This is a picture of me at almost three years old. That is my mother laying face down on the ground, grandpa’s cowboy boot frames the shot of me looking up at the camera with a weight in my soul. This was one of the days my mother went back to the hospital.
When I was growing up, my mother struggled with mental illness, my stepfather was abusive and I lacked the stability I needed to become a successful student. Like many kids, part of my survival mechanism was to hide what was happening inside the walls of my house. A home visit would have fundamentally changed my life, but no one from my school ever came.
