Growing up
Memories are funny things. They drift in like a cloud and can vanish just as suddenly. Some don’t drift at all. They sit heavy, unchanged by the years that have passed, untouched by time. Like a shard of glass buried beneath the surface of your life, they can slice you open before you even realize you’re bleeding. Early experiences have a way of carving patterns you don’t know are there but shape the way you reach for love, the way you flinch from it, the way you hold on, sometimes too tight.
My earliest memories come in fragments — flashes of people, rooms, smells, sounds, the way light pierces a space and dust floats through it like time has shifted. We moved so often that nothing stayed still long enough to form a full picture. I imagine most people remember childhood the way you’d watch a movie with each day in the same place becoming another frame on the reel. But for me, the reel was full of missing scenes. Whole stretches of life were left blank, interrupted before they ever had the chance to turn into something solid.
One of the earliest places that visited on occasion when I really think about my origins, was a tiny, tired bungalow off of Clark Avenue near Metro Hospital. That’s where I was born, Cleveland, Ohio. Our sat adjacent to a brick apartment building where my cousins lived. Everything around us was worn thin, the houses, carpet, furniture, people. Both buildings are long gone, erased from the street like they were never there at all.
Our kitchen had been chewed up over time. The square tiles were chipped at the corners. The table and chairs matched and their metal legs were freckled with rust. The seat cushions ripped open, where the stuffing poked out in soft gray clumps. When I climbed onto them, kneeling on my shins to see over the tabletop, the torn plastic scratched red lines across my legs.
Two big Shepards lived in the basement, a place I never dared go. It was dark down there and I didn’t like the damp musty smell that drifted up the stairs when you opened the door.
Mornings were just me in a quiet house. My mom slept late, so I made my own breakfast. I’d pour a bowl of crispy rice cereal and bury it under heaping spoonfuls of sugar, making sure each bite was half cereal and half sugar. Sometimes I didn’t even want cereal. I’d drag a chair across the linoleum, climb up like I was scaling a mountain, and reach for the yellow Domino box in the cupboard. One big heaping tablespoon straight from the carton filled my whole mouth with a pasty white goo that glued itself to my palate and forced me into silence until it melted.
After breakfast, I’d head outside while my mom slept. My cousins, Charlie, Ricky, and Terry, were usually already out there, waiting in the narrow strip between our houses. It wasn’t a yard so much as an uneven stretch of sidewalk with scattered patches of grass trying their best to survive in the dirt.
We didn’t have many toys, but kids don’t need much. One time they stuffed Terry into a plastic trash can and rolled him around until he cracked his head open and needed stitches. When lunchtime came, we’d walk to the school a few blocks away for free lunches. The place always filled the same way every day, kids from every direction, trickling in like clockwork. No parents. Just a hoard of neighborhood kids showing up because that’s where the food was. Sandwiches on Wonder bread with a slice of lunch meat, usually ham, and that heavy yellow cheese, like the block everyone seemed to have in their refrigerators. I hated cheese, especially that stuff.
It’s strange how invisible the truth can be while you’re inside it. Only hindsight reveals how different things really were.
After we moved away from my cousins, Mom sometimes dropped my brother, and me at my aunt and uncle’s house to watch us, while she and my stepdad went out. They lived a few blocks away from the old place, but this house felt even darker than the old one.
The smell was so gross.
Thick. Putrid. The kind of smell that stuck to your clothes and followed you long after you left. Old carpet, old spills, old secrets. I’d take one big breath at the door, hold it as long as I could, then let it out slow so I didn’t have to taste the air all at once. After a while you kinda got used to it.
The house always felt dim, even during the day. Uncle Billy stayed anchored to the same dent in the couch, a Pabst bottle glued to his hand all day. He reminded me of a sloth, in the way he sat twisted sideways with one leg tucked under him, the other bent so that his knee pressed up against his chest. Wheel of Fortune hummed from the TV while he sipped from the brown bottle all day and night.
Aunt Sally floated through the rooms like she didn’t notice any of it. She smiled at everything, her light-blonde hair falling around her small, Snow-White face. She always looked so soft, like a porcelain doll someone forgot to put in a box. I loved talking to her. She was so happy. So oblivious. And nothing like my mom.
My cousins were usually running around somewhere in the neighborhood, loud and wild the way kids get when no one is really watching.
One day, my uncle’s brother was there with his girlfriend. She reminded me of my aunt, pretty in a delicate way, like their faces had been drawn from the same idea. She sat on the living room floor with her back against the wall, knees pulled close, holding a crumpled brown paper bag. I watched as she squeezed the top closed with one hand, leaving a tiny opening she pressed to her mouth.
She inhaled like it was the only air left in the world.
Then she held her breath.
Held it.
Held it…
Her eyes drifted somewhere far away. Her body stayed there, but she didn’t. I couldn’t look away. Something about her stillness pulled at me.
“What was she doing? And where did she go?” I wondered, the question whispering through my curious mind.
BAMMMM! Suddenly a sharp crash snapped through the room. A beer bottle exploded against the wall, glass spraying out in bullets of ice. My whole body froze in mid space. My eyes locked on my uncle’s brother, who was screaming at his girlfriend.
“Give me the fucking bag bitch!”
So much was happening, shouting, pushing, bodies, arms flailing. My uncle tried to hold his brother back, arms wrapped around him while he lunged toward the girlfriend, who still looked far away, her eyes fixed on nothing. I don’t think she even knew the room was a warzone and she was the one who was about to get annihilated.
I couldn’t move.
My bare feet felt glued to the sticky floor.
My eyes went wide and stayed that way, taking in every ounce of the violence.
Eventually the shouting thinned out. My uncle shoved the bag into his brother’s hand, and he grabbed it like it was treasure. He inhaled deep, then leaned back, drifting to that same strange place his girlfriend had gone.
Aunt Sally wasn’t as lucky. Some of the broken glass had cut her arm when the bottle burst. I saw the red beads forming on her skin and rushed over, wanting to help. My small hands opening a band-aid to place on her cuts. No one looked at me. No one asked if I was okay. And everything went back to normal. That’s how it was, that’s how it always was after an adult behaved like that, as if nothing happened.
I don’t remember how old I was, maybe three, maybe four. A long time ago.
A few years later, we lived on Tampa Avenue again. The second time. A couple of years earlier we’d lived down the street in a different house.
I was in kindergarten now and would walk to school by myself. Lot of kids did back then. The school sat four or five blocks away, across a four-lane main road where I’d wait for the redlight to cross. The Garden Gate was a narrow boxed in by tall fences behind the school, on one side lined the school garden the other the back of garages from a residential street.
One morning, I was walking with a little girl from down the street when some twine got wrapped around my ankles. Slamming into the ground, tiny pebbles pierced through the skin on my knee, embedding into my flesh. I cried the whole way home. Marvin set me up on the counter and gently cleaned them out, picking each of the tiny stones one by one before pouring hydrogen peroxide on the wound and bandaging it up. Hugging me, he sent me back off to school. There’s a small round blue mark as a reminder from that day. Funny how some scars you can see, while others form without your knowing.
My mom was really young when she started seeing Marvin, maybe sixteen or seventeen I came to learn later in life. I was around two or three when they met I guess. I think it must have been when we lived on Clark next to my cousin’s apartment building. Marvin was a lot older, maybe around thirty or older at the time. It was like he was her dad too.
“Would you like Marvin to be your dad?” my mom asked one afternoon.
It was a confusing question. He had been there for a while I guess, and thought about a day or whether he was my dad.
“Yeah, I guess.” Shrugging, I replied.
Life seemed kinda normal back then. I went to school, played with the kids in the neighborhood most days. There were always boys who liked picking on little girls. One boy in my kindergarten class was especially mean. He’d follow me down the Garden Gate path after school, trying to shove me or hit me when no adults were looking. One afternoon my grandma came to pick me up, caught him in the act, and let him have it. He never bothered me again after that.
Another day, walking home through the same path, everything suddenly went black.
When my eyes opened, all I saw was the blue sky and a few white clouds drifting. My head felt heavy. Faces hovered over me, talking fast, voices overlapping like they were arguing or trying to figure something out.
Hands lifted me off the ground.
Someone was running with me.
They slid me into the passenger seat of a car.
“Ahhhhhhh!”
The scream tore out of me.
My leg felt like it was being ripped off my body.
I looked down and my foot was touching the back of my leg.
I screamed more.
“Aaaahhh! Aaaahhh!”
Big tears, hot face, chaos.
“I’m sorry, honey!” the woman holding me cried.
“Someone has to drive. I need to hold her!”
A door slammed.
The car sped down the street.
We reached my house and an ambulance was already there.
Hands on my body, placing me on the gurney.
There was a man in uniform crouched down, trying to comfort me.
Inside the ambulance, every bump jolted through my entire body.
“OUCH! OUCH!”
My screams ricocheted off the metal walls.
“What’s your name?” the paramedic asked.
“Taaa… mmmmy…”
It barely came out.
“What’s your address?”
“Ahhhhhhhh!”
Another bump.
More pain.
“Hey! Watch the bumps!” he yelled to the driver.
His voice kept floating toward me, low and steady, tugging me awake each time my eyes slipped shut.
The world smeared into colors.
Then it went black.
I woke to light.
Bright. Sharp. Too white.
It pressed against my eyes until I was finally awake.
The room smelled like disinfectant. Sterile.
Machines beeped nearby.
The white walls felt cold as muffled voices drifted in from the hallway.
None of them sounded familiar.
My leg throbbed, jolting the memories back in to the garden gate, the sky, the screaming.
From the hallway I heard, “Three boys on bikes ran over her… broke both bones in her left leg.”
I lay there by myself.
Nobody else.
The ache in my heart pulled louder than the ache in my leg.
Funny how I always remember that scene, not from inside my little girl body looking out at the details of the room. Instead, I’m standing at the end of the bed looking back at me from the outside.
After the broken leg incident passed and my cast was removed, life slipped back into something that looked normal again. My brother, sister, and I played in the basement with our toy jeeps. Those cool battery-operated ones you could drive. I loved driving around in circles racing each other. At night before bed, we’d wear our onesie pajamas and slide down the carpeted stairs head first, like it was a slide. Hide-and-seek was another favorite game, finding hiding spots, counting and screaming giggles when one of us was found.
Mornings were a bit different though.
Chris was always the first to wake up before everyone else, sometimes before the sun. He’d wander downstairs. Out of boredom, or impulse, or something none of us understood, he’d dump food everywhere. Cereal, flour, sugar, pasta… covering the kitchen floor in a crunchy, powdery mess. The dogs loved it when he threw them frozen meat from the freezer. By the time Mom and Marvin got up, the whole place looked like a food hurricane had spun through the house.
Marvin grabbed him, threw him over his lap in the living room with everyone to witness.
Hand or belt, whatever was closest.
Chris was still in diapers, kicking and squirming with every strike.
His crying made my heart scream.
The fear on his face destroyed me.
My soul reached for him.
I wanted to make it stop.
I wanted to save him from his torture.
Mom and my sister stood off to the side.
I stood frozen too, my feet glued in fright.
Chris’ eyes wide, weeping as he pleaded for it to stop.
“Stop! You’re hurting him!”
The words leapt out of my mouth before I even knew I was speaking.
Marvin snapped in my direction.
His jaw clenching his snarling teeth.
Roped muscles in his neck protruded.
My body grew cold and limp as the black of his eyes locked onto me.
For a second, I thought he’d turn on me next.
But he didn’t.
He stopped, put Chris on the ground, and started cleaning up the mess in silence.
Some moments burn into you. Like nails on a chalkboard, for a long time after that, any child’s cry felt like Chris all over again.
To control Chris, they cut his bedroom door in half so only the top opened. At night they locked the bottom piece so he couldn’t wander out. The room was dark paneling, bare floor, a mattress covered in plastic, no sheets. Sometimes a yellow Tonka truck. Sometimes nothing.
Some nights they’d put both Chris and my sister in there. They’d get bored, take off their diapers, smear the walls with whatever they had access to. That’s why the bedroom was left bare, less to clean up. Less to get into.
I learned early not to ask for much, so I taught myself the little things like how to braid my hair into two pigtails that made me feel like a cowgirl. I even had a black velvet cowgirl suit with a pink satin blouse and fringe to match. And then there were the boots. I worshipped those orangish-brown leather boots with the black crisscross laces that climbed all the way up and the clunky heel that made me feel as if I was a big girl. It was either the boots or the suit, until one day they simply disappeared from the wardrobe, the way parents sometimes make things vanish once a child’s favorite becomes too worn or too loud.
School opened my eyes in ways I didn’t expect. Other kids had little treasures we never did at home, ChapStick, gum, tiny race cars, marbles. I wanted them so badly that I started slipping into the coat closet in kindergarten, digging through pockets that weren’t mine. I didn’t know it was stealing. I only knew the wanting. Then one day I was caught.
Later, standing in the grocery store line beside my mother, I stared at a pack of gum I knew she’d never let me have. We didn’t have money for extras, so when no one was looking, I slid it into my pocket. That night, when she tossed my clothes into the wash during my bath, she found a whole pocket full of things that didn’t belong to me. She threatened to march me back to the store and school to apologize to each person I took from. I can’t remember if she actually did, but I remember the shame. It horrified me so much that I never did it again.
I had stopped asking long before I can remember. After getting caught, I stopped wanting too. When I got sick, I never asked for medicine or comfort. I just went to bed. Having no needs, wants or desires set up the foundation for an impoverished existence.
It wasn’t all bad though. Sometimes my mom would make fun with me. One winter afternoon, after a heavy snow, she took me outside and showed me how to make snow angels. We lay side by side, sweeping our arms through the cold powder, laughing when snowflakes stuck to our eyelashes. We even had a snowball fight. That was the first time we ever did that. It was magical.
But shortly after, something changed.
One sleepy morning, the world pulled me awake with a strange buzzing sound.
Bdddddrring. Badddddring.
It vibrated through the quiet house, louder with each repeat, tugging me out of my blanketed dream state.
Rubbing my eyes, I pushed the covers off and carefully climbed down from the top bunk, gripping the wooden posts so I didn’t fall. The ringing echoed through the hallway, calling me forward.
It led me into my mom’s room.
“Hello?” I whispered, lifting the heavy phone to my ear.
It was Rose.
“Is your mom there?”
“Yeah, she’s sleeping. I’ll wake her up,” I said, grabbing my mom’s arm and pushing it with both hands, trying to shake her awake.
“She’s still sleeping,” I told Rose.
“Wake her up so I can talk to her—it’s important.”
I tried.
I really tried.
“Mom,” I said louder this time, shaking her arm harder. “Mom, wake up. Rose is on the phone.”
Nothing.
Why wasn’t she getting up?
I tilted my head, confused.
I climbed onto the bed, straddling her belly, using my whole little body to shake her shoulders.
“Wake up!
Wake up!
Wake UP!”
Still nothing.
My heart started racing.
Something hot and cold crashed through me at once.
I shook her harder.
“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”
“I can’t do this…
I can’t…
I don’t know what to do…”
The blood drained from my face.
“Mom, wake up…
I don’t know what to do…
I don’t know what to do…”
The words spilled out, reaching for her even though she couldn’t hear them.
My throat tightened.
Tears streamed.
“She won’t wake up! Help me!
I can’t do this… I can’t do this!”
“I don’t know what to do! I don’t know what to do!” I wailed.
And then—
I don’t remember what happened next.
Everything went black.
Rose must have called an ambulance.
I don’t remember the sirens.
Fragments only: uniforms, footsteps, voices.
Then black again.
Someone was holding me.
And then I saw her—my mom—being lifted onto a gurney.
They slid her into the back of the ambulance.
The doors closed.
My arms reached for her on instinct.
My soul reached even further.
But she was gone.
Disappearing behind red lights.
Panic surged through me.
Who’s going to take care of me?
Who’s going to love me?
Don’t leave me.
Please don’t leave me here by myself.
I need you.