Chapter 1
Author's Note & Prologue: The State's Record, The Brother's Truth
*The Woman My Mother Became* Before you meet my mother in these pages, there is something I need you to know. The woman you are about to read about is real. I will not soften what happened, excuse it, or rewrite my childhood to make the past easier to accept. The fear was real. The drugs were real. The biker life, the partying, the instability, the neglect, and the abuse were real. For a long time, I carried an enormous amount of anger toward my mother for the childhood Eric and I were forced to survive. But that is not the whole story of Robin. Because somehow, against everything I remembered about her, my mother changed. And I don't mean she changed a little. She walked away from the biker life. She got clean. The drugs disappeared. The parties stopped. The chaos that had once surrounded her was replaced by a clean home and dinner on the table at the same time every night. She raised her other two daughters in a way that Eric and I never got to experience. They knew a different mother. That was difficult for me to witness sometimes. There was a part of me that wanted to ask, Why couldn't you have been that mother for us? Why did those girls get the clean house, the stability, the dinners, and the mother who was present when Eric and I got the woman you will meet in these pages? There may never be an answer that completely satisfies the little boy inside me. But as I grew older, I also had to recognize something extraordinary: she did the work. My mother fought her way out of the life that had consumed her. She became a good mother. And eventually, she became an incredible grandmother to my children. My kids did not know the woman I feared as a child. They knew Grandma. They knew her love, her presence, and the woman she had fought so hard to become. That doesn't erase what happened to Eric and me. And what happened to us doesn't erase what she became. Both things are true. So when you become angry with my mother while reading this book and there may be times when you will, I ask you to remember that you are meeting her at a particular moment in her life. You are meeting the woman she was. Later, I will introduce you to the woman she became. And perhaps that is part of this story too. People can cause terrible damage. They can leave wounds that last generations. But sometimes, if they are willing to fight hard enough, they can change the direction of everything that comes after them. My mother could never go back and give Eric and me a different childhood. But she could become a different woman. And she did.
PROLOGUE:
The File and the Boy
They say memory is fragile, especially a child’s that it bends under pressure, softens sharp edges,
rearranges details, and sometimes changes the past just enough to make surviving it possible.
I have heard that before.
I also know what happens when I tell people pieces of my childhood.
A boy living on freezing streets before his eleventh birthday.
Watching a man get shot with a double-barrel shotgun when he was seven.
Foster homes. Group homes. Psychiatric wards. Police. Social workers. Courtrooms.
People’s faces change.
Their brows tighten. Their eyes search mine. Sometimes there is a small, polite distance between
believing me and wondering whether any childhood could really have been that bad.
I understand why.
It is easier to question a man’s memory than to believe that the adults and systems created to protect
children could fail two little boys so completely.
But this story is not just memory.
There is a paper trail.
On December 6, 1977, just four days before my third birthday, the San Diego County Juvenile Court
declared my little brother Eric and me dependent children of the court.
From then until I turned eighteen, pieces of my life were recorded in ink.
Every placement had paperwork.
Every incident generated a report.
Social workers wrote progress notes. Police officers typed summaries. Psychiatrists evaluated me.
Attorneys stood in courtrooms discussing my future while I sat beneath them, too young to understand
most of the words being used to describe my life.
Whenever I was moved, evaluated, restrained, injured, or labeled a problem, somebody wrote something down.
Somewhere, those pages still exist.
Dated.
Signed.
Stamped.
Inside them, my childhood was translated into phrases such as minor placed in temporary shelter,
behavioral disruption, family instability, and maternal substance abuse.
Clean language.
Administrative language.
Words that fit neatly inside boxes and margins.
But behind those words were two boys.
My name is Benjamin Jones.
My little brother was Eric Timothy Jones.
He was fifteen months younger than me, and for most of my childhood, where I went, Eric went.
We learned early how to read a room before entering it. We knew the difference between an adult who
was angry and one who was dangerous. We knew when to stay quiet. We knew when to hide. We knew
when one of us needed to take the blame for the other.
We learned things children should never have needed to learn.
Most importantly, we learned to stay together.
Eric was more than my little brother.
He was my best friend.
In unfamiliar bedrooms, foster homes, relatives’ houses, dark hallways, and nights when neither of us
knew what would happen next, there was one thing I could count on:
He was there.
Our mother, Robin, drifted in and out of our lives like weather.
The records describe neglect, substance abuse, unstable relationships, and an inability to provide adequate
care. Those words are accurate, but they cannot reproduce a smell, a sound, or the fear inside a child’s
stomach. I remember stale cigarettes and cheap perfume.
I remember slammed doors.
I remember arguments coming through the walls.
I remember emergency lights flashing outside while we hid in another room.
I remember watching police arrest my mother after my uncle’s arm had been cut nearly to the bone with a
butcher knife.
And through so much of it, I remember Eric’s hand in mine.
Not every door we walked through led to pain. Some opened to kindness, and those doors deserve to be
remembered too.
Grandma June’s house smelled like Christmas fir needles, cinnamon, and gingerbread. For a child who
never knew how long anything would last, walking through her door felt like entering another world.
There were relatives who tried. There were people who gave us moments of safety.
And later there was Jim Fantoni.
Jim was rough around the edges, with calloused hands and a gruff laugh. For a short time, he gave me
something I had spent years searching for: the feeling of having a father.
The official record might reduce someone like Jim to a few words:
Family friend. Temporary placement.
But children do not remember people as case classifications.
I remember him teaching me things.
I remember feeling wanted.
I remember believing, however briefly, that maybe I had finally found somewhere I could stay.
Then that disappeared too.
Another adult gone.
Another home gone.
Another piece of childhood reduced to paperwork.
I had already learned how it felt to lose homes, adults, and every sense of permanence. But none of those
losses prepared me for December 20, 1985 the day I lost Eric.
The records that followed would describe what happened to me afterward.
Anger.
Outbursts.
Truancy.
Psychological evaluations.
Behavior problems.
Placements.
Diagnoses.
They would document the day I returned to school and exploded, throwing my desk and chair across the
classroom.
They could record what I did.
What they could not record was why.
They could not put into a case file what it felt like to wake up and remember, for one peaceful second,
that I had a little brother before remembering all over again that he was dead.
They could not measure the guilt.
They could not document the silence beside me at night.
They could not understand why part of me kept waiting for Eric to come through the door.
Years later, I would sit beside his grave at El Cajon Cemetery. His stone overlooks a fire station, fitting
for a little boy who wanted to become a firefighter and dressed like one every Halloween.
Sometimes we brought food and had picnics there.
I would sit near his stone and talk to him.
Sometimes the same words I had spoken while holding him in the road would return:
You’re going to be okay, brother.
You’re going to be okay.
Maybe I was talking to Eric.
Maybe I was talking to myself.
I am older now than many of the adults who made decisions about us were then.
For most of my life, I carried pieces of that little boy with me the anger, the guilt, the abandonment, and
the need to understand why the people who were supposed to protect us so often did not.
Judges.
Attorneys.
Social workers.
Police officers.
Foster parents.
Psychiatrists.
Family.
Our mother.
Some tried to help.
Some failed.
Some caused wounds of their own.
And through it all, someone kept writing things down.
That is why this book exists.
Not because my memory is perfect.
It is not.
No memory is.
But my memories do not stand alone.
There are dates attached to my name.
There are signatures.
Court orders.
Police reports.
Psychological evaluations.
CPS notes.
Placement histories.
Medical records.
Pages written by adults who had no idea that, decades later, the child they were describing would read their words and finally have the chance to answer them.
This book moves between those two worlds.
What the records say.
And what the boy lived.
Sometimes they will agree.
Sometimes they will not.
Sometimes a single clinical sentence will hide an entire night of terror.
Sometimes the paperwork will reveal something even I had forgotten.
I cannot tell you that every childhood memory is perfect.
I can tell you this:
There were two brothers.
Benjamin and Eric Jones.
We were there.
We lived it.
The State of California kept the paperwork.
I kept the story.