⚠️ Content Advisory: Mother Wounds, Custodial Trauma & Complicated Grief
Includes candid reflections on maternal estrangement and emotional wounds, and the long shadow of custodial trauma, including parental abduction.
If you carry tenderness around these subjects—please read with care.
This piece was written through the lens of healing.
It is not meant to accuse, but to name what happened in service of soul release.
Take what you need. Leave the rest. You are not alone in the ache or the reckoning.
Recently, I watched the movie Hope Floats with Sandy Bullock. It’s one of my favorites, but it’s not without scenes that hit painfully close to home.
Spoiler alert
Birdee Calvert-Pruitt, a former prom queen turned Chicagoan housewife, is married to her high-school sweetheart and ex-star quarterback, Bill. Birdee is invited onto a talk show under the guise of receiving a makeover. When the blindfold comes off, she discovers she’s sharing the stage with Bill and her best friend, Connie. Birdee isn’t there for a glow-up—she’s there to learn that Bill and Connie are in love and starting a life together.
Bill and Birdee’s young daughter, Bernice, sits in the studio audience, sobbing. Bernice and Birdee retreat to a rural Texas town and move into Birdee’s childhood home, where her eccentric mother, Ramona (played by the late, great, incomparable Gena Rowlands), lives with Birdee’s nephew, Travis—the son of Birdee’s often-absent younger sister.
Bernice struggles as the new kid and gets bullied, though she at least finds a best friend and has her cousin, Travis, for support.
Also waiting back home is Justin, a real estate developer and town handyman who’s carried a torch for Birdee since high school—though back then, she only had eyes for Bill.
Everyone in town saw Birdee’s talk show ambush, so her return is both a reckoning and a humbling. As the former golden girl, she left a trail of bruised feelings—some of which now stand between her and landing a job, since she has to swallow her pride and ask them for references.
Both Birdee and Bernice are reeling from Bill’s absence. One day, Bernice calls her father and tearfully tells him as much. Bill calls Birdee to say he’s sorry she’s sad, but insists she needs to pull it together for their daughter. Birdee hangs up, grabs Bernice, and declares that they’re fine. But Bernice pushes back: “No, we’re not.” She says her mother sleeps all the time, doesn’t ask about her day, and barely notices her. Birdee, confronted with the truth, softens and apologizes.
Meanwhile, Ramona—who was never Bill’s biggest fan—starts playing matchmaker between Birdee and Justin. One night, she invites Justin to dinner and suddenly “remembers” that she and Bernice need to eat in the kitchen, leaving Birdee and Justin alone. But Justin’s questions about her failed marriage hit a nerve, and Birdee snaps. So does Bernice—storming into the dining room to defend her father, shouting at Justin to leave, and getting scolded by Birdee for her behavior.
Birdee storms out and ends up at a local bar, drunk. When her high school nemesis heckles her, Birdee—finally, gloriously—gives it right back, and better.
The next morning, Bernice finds her mother passed out on the bathroom floor and storms off, angry and heartbroken. Ramona steps in, offering comfort to her daughter—a daddy’s girl she’s never quite been able to reach. Later, Birdee, disheveled in a nightgown and housecoat, brings Bernice’s forgotten lunch to school. Embarrassed, Bernice sees her mother outside and walks inside school without acknowledgment.
After a town hoedown, Birdee and Justin make love in the bed of his truck, parked outside his unfinished dream home. At dawn, Birdee quietly slips away before Justin wakes up. As she tiptoes through the house, Bernice, watching through her cracked bedroom door, catches her in the act. Their eyes meet—and Bernice slams the door in disgust.
Meanwhile, Ramona—who had shown signs of physical decline—dies suddenly of a massive heart attack. Birdee’s sister doesn’t attend the funeral, choosing instead to send her son a telegram. But Bill shows up. And he doesn’t just come to pay respects—he comes to ask Birdee for a divorce.
In a raw exchange, Birdee tells Bill she twisted herself inside out trying to be what he wanted. That she wasn’t a quitter. That she would’ve walked through fire for their family. Bill, unapologetic, tells her this is his shot at happiness, and he’s taking it. He insists she not make him feel bad about it. Birdee lets him go—telling him he should take it… because she got the best part of him: their daughter.
Just then, Bernice runs upstairs, shouting that she’s going with her father. She hurriedly packs a tiny suitcase filled mostly with stuffed animals. Birdee silently watches from the hallway. Outside, Bill loads his car as Bernice barrels down the walkway. “I’m coming with you, Daddy!” she yells. Bill calls out to Birdee for help, but she sits quietly on the porch steps, unmoved. She doesn’t intervene.
Bernice, sobbing, begs him to open the car door. He tells her he’ll come back once he and Connie are settled—that she needs to stay and take care of her mother. Bernice wails that she doesn’t want to, that he wrote he wanted her. Bill gets in the car and cracks the window, tearfully telling her, “I’ll always want you. You’re my little princess.” Then he drives away, honking as he goes—either as a farewell… or to drown out her cries. To this day, it’s hard to say which.
Birdee walks to the curb, scoops up her devastated daughter—wearing four-inch heels and all—and carries her inside. There, Bernice looks up and asks why she wrote that letter pretending it was from her father. Birdee pulls her close and whispers that she has such a vivid imagination.
I had to be about Bernice’s age when my father pulled a Bill.
I was maybe six, and playing in the great room of our basement, when I saw my father in the hallway packing hurriedly. I went out to inquire where he was going.
“You going on a trip?” I asked.
Silence.
“You going to work?” I asked differently.
My father had a job that, every now and then, took him away for days at a time.
When my previous question and the next went unanswered, I watched as my father took the stairs two at a time, only stopping to open the door when he reached the landing.
I ran after him and outside to watch him jump into his mother’s baby blue Ford Granada. It’s as if she were driving the getaway car in a bank heist from which my Dad had narrowly escaped capture. And I was the security guard.
My father was the OG (Black) Bill.
At least Bernice got an explanation and a horn honk.
Unbeknownst to me, my older sister had been upstairs, caretaking our emotionally wrecked mother, who would continue a roller coaster spiral until her death.
Bernice from Waiting To Exhale didn’t have shit on my mother when it came to a woman being scorned. Like Bernice, my mother had also been left for a white woman. While my mother did not burn up all my father’s belongings, she did try to run him down with us in the car. In a full leg cast, he fell over into a snow mound when she accelerated the vehicle, trying to hit him. We were screaming in the back seat, but the all-consuming rage was the only thing she could here.
But the cherry on top was making her parents accomplices to our kidnapping. My parents had a knack for implicating their parents in their attack campaigns against one another. Except for the ones who suffered the most, the line of fire was my sister and I. My grandparents dropped off at Union Station in Chicago, and we were all abroad to Arizona.
Fuck her, God rest her soul. I love you, Mama.
I was just starting to excel academically, having been invited into the GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) program.
GATE, popular 1980s and running into the 1990s, was established to identify and support children with exceptional abilities — usually in math, science, or the arts. Normalized now through what is known as modern day STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics…sans the Arts.
Kids were often:
- Pulled out of general population classes
- Given advanced curriculum
- Socially isolated or made to feel “other”
- Sometimes exposed to psychological tests or experiments
The government knew the 3rd grade me was psychic long before I ever.
These kids were told they were special. And we were.
But what if that “special” was also surveillance?
Stay with me.
1. Overlap with Remote Viewing Era
The CIA’s psychic research, including Project Stargate, MK-Ultra, and SCANATE, was still active or only just winding down in the exact era GATE was expanding.
➤ Pat Price dies in 1975. Ingo Swann continues to train military psychics into the 80s.
➤ GATE explodes across U.S. school systems in the late 70s and 80s.
Braided timelines if you will.
It would make perfect strategic sense for intelligence agencies to seed talent searches through “educational” programs, screening for:
- High intuitive ability
- Lucid dreamers
- “Abstract thinkers” (aka multirealm perceivers)
- Children who spontaneously remote-viewed or described “imaginary friends” who weren’t imaginary
My gifts didn’t begin in adulthood. That’s how they spotted me and other kids like me.
2. Common Experiences of GATE Alumni (Receipts!)
Across Reddit threads, anonymous forums, and even interviews, former GATE kids report:
Memory gaps or unexplained “missing time”
Being pulled aside for tests not given to other students
Being shown flashing images (some report trauma-related visuals)
Hearing high-pitched frequencies in class
Taking surveys or drawing “dream maps” and energy diagrams
Feeling like “lab kids” or emotionally detached observers of their peers
Many later awakened as empaths, psychics, mediums, or had spontaneous kundalini or remote viewing episodes, but felt “watched” or tracked throughout life.
Many of us GATE kids weren’t just bright. We were beakers on an aircraft.
3. MK-Ultra Subprograms Often Used Educational Fronts
MK-Ultra had over 180 subprojects, many disguised as:
- University research (e.g., Harvard, Stanford, McGill)
- Gifted programs
- Military family school experiments
- Spiritual or consciousness studies
Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff ran their psychic experiments under Stanford Research Institute, a government contractor. GATE was not a random initiative — it came to schools just as these programs “disbanded.”But intelligence programs never die. They just rebrand.
So maybe not fuck you Mama. You inadvertently (or advertently) saved me from being a Department of Education Lab Rat. Or maybe it prolonged my suffering of not fully knowing why I never felt like I fully fit in. And why am I just now coming fully to understand and integrate my gifts? So…back to fuck you again?!
We made it to Arizona, and while it was an adjustment, we settled in. We were not allowed to answer the phone or the door in case the law (our father) came looking for us. He eventually found us and we had to travel back to our hometown and tell the judge who we wanted to live with. We said our mom since she was all alone.
My father had since gotten married to the woman he was seeing when he moved out. I skipped the wedding to stand in solidarity with my mom. As a reward, she promised we’d go to the movies and out to eat. My reward was eating an American cheese slice, topped with ketchup, on the curb with muddy fingers, while my sister ate cake and danced with my cousins down the street. I hadn’t known then that my mother was in bed, grieving –– oscillating between anger, naps and sobs at the loss of her husband to another woman. As a kid, all I saw was that she broke, the first of many, promises.
On The Move –– Again….
A third of the way through seventh grade, my mother had essentially run out of jobs from which to get fired, so we had to move again. This time to a small town outside New Orleans. My sister and I went from a predominantly white space where our friends’ parents treated us as one of their own, to predominantly Black classrooms where I was teased for talking and dressing white.
I was bullied, and I hated home just as much, if not more than, school. We moved in with my mother’s younger sister, her husband and their twin boys. I shared a room with my sister, and much like Birdee, my mom spent a lot of time in her room –– absent.
Our car got repossessed. Our neighbor, a made guy from the previous town who was sweet on my mom, “bought” the car for her. He probably had no idea that when he got the car for her, she would skip town in it shortly thereafter.
My mom had a real boyfriend, an Air Force veteran with whom she was deeply in love. One day, he just up and flew back to Honduras… with our matching 10-speed bikes still in his shed. When the mob(ster) got wind that we left with what was basically his car, he sent a guy who knew a guy to Louisiana to get his car back.
My mother was humiliated as she removed her personal belongings from the first car we ever heard talk. But you can’t shit on people and not expect consequences. She had a knack for that. Borrowing money, for example, from her sister, then returning her sibling’s rage, with either surprise or indignance. Kidnapping children she shared with her ex-husband… Stealing a car from a neighbor and thinking you could get away with it… My mother was the textbook definition of better to ask for forgiveness and instead permission, except she rarely apologized.
Moving…Again, Again
Having had enough of all of that was Louisiana, its energy and badly-built below sea level-ness, I hatched a plan to leave. My best friend and I, along with two other school friends, decided to run away and live with one of the guys’ sister in Florida. Twelve, twelve, fourteen and fifteen. Who the fuck had a license in 7th grade you ask? Guys, I told you this was Louisiana. One of the guys in the group with fifteen in the 8th grade. The state being consistently ranked among the worst for education in the United States is unearned.
We made our escape and got as far as –– I forgot. But we ran out of gas. We even picked up a hitchhiker along the way. Talk about being young, dumb and full of cum. I don’t even know how I am still alive with half the dumb shit I have done that endangered my life. God really does take care of fools and babies. I am both –– then and still now.
Since I didn’t want to go back to Louisiana, and since my dad and stepmother drew the shortest straw: Surprise! It’s a girl!
Like any wise white woman worth her salt: She threw my ass straight to the nuns and into therapy. Much like PKs – Preacher’s kids, and the other PKs – Policeman’s kids, Catholic school kids were far more deviant and problematic than public school kids.
He hurled spitballs at me
Last and final school of seventh grade.
Sitting in music class, a kid, Brad something or another, projected spit-drenched paper balls through a straw that landed with force at the back of my head. After the second one or so, my stick-thin chocolate legs and mahogany colored bass weejun loafers were in the air, along with a plaid skirt revealing my panties of the week. I windmilled the fuck out of this kid for picking on me as the newbie.
I beat Brad for the bullies in Louisiana, for feeling like I had to choose my mom and missing the wedding of the people who I was now forced to depend on for my very survival, for that stupid ass itchy skirt, for missing my mom and sister…for having to be the new kid…again.
When the principal asked why I did it. I sat catatonic in her office, with tears streaming down my face, rocking back and forth like a mental patient, repeating over and over that he “wouldn’t leave me alone…” My Dad later told me that he and the principal shared a brief chuckle at my reaction to Brad’s behavior. She said he had it coming.
I’ll speed this up…
- Dancing on Bourbon Street at 20.
- In county jail facing felony assault at 21.
She, too, wouldn’t leave me alone. I asked her nicely. - Science degree by 22.
- Flight attendant by 28.
- Mama dead by 29.
We weren’t speaking when Mother transitioned. I am no clinician, but I’d bet my prized Jem and the Holograms prized DVD collection (that’s not a real thing, btw) that there was at least one Cluster B personality disorder floating around in my mother’s energetic field. If so, it tracks.
My mother once shared that her mother spent the first part of her high school years held up in a back room of the house – “asleep”. My mother became the housekeeper, cook and caretaker for her three younger siblings… on top of managing her full school course load. Back then, you weren’t allowed to speak of or label breakdowns and psychosis. You were just banished to the back until you came to terms with your husband’s serial infidelity.
During college, I went back to Louisiana to care for her after her diagnosis. We grew close and in many ways, it help mend our relationship. She hadn’t been angered so much by the way in which I left –– she was mad at that; but it was for whom she was left. She felt rejected that I had chose my father (and that “woman” lol) over her. When I shared that I thought they were both ill-equipped, as strange as it sounds, it put her ego a bit more at ease.
She went on to share that before she “took” us, she went to her mother and asked if the three of us could move into their basement. She always dreams of being a principal and asked if they would support her –– us while she went back to school. Without even consulting my grandfather, my grandmother told her no. Because she knew he would have yes. Why was my grandmother down to aid and abet, but not help foster a future for her daughter and granddaughters?! My Grammy was a piece of work when it came to how she “loved” my mother –– loved us!
Did she resent my mother for trying to advance and rebuild herself after a man?
When she was a teen mother whose boyfriend dumped her upon hearing the news?
A pick-me, grateful that when a new guy, the Poppy I have only ever known, chose to be with a girl who “stubbed her toe”, and brought a toddler in tow to their marriage? Was it that Grammy wanted Poppy all to herself, sans the interruption from her eldest and granddaughters?
Hell, I would have thought she wanted the company, since she spent her nights alone, well, with her husband spending his nights with a woman who was her carbon copy, across town.
I remember my mom sharing that on her senior ditch day, she saw Poppy driving down the street with another woman in his car. She said that as adults, she and my uncles begged their mom to leave their dad. She never would, because she said she had nowhere else to go. She had been with him since she was a teen. She had no life skills outside of being a housewife and playing bingo. Where was she going to go?
I loved that my mother did not want that for us. I remember her trying to get a better job and a house for the three of us in our town. I remember some of the affordable places we looked at being shit, and she refused to have her children living like that. So I suppose when she felt all options were exhausted, her friend from high school invited her out West to start a new life. It was a disaster as you would imagine –– but in the best possible way. I wouldn’t trade that time in my life. And I do not say that often. I loved living in Arizona and cried when we left. More than I did our hometown.
I was living in DC the last time we spoke. She snapped at me for moving (read: CLEANING) something at her house during one of her frequent hospitalizations. I was on an aircraft between flights. I lied and told her the gate agent was sending passengers, and that I had to go.
The day I got the call, I felt something earlier in the day was off. I thought about calling. But the Taurus in me – my nervous system said, “you can’t continue to revisit spaces – physical or even conversations – that harm you. Then I got a call from the fire department. I hung up on the paramedic when he told me, then called my Dad scream/crying inconsolably.
Thank God, unlike Birdee, I didn’t have a bratty Bernice and a selfish bastard named Bill with which to contend when my mother died. But like Ramona, my mother had a closet. And like Birdee, on the day of my mother’s funeral, I found a garment of my mother’s and wept into it for the fantastically flawed matriarch who would no longer be there in the flesh. I wept for what was, what had been and what she would never be.
While my mom may not have been the best parent, she was a terrific mother to many. Confidant, sewer of wedding dresses, refuge for DV escapees… the neighborhood mama.
In a previous post, I recounted a download that my Spirit Squad downloaded to me:
Some souls — especially the ones you come through biologically — were not sent here to see you.
• They were sent here to shape you.
• To activate your divine rebellion.
• To teach you how to choose yourselves.
And that she did –– activated my rebellion.
Not only that. During our fragmented time together, she taught me street smarts and how to honor my masculinity.
•She taught me how to change a tire and the oil in my car.
•That I should stay near and linger while my car is being worked on, especially if being serviced by an alley mechanic.
•To move from, but especially into new spaces at night –– so your neighbor wouldn’t clock your shit and rob you.
•To never, EVER spend your rent money on a new pair of shoes at Dillards, even if a man promises to give you money.
Otherwise, you could find yourself out of a home with cute feet. Always protect yourself and consider anything he gives you extra.
It is from her that I was reintroduced to the love of sewing from a previous lifetime.
I am grateful to and for her as long as I had her. And she hasn’t gone anywhere.
She is always around and available anytime my heart allows her to be.
She was a real one.
She never sugar-coated things.
But she allowed us to very much still be kids. She gave us her last –– often.
But always seemed to make miracles when preserving the arts in our lives.
We didn’t have much materially –– but I never felt like we were missing out.
And in that way –– she was perfect. Even if imperfectly so.
Up Next: Part II picks up inside a different kind of home—where love, longing, and lineage collided between two women bound by one man and an unspoken ache. What happens when the one who raises you is also reckoning with her own ghosts? Stay with me. This chapter matters.
💫 A Gentle Invitation Before You Go
What you just read might have stirred something. Maybe it cracked something open. Maybe it made you remember. Or maybe it was just… a lot.
If you’re open, I want to offer you a soft landing. A quick moment to call your energy home and bring your nervous system back to center.
Try this:
Close your eyes (if it’s safe). Drop your shoulders. Unclench your jaw.
Take a deep breath in… for 3 seconds.
Inhale what is yours.
Hold for 3 seconds.
Anchor into yourself.
Exhale for 3 seconds.
Release what is not yours to carry.
Place your hand on your chest or your belly.
Say, out loud or silently:
“I am here. I am safe. I return to myself now.”
“I call my energy back to me now—lovingly, gently, and fully.”
That’s it.
Take your time. Drink water. Stretch.
You’re back.
✨ Want to go deeper?
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Jehan Cicely | www.awakenedasshole.com
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