Read Online Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina by Misty Copeland - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Misty Copeland
Ads: Link
stayed with Ray for about a year before moving even farther away from our onetime home in San Pedro to a town called Montebello, where we lived in another cramped apartment with Mommy’s next boyfriend, Alex. He was Latino and seemed a little more at ease in his own skin than Ray, but hewasn’t much more stable. We were never sure if Alex had a real job. And just like at Ray’s, Mommy and Alex slept in the one bedroom while we kids spread blankets and pillows wherever we could find a clear spot on the living room floor.
The neighborhoods where Ray and Alex lived weren’t dicey like the streets where Auntie Monique and Uncle Charles lived, but their apartments were meant as basic, temporary housing for young men who partied all night and woke up at noon, not for a family with six children. And in those cramped spaces, the scraping back of a kitchen chair or the ringing of the telephone seemed louder, as if the smallness and clutter amplified the sound.
We were coming undone. Mommy had always been a neat freak, but there were too many people and too little room to bother tidying up much. And she no longer wore her high heels and stylish suits. She had no reason to. Sometime between living with Ray and then Alex, Mommy had lost her last job and was struggling to find a new one. Our gray Chevy Corsica was gone now, too.
We kids were still a unified tribe, more so now than ever. I was never alone in riding the bus or walking home. But the distance between us and Mommy continued to grow.
Then, a few months after we began living with Alex, he lost his apartment. Again, we moved, this time into a motel. He came with us.
It was called the Sunset Inn, two stories of stucco just off a busy highway. We were now in Gardena, a town right next to San Pedro. We were closer to our old neighborhood, but this place, this part of town, didn’t feel like home.
Our room was toward the back of the top story. We childrenslept on the couch and the floor in the large front room, but I would often disappear into Mommy’s bedroom after school, trying to drift away in a dream or a dance. Our front porch looking out over the Pacific was long gone, replaced by an outdoor hallway that we and the other motel tenants shared.
I tried to make the best of it. I would pretend the hallway was a veranda and I’d sit there, soaking up the sun. And I turned the rail into my very own barre, which I would grab hold of to balance as I stretched toward the sky. Or I would place Cameron’s tiny hands on the cool metal and shift him into various ballet positions, the way Cindy had first done with me.
Cameron was in and out of our lives at that point. His father, Robert, didn’t want him living in a motel, so he took Mommy to court and was given primary custody. Cameron would be with us only on weekends. It devastated me. Cameron’s absence in my life opened a wound in my heart. Now I didn’t hold back the emotions that hurt me. The tears that poured out of all of us when we had to say good-bye are still fresh in my gut and memory to this day. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced—I wasn’t ever this expressive of my pain when we left Doug Senior or Harold or Robert, but Cameron was my baby. I think all of us kids felt we had contributed to raising him. I continued to see Cameron at Robert’s home if he wasn’t at the motel on weekends, but it simply wasn’t the same, especially when my other siblings’ presence in my life was likewise beginning to fracture. Lindsey had always spent weeks at a time with Harold, her father. And Erica, who had started staying with friends as much as she could back when we lived with Robert, now hardly ever slept at home. Our family, fraying even at the best of times, was now unraveling.
Often we had no money at all. We would run our hands around the couch cushions and through the carpet to find change. Then we’d go to the corner store to see if we could afford something to eat. Eventually, Mommy applied for
The neighborhoods where Ray and Alex lived weren’t dicey like the streets where Auntie Monique and Uncle Charles lived, but their apartments were meant as basic, temporary housing for young men who partied all night and woke up at noon, not for a family with six children. And in those cramped spaces, the scraping back of a kitchen chair or the ringing of the telephone seemed louder, as if the smallness and clutter amplified the sound.
We were coming undone. Mommy had always been a neat freak, but there were too many people and too little room to bother tidying up much. And she no longer wore her high heels and stylish suits. She had no reason to. Sometime between living with Ray and then Alex, Mommy had lost her last job and was struggling to find a new one. Our gray Chevy Corsica was gone now, too.
We kids were still a unified tribe, more so now than ever. I was never alone in riding the bus or walking home. But the distance between us and Mommy continued to grow.
Then, a few months after we began living with Alex, he lost his apartment. Again, we moved, this time into a motel. He came with us.
It was called the Sunset Inn, two stories of stucco just off a busy highway. We were now in Gardena, a town right next to San Pedro. We were closer to our old neighborhood, but this place, this part of town, didn’t feel like home.
Our room was toward the back of the top story. We childrenslept on the couch and the floor in the large front room, but I would often disappear into Mommy’s bedroom after school, trying to drift away in a dream or a dance. Our front porch looking out over the Pacific was long gone, replaced by an outdoor hallway that we and the other motel tenants shared.
I tried to make the best of it. I would pretend the hallway was a veranda and I’d sit there, soaking up the sun. And I turned the rail into my very own barre, which I would grab hold of to balance as I stretched toward the sky. Or I would place Cameron’s tiny hands on the cool metal and shift him into various ballet positions, the way Cindy had first done with me.
Cameron was in and out of our lives at that point. His father, Robert, didn’t want him living in a motel, so he took Mommy to court and was given primary custody. Cameron would be with us only on weekends. It devastated me. Cameron’s absence in my life opened a wound in my heart. Now I didn’t hold back the emotions that hurt me. The tears that poured out of all of us when we had to say good-bye are still fresh in my gut and memory to this day. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced—I wasn’t ever this expressive of my pain when we left Doug Senior or Harold or Robert, but Cameron was my baby. I think all of us kids felt we had contributed to raising him. I continued to see Cameron at Robert’s home if he wasn’t at the motel on weekends, but it simply wasn’t the same, especially when my other siblings’ presence in my life was likewise beginning to fracture. Lindsey had always spent weeks at a time with Harold, her father. And Erica, who had started staying with friends as much as she could back when we lived with Robert, now hardly ever slept at home. Our family, fraying even at the best of times, was now unraveling.
Often we had no money at all. We would run our hands around the couch cushions and through the carpet to find change. Then we’d go to the corner store to see if we could afford something to eat. Eventually, Mommy applied for
Similar Books
