Sable Monroe

At 16, I was already being told I needed to help pay the bills.

The problem was… I didn’t even have legal work papers.

But that didn’t seem to matter.

My mother made it clear that I needed to find a job.

According to her, plenty of people in America worked without papers.
So in her eyes, I didn’t have an excuse.

I tried to explain that I was also in school.

That I was already struggling to keep up.

That the instability at home made it hard to focus.

But none of that changed anything.

At one point, my uncle came to stay with us.

He had immigrated to Canada and had his own situation going on, so he came to my mother’s house for a while.

And instead of seeing what I was dealing with…

he agreed with her.

He told me that people my age worked all the time.
That I didn’t have a strong accent.
That I should be able to find something easily.

In other words—
I just wasn’t trying hard enough.

No one asked how I was managing mentally.

No one asked how I was supposed to balance school, fear, and survival at the same time.

The expectation was simple:

Figure it out.

And there was always this underlying pressure tied to money.

My mother would say things like—

if I helped out with bills,
if I contributed a little,
then she wouldn’t need my stepfather’s help anymore.

And that meant he wouldn’t have to come back.

So I believed her.

I started helping where I could.

Paying small things.
Contributing what little I had.

Trying to hold up my end of a deal that I thought would change my environment.

But within a couple of months…

he was back.

That wasn’t the first time.

She had a pattern.

She would say she just needed a little help—
and once she got it, everything would go back to how it was before.

At that point, I realized something without fully having the language for it:

It didn’t matter what I did.

The outcome wasn’t in my control.

But the pressure to work didn’t stop.

If anything, it got worse.

She told me she wasn’t going to buy my clothes anymore.

That I was old enough to take care of myself.

Meanwhile, I was barely making anything.

On a good week, maybe $75.

And out of that, I still had to cover things like transportation.

Sometimes I had a ride.

Sometimes I didn’t.

Sometimes I had to walk.

And when I walked, it wasn’t on well-lit streets.

It was along dark, unpaved roads where I was constantly on edge.

But none of that changed the expectation.

I still had to show up.
Still had to work.
Still had to figure it out.

And I did.

I found a job.

I made it work.

But I didn’t realize what it would end up costing me.