My Reasons for Leaving Home

In 1882, there was nothing for me in Norway. The crops were dying, the prices were falling and our streets were congested with writhing masses of people. There were no jobs, and no hope. There was only the dream of safe passage across the sea.
My name is Pirkko Ericson. My family never had much money, but we got by. We had never been driven into the dirt. The upperclass still looked down on us, spit on us, but we never gave it much thought. However, one winter, when I was young, my father and his fishing boat were swallowed by the sea. That boat was out livelihood, we marketed fish for a living. Now that it and my father were gone, we had no income. We hadn't nearly enough money to buy a new boat, and no one could replace my father as head of the family. Or, so I thought.
When I was fourteen, two years after my father died, my mother married a man she thought would be able to provide for us. She was wrong, any money that came into his possession was spenton alcohol and gambling with sailors on the docks. Needless to say, he wasn't very good at it. He came home late at night, when i could only hear his labored breathing and heavy boots as he went up the stairs. He had an aura, like the stench of raw sewage, that repulsed and frightened me. I was horrified of him, and where at first I tried to fight back, I began to shrink every time he looked at me, until I became so small he no longer even acknowledged my existance. One day, after five years of this bad dream, he disappeared. He was gone, but so was all our money, and what little was left of my mother's spirit. She would never wash the stench of him out of her skin.
There were no available jobs in Norway. I tried. Being the oldest child, though I was a girl, I was chosen to go to America, to find a job and send back money to repair the damage, and to provide for my family.