We were just kids

Just feelings about childhood

We were just kids.
I’ve carried these memories for so long without ever having the chance to voice how I truly feel. Everyone else has had their say�"family, outsiders, people who never lived my life�"telling me how I should feel about my own childhood. But the truth is, they only ever saw what my mother wanted them to see.

She worked hard to maintain an image: the strong, single mom doing her best. And while that may have been true on the outside, behind closed doors was a different story. I’m not saying she was the worst mom in the world, but I am saying this: we need to stop using “she did the best she could” as an excuse to dismiss the pain we went through. Because while things were hard for her, they were hard for us too. And we were just kids.

At an age where most children should be shielded from the harshest parts of life, we were already introduced to death, drugs, and violence. Those weren’t just things we overheard about in whispers�"they were things we lived through, right in front of us.

For a short time, it looked like we had a two-parent household. But even then, it was a façade. I used to think the reason I had so few memories of my dad was because I was too young. That’s partly true, but as I grew older, I realized the bigger reason: he was gone more than he was present. Days would pass without him. I later learned he was on drugs, and suddenly, it all made sense.

But instead of protecting us from that world, my mom drove us right into the middle of it. I remember nights packed into the car, searching for him. No explanations. No conversations afterward. Just silence, and the expectation to deal with it. We were just kids.

The instability never ended. We moved constantly�"new homes, new schools, new neighborhoods. No house ever felt like home. We lived with other people at times, because we couldn’t afford to be on our own. As a child, I thought it was normal, even exciting sometimes. But looking back, it wasn’t adventure, it was survival.

One house in Venus�"we left all our belongings behind. The longest stretch we stayed anywhere was Mansfield, and even then we bounced from duplex to duplex along the same street. The neighborhood was rough, full of bad people and bad influences. I never had a single childhood home. I had fragments. Pieces. None of them permanent.

And through it all, one truth remains: we were just kids. Carrying burdens too heavy for children, living lives too complicated for our age, surviving situations most adults could barely handle.