Due to everything that was going on, my mother’s overdose, my brother’s arrest, and my sister’s pregnancy, I stopped attending school. My sister had already dropped out, and my brother and I took the city bus early every morning to keep going to the same school we had always been to.
But eventually, that wasn’t sustainable, and it stopped. But I started school again when I went to live with an uncle while my mother rehabbed.
School felt like torture. I couldn’t focus on learning because I was consumed with my mother’s well-being. I so desperately wanted her to be there to pick me up, to be there when I got home from school, but she never was. Instead, I watched as other children were picked up and loved on by their mothers; it was soul-crushing.
Even more soul-crushing was learning what my mother was visiting my brother during the day when I was at school.
On multiple occasions, I got home to my brother telling me he got to see her. One day, I even ran to the gas station adjacent to our apartment complex because he thought she said she was stopping there before leaving.
In my child’s eyes, I couldn’t understand what I had done to upset her, to make her not want to see me, to not love me. As an adult, she would tell me that she couldn’t handle seeing the pain in my eyes; it served as a reminder of how badly she messed up.
We moved several more times before finally resting on Putnam Street—the street where our family truly came to an end.
Putnam Street was a one-bedroom apartment that housed me, my mom and grandma, my brother, and his father. My parents slept on the bed in the room; we slept on couch cushions on the floor in the living room. My grandma slept in a recliner in the living room with us.
The bedroom was often off-limits. Our parents would lock us out for hours on end. Curious as to what they were doing, we devised a plan to hide out to see what was going on. In our child’s minds, We were certain they were having fun without us and we wanted in on the fun.
Because the bedroom was such a mess, with all our belongings tossed into one massive pile in the middle of the floor, it was easy to hide. I was so small I fit on the side of the bed, and that’s where I chose to hide to spy on our parents.
Within minutes of being shut in, my brother was caught moving and laughing so much. They were so pissed when they caught him, their reaction scared me.
I wondered if they would be lenient on me if I came forward from hiding instead of them possibly finding me, but I was too scared to move. Not used to being in trouble I couldn’t bare the thought of getting yelled at and risk possibly being loved any less than I already felt.
Eventually, I watched as they took turns tightening a belt around their arm to protrude their veins. When I saw them shooting up, I was terrified and confused; I forced myself to sleep so I didn’t have to see anymore.
When it was over, my brother ran straight to my hiding spot between the wall and the bed, ripping the sheet covering me and waking me from my forced sleep. He wanted all the details, but I was too angry to reiterate what I had seen.
Slowly, it was all starting to make sense. Why they were locking themselves in the room, why they didn’t want us to see what they were doing. Though I didn’t quite understand what was happening, what I saw left me with bad feelings.
I knew enough to know that they weren’t supposed to be putting needles into their own arms. And while my innocence had long been lost, this was the catalyst of my trust in them depleting. I stopped holding onto my good girl persona so much and stopped caring what they said.
All the rules they had set out for us were dead to me and I began to do things to purposely defy them. But not in a way that was blatant.
When they would leave, so would my brother and I. We’d spend the day walking around the blocks, usually looking for more milk crates or stores to steal snacks from as a means of eating.
One memory that is burned into my brain is running into my mom who was sitting on the steps outside of the court house less than a mile away from our apartment. She was clearly high, and though my brother wanted to approach her, I knew better. If she wasn’t high we would get in trouble for leaving the block. If she was like I suspected, her eyes would be empty and cold towards us.
This time is was worse than I imagined. Not only were her eyes empty and cold, but she was so out of her mind that she didn’t even recognize us. As we walked away my brother squealed in delight that we didn’t get in trouble. Known for her pranks, he thought that she was only pretending not to know who we were when she asked us for money.
But after seeing all that I saw that day in that room, I knew that she wasn’t pretending. She was too far gone to know who we were. As I write this I can still feel the sting left in my heart, my soul from my own mother not recognizing me.
On the one hand, no child should ever have to experience what I experienced that day, or at any point in my childhood. But knowing what I know now, the Trauma Specialist in me makes me wonder what she was going through, how bad her trauma truly was to bring her to such a place where she would not only lose herself, but her entire family and not be phased by it.
Her addiction was getting worse, as was the neglect my brother and I were subjected to because of it. But in those moments it was almost kind of cool. We got to experience freedom no other kid could even fathom.
But even that got old. As much as we wanted to be adults, the truth was, we still weren’t. When we were caught stealing and had no food, when we experienced an injury, when we simply just wanted to be loved, we had no one to turn to to be there for us.