Evicted at Eight: The Road to Your Kids Independence Starts with a Swift and Early Kick out the Door

By Shan Otare

Evicted at Eight follows a trailblazing teen-moms journey to end generational poverty, trauma’s, divides, and attitudes with a big flip of the bird to familial and societal norms.

Her methods…an Audacious mix of Bonkers and Brilliance will have you laughing and crying in unison.

If you think evicting your kid at the age of eight is excessive, strap in for how stories of Life goals, Masturbation, Money, Drugs, Forgiveness and ultimately, Death, play out when talking to your kid in a way that they’ll respond to and hopefully get them confidently out of your house at eighteen (if that’s what you want).

Parents:
The matter-of-fact yet hilariously clever ideals introduced in Evicted at Eight will adjust your way of thinking regarding your teen by offering a fresh perspective that you may have never considered. I promise you will ponder: “should we do that?”

Teens:
“You’re Welcome”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664162006

Shan Otare

Shan Otare transformed herself from a teen mom of four living in Section 8 housing into an executive at a multimillion-dollar company and eventually walked away from it all to honor her calling. Originating the hashtag #GhettoToGlobal, Shan has employed a beating-the-odds mindset in transforming herself, her family, and thousands of other families over the years. With her infectious laugh and her lighthearted and unassuming approach to teaching through storytelling, whether one-on-one, in a large crowd, or now on the written page, Shan’s charisma has led her to be affectionately dubbed “the Polynesian Oprah.” Shan resides in Kona, Hawaii, with her husband, Kapena. They are recently semiretired empty-nesters. When they are not traveling to Europe and the US East Coast to visit their adult daughters, they work together on real estate projects and contribute time to support their community.

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Copyright © 2021 by Shan Otare.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

You may visit this website:

https://www.shanotare.com/evictedateight

Rev. date: 03/11/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

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Contents

1 Eviction Day

2 The Foundation

3 A Turning Point

4 A New Chapter

5 Be a Safe Haven, but Let’s Talk about Sex

6 Stand Up for Yourself, Even within the Pack

7 Stay the Course: You Always Get What You Need, Maybe Just Not in the Package You Thought

8 Be Mindful of Your Habits (Kids Follow)

9 When Shit Hits the Fan (Because It Will)

10 Listen to Your Kids (They’re Smarter Than You Think)

11 Money (They Gotta Know This, so You Gotta Know This)

12 Create a Family Identity: Belonging Matters

13 Your Relationships Matter

14 Finding New Eyes to the World

15 How Parenting Led to Discovering Myself, My Value, and My Next Chapter

16 Full Circle

To Kapena, Hinatea, Tehina, Maimiti,

and Vaihere, a.k.a. the other five members of the Big 6. Only through you can the equation 1 + 1 = 6 make sense. I love you.

And to time. Your passing has been the most naturally healing prescription. For the remainder of my life, I hope to be reminded daily of your priceless value.

1

Eviction Day

It was August 2005. My daughters say they remember that day a little, but for me, it’s as if I’m sitting in the middle of my bed, calling my girls into my room. That day, my twin daughters turned eight years old. I had been planning and thinking about how I would say the words to them and if they would understand the importance of what I wanted to share that significant morning. I spoke with their dad about the conversation I was planning for them, but he just blew me off. He thought I was nuts, an opinion that hasn’t changed in our twenty-four years together. I’ve come to accept the fact that nuts is just one of the words he would use to describe his wife if the opportunity afforded itself—in a loving way, of course.

C’mon. I want you on board with this, I told him. It’ll be so much more effective if it comes from both of us, I thought. Deep down, I knew this was all my own doing, and I’d have to take the reins myself and deal with whatever results came my way.

Don’t screw it up. It’s all on you Shan, my inner voice said. Back then, I didn’t identify it as an inner voice, but it’s always been there, and it remains a confidant I rely on to this day.

The girls came into our room from theirs. We were right across the hall from each other. Our little family of six lived in a small seven-hundred-square-foot apartment in government-subsidized Section 8 housing, a.k.a. the ghetto. But it was our own space, where we got to make the rules for our family, and by God, the rules were all over the place—consistently inconsistent—except for this new one. This one I had thought through since I was a teen myself. I envisioned the outcome and even imagined the potential damage it might cause; however, after weighing the pros and cons, the pros won out, and I was going in. That morning. Right then.

If they only had known what was coming their way.

Morning, Mommy, Hinatea said in her usual high-pitched voice as she jumped into bed with me.

I was already sitting up.

Hi, Mommy, said Tehina in an equally high-pitched voice as she followed just a few steps behind her twin sister.

It was still early, but they had school that day, so I needed to get this done quickly if they were going to make it there on time.

Happy birthday, girls, I said with a big smile, followed by a kiss and a hug. They half smiled and slowly slid their bodies into my bed to try to get back into a sleeping position, figuring we could talk while lying down.

Why not? We’d done it many mornings before that day.

That day was a special day, however.

I asked them to sit up and face me.

It was obvious they both thought all the formalities were weird and quietly laughed at me, but they obliged. As they sat crisscross applesauce facing me, I leaned in and said the words again: Happy birthday, girls.

They smiled, chuckled a little, and said, Thanks.

I knew they were wondering why it was so important to be sitting up and directly facing me. I could read on their faces that my unusual request seemed out of place.

One memory that has escaped me since then was their initial reaction to those three words: Happy birthday, girls. If I remember correctly, one of them rolled her eyes, because I guarantee she would rather have been lying down if she had known she was going to have to expend so much energy and only get words as simple as those. But that wasn’t all I had to say. I continued.

Not only is today your eighth birthday, but today is extra important because it’s also your ten-year eviction notice.

Now that was the reaction I had been waiting for. They looked at each other, dumbfounded. Their faces looked as if they’d just heard a new word for the first time.

What’s eviction, Mommy?

Confirmed.

It didn’t matter who asked the question, because the curiosity on both their faces at that moment, for me, has fueled every effort toward all things that have come to pass since that day.

Eviction means that you can no longer live here at home and that you’re basically kicked out.

Counting on her fingers, one responded, So when we turn eighteen, we can’t live here anymore?

Yep, that’s correct.

Okay, they responded.

I mean, what else were they supposed to say to that? At that age, eighteen seemed like a lifetime away. I knew, however, how quickly the time would fly by, so I started to list the things I wanted to make sure I covered over the next ten years before they left. You will come to learn that lists are my thing. I think in the list, I live in the list, and my day is complete when the list is cleared.

I continued. But here’s my promise: between today and the day you turn eighteen, I will create as many opportunities as I can to teach you about the important things in life. Things that will build your confidence so you feel prepared to leave when you turn eighteen. I proceeded to list some of those things:

There were many things I wanted to impart on the girls in that moment, but by the time I was done listing all the lessons I planned on, their eyes were glossed over, and as if dealing with a classic case of ADHD, I couldn’t decide where to start, so I didn’t.

It wasn’t until a few years later that I finally found my in. It was natural, and it became the foundation for all my teaching opportunities as far as the girls were concerned moving ahead into the future. I eventually started calling it mindful parenting. Mindful parenting, to me, meant I needed to be mindful and fully aware of any opportunity to teach as it arose, no matter how energetic I was (or not) or how sure of myself I was (or not). I later found that conscious parenting was written about by Dr. Shefali Tsabary, whose writings encourage parents to remember that we need to let go of what we want for our kids and that grown-ups can become who they themselves need to be via a relationship with their children.

I also became masterful at the art of underreaction because I realized that some of the things my children were saying, asking, or doing were uncomfortable for me at the moment. I couldn’t show them that, or I risked losing their trust as a person they could come to for answers and direction. I realized that an opportunity would pass if I didn’t scoop it up for all the goodness it provided in that moment, and it all started with a little middle school joke.

Before we get to that joke, though, it’s important to understand why I thought it was a good idea to release an eighteen-year-old, a rookie adult, a kid, at the about the greenest stage in life, out into the world at such a specific time.

Why eighteen? people have asked. Why not twenty-one, twenty-two, or twenty-five?

Simply put, in the house I grew up in, the number eighteen was made out to be a liberating year. The year in which I would become responsible for myself. The year I was expected to leave, whether or not I had children on the way.

That’s what was taught to me, and therefore, it’s all I know how to do. Many friends I have made over the years cannot wrap their heads around the fact that a parent would expect a child to be ready enough to leave home at eighteen. Though my dad did a good job in being a respectable, hardworking, contributing citizen, the only thing he did to prepare my siblings and me was to tell us, When you’re eighteen, you gotta go, he didn’t get into the nitty-gritty of the daily how-to’s of living an independent adult life, specifically showing us that he and my mom were fallible human beings.

I expected to be out of my parents’ house from when I was a young age, and I even looked forward to it because in many ways, my house felt like a prison more than a home. However, when the time came, all I really knew how to do properly was keep a house. How to be a domestic queen, if you will. Though that is a nice skill to have, most times, that one dimension of being domestic isn’t something that can easily be translated into a career. I think my dad was on a good path regarding giving us the heads-up that we would have to leave at age eighteen, but he missed many opportunities to teach us valuable lessons along the way. I have, in essence, picked up the torch with a whole new outlook on exactly what my role is as a parent. I’ve decided not to say, I’m raising kids. Instead, I say, I’m molding future adults. My parenting mission is this: to be compassionate and, most of all, present in all dealings with family, friends, and peers in the hope that it helps others do the same for themselves and other in their lives.

With hindsight being twenty-twenty, I realize now that this book and my Eighteen and you’re out thinking pattern were a way for the child in me to get