Raised by Whores
What is it like to have a sex worker as a parent?
My sister Ramona looks a lot like I did when I was sixteen. We are compared to each other frequently. Despite the mere six years between us, she feels to me as if she is decades removed. When I ask her why she thinks this is, she reminds me that I used to put her to bed every night with a bedtime story. I left when she was twelve, and she had never conceptualized me as anything but a responsible grown-up. In turn, I had never conceptualized her as anything but a child that I had to leave behind. This dynamic made it easy to slip into a role as a parent when she, too, had to leave the house we grew up in, two years younger than I had managed it.
In a strange way, both of us are both young and old. When I first started organising in sex worker movements, people were taken aback to find out that I was only nineteen. I had grown up in a neglectful household and taken on caring responsibilities for my younger sisters from a very young age, shielding them from our abusive father and stepping in where our mother — who was abusing alcohol to cope with the domestic violence — was falling short of her responsibilities as a parent. This, and my experiences as a sex worker, aged me considerably and I continue to find it difficult to relate to people my own age. Ramona, on the other hand, has experienced far too much for a sixteen year old and is…
