The Shit That Built Me… and Broke Me (5-8)

Age 5–8: The Quiet Before the Storm

After my father died, life didn’t immediately turn into chaos.

For a few years, it was actually… pretty normal.

My mom did the best she could. Looking back now as an adult, I realize how much weight she was carrying during that time. She was a single mom raising a kid, working, grieving the loss of my father, and trying to figure out how to keep life moving forward.

That’s not a small thing.

My maternal grandmother was a huge part of those years. She helped more than I probably even understood at the time. Some of my warmest childhood memories are tied to her. It’s funny though—those memories don’t sit neatly on a timeline in my brain. They’re just scattered moments. Small flashes of comfort.

But one thing is clear in all of them.

My grandma was my angel.

And now she’s my angel in heaven.

My mom dated a few men during those years, but honestly none of them left much of an impression on me. If they were around, they never stayed long enough to become a real part of my memory.

Life during that time was simple. We were lower middle class, nothing fancy, but we had what we needed. The memories I do have from those years are mostly calm ones. Loving ones. Moments that actually felt like a normal childhood.

Which makes what happened next feel even more surreal looking back on it.

I remember the day things changed.

I had been at my grandmother’s house. She was still working at the time, and it was probably a Sunday afternoon like many others when I spent time there. My mom came to pick me up, and we started driving home.

The road we took that day was my favorite road as a kid.

It was curvy and hilly, and when you were small and sitting in the car it felt like a roller coaster. Up and down, around curves, the kind of ride that made your stomach drop in a fun way. Even now, thinking about that road still brings back a little bit of that childhood excitement.

That ride was always the best part of going home from my grandma’s house.

But before that ride ended that day, my mom told me something that would change the rest of my childhood.

She told me she was pregnant.

She told me she was engaged.

And she told me the man she was engaged to—a man I had never met before—was going to be moving in with us.

At the time, I didn’t really think much of it.

When you’re a kid, you don’t have the life experience to understand the weight of news like that. It just becomes another piece of information your brain accepts and moves on from.

Ignorance really is bliss.

Because what I didn’t know in that moment—what I couldn’t possibly know—was that the man she was engaged to was also an alcoholic.

And that the next fourteen years of my life were about to change in ways I couldn’t even begin to understand yet.

Kids don’t get a vote in who moves into their house.

And that day, somewhere on my favorite roller coaster road, the quiet part of my childhood ended.