Two months after Sharika was born, her mother went to prison.
That’s how life started for the now 20-year-old. In the ensuing years, she faced every worst-case scenario for a child of an incarcerated parent. She lived with an abusive relative, was admitted to a psychiatric facility, and spent five years in the foster system before she checked into a New Orleans youth shelter.
The only thing she hasn’t experienced is prison.
“I didn’t have a childhood growing up. I was on an adult line,” Sharika said of her early years. “I’m watching sex go on in this room. I’m watching gambling go on in this room. I’m watching dogs fight each other in this room. I grew up in this negative lifestyle to where it put a negative influence on me.”
Sharika, who is being identified only by her first name to protect her privacy, said her mother had a gambling problem and would rob and steal to fuel her addiction. Her mother is imprisoned at the Robert E. Ellsworth Center in Madison, Wis., for theft, false representation and bail jumping. She is not eligible for release until 2021. Sharika hasn’t seen or spoken to her mother since she was arrested and gave her up more than 19 years ago.
After her mother’s arrest, Sharika and her two brothers moved in with a family acquaintance. This is when a lifetime of trauma started. The children were abused physically and sexually. They were whipped with extension cords and switches, Sharika said. Her brother was shot with a pellet gun for trying to defend himself.
Child protective services took custody of Sharika after she showed up at school one day badly beaten. She entered the foster system at 13 and stayed there until she aged out at 18.
“In foster families, I always wanted the mother and father, someone I could call that because my momma left me at 2 months and my daddy is unknown,” Sharika said.
The four years she spent bouncing around from group homes to foster homes didn’t prepare her for the real world.
“I didn’t know what to do. I was expecting someone to grab my hand and help. I was terrified,” she said. “I was always down-talked to where I never had the self esteem to think otherwise. So I just gave up fixing myself. That’s what broke my trust in people.”
After Sharika left the foster system, she moved to New Orleans, stayed with a distant relative for a brief time, after which Sharika became a temporary resident at Covenant House, a youth shelter at the edge of the French Quarter.
Today, Sharika is living on her own in an Uptown apartment working with a local nonprofit that focuses in part on housing issues. She said she’s working on improving her situation, but it hasn’t always been easy. In July she was arrested for domestic violence, a charge later reduced to disturbing the peace. In November, she miscarried and lost her baby.
Sharika is no longer in contact with any family members. She said she often wonders about them, picturing them together as a family, “out having fun, eating barbecue, doing what they love to do, while I’m sitting here worrying about somebody loving me, somebody coming to rescue me. And it never happened. So here I am.”
Sharika said she asks herself why she’s had to endure so much at such a young age, and comes up with a simple answer: “Momma made mistakes.”