Rags to Leather

Chapter One

When kids imagine how their lives will be when they grow up, they always imagine living this life where they have everything they could ever possibly want. They usually dream of being an astronaut, cop, firefighter, doctor, lawyer, or playing for a team in the big leagues.

Not that they could someday be living in a crappy apartment using an air mattress to sleep on because they can't afford furniture because they clean houses for a living and are barely earning enough money to pay the rent. So they work any other job that gives them crappy hours to complete the rent and pay for any other necessary utilities they need. Which usually involves working at some place open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

No one ever thinks that they're going to have a drug addict as a mother who would rather sleep with strange men to get her next fix than take care of her kid. Or that they would suffer verbal and physical abuse at the hands of the person who's supposed to protect and care for them.

They wouldn't have someone to turn to who could give them the loving home and family they wanted because they didn't have any family members besides their mother and their father,  who was just a name on the birth certificates.  So, they had to deal with the abuse because they had nowhere to go.

Until the day they turn eighteen and have just enough money saved for a bus ticket to get them as far away as possible, but the abuse they suffered as a child still affects them. Or that they would end up pregnant at eighteen because their mother's boyfriend's son took advantage of them while their mother was high as a kite and passed out next to her boyfriend.

Lennox never thought that would be her life. Like many of the other little girls, she used to dream of one day finding her Prince Charming. She never thought her own mother would rob her of her childhood.

Her mother practically destroyed every single dream she ever had as a child, so Lennox grew up believing she was nothing because of it. Lennox did well in school, but nothing she did was ever good enough in her mother's eyes.

Her childhood was like any other kid's, but it all changed when she turned six and one of her mother's boyfriends introduced her mother to drugs. That was when her life changed and started crashing around her.

Her mother, Olivia, didn't care about her daughter anymore. The only thing she cared about was getting her next fix, so she would sleep with anyone to get them to buy it for her or to get money from them to buy it herself.

If it hadn't been for one of her neighbors, Lennox was sure she would have starved to death.

Lennox saw what the drugs had done to her mother, and she didn't want to follow in her mother's footsteps. She promised herself that if she ever had kids, she would ensure that she treated them better than her mother and that they were fed and well-dressed. She didn't want them to suffer like she did because nobody deserved to grow up scarred like she had.

However, she never thought she would have to fulfill her promise sooner than she had hoped.

She had just graduated high school when she used the money she had earned to get the hell away from her mother and the hell hole she had called home her entire life.

She had suffered too much to continue living in that place. She had lost the one thing she had that belonged to her, to a guy who she didn't love and was following in the same footsteps as her mother and his father. So she left, and it wasn't until much later that she found out she was carrying his baby.

Who would have thought that after being on her own, struggling to support herself and her son financially, she would meet a guy who didn't mind raising a kid that wasn't his? Unfortunately, the nice guy's act didn't last long, and the only thing she got out of it was a split lip and bruises on her body. She knew she couldn't stay in a hostile environment and risk not only her life but the life of her child as well. So she left while he was on a "business" trip, where he would screw anything with a nice rack and was willing.