I can remember all the yelling and screaming from my parents. I remember seeing my mom and dad standing in the doorway, my mom yelling and hitting my dad. He’s just standing there taking it. I was crying and screaming sitting on the couch, my sister was trying to keep me calm and get me to stop crying. I remember my dad walking out of the front door, while my mom walked into the bedroom.

My mom never spoke of what happened with my dad or why he was never around. We moved to Salem, It’s a small town in the middle of Missouri. While we lived there my mom was talking to this guy in prison, she said he’s my dad. I was too young and didn’t know any better. So when we went to meet him I called him dad, then a little while later they got married in the prison. 

After he got out we moved to Sedalia, we lived there for a while in a two-story house. We lived right of the Katy Trail and we would ride our bikes every day to school and would spend hours racing each other and the kids down the road. We were never really in school, we were home a lot. My mom and her husband were never around, they would leave for days on end and never say where to. We kids were there and we never had money and any food, so we walked a mile every day to the food pantry to get lunch and dinner. It was me, my three brothers and my two sisters. We would sometimes get the leftovers and we would bring them back.

I remember one day we got a five-gallon bucket of hard-boiled eggs, they were old and we would throw them at the cars in the street and the cars passing by. I can remember my sister and her boyfriend rolling their own cigarettes while everyone else was gone. I can remember the fight that my family and friends had with some people down the road, It was right on the corner of the street almost in front of our house. The police showed up and I remember running outside and my brother sitting on the ground yelling at me to run inside and get a pitcher of water, I did as she said she started to have him drink it. I didn’t know what happened at the time, but one of the other people from down the street had a pair of brass knuckles and hit him with it in the head. He was rushed to the hospital. Then after that, we moved again.

We moved to a place called Richwoods Missouri, we moved into a trailer in the middle of the woods. I can not go into detail about what happened here, this is where the worst happened with my family. But my mom had been put in prison because of this, and her husband. He got more time than my mom did. She got 5 years, I don't remember how many he got. But all I know is that if they had never been arrested then I would not be the man I am today. My mom has nothing to do with it, I wish I could just lock my family away from my mom. Because anytime she gets near it or in my life she messes it up. She makes things a “ living hell” so it would just be easier to keep her out and away from it.