Growing Up Research Paper

The reason I am who I am today is because of my unsupportive mother. My life has always been filled with hardship that just sent my life on an uncontrollable roller coaster. My mother said, “I never wanted you, you were not even supposed to be here.”

You don’t get to choose where you grow up, but you do decide if you’ll stay there the rest of your life. Growing up I feel I saw things that I shouldn’t of ever seen for my age. The neighborhood I lived in had a lot of violence, and the cops would show up at least once a week so that nothing too major would happen. Crimes were always committed on my street, and the only time I was away from it would be when I went to school. After school I would go to the salvation army with my sister, and wait until my mom would get off work. We never knew when we would get home. Sometimes it would be until 5, and other days we would stay until 7. I met many new people which taught me a lot about working with others. Some days were good, and others were not

On my 14th birthday I got a text from my father reading, “You’re not going to accomplish anything if you’re anything like your mother.” For the last three and a half years I have been living with those words constantly in my head. For years I thought that I was worthless, that I had no place on this Earth. I questioned why I should even be alive, just because one person thought bad about me. Since then I have always pushed myself harder than I can handle, and done everything possible for me to prove to people that I am worth something.

Growing up, I went through so many obstacles that have helped me shape me into who I am today. In elementary, I struggled with learning English. Both of my parents are Spanish speaking so school was hard for me. All the way up until middle school, I grew up with an abusive father. My parents eventually got divorced. I was raised by a single mother and was bullied a lot. I was always scared, confused, alone, and angry. I suffered emotionally and physically. I felt lifeless. In 7th grade, I started to become more active in the church ,and my life change for the better. I stopped holding resentment towards my father. Once my parents finally got a divorce, I was finally able to start to live. All the pain I went through made me stronger and more knowledgeable. My father showed me what not to be ,and made me realize I deserved better.

I was able to be myself and I felt free. With a few bucks in my pockets, I felt I could buy the clothes I wanted and those skinny jeans I saw at urban outfitters. I came home one day galvanized only to find ambulances outside my aunt's house and my mom on the stretcher bed. My mom has been ill and had an infection that ate her leg. Days I would come home and it smelled like rotting flesh it was her. I spent months with her after her amputation. One of the kids who 've met, she and her mother allowed me to stay at their home, but I was no longer a teen and her daughter who liked me was underage, but they were in need as I was, they had little money and 4 mouths to feed and had just found an advantageous paying job so I figured I help them for helping me. 4 mouths turned into five and I quickly realized I was being played not by the daughter, but by the mother and quickly left them alone and used wisdom, for I cannot help others until I help myself and they were too broken. I saved my money and got an apartment on my own. I take care of my mother who is now disabled and I am taking on the challenges of adulthood. I ride a 2-hour bus to work and back every day. I get up 4 o'clock in the morning and don't make it home until 8pm at night. I feel accomplished an 18-year-old with his own apartment, taking care of his mother, and I might not have a car...yet but it's so close I can taste

All I wanted was moments with my mom when I was nine; I did not get it. What about age ten, eleven, and twelve? My whole childhood was snatched out from under me, and I had to grow up way to fast. Don’t worry, I did not blame you. I blamed myself until I was fifteen. It was my fault my mother tried to drown my sisters and me. I saw signs and clues. I could tell she was not acting herself, but I said nothing. I didn’t go and ask another grownup for help. I put my sisters’ lives in danger, because I didn’t protect them.

As a child, I was quiet and withdrawn. I taught myself to read when I was three, and spent most of my time reading instead of playing with other children. I understood very early that I was different from others at school. I didn’t have to pay for lunch, something I found (and to be honest, still find) completely mortifying. My father was almost never home, always trucking all over the country in an effort to keep our family afloat. When other kids talked about their dads in school, I often found myself feeling jealous. I, too, wanted a dad who could teach me how to ride a bike or throw a ball. I also understood that it was impossible for me to have that, because my father worked around the clock to keep my family from going hungry. I realized that in order to achieve the things that I wanted to, i would have to take the initiative and do it myself. I borrowed my sister’s bike (although it was much too tall for me to use comfortably), and I practiced riding it until i knew i was better at it than any other 7 year

As I got older things got better, my mom got help for her drug problem and I got healthier with the help of my dad and step mother. While living with my father my mom was supposed to come every other weekend to visit me, and many of the times she was scheduled she did not come because she could not afford the gas. This made me upset sometimes because I thought she didn’t want me or she was doing more important things. After being disappointed so many times it made me stronger because I learned not to let other people control my

Growing up as an only child, you learn lessons about life earlier than most kids. I learn that you have done everything yourself. There is no one else to blame when there is trouble. I moved seven times, meaning I have lived in seven different houses or places. With moving that many times I learned to not get attached to people or places. For school, I ended up moving to four different school districts. Two of the school districts being private and the other two public schools. My experiences from both types of schools gave me an insight to how people do things in life. Therefore, I got the chance at a young age to meet at various people that live in our country. I'm first generation born and raised in the United States. Both my parents went to college in the

As the eldest of three kids, I am who I am because of my younger sister and brother. Coming from an immigrant family, my parents worked full time at their restaurant. They had to care for the customers, the finances, kitchen supplies, and food; money was their priority because that money was for me and my siblings. From the first day I started kindergarten, I was extremely independent. Everyday after I got off the school bus at approximately 2:45 PM, I walk home and eat a bowl of cereal. I studied completed my homework, and on the occasional times my dad was home, I asked him to correct my answers. All that changed two years later when my younger sister started her kindergarten year.

Growing up I had two influential individuals impact my life both positively and negatively, which would be my parents. It is to them, which I credit my accomplishments both inside and outside of school. Considering my parents are immigrants, they never got the education they desired; instead, they arrived to the United States with no English background. After all, most immigrants such as my parents vanished their country to build a life in America in order to supply their kids the advantage to obtain a higher education.

People all grow up in different places, around different people, under different circumstance and, all of these cause different effects on their lives. People are who they are today because of the experiences that they faced. Until I was a teenager, it was always just my mom and I. I never met my “dad”, not even from day one. I never was able to get to know him, or see him, but I did have a mom. I faced the odds of becoming the stereotypical kid with a single parent that went down the wrong path, but I never did. Life caused me to have a single mother that has made me the strong person that I am today.

There isn’t a day in my life that I wake up and do not ask myself, “Why?” Why did my mother have to leave? Why did this happen to me? Without a doubt, the absence of my mother is the hardest obstacle I have had to overcome. My parents were young and unsure how to raise a child on their own. My mom really believed she could not do it, so she left when I was eight months old. At that age, a mother to an infant is everything, yet she was not there. I grew up not knowing the love of a mother, but learned to be independent. I did not have someone to guide me through childhood because my dad was too busy working in order to provide for us, and his family had kids of their own to worry about. Though his family loved us, they favored their own children over me and my sister. We had to do everything around the house while they did nothing. We felt as if we had no voice and no one to support us. Being in this situation made me into

Growing up, I have faced many difficult challenges. When I was just five years old, I was taken away from my mother due to her addiction to drugs. My oldest sister, the one that took care of me, was sent to live with her dad hundreds of miles away. That was very hard for me and my other sister, because she was our mother figure. My other older sister and I were sent to live with our father, and throughout the years he had four other daughters with my stepmother. I was always treated differently than my younger sisters, in a way that made me feel like I was excluded out from them.

Sometimes we are so caught up in our own bubble we forget how much others have sacrificed for us so we can make something of our lives. As I sat down to study one day, my mom joined me. As we talked about various subject, slowly teardrops started rolling down her eyes. Those were tears of happiness, for that she was proud of me. Sadly, those tears were also a reminder of the abandoned dreams and aspirations that she always held. She always wanted to go to college and become someone in her life. Rather, she was forced into marriage when she was seventeen. My dad was a victim of his own brothers who deprived him of a college education. Despite challenges and hardship that always plagued our family, my parents never gave up. My parents slept hungrily