Leaving Cloud 9: The True Story of a Life Resurrected from the Ashes of Poverty, Trauma, and Mental Illness

PROLOGUE

PRESENT DAY

My husband, Rick, is chasing our eighteen-month-old around the staircase in our recently purchased two-story house in the suburbs of Indianapolis. I’m upstairs working but keep hearing incessant bursts of laughter from our son, who squeals in delight every time his dad rounds another corner to surprise him—even though he knows perfectly well that his dad has been there all along.

Rick is also cracking up with every belly laugh Jacob lets out. Baby laughs—aren’t they the quintessential expression of joy? The worst day of your life could be improved by a hearty belly laugh from a baby who doesn’t know any better. A baby the harshness of the world’s edges haven’t yet cornered, for whom everything can be made better with hugs and warm milk—or Puffs cereal and a cartoon on the iPad.

If there were any baby pictures to compare, no doubt people would mistake our son and Rick for twins. The golden-blond hair, the lake-blue eyes, the round grin, the face as friendly and sweet as a baby koala’s. They are both excessively cute, one of those father-son pairs young moms gush over when the two are grocery shopping together or playing at the park.

Jacob is the smiliest of all toddlers, quick to practice his waving skills—a tiny wrist flipping up and down and up and down—and winces away in faux embarrassment when a delighted stranger waves back with a winking reply. He ducks his head into a parental shoulder for a moment before whipping back around to charm his new friends at Walmart or Target. I am biased, of course, but I have a hunch this one rates high on the universal scale of adorableness.

And Rick—Rick is the wonderful costar of our little world. A loving husband, a fantastic father, a good provider, and a lot of fun. If you met him at the park or at church, you would probably never guess that his own start in life was completely different from that of our well-loved, carefully nurtured one. He is determined to ensure Jacob’s childhood is the opposite of his own. By all accounts, my husband should be one of the lost ones, a child of America’s forgotten underbelly, destined to inflict the pain and dysfunction of his upbringing onto the next generation. The generational curse ended with him, though. Only by God’s grace is he breaking that cycle. Only by grace and his own resilience is he the man I’m raising my children with.

Jacob and Rick continue their chasing game for another twenty minutes, racing around on the carpet, sliding back onto the fake hardwood in the kitchen with an occasional pause to cry due to a fall from the travails of learning to walk. I’m thinking to myself, He should take off Jacob’s socks so he won’t slip so easily. I’m also thinking what a miracle it is in so many ways that the scene just one flight of stairs down from me is actually happening.

This simple life of a home, a decent job, a good marriage, and a baby son is not flashy or notable, really. But it’s the luxury of the ordinary that makes this miracle so important to notice, because for people like Rick—and there are many in this world—ordinary is a novel concept. Peace, contentment, a white picket fence—it’s hardly a reality he ever thought would exist for him.

A son he thought he’d never have, a wife whose love he doesn’t think he deserves, a well-paying job that he doesn’t necessarily enjoy but deeply appreciates. The traumatic scenes from an abused and neglected childhood remain stored behind the gates of his memory. They are locked in their own little boxes, each with individual keys that can turn when he least expects it.

The smell of homemade fried chicken, flipping through a rack of used clothing, a sip of Jack Daniel’s—the little things that jog a memory and bring out pain you forgot existed are always out there. There are things he needs to stay away from—like the whiskey. There are things he may never feel fully free from—like his mom while she’s still alive or the nightmares that still shake him awake so often.

But, for the most part, life is good for Rick—for all of us. Ours is the luxury of the ordinary, free from the drama of drunken mothers, soul-crushing depression, or family drama that threatens to tear people apart and is intent on ripping out the stitches of wounds still healing. We don’t have all that. And what we do have is precious to us. We have each other. We have our son. We have our extended families. We have love. And best of all, we have Christ. To us those baby-boy giggles are something to capture forever, bottle up, and hold on to as reminders of the grace, blessing, mercy, and miracles that have enveloped our lives.

Those miracles are not about me much at all—as I am one of the lucky souls born to wonderful parents, growing up with plenty of love and a million more things. But Rick’s life was the opposite of mine. He’s the one who beat the statistics. The one who was supposed to fail. The one whose whole life is a miracle.

All the reports predict that kids like him will end up in prison. They’ll be angry, unhappy alcoholics or addicts—losers. And yet Rick is not any of those things. His story showcases the resilience of the human spirit and the power of Jesus, which can transform our lives if we open our hearts, homes, and minds to His promises.

In the early days of our marriage, when someone used to say or do something offensive to me, Rick would be quick to launch into a tirade of over-the-top defense, calling the accuser a cruel name and relinquishing zero amounts of grace or understanding. These days, that doesn’t happen very often, and for both of us it’s an incredible relief to live in freedom from the tyranny of anger that once controlled him. But the reality is, while growing up, he was never granted grace, nor did he ever have anyone to stand up for him. His mom taught him that people weren’t to be trusted and that anyone who spoke an ill or harshly toned word against you wasn’t worth the dirt under your feet. Anyone driving too close or looking at you the wrong way was equally offensive.

And Rick’s mom constantly referred to people she disliked in awful terms you’d never want spoken in front of a little kid. It was common language in his community. While that kind of talk sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me, it’s pretty normal stuff to a guy who grew up in a drug-filled trailer park. When Rick talked that way in the past, I couldn’t believe I was with someone who would say such things. But talk to someone who grew up in Rick’s neighborhood, and they won’t bat an eye. To them, that’s just how you deal with people.

As a kid, Rick feared change. To him it meant uncertainty. It meant moving to his grandma’s house again—or moving back in with his mom and whoever the father figure of the month was. It meant moving to Colorado or back to Arizona, the two states where he spent most of his early life. It meant never knowing what he would find when the next change occurred. It meant never feeling safe or secure or trusting what anyone said.

Not surprisingly, Rick hasn’t been overly fond of change as an adult either. And having a child was the biggest change of all. It so overwhelmed Rick at first that he wasn’t sure he could handle it. His love was so intense that it scared him into a mental panic at times. His emotions can be like a high-powered electrical wire. When stressed, he’s been prone to act out—dramatically, powerfully—and disrupt other parts of life. And having a newborn in the house is the very definition of stress. Sleep, work, marriage, friendship, family—it was all turned upside down when Jacob was born.

Of course that’s the case for any first child, but for Rick the effect was tenfold. Being a dad was much harder than he expected—especially the emotional and mental aspects. But the knowledge that his own dad walked out on him and his mom couldn’t stay off drugs or alcohol steeled his determination. They may have let him down, but he was going to be the best parent he could be, no excuses.

And he is. In the first year of Jacob’s life, the stress of just plain old living life maxed him out. He couldn’t fathom ever being able to handle more than one child—but things have changed since then.

Rick wants Jacob to have a sibling, and now there’s a baby girl on the way. Rick’s sister was his saving grace growing up. While their relationship has sometimes been tumultuous, she has always been a rock in his life. They shared something terrible together, and though they don’t talk about it much today, it was better survived together than alone.

Like so many other things, the building of this life is actually quite wonderful. It’s not by his own strength that Rick is a great parent to Jacob and will be a great parent to our next baby. It’s the strength of the Lord who has always been by his side. He’s the one who has always urged Rick to continue on, to take the next step, to do the right thing, who has protected him from disaster and rescued him into love.

It wasn’t until Rick opened his heart to God in his midthirties that his hard life began to soften a little. It wasn’t until then that he realized he didn’t have to carry all his burdens alone—in fact, he didn’t have to carry them at all. He’d been carrying the load of everything that had ever happened to him, physically and mentally, on his back for more than three decades. But that changed when he finally met Jesus. Life didn’t get a ton easier, at least not at first, but it did become manageable. There was room for joy, for hope—room to grow and believe that the gaping wounds of his childhood might someday become just fading scars. There was room to believe that he might be able to forgive his mom even if she never changed and find peace in knowing his worth wasn’t determined by the insulting words from the past, the abandonment and neglect from adults in his life.

Nothing happens overnight, of course. It took awhile for all those possibilities to become realities. And the scars are still real and often painful. His first reaction to problems still tends to be defensiveness, but each time it melts away more quickly.

Best of all, Rick is learning to put his painful memories to use in positive ways. There are elements of his past experience that today make him uniquely qualified to help others through tough situations. The things he went through were horrific but there’s always someone else who is going through something similar. There’s always someone down the road who will benefit from knowing someone who can relate.

As for the woman who was responsible for putting Rick through so many years of torment—his mother—we’ve come to understand that she was a tormented soul as well, plagued with an evil she didn’t ask for either. Her love was tangled and misinterpreted, strangled and inappropriate. But in her own way she loved her kids. In between the boozy nights and the drug binges, she had regrets and attempted to do better. She tried hard to keep her children in her care, even if they probably shouldn’t have been.

Sometimes it’s tough to find the fine line between personal responsibility and the ills that plague people beyond their control—issues like addiction and mental illness. It’s a tragic and incredibly frustrating experience to watch someone self-destruct, especially when that destruction involves children.

I admit that it’s often difficult for me to have sympathy for the woman whose actions hurt my husband so much. I have had to pray for understanding and for mercy for her. You’ll meet her in these pages and come to understand how infinitely confused she must have been.

I’m coming to understand that the redemption in Rick’s situation is not a matter of his mother apologizing or feeling bad about her choices. The redemption is God’s healing power and Rick’s ability to be the parent he never had. In a way, it feels like he tries to be both mom and dad to Jacob. He will wake in the middle of the night for a feeding, try to meet Jacob’s every need, going above and beyond what anyone expects. He has lots of opinions about diaper brands, baby foods, rules and particulars, things you might not expect from a new dad. Sometimes it feels like he’s compensating for what he never had—or maybe he’s just being who he is. Either way, the world has come full circle, and the ultimate joy has made its way into his life.

Becoming a dad for the second time, it will be hard for him again. But Rick has learned to lean on a key Bible verse that we quote often in our prayers together: And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose (Rom. 8:28 KJV).

It was a long road to get to this point, so let’s start from the beginning.

CHAPTER 1

IN THE BEGINNING

It rarely starts with just one person. There’s almost always a story that goes back generations. In fact, it’s difficult to put the blame on any one person because the beginnings are so difficult to pin down. One mother hurts her child because her mother hurt her and her mother hurt her and so on and so on. There is often an intervening factor, too, something no one could control that impacts the way children are raised. Adults process their difficult childhoods in all kinds of ways—from addictions to people-pleasing to feeling intense, irrational shame. Add a generational curse of mental illness, or just the right kind of sensitive personality or character, and you have the perfect storm.

Most adults from such a background can pinpoint a few specific moments when feelings of inadequacy and a life of hardship began. Memories of such moments have the power to grind their brains to a halt, mentally transporting them back to the emotional muck that bogged them down again and again. By looking at one such moment in one little boy’s life, we can peek into the past that began to shape that arc of his life.

For Rick, it was kindergarten. No one told him why he was going—or even what kindergarten was. There’d been no daycare or preschool to prepare him—not even Sunday school. One day his mom just shoved him out of the house and toward the big, yellow school bus breathing heavy diesel on the street outside their rundown trailer in a less-than-beautiful part of Denver.

He hadn’t a clue why a stranger with a bus full of kids he’d never met was taking him away from his home. Sure, he’d seen those buses drive down the road, but he’d never been in one, and he certainly didn’t understand why he had to go in one alone. His tears erupted as he watched his mom saunter back to the trailer in her stained T-shirt and bare feet, hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, fumbling to light the cigarette in her hand.

Fear gripped his heart at the loud chug-chug-chug of the bus engine. But apparently he had no choice. It was either get on the bus or endure the fallout from a Monday-morning screwdriver with endless refills.

He wasn’t one to make a scene, so he climbed up the steep stairs with horizontal crinkles and found a seat, legs pasted to the brown fake leather, wondering where the bus would take him. His stomach felt hollow, as empty as the Seagram’s bottle broken at the corner of his yard. He’d used one of its jagged pieces to draw in the dirt.

It was the kind of September day that in some would evoke warm excitement for apple cider, hayrides, and Halloween—though Rick wasn’t aware of what those things were. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the Rocky Mountains stood solid and motionless in the distance as the bus bounced over the gravel road spiked with bottle caps, cigarette butts, and random scraps of trash. Each bounce felt like torture, the brakes screeching with every stop.

Even so, for a moment, Rick thought he might not want to go back. Maybe that bus could take him to a new life. But he couldn’t imagine what that life might be like. He knew nothing of blueberry pancakes for breakfast or warm baths at night or someone to sing him to sleep.

It would be like this for the entirety of Rick’s early life. Living with a charismatic and unpredictable drunk of a mother, he didn’t know anything different.

Her name was Sylvia. Sylvia, who cried and screamed for no apparent reason in the middle of the night. Sylvia, who ordered her children to hide behind the bed when the cops came looking for drugs. Sylvia, who was too wrapped up in her own addictions and narcissism to consider the epic failure she was to her children from day one.

Famed author and life coach Tony Robbins grew up with a neglectful and abusive mother like Rick’s. He frequently mentions her in interviews, but he gives her credit for giving him life and, because of her abuse, for making him the man he is today—someone who helps other people live their best lives and escape prisons of their own making. Rick would one day be able to look back and adopt a similar perspective—to recognize his mother’s positive attributes, difficult as they were to discover amid the rot, and to understand a little of what had made her the way she was.

Sylvia came from a long line of dysfunction, and the same combination of nature and nurture that had haunted her mother and so many others in the family hit her hard. It almost seems like she was waiting for the right moment to let it sink its teeth into her soul. And once it did, she never looked back—at least, not for more than a few minutes at a time.

Sylvia was usually able to keep her life together long enough to retain custody of her kids. Something inside of her desperately wanted her kids enough to clean up her act and make it happen. They were sort of a security blanket for her. If she was arrested, she would call her parents to help with the kids. They would take over temporary custody until she completed the required AA meetings, parent training, and whatever else social services required. Then she’d bring them back home, and the cycle would start again.

I suppose most parents love their children in their own way, whether or not they wanted them in the first place. But in Sylvia’s case, the actual expression of that love was erratic. Rick and his younger sister, Jenny, were like neglected puppies she kept forgetting to take care of. Sometimes they were fed, bathed, and watched. But just as often they could be found scrounging in the kitchen for a piece of bread, wearing the same underwear for three days, and fending for themselves overnight while wearing pull-up diapers. She showed them love only when the time was right, when addiction wasn’t sucking it all up, when she remembered that these two parts of her were breathing, walking, living right inside her own home.

With a childhood like his, Rick was all but destined to become an abusive drunk or drug addict with little hope of a future. He was just one of many caught up in a vicious cycle perpetuated by an impoverished culture.

The poverty rate in Arizona, where he spent so much of his childhood, has always been one of the highest in the country, and though it has improved a little recently, is still among the highest.¹ In 2013, all but four Southern Arizona cities had poverty rates exceeding 25 percent for female-headed households with children under eighteen, with South Tucson nearing 70 percent.²

While so much focus in the media is on immigrants streaming across the borders, looking for work, very little is spoken of the white working poor in Arizona and places like it—how they got that way, why they stay that way, and how the legacy of drug abuse and alcoholism destroys families decade after decade. (After all, the alcoholism didn’t start with Sylvia. It was just passed down to her like a family jewel.)

And Arizona is just one example. In the past few decades, the entire country has begun to segregate more distinctly according to class. The resulting disconnect and misunderstanding between the cultures of rich and poor seems to drive them further apart and, in the process, help perpetuate the problems of the poor. As famed culture analyst Charles Murray explains in his book, Coming Apart:

As the new upper class increasingly consists of people who were born into upper-middle-class families and have never lived outside the upper-middle-class bubble, the danger increases that the people who have so much influence on the course of the nation have little direct experience with the lives of ordinary Americans, and make their judgments about what’s good for other people based on their own highly atypical lives.³

Those in power, in other words, the ones who are making decisions and laws for people in poverty or working-class lifestyles, have little understanding of the challenges poorer people face, especially those who are also battling addiction and mental-health issues. As a result, the solutions offered to the poor tend to be ineffective.

This was already true in the 1970s, when Rick’s personal story began—and has more recently been amplified by the opioid crisis facing this same population of people across the country today. Plus,