When it rains it F-n pours……

            The skyline of New York presents it self as a beautiful tempting city that doesn’t sleep and full of job opportunities, calling out to hopefuls from around the globe. They even have a saying,  “if you don’t make it in New York you can’t make it anywhere”. God I hope they are wrong. New York is not the haven of opportunity and greatness that they portray it to be. Maybe it is a haven to white middle class individuals that already have money to start with; but not to us poor individuals that make it through each day on a can of sardines and crackers. Those living in poverty and think they are doing great only because they don’t know any better. New York, my home town. I view it as the town that avertedly, fucks over you with an attitude on top of it. So, you’re earning $90k a year. Pretty good, No, you really just receive half, then you pay $1000. of rent for a room that you can’t fit a sofa bed, and $200. for electricity when you only use it the one light in your tiny apartment in the evens. Your cable just to have basic is $80 dollars before the charges! So your paying for a 15 by 10 room $1500 a month! and You will barely have enough for food! That’s just the monetary aspects of it. What about the fact that if you get mugged outside in the daylight, no one will help you! You can be stabbed bleeding to death and people will walk over you and think, he must have done something fucked up to get it; or It’s none of my business and walk away. No New Yorker can tell me that this not true, because I have lived it. Do I love New York, I don’t know it depends on the month and outlook I have that particular day! Nevertheless, this is where my story happens.  

As a child I dreamt of beautiful things. I dreamt of traveling to outer space. I believed in many things such as castles, knights in shining armor, and a big house with a wooden picket fence. I don’t remember where I learned about homes and fences since I was raised in the ghettos of the Bronx. We didn’t have a T.V. until everyone in the neighborhood had one. I guess it could have been in the drives pop use to take us on.  At times those dreams were the only things that kept me alive when life became too horrendously painful. These are my memories of a life that Christians would call ‘blessed’ and Jews would say that I was ‘chosen’. I would just call it, an extremely fucked up life!

My struggles started from birth. I was born disabled, which some of my elementary teachers would refer to as ‘stupid’, especially when addressing me. I have been mentally, physically, and sexually abused. I have been treated like shit, by many, especially my own kind. I was locked in a closet at the age of 9 for a year, and as an adult I was hospitalized in a mental institution for 2 years and received 3 sets of shock treatments. I have been beaten as a wife because that was a normal and expected management of a wife in the ghetto.  I used drugs and lived in the streets as a homeless woman with my babies. The love I have for my children caused me to go through a metamorphosis in life. The change was so drastic, that not even my own family recognized me.

These are my experiences. I realized after 50 year, my life can be used to motivate those that are in similar situations and understand the life of oppression. It can provide the hope that most poor minority women need to make it in this world. I hope this book will help set free, liberate all the women that are or have suffered in life through the hands of a so called loved one because of ignorance or culture.