Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction

“And my mother? I stopped counting on her a long time ago. If I am ever in a pinch, I know I can ask her. But I hate to. I don’t like asking her for anything.” 

These lines from Jarrett’s internal monologue spread out across five panels of images from his driving lesson, giving a feeling that they’re part of a reflective and familiar pattern of thought for him. They’re also the first sign of the trouble Jarrett has with his mother. The Prologue hints that something is wrong in her life and in their relationship.

“There are a lot of empty plots at the bottom of the hill. Maybe that’s where I will go someday. It would only make sense for me to end up near them—they raised me, after all. And my mother? Who knows where she’ll end up. Honestly, it’s surprising that she isn’t here already. And my father? Who knows if I’ll ever even meet the guy before either of us make it to the grave.” 

Jarrett stands on a hill in the graveyard and muses on both the past and the future here. Again, his internal monologue lays out some of the major conflicts of the story. It’s notable that he doesn’t say any of these thoughts out loud to his grandfather, who’s shown walking past in the background: There’s a degree to which Jarrett has to carry the pain he hints at here all by himself. 

“And then, with three kids in tow, Shirley had a miscarriage. It threw her.”

These two sparse sentences appear across a double-page spread with a pitch-black background. Shirley’s three children are watching TV; Shirley herself sits behind them looking sad and alone, drinking a glass of whiskey and smoking a cigarette. Here, the simplicity of the words and the starkness of the image (it’s very different from any pages that have come before it) between them suggest a bigger grief than Jarrett can fit into words.

“And how did my parents meet? How did I come into this world? I don’t know many of the details of it. I just know that it was at my father’s family’s bar. He was onstage, playing with his band.” 

Jarrett’s limited knowledge of his parents’ lives is clearer by comparison with his detailed story of his grandparents’ romance and marriage. The sparse and sometimes hypothetical description of how Jarrett’s own parents met demonstrates how big this gap in his history feels to him. He can draw his mother’s teenage face, but his father barely appears in his illustration of this scene. 

“My father backed off, claiming that the baby wasn’t his. Supposedly, his girlfriend started spreading stories about how my mother had been sleeping around, so the baby could have belonged to anybody. And sure, she had been sleeping around, but my mom knew he was the father as soon as I was born—I was white. All of her other boyfriends hadn’t been.”

This story of Jarrett’s father’s unkindness and irresponsibility frames a sympathetic picture of his mother standing alone in a doorway, bending over her pregnant belly. Behind her, a phone dangles from its cord. Jarrett depicts the lines of communication truly broken here. Jarrett’s language is plain and matter-of-fact; the emotion of this part of his story appears in the pictures, not the words.

“I had this recurring dream when I was a kid. I was in the middle of a field. And there were these monsters surrounding me on all sides, creeping in from the woods. But if I looked at them, stared them right down, they’d freeze. The only problem was that every time I froze a monster with my eye contact, another monster would creep up behind me.” 

Jarrett’s nightmare emerges from everything he couldn’t consciously understand as a young child. There were too many scary things going on in his home with Leslie for him to “keep an eye on”: It wasn’t possible to feel safe, because some new scary thing could always be creeping up behind him. The vivid drawings on this page reflect a small child’s desperation to keep his life under control in a situation far beyond him.

“[...] when I slept over at my grandparents’ house one night, I remarked at how amazed I was that they served me breakfast in the morning. As a three-year-old, I was getting my cereal on my own, because I was waking up in an empty house.” 

The adult Jarrett tells this story over pictures of his young self as he happily plays with his aunts. The contrast between the words and the images drives home the point that he was far too young to understand what was happening in his life with Leslie. The gap between the images and the words here reflects his adult pain.

“This had been Steve’s bedroom. Once he left for college, my grandparents had the room done over for Shirley to live in. She often reminded me of that over the years. Not in a mean way, just in a Shirley kind of way.” 

Jarrett’s memory of living in the bedroom that his grandparents redecorated for Shirley tells a lot about her and about their relationship. Shirley had everything in the whole room redecorated in green, her favorite color; that unsubtle style also appears in her matter-of-fact noting to her young grandson that this was supposed to be her room. The fact that Joe and Shirley wanted separate bedrooms might also foreshadow the tension in their marriage that Jarrett will remember later in this chapter.

“Some nights, my grandparents would fight. And it was scary and it was bad.” 

Jarrett’s language here suggests his childhood perspective. The simple words “scary” and “bad” reflect his straightforward fear and sadness: Adult arguments can be too overwhelming for a child to find words for.

“There would be phone calls from her once in a great while. Mostly she’d write. She was an incredibly talented artist. She’d make her own cards and draw my favorite cartoon characters. We had this thing where we would go back and forth—I’d request a cartoon from her and then she’d request one back from me.” 

In this memory of communicating with his mother through cartoons, Jarrett reveals how much drawing means to him. Art was a way for him to process his feelings and be close with his mother. Their shared talent linked them as much as their actual exchange of drawings. This moment, with actual pictures of Jarrett’s mother’s drawings on the page, demonstrates why cartooning is Jarrett’s chosen medium.

“But the most heartbreaking moment came when Shirley was washing the dishes one night. She took her wedding ring off and placed it to the side of the sink. Leslie knocked her down, grabbed the ring, and disappeared into the night.”

Leslie started using drugs as a 13-year-old, struggling with the violence of her home life. Here, her theft of Shirley’s wedding ring is both terrible and meaningful. The symbol of a not-always-happy marriage that she had to live with as a child ends up buying her the drugs that ruin her life.

“The only time that Leslie didn’t use was when she got pregnant with me. I was lucky not to be born addicted to heroin. And I was told that—often. But after I came into the world, Leslie started using again. And again and again. [...] She always went back to that poison.”

Jarrett tells the story of Leslie’s addiction with sympathy and sadness. She is always “Leslie” in his narration, never “Mom”; heroin took away the chance for Leslie and Jarrett to have a mother-child relationship. Jarrett is grateful to her for staying off drugs while she was pregnant. Her care for him was real, though she couldn’t be there for him in a lot of important ways.

“‘Your grandmother and I have been thinking...and it’s up to you...but we’d like to send you to take classes at the Worcester Art Museum.’ ‘Really?!’ ‘Really. You can choose any class you want. I earmarked the page for kids 12 and up. Doesn’t matter how much it costs or what day it’s on—we’ll get you there.’” 

This conversation between Joe and Jarrett shows the real love and support Jarrett’s grandparents provided for him. While in this chapter Jarrett struggles with his feeling that his family is abnormal, this introduction demonstrates how well his grandparents knew him, and how much they wanted to support his ambitions. He slowly paces out this exchange over three panels, demonstrating through a drumroll-like build-up how important this small but meaningful gesture was to Jarrett’s future life.

“Week after week, I’d get to Mark’s classroom and I would work my butt off. I didn’t have the motivation to work this hard on my regular coursework for school, but this was everything I wanted in life.”

This chapter’s theme of mentorship and family-making continues in Jarrett’s memories of his comics teacher, Mark. He remembers Mark as a positive force in his life, who encouraged him to read and to draw in his own style, not imitating Marvel comics. Much as in the image of Jarrett trading comics with Leslie, this passage shows how Hey, Kiddo originated from the experiences that it records.

“‘Hubba hubba! Nice moves, Patrick!’ ‘Oh, uh, hi, Mrs. Krosoczka.’ ‘Call me Shirley, sweetheart. Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh…’” (

In this exchange between Shirley and Pat, Shirley’s mischievous personality shines through, as well as the humor of the household that went alongside its sadness and violence. Shirley embarrasses Pat as he tries to show Jarrett how to dance, slyly singing “Uh-oh” along with the song’s chorus. This anecdote shows the real texture of Jarrett’s childhood, which had many warm moments among its difficulties.

“You’re going to have to draw cityscapes and environments, right? Your imagined worlds will come to life so much more strongly if you get a good foundation in learning to be a draftsman through observation. Keep at it. You’ll be great!”

This speech of encouragement from Jarrett’s art teacher, Mr. Shilale, reflects an ongoing pattern in Jarrett’s mentors. Like Joe and Mark, Mr. Shilale is a combination of uncompromising work ethic, encouragement, and kindness. The young Jarrett finds solace in people who are both loving and firm: The boundaries they set for him give him safety. 

“When you’re here, it’s Joe. Kapeesh?”

When Joe tells Jarrett not to call him “Grandpa” as they work together at the family factory, Jarrett shows how he hasn’t been calling Joe “Grandpa” in most of the text. His habit of referring to his parents and grandparents by their first names reflects his story’s attitude toward them: They’re not just adult authority figures, but real and complicated people. He remembers them not only as a child to a guardian, but as an adult to an adult.

“When I was a kid, I’d draw to get attention from my family. In junior high, I drew to impress my friends. But now that I am in my teens, I fill sketchbooks just to deal with life. To survive.” 

The changing tense here brings the narrative up to date with high-school age Jarrett, the Jarrett in the Prologue. These words spread out across three pages, each with a full-page portrait of Jarrett at the age he’s describing. There’s a sense that he’s reaching some important turning point in the story as Jarrett becomes an older teenager. His artwork is no longer something he does for others but for himself.

“It was unsettling to see my mother with a boyfriend. It’s not that I thought she should be with my father—I didn’t even know that guy. But I had never seen her with a dedicated anyone, and the men that I did see come into her life had always mistreated her.” 

Jarrett’s mixed feelings about his mother’s new boyfriend mirror his mixed feelings about her renewed presence in his life. The past has taught him not to trust that things will go well around her. This passage also shows how Jarrett has had to grow up too quickly: His concerns for his mother are like a parent’s for a child.

“‘That’s supposed to be us? It doesn’t look anything like us. You’re not that good.’ ‘You know this art thing, this is what I want to do with my life. This is my dream.’ ‘Yeah, and that’s exactly what it is—a dream.’”

Shirley’s cruelty over the portrait that Jarrett lovingly paints for her and Joe’s 45th anniversary reveals some of the complexities of her character. Shirley often makes terrible mistakes in her treatment of her children and grandchildren: Her fears and disappointments make her lash out. She’s also genuinely concerned for them, and her rejection of Jarrett’s picture stems from her fears that he’s going to have a life as difficult as his mother’s.

“Hallmark didn’t make cards that said, ‘Even though you did all of those drugs, you’re still a swell mom!’ or cards that read, ‘Hey, remember all that time you spent in jail and missed, like, every aspect of my childhood?!’” 

In learning who his father is at last, Jarrett must confront the other complications of his past. His decision not to send Leslie a Mother’s Day card is an important step for him. Though it’s painful, the fight with Leslie that follows allows him to honestly express his grief and disappointment at her long absence from his life. 

“My headlights spotlighted two small figures. My brother and sister.” 

Jarrett’s description of his momentous first sight of his siblings uses both the verbal and the visual language of comics. The “spotlight” and “figures” are both ways to describe effects and characters on a page—and, in fact, that’s what he sees. Here Jarrett illustrates how he imagines the emotional moments of his life through the art he loves.

“There he was. He was shorter than I imagined him to be.” 

Jarrett’s first encounter with Richard points out the mundane amid an important moment. In matching up this real person with his imagined father, Jarrett finds him “shorter”—maybe not so big or so frightening a figure as he’d thought. The illustration shows Jarrett looking at Richard—another way of evoking the power of the moment. Jarrett shows what he feels, but not what makes him feel that way until the next page—and then, all he shows is a normal-looking man. Richard’s significance is all in how Jarrett perceives him.