Jungle Book Boy

The story before the story. I'm releasing this before I feel ready. I'm hitting publish despite.

For half a decade I have been unknowingly keeping myself from writing about this day. Because, for six years my fingers have sat hovering over the keyboard, staring blankly into the ether, unsure exactly what it is that I am trying to convey with the writing of this family story.

My writing is not polished, and neither is the message at this stage. And though this is starting to change with time and knowledge attainment, social entropy freefall seems to have commenced all around us. Which has further compounded the writing of this story such that I am not sure what it is I am trying to message my daughters at this point.

The historical pendulum of human fallibilities is in the stage of nationalism and hatred of the ‘other’ at the present moment. Which is not necessarily the best time to be alive if you are on the outside looking in. Nor is it the best time to write a book spreading a message of love and unity followed by tragedy. But then again, maybe it is.

The specific day I am referring to in the above intro is the day my Big Brother volunteer turned foster father of 36 years hung himself from a tree out at the Lakehouse my other foster father’s parents had bought us. And just two days after Epstein was murdered in his cell. In fact, the last words I ever spoke to him was to let him know he was no different than Epstein and belonged in jail for the rest of his life.

I had grown up in the early 1990’s with two gay fathers, long before being gay was socially acceptable. And while neither of my father’s ever touched me, when I went to college they were left with an empty nest, and something changed, in terrible ways. As though my absence allowed them to become who they wanted to be all along. Which is something I will be digging into through the slow release of this autobiography. And there is so much more than this, it is often overwhelming trying to think about how to write this.

After my sophomore year in college, I returned to a full house of children. This would be 2003. Prior to this it was me and my brother who is to my right.

There are deeper messages to lift from my story of survival against all the odds. A deeper ability, a deeper understanding to be gleaned about the capabilities of our species. If given the right building blocks. Which, besides my daughters, is who this autobiography is written for. The humans who need just a little love and guidance to turn a corner.

My great-grandmother never had such luck, after being impregnated by my great-grandfather at the tender age of 12. There would be no such love and guidance being handed to Zella Mae Tackett in 1920’s America. And the rate at which child rape was occurring in America in the early to mid-1900’s is absolutely shocking. Yet another truth I’m not sure many people realize, let alone understand just how recent it was that we knowingly allowed this to take place. It has been conveniently left out of our American history books. I won’t speculate on that just yet. I have too much of this story left to write.

My grandmother was the 4th child born to Zella and Sherman. The first being Garnett, who was birthed by Zella at the age of 13. Meaning she was impregnated at the age of 12.

Writing this story is going to be the cherry on top of a crazy ass heroes journey I have been on the last 36 years. At the same time, I understand that for others to have corners to turn like I was granted, I must write this story at, and about, the very people who can enact change at the highest levels of our government. Which is why this is so fucking hard to picture at this point. It seems impossible to be honest.

Politics has been hacked by money and special interest groups. And the story of my survival is one ripe for partisan hijacking. Something I am trying to avoid falling victim to by writing this as middle of the road as I can while shouting from my blue island in the middle of a sea of red.

The world my girls inhabit is changing at such a rapid clip, that I felt I needed to take a pause on releasing this story. It was not yet written. Plus, I was not ready. I’m still not ready. But I am doing this for my mental health, as well as for the health of my family environment at home. Which is a big part of why I hit reset on all the writing I had released in early 2024, deleting everything I had put out on Substack after just a few months on the site.

Besides needing to vastly improve my writing skills, I needed to digest more than just my childhood at this stage and had drastically underestimated the work I would need to do to vent the pain following events of late 2019. What I underestimated most, as I’m sure many of us did, was the environment in which I would be digging. As I sit here and write, bodies are being snatched off the street like it’s 1930’s Europe.

How do I tell this story such that I encapsulate the world my wife and I are dropping our girls into. There are no words for what I’m seeing. To say that the world is on fire right now would be an understatement. Nothing from my 1980’s childhood pointed to our world being this divided at home.

At the same time, how do I write this in such a way as to convey the life messages I wish for them to digest before they are confronted. Additionally, how do I tell this story in a manner which enables the messages within to cross the partisan divides and hit the world writ large? I am not sure if this is even possible anymore.

As soon as something or someone comes out of the woodwork with a string of words with any hint of opinion, they are immediately painted into a corner. The algorithm doesn’t give a shit about nuance, you get painted. Which is why I must be careful with the telling of this story. There is power in the overall messages it conveys.

But if I am to do this right, if I’m to get this message across—I must take my time and get it right. Therein lies the conundrum, none of us knows how many spins we have left on this rock. So, do I rush this all to the page in hopes the words I leave my daughters convey the message I’m trying to leave them?

Creating and successfully raising a human after never having a relationship with either biological parent has provided me with this unique perspective to now look back on the life I survived. First off, bringing a human into this world was all predicated on me successfully cultivating my own life from the depths of childhood trauma and foster care—to the point where I felt I was ready to do what my mother could not.

When you come from a traumatic childhood you tend to suffer from an intense and disabling type of imposter syndrome. It follows you everywhere. It’s not the same type of imposter syndrome we speak of broadly, it’s more like the ‘C’ in CPTSD, it’s complex. I believe I suffer from a complex form of imposter syndrome. One that comes from having biological parents who chose not to be in my life. The impacts are invisible until they’re not.

Which is why lifting a child from this type of existence is one of the hardest things a society can face. At some point in recent history, we decided it was too expensive to ensure the future occupants of our country were properly reared. We punted it to the states and told capitalism to figure it out. Well, it did. It decided short-term profit was more important than future societal security. So, I will continue to write. Cheers all. I’m here.