By the time Holly Thompson Rehder was a sophomore in high school, she'd lived in 30 different places. She survived an unstable childhood, got married at 15, had a child at 16, and got divorced at 22. But along the way, she earned her GED, her college degree, and started a business with her second husband.
Now, Rehder is a Missouri state Senator whose district covers Cape Girardeau, Perryville, Sikeston, and areas just to the west. She shared her story in a new memoir called Cinder Girl: Growing Up on America's Fringe. On the cover, a young Thompson Rehder poses for the camera holding her baby.
"I was 16, and my daughter was 10 months old," Thompson Rehder told KMOX. "And I'm standing in the trailer park that we were live in at the time. That's the picture we thought would be the best one to describe the book."
"I'm very determined and intense at times," she added. "But, you know, I was hell bent on making sure that I got my daughter out. And I didn't raise her the way that I was raised."
Thompson Rehder went into some of her background, and said she got married at 15 partially after she had to quit school to take care of her mother and sister who needed care after a bad car accident.
"But honestly, I had already planned to get married before that, because I needed out of our home life," she said. "My mother, we had domestic violence was so bad. I mean, there were times that I didn't know if if she was going to make it through the last beating."
Her mother was married five times, she said, and at one point when Thompson Rehder was 14 one husband came after her with a knife, then pivoted towards her mother, giving her time to call the police.
"It was at that moment that it was like, this is is not going to change, this has been happening," she said. "And there's nothing that I can do other than remove myself because I can't protect her."
Thompson Rehder said she was determined to get an education, because it was something her mother instilled at her. Eventually she was able to get work, get through school, and break the cycles of abuse that her mother had been in since she was a child.
Hear Holly Thompson Rehder's story from her interview on KMOX:
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