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Chapter 3: No Excuses

I believe I was in first grade when I was personally affected with my first experience of Evil on earth. My mother worked long hard hours everyday which meant my sisters and I had to go to the after school program until my mother was able to get off work and pick us up. The after school program was broken down into grade levels, which meant while in the program I wasn’t able to be in direct contact with my siblings, during that this age I believe I wasn’t quite emotionally and physically weaned off of my mother and siblings yet. As everyone would say, I was always very quiet and definitely very much of an Introvert. I was truly still searching for the affection and closeness of my family pack and now I was exposed to a vibrant social society.

My mother was strict and always ran our house with an iron fist. Lets just say she was a no non-sense type of a personality. When one person got in trouble, we all got in trouble. If one person got a whooping we all got a whooping. It didn’t matter if you didn’t do anything wrong that week or not. She had a good memory and my mother would remember something she owed you a whooping for. Without fail, the next day after receiving our punishment that would normally be the biggest conversation in the neighborhood. First question would usually be, “What did you do”? Second, “Did it hurt”? Then someone would utter out, “I heard you screaming, you were trying to get away for at least an hour”! Since my house was right next to the basketball courts, everyone in the neighborhood could hear so they would know what was going on. We were raised in a generation that if you were to go outside and get into trouble, you might get whooped two or three times before you even got home by all the play mothers in the neighborhood, who were granted permission by the parents to watch out for the children. In my culture growing up, it’s always stated that it takes a village to raise a child.