My name is Ayem Lowst
My mother decided to name me Ayem ‘cause it means spiritual and wise in Irish. She believed that names have a big influence on one’s personality, and she hoped that being spiritual and wise would keep me from making the same mistakes as her, but attached to her last name, “Ayem” just meant “doomed”.
My mom’s story is a classic. She grew up in a “respectable” family but was stupid enough to get knocked up my some penniless player. Why? Because she was dumb enough to think that she would be the one to make the player hang his jersey…. He didn’t. So when her parents found out about her pregnancy she got kicked out. With the help of some close friends she managed to find a place to crash and a job. Couple years after I was born things were going ok; she had managed to get back on track. When I turned eight she decided that she wanted to turn her life around and start all over so I …. Ended up in a foster home.
I grew up with a step dad, Mister Snips and three brothers. Darwin 20, Drake 19 and Junior 16, all Afro Americans like me. I turned out just fine. Mister Snips is a lawyer. He had lost his wife and his son in a car crash. He took us in one after the other and devoted his life to us.
Drake got kicked out when he was twelve by his step dad/gym teacher/wife beating Alcohol-drinking, drug-abusing, child-harassing, womazing bastard, without any protest from his mom. He never forgave her for not standing up for him.
Darwin lost his parents in a plane crash, and the selfish gold digging-money worshiping bitch he calls, or should I say used to call his aunt, left him in front of the church mister Snips goes to, because she was “too young and beautiful to sacrifice her life to some kid”, even if that kid was her dead sister’s child.
Junior was in the same case I me. His dad had bailed on his crack head of a mother who had later bailed on him when he was 5. And some might say that the crack doesn’t fall far from the pipe but he clean pretty well.
Even though what we had was not exactly the “perfect” family I think we grew up happier that most children with a mom and dad and “blood” siblings. And growing up with three brothers really helped me build my personality. They taught me how to play basketball, video games, they taught me how to be strong without being masculine, how to be sweet without being annoying or passing for a push over, how to be devoted without seeming desperate or easy, in other words they transformed me into a complete girl.They are the reason why I’m not desperate for love and attention, unsecured, and stupid. They schooled me. They made me.
This is, according the English dictionary, the definition of family:
Family= > 2. [Treated as sing. or pl.] A group consisting of two parents and their children living together as a unit
■ A group of people related by blood or marriage
■ The children of a person or couple.
But such a definition seems pretty simplistic to me, just as many of the things we are supposed to learn in school. Family is more than that, it’s complicated, it grows, it shrinks, it explodes, it gets recomposed etc etc… A family can be a group consisting in a single parent and his or her children living as a unit, or two parents and their children living as strangers. People who can’t stand each other and who only get together at meal times, if at all. It can be a group of people living apart for different reasons such as professional obligations but love each other very much, or it can be a group of people who are not related by blood nor by marriage but simply by fate, and who learned to live together, grow together and provide for each other in the name of compassion, love, and friendship.
We are a family, and Mister Snips is not our father because he is the “man who provides care and protection to us” but because he is a man with the heart of gold who loves us unconditionally and who took us in when our own “families” did not want us. Your father might be paying for child support but that’s not “caring” that’s doing what the law is making him do before his ass ends up in a jails cell. It’s easy to be a “father” according to the dictionary, but to be a real Dad takes more than taking part of the procreation process, or paying for child support. Mister Snips is ours Dad, our Pops. And we are a family because we are all each other have got, god blessed us with one another and we love and cherish one another.
OKC
A fuck to give & stories to tell 