Who Is Malcolm Kareen Freeney (Part II)

So we can pick up with the Malcolm Freeney story so to speak with the end of Chicago and the beginning of Madison, Wisconsin. So I stayed with my Aunt Julia for a year and then my mom and dad adopted me. Madison is where I first got exposed to racism because none of the kids in elementary school liked me at all. They called me names like Milky Way and a few other racial epithets. I used to pick fights as a kid and have my sister come beat up the kids because she could fight. Now my sister isn’t my biological sister, but she is my sister all of the same. People say racism is about people being scared of something that they either are afraid of or don’t understand. And the resulting action becomes about controlling that ‘something.’

Well control would be a central theme throughout my entire life to date. Especially when kids found out how smart I was through class activities such as completing your times tables in math class when I would go faster than anyone else. When I was adopted, even my mother didn’t know what to do with me. I was an emotionally wild, scarred child with multiple traumas that got to the point where if I could get used to the pain, then I can numb myself from it. So the more my mother spanked me for something, the more I got used to it. And to this day, I don’t cry over much. I don’t cry at funerals, rarely cry in pain unless the pain is extreme, and really just keep an even keel about most things. So my mother tried to put me into therapy, but when you don’t want someone to reach you, then you try to outsmart them. This is exactly what I did when I went to these sessions that I actually don’t even remember. If anyone has ever seen the movie “Good Will Hunting” with Matt Damon and Robin Williams, then you would understand when I say that you keep trying out therapists until you find one that can actually reach the subject in question. In that sense I was abandoned by my parents which hurts to this day because they can’t make themselves vulnerable enough to admit it.

However, on the flip side they saved my life because without them, I would be either dead or in jail. They are my mom and dad and I do love them dearly. Sometimes I just can’t be around them for extended periods of time. I just wish that we could admit that in our relationship mistakes were made, and then let’s just move on from there. But vulnerable is something that they don’t function well within our parent-child relationship. It would require ceding control which seems to be a problem for them. It’s one thing to set and establish boundaries; it’s another to impose those to the point where the relationship becomes dysfunctional being about control instead of raising a child to be a functional adult. But I’ve gotten off on a tangent, which I can tend to do from time to time as I am a long winded person both in speech and in writing; an important tangent which will be revisited later in these journal entries. But we need to complete the saga of Madison, Wisconsin, explain how I moved to the DC area in the 5th grade, and extol the virtues of Mom and Dad, and how we got to this point today. We will get to all of that I promise as we journey through the adventure of writing these journal entries. Oh well. The saga continues...