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The exact moment
The scene, as it happened.
It was only when I was around sixteen that her words began to make sense to me. I started to notice how differently my mother treated my sisters and me compared with my brothers. My brothers did not have to cook or clean. At most, they were expected to tidy their own rooms. My sister and I, however, had to clean the house, wake up early on Saturdays and Sundays, do laundry, and help with chores. My older sister was twenty-three, and the unspoken rule seemed to be that if you were over twenty-one and could not pay your own rent, you had to contribute more at home. She was not ready to leave, and I was not sure any of us were. Even though my father was no longer violent, each of us carried our own pain, resentment, and distance from him. I also had a younger brother, two years younger than me, who refused to clean or even wash his own dishes. After eating, cleaning his own plate was too much to ask. At sixteen—almost seventeen—I felt I had more important things to do than clean up after the men in my house. At first, my mother tried to convince my brothers to do their chores. My older brother was not home very often, but my younger brother seemed to refuse on purpose. It felt as if he wanted to prove that even though he was younger than me, he was a boy, and I was a girl—and that my role in the house was to serve him. I could not stand him. I could not stand anyone in our house. Everything felt too dysfunctional, in too many ways, and it seemed as if it would take years to understand, repair, and rebuild our family. Because I refused to do his chores on top of mine, my parents decided to stop giving me money. I could keep living under their roof, but I could not count on them anymore. Even my boyfriend started, in a really subtle way, to offer me money if we "became more serious"—meaning having sex. One day, we had an argument, and he told me to get out of his car. He left me in the middle of nowhere, at 10 p.m. Money controlled everything, and I didn't have any. But this guy could not control me. Not him, not anyone.