While I Was Growing Up We Moved Frequently, Often Packing

My mom was recently going through a financial struggle. Her and her husband were going through a rough patch in their marriage, so they took a break. She was living alone and unemployed. I felt like I had a responsibility to help out since I'm the oldest child, but there wasn’t much I

My family comes from a humble background. My grandmother started working at the age of 13, with small jobs in order to feed her siblings. My grandfather worked many hard labor jobs in order to provide for our family. With my grandfather’s hard work, he was able to bring my grandmother, my two uncles, my father, my mother, my brother and I into the U.S. My grandparents decided to migrate to the U.S because in Mexico, they had nothing. They had enough to eat but they were still struggling to come out of poverty. When my grandparents migrated into the U.S my grandfather would still work a blue collar job, until he fractured his spine and couldn't work anymore. Nevertheless, that did not stop him from working. He began selling in swap meets, selling

That was illegal, so from time to time she would get in trouble with the government authorities and, as a result, I would go live with my grandparents. Things changed when I turned 14, 15 years old. My mother finally accepted partial help from my grandparents. She officially opened her business with my grandparents’ investments. From that time on we became a solid representation of the middle class. Thus, answering the question about how the information in this book relates to me and my life, I can certainly state that I have crossed the bridges from Upper Class to Poverty and from Poverty to Middle Class, where, I believe, I presently belong.

My mother worked day and night so I had to care for my sister and cousins. On some occasions I had to help my mom clean houses to earn money. At the age of thirteen up until I was sixteen I was cleaning houses for the people we longed to be. I got a glimpse of a life I have never known. For the most part my mom’s boss was nice, but her family was ignorant at times. They would ask me where I have traveled and if I’ve been to all these kinds of expensive places. When I answered no they asked why not. I guess they didn’t comprehend the fact that my mom and I were cleaning their dishes and making their beds for less than the minimum wage to be able to barely afford the rent of the small room we all

My mother was a widow by the time she was in her mid-thirties with four children under the age of 16. It would have been easy to accept handouts and pity, but I witnessed her rise from tragedy, more determined than ever to provide every necessity that her children needed and wanted. As appreciative as I was when I was younger, I look back in total awe of her. Even though she worked 60-plus hours a week to make ends meet, she still told us that

Money was very short. We had to account for every penny. Every week, my mother wrote down in a leather-bound journal everything she earned and everything we spent in the household, down to the penny. Every week, from the time I was ten years old, she went through that with me. We lived on a cash basis. There was no credit card, no second mortgage. In that situation, budgeting became extremely important. Her comment to me was, “You can’t complain [about what you don’t have] unless you understand what’s happening.” Those were her ground rules.

Thousands of Americans use some type of help from the government, whether it is finical aid or food stamps and more than half of those Americans have children that they are trying to feed but barely getting by. It must hurt those thousands of people prides that they can’t put food on the table to feed their own children by themselves without help from the government hoping that one day they can support them; but they do what they must do to provide for their families, they put their pride aside and their responsibility first. In The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, Jeanette’s parents Rose-Mary and Rex Walls have trouble doing this, they don’t accept hands outs or any form of charity because they think they can take care of their children by

My mom did everything in her power to make ends meet. After my brother graduated, my mother moved 500 miles away to Connecticut. I grew up in West Virginia, this resulted in me not wanting to move. I moved in with my father my freshman year. My father was constantly distracted from drugs and alcohol. At this time, I was half way through high school. I realized that I could not live with him anylonger. I spent about a year living with friends. My grandmother, who I was not particularly close with, so graciously allowed me to live with. In order to do this, I was requirered to learn how to support myself financially. Today, I assist my grandmother in paying utilities as well as paying for all neccessitites for myself. My grandmother never had a license or a vehicle. I provide her with transportation too. She does not support me financially, but she does provide me with a roof over my head. In June, I will be moving out on my own. I will continue to live each day with optimism. I will continue to endavor through the difficult times, and will stop at nothing to reach

I was born very early and had teenage parents who did not really have their life together at that time. My parents were both high school dropouts. My dad dropped out because school was not for him and he just wanted to work and get money and my mom dropped out because school was not for her also and she was pregnant with me and did not want to deal with school. My dad worked everyday to keep our family moving and my mom just stayed at my grandmas house with me because obviously she had to take care of me. So we were living by paycheck to paycheck. One year later my sister was born and two years later after that my other sister was born. Since my parents really did not have that much money to get our own place we would live at my grandmas house to my papa’s house but at times we would have to camp out at the beach because we had no other choice. When we would live at the beach I would think that we were just camping for fun but I did not realize that we did not have any place to stay. My parents clothed me and my sisters, provided food for us, but we did not have a house over our head. So

The inability of Rex and Rose Walls to keep a stable job led to the family living in inescapable cycle of poverty for most of Jeannette Walls’ childhood. Walls’ grew up in “traditional” or “nuclear family,” where there was a husband and a wife (Moore & Asay, 2018, p. 23). They also maintained the structure of a “modern family” where Rex was usually the “breadwinner,” and Rose was the housewife (Moore & Asay, 2018, p. 23). This structure of their family was ineffective because Rex Walls couldn’t keep a job so as result, the family was constantly lacked capital to buy the resources that they needed. This led to a

There have been countless influential people in my life that I’ve come across. One who was a meticulous inspiration continues to be my grandfather. My grandmother had remarried to the one I call “grandpa” when I was at the age of five, and they both took to each other’s grandchildren as their own. With my mother and me only living a mile down the road from their farmhouse out in the country, I’d spent heaps amount of time there as a child. Indeed, I had been without a father but my grandfather stepped up to the plate and had taken me under his wing and willingly played the personification of a father figure.

From a very young age, I contended with countless setbacks, but the vitality placed on our income at home was the leading factor to my family’s problems. I remember when my parents chose to buy me a new pair of running shoes over paying the electricity bill or when they stayed up all night making tamales to sell so they could afford to pay for medical bills. There never went a month without my parents constantly arguing over the monthly rent or not having enough to buy groceries for the family. I grew up with five siblings in addition to two cousins who were sent from Mexico by their parents and placed under the legal guardianship of my parents. Naturally, learning to adapt to unfortunate circumstances was not rare and I quickly understood

Throughout the seventeen years that I’ve been alive I have witnessed all the sacrifices my parents have gone through ensuring I have a better future than they did. I come from immigrant parents that weren’t fortunate enough to continue studying. I myself was brought into the country when I was two years old so I could build a different path than the one my parents had to take due to financial reasons. Short after, my sister was born my mom got remarkably ill with Diabetes. I would watch in terror as my mother would lay in bed barely able to move. I held her hand, wiped her forehead, with a cool wet towel, and longed she would get all better. Being the oldest in the

Eventually they got a nice brand new truck later on with what they saved, got more money, and could actually afford something new and nice. Well my “apa” was getting better jobs, he literally started from the bottom and worked his way to the top he had a really good job that payed for what they need and for what they sometimes wanted. It was a really good job that he had because they had a nice house, nice clothes and food at the table. I thank my grandpa for everything he showed me because if it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t have a roof over our heads. He had eight children in total, my grandma never had to get a job, my “apa”was the only one that worked.

So many people in the American society live paycheck to paycheck and are one financial catastrophe away from financial ruin. In my own experience, after my husband’s employer continually embezzled from employees and clients, we found ourselves in a terrifying position. Jobless, penniless, and entrenched in mountains of subsequent debt, we were acquainted with the terror many American’s face while struggling to keep food on the table and a roof over our family. Just as the chapter 9 in our textbook describes, Aaron and his wife quickly realized that their income was “no longer sufficient to meet their needs,” (Openstax Intro to Sociology, 2015), we found ourselves in the same position. During my husband’s search for a new job, he began doing all he could to keep food on the table. He participated in tree removal, a laughable wage for hard physical labor. In desperation, I took a full time babysitting job looking after two very difficult little girls for a measly $250 a week. Looking back, although the situation was terrible and trying, we cannot wish it away. The situation taught us what mattered. There were so many things my family took for granted. The situation opened our eyes to the trials and suffering of many people in our society and allowed us to develop compassion, love, and understanding. Now, as we think back to our own struggles, it is much easier to reach out