So Auntie had gone to church on a Sunday night and left her son in charge. He was 9, I was 7. We threw a softball around in the dining room and broke a window of the china cabinet. We cleaned it up as best we could, but when she got back, she saw what had happened, had a screaming fit about how expensive it would be to replace the glass (I found some years later it would’ve cost $10(!!!)), whipped us with an extension cord and then in the middle of her rage, yelled at us to put on sweaters, boots and coats, opened the door, put us outside and shut it.
We banged on the door and begged her to let us back in. It was very cold. I think it was before Christmas. “Leave! I don’t care where you go,” she said. So we went to the flat of one of her church friends who lived about 5 blocks away. This friend was angry enough to call her and yell at her for a couple of hours, but didn’t want to get her in trouble, I reckon, so didn’t call social services. We ended up going back the next day after school.
Auntie was 28 at the time. I’m older than that now and I can only wonder just how wigged out by her life and finances she must have been at the time to put two little kids out on the street in the winter (and for me it was the 2nd time in 4 years that someone put me outside in such conditions and locked the door behind them). I’ll never forget how her eyes were bulging out of her head in rage that night. I’m trying hard to understand, and I can only come up with the confluence of her relative poverty, frustration at being very heavy and single with two kids to feed, along with incipient mental illness. It didn’t occur to me until well after I was an adult that her reaction was way out of proportion to the “crime”. I was never kicked out again after that, but my cousin would repeatedly take off and then return until he left for good at 17.