By Justin Black
Justin and Alexis are authors, speakers, and business owners. Together, they’ve created The Scholarship Expert and The ROSE Empowerment Group to support hundreds of young people. Now, with their new venture, Redefining Normal, they hope to continue the conversation on healthy relationships, mental health, and healing.
What is your normal? As a nine-year-old, the poverty-stricken drug-induced neighborhood my family and I lived in was ours. Our way of life was acceptable in our community, but the day that Child Protective Services (CPS) came knocking on our door, my life would change forever.
My transition into the foster care system was a wild one. My mom and dad were separated at the time and my mom had a new boyfriend who enabled her addiction and other bad habits. Around early October of 2005, my mom welcomed a former co-worker to stay with us as she escaped an abusive relationship. My mom had a heart for those experiencing physical abuse because she had dealt with similar issues with my dad. Though addicted to drugs, my mother was comforting to the weak and needy. If a friend of ours became homeless, without hesitation she’d offer a couch or our room as a shelter. My mom tried to make sure that no one around her had to suffer. Unfortunately, addiction blinded her of the true suffering we endured throughout life.
Her former co-worker only stayed with us for a week, but she noticed the quality of life we were living. We were behind on rent for months and regularly without hot water and heat. The refrigerator was always empty until the first of the month when we received our food stamps. Hundreds of roaches would scatter in the bedrooms once you turned the light on. We lived with roaches, bed bugs, and any other thing you could think of. When my mom’s drug addiction got worse with her new boyfriend, her former co-worker truly saw us at our worst.
One or two days after she left, Child Protective Services (CPS) came knocking on our door. Even though all of the signs were there, I never believed my mom did drugs. When she went to rehab for a short time and CPS paid regular visits, my heart never allowed me to accept that she was addicted to drugs until she actually said the words, years later.
On the run from CPS, my mom, two older brothers, and my sister who was pregnant at the time, resorted to living in an abandoned house in our old neighborhood of Southwest Detroit. Including my sister’s boyfriend, there were six of us living together in one abandoned house. We had no water, no heat, and were without any source of income. My mom was regularly gone, so my sister Tiffany and her boyfriend assumed the role of our parental figures at 18 and 20 years old.
My dream was to reestablish what my grandparents had built. I believed this house could be the house we always wanted and needed. This could be the house where my nieces and nephews would grow up and my kids would one day visit. I thought of this house being known as grandma and grandpa’s house for my children and great-grandchildren. This idea sparked a dream of rebuilding our neighborhood and bringing glory back to the city of Detroit. I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do in life, but at the age of eight, I knew it was our responsibility to rebuild the city and our neighborhood.
Unfortunately, the bad influences of the community only worsened my mom’s drug use. Strangers throughout the neighborhood who were also addicts regularly showed up at our house. My dad came back around and continued his drug dealing and this was the first time I had seen him in action. I grew up around dealers so discovering that my dad was one as well didn’t mean much to me. Our house officially became known as a trap house, a house on the block known for drug use and drug dealing. Addicts would sit on the couch next to me as they waited for my dad to arrive. They would often try to make small talk with me, but I ignored them most of the time because I knew they were addicts.
From the outside looking in, these may seem like extreme situations, but I had a lot of fun during those times. I was eight years old and I didn’t go to school, which I thought was cool. We used an extension cord from a neighbor’s house to plug in a TV and play video games. My parents were either gone or hiding away in their room, so I had no one telling me what to do. I believed my dad would eventually make this into a real home. But most of all, I was ignorant of what was going on around me. I didn’t know anything outside of the life we lived and extreme circumstances became daily activities. Seeing addicts in our house became normal and didn’t bother me after a while. Strangely, life seemed good and this became our normal.
*
As the Michigan winter began, I started shoveling snow to make a little money. Living in an abandoned house during the fall wasn’t bad, but when winter came along, things weren’t pretty. Detroit’s winter winds are brutal. Living in a home with no heat became unbearable. Without running water, we had to scoop snow off of the ground, carry it inside in buckets and wait for it to melt to use as makeshift showers. No one in the house had a bed so we regularly piled up clothes to sleep on to avoid feeling the wood and sharp nails sticking out of the floor. We lived on baloney, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and anything we could make easily. To this day, the smell of gasoline recalls those gasoline heaters we used to warm our dinner in abandoned housing. By the end of January, everyone in the house was sick.
Both of my brothers had miserable stomach viruses that passed onto me. Shortly after, I became sick as well, vomiting and having diarrhea simultaneously. Our living conditions were taking a toll on our health. With my sister only a few months from having her baby and my brother Andre having his first child any day, as an eight-year-old I began to realize how bad our situation was. Meanwhile, my mom told us to make her funeral arrangements, instructing us on the music she wanted played and other details.
As spring arrived, Child Protective Services somehow found out where we were staying. My dad had been making excuses for months of why he couldn’t fix the house and resorted to hiding from CPS. I began to lose faith in my parents. They told us that we would have the house fixed by the time CPS came to visit again. They never had any plans to fix the house at all, and my dreams of making it a home were long gone. I thought fixing the house would be the first piece of making us into one happy family. When CPS finally visited, our parents told us to hide. I ducked behind the living room couch in case they peaked through the windows. We all remained silent as we heard the social worker knock on the door. We did our best, but my parents had no choice but to let us go.
All four of us separated on our individual journeys; it was up to us to figure out life on our own, with the foundation set by our parents. I still clung to the faith I’d had in my parents. At the same time, I felt that they had let me down completely. Here is where my mental health issues began. Filled with anxiety I thought, “If I couldn’t trust my parents, I reasoned, who would I be able to trust?”
Drug abuse is a result of unhealthy ways to deal with mental health issues. Many Black communities have been deprived of information on positive ways to maintain or improve mental health. The resources tha
t other ethnic groups have access to compared to those available to Black communities puts youth like me at an immediate disadvantage. Society has put a dollar value on mental health and if you can’t afford a counselor, then you’re out of luck. Of course, mental health support and the stability it offers help pull impoverished communities away from the brink of destruction. Many impoverished Black communities have little if any access to information about mental health. Without these resources, Black youth are positioned for failure, stuck in patterns of unhealthy behavior, creating an imperishable cultural hierarchy among ethnic groups in the U.S.
Anxiety and depression are swept under the rug in Black communities, usually going unnamed and unaddressed. Black men make up more than half of the prison population in this country, meaning that huge numbers of Black children are growing up without their fathers. With the appropriate therapeutic resources, the number of Black men behind bars would drop drastically, which would contribute greatly to reducing the violence and poverty in Black communities and households. Because I grew up in a household that lacked any knowledge of how to resolve conflict healthily, I was positioned to become another statistic. It wasn’t until I took advantage of the resource (and privilege) of counseling that I learned how generational cycles could be reversed and how to disrupt the path of brokenness set for Black men and women in impoverished communities.
Learn more about how you too can redefine your normal in our new book Redefining Normal: How Two Foster Kids Beat The Odds and Discovered Healing, Happiness, and Love available now at re-definingnormal.com and on Amazon.