"Momma I Love You But This Trailer Has Got To Go" Breaking Loose From Generational Poverty

 

"Lose Yourself" Eminem

"Gotten me to the point I'm like a snail, I've got
To formulate a plot or end up in jail or shot
Success is my only option, failure's not

 

Mom, I love you, but this trailer's got
To go; I cannot grow old in Salem's Lot
So here I go, it's my shot: feet, fail me not
This may be the only opportunity that I got"

 

 You better lose yourself in the music
The moment, you own it, you better never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo
You better lose yourself in the music
The moment, you own it, you better never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo
You better…

                                                          

"But My words and My decrees, which I commanded My servants the prophets—

did they not overtake your fathers? Then they repented and said ‘As He determined,  

Adonai-Tzva’ot has dealt with us according to our ways and our deeds.’”

The Prophet Zechariah Chapter 1 Verse 6

 "Mom I Love You But This Trailer's Got To Go"

 Breaking Loose From Generational Poverty

In late Summer of 2021 I had a very powerful dream. 

But before I tell you about the dream I have to make you aware of our unusual living arrangements

 up until the point where the dream begins so that it all makes sense and so that you see how my story and your story intersect. So we can both find a way out of the pit of poverty we were born into.

 

When I was born way back in 1980 we lived in a concrete basement that my Dad planned on turning into a full house but due to finances and lack of finances due to drugs and alcohol the basement never was finished. It was just concrete block walls built into the side of a hill with a temporary tin roof and a glass patio door. I remember a black snake being in my bedroom one day and me screaming and I think that was the last straw for my mother. My brother was on the way and she certainly didn't like snakes.

Then we lived in several trailer parks where our toys were stolen by neighbor kids and the water was literally orange and made your teeth orange and the dishes orange too. Artisian Well water that has high iron content was common in the area and the poor people lived where the orange water was. Think Flint, Michigan but with more sweet tea and less red or blue bandanas.

 

 After that we lived in a cabin (pictured above) built by my Grandfather and Uncle on that side and my Dad. They literally went into the woods and chopped trees down with hand axes and used mules to pull them up the holler (giant gully). Then they laid the logs on top of each other and filled the spaces with glue and installed an iron rock and black mortar fireplace for heat. In the end they had a log cabin to live in complete with bark for vinyl siding and a thirty foot tall vaulted ceiling with six bedrooms to heat using wood.

My grandparents lived in the cabin after my grandfather retired from being a firefighter in Memphis and a Sheriff's Deputy one county over from Sheriff Bufford Pusser ("Walking Tall" movie from the 70's and the later film starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson). He was also an Army Military Police Sgt. during the Korean War and a land developer that did all of his own land clearing and upgrades.

 

After my grandparents moved out my Uncle (who was previously a local Constable) moved in for a few years and didn't make any repairs due to alcohol. Then my Dad and Mom and my little Brother and I moved in and my Dad didn't make any repairs either for the same reasons. This was despite my Dad having years of experience as a woodworker and carpenter and a cabinet maker and helping build the cabin in the first place.

 

In the Winter I turned 14 (1994) my saintly Mother, who had always worked double shifts at the factory to ensure the power stayed on, passed away from a sudden brain aneurysm. So you guessed it, the power didn't stay on anymore and neither did the water. The shoes on our feet fell apart and didn't stay on anymore either unless I glued the soles with plumber's glue from my Dad's toolbox every night before school the next day and prayed all day they would make it until I could catch the bus home. 

 By this point the cabin had a foot wide square hole in the lower bathroom wall so baths in Winter were rather miserable. You could also see traffic going down the highway between the logs because the glue had come out a long time ago. Wood in the six foot deep fireplaces was of course still the only heat source for the entire cabin with one window unit air conditioner in the Summer. We mostly never had a phone the vast majority of the time and being without water or power and dinner wasn't completely uncommon after my Mother died. We threw our trash in the "garbage pit" behind the house which was just a ditch. My Dad thought it was  good idea to get goats so we ended up with two of those until they found his marijuana plants in the 5 gallon buckets out in the woods. So we had happy goats for a brief time that were then "gone goats". I also had a pet raccoon that I named "Rocky" of course.

 

 Thanks to my Mom working so much she was able to get us new clothes from Wal-Mart every school year but after she passed we only had the thrift store or what was given to us. My eye doctor gave me a box of clothes once that include a nice leather jacket and my boss at the grocery store (Doug Maxwell) bought me a pair of shoes to replace the sandals I had worn for several months plus some khakis and polo shirts. We also had a cousin who played high school so we had some to grow into as well.

My Dad had lost his driver's license after 3 DUI's so my brother and I could only travel as far as we could walk or hitchhike. This precluded any clubs at school later on or sports that might help with a scholarship. It also precluded any kind of social life back in the days before internet. We had previously bought our food at Save-A-Lot with the blue and brown paper food stamps from the 80's and 90's when Mom was alive but afterwards there was no way to get to the grocery store. Finding dinner was me and my brother waking to the gas station.This developed in me a real love of cooked food that continues to this day because I'm not use to it not coming in anything but styrofoam or cellophane wrapping.

 

 My Junior High eventually called a social worker to interview my brother and I, mostly because we hadn't taken a bath in a really long time the next Winter during the Ice Storm but also because we were constantly hitch hiking and our clothes were too small and we had to ask a teacher for lunch money.  A friend had offered to adopt us but she was also adopting toddlers and infants with severe special needs and I didn't want to take the place of those kids who needed it far worse than little brother and I. Outside of her house I knew we would be separated in Foster Care and I didn't want to be separated from my brother in that environment. So I lied to the social worker with my eyes full of tears and told her everything was "just fine" at home. It was actually drunken white trash hell in reality for a kid of any age.

 

After the power went off in the cabin in Winter again and the social worker visit we moved in with my grandmother. She had developed an addiction to prescription medications before my grandpa passed (I was age 10) and afterwards with the inheritance, an addiction to the casinos in Mississippi, and the Cash Advance Places that eventually took their house. I'm still not sure if the move was out of concern for myself and my little brother or out of concern for losing the Social Security Survivor's Benefit Checks of about $480 a month my brother and I received from my mother working double shifts all those years. The double shifts literally killed her after the first hospitalization where the doctor told her she couldn't work all those extra hours or be in any high stress environments. Of course having your kids taken to the home of a Hell's Angel named "Roach" to hang out is difficult on any mother's heart just as much as having the Iron Horsemen rolling joints in your living room and a cabin falling apart on top of your head little by little. Plus the constant trips to bail Dad out of jail for bar fights he started. 

My joke after I grew up was that "My Mom drug us to Church while my Dad sold drugs". We never knew if the knock on the door was going to be a Southern Baptist Deacon or a Hell's Angel Dealer. My Mom didn't curse, didn't smoke, didn't drink and was a proud Southern Baptist lady who didn't believe in divorce. Even if her marriage was killing her and an increasing threat to her children. I never could talk her into leaving and neither could her family or anyone else in town that cared about her and us. Given who my Dad was we never could really make close friends with the church kids but given how my Mom raised us we never really fit in with the drug dealer's kids either. It was a social limbo of sorts.

 

Our only other income was my Dad being on disability for degenerative disc disease (his vertebrae were literally turning to powder) and medical care from the VA for his Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam. He had asked to be an airplane mechanic to have a real job after the military but they made him a "weapons armament mechanic" loading napalm, something Delta needed few of apparently. Since he worked on the flight line the Agent Orange would blow right in choking the whole flight crew. After fighting Social Security and the VA for years on end his disability was like $580 a month. We also all cut grass for the city and some elderly folks in the Summers. 

 

 Other ways we made money growing up were that my Dad sold pills and marijuana to the Iron Horsemen Motorcycle Gang and the Hell's Angels and later to the local wanna be Crips (but that's another blog). My little brother and I would collect beer cans after the motorcycle gang parties to recycle for school reduced lunch money. My brother and I also picked up cans on the side of Highway 64 where the 18- wheelers whizzed by our heads and stray dogs liked to chase us so we carried a pocket full of rocks and a pocket knife or a stick at all times. 

Before we moved in with my grandmother who did cook and keep the power turned on, we were fortunate that there were two country diner/gas stations/convenience stores in our town. The town wasn't large enough for a traffic light but it had a strict caste system.  One country diner was ran by some Church folks who let us clean trash up out of the parking lot for a warm meal after the Church people had all they wanted from the special on Sundays. Only Church people ate there usually. If you weren't Church people (a.k.a. financially successful people that wear khakis to work) you hung out at the other country diner/gas station/convenience store with the two pool tables and the three arcade games. That was where we usually hitch hiked from with whoever we thought was safe. If it was really late at night the owner Donny Spence would go the opposite of his way home just to keep us safe by giving us a ride after his two jobs. 

 

Strangely enough my Dad never went to Church with us but he kept volunteering to cut the Church grass for free-I think to thank them for letting me and my brother eat at the potlucks without bringing a casserole?  He also didn't let us curse or forget to say "Yes Ma'am " and "No Sir" and told every drug dealer he knew that if they ever sold to his kids he would beat them senseless.

 

 He had a strange sense of honor that way I suppose.

I eventually moved out and couch surfed for a few years with various people in town to avoid fisticuffs with my Dad. Most of the people offering a place were after the $480 a month S.S.I. Check. Some really were watching out for me though like my Sensei, whom I couldn't live with because he was still out on parole. Then after that he married a very narcissistic woman who certainly wasn't having a homeless teenage boy live with them at her house.so we didn't see each other much again until they got divorced. I did stay for over a year or two with a friend from elementary school who had an Intellectual Disability so I helped with his school work and his Mom fed me. She was addicted to both prescription pills and alcohol but she did the best she could. She even almost got beat up by her husband just to keep me there because he wanted me gone. Now my job is working for the State helping people with Intellectual Disabilities and Developmental Disabilities to improve their lives through a Medicaire Program. I'm not sure if that is irony or that was all a God Wink of preparation. 

 

 Eventually three alcoholics on pills and disability in one house was too much even for my Dad (my Uncle had moved in with our Grandmother too). So he used his G.I. Bill from serving in the Air Force during Vietnam to purchase a modular home (that's a super nice double wide trailer for those who are unaware). It was the nicest place we had ever lived in. It had a dishwasher and central heat and air and I never did see any holes in the walls. Best bath I had ever taken in my entire life at 16 was in that place! He had the modular placed on top of the hill next to our cabin which had literally fallen in on itself. Both the cabin and the modular were about 10 yards from Highway 64 which everyone had to use to go in and out of town.  

 

 I tried to come home one day to the modular and my Dad was drunk on the porch in his Lynrd-Skynrd (an old southern rock band) sleeveless shirt (this is important later), and his cowboy hat and boots and jeans. On the day I tried to come home he was in a rage I could feel from the highway. This made me concerned for my little brother even though my little brother was his favorite.  I had parked my little two-seater street car I had bought from a deacon for 500 dollars in the gravel driveway and before I could get to the stairs he threw a full glass quart beer bottle at my head. My training kicked in and I dodged it so the bottle smashed against the car I had bought the week before which made it worse.

 

Miraculously my Mom's Dad, who had more medals from World War II than anyone I had ever met in my life (U.S Army Infantry in D-Day, Invasion of Berlin, Invasion of Sicily, with countless confirmed Nazi kills despite his 90 pound frame and soft voice) had pulled up right before I got there to check on my little brother. My little brother was hiding out at someone else's house and my grandfather had seen the whole episode go down. So he just said  "come on home with me son" with tears in his eyes and I followed him to his dilapidated two bedroom farm house on the other end of the county and that's where I lived until I shipped to Air Force Boot Camp in Texas.

 

Me and my grandfather got along great. He had to drop out of school in 4th grade to help his father and siblings sharecrop during the Great Depression and never returned so he could barely read. He and his siblings wore potato sacks to school for lack of clothes. Then he volunteered for the Army. Then he was a maintenance man at a low income apartment complex until he retired with lungs full of asbestos. They were so poor that my Mom and her siblings had to pick cotton on the side of the road during the Summers just to buy school clothes but they had a big family and they were loved. He also grew most of his own food in a garden behind his house on through his 80's. We helped each other out as I read his mail and answered his phone calls and talked to his doctors and he gave me a safe roof and love and wisdom. He later died when I was living in Europe as an exchange student at age 27. His first wife (my grandmother on my Mom's side) died when in 1986 I believe, I was 6 years old.

That day was the very last time that I saw that modular, our long awaited "dream home". We it had for less than a year before it was very publicly and very shamefully taken away. When it was repossessed by the finance company they put a big yellow tape roll around the whole thing for every passerby we knew from school and church to gawk at. After that, somewhere inside, I learned to just not hope for every having a nice home. The cabin next too it had fallen apart with the wooden pillars crooked and the roof caving in for a show that everyone in our little world could get a laugh from.

This dream, maybe the most powerful dream of my life at 41 years old, was in front of the modular.

 

 In the beginning of the dream,  my birth Dad and I were standing on the hill down from the modular. He had on his Lynyrd-Skynyrd sleeveless shirt and boots and jeans and cowboy hat. I was standing not close to him but not far from being shoulder to shoulder. I was about the age I was when I decided that working two jobs in two different counties at once wasn't a life I wanted to lead so I would join the Air Force so they could pay for me to go to college. I was in civilian clothes in the dream though.

This figure appeared dressed somewhat similar to my Dad but he had on one of those "dusters" which are like leather trench coats that go down to the heel of the boots and the collar goes up to the ears. He also had on a cowboy hat and I couldn't see his face. He seemed like the evil gun slingers working for "LaHood" in Clint Eastwood's "Pale Rider".

 

The figure was communicating with my Dad through either very subtle hand and body movements or telepathically. My Dad, being fully inebriated for the past several years, was helpless to say "no" and was just like a puppet on a string. I was fully conscious and could see it all going down though.

 

The figure was almost giving instructions on how to wreck our family and keep us poor and of course to keep my Dad drunk and on pills. He seemed to want to make it so persistently hopeless that myself and my younger brother would never be able to imagine a way out, so we would just be sucked into the whirlpool of being generational white trash moving from one trailer park to the next until we die of cancer like the majority of the family already had.

In this dream, something welled up inside of me and I looked at this figure straight in it's 

shadowy face and said both politely and quietly yet firmly "NO".

 

Then I stepped forward from being beside my Dad, closure to the figure in the duster and hat.

 

I said "NO".

 

"No, We aren't going to do this anymore".

 

I knew I couldn't speak for my brother who wasn't present or his line, 

 

but I was speaking for myself and my future children. 

 

I said again, "We are Done playing your game and you really need to leave, Right Now". 

Then a huge cloud of dust came out from the woods behind the cabin and the modular where 

 

my brother and I use to play in the creeks as boys and it completely enveloped the shadowy figure. 

Then everything was much calmer and brighter like an early Spring day.

 I wish I could say that I woke up and my life suddenly changed. It didn't.

In fact, I fell ill the following week and couldn't eat solid food for nearly a month.  I also couldn't walk across the room for a week on vacation with my Messianic Congregation in Florida without falling over. In addition to sleeping in 30 minute bouts and throwing up even water until my throat was swelling up shut.

I almost went to the hospital on numerous occasions two of those weeks and might not have made it if some good friends hadn't taken care of me in Florida. On the way home I felt like God was offering me a choice of giving into the intimidation and going to the hospital and filing for disability as there were some other health problems such as high blood pressure and diabetes that this was making incredibly more severe that I likely wouldn't be able to recover from. The other choice was to follow His steps and letting Him heal me.  I asked HIM to heal me and the next morning he prompted me to eat the protein bowl breakfast at the hotel I had to get on my drive home to Tennessee in that condition. It was the first time I had eaten solid food in almost a month and it actually stayed down.

I got home that day and He showed me what to eat every single meal. It began with watermelon for the my circulatory and pineapple juice for my respiratory and fruits and worked up finally to a baked potato with chicken for carbs and protein. Now its far more protein than fruit.

He healed me over a five day period of the stomach bug and sinusitis that seems to have turned into Pneumonia (I did NOT have Covid, had none of the signs actually) with continued guidance on food. But not only did He heal from of that He also healed me of 4 decades of Depression, Anxiety, Insomnia, and Sugar Cravings. He also seems to have healed the pressure fracture in my spine and my slight scoliosis and my overeating. He also healed me from my fear of being fully vulnerable with you.

The Depression and Anxiety, plus lots of childhood emotional and physical abuse from my rageaholic grandfather, the shame of loading Napalm and also P.T.S.D drove my Earthly Dad to his addictions. 

My Heavenly Father cured me of the disorders I shared with my Earthly Dad that nearly took all of us out of the fight. I had decided before I even had children that they would never see their father in a drunken stupor or putting them in danger because he was high on drugs or had idiot friends. But they had seen their father worried to the point of exhaustion, depressed to the point of not fighting for them, and unable to sleep so he could fully be present for them in the little time he had with them. It just seemed like a battle I was doomed to fight alone and to never winning, just like poverty.

Those were the things I had never had it in my Spirit to stand up against until then.

 

After the dream and the intimidation and the miraculous healing, I no longer had my mind preoccupied with the past (Depression) or the Future (Anxiety). So I could focus on the moment and what I could do in the moment for a better life with and for my girls. I went to the store and bought healthier foods. I called the bank to set up an appointment to see how to work on my credit score and had a Divine Appointment there (paid off all collections and derogatory comments). I visited my installment loan lenders to ask about interest rates and pay offs and while that was extremely discouraging up front I did ask them all to round my payments up so I could pay each off faster. Additionally this told me which debt was smallest so I could pay it off first and then take that money and apply it to the next largest (a debt snow ball).  I also sought the advice of a VA Home Loan Agent, a Student Loan Adviser, and of my Attorney (to continue fighting for full custody which is extremely expensive but she works with me). All of which I had simply been too discouraged to do since being homeless in a divorce in 2013.

My student loans from three degrees (B.A. in History, B.A. in German that included studying in Europe, M.A. in Human Services Marriage and Family Counseling plus a year of Graduate School Seminary) are still keeping me from getting a home loan and a consolidation loan but now is not a good time to buy. Plus I think that God wants to help me solve the debt problem with something aside from more debt?

 

 I do begin hosting a t.v. show next month on the local Christian station (called "Let's Talk Shalom") with a local viewing audience of 300,00 so I am praying that some give generously. The mid-week of my air time is just after one my favorite Rabbis has his show "Discovering the Jewish Jesus". 

 

I am also taking a Hebrew Class online through http://www.isow.org and I am working on getting my Life Insurance License after getting my Life Coaching Certification last Summer. I get to see my girls but not enough and I'm hoping the Court will see fit to change that over the next 6 months.

 

 I am also hoping to have my third book on Amazon by the end of the year and I occasionally teach classes at local ministries on the topics I write about. Still no money, but a much better life.

So what can you, my beloved reader, take away from all of this tragedy and the new light of breaking dawn peeking through the rock wall that has held me in this pit of generational poverty?

Firstly, the Spirit World works by INVITATION. Somebody invited them into your Family's House, so its up to you to kick generational Demon Casper out and tell him to go on somewhere.  He has been hanging around the family for generations and he knows ya'll's weaknesses and triggers and discouragements very well by now so it could take some doing.  You can't act on behalf of other grown folks in the family sometimes but you can speak on behalf of you and your children in the very least. You can kick him out just like a drunk neighbor that won't leave. You kick him/them out however in the Name (Authority and Character) of Jesus/Yeshua. Kind of like calling the cops to remove someone not welcome, but this is Yeshua and He's a little more like Rambo than a patrol officer.

 

 Secondly, you have to examine yourself and your life and see what habits and thought patterns and spending habits and behavioral choices that you have on repeat just like your parents. I've never been high or drunk a single day in my life and my friends are all in ministry but STILL I had so many things turning out just like my Dad on a level that seemed to be purely supernatural in their nature. You also have to forgive and suspend judgment-esp. if they did what you are now doing.

Thirdly, you have to ACT instead of REACT. If somebody discouraging happens, sit down and think before you impulse buy or impulse borrow or impulse get yourself into a deeper hole of some kind.

Fourthly, you can't submit to the complacency that is currently trying to tap you out with a guillotine choke. If you "feel" like it is going to change anything or not, for the sake of your children wake up every day and do something no matter how small it seems to improve your situation. It may be ordering the fruit cup instead of fries at Chic-Fil-A or applying for just one job or making just that one phone call.  Act upon your situation instead of it acting upon you.

Five, pick up the freaking phone and call some of those people you think are looking down their nose at you. You'd be surprised at the people in high places with a lot of wisdom and understanding that God will place in your path to help you out if you are willing to talk it out. The one in my life right now is named Tony and he works at Regions Bank in Collegedale. I got turned down for a loan twice but the understanding of how credit scores and loans and mortgages work he shared with me is invaluable.

Six, if you are by chance the smartest/most talented/most hard working/most inspired/most spiritual person in the room, then you are clearly in the wrong room. Surround yourself with people that you can learn from and you would be happy to be more like. Even if its intimidating, it is surely worth it.

 

Seven, don't stop the boat for stowaways. There are some loyalties and duties and honor we have to pay to the people in the past who helped us along the way, sure. We cannot however stop moving forward for the sake of people that refuse to move from where they are despite a multitude of opportunities. There are lots of people who had to move on from me when I was sitting in the mud and they were on their way to the river to be baptized. 

I don't blame them anymore today and in fact, I admire their wisdom.

Eight, don't settle. I don't mean be a picky brat who over values what they bring to the table. What I mean is don't say to yourself  "I have this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach but I should commit to this anyway because people like me aren't able to do or have any better". That sinking feeling is the Holy Spirit telling you to not sign that piece of paper/put that ring on your finger, take that high interest loan, because that is NOT for you Bubba.

Nine, never put God or your life in a box. I failed 1st Grade and failed 11th Grade and dropped out of High School and along the way I was diagnosed with "Slight Mental Retardation" in Elementary School. I also failed Math three times in Junior and High School and I forgot how often in College. I happen to have spent 5 years in a Special Education Classroom because I can't divide a fraction. Still have three College Diplomas on these walls though and I'm also still trying to find the address of the person who listed me as "Slightly Mentally Retarded" so I can mail them a copy registered mail and KNOW they saw it and remembered my name. Famous Game Show Host Steve Harvey had a teacher who told him "You need to quit because you will NEVER be on television Steve Harvey". He has had FedEx deliver her a Panasonic Television every year for three decades now I believe just so she can see his smile on Channel 5. He had several nights when he didn't know where he was going to sleep but he made it. It's okay to be mad at being underestimated but like that Eminem song, let it push you not burn you. Miracles happen all the time and some will have your name on them if you request them from HIM.

Finally, for Number Ten....This may "seem" self-obvious but deep down in the core of our being we STILL don't get it. So hear me loud and clear "YOU ARE NOT SMARTER THAN GOD". Quit laughing and let that circle on the hamster wheel between your ears for a minute. If we really think this through, just because YOU in your very very limited human intellect and short decades of existence and experience cannot see a way out of a situation that in no way means that God can't see it plain as day. All you have to do is get down on your knees and admit that you don't know,and ask HIM for next steps. Jesus called those next steps "Daily Bread". You don't ask for the bakery, the master plan, you couldn't handle it and it would all mold over on you. Just the DAILY Bread, your marching orders from this sunset to the next. This builds relationship which He values more than you buying a house or a new car.

Shalom to your Hearts 

 

 

 

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