When my mother hated me, she’d call the whole family
And tell them what I had done this time.
She’d call my in-laws and tell them not to let me
See my kids.
When my mother hated me, she’d disappear.
I would walk the streets and knock on every door.
Sometimes I would find her, and
Sometimes I wouldn’t.
And she just told them to tell me
She
Wasn’t
There.
I wasn’t taken care of the way I should have been at first. Most of the time she would sleep. She would keep us in her room, and just keep the tv on for us so we wouldn’t go wandering throughout the house during the daytime.
My mom she said that he, my dad, had come over to take us to daycare and he came in with a gun. I don’t remember it that way.
I remember her and her boyfriend running into the bedroom and getting out a gun from underneath the clothes in the closet. So. That is what I remember…
I was scared. Me and my older brother, we put our faces in the couch. We were running back and forth because they were just running and yelling and screaming and fighting. And I remember we were watching Jasmine and Alladin, um, when the gun went off. I saw my dad fall down.
(compiled by women who participated in Stories From the Inside Out, at a Northwest Arkansas correction center in 2016.)