Draft Chapter 3: Growing Up and Moving On

Guest Commentaries, Writings and Memorials:

CHRISTAL HOPKINS

Draft: Chapter 3 (draft) of my book:

Growing Up and Moving On

By Christal Hopkins

I was twenty-three when I decided to go back to school, at the encouragement of someone who had been working on our house and knew about a program that had just started at our local community college for the disabled. My first few months at Fresno City College were hard, mainly because unlike my previous educational experience, for the first time I had teachers that challenged my ability to learn.

Some of the teachers and friends that I met during my colleges years still play a very prominent role in my life. My first teacher at the community college was someone who is still a mentor and friend to me.

Janice is now the director of disabled students’ programs for the Fresno area community colleges. When I first met her, she was the English teacher in an old trailer that was separate from the rest of the campus. Janice and her staff expected you to work to the best of your ability. There was a lot of anger on my part, manly at myself for wasting four years of my life doing nothing.

The years that I have spend in trying to get my education has been fraught with starts and stops, but I realized how important it was for me to have a good education no matter how long it took.

For the most part I had gotten through the trauma of my father’s death, but my mother had not managed as well. The pain of losing my father and watching her own dad die of bone cancer three years later, in addition to other family problems, made it very hard for my mother to cope with life.

Mom’s poor memory was, perhaps, a foretaste of things to come later in life. She was always very forgetful even when I was a little girl. She would frequently misplace her car keys or other things. Her forgetfulness as a young mother even included almost leaving me home on one occasion. As we were going out for the day, she got my brother and sister ready, put them and my diaper bag into the car, and started to back out of the driveway. She remembered me when my sister piped up and asked, “Momma, where’s the baby?”

The years following my dad’s death were very lonely for mom. After Dad died and my sister and brothers moved out, there was only the two of us left to occupy the large house that consisted of three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a large living room, a dining room, and a kitchen that looked liked it was build to feed a small army.

At seventy years old my grandpa could out work most younger men. So it was a real shock to everyone when the doctor told my mom that her father was dying of bone cancer.

During my grandfather’s illness, we moved in with my grandparents. That was a very stressful time for my mom, and she was the first one to notice Grandpa’s weight loss. Grandpa was always a very health man; until the time that he became ill, I can’t even remember him even having a head cold.

I had been in school a year when I dropped out to help take care of my grandpa. He would not go to the doctor; although, my mother tried insistently to get him to go. Finally, my great-aunt almost literally forced him to get checked out. He fought the disease really hard, but in the end, it took him down very quickly.

That year at my grandparent’s house was hard on me because, like all young people in their twenties, I wanted to brake away and start my own life. It was a family joke that I would always be the baby of the family, and to a certain degree this is true. I think that for some of my family the thought of me growing up and becoming an adult was something that they never seriously considered.

For my grandmother, it was hard for her to let me be the person that I was trying to become, probably due to the stigma of her generation. Women were seen but not heard. Disabled people were not seen or heard.

My mom, my grandmother and I would often clash when I expressed my opinions and feelings. Living in the same house with my grandmother was a challenge, and a conflict, since I had been taught by my parents to express myself, but I was also taught to respect my elders.

I walked a fine line between expressing my opinions and maintaining respect for my grandmother – and I didn’t always succeed. There were times that I didn’t handle things as well as I should have with my grandmother, but I learned that when dealing with older people, I sometimes just had to let them have their way, regardless of my feelings. I suspect that in my grandmother’s eyes, I never really grew up, but her attitude came from her love for me, and from wanting to keep me safe.

In the early 80's, Mom began to show signs of decreased mental capability. We had moved back home after my grandfather passed away, but my grandmother was unable to stay by herself, so Mom felt that she had no choice other than to move her mother in with us.

Due to Mom’s memory loss, and my grandmother’s illness and age, a lot of the responsibility for our daily living began to fall on me. My brothers and sister were living their own lives now, and didn’t know what was going on.

In the summer of 1982, Mom received a call from an old friend from Iowa inviting her to come to a family reunion. Mom was looking forward to going and seeing her old friend and her family. She had planed to go alone while I went to Los Angeles to visit a friend.

As time drew near for us to go our separate ways, I grew increasingly concerned about Mama going cross-country alone on a bus. Mama’s memory was getting increasing worse, and I felt like someone needed to go with her on such a long trip.

My sister and brothers weren’t as concerned because they weren’t around much anymore, and didn’t realize how much my mother’s memory had deteriorated.

We put my grandmother in a rest home until my mother returned from Iowa. After reiterating my mother’s memory problems to my siblings a few days before the trip: lost keys, lost security check, skillet of greased burned, etc., I finally convinced them that I should accompany Momma.

Somehow, we managed to come up with enough money for the ticket. The night before we left was hectic, doing laundry, packing clothes, doing hair; Mama and I got very little sleep that night. By the time morning came, both of us were tired, to understate. We were both excited, though – Mama because she was going to be reunited with childhood friends, and me because it was to be my first trip out of state.

When Oswald put us on the bus that morning, I realized that Momma had become restless. It would take us three days to get to Iowa, three days that would change the course of our lives.

Mama’s restlessness continued as she began to ramble about people and situations that didn’t make sense. As first I dismissed her rambles as a result of our hectic pace the night before, but when she insisted upon calling me Doll, the name of her first cousin, I began to realize that something was terribly wrong.

As the trip continued, Mama’s condition worsened. She started talking about dead friends and relatives as if they were alive, and began asking when we were going to get home, although we had just left on a three-day trip. I, of course, tried to explain that these people were dead, and we had just started on our trip, but she could not understand.

When we arrived in L.A., we had to change busses, and in all the commotion Mama’s confusion grew worse. When we boarded the second bus, Mama began to quieten down somewhat, but while we were sitting there waiting for the bus to leave, they driver announced that there was something wrong with the bus that we were on and that we had to transfer to another bus.

For some reason the changing to the second bus seemed to set her off again, making the confusion worse then before. Once we got back on the bus I thought that if Mama were able to get some sleep she might be a little better.

Mama didn’t sleep long, just little catnaps that didn’t seem to help. We reached Nevada around 11:00 p.m., where we had a half-hour layover. I tried to get Mama to eat, but she seemed to be very upset about something. I racked my brain trying to figure out what was causing her so much stress.

When we return to the bus, Mama gathered up our things as if we were getting off. When I asked her what was doing, she said that it was time to go home. There we were in the middle of the Nevada desert at midnight, and Mama was thinking that we were just down the street from our house.

I was really alarmed by her behavior, but I was at a loss what to do about it. I tried to talk to her, but the more I talked the more upset she became. The situation had become very frightening for me. By now we were beginning to cause a commotion.

When the bus driver came back to the bus and was preparing to leave, he noticed Mama. When he came back to inquire about our problem, Momma told him that we wanted to get off the bus.

I tried everything that I knew to get the driver to listen to me, but of course because I had the disability and the speech impairment, he wouldn’t listen to me. As hard as I tried to make him understand that it was Mama and not me who was having the problem, he continued to ignore me.

Just about the time the driver was about to put us off the bus, a voice came from the back of the bus. “I think it’s the mother that having the problem. I think you should listen to her daughter.”

When I turned around, I saw a couple that I had noticed in the bus station in Fresno. I was certainly relieved to see that there was someone willing to listen. I was able, with the help of the couple, to convince the bus driver that it was Mama that was having the problems. After everything calmed down, I thanked the couple for their help. They told me that they were on their way to Iowa themselves, and they would help out in any way they could.

Mama wasn’t the same after the trip to Iowa, but then neither was I. The trip was the beginning of my coming of age. I now knew that I was going to have to find a way to make a life for myself.

Over the next year, Mama’s memory problems would come and go. At times, everything would be just fine, but then there were days when she was barely able to function. Mama’s mind had deteriorated to the point where I would have to stay up all night just to make sure she wouldn’t walk out of the house, or turn on the stove in the middle of the night.

Before she became sick, Mom frequently commented that she never wanted to lose her ability to think. The thing that my mother feared the most was now becoming a reality.

One day while Mama was out in the yard working, she got a phone call from her doctor. When she came to the phone, he asked her if she felt all right. When she told him she felt just fine, he told her that her sugar level was five hundred and eighty. He said she was in danger of having a stroke, or going into a comma. While her doctor was treating her for the high sugar level, he diagnosed her with Alzheimer’s Disease.

My brother finally realized that something needed to be done, and he and his family moved back home. However, he was not at a high point in his life, either. He not only sold drugs, but used them as well.

My brother, Oswald has a wonderful life now, but that was not the case then. Crack cocaine had become the drug of choice for many in the black community. He had always had many friends, but had undergone a major personality change.

Even Mama, as fragile as her mind was at the time, knew that something was very wrong with her youngest son. Through a series of bad drug deals that was mainly caused by him smoking up what he was supposed to be selling, his life was reduced to just trying to stay alive from one day to the next.

Because he did his business out of our house, his suppliers knew where we lived, and since they weren’t getting their money, they were less than pleased.

At some point, Oswald wised up and remembered something that our mother had tried to instill in all of her children. She would tell us that whenever we had trouble, we should go to God in prayer. My sister and her husband had been living in Phoenix, Arizona for several years, and when she found out what was going on, she came home to see if she could help her brother out of the jam he had gotten himself into.

When my sister came home, she found that Mama was in far worse shape then she had thought, plus Oswald owed a lot more money then he would ever be able to pay back. She made arrangements for Oswald, his family, and Mamma to move to Phoenix.

By now, I was making plans to move out on my own. I knew that I was capable of taking care of myself, and I had cared for Mama and me for a year and a half. When my sister asked me whether I wanted to stay in Fresno or move to Phoenix, I chose to stay in Fresno.

My sister helped me find an apartment and an aid to help me live independently. Mama’s first cousin and his wife were still living, as well as my grandmother, so I still had family in town.

Once things started to settle down, I was able to think about what I wanted to do with the rest of life. I started taking classes again, and started to learn about whom I was as a person.

It took me a while to figure out what course I wanted to take. As a black woman with a disability and a limited education, the choice of what I could do seemed very limited.

One of the first classes I took when I went back to school was African-American study. In that class I learned so much about who I was as an African-American woman. There is so much of our history in American to be proud of. If you looked to the media to find out who black people are in this country, you would get a very poor image. When I was growing up, I never heard anything positive about our people, except that we were slaves and that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. It wasn’t until I got into college that I started to learn about Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831. Nor did I know about the real story behind the Black Panther Party. It was a very eye opening time in my life.

1986 was the beginning of a very hard year-and-a-half for my family; we lost six family members, including my mother. Mama’s death was not unexpected of course. The Alzheimer’s Disease had taken the mother that had loved and raised me through good and bad times. I think her passing brought a peace to her children because we all knew that Mama was where she wanted to be – in Heaven with my father.

When I was with my family, I always felt that I was either someone’s daughter or someone’s sister. I never really made friends of my own until I was on my own. A lot of my good friends are the ones that I met in college. My family has gotten smaller over the years; the death of my dear brother Kenneth brought home the fact that the gift of live should never be taken lightly. The family that I have left seems to be proud that I’m doing well. My brother, Oswald, and I are very close, and it is at this time in my life that I am beginning to have the kind of relationship with my sister that I didn’t have growing up. I guess you can say that timing is, indeed, everything.

I have lived independently for over twenty years now, and with the help of my aid, Darlene, who takes very good care of me, I’m doing fine. Living in California where there are a number of great programs that serve the disabled community has allowed me the opportunity to work with all types of people.

It took over twenty years to complete my education. Deciding what I wanted to do should have been easy. I have always been good at writing but I never thought I wanted to make a career of it until recently. I went through stages of wanting to be everything from being a lawyer to being a teacher. I’m discovering that I can combine all my interests and put them into my writing. Being able to change the minds of people for the betterment of any group of people is a real blessing for me.