Started From the Bottom, Now We’re Here

Before the degrees, before the business, before anyone decided I was “too much,” I was a broke little girl being raised by children.

Buckle up, because this one ends good, but we’re starting at the bottom. And no, it’s not a sob story. I don’t do those. This is just me telling you the truth the way I’d tell you anything, straight, with jokes, because that is how I actually made it out. It gets dark for a minute. Stay with me. I always come back.

Two teenagers made me in my grandparents’ house, and my grandparents were basically kids themselves. So home was young, loud, and always one comment away from a screaming match. There was love in there somewhere. It just lived under a whole lot of yelling and never enough money.

My first real money lesson came in kindergarten. My grandma asked my grandpa for twenty dollars, and he got so mad he pulled out a whole stack of twenties and burned them, one bill at a time, in the ashtray, screaming the entire time. He’d rather torch the money than hand it over. That’s the house that built me.

My mom and my aunt both had babies as teenagers, three days apart, so I grew up with a cousin who’s three days younger than me. We were basically twins. She was the blonde, blue-eyed pretty one, I was the dark-haired, green-eyed one. Grandma favored me. Great-grandma favored her. But being the favorite doesn’t make you safe.

Her life was harder than mine. When we wet the bed, her mom made us wear the dirty underwear on our heads. She beat my cousin with a wooden spoon and told her, to her face, that she wished I was hers instead. Neither of us earned a second of that. Two little girls, raised by people who got handed nothing and passed it straight down. Kids raising kids. That’s where I come from.

My mom’s house was softer. We weren’t rich, but we ate, the place was clean, and there was always a little extra. She wasn’t perfect either. She threw remotes, lighters, whatever was close, and skinny was always the assignment. Her own dad had been abusive too, and that’s just how it goes. The pattern feels like home, so you keep picking it in new faces. She was young and doing her best with broken tools, and I’ve got grace for that now, because I’ve been a young mom too.

Then one summer she fell in love and left my sibling and me at our dad’s. We were supposed to come home. It was the worst decision of her young life. My mom is beautiful. She should’ve been somebody’s trophy wife. She deserved a soft life, and she never got one.

My dad was a heavy addict, too checked out to work or provide. My stepmom was the only one with a job, and she did not want us there. Two extra mouths she never asked for. I get it now. I didn’t then. Back then I just remember my heart sinking, and how homesick I was. That Christmas, all I asked for was my mom’s perfume, and I’d spray it on myself just to smell her, just to feel like I still belonged to somebody.

Home was a trailer outside Memphis, and it reeked of animal pee and filth. Roaches, holes in the floor, no AC in the summer, no heat in the winter. My dad hid in his room all day, sleeping or high, while I sat in that mess getting told exactly who I’d become. That I was a slut. That I’d be barefoot and pregnant by sixteen. That every other kid had potential and I had none. That I was worth nothing.

The funniest part? I hadn’t even kissed a boy yet. But my step-grandma still called me “hot pants,” all because her husband’s son slept a little too close to me at a sleepover, on a floor where every single one of us was sleeping, because that was the whole setup. My sister and I still cackle about it. There I was, a little kid like, ma’am, what? I’m not sleeping with him. Ew.

Here’s the context nobody bothered to ask for. I was a wild ADHD kid who couldn’t sit still, so I spent most of those years grounded in my room. Solitary confinement before I knew the words for it. And whatever they wanted to call “fast,” it had a reason nobody wanted to look at. I got exposed to grown things way too young, off abuse that happened to my cousin and got passed down to me. I wasn’t a bad kid. I was a hurt one, being raised by people too broken to know the difference. I know the difference now, and that’s the whole point.

Eventually my dad and stepmom split, and I moved in with my paternal grandmother, same trailer park, same road. You can’t make it up. But something in me had already flipped. I got a job. I got a car. I started building the smallest version of a life that was actually mine.

Then I watched my dad go to prison for meth. Watched him get sentenced. Visited him in federal prison, sat in that visiting room, looked at the officers, and thought, half out loud, that I wanted a job where I just got to watch people all day too.

So guess what I became. A Lieutenant for the State of Texas corrections. Took a few years, but I got there. The universe has jokes, and so do I. I got into Central Texas College, and the day after graduation I left, went back to Texas, back to my grandparents, and never looked back.

Everybody in that trailer was in such a hurry to tell me who I’d be. They rushed the whole verdict before I was old enough to spell my own future. But here’s what not one of them ever knew. Rush it, and it burns.

So I did the one thing nobody in my childhood knew how to do. I turned the heat down, and I let the bacon cook low and slow, for as long as it took, until it came out exactly right.

Unraveling with Mo 🥓