What were the circumstances under which you and/or your siblings left your parents’ (or parent’s) household to live on your own?

My elder sister at age 17 moved into an apartment with our cousin who was a year younger and an emancipated minor. My sister never again lived with my mother, she later got married around age 19, and moved into another apartment with her husband.

Both my elder brother (13 months my senior) and younger brother (13 months my junior) were removed from the household at ages 15 and 13 respectively due to problems surrounding and leading up to our mother‘s divorce from our stepfather. They are placed in a group home, and as far as I remember, never permanently returned to live with our mother between then and their 18th birthdays. Both of them eventually joined the US Army, neither of them made a career of it.

At age 18, in the wintertime, I signed up for the Delayed Entry Program to enlist in the US Marine Corps. That program allowed me time to finish high school, and after my senior year of high school that next spring, I reported for boot camp in the summer, never again lived under my mother’s roof. In the Marines, I truly grew up from a boy to a man, I saw the world, I served three tours of duty, and to this day, I consider my time in the Marine Corps to be some of the best chapters in my entire life story.

My younger sister, who is the only biological child of my former stepfather, was the only one of my siblings who fell under any custody question when he and my mother got divorced. My former stepfather was extremely wealthy, and became even more so after the divorce as he expanded his business/financial portfolio (real estate on the side in addition to working for over thirty years for the same federal agency), wealth that he excluded from imparting with my mother with the exception of any court-ordered rulings. My younger sister, bring his biological child, spent about half her time between my mother’s house and his house, and he lavished her with every luxury, comfort, and any other type of spoiling imaginable. He had never adopted the four older children, we didn’t even have his surname, and as such were not legally his responsibility. The myriad of problems he had with our mother also led him to deem he had no moral or ethical responsibility to us either. My younger sister eventually left home at age 18 to attend a four-year, left win, liberal arts college a couple of hours away from our hometown, where she moved into the dormitory, tuition and all other expenses paid for 100% by her father.
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