Charlotte was my grandmother, and the woman who raised me. She, along with her husband Lawrence, put their lives on hold to raise my sister Natalie and I after our father and mother took on new challenges in their lives. Charlotte did her best with what she knew. However, she was not a pleasant woman by any means. She never took care of her own ADHD or mental health, and was not a healthy person to live with. 

Charlotte did her best to make sure that my education was accounted for: she was always making sure my IEPs were accommodating my every need, she took my learning disabilities very seriously when it was hard for anyone else to, and she made sure that I understood how important an education was to an individual. In a way my childhood was a sheltered one, in other ways it was a free childhood. 

I had little say in my schooling or agency in highschool, yet I was free to explore Long Beach, Signal Hill, Carson, or even down to Naples or Seal Beach on my bike, alone as a kid. I'd run into trouble and never say anything about it. I'd find a gun and use it to protect myself on the streets. Nobody believed me when I said I was in a driveby shooting when I was seven years old. I grew up terrified at home so the streets of Long Beach in the early 90's didn't seem so rough.

Char would beat me a lot and be extremely emotionally and verbally abusive. I'd hide under my bed when she would get into a fit of rage, or run out of the house as fast as I could to avoid her grabbing me. She was a tyrant of a woman. Other times she would break the toys and things I valued most, because they took my attention and focus. Despite accommodating my disabilities, she would often use them against me or deride me for them. She'd demand that I keep my mouth quiet, that I not show my bruises to teachers or friends, and that I better be loyal to her for she would warn me that the state would come and take me, and put me in with a foster family way worse than I could ever imagine.

She was pretty secretive about her life. She'd tell me a little about her twin sister, her brother, and her parents, but never went into detail about who these people really were. I never learned what was important to them or what drove them, in fact she would usually tell stories about the hurt they experienced or that they had something awful happen to them. As I have grown older, closer in age to when she began raising me, I have realized her life was one of trauma and abuse as well.