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helped raise me since my birth. I still visited
my mother and other family members in
Kansas each summer.

I didn’t know about my mother’s cocaine
addiction until I was around 15. She was
addicted when she was 18 and living in
California with her father in the late 1970s,
and kicked the habit a few years afterward.
She picked it up again, decades later, from
around when I was in fifth grade until her
mother died after I finished the ninth grade.
Her boyfriend Gene reintroduced it into her
life.

She also smoked marijuana throughout
her entire pregnancy with me, has smoked
cigarettes ever since she was busted for
marijuana use when I was six, and tried
crystal meth once. Meth, in her words, just
“wasn’t her thing.”

When I was 11, my mother showed me how to
make jewelry. She had several pairs of sturdy
pliers and countless thousands of beads, from
little plastic baubles to expensive Swarovski
crystals. I loved making earrings—they were
the easiest. Put a few beads on a little metal
wire, attach it to the hook that goes in the ear,
and done. I had been too afraid to get my own
ears pierced until that summer visit, but she
told me I should be able to wear my creations.
She took me to the mall, and getting pierced
barely hurt more than a pinch—the piercing
lady said I handled it better than some thirty-

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