Elizabeth P. - A Lifelong Story

Elizabeth P. is a woman in her late 40s currently experiencing homelessness. She grew up in a very toxic family that did not treat any of the women within the family well. She shared that many of her family members were heroin addicts & that from the ages of 3-13, Elizabeth was molested by her grandfather. Elizabeth then mentioned that she fought a lot in school because she wanted people to notice how bad it was at home. She also said that she never had many friends because she "didn't want them to get raped or molested." Her mother was married to an abusive man who degraded her, put her down, cheated on her, etc. Elizabeth began drinking at 13 and quickly got into drug use because she just wanted to get away from the chaos that happened at home. Elizabeth was also raped by her uncle at one point & was raped by a large group of boys at a riverbed because "they had mistaken [her] for another girl." When she was 15, Elizabeth was placed into foster care & she later got emancipated at 17.

Elizabeth was with her children's father on and off from 17 years old to 35 years old. She had her children in her early 20s and her first two were taken away by CPS due to her drug use. Elizabeth was both selling & doing drugs in order to make ends meet, but when her two children were taken away, she was devastated and became clean as quickly as possible. She began handing in clean tests to CPS, but she still struggled to get her children back. At this time, Elizabeth was also pregnant with her third, & last, child. Continue reading Arielle Zappia's full article on Project Why's website