Christopher Frerichs Discussion 6

I am not an immigrant to this country nor is any of my immediate family.  However, just because I am not an immigrant doesn’t mean that my family was immune to the trials and tribulations associated with poverty.  That’s why the first vignette resonated with my own childhood experiences with poverty, hopes, dreams, disappointment, and ownership.

My father was a Gulf War veteran and his experiences in that conflict triggered his underlying mental illness, which ultimately led to my parents’ divorce.  This in addition to the fact that my father could no longer hold down a job essentially made my mother a single parent to 5 children.  As a woman with no college degree (at the time) this meant things got rough.  We were fortunate to never have to move from house to house as in the vignette, but as time moved on things began to fall apart in our old home.  I keenly remember when the upstairs toilet stopped working, then the bathtub in the same bathroom would no longer drain, and we were left with a single bathroom for 6 people.  Plumbers are expensive, and when it came down to it food was a bigger priority than 2 working bathrooms.  The roof needed to be re-shingled, but that was also expensive.  These things were always “temporary” but I was always aware of our poverty, and was embarrassed to invite friends over to my home.  But….that being said the house was ours.  It meant that we had to work hard for the things that we owned, and dreamed of the moments that we would own them.  I had a job delivering newspapers when I was in middle school, and I dreamed of owning my own car.  I saved all the money from that job to buy my first car before I could even legally drive it.

All these experiences have informed my outlook on life, and I think that the adversity we endured has better prepared me to be an empathetic and conscientious member of society.