By Nancy
Have you ever imagined living without your parents? I don’t have to imagine it because I lived it. I was nine years old when my dad left us and shortly after, my mom was incarcerated. For a very long time I was mad. I didn’t know who or what or why I was mad, but I was mad and I showed it. My life from the time I was fourteen years old was a disaster. I was getting tattoos, piercings and I was drinking and doing drugs on a regular basis. My grades were hitting rock bottom and my family had no idea what to do to help me. It’s not like I could blame them, I was a mad teenager with no parents. I made their life miserable, I blamed them for everything, from me doing drugs to me failing in school. I would go visit my mom in prison every once in a while and every time I went, I didn’t exchange more than three sentences with her. I ended up in foster care shortly after. I was mad. I didn’t know why, but I was mad. This went on till I was seventeen. One night I was out with friends when one of them got so intoxicated that they started convulsing. I don’t know why, but something clicked inside my head that made me realize, what I was doing was going to kill me. That week was the first time I ever hugged my grandmother, my aunt, and my siblings and cried. I visited my mom shortly after and that day was the first time I had a full conversation with my mother in three years. Suddenly I knew why I was so mad for so many years. My family was taken away, my chance for a normal life was taken and I made it worse by choosing to behave the way I did. I didn’t have a mom or a dad and that’s what made me mad. To be the oldest child and to have no one in my family ever asks me if I was ok made me mad too. Now that I’m nineteen I understand what I did was wrong. If I could go back I would have stayed in school, I would have been closer to my mom and the rest of my family. I consider myself a strong person now because of all the things I have lived through, but it would have been nice to have a real family, with a mom and a dad.