Consider the life of Kimberly Buirst. Today Kimberly is a
thirty-one year old single mom and Bridges To Life volunteer who
is pursuing a degree in Criminal Justice at the Austin Community
College. But in many respects her life has been a nightmare, not
because of murder or assault or burglary or other things with
obvious and immediate bad effects on her life. Instead, the drug
dealers who contributed to her mom’s abuse of alcohol and drugs
have caused a lifetime of hurt for Kimberly and her sisters.
Kimberly tells of being moved back and forth between her mother
and her father and her father’s ex-wife and her boyfriend, of—at
age 13 and even after she had her own children—having to be a
mother to her younger sister, of being molested by her mom’s boyfriends and then always feeling dirty around men, of beginning
to drink at age fifteen, of struggling in school, of marrying the first
man who said he loved her and then divorcing, of the continuing
shame of her mother now being incarcerated for selling drugs to an
undercover agent. Kimberly has captured the continuing hurt from
the actions of the drug dealers who sold to her mother, and from
her mother’s abuse, in the following poem: