My journey to steem has been a long time coming. My life has been filled with many challenges that I've had to overcome long the way everything from my father being in and out of prison to meth labs to foster care to adoption and even being hung in a tree. But, for now Ill start at the beginning. My name is Benjamin and I’m 27 years old. I’m originally from Louisville, Kentucky. To be more specific I began my life Portland. This is a photo of the home I grew up in as a child.
Portland is a miserable area of Louisville were the median income is less than 20 thousand dollars. However, this isn’t were my life gets interesting. Back on September 10th of 2000 my father went to prison for the first time he was charged with transporting greater than 70 lbs. of pot from Texas back to Kentucky but was apprehended in Tennessee. The original police stop was for following to close to a semi.
It was during these years from 2000 to 2004 or the age of 10-14 that the lives of both my brother and I had changed. Soon after my father went to prison my brother and I found several pounds of weed that my father had hidden at home. From this pot forward we became two bonafide drug dealers. This went on for several years, after looking back I realize what a terrible parent my mother really was and how she was ill equipped to handle my brother and I. Eventually as my brother grew up he dropped out of high school at 16 and the pot selling had eventually grown into selling pills and selling pills eventually led to taking pills. Lucky for me by this time I was only 14 so I was pretty much exclusively smoking pot. However, for my brother he hasn’t been so lucky his life from this point in the early 2000’s up till now January, 2018 he has been a slave to prescription pain pills and for at least the past 3 years has progressed to heroin. But this story is about my life so let’s continue.
Sometime in 2004 my dad was released from prison and pretty much like the statistics say it didn’t take long for him to find another reason to go back.
This time it wasn’t for transporting or selling pot it was for having a methlab in our garage. This is where my life takes yet another turn for the worse. On the day the Swat team led a raid on our house I was in 8th grade and I remember waking up that morning and having a horrible feeling in my gut. This feeling was something I can’t really describe in words but I had a feeling something terrible was going to happen and so I told my dad. I’m not really sure why he believe me that day but we gathered up the main components of his methlab and drove to a strip club down the street and tossed everything in the dumpster. Not long after we returned home the swat team arrived and began ran sacking our home in search of the so called methlab. I can remember my mother standing at the kitchen sink doing dishes while the swat team completely destroyed our house. Little did they know my mother was washing away their evidence in the sink. I remember standing their watching all this happen around me it was like the whole world was spinning. I haven’t even had my father back that long and now this was happening. The police payed no attention to me not being aware that I have lived a life well beyond my years. As my father was sitting there in handcuffs he called me over to him and he said. “Hurry and go around back, I left some of the meth concentrate behind the garage.” He went on to tell me that this one piece of evidence was exactly what they were looking for to put him away for at least the next 25 years. So I did what I believe any good son would have done and went behind the garage and I grabbed the container and slipped through a hold in the fence and I ran and ran. By the time I stopped running I just sat there and cried. I didn’t know it at the time but that day was last time I seen my father for the next 5 years.
In the days following the raid on our home I had quit going to school because I was afraid that the police would come and take me away. Eventually my mother was release from jail and the time came that she had to go to court. I remember arguing with my brother about whether or not we should go with her. He decided not to go, at this time he was 17 years old, but I wasn’t so lucky my mother made me go with her and my worst nightmare happened. The court decided to take me away from my mother and put me in foster care.
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