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“Are you my mommy?” to my own mother.
She would smile, her blue eyes lighting up,
and say, “Yes! I am your mommy!”

When I was four, my mother told me to
lick the bottom of her boot, and laughed when
I actually did. “There could’ve been poop on
the bottom of that!” she declared. It did not
occur to me that this was unusual or wrong
until I was in college.

My mother gave me her blue eyes, her
elongated second toe, and the moles she has
on her upper left chest and left hip. She also
gave me her middle name, her love of
shopping, and her inquisitive nature.

My mother gave me lasting abandonment
issues ever since she ditched life as a mother
for a life of Johnny Walker and cocaine.

When I was eight years old and living with my
mother and her brother Keith in Kansas, she
loved me enough to realize she could not
adequately care for a child. She had taken me
from my home, the East Coast, less than a
year and a half previously—away from my
school, my friends, my father, my half-sister,
my aunt and uncle. She knew her meager
wages as a waitress and caterer combined with
her party lifestyle of drinking with strange
men in our basement were not conducive to
parenting a young, developing daughter.

In the fall of third grade, I moved in with the
aunt and uncle, Terry and Web, who had

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