I’M HOME TOO A Memoir of Survival, Motherhood, and Grace

Chapter 1

Before the Streets

People like to say everyone has a childhood.

I had one too.

It just ended sooner than it should have.

I grew up in a small town north of Birmingham, Alabama, where everybody seemed to know everybody else’s business. From the outside, we looked like another ordinary Southern family. We smiled when people were watching. We went through the motions. But behind closed doors, the house changed the second my father came home.

My earliest memories of him are mixed together like broken pieces of glass. Some days he could make me laugh. Other days, the smell of whiskey hit before I ever heard his truck in the driveway. My mother would go still at the kitchen sink, one hand frozen around a dish towel, listening for the slam of the screen door.

Then the yelling would start.

As a little girl, I didn’t understand addiction or domestic violence. I only knew the sound of a bottle rolling across the counter, the sharp crack of a fist against the wall, and the way my mother would tell me, in a tight whisper, “Go to your room.” I’d shut my door and press my ear to the wood, counting the thuds in the hallway and praying the walls would hold.

Eventually, my mother found the courage to leave.

Their divorce felt like the end of one storm, but I didn’t know another one was already waiting.

When my mother remarried, I wanted to believe life was finally going to be normal. I wanted a family that laughed around the dinner table. I wanted to feel safe.

Instead, the person who was supposed to protect me became someone I feared.

There were nights I could hear his boots on the floorboards before he even reached my bedroom door. There were mornings I learned to read his face before I said a word. One wrong look, one wrong answer, and the whole house would tighten around me.

The abuse stole pieces of my childhood that I can never get back. It left bruises no one could see and a knot in my stomach that never seemed to go away. For years I carried secrets that never should have belonged to a child.

I became good at pretending.

Pretending I was okay.

Pretending nothing was wrong.

Pretending I was counting the days until I could leave.

And when I finally got out of there, I started working at Hooters, trying to build a life that belonged to me. I met Sonny not long after, and at the time I thought he was the first person who could give me the safety I had spent my whole life chasing.

I thought I was escaping one kind of pain, but I didn’t realize I was walking straight into another. Sonny had money. He used it to wrap himself around every part of my life, and I mistook that for safety.

I was wrong.

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Chapter 2

Chapter Two: Sonny’s Rules

People always ask why a young girl would date a man old enough to be her father.

They’re asking the wrong question.

The better question is: What was that young girl looking for that made someone like Sonny seem like the answer?

I was seventeen years old, working at Hooters, wearing the orange shorts and the biggest smile I could fake. Every shift taught me something about men. Some came to laugh. Some came to flirt. Some came because they liked feeling important.

Then Sonny walked in.

He was old enough to have lived an entire lifetime before I was even born.

Confident.

Well dressed.

Driving a Cadillac that looked like it had never seen a speck of dust.

He didn’t flirt the way the younger guys did.

He made promises.

“You don’t have to struggle anymore,” he told me.

Those words landed differently for a girl who had spent most of her life trying to keep her head above water.

The flowers came first.

Then shopping trips.

Jewelry.

Money.

Then one afternoon he handed me a set of car keys.

“That’s yours,” he said with a smile.

I had never held anything that expensive in my life.

I thought someone had finally chosen me.

I didn’t realize gifts could become handcuffs.

Sonny didn’t just help me.

He helped my whole family.

If someone was behind on rent, Sonny paid it.

If the refrigerator was empty, Sonny filled it.

If someone needed money, somehow Sonny always seemed to have it.

Looking back now, I don’t believe my family saw themselves as selling me.

I think they saw a man who was making life easier when life had been hard for so long.

But now that I’m a mother, I can’t imagine looking at my sixteen- or seventeen-year-old daughter with a man decades older than she is and convincing myself everything is okay because he pays the bills.

I would see the danger long before I saw the money.

Back then, though, no one stopped to ask why a man his age wanted a teenage girl.

The relief of a paid bill was easier to swallow than the questions sitting right beside it.

Everyone benefited.

Except the teenager who believed being provided for meant she was finally safe.

At first, Sonny’s attention felt like love.

Then I started noticing the rules.

The car wasn’t really mine.

The gifts weren’t really gifts.

Nothing belonged to me unless Sonny was happy.

Sometimes, while I was working at Hooters, one of the girls would glance out the window.

“Isn’t that your boyfriend?”

I’d look outside and feel my stomach drop.

There he’d be, standing beside my car with the keys in his hand.

When my shift ended, I’d walk outside pretending everything was normal.

“Give me my keys,” I’d say quietly.

He’d smile.

“They’re my keys.”

“You said the car was mine.”

“It is… when you remember who bought it.”

Sometimes he’d drive away and leave me standing in the parking lot.

Then I’d have to call him.

Apologize.

Promise I’d do better.

Beg for my own car back.

It didn’t take long before I figured out how to avoid the arguments.

If Sonny got what he wanted, life stayed peaceful.

If I made Sonny happy, I could keep the car.

I could keep the apartment.

I could keep the security I’d become so desperate to hold onto.

Back then, I called it love.

Today, I know it was control.

The apartment should have felt like home.

Instead, it often felt like a place I was waiting to be found.

There were nights I didn’t want to see him.

I’d turn off the lights and sit perfectly still, hoping he’d think I wasn’t home.

Then I’d hear the knock.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

“I know you’re in there,” he’d call through the door.

I’d stop breathing.

Afraid to move.

Afraid to make a sound.

Afraid he’d hear the floor creak beneath my feet.

Imagine being seventeen years old, hiding inside your own home from the man who paid the rent.

People assume money creates freedom.

Sometimes it buys captivity.

Working at Hooters quietly gave me something Sonny never intended: hope.

Every tip I earned, I tucked away where I prayed he wouldn’t find it.

Twenty dollars.

Fifty dollars.

Sometimes a hundred.

It wasn’t much.

But it was mine.

Every dollar represented another step toward freedom.

And the more I saved, the more I started thinking about what life could look like if I ever got out from under Sonny’s rules.

One night, another waitress leaned over and said, “Have you ever thought about dancing at Sammy’s? The money’s unbelievable.”

I laughed.

Then I went home and counted my savings.

If I could make in one night what Hooters paid in a week…

Maybe I could finally leave.

Maybe I wouldn’t have to ask permission to live anymore.

By then, I already understood that Sonny’s money came with strings. Sammy’s sounded different. It sounded like a chance to trade one kind of control for another, but at least this time I would be the one choosing to walk through the door.

I didn’t know that walking into Sammy’s would open another chapter of my life—one filled with brighter lights, bigger money, and even darker consequences.

I only knew I was finally trying to choose my own future. For the first time in a long time, that felt like freedom.

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Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

• Oscar Wilde