The only thing that kept Tom going was love for his mother. He says with tears in his eyes, “She was my strength through the whole thing, and what I went through was nothing, just nothing, compared to what she went through. You know I always thought, ‘If she can do that and rot away in a nursing home bed, I can suck it up, I can go through homelessness and no food and getting beaten and all that stuff because it’s nothing compared to what she’s going through.’”
So he fought his way through the tough times and even excelled in high school. The success numbed his pain, until he got out of the foster care system.
“Something snapped in my head where I went, ‘I’m free of all that. And I made it.’ This anger came out of nowhere. I’d never been an angry guy before, but I was really angry, I mean raging angry.”
In college, Tom used his anger to control situations and protect himself. He admits, “I was still going to succeed no matter what the barriers were. I just felt like I was king of the world. That no one could beat me and I was smarter, faster than anyone else.”
He pushed everyone but his mother away and soon started to struggle with the man he’d become. “I’d look at myself in the mirror and just go ‘I don’t like that guy. Just don’t like him. I don’t like what he stands for. I don’t like what he’s doing. I know it’s wrong.’”
Then, his mother died. “At that point, I just kind of stopped and didn’t care. I didn’t care about success anymore. Mom was the meaning of my life. No more mom, no more meaning.”
Tom dropped out of school and tried to make sense of his life of hardship. He had a theory about God’s role in it. “I’m like, ‘Okay God, if that’s what we’re going to do, if you’re going to make me bear my cross to prove my worthiness to you, you won’t beat me either. Because I am worthy and I’ll prove it to you.’”
Tom joined the Army, where he worked hard and quickly climbed to the top one percent in his class. Just when he thought he’d “proven himself” again, he blew out both his knees playing basketball.
