The Unparented Girl

Age 13: The Unparented Girl

The moment I realized my foundational safety had completely evaporated, I was seven years old. It was a Saturday morning, and I was sitting in the upstairs window of our nicely landscaped, middle-class home—a home with two stories, four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a two-car garage. I was waiting for my Dad’s van to pull into the driveway. He had promised to take us to Showbiz.

He was my person. I was a Daddy’s girl who jogged with him and watched Westerns, Kung Fu, and wrestling. My Daddy was a practicing Christian. He made sure we were at church every Wednesday and Saturday, and we had play dates with the Pastor's children. My Daddy was respected at church, and we were treated with love. Up until that point, my Daddy never lied to me; I could depend on him.

But he never showed up that day, or the next. When I asked why he wasn't coming home, he told me he was working on a big construction project with my Grandpa. It was a lie.

My father had become a crack addict.

That addiction was the sledgehammer that shattered our middle-class life. When his habit became unhideable, he began selling our home appliances for drugs, stripping away our comfort piece by piece until we lost the house entirely. His addiction did more than bankrupt us financially; it was a massive contributor to my mother’s own descent into a gambling addiction. Because of his choices, I was left completely unprotected and alone in the world.

At seven years old, the man who was supposed to be my ultimate protector became my first heartbreak—and the reason for so many more heartbreaks to come.

The Hostile Shelter and The Crossfire of Colorism

Overnight, we were thrust into a duplex in the New Orleans 7th ward owned by his mother. This would be the environment that sharpened me.

My paternal grandmother was a cruel woman who hated her own Blackness. She was the daughter of an African man and a Native American mother, from whom she inherited lighter skin and fine, silky hair. She avoided the sun and would yell at my sisters and me to get out of it before we got "Black," which we clearly were. I can still hear her voice calling us "lil nappy headed girls". She provided physical shelter, but actively attacked my worth.

But the cruelty did not end there. During the time we lived by my paternal grandmother, my mother became close to her family again. Before we moved to the 7th ward, I don't recall seeing her family often or them ever visiting our home. I quickly learned that my maternal grandmother despised me for the exact opposite reason: my complexion was not dark enough. She cruelly referred to me as a "dirty red bitch," often telling my Mom she should've never married a man who thought he was more attractive than her. My maternal grandmother actively favored my older sister and cousin, who had darker complexions.

During this time, the elder New Orleans Black women were deeply entrenched in colorism. I was caught in the middle of a brutal contradiction. To my father's mother, I was too Black. To my mother's mother, I was too light. I was entirely unprotected, surrounded by women with beautiful faces and ugly souls.

The Shield of Intellect

Caught in this brutal crossfire, I went through a period of feeling ugly. I simply did not see myself as beautiful. Outside of our home, people would constantly stop my Mom to compliment her "beautiful girls" and ask, "how do you manage all that long pretty hair?" But inside my family, my appearance was a weapon used against me.

So, I built my own shield. I knew I was smart, and I decided early on that being smart was far more valuable than being beautiful. I learned to detach my worth from my reflection. Even as I entered my later teens and realized I was not just smart, but "above average pretty" with a physical shape that made men and women take notice, my core belief remained unchanged. Even today, I reject being complimented on my beauty first. Beauty varies by perception; it is superficial. My character, my personality, my intelligence—my depth—is worth infinitely more.

The Bitter Trade-Off

When I was ten, my mother finally moved us out of my grandmother's home. The verbal abuse stopped, but the cost of that emotional liberation was brutal. We lost the security of a home phone, a refrigerator full of food, and constant electricity. My mother's gambling addiction was now full-blown, fueled by the chaos my father left behind. I only saw my Dad sporadically. He broke more promises than he kept, so I stopped valuing his word entirely.

This is when I first learned to compartmentalize my pain and pack it away; survival became my priority. There were no Christmas gifts or birthday cakes. Sometimes, we stood in donation lines just to receive a free gift. No one attended my academic award ceremonies or report card conferences, even after I was accepted into an advanced academic middle school and thrived in gifted classes.

Architecting My Own Light

Because the adults around me were falling apart, my imagination came alive. I lived inside my mind, envisioning the life I should have been living. I vividly remember walking down the street with my sisters and my Mom, carrying trash bags full of laundry to the laundromat because we couldn't afford a washer and dryer. I looked up at her and said, "I’m not supposed to be poor."

She looked me in the eyes and said, "Shut up."

By the time I was 13, I had begun working in a summer program just so I could buy my own shoes, school clothes, and undergarments. I knew my parents were too consumed with themselves to care about us. I became overprotective of my sisters, watching us evolve into our future selves on completely unaligned paths.

I was 13 years old, an academic scholar entering the 9th grade, standing on the cracked concrete of New Orleans. I had learned to parent myself, compartmentalize my trauma, rely on my intellect, and build my own systems. But as much as I had survived the dark, nothing could have prepared me for the fact that my life was about to get infinitely harder.

The unparented girl was about to become an unguided teenager.