Karamo confronts his mother about being placed in foster care, experiencing sexual abuse in a church, and physical violence. He describes a lifetime of feeling abandoned and unprotected, and how that pain might eventually become the source of his healing.
Chapters
I kind of feel misunderstood. How do you feel misunderstood? How do you feel more misunderstood than me? Mom, I've been in placement. I was getting raped. Do you understand that? My first, I was in church. Why you had this story in church? I was molested in church. That was my first sexual experience in church. Was beating on us and was beating on us. You was never there, Mommy. This is real shit. Exactly. So you knew that and you never tried to get yourself clean to get me. What about me? Y'all, you left me in that house. All that time, I'm with nobody. And this is not a, this is real. I feel like I'm sorry for cursing. I can't even say how I wanted to say it at home because I felt like we would argue and fight. Mom, you was never there for me at all. How am I supposed to look at my friends and say this is my mom? Did you ever try to get her back during that time? No, I didn't feel capable of being able to take care of my kids.