An immigrant childhood, domestic abuse, and growing up with a violent stepfather

This essay is part of a memoir-in-progress about immigration, domestic violence, and childhood survival in America. It focuses on the first apartment my family shared after immigrating to the United States, and the moment I realized instability was no longer temporary.

When we finally found an apartment of our own in 1990, it was supposed to mean stability.

By then, I was still new to the United States, a recent immigrant child, still learning how to live inside winter, still trying to understand how a country could feel both abundant and hostile at the same time. Moving into our own place felt like the next logical step. A reset. A chance to breathe.

Instead, Bricktown became the place where everything hardened.

The apartment was in a low-income immigrant neighborhood, the kind of place where roaches didn’t hide and everyone minded their business because they had to. This was not the America I had imagined before we arrived. I had expected something closer to television. Bright kitchens. Calm evenings. Families that closed doors gently.

What we got was survival America.

This was the first home where my mother, my stepfather, my brother, and I lived together under one roof. It was also the first time I had to learn how to exist around a man whose moods dictated the atmosphere of the entire space. Getting used to him wasn’t a process. It was a constant recalibration.

When he returned home, the apartment changed its breathing.

It always started the same way. Cigarette smoke slipping under the bedroom door. The sour smell of vinegar rising from whatever he threw into a pot. The sound of the mattress creaking as he settled into the room like a permanent shadow. He didn’t sit at the table with us. He preferred the dark, the blankets, the television humming low, as if even the electronics knew better than to be loud around him.

His calm days were rare. Maybe ten percent of the time, he was almost normal. Almost someone you could imagine talking to. The rest of the time, he moved through the apartment looking for an outlet. Sometimes that outlet was my mother. Sometimes it was me. Sometimes it was my younger brother. The target changed. The tension didn’t.

I learned quickly that children were not children to him. We were interruptions. Disrespect waiting to happen. If I forgot a chore or spoke in the wrong tone, he’d call me a bitch without hesitation. Full volume. Chest out. As if authority was something he had earned.

Language itself became dangerous. He hated Jamaican Patois. The moment my mother or I slipped into it, he accused us of plotting, of talking about him. His paranoia filled the space. My accent faded faster than it ever should have, not because I wanted to assimilate, but because survival demanded silence.

He hated the food too. The dishes that connected us to home offended him. He called them nasty. Said my mother couldn’t cook. Covered his nose dramatically, as if our culture itself smelled bad. Slowly, the apartment drifted away from who we were. The sounds. The flavors. The small comforts that reminded us we had once belonged somewhere else.

Some days the violence was loud. Yelling. Smashing. Fear you could hear coming down the hallway.

Other days it was quiet. The kind of quiet that makes your body tense anyway. Walking on eggshells. Reading the air. Waiting for the moment calm would break.

It was in Bricktown that I learned not to trust calm.

Living in a home that changed weather without warning sharpened something in me. I started reading rooms the way other kids read books. I watched how doors closed. How footsteps landed. How his breathing sounded when he’d been drinking. I learned when to disappear emotionally while still functioning physically.

These weren’t lessons a child should have needed. But they became the foundation of who I grew into. Hyper-aware. Watchful. Precise.

Bricktown was where America stopped feeling temporary. Where I understood that this wasn’t a rough patch to pass through, but a reality I would have to outthink. It was the first place where a quiet voice inside me started repeating something steadily, patiently:

One day, you’re getting out.
One day, this won’t be your whole story.