In Between Days: Raising Jordan (boyxman)✅

God Save the Queen

***PUBLISHED***Shortened and edited version can be found on Amazon under a new name, A Not So Typical Love. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MHQ1J27

Today is the day my mother is going to speak to me again. This was something I told myself every month since my mother left when I was ten. She hadn't spoken since, trapped in her body, trapped in her mind. Physically she was fine, but mentally...mentally "she's out to lunch" as Tim would say.

Tim, my older brother by eleven years, had given up, but I didn't. I couldn't give up. She liked it when I played her favorite punk and post-punk music of the seventies and eighties with a few songs of the nineties thrown into the mix. The only songs on my phone were her favorites, which were in the hundreds, maybe even thousands. Before her mental collapse, she had been playing me those songs since I was in her womb. She was a "punk rock girl," Dad said. And since then, punk and post-punk music was the only music I listened to, the only music I could relate to because it connected me to my mother.

Old photos of my mother in her teens reflected her various punk phases. She and Dad met their freshman year of college when she was just seventeen during what's been referred to as her "Nancy Spungen years." Nancy Spungen was the girlfriend of bassist Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols who allegedly murdered her in the Hotel Chelsea in Greenwich Village. They were both a couple of junkies. He died not long after of a heroin overdose. Anyway, Mom's hair was dyed platinum blond back then. She wore lots of makeup with fish net stockings and leather pants or skirts that barely covered her butt. A few years later she went through her Patti Smith phase with dyed black hair and wore hardly any make-up. Patti Smith was her all-time favorite.

Now Mom's hair was wiry gray and mostly in disarray because she wouldn't let any of the group home staff comb it. She usually wore sweatshirts and sweatpants and was at least fifty pounds overweight, nothing like that punk rock girl.

Tim said she didn't know who I was, but I knew she knew who I was. I just wished she would speak. I hadn't heard her voice since I was ten. That's when she was sent away and never came back. It was all Dad's fault. If he had been home more, none of this would have happened. That's what I told myself, anyway. Sometimes I blamed myself. I was a horrible kid, a horrible son.

God Save the Queen played through my iPhone as we sat at the picnic bench in the small backyard of the five-person group home she had been living in for the past five years. She spent a number of years in an institution in addition to various other group homes that never seemed to work out. She had the most success in this home, over an hour away from my home, the same house she left just shy of her forty-seventh birthday. Now she was nearing her fifty-seventh birthday, which was two weeks before mine. I was going to be 20 and continued to be nothing but a nuisance and burden to Tim.

During my bi-monthly visits, Tim sat in the car, only venturing out to get me. He never saw the point in visiting. He also harbored a lot of resentment as if this was all her fault since he was the one who more or less raised me.

Dad was a geoscientist who traveled from one face of the earth to another, rarely ever coming home. Maybe we saw him one or two months out of the year. It had been this way for years.

I think Tim resented me, too, because I wasn't like most guys my age. I was more than a little weird. People didn't get it. They didn't get me. I talked when I felt like it and no one could force me to do things I didn't want to do. Tim was always afraid I'd have a freak out if I went away to college or even if I commuted to college so I took college classes online. Driving also didn't seem to be an option for me. Too many so-called freak outs. Everyone determined that I was safest at home.