This is the last installment of what class are you, at least for now.

Ashley Messier is the co-chair of the Corrections Monitoring Committee in the Vermont

Legislature and she's the reentry services program manager for Vermont. in the money and she found herself repeating the cycle in early adulthood. This is a story

about multi-generational poverty and abuse and the temporary relief of opiates.

My mom was fairly young when she had me, you know, barely in her 20s. My dad was

horrifically abusive even while I was in utero, you know he pushed her down the

stairs. My father would never keep a job.

He would always get fired or lose his job.

And then when I was five, my dad assaulted my mom and really almost killed her and that's when

she decided that she was going to leave him.

And so we were a crowd, my dad had to move out.

And when I was seven my father hung himself best thing that man

ever did for me and my mother and so then it was you know living solely on section reach up, and food stamps.

And my grandmother tried hard to supplement

if I wanted to take gymnastics lessons,

you know, but I could only take like the cheapest version and I

couldn't do it as much as the other girls so I wasn't as good as the other girls.

Or I would get picked on because my mom couldn't get me the name brand stuff.

So, you know, as I got a little bit older

and could really start to realize,

because my mom didn't talk to me about money.

But it's really easy when you're a kid walking through the grocery store with your mom and you get to the line and you're in the checkout and you watch the com and you hear the comments. You know things like, oh God, here we go go she's going to have to rip out all those

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