Growing up..

“Back in the days when i was young i’m not a kid anymore
But some days i sit and wish i was a kid again” – Ahmad “Back in the Day”

I’d say the worse decision of my mother’s short life was that she moved out from my grandmother’s house.

We were your typical westside Baltimore family. A few generations living under one roof. A time when it was ok to be in a house tight with family. Plenty nights of card playing and the adults shooing us away.

My mom was your typical teen mom, except she had me when she was 14. My dad was well into his 30’s. I was the 10/11 of 12 children for my dad and I was my momma’s 1st.

I can remember those first, maybe 5-6 years of my life being easy. Mainly because granny was around and ya know granny makes it all better.

I was a chubby jovial baby. As you can see my grandmother and mother thought I was most adorable by the amount of picture they took me.

When I was about 6-7 years old my mother decided it was time to strike out on her own and get her own place. It was shortly thereafter that she met my younger brothers father and we all got this cool house on Winchester. I can remember my mom working @ Hecht’s out Reistertown Rd. She’d take me to work with her. Those years in that house were fantastic. My family was small but we were happy. We lived right across the street from my first elementary school and granny was 2 blocks away. I really think the time in that house was the most stable my family was throughout my whole life.

My mother and my brother’s father stop seeing each other 2 years after he was born. I don’t know all of the logistics but i remember that was about the time my mom just started wylin out. Droppin us off over peoples houses(we knew them)..sometimes overnight..maybe all weekend. She was after all at this point 20 years old. I suppose she felt like she hadn’t lived her life to the fullest. After a brief period of play we moved to 2 more places in the subsequent years..not staying too long at either residence..there was Madison Ave (I’d play with my friend Renee..I one time got in trouble for tripping my brother on the concrete..his face was scrapped ), McCullough with her best friend and kids, Cottage avenue (where I fell out of a swing while swinging and pushed my little brother in a rose bush…) We lived alot of places in those short years. I know it was probably for the best but at some point when u’re a child and you’ve been in 5 different elementary schools you start to think, what’s really good?

I became really disenchanted with my mother about the time of this picture..and it is one of the only ones we have together when u can slightly see her. My mother later carted my brother off with my Uncle and Me with my aunt as she ran away to Florida for a few years. I wrote her scathing letters about leaving us. I can’t remember if she ever wrote back but by now I was in the 3rd/4th grade.

She eventually came back. Showered us with gifts and promises of never leaving us again. I was always the skeptical one. My brother loved my mother blindly. In his eyes she could do no wrong. By the time she came back for us I really just wanted to stay with my aunt because I didn’t know where we were gonna live or anything. I was tired of the promises that always got broken. I loved my mother but I didn’t love her life style. She loveddddddddddd attention and always had a string of boyfriends (our uncles..lol)

One day she came to my aunt’s house on Baker street saying she’d gotten a place to stay. She said we were moving to LA. I was so excited because the only LA I knew was Los Angeles. Ugh! If I had only known that LA stood for Lafayette Apartments… Lafayette was a series of High Rises and Low rise projects. At first I was excited by the possibility of having all these new potential friends. And hell we lived so close to the Harbor, Corn Beef Row and Old Town Mall that i really didn’t care. I kinda let down my guard and starting to like living with my mother again…that was until she started hustlin.

It’s not uncommon in the hood for some to start hustling because someone has turned them onto game. I never saw the stuff..but i knew she was doing something. Her and her boyfriend at the time would spend hours holed up in her room.

At this point nothing really changed but i noticed my mother moving slower than usual..not the mommy that would take us to the zoo..not the mom who always found a few things for us to do even tho we were poor. She’d kinda would give me and my brother some money and we were free to do what we pleased. I didn’t realize it was the beginning of the end of the family I’d known and was leery about.

~ by bewradley on August 6, 2008.