you flower, you feast (harry styles)

chapter 6: winnifred rose evans

when you love someone - james tw
l o v e - nat king cole
yes girl - bea miller
how to save a life - the fray
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WINNIE'S POV

I was born on August 13th, 1999 to my parents, Suzy Smith and Adam Evans. My childhood home was a four bedroom, two bathroom house similar to a craftsman style.

I had a relatively happy childhood, up to the age of six. My dad taught English at Hyde Park High School, and my mom worked as an LPN at a local skilled nursing facility. We didn't have much money, but we were happy. The problems began right around my sixth birthday. My mom had been fired after failing a drug test, and my dad had no idea what they were going to do about the bills. Mom had shattered her ankle in an accident, and was supposed to finish her pain medication a long time ago. I'm not sure what they gave her, I think it was Oxy- but I was too young to know for sure. She was finally determined by her doctor to be well enough to get back to work.

I think the part that frustrates me the most looking back, is that they wouldn't have even tested her if she hadn't showed up looking all hazy eyed and passed out at the nurse's station. After clarifying with her doctor that she was not supposed to still be taking anything for pain outside of tylenol or motrin, she was let go. This is when things started to get bad.

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My dad loved my mom, so much. They met in high school, and they'd had an on and off relationship since they were sixteen. When they were happy, they loved each other like two teenagers who were so infatuated that they didn't want to spend more than a minute apart, ever again. When they fought, they fought hard.

Lots of my memories blur together, because I've tried to block it out. I wanted to be just like my mom when I was a little girl. I thought it was so cool that she got to go to work and help people every day, and that she loved every bit of it. My mom was such a pretty woman, and it broke my heart to watch not only her natural beauty but her health decline as her addiction grew worse.

My siblings and I didn't always get along very well, so I stuck by mom when she wasn't working. We watched silly old soap operas and stuffed our faces with kettle corn until we couldn't eat anymore. For most of my early childhood, she was truly my best friend.

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To be blunt, my dad was kind of a hard ass. He loved us, so he pushed us, but that was why he and I butted heads like we did. Dad grew up in a broken home, in a bad neighborhood, with too many half and step-siblings for his parents to provide him with what he really needed to succeed. And so, he dropped out of high school on his sixteenth birthday, and finally decided to go back and get his GED the year after he proposed to my mom. He had been working three jobs- bussing tables, mopping floors in a local office building and construction on midnights. My mother knew she wanted to start a family, and they both grew to realize that living paycheck to paycheck while struggling to feed themselves and paying for a place to live, they knew it was time.

By the time my dad was twenty-seven, he had secured his first teaching gig, and mom had been working at the hospital for about a year.

When my mom was twenty-eight, she fell pregnant with my oldest brother, Henry. When my grandma found out, she was beside herself. She told my parents that if they didn't get married before he was born, then he would be a bastard and she would disown all of them so that she wouldn't go to hell. Pretty messed up, if you ask me. But as distraught as my mom was, my dad immediately set up an appointment at the courthouse, and they were married within a week. That's how they became Adam Evans and Suzy Smith-Evans.