I Beat the Odds_ From Homelessness, to the Blind Side, and Beyond - Michael Oher [37]
Basketball was a challenge, too, because I was surrounded by a lot of kids who had been playing organized ball since they were six or seven years old. I didn't have anywhere near as much experience, but it gave me something to work on. My goal was to be as disciplined as those other kids so that no one watching us all play would be able to tell who'd been playing in a league since they were very young and who hadn't. It took a little while to get used to playing organized ball instead of just street rules, but I eventually learned.
But other than sports, I really didn't have anything in my life that I was happy about.
Life at home was still challenging. My mother sometimes would fall back into her old habits of doing drugs and leaving us alone. At that point, it was just two new little brothers and me who were still at home with her. Carlos was there for a little while, but he was nearly eighteen and moved out on his own.
My mother would come to school to pick me up a lot of afternoons, which was nice. She also came to almost all of my home games for football and basketball, and would sometimes bring some of my brothers, too. But whenever the school called her to talk about my grades, my mother was nowhere to be found. It was as if she only wanted to be involved with the easy parts or fun parts of my life.
When I talk with people now who knew my family back then, I've had people say to me: "You know, it wasn't like she was getting high and leaving you all alone every single weekend. She'd be clean for months at a time before slipping up." I understand what they're saying--that is, not to let the bad times at home crowd out the good times. But how many times is it okay for a mother to smoke crack and lock her kids out of the house for days at a time? I would think that one time was one time too many.
As a kid, I knew it wasn't a good way to be living, but I didn't have the perspective on the situation that I do now. Now, I wonder why people try to defend that kind of behavior. I love my mother with all my heart, and I always will. But that does not mean that I can just look past her actions and say it was all okay because it only happened every couple of months instead of every week.
I don't want anyone to think I am talking in a disrespectful way about my mother. It's important to honor our parents--that's even in the Bible--but honoring them and approving of their lifestyle are totally different things. I will always love and honor my mother, but that doesn't mean that I can just shrug off her addictions and pretend that they didn't hurt me or my brothers and sisters. In some ways, I feel she robbed us kids of the chance of future success, as her actions told us that selfish, indulgent, irresponsible behavior was okay.
That is probably the reason why I liked Steve's company so much; I just enjoyed being around him and his family. I liked that he worked hard, applied himself in school, didn't cut class, got good grades--all of that. I admired it because I'd never seen anyone else my own age who was disciplined like that. And other than my good friend Craig, I didn't have any other friends who were so determined to keep out of trouble.
I also liked that Steve had a father in his life. There were so few men in my neighborhood who stuck around and stayed with their families, I didn't even know what I was missing until I saw what it was like to have a male authority figure in the house. Ms. Spivey had tried to bring a male authority figure in a few years earlier with Eric, but since he was part of DCS, I couldn't see him as anything but one of "them"--the people who wanted to split up the family. But seeing a man come home