It's been a long and humbling journey to have gotten this far in life. I remember when there was a time that I didn't expect to see thirty years old. I lost a lot of people at a very young age, both family and peers. People got killed every day in front of me or around me. When I had my coma at nineteen, the hospital and everybody else thought my Dad was off his rocker for believing I would wake up one day. If ever anybody was thankful to have a parent on crack cocaine, I sure am. I really don't expect too many people to relate to that, but it is what it is. If he hadn't been in denial, the doctor probably would have successfully convinced him to pull the plug. They tried so hard, but he just kept denying that it was that bad. He denied it until I woke up seven months later. Almost a year later, I was walking. I think it was the part where the doctor called me a vegetable as if I weren't in the room.
When I hit twenty-one, I was faced with having to make a choice of what I was going to do with my life. I would have gone to college right after high school, if my family dynamics were anything less than disastrous. I had invested in four businesses already but between my coma in 1996 and my fiance getting murdered in front of me in 1998 had killed all but one business. The last one, my brother took over, while I was traumatized. Just after my twenty-first birthday in 1998, I found out I was pregnant by my fiance. I still hadn't gotten over his death, having violent bouts with PTSD while fighting for my own life on the streets. I still had my job at the supermarket and my co-workers really stood up with me. Who else has a Baby Shower in the break room at work?
We lived in my car until my baby was about seven months old. Although my family lived all around us, we had nowhere to go. My fiance's family was not only crazier than mine, but also a warring clan against my family. It was far too complicated for me to bridge both disasters. After all, I was heavily traumatized over the course of my twenty-one years and was losing my ability to balance so much struggle. I worked day and night until my house was robbed, and paperwork exposing my future fortune was discovered. At that point, I was actively being hunted. I probably could have used some kind of therapy and protection at any point, but all I got were other people's kids, whom I tried to send home, but they had no home and were going through much of the same stuff as me. All the kids stuck it out with me and we all put in our work to making it work for us all, while all of our families continued to be a growing problem for all of us. It was horrible, but the lining was sparkling silver with an unspoken unity and love, indescribable.
As my grandmother's health worsened, she requested that I live in her house, while she lived with my mother. With that, I inherited a dog who hadn't seen another person beside my grandmother in all of the dog's fourteen years. With an infant and a smaller dog of my own, that was its own struggle. I soon found out that the 200 year old house was being held together by endless rolls of masking tape, contact paper and can tops that covered holes in the floor.
My Father was still on drugs and his behavior was gnarly. He also thought my child was his second chance to be a father, as though my offspring were destined to be an opportunity for him to get it right this time, but he couldn't even get himself together yet. My corporate drive increased a thousand percent as I identified that work promotions were my only immediate way out. I was not the type, nor did I have the time and patience to be a welfare mom. I was getting my baby and myself the hell out of North Philadelphia and going back to my roots in Hawaii, and that was my choice. I didn't know anything about Hawaii except the visions my brother had, mixed with the calling I had. But who the heck knew if we were accurate? The "Uncles" from O'ahu would tell us stories, but they only came in the summer, for one week a year. We were eight years old. Um yeah, unks.. what did you just say? It was foreign to us. They told us our Kumulipo and we were like, um yeah. A long list of long K names and a few other words here and there. Sounded like a continuation of that story I don't remember from last year, or something. But we kept discussing these crazy visions and our Indian Uncles with the Iroquois Nation used to be the only ones to listen. They only told us to go west and to follow it. Perhaps we had to give them the history of what happened here. Yeah... we were too young then, but they said we'd remember, and we did. That year was 1984. In a kid's mind, cool.
Well, the only way I was going to escape the deadly grasp of North Philadelphia was to make enough money to get out. First things first - save. How? Um, we'll coupon shop and put all the money into a hidden bank account in the baby's name. When the time is right, I will close the account and we will go. What next? Uhhh... budget, yeah. I'm going to need to put my life together there and people who go there say its expensive. So let's take a wild guess what it's going to cost to do that and put the next money aside to pay rent for awhile. I'm a hard worker so getting a job should only be as hard as finding child care. I hope I can find an old Hawaiian lady so she can teach my child what I cannot.
But I had a family and they either had needs or habits. I got robbed constantly, but it was hard to stop that from happening because I needed someone to watch the baby so I could work at night. I quickly went up the payscale at my job but I didn't appreciate my new management team. One day they pushed me to the limit and I snapped and walked out. A week later, I was hired at Discovery Channel and the following month later, at Starbucks. I liked Discovery Channel better at first, but I immediately advanced in both position and payscale at Starbucks. It was a great company back then.
When I lost respect for my job at Discovery Channel, I picked up extra hours at Starbucks, as our team was extremely successful in a very short amount of time. I was kind of immature so we had music going and we danced all of our jobs complete. We were a bit wild, but in the location we were, that was perfect. It was a millionaire pocket with a whole lot of big music stars and savvy millionaires. They thought we were entertaining and spent with us, just to have a place to go that was free from every day pressure.
Things got really scary again for awhile, as my predators were closing in on me and I wasn't getting out fast enough. People knew I was growing in status and rather than be uplifting, they envied me. Before I knew it, the home invasion, shooting and firebombing happened and once again, I was traumatized to the high holy moon. It left me pregnant with my daughter, whom I couldn't imagine my life without, today. But at that time, the trauma. Little by little, my tolerance was going down again and I remembered what happened the last time I lost it. I never want to go through that again.
I went to my other side of the neighborhood, my other stomping grounds, and I sought my old warrior friends. Most of them were dead or in jail, but I knew I'd find someone. I just didn't think it would be the only non-confrontational person in the whole squad. Everyone kept him around because he was cool, but this guy was no warrior. He simply wasn't built for it. But he was there, I knew he'd do what he knew to protect me and my child. It wasn't long before he prevented me from aborting my daughter and his family took me and my son in. They were grateful for all the years I protected theirs. I was thankful because I was too scared and damaged to come out of my corner at that point. I was afraid I'd snap. But I was gone at work much of the time, and they enjoyed my baby boy. It wasn't long before he went to jail and I was alone through the pregnancy. I worked three hours around the nearest mountain and put in 90 hours per week on the clock. Everybody got paid well, because I was appreciative of their support. Of course, this put a huge dent in my savings, but I was lost again. Now I'm having a second baby, I really don't know how to put together a move so big, and I got this new family thing going on. I'll talk to him to make a long term goal.
A few years went by and after my father and I invested in his education, he began to steal from me and the kids for his drugs. I never thought this guy would be one of those. He was so lame, I thought he would outgrow the ghetto and move on. But he began to rebel, and while I was at work, he would abuse my son and take my daughter to dope houses. On one occasion, the result was my daughter almost taken from me at the hospital because he ripped her arm out of socket twice in a row, the second time, never calling me until five hours later, when I had to close the store and drive three hours home. It was eight hours before she even arrived in the hospital and another three hours before she was seen. Child Protective Services came to take her, and if it wasn't for my coworkers being there to support me, I don't know what I would have done. They made me break up with the kids' father, but he and the streets didn't see it that way. They showed up to my house by the carloads, threatening me. The police were no help. They liked this kind of thing because they would let the streets eliminate one another, and just come to clean the bodies. Yeah, that was nuts.
I didn't mean for it to happen, but right during all of that, I ended up pregnant with my third surviving baby and as I was already moving into the high levels of corporate management, my life began to unravel my career. Right after I gave birth to my third, I lost my career to a thug with a gun. Great. I'm beginning to panic now, and to make things worse, I had been going to the doctor for my traumatic brain injury and my never ending internal bleeding, and both were progressing. I was never more lost or alone. My family split to pieces at the seams that year, and my brother was sentenced to life without parole. Never in my entire life had I ever felt so alone and broken. Just shattered.
As things got worse, he decided to play head games and start a court process, while urging me to just go to Florida with my father. The day I did, he had me charged with kidnapping. When I got to Florida, my father did exactly what I feared from him too - he took me a thousand, actually twelve hundred miles from the last person I knew, and beat the crap out of me in front of my kids, every single day. At the same time, the judge was calling me from Philadelphia to threaten to extradite me and that I would never see my kids again. Me and my daughter were too dark for the KKK territory we were living in. I thought last year couldn't get any worse. It just kept getting worse in all sorts of ways I could never imagine and now my father decided to desert us in Florida with nothing at all.
It wasn't long before I lost my job and was one of the 22 million people who struggled with policy changes in unemployment, leaving us homeless in a foreign land. When I did find a job and a house, the racism was so gnarly, my daughter was only eight years old and was targeted every single day by the adults, not even children. Its not like we were bad either. All my kids were well behaved, I was a minister with an outreach program extending to seventeen churches, I was a soccer coach, and I was paralyzed from the neck down, much of that time. But they pepper sprayed my little girl while she waited for the school bus, and surrounded my house on a regular basis. We actually had a league of ministers and pastors with guns, outside our home 24/7 to protect us because the cops wouldn't. Child Protective Services knew us on a first name basis because they were called at least twice a week and all the minorities in the area would just tell us to shut up and join them, because it was in the best of our interest to do so. At that point, people in Hawaii began to put together an action plan to help us come home. It was ridiculous already.
In the meantime, my brain surgery was finally ready to be scheduled, but now I had cancer and my digestive system shut down. The stress caused my body to self destruct. This had happened to me in 2006, but not as bad as this time. It took the combined efforts of sixteen churches and an eighty-four year old activist to threaten the hospital close by to care for me. They did not want a colored person in their hospital. Have you seen a picture of me? There's not much color to it! Tampa General was waiting for me to be healthy enough to go into brain surgery, but seeing all that was going on with my health, the surgeon at Tampa General was beginning to back out of the surgery. There was supposed to be a 75% chance that I wasn't going to live through it, and a 95% chance I would never walk again. I kindly told them God would guide their hands and that I was walking out of that hospital whether they thought I would or not. I left the hospital within a week - precisely 120 days prior to when they thought I would be released from rehab. I think they thought I was going to need it. I didn't need that. My sheer determination to get back to my regularly scheduled program of coming home to Hawaii Nei and doing what I could to restore our Kingdom. I still don't understand how I made it this far, so I cannot really plan any further because I don't see further. I only see that I have to be a powerful single parent, despite my inequities because I don't know what God means when I have gone through so much. Honestly, I'm still waiting for this egg to crack and I am only trying to make the greatest impact that I can while I'm here.
We've been home for almost four years now and we have made strides, as far as I'm concerned. I fully intend to continue that hard work, to restore everything in sight, as I describe it. Today, we live a humble existence and work really hard to advance what's around us. We have a nursery, a crew and a network. All we have to do now is work on getting money together to afford our work. Does that make sense? We need equipment to get our work together. Somehow, with plenty faith, we will get that taken care of. Until then, I'm really thankful to have a keyboard to share the depths of my soul with the universe, in hopes to inspire others to see that they are stronger and more powerful than they think and that you can do it. I didn't do it alone, but my heart was in the right place and my efforts matched. Still does, I'm still the same. People might not agree with me on how I do things or my timing, but trust and believe that when you can pull your ancestral strength and determination, you can do anything. Just don't give up.
With Love,
Kahala Lei
