I Beat the Odds Read Online Free PDF

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    ALL TOLD, THERE ARE NINE BOYS and three girls, but we never all seemed to be in the same house at the same time. Rico, especially, I remember was almost never home. He was always out on the streets, hanging with his friends and sleeping at whatever house he ended up at that night, but almost never ours.
    The girls kept to themselves. For one thing, they were a lot younger than us and my mother was usually toting one or more of them around because they were just babies when I was in elementary school. Denise, the oldest girl, is named after our mother and she is my full sister. The rest of the kids had a variety of different dads, though we all shared the same last name. It didn’t matter what the father was named or what the birth certificate said because my mother decided that she wanted to go back to her family name, and from that day on, we all went by the last name Oher.
    I didn’t pay much attention to the fact that we were all pretty much only half-siblings, because we all looked out for one another. Once we got a little older, when we’d scrounge for food or places to sleep because my mother had left and locked us out, we would usually work in pairs or small groups. Even when we were fending for ourselves we tried to stick together.
    No one in my family—not my mother or my brothers or my sisters or my grandmother—no one ever said the words “I love you.” I never once remember hearing that as a child. But even though the words were never there, I could feel the bond that connected us all together, and I knew it was strong.
    It wasn’t that our mother didn’t love us, or that she was physically abusive. It was just that sometimes she seemed to forget that she had children and that we needed her care, so she’d go off for a while and we kids would be left to take care of ourselves and one another. Since we didn’t know any other way of life, we just adjusted to it the best way we could and always tried to back up one another. And we weren’t the only kids in the neighborhood who lived like that. It probably shouldn’t make me feel better that there were other families with the same kind of messed-up routine as ours, but back then I think it made me feel less alone and a little more normal.
    My mother is from Memphis originally. I don’t know much about her life, but I imagine she was like most of the people who lived around us: She was born in the ghetto, and that’s where she stayed. I don’t know what her schooling was like, where she went, or how many grades she completed. Those weren’t the kinds of things she talked about. I do know that she was, and still is, one of the nicest ladies you would ever want to meet—when she’s clean.
    There would be stretches when she’d get off drugs, straighten herself out, and get a job. It was great to be home then because she would always have a smile on her face and just make you feel happy. Since she is a big lady, it’s impossible to miss her in a crowd; and with her huge grin and strong hugs, she makes you proud to know her. If one of us kids brought over a friend who needed some food or a place to stay, she’d welcome them in, even though we didn’t even have room for all of us, let alone for an extra body or two. But she made room. That was just how she was. She was big-hearted and loved to have her family around her.
    But she seemed to love the crack pipe even more. Crack and cocaine were her drugs of choice and she never seemed to be able to get very far away from them. Every time she would pull herself together, fight back against the addiction, get a job, and try to make a nice life for us, it would only be temporary. Before long she’d be back on drugs and back to disappearing for days at a time.
    To her credit, I will say that she never did drugs in front of us kids. She always made sure that she was somewhere else when she got high. She would leave to meet her friends, lock the front door, and just not come back until she felt