Personal Experience

When most of us are young we may recall talking about when we get older we will be rich, drive cool cars, and live in a mansion. Maybe not all of us spoke of these events exactly, but when you are young everything in life seems so easy to achieve. As most of us get older we all realize that it is not always easy to achieve these expectations.

In 1993 I graduated from high school and was three months pregnant. I had no idea when, what, where I was going after graduation. I just thought I was in "love" and would live happily ever after. So after graduation I moved out of parents home and in with my baby's father. Not even having any thought on how I would make any money to survive with my newborn baby. I was the only child and my parents were always good to me and raised me very well. They only wanted the best for me and as you can imagine having a baby at eighteen and moving out was defiantly not what they wanted for me in my life. Despite my parents not agreeing with my choices they still tried to stand by me as much as possible or I guess you would say as much as I would allow them too.

On January 13th 1994 one of the happiest days of my life my first child Anthony was born. I was on top of the world and everything seemed to be "perfect". After we went home life was what seemed to me a picture perfect life. Mother, Father, and baby all together in one home. As time went on life seemed to only get harder. Situations such as rent, food, clothes, diapers, babysitting, etc. all seemed to come crashing down at once! All the situations of course involved money which we did not have very much of. I was very young and had only worked small low paying retail jobs. With no college experience and having a young child it was almost impossible to find the type of job I needed to make the money necessary to survive. My baby's father Rudy was somewhat of I guess you would say "hustler". So he did make legal money doing side jobs in construction and automobile mechanics. He never went to college so just like myself it was not easy for him without a cbollege education to receive a high paying job. I thought at that time I could never go back home and let my parents know that they may have been correct when they said "Jennifer it's not easy out there are you sure you are making the correct choices in your life"