#2 "Look, I'm Still Here." A Story of Abandonment, Loss, Grief, and Resilience

Chapters

1. 1Author'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.
2. 2Episode 2, Chapter 1: The Paper Trail Begins.November 1977–January 1979 Benjamin Raymond Jones The world was a carousel of strangers’ houses, each one a temporary stop on a journey we never chose. follows Benji and his little brother Eric from extreme neglect and their removal from their mother’s care in 1977 through a series of court decisions, receiving homes, relatives’ houses, and foster placements. After Benji is found wandering alone near a dangerous roadway, the brothers are declared dependent children of the court and placed with their grandparents, who take them to Douglas, Arizona, love them, and fight for financial help to keep them.
3. 3Episode 3, Chapter 2: A Shared ShadowForty-Nine Dollars a Month After being removed from their mother’s care, Benji and Eric are placed with their grandparents, William and June Jones, shortly before Christmas in 1977. When Grandpa’s job takes the family to Douglas, Arizona, the boys experience a brief sense of safety, love, and belonging. However, their grandparents struggle financially after learning they will receive only forty-nine dollars per child each month. Although they fight for additional assistance because they genuinely want to keep the boys, growing family problems eventually makes it impossible. In October 1978, Benji and Eric are sent back to San Diego because the court believes their mother’s recent improvements have not lasted long enough to prove she can safely care for them. The boys return to Hillcrest Receiving Home and then enter the Winterbergs’ foster home, which collapses when the couple’s marriage ends. They are returned to Hillcrest once again before being placed with Mr. and Mrs. Moanale. Throughout every move, Benji and Eric remain each other’s only constant. This chapter shows how repeated removals taught them not to trust that any home, adult, or feeling of security would last. It also reveals something deeply important to Benji: his grandparents did not give them up because they were unwanted. They loved the boys, fought to keep them, and simply reached a point where they could no longer provide for them.
4. 4Episode 4, Chapter 3: For a Little While, We Were Home 1979--April 1980This chapter takes you into one of the darkest and most confusing periods of my childhood. It is about trust, manipulation, fear, and the things that can happen to a child who does not yet understand the intentions of the adults around him. Some of what follows is difficult to read, but it is part of my story, and leaving it out would mean leaving out part of the truth about the boy I was and the man I eventually became. This chapter is not written for shock or sympathy. It is written because these things happened, they affected me for years afterward, and they are part of understanding how I survived long enough to be able to tell this story today.
5. 5Episode 5, Chapter 4 1980 July 10th. The state finally almost lets us goThe State Finally Almost Lets Us Go July 10, 1980 — Five Years Old By the summer of 1980, something was happening that nobody could have predicted from the reports written about our family just a few years earlier. Mom was doing it. She had Eric and me back. Baby Summer was with us. We had a home again. And for the first time since the State of California had stepped into our lives, the people watching our family were beginning to believe that maybe they didn't need to watch anymore. Things weren't perfect. They never were. on July 10, 1980, after nearly three years of being watched, evaluated, moved, placed, reunited, and watched some more, the recommendation was finally made: Let them be a family. The State of California was ready to let us go. And for a five-year-old boy who had already been taken from home more than once, maybe the greatest thing about that moment was that I didn't understand any of it. I didn't have to. For once, I could just go outside and play.
6. 6Episode 6, Chapter 5 The Roller Coaster begins againFive Days July 1980 — Five Years Old Five days. That's how quickly everything changed. On July 10, 1980, the State of California was ready to let us go. After years of court hearings, foster homes, social workers, lawyers, and strangers deciding where Eric and I would live, a social worker had finally concluded that we were no longer in danger. Mom had "come a long way in straightening out her life." Those were their words.

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