Saying that growing up in a single-parent home is hard is definitely an understatement. When you come home to an empty house after school, nobody is there to welcome you or ask about how your day went. From the age of 7, I felt the burden of my responsibilities to keep track of my key, tidy the house, and start dinner. Because my mother Gloria worked until 6 every day, the first thing I did when I got home was call her to tell her I was home and ready for instructions on how to make dinner so we could eat together when she got home from work. Even with her two jobs, we teetered on the edge of homelessness as my mom struggled to pay the mortgage, utility bills, and put food on the table every day with no support from my father. Meeting the financial needs of raising children meant working long hours, especially since she only had a high school education and women with high-paying jobs were not common at that time. Because my mom lacked a strong educational foundation, she didn’t know how to help me to excel at school. Even in elementary school, it was clear to me that my mother simply did not have the time or energy to help me with school work when most of her time was spent working to barely make ends meet.
One evening while I was watching TV with my mom, I scratched my nose and noticed that there was black soot on my hands. It turned out that their furnace was malfunctioning and the house was slowly being filled with dangerous fumes, causing a residue to build up on our skin. We immediately opened all the windows and turned off the furnace. This was a scary incident that could have turned out much worse if I had not noticed it. Simple home maintenance expenses like checking the furnace could never be covered with my mom’s income, so any unexpected problems like this were always stressful.
Every summer, my mom had one week of vacation. She spent her week off holding a garage sale and selling anything that we did not need to raise a bit of extra money to help ease our financial situation in any way possible. Watching my mom earn an extra hundred dollars or so each summer instilled an entrepreneurial and hard-working feeling inside of me. Soon, I too sifted through my belongings looking for old items to sell. All the money that I earned for myself was always saved and never spent on unnecessary items.
Raising a child as a single parent requires the parent to be both mother and father. However, a single parent can never fill up the absence of the other parent. Though I did not have a positive relationship with my father, I still missed his presence at home. More often than not, children living with a single parent face difficulty throughout their lives. Not all of them are able to recover from this childhood hardship. I was too focused on navigating life as a child with adult responsibilities to stop and feel the effects of the situation. Rather than succumbing to any feelings of loneliness or sadness that I had, I sought ways to feel fulfilled by getting involved in activities like working full-time in the summers at age 14 and imagining new ways to have fun through world travel and education. I took advantage of the long hours alone watching travel programs or reading books about the rest of the world to realize that I did not need to be defined by my circumstances.
I learned the values of persistence, resilience, and diligence through the struggles that I faced throughout my life. My levels of maturity and independence were far beyond my peers. Witnessing my mother’s struggle to provide for our family on just a high school education and navigating the complex administrative bureaucracy of the court system to apply for child support made me more empathetic to my mom’s difficulties. As a result of this, I learned to tackle my challenges and struggles in life by focusing on solving my problems instead of dwelling on them. I learned a deep sense of responsibility for taking care of her family from my mom and vowed to do everything I could to make my own child’s life a stable and happy one.
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