All throughout my childhood, after my parents’ divorce, I was influenced by my mom to move from place to place with her and experience living with different men I didn’t even know the names of.
At the age of seven, my mom picked my brother and I up early from school and took us to her boyfriend’s RV. I was living in an RV with a man I had never met before. My mom, brother and I were kicked out not even two days later.
A month later, my mom had moved back to Indiana to live with her sister, leaving my brother and me with my dad.
Two years later, she came back and was living with a new man and his sixteen-year-old son. I remember the first time she took my brother and me to his house, it was in the middle of nowhere and shabby.
I was nine years old when I was minding my own business, watching Youtube in the living room, and all I saw was my mom running out of the house with my little brother, leaving me behind. All I remember after that is my mom’s boyfriend yelling at me while I’m sobbing on the couch, as if it was all my fault that he and my mom got into a fight. It took my mom three hours to come back and get me.
Three years later, my mom got her own apartment, and her new boyfriend was living with it. At around two in the morning, I heard banging on the front door. I assumed that it was my mom because she told me that she was going out the night before. As I unlock the door and go to open it, I hear a man yelling at the top of his lungs to open the door. I ran back to my room, scared and left the door half open. Not even 20 seconds later, he forcefully let himself in.
I remember the way he started yelling at my mom to get up as she’s in bed with her boyfriend, the way I was shaking while calling 911 in the closet with my brother, the way that the police escorted him out and the way that I was the only one sobbing.
To this day, I don’t trust anybody I meet too quickly just because of all I’ve gone through with my mom. I still think about what if it happens again, what I will do and how it could go worse than previous times.
