While I do find her story sketchy and question some of the decisions
she owns up to, it is not clear to me that she could have stayed at her parents' house.
She says only, "I moved in with my parents, and that was not a good idea. I had to get out. I'm not connected to my parents any more." That just sounds very withholding of what happened. Maybe she can't bear to explain. Maybe she just wants us to find out what happened by buying her book. Maybe the editor of this article just did not include the fuller story.
"I had to get out" could mean-- I had to leave because my father would not let me stay there without being his sex slave as I was when I was a preteen. I won't do that.
"I had to get out" may mean-- I had to leave because my parents are still dealing drugs, bringing all kinds of unpredictable, sometimes violent people into the house.
"I'm not connected to my parents any more" may mean something like-- when the neighbors finally turned Mom and Dad into the police for their drug dealing, Mom & Dad managed to portray me as the criminal. They never did, of course, file charges against me but I was so appalled at being offered up to save their skins that I realized I had to get out of there for my own good. There is no way I can have a relationship with parents who would at once deal drugs and accuse me of as much in order to save themselves.
My own reading of this is colored by having worked full time for seven years in a homeless shelter. The women who ended up with us were some of the most resourceless you could imagine. Resourceless not just in terms of money, job, and mental health, but in terms of healthy human relationships. Just because they had relatives out there, did not mean that those relatives were at all a resource for them. Sometimes homelessness was better than trying to remain with the vile sick-os at "home."
05-26-2011, 07:06 AM
Homeless 24-year-old living behind Wal-Mart
