Raw-8

During my entire childhood, I don’t think we ever lived in any one place for much longer than a year. Any time my mom got into a confrontation or encountered adversity, her instinct was to just pull up stakes and move on. It seemed like she was always running from something and searching for a fresh start. But no matter, where we went or how many times we started over in a new town (or even a new state), it was always the same. By the time we had unpacked and settled in somewhere, it was never long before something would trigger her impulse to run and we’d be boxing it all up again for the next move. The core of your happiness has to come from within—otherwise, it won’t matter how far you run, the unhappiness is going to follow you wherever you go.

Dressed up as Barbie for Halloween in kindergarten.

My grandma’s house in Clay County, West Virginia, was the most consistent address we had. She owned a three-story home on around a hundred acres of land in Bomont, way out in the countryside. My mom kept a single-wide trailer home on the property behind the house, and we lived there on and off throughout my childhood. But most of the time we were bouncing back and forth from different low-income apartments or rental homes all over West Virginia, and as far as North Carolina and Columbus, Ohio. For me, the consequence of all that moving around was that I never felt like I fit in anywhere because we were never in one place long enough for me to set down roots. Not only was I unsure of myself socially, it got to the point where I always felt confused in class because we would learn one thing at one school and then go to another school. At the new school, what they were working on would be completely different—different chapter, different subject, different everything. Sadly, I had no idea moving around that much wasn’t normal. I just thought there was something wrong with me.

For most of my childhood, and even through high school, the only constant friendship I had in my chaotic life was with my best friend, Kayla Roush. I first met Kayla in second grade at H.E. White Elementary School, just down the road from my grandma’s house. At first, we had a catty little fight about another girl in our class, but we quickly realized she was playing us against each other. From that moment on, we were inseparable. Kayla and I instinctively gravitated towards one another because we both understood what it was like to live in a family with so much toxic dysfunction. Her father was an abusive alcoholic and her mother was always working to make ends meet, so Kayla, being the second oldest of five, became the caretaker for her younger siblings.

Kayla was the only person outside of my family that I felt like I could trust enough to truly be myself around. We had the same sense of humor, the same taste in clothes, the same unhappy home lives, and the same need to take care of everyone but ourselves. We even looked so much alike that people often mistook us for twins, which we loved—we would always beg my grandma to take us shopping at the mall so we could buy matching outfits to wear to school. When my mom decided, on the spur of the moment, to move to Walkertown, North Carolina, before the end of the school year I was heartbroken. We were there for a little less than a year. I can still remember the feeling of excitement when a card from Kayla would come for me in the mail, or I when I got to hear her voice on a message that she had left on our answering machine. When we moved back to my grandma’s a year later, I got to go back to school at H.E. White with Kayla again. It was like a celebration. We picked up right where we left off and I knew we would be best friends forever. We moved back to North Carolina a second time in my fifth-grade year and it was tough, but by then we were old enough to write letters back and forth and talk on the phone for hours. We were the only support system we had in the chaos of our home lives and we kept each other’s heads above water.

Me and Kayla just before we moved to North Carolina in my fifth-grade year.

By the time I started middle school, we had moved back to West Virginia for good, but my mom’s pattern of uprooting us every few months didn’t stop. Between sixth and seventh grade I went to three different schools and lived in four or five different homes in almost as many towns. We moved into the main house on my grandma’s property the summer before sixth grade, so I started that school year with Kayla at Clay County Middle School. Like most eleven-year-olds, I desperately wanted to fit in and make friends. At that point in my life, I wasn’t super outgoing—but I wanted to be. Deep down I had this big, fun-loving personality, but I was so boxed in and insecure that I had to know you and trust you to be myself. Even after I started to make friends, one of the biggest issues that I struggled with in middle school (and then even into high school) was that they never wanted to come over and hang out or have sleepovers at my house because they didn’t feel comfortable around my mom. She always came off as angry and too strict. I would have friends come over once and then after that, if I invited them over again, they always said, “Let’s go to my house because your mom’s mean and she won’t let us do anything.”

All the kids I was hanging out with were involved in athletics and after-school activities. I wanted to fit in, play sports, and be part of a team like all my other friends, but I didn’t have that kind of support at home. I had no one to give me the direction I needed to go where I wanted in life, so I was just kind of lost. I had played a little basketball in elementary school when I went to H.E. White, so I decided to try out for the team at Clay. I was terrible. Even though I was naturally athletic, no one had ever practiced with me at home or taught me basic skills like how to dribble and pass. When that didn’t work out, I tried out for the cheer team. I was so excited and proud of myself when I made the cut, but I was way behind the other girls on the team who had all been taking gymnastics classes and doing one-on-one private sessions for years. I remember a couple of them laughing and making fun of me at practice because I didn’t have my back handspring. But I knew not to ask my mom for lessons. The only reason she had even agreed to let me be on the cheer team in the first place was because the school had a bus that took us home every day after practice. If she had to pick me up, pay extra money, or if it interfered with her work schedule, there was no way it was happening.

However embarrassed as I was about my tumbling skills, it was nothing compared to when my mom decided it would be fun to experiment with my hair. By the time she was done putting in all the chemicals to bleach and perm my hair, it was such a fried mess that I looked like I had a frizzy banana on my head. But my mom actually thought it looked great, so I just went along with it because I was never able to speak up for myself, especially at home. Going to school the next day was totally humiliating; everyone was asking me what the heck I did to my hair and laughing at me behind my back. I was already insecure about the gap in my teeth, but now I hated everything about how I looked. I desperately wanted braces, but we couldn’t afford them (and Medicaid would only pay for them if they were medically necessary). Since I couldn’t do anything about my hair, except wait for it to grow out, I decided to try and fix my teeth myself. I remember sneaking into the bathroom with a pair of pliers every night while I was getting ready for bed and trying to use them to force my teeth closer together.

After that, I started to develop intense anxiety about going to school. I would hide under my bed every morning and beg my mom to let me stay home. Most of the time she would just let me skip. The truth is, it made her life easier when I stayed home from school because I would do chores, help with the housework, and be around to help take care of my brother and sister. My mom had dropped out after eighth grade. The importance of an education was never expressed to her growing up, so school was never really a priority for her. We got in trouble if we didn’t bring home good grades, but it wasn’t because she wanted us to get into a good college. In her mind, school was just someplace you went until you were old enough to get a real job and settle down with a family.

The only people I had in my life who ever encouraged me to be a child were my mom’s brother, Danny, and his wife, Misty. They had bought the property next to my grandma’s, and they were living next door in a modular home at the time. They had a completely different parenting style. I used to walk over and visit with them. They would try to get me to play like a young child should without any responsibility. They didn’t agree with a lot of my mom’s parenting choices and wished for me to be the child that I was. But that was all I had ever known. I had been watching my brother and sister from the time I was in kindergarten, so I felt protecting them was my responsibility.

I ended up having to switch schools again because my mom got into a huge fight with Misty over the way she was parenting us. On one of the days my mom let me stay home from school, she called from work and told me I had to go down to H. E. White to pick up Isaac (who was in first grade at the time) because they were sending him home with a fever. The school was about a mile from my grandma’s house and I would have to walk down there and then walk back with Isaac, but I was used to caring for my siblings so I didn’t really think much of it. But when Isaac’s teacher, Miss Varney, found out my mom was sending me to pick him up she immediately called Misty. Bomont is a town with a population of four hundred people. Everybody knows everybody. Miss Varney had grown up with my mom, aunt, and uncle. They had actually all gone to school together as kids. So she had no problem calling up Misty and telling her that it was absolutely unacceptable for my mom to send a child to pick up another child who was sick with a fever.

Misty ended up going down to the school to get Isaac herself. When my mom found out she was pissed. She got into it with my aunt, and then my grandma got involved. It turned into a big family feud because they were calling her out for putting too much responsibility on me. My mom did not like anyone interfering or questioning her authority over her kids, so she stopped speaking to all of them. She just cut them out of our lives completely. We moved out of my grandma’s and into a rental out on Frame Road in Elkview. It was only in the next county over, but it was a different school district. I begged my mom to not make me transfer because I had already been in so many schools, but we were now forty miles from Clay, so my mom had to drive fifteen minutes to the county line to drop me off at the nearest school bus stop. She did that for maybe a week or two, but it was just too much for her to make that drive every morning. So she pulled me out of Clay.

Halfway through the school year I had to leave my best friend, quit the cheer team, and start over at Elkview Middle School. I was totally miserable. I hated being at yet another new school where I didn’t know anyone and no one knew me. Every morning I woke up with this feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. The sad thing is, I actually liked school. I loved learning new things and I craved the structure—which I didn’t have at home. I hated always being the new kid. Every time I had to start over it chipped away at my self-esteem, and I retreated into myself a little bit more.

I was too young to understand that never having any kind of solid foundation under my feet was the real reason I didn’t want to go to school. I was never able to express my feelings to my mom because I was afraid I’d be accused of back talking or questioning her parenting and get into trouble. Punishments tended to be brutal at times too—we were spanked, smacked, and paddled. We never really knew how a punishment was going to go down, or even how my mom would react to simply expressing how we felt. But, as harsh as she could be, my mom was also very manipulative. When I cried about school or because I missed my grandma, she would cuddle me up and say, “I’m here for you, baby. I’m always here for you.” She knew exactly how to make us feel guilty, so we never spoke up for ourselves or rebelled against the choices she made that impacted us negatively. It was easier to just shut down and beg not to go to school.

A few weeks after I started at Elkview, my English teacher humiliated me in front of the whole class. In Ms. Brown’s class, the minute she turned her back everyone would start fooling around. Kids liked her class because she had so little control you could get away with goofing off, and no one respected her because she would lose her temper and throw kids out of her classroom over the most ridiculous things. I rarely ever spoke in any of my classes or did anything to draw attention to myself. I was already painfully shy and self-conscious, so when Ms. Brown scolded me in front of all the other kids because I didn’t have a pencil, it was my worst nightmare. I could feel everyone’s eyes on me and heard a couple of kids laughing under their breath. I was so embarrassed that, instead of holding my tongue, I decided to give her attitude because I was humiliated. I thought I was standing up for myself. Instead, it got me thrown out of the classroom and I had to spend the rest of the period standing out in the hallway.

After that, I started getting sick all the time. I don’t know if it was all the stress breaking down my immune system or if I was just prone, but I got strep throat so many times that I barely went to school the rest of the year. I’d come down with a sore throat and a fever and then be out for weeks at a time. I never settled in or started to feel comfortable at Elkview because I never got the chance to establish any friendships before my mom was on the move again. She and my stepfather got into an argument with the people we were renting the house from, so they uprooted us again and we moved to Charleston.

At this point, I had come down with strep so many times that I couldn’t even start seventh grade at South Charleston Middle School right away because I had to get my tonsils and adenoids taken out. I don’t remember much about the surgery, except that in the car on the way home from the hospital after it was over, my mom handed me a journal my grandma had left for me. She must have tried to see me after the surgery, but my mom wouldn’t let her because she was still angry about the fight. The journal was covered in pretty flowers. Inside there was a letter from my grandma telling me how much she loved me and missed me, and that she hoped I would use it to write down all my hopes and dreams. The letter was sweet and loving, but underneath there was such sadness. Not being allowed to see our grandma was so heartbreaking. All our lives she had taken care of us whenever my mom was working; she cooked for us, took us shopping for school clothes, and was one of the only consistent sources of love we had ever known. Not allowing her to see her grandkids was probably the worst thing that my mom could do to her. What I don’t think she realized was that she was punishing us too. It sent a message to us that nothing in our lives—not even family—was permanent. She ended up making up with my grandma a month or two later, but the fact that we watched our mom repeatedly cut people out of her life so easily would have a lasting impact on all three of us.

Meanwhile, I had been out of school and hanging out by myself at home for so long that after I recovered from the surgery, I was actually looking forward to going back and being around other kids my age. Charleston is less than twenty miles from Elkview, but it might as well have been on another planet. For most of my life, we had lived in small, rural towns with populations that barely topped out at a thousand people. Now, all of a sudden, we were living in the capital of West Virginia, which to me seemed like this big, fast-paced city. The kids at South Charleston Middle School were totally different from the kids I had met at my previous schools. The way they dressed was different, the way they acted was different, even the way they talked was different. At all the schools I had been to before nobody thought twice if you wore raggedy hand-me-downs and scuffed up shoes, but at South Charleston all the kids were into expensive sneakers, designer jeans, and cool clothes—which, of course, I didn’t have. I remember showing up on that first day, wearing a dingy T-shirt, no-name jeans, and bargain store shoes. I felt like I looked like a country mouse in the big city. Once again, I was the new kid who was out of step with everyone around me, but I was determined to stick it out and fit in because being in a big city with no friends and no family was so lonely and isolating.

Between all the school I had missed from the end of sixth grade to the beginning of seventh and how far ahead the curriculum was at this new school, I was so far behind in all of my classes it seemed like I would never catch up. I remember sitting in math class, looking at the equations the teacher had put up on the chalkboard, and feeling totally lost, like she was writing in some kind of alien language. It was the same thing in all my classes. I should have raised my hand or gone to speak to my teachers after class, but I was too afraid to ask for help. I just kept my head down and tried not to draw any attention to myself.

Socially, things were a little better than at my last school—at least, at first. I hit it off almost immediately with a girl named Katy who sat next to me in homeroom. She was sweet and funny, and for the first time since I had started middle school, I began to relax and feel like I could be myself. I ended up being absorbed into her circle of friends. We all got along great and they were fun to hang out with, but at the same time, these girls had known each other forever. So there was a part of me that always felt like I was a little on the outside; like they had a secret language or were all in on some inside joke that I just didn’t get. I had a crush on this cute boy in our friend group named Jonathan. Katy liked his best friend, so the four of us went on a couple of double dates to the movies.

South Charleston was much more ethnically diverse than Clay or Elkview, so a lot of my new friends were Black and Hispanic. The difference in the color of our skin wasn’t something that I was even really aware of until my grandfather refused to come to my birthday party because my “Black boyfriend” was going to be there. That was the first time I saw a glimpse of the cruel man who was full of hate that my mother had grown up with, instead of the loving grandfather I had always known.

Despite how hurt I was by my grandfather’s racist boycott of my thirteenth birthday party, things were actually going well for me in South Charleston. I had friends, a cute boyfriend, and I was finally starting to feel like I had some solid ground under my feet—which were now decked out in my first pair of Nike high tops, thanks to Jonathan who gave them to me as a present for my birthday. Then one day, I was walking from second period to my next class and a girl I didn’t even know jumped me. I remember stepping through the set of double doors that led from the hallway into the stairwell. My arms were full of books because we only had four minutes between classes and we weren’t allowed to go back to our lockers until lunch. The girl must have snuck back to her locker before the end of second period and put all her books away because she was waiting for me (with her arms free) behind one of the doors. I was getting ready to go down the stairs when she came out from what seemed like nowhere and sucker-punched me right in the face.

I’ve never been a fighter, but I was tougher than I looked. Back when I was in fifth grade with Kayla, we used to be part of what I can only describe as an elementary school Fight Club. In the schoolyard at H.E. White, there was this log cabin-like structure that was completely empty inside. Kids used it as a kind of clubhouse, and every day at recess there would be these prearranged fights. It was totally under the radar, but also highly organized. There was a kid who would referee the fight and brackets where you could bet on who would win. All I ever wanted was to fit in, so of course, I ended up getting pulled into a couple of fights. You’d be down on the ground wrestling, pulling hair, punching and kicking each other, doing whatever you had to do to stay in the fight until one of you finally gave in. I was actually undefeated, and then on my third or fourth fight, the girl I was up against got hurt and we all got in trouble. I tackled her and took her down, but as she was squirming around on the ground, she hit her kneecap on the wooden wall of the cabin and it split open. Suddenly, there was blood all over her knee and all the kids that had been watching and cheering us on instantly scattered—that was the end of my junior wrestling career.

I was little, but I knew how to defend myself, so when that girl attacked me in the stairwell, I remember taking a second to process the pain and then I instinctively dropped all my books and started fighting back. As we were punching and kicking each other, I was vaguely aware that kids from all over the school had come running to watch and had begun chanting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” The next thing I remember was a couple of teachers pulling us apart and both of us being sent to the principal’s office. They called my mom and we both ended up getting suspended for three days, even though I was just defending myself. To this day, I have no idea why she attacked me.

Me, Victoria, and Isaac—just before we moved back to West Virginia from North Carolina.

That was it. I shut down completely. Whatever confidence I had gained over the past few months completely evaporated, and it was replaced by a familiar, paralyzing sense of dread about going to school. I begged my mom, “Please, don’t make me go back there. I don’t want to go. Please, homeschool me. I’ll do all my work from home. I’ll do anything; just don’t make me go back there.” We ended up moving again pretty much right after the fight anyway because the lease was up on the place we were renting and my mom found a cheaper apartment in Dunbar. We had moved less than five miles from South Charleston, but Dunbar was in a different school district, which meant that I would have to start over again at another new school. Isaac and Victoria finished the year at Dunbar Intermediate School, but I was done. I had been to three schools in less than two years, and it hadn’t gone well for me at any of them.

That was the end of middle school for me. My mom let me stay home for the rest of that year and for all of eighth grade. It was convenient for her because I was around to help with chores and take care of my brother and sister while she and my stepdad were at work, but it’s not like she put me in any kind of homeschool program. I don’t remember reading a single book or filling out any worksheets that year. At some point, I took a test that allowed me to technically pass eighth grade, but I didn’t step foot inside a classroom again until high school.