by Aretha Brown

Created on: July 09, 2008

My parents, are only human i know that, but they are the sort of people who should never have had any children. They both started out too young, my father was running with a gang and was very abusive and my mother wore the brunt of it all. I was ten, my sister was eight and my brother was only seven, when we left dad to start a new life, and things were never that much better, we spent most of our nights alone,she would tell us she was going to a bible study we would beg her to stay home just for tonight but she would shrug away from us and walk away, she didn't care if we were scared, she always said if i need space i'm going to take it, with or without a baby sitter, after a while we realised that mum wasn't going to bible study, she would go out night clubbing and sometimes she would bring home a man. We had to stay in our bedroom, and not make a noise, i realise now that it was to conceal the fact that she had three children. We never had any school lunch, because she never bought any food, i can remember rubbing out my work from my the previous term so i'd have a fresh book to start the next term with, the teacher really tore into me about that, but how could explain that mum wouldn't buy us any more and that she said we had to make do or go without. As time went on i eventually resorted to stealing food, and things from school and the shops, years later i discovered that both my sister and brother went through the same thing. We never got excited around christmas time because we knew that she never ever got us anything not even food for christmas, I remember one christmas we were invited to a christian friend of mums, and we had to sit there and watch her son open all his presents and then we for added measure we got to watch them eat their christmas dinner we were never offered any. so after wards went into town while mum went out again and stole some little soft toys and pretended to our friends that we got them from santa just like they did. Sometimes i wonder if the shopkeepers actually let us take them, i know if i had seen kids like us, i would have turned a blind eye too. we weren't much to look at back then, a scraggly bunch we were. Uncombed hair, with nits crawling through, clothes that looked like they were from out of the depression days and shoes that were barely hanging on by a thread, but mum, she always had the most beautiful things my favourite was her jewellery and shoes there was just so much of it. and every time she went out she always

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