1 part Complete MatureI could remember there was always liquor or beer, coke in the plastic, dope in the rice though, and weed in the dutches; some may have crack inside, so keep your lips off people's stuff. Growing up in the projects, you learn to keep your mouth shut and never to say what you saw in the hood. My mother got pregnant by my father when my grandmother was at work, thinking her boyfriend was watching her teenage daughter.
My father raped my mother before leaving the house forever, only for my mother to be covered in blood on the bed for hours. She was too shocked to move and too young to understand what had happened to her. My mother got pregnant at fourteen, gave birth at fifteen, and joined the local gang for support and family by sixteen.
Growing up fast with hard times, my mother had a case worker and was in every line available for a teenage mother to get public assistance while I played in her belly. I was born at Upstate Hospital on E. Adams St. in Syracuse, New York, in August on the eighth day of eighty-eight. Unlike the other infants in the nursery when I was born, I was going home to the projects. No warm blankets or crib were waiting for me, only filthy sheets and wet pillows, roaches, mice, drug deals, and gunshots at night.
Never the one to do drugs or drink, my mother would be forced to breastfeed me because she did not have food herself many nights. W.I.C. helped, but she sold most items in the hood for cash or things we needed. Forced into a life of crime by seventeen years old, my mother was an official member of the local gang that ruled our neighborhood.
My name is Rose; I was born from the concrete. This is my story.
