Why we moved to Costa Rica, Part 4: The traumatic childhood.

I had a difficult childhood. My mother was a drug-addicted prostitute with a junior high education. From her I have two half-sisters. As teen mom, her first, Shelly, died as an infant. Her second, my sister Sheila, was murdered when I was ten in a drug deal gone wrong while she was nine months pregnant with her third child. And then there was me.

My parent's relationship was rocky and abusive, and they split up repeatedly. My mom would pack us up and disappear to North Carolina where she was from. Eventually my dad would track us down, rescuing me from whatever drug den she had tried to escape into.

I experienced a lot of trauma at a young age, including the worst kind. I was experiencing sporadic homelessness, custody battles, drive-by shootings, and molotov cocktails thrown by a rival drug gang burning down our trailer home, all while learning how to read.

Once, when I was 7, the police stopped my mother and I as we walked down the street in Key West, where we had been living in a van with my mom's new abusive boyfriend, Billy. They'd separated us and asked each of us what I had eaten for breakfast. We both lied, but similarly enough that they let us go, satisfied I wasn't neglected. The truth was that I hadn't eaten blueberry muffins for breakfast. I'd eaten cold corned beef hash out of a can that my mom and Billy had gotten from a concerned drug dealer. Worried I wasn't eating, they'd thrown a few cans in with the box of hypodermic needles filled with heroin they'd handed my mom the day before.

Things in Key West had gone beyond the usual nightmare. There was now another couple living in the big brown van with us. Often, the four of them would get high on whatever drugs they could afford that day, and some or all of them would have sex while I tried to dissociate. I had been such a sweet, timid child but I started acting out, violent with my mother - terrifed, traumatized and angry.

Finally my mom had enough sense to know things had gotten too far out of hand. One day she dropped me off at the airport with a flight attendant, and I flew alone to Iowa to live with my dad permanently the week of my 8th birthday.

Continued in Part 5.