Challenges

I related to many of the stories from this section of the book. While I am not a product of gang violence or rape, I have never done any substances or lived with an addict, and I haven’t ever been homeless these things are much a part of my past. They all happened to my mom. My biological grandmother, I call her Donna because she has never been a part of my life, was a pregnant teen who gave my mom up to her mother, the woman I knew as Grammie Johnson. Grammie was a mean drunk. My mom dealt by doing drugs, which eventually caused her to drop out of school and run away from home. My mom has lived on her own since she was 15. My mom eventually got her life together, she got cleaned up, got her GED and went to bartending school. She met my dad and got married. They got divorced. While I did grow up in a home where money was always stretched thin, I was lucky. Unlike many of the kids in these journal entries I had a mom who knew what poverty could do to you and who knew what trying to get lost in something else, even for a little while can make you lose forever. My mom took any help she could get, and always put us first. She made sure we had everything we needed and most of what we wanted. If it wasn’t for her courage though I would not be in college and my brother and I would probably be in the same situation these kids found themselves in. In many ways I am a success story. In that way I connected to entry 36. I hope that someday I can share my mom’s story and even my story with them in order to give them hope. I want them to know that they can take charge of their lives, that they can change their circumstances no matter how bleak it looks and that money is not the obstacle in often seems when you don’t have any. Hard work and determination do pay off.