I don't remember the day Mom packed us up and left that little government apartment, but I've felt the echo of it my whole life—the way decisions can pull a person forward and backward at the same time.
What I know now is this:
Carolyn was gone.
And somehow, in the space she left behind, Shannon slipped back into our world, hardly.
Carolyn stayed long enough to spend all his money and make my mother miserable. Mother will stand up and fight the petty with pettier. As Carolyn was with my dad, my mother sought it a good idea to befriend Carolyns husband, Tony. Carolyn moved in temporarily with Shannon, my mother living across the gravel from Tony's house. The more mother spent over at Anthony's, the more attached she didn't mean to become. He was a gentle and sweet character with a very mature yet interesting personality. Mothers intentions was to fight fire with fire until feelings began to surface. The more comfortable mom got at his house the worse the ending to this situationship was going to be. It was maybe a month of this and Carolyn went running back to him, his arms wide open, and here mother is again, left like she's nothing. First shannon, now Tony.
The first thing my mother did was go running to my father hoping he would want to have the family back together. The way it should have been all along. He was crying over Carolyn and mother consoled him. Mother was a last option. Away for shannon to not have to be alone.
Even though, to Mom, he was history. He was pain. He was someone she thought she could save, or someone she hoped would save her. Maybe both.
When she talks about that time, she always says, "I found my way back into his arms."
But I've learned that sometimes arms can feel familiar even when they've never really held you right.
Mom gave up the apartment she worked so hard to get. She packed our things, gathered what little we owned, and moved us into another trailer.
The third one she and Shannon had lived in since the beginning.
The first burned down.
The second was where I was conceived.
And this one… this one would teach us all what it meant to endure.
It sat in a gravel lot that never felt like home—rocks shifting under every step, dust kicking up around our shoes, the kind of place where the wind felt colder than it should've. The trailer leaned slightly, like even it was tired. The floors groaned under the weight of footsteps. The walls carried the memories of whoever lived there before us—memories Mom tried to scrub clean but couldn't erase.
I imagine her walking through it for the first time, holding me against her chest, my sister at her side.
Her eyes scanning every corner.
Her heart sinking and rising at the same time.
Sinking because it wasn't what she wanted.
Rising because at least it was something—somewhere she thought she could rebuild.
Shannon was there, smiling in a way that promised change, the way people do when they want to be believed. Mom wanted to believe him. She wanted a family. She wanted stability. And she wanted to stop fighting alone.
But being back with him didn't bring calm.
It brought complication.
Arguments whispered through the thin walls.
Stress pushing into her shoulders, heavier every day.
Mom pretending things were fine so we wouldn't feel the cracks.
Her eyes telling the truth long before her voice did.
Still, she stayed.
Because in her mind, this was the next step.
A chance for us to be a family.
A hope she didn't want to let go of—not yet.
I didn't understand any of it then. I only knew the world felt different. The air heavier. Mom quieter. My sister watching everything with the eyes of a child who grew up too fast.
Inside that third awful trailer, something shifted—not just in Mom, but in the path our lives were on. Every decision she made from there was influenced by the weight of that place, by the man she returned to, by the promise she kept trying to hold together with shaking hands.
I didn't know it then, but this was the chapter where childhood innocence would start slipping through the cracks. Where love, survival, and heartbreak would begin to blur.
Where the story of us—me, Mom, and the life we tried to build—would take a turn that none of us were ready for.