As Patty Smith looked over the hundreds of toys piled up in her office at City Hall last week, the Aurora City Council member couldn’t help but smile at the overwhelming response she got from her 8th Ward constituents for this holiday toy drive to benefit the children at Mutual Ground, a domestic violence shelter in Aurora.
Still, that joy was shadowed by stirrings of long-ago pain from her own childhood in a household marked by trauma, poverty and abuse, she said.
It’s a side of this successful career woman, mother and city leader few are aware of, including those who referred to her “white privilege” at a heated City Council meeting last month.
But Smith has decided to go public with those toxic early years, not so much because of a phrase thrown out by those “who have no idea what I’ve been through,” she said, but because she’s well aware of what children who are victims of domestic violence are going through this time of year.
Smith remembers her father, long dead from cancer, as a “mean drunk” who was “severely abusive” – physically, mentally and emotionally — to his wife and five children in their small blue-collar town in upstate New York, she said.
“When you go through that in life you understand the confusion and sadness in a dysfunctional household.
“You go to bed on Christmas Eve and wonder if there will be a single gift under the tree,” Smith said, also recalling what it felt like to stand in welfare lines to get processed cheese and powdered milk.
The truly bad memories were from elementary school – when you are old enough to know just how horrible your life is but too young to have any control over it. For that reason, Smith, who in the past has organized toy drives in her ward, decided to focus this year on kids ages 6-12 at Mutual Ground.
But doing so, she soon realized, reopened that harsh chapter of her life, unleashing memories that included a “sad little Charlie Brown Christmas tree we would cut down” from a nearby field “because we could not afford to pay for one.”
Smith recalls one particularly bad day when her father was fighting her brothers in the kitchen. That’s when she “walked upstairs, packed my bags and walked out the door,” telling her mother she was no longer going to live in a home dominated by chaos and fear.
That night her father “was taken away by police.”
“I always wished I had the perfect Norman Rockwell childhood,” Smith noted. “But that simply was not the case.”
And so, after saving money from her job at a bank, 19-year-old Patty “bought a car and drove away” from this broken and chaotic season of her life.
That road into adulthood took her to Virginia, where she met her now ex-husband, and later New Jersey and Texas. In 1990 Smith’s family, including three children, arrived in Aurora’s 8th Ward and “made it our home.”
For Smith, having a parent who called her “dirt” and declared she’d “never amount to much” only spurred her to do the opposite. When presented with forks in the road, she learned, there are always choices on which direction to take.
Now a certified paralegal and licensed real estate agent, the single mom says leaving her career to advocate for her oldest child, born with Down syndrome, seeded and nourished her strong connection to this community. In 2008, the late Aurora Mayor Tom Weisner named her Volunteer of the Year, and in 2019, she was elected to the City Council.
“I may have enjoyed white privilege but I worked my ass off to be where I am today,” Smith told me, referring to statements made at recent council meetings after she expressed concerns about how a proposed ordinance to limit ICE activity on city property could legally impact staff employees.
As a child of domestic violence, Smith knows how “blocking it out” can be a way of dealing with trauma. “But certain things will stir it up,” she told me. “And then you go down the rabbit hole for a couple weeks …”
While this has been Smith’s first time talking about her rough childhood, Smith admits that as “painful as it has been,” she has no regrets after watching the generosity of her ward.
Aurora Ald. Patty Smith, 8th Ward, who has spoken little over the years about her own traumatic childhood, delivers a city van filled with toys to Mutual Ground domestic violence shelter on Thursday. (Cristal Colon)
Smith estimates that within three weeks over 500 presents came in, so many that she and aide Cristal Colon had to borrow a city van to drop off the gifts to Mutual Ground on Thursday.
Smith’s excitement about that special delivery were still evident when we spoke again on Friday.
“It just feels so nice to do something good,” she said. “We shouldn’t have to walk a mile in other shoes to be kinder to one another.”
dcrosby@tribpub.com
