Recently, one of Project Learn’s students wrote an essay about three events that made a huge impact in her life. I thought it might be interesting to post it to allow others to have a better understanding of what some of our students have to go through and what may lead them to come to Project Learn.
Because of it’s personal nature, I decided not to include her name, but I still think it’s a telling story of the adversity that many students must go through before and while earning their GED.
Kolter
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There are three major events in my life that made my life what it is today. One event is becoming a teenage mother. Another event is moving out of my father’s house to raise my kids on my own. The last event is getting evicted from a home i live in for seventeen years.
When I was fourteen years old I knew I was pregnant. But I was in denial about the whole situation and scared to tell anyone that I was pregnant. Until my father took my older sister and I to the doctor for a check-up. We found out that my sister was four months pregnant and I was six months pregnant. Oh my father was highly upset which was understandable.
About three years later two kids and three months pregnant, I told my father that I was pregnant again. I also told him that I was going to move out of his home. That they are my children and I have to take responsibility for them myself. Plus, I couldn’t keep having kids living at home with my siblings and seeing the stress in my father’s face. So the next day my kids and I moved out. I didn’t know where we were going. We walked around the neighborhood for a while. Then we went to an older lady’s house that used to babysit me when I was younger. She let us live with her for a couple of months. I found us an apartment. My kids and I moved into the apartment then I was able to call my father and invite him over for dinner. He said that I scared him when I left with my children. But he know I could do it and that he was proud of me.
Two years later we moved into a three bedroom home. We were very happy to have a front and back yard. My kids had birthday parties, Halloween parties, and Christmas for seventeen years in this house. Then the summer of 2007 we were evicted from the home. The move was very stressful. We had to put our furniture in storage and find somewhere else to live, my youngest daughter and I. It is now the summer of 2008 and we still have not found a permanent place to live. But we will and I hope soon.
Being a teenage mother was very scary from giving birth to taking care of a newborn baby. To be a teenage parent you have to be responsible for your actions. You have to give your children shelter , food, and clothing. you have to love them, you have to teach them, and you have to praise them so they can make better decisions as they grow to adults.
