I had a care free childhood. I was born last of nine children. My parents immigrated to America from Ireland in their late teens. They met and married in America. My brothers and sisters were all 1-2 years apart. Seven years separated me chronologically from my closest sibling. I have wonderful memories of my moms love and attention. She was very physical, with lots of hugs and warmth. She sang me hundreds of Irish lullabies, my favorite being Tura lura lura. I can still hear her beautiful voice in my heart.
Being a late child and a boy, I suppose, meant there was no such thing as too much attention, nurture or care when it came to her raising me. In retrospect I’m sure she didn’t want me to grow up. I remember her putting on my socks and shoes every morning. Brushing my hair. Heating my gloves on the radiator. Bundling me into a hat and coat and scarf in the winter. She lavished love and attention on me endlessly. She spoiled me terribly.
I recall being amazed by ants and sunshine and rain. My physical experience of the world seemed mysterious and awesome. I avoided walking on ants. I felt spellbound watching raindrops in the puddles in the street. I guess I would characterize my first 5 years as innocent, loved and spiritually awake.
I started first grade at Our Lady of Perpetual Help on my fifth birthday. I was academically ready but emotionally and socially unprepared. I felt extremely awkward and excluded. I wasn’t assertive enough to avoid getting bullied and made fun of by the boys and I was afraid of the girls. My brothers might carry me on their shoulders in the woods all day one day (which was great) or punch me so hard in the stomach I couldn’t breathe or hit me hard enough so I would hit the wall on the fly another day. I usually didn’t even know what I did to make it happen. So I learned to become invisible around my home.
My mom and dad used a belt when I was bad. My mom would usually wait and tell my dad when he came home. “You just wait till your father gets home. He is going to give it to you.” When my dad came home from work he often had gifts, treats and surprises for the girls but not for me. If he was in a bad mood he would check my homework and tear it up if there were any mistakes. I distinctly remember deciding to quit trying to please my dad, during an incident in third or fourth grade.
I started running away when I was eleven or twelve. One time, when they caught me, I was screaming, “I don’t need you. I don’t need anybody.” When I was a kid I remember thinking, like most kids perhaps, that my life was unbearable. But as I became an adult I began to realize how fortunate I was as a child. So I don’t know why I made such unhealthy choices as a youth. It really wasn’t that bad.
I beat up my first bully while I was in third grade. I was on the ground and he was beating me up. Kids were laughing and kicking me. I exploded and started beating up the bully. The kids started slapping me on the back and laughing at the bully. I practically had a spiritual awakening or at least a paradigm shift. I felt included. I felt accepted. I felt powerful. I went on to discover if I could make people afraid of me they wouldn’t know how afraid I was of them.
Because of my brothers, I always thought of myself as weak. When I started fighting kids I found out I could handle myself. Eventually I beat up just about everyone on my block and in my neighborhood. I found my niche. I became a gang member and then a gang leader. I had mastered the boy code.
Because I was two years younger than most of my peers through grade school and high school – I graduated at sixteen- I felt sexually incompetent during adolescence. Boys were talking about girls and sex and doing things like masturbating and making out, which seemed foreign to me. Naturally, I felt weird and intimidated. When girls started being attracted to me I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t attracted to them yet. I thought there was something wrong with me.
I started drinking outside the home at eleven and using other drugs around twelve years old. When I used I didn’t have to think or feel. Catholic high school probably saved my life. My friends in public school were getting strung out, dropping out, doing more crimes and getting arrested and going away. I was actually expected to attend school and the brothers kicked my ass every other day. I stayed in school, stayed out of the worst trouble and was able to graduate. I met my best friend in high school. Heroin.
Marijuana saved my life. As a freshman I drank and took barbiturates, a lot. I was full of violence and hate. In ’62 I started smoking dope and had my first spiritual experience. I started to see peace, harmony and community as real possibilities, real values. My mom thought I got saved! My friends were starting race riots and I was going to rallies and love-ins. My hippie thing was short lived. Over the course of a few years I went from LSD and unitive consciousness to heroin and nothing else matters besides getting high. The ability to remain true to oneself in the face of tremendous pressure to conform is rare, in adolescence as well as adulthood.
The baggage I carry from my youth is self-loathing, contempt, rage and powerlessness. Don’t trust. Don’t think. Don’t feel. I like to use the metaphor of alchemy. Alchemy is the ability to turn lead to gold. Rebirth and recovery have given me the experience of spiritual alchemy. God/recovery takes the wounds of my childhood/curse of addiction and turns it into the gift of healing/reconciliation/recovery. I call it choosing my pain. Pain is unavoidable. I can choose the pain of addiction or the pain of recovery; the pain of isolation or the pain of relationship; the pain of living in fear or the pain of trusting; the pain of self will or the pain of gods will; the pain of control or the pain of surrender. Addiction, isolation, fear, self-will and control are the pain of dying which only gets worse. Recovery, relationship, trust, Gods will, and surrender are the pain of living and get less and less as I grow spiritually.