About Jos

Always when I see a single mother with a child, I feel extra empathy for them. Knowing from my own experience as a child of a single mom, and the oldest child of four, how it feels to grow up with struggling finances, to feel unsafe, to feel responsible for the siblings, and wanting to take care of your mother.

My parents divorced when I was 10 years old. I grew up mostly with my mother. When I was 16 my best friend committed suicide. When I was 17, my mother died and was then reanimated because of a procedural error in the hospital, when I was 18 my mother got into a high-impact car crash, when I was 19, my mother underwent surgery for a brain aneurysm. Most of the time these years we only had ourselves to cope with the circumstances.

You do what you have to do to survive as a family, so as a kid, you do whatever you can. Looking back at this period, I realized I felt lonely during that period and experienced the world as very dark. I struggled at school, couldn’t relate to my peers and when I was 18 I got severe glandular fever and a destructive psychopath entered my life. (That’s a story for another time.)