."

And I'm sitting there thinking, y'all are looking at this child like he's the only person in the equation.

His mother is standing there recording him.

She's the one that's afraid of her own child.

She's the one that's triggering that kind of reaction in him.

And she's talking to him like she's outside of what's happening.

But she's not outside of it. She's part of the environment.

She's part of the culture that created that attitude and that negativity in his heart and mind and soul.

And if this child is only 11 years old and behaving like that, that didn't start yesterday.

This didn't start when she pulled out that phone.

Something happened before that.

And now, I'm not saying the child shouldn't be disciplined. He definitely needs to be corrected.

But discipline isn't the only thing he needs.

He needs guidance.

He needs some boundaries.

He needs love.

He needs consistency.

He needs to be accountable.

He needs somebody to figure out why he's behaving the way he's behaving, 'cause that's something serious.

But if we think the only thing he needs is punishment—always punishment, whoop his ass, beat his ass—then you're punishing the symptoms, but you're still not addressing the cause.

And then everybody's, "He either needs his ass whooped or he needs Jesus, or he needs both."

And I'm saying, you know, in our community, we've had plenty.

We got plenty Jesus.

Ain't no more Jesus people than Black people.

Ain't no more ass-whooped people than Black people.

We done had our ass whooped.

We done been to church, revival, Sunday school, Bible study.

We got Jesus, and we definitely done been beat on.

And it's not helping.

It's clearly not the answer to our problems.

It's obviously not enough, 'cause if beating children and taking them to church automatically created emotionally healthy, accountable adults, the Black community would be number one.

We'd be a very different society.

We'd be so intact, on point.

So, you know, we have to look at it.

Maybe we do need more than that.

Maybe we need to actually parent, listen, understand, explain, try to interact on a different level than just always fussing, hitting, all that frustration, hostility.

That's not what our children need.

And that brings me to something else too.

A lot of times, boys are not treated as children.

Boys are children too, and we have to stop acting like boys don't need nurturing.

Boys need hugs and kisses.

They need affection.

They need somebody to be able to talk to and open up to.

They need discipline.

They need protection.

Boys need somebody to tell them, "You're a child. You don't have to go through this by yourself. I'm here for you. Come to me if you need anything."

They need that.

Girls need the same thing.

And I'm not talking about gender neutrality. Everybody doesn't have the same everything.

But basically, generally, overall, they need the same thing: they're children.

I'm talking about recognizing the humanity.

A boy is a child just like a girl is a child.

What's good for one is good for the other, and what's harmful to one is harmful to the other.

And this whole, "Boys are icky, girls rule, boys need to be tough. Ah, he'll be all right, he's a boy."

We need to stop that because we're seeing the consequences of those ideas when those children become adults.

And I think sometimes the mother-son relationship swings between two extremes.

You're either babying him, spoiling him, just treating him like a little prince.

He don't have to be responsible for nothing in his world.

He don't have to do nothing for himself.

No type of real-world experiences so he can understand how to be a person that can handle the world and manage their own life.

Or you're throwing them to the wolves.

You're hard on them, harsh with them.

No nurturing, no tenderness, no care.

Just straight boot camp. Just mean and tough.

But there's gotta be a middle ground.

You can love a child and still hold them accountable.

You can nurture a child and still discipline them.

And you can also protect a child without making them helpless and hopeless and pitiful.

You can teach responsibility without having to take away their humanity.

You don't have to humiliate them and beat them down and discourage them.

You know, that's what I'm talking about.

Just being there.

Creating a healthy, functional human.

And I wanna be very clear about something before I close out this message.

I am not making excuses for this man.

I'm not saying what he did is justified in any way.

I'm not saying his trauma gives him or anybody permission to hurt other people, because it doesn't.

What happened to him does not erase what happened to his victim.

Two things can be true, though.

He can have been deeply traumatized as a child, but he can still be responsible for the harm he causes as an adult.

Those things don't cancel each other out.

But I also believe it's tragic when somebody can be so damaged for so long that they become somebody just unrecognizable.

Because when I looked at that mugshot, I don't see the man that I knew.

'Cause I remember him.

He's very intelligent, talented, sings, raps, funny, just—oh my God—comedic.

He's charismatic. Just beautiful. Beautiful.

He could sit down and have an incredible conversation—politics, religion. He could just... just very, very well-rounded.

And I remember somebody who clearly had been carrying demons for a very long time.

And none of that makes what he did okay.

It doesn't make it okay.

It makes it that much more tragic.

And the part that I keep thinking back to and imagining is just that little four-year-old.

Father gone.

Mother there, but she's gone.

And you don't understand why.

You don't have anybody explaining what's happening.

You don't have anybody telling you that you're loved.

Everything around you is hard, cold, mean, cruel, and you learn how to survive.

You learn how to run.

You learn how to duck.

You learn how to dodge.

You learn how to hide.

You learn how to steal.

You learn how to protect yourself.

You learn not to trust people.

You learn that asking for love can get you rejected.

You learn that nobody's there and nobody's coming.

And then you grow up, and everybody looks at the adult that you've become and asks, "What's wrong with you?"

But maybe somebody should have asked him that when he was four.

Maybe somebody should have asked that when he was seven.

Maybe he should have been able to get that understanding of what the problem was when he was 12.

Maybe somebody should have asked it when he was 15 and moving through the system from facility to facility.

Maybe in one of those group homes or detention centers or training camps.

Maybe somebody should have just stopped long enough to ask:

"What happened to you?"

What happened?

Not so he could be excused.

Not so it can erase his responsibility.

But so we can understand what we're looking at and what we're dealing with.

And I think that's where I wanna leave this conversation.

Because sometimes we look at the adult standing in front of us and we ask:

"Who raised him?"

But maybe the deeper question is:

"Who was there when he needed to be raised?"

Who taught him how to love?

Who taught him how to regulate his emotions?

Who taught him that being hurt doesn't mean you get to hurt somebody else?

Who taught him accountability?

Who taught him that vulnerability doesn't make him weak?

Who taught him that he was worthy of love before he ever felt like he had to earn it?

Because children don't raise themselves.

And when the people who are supposed to raise them aren't there—or don't know how to do it properly—something else is always gonna be there to fill in that gap.

Sometimes it's the streets.

Sometimes it's trauma.

Sometimes it's survival.

Sometimes it's institutions.

And sometimes it's other children who are just as lost as they are.

But eventually, that child, as all children do, becomes an adult.

And now we're standing in front of the consequences of everything that happened before we ever even met them.

This in no way is meant to excuse harmful behavior.

It doesn't mean that accountability gets erased.

And it certainly doesn't mean that we ask the people who were harmed to try to understand the person who harmed them before they're allowed to acknowledge their own pain.

They're allowed to acknowledge their pain.

But two things can be true.

Somebody can have been deeply wounded and still be responsible for the wounds they inflict on somebody else.

And that's the most uncomfortable part of this conversation.

And maybe that's why we need to stop asking only:

"What's wrong with him?"

And start asking:

"What happened to him?"

Not to excuse him.

Not to save him.

But just to understand the whole picture.

Because if we really wanna change what happens to adults, we have to be willing to look at what happens to children.

And that brings us right back to where we started:

Who raised him?

Maybe the answer isn't always a person.

It's not always Mom, Dad, Aunt, Uncle, Grandma, Grandpa.

Maybe sometimes that answer is whatever was available when nobody else with nurturing, caring compassion was there.

And if we don't want the next generation raised by trauma, neglect, violence, and survival, then somebody has to be there for them.

Somebody has to teach them.

Somebody has to be there to nurture.

Somebody has to be there to set boundaries.

Somebody has to hold them accountable.

Somebody has to love them enough to tell them the truth.

Because eventually, whatever raises that child is responsible for the adult we meet.

I'm Crystallyzed, and this is Relationship Status: Uncomplicated, the podcast.

Until we meet next week, stay honest, stay accountable, and never be afraid to look deeper.

Emotional responsibility changes relationships.

Let's make relationships uncomplicated.