There are so many places I can begin however I want you to understand where I come from, what I have gone through and how I came to where I am today. This is going to be a brief testimony of my life and how I got to this time of my life. This will help us when understanding why I'm saying something a reason I'm being critical or even a look into how things can be perceived from others.
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Waking up from the cold was one of my first memories, a memory of walking out to find my mother laying on the living room floor sleeping where she always did (I was always given the bedroom one of the most decent things my mother did growing up). I remember wanting to be in her arms because of how cold it was and how the sounds echoing from the streets were penetrating through the window panes of our small shack of a house. She was passed out once again from who knows what drug. This wasn't new or ab-normal to me even though I was only four at the time I knew what was going on, my mother didn't hide it from me. My father wasn't around, I honestly thought of him all the time wondering if it was my fault but my mother constantly told me that he never knew I was even born and that he was a good man. Once again my mother was decent in not ruining the thought of who my father was but making herself look as if having him in my life wasn't really a want of hers.
Time progressed she found a man for us to move in with and just about the time I was getting used to the father figure in my life he cheated on my mother. We moved, that took us to another one bedroom apartment that was in the good part of town, exactly one block south and one block north of the good part of town. Actually there really wasn't a good part of town it was South Park, Seattle. One of the many ghettos of Seattle. This place was not where a single woman and her daughter should be raised.
Though-out my life I was blessed with people that where there for me in hard times no thanks to my Mother or anything she did. I now know it was the Grace of God who did all of these small things that lead me to where I am now. But that's jumping ahead, let me get back to where I was. I was blessed with a school that was there for me, Teachers that loved me and where there for me every step of the way. I can't remember much from the early years of my life because of the amounts of men my mother dated and the amounts of drugs she did. I do however recall that I learned how to make dinner while in second grade, and to my mother she figured that meant she was off the hook for making dinner. Unless of couse one of her men was coming over.
We moved. It was only one block to the east and luckily we were still right in between the bad parts of town. In this move was when things went from bad to worse and my perception of what was happening around me increased.
My mother would constantly send me to friends houses to “Get me out of her hair” as she would say it. See my mother was finally picking up on the fact that I was understanding everything going on around me. The pep talks about how not to tell the DARE officers at school about what went on at home and how when I would walk through the front door and her and her best friend would have out the big book of pills and a pile of pills they were sorting wasn't quite what I should see. However, My mother had yet to break the surface of what could happen in front of my innocent eyes.
She gained an actual boyfiend and I didnt' like him from the momment I laid eyes on him. He was a man that had that look like he was always up to no good. As a child you have a good understanding on people and their intentions, and I could tell they weren't to marry my Mother or do anything less then bad. I told my mother of the feeling I had and after a long screming fight I gave in and learned that I had to accept that he was going to be in my life no matter what. So one day he dropped us off to get grocreys and told us we would see him tonight back at the house. My mother and I went and got the food and took the city bus home as we always did. I remember this moment vivid in my mind. We walked in the back yard to the house and I told my mother that I was going to go though the back door. She told me I couldn't it was lock as she preceeded to the front door, next thing I knew I was in the house in the living room looking at what we didn't have. Everything was gone the only things that were left was the stuff that was too big to take out or not worth taking. This was the first of many times a man would make me feel as if men were only out to hurt me.
As my mother became more and more lost in drugs and the state checks weren't keeping up with the drug increase she started to figure out different sources of income. First the was the Dealing of drugs, then came the harboring of drugs and that lead to harboring of money drugs and who knows what else. When this wasn't enough she started wondering what my father was doing. Once again not for my good, because if it was she would have done it years prior. Nope it was because she thought that she could acquire back child support. But what she didn't know was that the state was going to acquire it all since I was what most people call a “Welfare baby”.
I finally met my Father at the age of 11, and sadly I was scared at first. I made every idea up in my head for me to not like him. He was what I had always needed and I was distant, and only let him know as much as he needed to hear it was as if my mother made my father like a DARE officer, he really didn't need to know the truth. He made sure to always have our Sunday phone calls and our summer visits but in that time how much can you really get to know an absent father.
My mother continued to put me in the mist of stuff that to this day scars me. I remember being allowed to go to a concert at the Gorge in Washington at the age of 12 with a bus full of drug dealers. Now what I want people to see was that I was “allowed” to go with this bus. This sadly was the first time I did drugs. I was only 12 and I had done mushrooms. Shortly after I started doing marijuana. My mother told me if I did it in the house it wasn't a big deal. So of course I did everything she would let me and sometimes the stuff she wouldn't let me.
Things started to get odd. Men started coming into the house and getting in to bed with my mother naked. They started looking in the windows of our house and pleasuring themselves. And I'm sure there was more but a lot of things started being blocked out of my head at that age. A lot of stuff from that age to about 20 is a blur. The last months of living in Seattle I woke with a gun pointed at my head. My mother and I was being robbed at gun point. At this time my mother was still dealing drugs and money was known to be in the house. Two men robbed us, the sad part was I wasn't as shaken up about the robbery as much as I was it was one of my best friends growing up who had did it. At this point my trust for men was just about lost.
