Growing Up With Drugs

It was a challenge growing up with my mom addicted to cocaine and a delinquent brother who was controlled by marijuana and cocaine. The drugs had them by its grasp but I still managed to have other people in my life who illuminated over the bad things. My older sister, Meli, and my little brother, Steyn, were there for the difficult journey but at least we did it together. My house was not a home to me for the longest time but experiencing these events has blossomed me into the person that I am today. I’ll always remember seeing everyone around me high, stealing, or mentally abusing a loved one, but it’s just shown me how not to act and how to treat the people I claim to care for.
When I was in the 6th grade, my mother got into an awful relationship

When she got into the relationship, not a lot of money was going towards anything and she was getting her priorities mixed up. Instead of paying the rent, my mom would have to convince the landlords to wait a little longer for the money. I remember from time to time this happening and it made me feel embarrassed. I had witnessed this before but this landlord wasn’t as nice as the others. I wasn’t angry at them though and more towards my mother. With her income, I knew we would struggle for years but it didn’t mean that we wouldn’t make it. Life was difficult and the last thing we needed was the rock of our home to

We moved to Pennsylvania because my mother wanted to keep us away from the harmful things that surrounded Puerto Rico. It’s a bad area to live in if you don’t have much money. A lot of the teens there don’t get the proper education and end up in gangs or pregnant. Even after my mother took Derick away from all of that he found trouble in PA. He has been in three in and out houses. That usually means teenagers get into trouble, but they’re too young to go to actual jail so they’re taken away from their families in hopes of transforming them into decent human beings. We travelled many times to bring him snacks and other things that were permitted. All the kids there seemed sorry for the crimes they had committed. I remember visiting him in those in and out houses and him telling us how he was going to change because he missed us. At the beginning, we believed him since we thought he wanted to make a change. It seemed like he did because there was progress. When he got out of his last in and out house, he just went back into drugs and stealing. That was when I realized you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. Once he was finally of age, he went to jail. At this point, I can’t remember what he even did to get put into jail. All I do remember is that he was willing to betray his family to get a little high. Up until the age of twenty-one, we’ve helped him. Even after he spent his 21st in jail, that wasn’t