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Raising Nate Part II - my own childhood [1]
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Date: 2025-04-23
To understand the way I’ve been raising Nate, young artist extraordinaire, you must know of my own childhood. As most people one tries not to replicate the errors of the past onto the next generation right?
I was born in 1966 in Queens New York. My father (exiled under the dictator regime in Haiti of Duvalier had settled there) but he was a drunk a very handsome one and my mother was a spoiled beautiful girl who married him despite her family’s warnings. She was 20 when my brother was born and 22 when I was. My father (like most men on his side of the family) was violent when drunk so you can imagine what ensued. My mother, to this day I call her the eternal teenager. Took me a while to stop blaming my parents for what their own trauma had made them.
When I was around 2 my mother had had, enough she packed us up and took us to Haiti following a man she had met in the US. She dumped us on our grandmother, for the new beau did not want children around. It wasn’t long before my grandmother (who had already raised 11 children) dumped us into a boarding house, it’s like a foster home but families pay to leave their kids there, we were the only ones that never got picked up on holidays, we were there year round.
When I was 8 (brother 9) I contracted hepatitis it was early February (only reason I remember is because it was Carnival season and I fainted watching a small parade in front of the boarding home) and was laid up for the rest of the school year, that summer I discovered my father’s side of the family (not my father he was still exiled), as we were sent to their house in another city so I could recuperate, it was the best year of my young life but alas after a year my mother whom we saw maybe twice a year, came and took us back to the capital, it would be years before I learned this was because my aunt had wanted to adopt us.
Instead of going back to the boarding house, she rented a home and a housekeeper and left us there and the twice a year sighting started anew. Hell it was a full year because she found out my brother had stopped going to school, and it was 2 more before she learned he was smoking and drinking following in his absent father’s footsteps. She often forgot to pay the housekeeper or send money for our keep, thus Marie would spend her own money on us, or if she had none, me and my brother would steal food from the supermarket, which in an ironic twist of fate belonged to my mother’s lover’s family.
When I was 13, an aunt of mine from the state visited Haiti and seeing how we lived persuaded my mother to let her take us back to the states with her. She was a loving woman she had but one flaw and that was her youngest daughter who at 11 was spoiled beyond belief. She was the last of 4 children, but had a different father and a 12 year gap in age with the nearest sibling.
My cousin, felt betrayed by this “invasion” and made our lives hell. I spent 5 years sleeping on the floor (see I’m used to this) and being the maid of the house while my cousin was the princess. After 1 year my brother went back to Haiti it would be another 6 years before I saw him again. I spent 5 years in that house invisible, no pictures, no toys that were mine, my clothes were stuff in a suitcase under a bed I was there but not there.
In was in CA that I first met racism, at 13 freshly arrived, I was stopped by the police because I didn’t look American (see told you it wasn’t new) and interrogated alone for over 3 hours (I wrote that story somewhere). It was my love of books that saved me, for the first thing I’d done was get a library card.
My father lived in Canada at this time and asked to meet me, I was 14 and went to spend a summer with him, he was still drunk and beating on his new wife, there was a 3 year old brother who spent the summer hiding in my room when the father was drunk. My father died last year, I have never seen him sober. At 17 I graduated high school left California and never looked back.
I went to Miami, worked for some years at a dry cleaner, a movie theater etc… at 19? I went for a vacation to Haiti… to my shock no one knew my mother had a daughter, nor my brother a sister. I went to a new year’s party with a friend of my brother’s who proceeded to get drunk, rape me and never even realizing he took my virginity. I went back to Miami more angry than ever. Only to be sexually assaulted at 22 by 3 men. Ouf!
I do not possess, one single picture of me and my mother, not a baby picture, not a birthday picture, not a Christmas picture… no milestones immortalized to share memories with my kids or grandkids. I have some childhood pics sure a few, but none are of a special day or moment, or even with either parent.
That part should tell you why I have so many pictures of Nate, and Nate and me. My mother and father both had in excess of 10 siblings… I have never received a reasonable answer as to why me and my brother ended up in a home at the ages of 4 and 5.
Coming soon… part III
Muriel Vieux
#TheAmericanHaitianPoet
October 29th, 2023
#Woke #SocialPoetry
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