Devi

My mom is a sex worker, and I grew up in the middle of it. She brought men home to have sex with them, and she never hid it from me. In the place where we lived, there was nowhere to hide it. When a man was coming over, she'd do her hair and makeup, change her clothes, and put on a voice I didn't recognize. Then she'd turn to me with a smile and say, "Go out and have fun with your friends." Sometimes she handed me money to go with it. I learned young that the money was for my absence. Some nights I had nowhere to go. It was too cold, too late, or my friends' parents had stopped inviting me over. On those nights, I stayed inside and slept on the floor, in the same room, while she was with a man. I kept my eyes shut, breathed slowly, and pretended to be asleep. I could hear everything, and I made myself believe I couldn't. I learned to lie perfectly still and shrink into the floorboards. I was a kid. I knew what the knock at the door meant. I could tell the kind of man by how he talked to her when he came in. I knew things about adult life at nine years old that I should have learned from nobody for another ten years. What people don't expect is that she wasn't cruel. She loved me. She burned dinner and made it anyway, she kissed my forehead, and she showed up to school events in her best clothes. She was a broke, scared woman doing what she thought she had to do, and I was a kid who happened to live in the room where she did it. What I carry isn't hatred. It's the shame of how much I understood, and the loneliness of being a child whose home had no door she could close. I'm not ashamed of what my mom did for a living. I'm not ashamed of surviving it. I just wish a kid hadn't had to be so quiet for so long. I'm saying it out loud now because I spent years not saying it. This is where I come from.