Though she didn’t yet know the term “toxic,” Rashawnda James knew something was very off about her relationship with her mother when she was just 13 years old. “I realized that in the conversations at school that they were talking as though their parents were around a lot,” she says.
James says that wasn’t true of her parent, who had an addiction to crack cocaine. “There were times when I had to go search for my mother because I didn’t know where she was,” James says. “I felt responsible for my mom. Once I made that connection, I knew it was…
