And so the young African girl joined fifth grade at Beacon Heights Elementary School in Prince George’s County and became caregiver for a family of six. The next nine years were an exhausting regimen of cooking and cleaning under the supervision, she said, of a controlling and sometimes-disparaging female relative.
“I wouldn’t say I had a childhood or anything that resembles a childhood,” Aribisala recalled in an interview.
The older cousin declined to discuss Aribisala’s upbringing. “Whatever happens in the family, the family handles it,” the cousin said in an interview.
Aribisala ran away from her family’s Prince George’s home when she was 21. Today she is a 39-year-old single mother of two in Silver Spring. She is a PTA vice president at Brookhaven Elementary School and plays defensive end for the D.C. Divas, a professional women’s tackle football team.
