My Mama collected strays: wild dogs, feral cats, abused women and their kids, but Mama’s most enduring stray was my father. Like Mama’s strays, Dad escaped for weeks at a time while I was a boy only to return soaked with booze and his tail between his legs. Mama, a Navy brat whose own father shipped off every other week, always let my father back in; no matter which territory he’d marked or drank from while he was away, Mama nursed his wounds. My father, a functional drunk and a draftsman, spent his life measuring lines, angles, and whisky, and his compulsivity and militant cleanliness at home garnered my terror and awe especially when juxtaposed with Mama’s hoarding, crafting, and disorder.

Mama spent most of her life a stray herself, running away from abusive parents at 14 to live in a cave on the California coast for a few weeks after hitchhiking there. When Mama’s father was at war, my grandmother’s mental health issues swung an ax-handle at her six kids. So in a way, the strays Mama rescued were herself, and her stubborn forgiveness of my father was her own kind of addiction learned from her parents.

My memoir, tentatively titled, “Please, Don’t Rescue Me,” is the story of me, a boy with unresolved trauma and an ever changing familial landscape, and my attempts to speak the coded languages of manhood out of a desperation for belonging. My parents married, divorced, and remarried 3 times, and we lived in 12 residences by the time I was 17—our family’s docking and shipping out another echo of Mama’s military reality.