I Beat the Odds_ From Homelessness, to the Blind Side, and Beyond - Michael Oher [8]
My mother did her best. I have to give her that much. When she was sober, she worked hard to give us a good home and look after us. The problem was that she wasn't sober much. When she got back into her old habits, life at home kind of fell apart. We didn't always have a roof over our heads. Sometimes we'd get kicked out of one place and just wander over to another. If one of us kids had a friend who would let us stay longer than just a night or two, we'd sleep there until my mother got another place, and then we'd eventually make our way back to the new place to live with everyone else again. Once, seven of us kids lived in a car with her for about a month. We piled on top of one another to sleep, kicking and hitting one another trying to carve out a little space of our own.
We managed to stick it out, though, because we all loved one another. Neighbors used to comment on how attached the Ohers were to their family, and they were right. We truly were loyal to one another. I loved my brothers and sisters so much that I was always determined to look out for them and wanted to live as near to them as I could. I loved my mother so much that it hurt even more when she would relapse with her addiction, because I knew how much damage she was doing to herself and to our family.
Social workers would come over for visits, to evaluate how we were living, how my mother was doing, what the condition of the house was like. They would ask us questions and make notes on their clipboards. They wanted to make sure we were still going to school and not getting into trouble. We told them whatever we thought they wanted to hear because we didn't want to end up separated again. That had happened before and I think we all hated it too much to risk it again.
Besides, things could be good at home. When my mother was off drugs and working, she would remember to buy groceries, and there would be a mad scramble to grab whatever you could before anyone else got to it. If you put anything down, someone else would grab it immediately, so you learned to eat fast. It wasn't the best system, but at least we were together. Those were the good days. But they usually didn't last.
One of the first things you learn in the ghetto is to look forward to the beginning of the month, because that's when you have money. Paychecks from work come at the very end of the month and government checks come at the very start, so for the first week or two, life is good. There is no sense of saving money because when your future is that uncertain, you just live in the moment and let tomorrow deal with itself.
It was the same in my house, except that a day or two after the welfare check arrived, we knew that there was a pretty good chance that the door would be locked when we got home from school and my mother would have disappeared.
She'd often spend a couple of days gone--no note, no goodbyes--but we knew why she'd left and we knew what we had to do until she got back. She was buying crack, and we had to fend for ourselves. But we never worried too much, because the beginning of the month was good for everyone, so we would bum food from other families, and maybe even bum some old clothes.
My brothers and sisters and me--there's a total of twelve of us, five boys older than me and then my younger siblings, some who were born while I was in middle and high school--learned the routine fast. We'd wander over to a friend's house at suppertime and then just stay, sleeping on the sofa or the floor until the next day. We'd go by the house to see if our mother had come back, and if she hadn't, we'd just find somewhere else to get food and crash for the night. Begging and bumming was just a way of